The DSR Network

The president's wife carries industrial strength disinfecting wipes wherever she goes because her man is a germaphobe. But when it comes to the growing ebola outbreak in Africa, he seems anything but prepared. (Pro tip for POTUS: The wipes won't help.). In fact, when it comes to the big crises that might come from left field--epidemics, climate crises, cyber attacks, and the like, Trump's America...

One thing about the tough guys in the Trump Administration, when it comes to foreign policy they sure do have colorful fantasies. Mike Pompeo's wish list for Iran is as far fetched as a fairy-tale but less likely to come to life. In North Korea, the president's hopes and dreams are just as impossible. But some of his advisors have imaginations that run to the dark side and are served by the presid...

So much for the Nobel Peace Prize. So much for the celebration in Jerusalem. So much for teaching those Iranians a lesson. So much for witch hunts. So much for so much that our heads are spinning...much like this crazy world we all live on. On this episode of Deep State Radio Kori Schake, Rosa Brooks, Evelyn Farkas and Dan Benjamin discuss it all...and we have to be honest with you, the results ar...

With boatloads of trouble at home and a Congress unlikely to actually do anything between now and the election, Donald Trump needs to come up with some way to distract from the Mueller investigation and his deepening legal woes. Live Tweeting Fox & Friends is obviously not doing the trick nor is The Rudy Show. So why not blow up the Iran deal, open an embassy in Jerusalem and negotiate a nuclear d...

The president lies. He lies all the time. He can't help but lie. That's why his lawyers consider any move by Robert Mueller to be a perjury trap for Trump. Because any question Mueller and his team will ask is certain to produce over-heated prevarication, deception, and deception presented on a bed of utter bullshit. What does this mean for America? For our democracy? For our standing in the world...

It's a mad whirl these days with more mad than whirl going on. This week alone offers everything from the Iran deal (the one new NRA president Ollie North did back in the day) to the Iran deal (the one Donald Trump hates). It offers a debate about the use of torture (re: the Gina Haspel confirmation hearings) as well as a debate about the use of torture (having to watch Rudy Giuliani on television...

How are we supposed to concentrate on nuclear weapons dramas in the Middle East and the Koreas, new U.S. special forces deployments, Bibi Netanyahu doing his best Gallagher prop-comedy impression and all the other lunacy going on in the world with all the even more distracting lunacy going on in Washington? Can a strong mastery of acronyms help? Or is beer a better choice? Ploughshares Fund’s Joe...

Move are afoot--everywhere. In the Koreas, North and South are posturing pre-negotiations while back in the U.S. the president is writing his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. In the Middle East, Israel is working with the U.S. (and maybe the Saudis) to try to find a way to torpedo the Iran nuclear deal...and the Europeans are pushing hard in the other direction. Somewhere between the two U.S. policy...

Not since Chevy Chase's European Vacation has an American brought so much mayhem to U.S. Trans-Atlantic Relations. Perhaps new Secretary of State Mike Pompeo can start to make amends on his first trip as America's chief diplomat. But if the recent visit of French President Macron is any indication, it seems unlikely. For all the diplomatic foreplay between the two leaders, Macron achieved none of...

With John Bolton loose in the West Wing, what will happen to US foreign policy? Deep State Radio's Rosa Brooks hosts in David Rothkopf's absence, joined by regulars Kori Schake of the International Institute for Strategic Studies and Ed Luce from the Financial Times, with a special guest appearance by Stanford University's Colin Kahl. Colin assures DSR listeners that Bolton's a nixer, not a fixer,...

When Donald Trump thinks about Kim Jong Un he sees Stormy Daniels. At least he sees what he saw that night long ago with Ms. Daniels, which is something that he wanted very very much, that he needed to the exclusion of everything else. He yearns for what Kim and Kim alone can give him. And that is a taste of historical redemption, something that might change the narrative that even Trump can see i...

The Syria strike was likely highly ineffective due to the fact that it was limited in impact, came without a long-term strategy or much likelihood of follow-up actions to end the use of chemical weapons or the wholesale slaughter of Syrians. But wait, it gets worse: It was also an illegal strike by almost every measure. But hey, that's not a bug it's a feature of the Trump approach to the presiden...

