The DSR Network

As reports have come in of Russia escalating its attacks on American democracy, our President has hopped into action escalating his war against the people who are protecting us from the Russians. Trump has begun a campaign of stripping security clearances from America's most experience national security officials in an effort to punish them for disloyalty. Our experts, Susan Hennessey of Lawfare,...

With great fanfare Donald Trump did the presidential equivalent of stuffing a pair of athletic socks down his pants and announced the new defense spending bill. It was, as might be expected, yuge. Once again we will outspend China by four or five times and Russia by perhaps a dozen times. Are we safer? Does it matter that if we spend that much we can't have the schools, roads and health care syste...

Nothing is more core to the life of the Deep State than marking documents classified. After all, if just anyone could read them, who'd want to? On the other hand, if documents are classified, they can't be shared which is a bit of a problem in the cyber era when our most important defenses may be in the private sector. What's a secret-loving country to do? The NY Times' David Sanger, Georgetown Un...

Summer Reading Edition: On this special episode of a podcast so special it doesn't need special episodes but can't help doing them anyway, we delve into the world of books. Georgetown's Rosa Brooks, IISS' Kori Schake and the Financial Times Ed Luce reveal what they're reading, what they're avoiding, why they are academic pariahs, what sucks and what sucks so bad they don't even feel comfortable di...

Did you know that Ed Luce was once on a cricket team that Imran Khan occasionally would coach during breaks in his high profile high society dating life? That Rosa Brooks briefly played on a cricket team at Oxford? That Kori went to a cricket match and was not bored to tears? Well, you will if you listen to this episode of Deep State Radio which also has the president admitting to a felony, Americ...

In which we start with cricket get to Imram Khan, discuss how hunky he was as a young cricketer and how his populism and the nukes he now controls may make him somewhat less attractive. Then on to the expanding realm of hybrid warfare, what it means in Clausewitzian terms, what that may all mean in terms of Metternich and then of inevitably, on to the proliferation of vegetables of mass destructio...

In the latest Deep State Radio our friends Rosa Brooks of Georgetown University, Kori Schake of IISS and Evelyn Farkas of the Atlantic Council offer secrets into how they remain so well-informed. It all turns on fiction, apparently and those who remember what they read last will tell you what it was. Then we turn to Trump, Italy's new prime minister, a whole slew of lies and misstatements from Tru...

If only someone had told us that Trump has distrusted alliances and the international order his whole life, that he was close to Russia and Russians, that he was unhinged and wholly unqualified for the presidency! If only we had known! Maybe then we would not be inviting Vladimir Putin to come to the White House to give him a hero's welcome commemorating his successful 2016 election hack...just in...

A lonely old man wandering the White House late at night in his bathrobe, perhaps with a half-eaten McDonald's cheeseburger in his pocket gets angry at the world...so angry that he hits the ALL CAPS button on his cellphone and starts to Tweet out threats at a foreign nation. "ALL CAPS?," says his target, "this means WAR!" That's very nearly where we were this week when Donald Trump lashed out at I...

As Richard Nixon might have said, "What are we going to do when we don't have Western Civilization to kick around any more?" Things happen fast in this bad old world and a few years is a enough time for the wheels to come flying off the damn cart. And if you don't get our point, that may have been a wheel that went flying by on Monday in Helsinki. Our panel of IISS' Kori Schake, Georgetown Law Sch...

Donald Trump completed the most unsuccessful foreign trip of any president since Theodore Roosevelt, who took the first foreign trip, with a disastrous summit for the ages. Critics on the right and left called it an embarrassment, a disaster, or worse. And honestly, it was all that and more. A turning point in the history of US foreign policy perhaps. Our experts, Georgetown's Rosa Brooks, IISS' K...

If, as Sarah Huckabee Sanders alleged, it was a lousy breakfast that had White House Chief of Staff squirm while President Donald Trump kicked off the NATO Summit with an attack on Germany, then someone needs to get a Denny's Grand Slam to Rosa Brooks, Julie Smith and Ed Luce pronto. Because as our great panel looked back on Trump's NATO performance, they certainly did more than just shift uneasil...

With America's foreign policy savant, our president leaving the country this week it's easy to understand the fireworks and celebrations last week. Now we get to share him with the rest of the world--including our NATO allies, the keepers of our special relationship with England, the patrons of a Trump resort in Scotland (ancestral home of his immigrant mother) and then with the main man in his li...

The GOP could win in November and maintain its hold on both houses of Congress. Which Donald Trump would find encouraging. And might lead him to be even more like...himself. And that might lead his base to re-elect him. And we could have six and a half more years of Trump. So...what would that look like? Is there enough box wine in the world to help you get through this? Who knows? It can be an ex...

50 years ago the multilateral agreement that kept us all from blowing ourselves to smithereens was signed. And look, we're not smithereens, so that's good, right? On the other hand...North Korea. And Iran. And a president who wants new nukes that are smaller and easier to use. So, there's that. We discuss. You should listen. With Rosa Brooks, Joe Cirincione and Kori Schake. Tune in. Support this s...

At the end of the Cold War, the West triumphantly crowed that it was our open societies and the information revolution that ultimately defeated the USSR. They lost because people deprived of information simply couldn't compete. Now however, as we enter another stage of the information revolution, it may be that we celebrated yet another premature "mission accomplished" moment. It is now possible t...

On this special episode of Deep State Radio we get a sneak peak at the latest work of our own David Sanger (who we share with the New York Times and his students at Harvard's Kennedy School). The book, "The Perfect Weapon", is the definitive work on the state of cyberwar told compellingly in the real life stories of the unfolding of a new chapter in the history of global conflict. Join David, Geor...

As Deep State Radio's resident Constitutional scholar (and Associate Dean of Georgetown Law School) Rosa Brooks explains, the legal threshold for designating behavior as treasonous is quite narrow. But as she also points out, it would be up to Congress to define what was unacceptable in an impeachment hearing. As evidence mounts that the Trump campaign was deeply entwined with Russia and the Trump...

Deep State Radio's own Kori Schake wrote an important piece about the current threat to the international order posed by the Trump Administration. In this episode we discuss the article and just exactly how grievous the threat is and how we ought to characterize it. This takes us from John Locke to John Winthrop to Stephen Miller...(and we hope that's the last time you ever see those three names i...

The president salutes a North Korean general while praising that countries murderous leader. Babies are torn from their mother's breasts by our border police and children are housed in concentration camps. Loyalty lists are being compiled within the State Department. Our allies are turning away from us, alienated. Trade wars loom. Foreign attacks on our democracy are ignored. The president and his...

The U.S. has done plenty wrong in its history. There are millions around the world that have been victims of flaws in U.S. foreign policy. But since the early part of the 20th Century there has at least been a myth that Americans could cling to that we stood for what was right, for "the American way" and tried to shape the international system around those values. Now, in a week, the U.S. has atta...

The recent round of primary elections in the US don't seem to show a groundswell of public indignation over the fact that the president of the United States has obstructed justice, is a pathological liar, is profoundly corrupt and is, at the very least, surrounded by people and family members who may well have conspired with the Russians to tip the scales in the last election. So, that's a bummer....

On this, the historic, 100th episode of Deep State Radio (once called by Bridget Jones "the world's most important podcast") our usual band of troublemakers discuss just how much worse off the world is 100 podcasts later than it was we started. Could it all have to do with the man one NPR commentator referred to as "an escaped monkey from a cocaine study?" Which English monarch is most reminiscent...

Yes, this episode is about the rise of China and America's woeful unpreparedness for this epoch making event. But when guest Anna Fifield, Tokyo Bureau Chief of the Washington Post, sees a cockroach crawling through her Tokyo apartment during the broadcast, important lessons are learned. Tune in for the fun as Anna exits to another room and continues discussing the future of Asia and the world wit...

Their courtship will go down in history with those of Romeo & Juliet, Tristan & Isolde, and Goldman and Sachs. Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un have had their spats to be sure...but what's a little pre-nuclear foreplay between true loves. Now, all that is behind them it seems and we are heading for the steamy consummation of their relationship somewhere in Singapore...possibly, fittingly, in a a Sheld...