Every day in Trumpassic Era seems like a million years in geological time. Sex scandals, echoes of old pee tapes, pending missile strikes in search of a strategy, waves of national security experts leaving the White House, the president calling the former FBI director a “lying slimebag”, the FBI director launching a book that is the most stunning attack by a top former official on a sitting presid...

John Bolton’s first day as National Security Advisor presents him with the kind of opportunities he has waited his entire life for—a choice between worsening relations and possible military action against Syria, Iran and North Korea. Where will he succeed in making Trump’s terrible instincts worse? Or is there a chance he might become in his new role a more responsible voice creating a constructiv...

The day after Trump leaves office some things will change immediately (like a terrible management style or diplomacy via Twitter or bad relations with Mexico) and some things will take years to fix (like the institutions we have broken or repairing our standing as a reliable partner.). On this episode of Deep State Radio Kori Schake of the IISS, Rosa Brooks of Georgetown, Kelly Magsamen of the Cen...

Perhaps its his fear of an impending Oprah candidacy but Donald Trump seems to be embracing her tactic of great generosity to her audience. In his case, it is of course, the audience of one he covets most...the one in the Kremlin. And so in this week's episode of Trump's reality television show he has decided--after attacking our neighbors to the South (Mexico), a big American company (Amazon), an...

It looks like the Trump-Kim Summit is a thing. A real thing. That’ll likely happen this Spring. At least, all indicators were pointing in that direction following Kim Jong Un’s stealthy train trip from Pyongyang to Beijing this past week and the follow up announcement that meetings with Chinese leader Xi Jinping were productive and that Kim was willing to discuss the de-nuclearization of the Korea...

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! David Sanger of the New York Times, Rosa Brooks of Georgetown University Law Center, Evelyn Farkas of the Atlantic Council and Edward Luce of the Financial Times elucidate. Tune in! Support this show http://s...

He doesn't love democracy. He is aging. He, frankly, doesn't run with a very nice crowd. Oh, and there are all those invasions and murders and all that spying and so on. But Vladimir Putin has now won four elections to be Russia's president...and is two-for-two in major superpower elections in the past couple years. Where can this lead...and what happens if Trump turns up the heat on his patron an...

A recent article in the Atlantic echoed a discussion we had not too long on Deep State Radio about whether or not we are in a "constitutional crisis." The conclusion was we face "rot" not a crisis right now. But is that worse than a crisis because it inures us to a problem without motivating us to confront and change it? And is there something worse, an underlying cultural crisis that threaten our...

With so much focus on scandal, corruption, nuclear war, racism, isolationism, protectionism, and nationalism in the era of Trump, we sometimes lose site of the little things. Like the future. Or the urgent problems we have to solve. Or the truth. On this episode of Deep State Radio Georgetown University's Rosa Brooks, IISS Deputy Director General Kori Schake and Vice President for the National Sec...

Every feel like you're living inside a washing machine in the middle of the spin cycle? We hope it's not because you have a Tide pod in your mouth. Instead, if you're like the typical Deep State Radio listener its because you have a fairly acute addiction to cable news and social media. We'd cure it if we could. But for now, the best we can do is help you manage it by talking about the very latest...

It's an old rule of improv comedy that you have to play along with the premise you are presented with. It's a rule apparently that the old show biz wannabe who is currently president of the United States took to heart last week when he jumped on North Korean dictatorial dumpling Kim Jong Un's invitation to have a sit down. He said "yes" before he or anyone on his staff had the slightest idea about...

Russia scored its biggest recent victory in its on-going war against western democracies with the victories of the right wing in the recent Italian election. It ranks right behind the Trump victory and the Brexit vote. But the reality is some of what Russia is doing is winning and some of what is happening is just us losing. We're making mistakes and often, not even making the minimum basic effort...

What's more screwed up in the White House--personnel or policy? There's virtually no senior advisor to the President who hasn't left or been rumored to be on their way out. (With the exception of Trump's Igor, Stephen Miller, who will be flattering his boss and promoting institutionalized racism until the very last day of the administration.) There is almost no policy area where the policy approac...