Trip the Beltway Fantastic With Kelley Vlahos and Friends

In the last two weeks we have witnessed a wave of aggressive tactics from Israel that have finally expanded the war in Gaza beyond the borders of the Gaza strip and West Bank and now into neighboring Lebanon, Yemen and possibly Iran.  We have seen Israel redefine terror tactics by simultaneously blowing up pagers connected to Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon, killing scores and injuring thousands....

NY Mayor Eric Adams took a bite out of the Big Apple of temptation and is choking now, charged with foreign taking bribes, campaign donations, luxury items and more  New York politics is exploding this week as its Mayor Eric Adams has been indicted  on charges of bribery, wire fraud, and seeking illegal campaign donations from foreign sources. In the latest revelations, gleaned from an unsealed in...

It has been a tremendously brutal week in the Middle East. The war in Gaza continues apace with no ceasefire in sight. Meanwhile, thousands of Lebanese have been injured and at least 32 killed after pagers and other electronic devices reportedly connected to Hezbollah members exploded on Tuesday and Wednesday across the country.  It is still not clear how many civilians and bystanders were among t...

This week we’re talking about diplomacy — or the lack of it — in the now 31-month war in Ukraine. I have the honor to welcome Ian Proud who was a member of His Britannic Majesty's Diplomatic Service from 1999 to 2023 and served as the Economic Counsellor at the British Embassy in Moscow from July 2014 to February 2019. Prior to Moscow, he organized the 2013 G8 Summit Northern Ireland, working...

President Joe Biden was reportedly “visibly shaking” as he got off Air Force One two weeks ago and was unable to get into an SUV on his own. This was a report not by a MAGA-inspired X account but by the Daily Mail’s Emily Goodin the week after Biden spoke at the Democratic National Convention (DNC). “Walking slowly down the plane’s stairs, he struggled to step up into the SUV waiting to take him t...

This week I’m happy to welcome back Stephen Semler who is co-founder of the Security Policy Reform Institute . He also writes the Polygraph newsletter on Substack. He just published a true deep dive on Responsible Statecraft entitled Gaza breakdown: 20 times Israel used US arms in likely war crimes . I thought it would be helpful to have him come on the podcast and explain all of the data in the p...

This week the Democratic party faithful are gathered in Chicago to engage in the quadrennial ritual of formally nominating the presidential ticket as well as whipping up support for their candidates in the homestretch of the election. No longer a forum for contest, the national convention is a multimillion dollar infomercial not only for the candidates, but their policy agendas, strategic messagin...

For years the U.S. military has been faced with the reality that for decades water contamination on its bases and installations throughout the United States has affected the health and well being of servicemembers, military families, as well as entire communities that have hosted the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines since the early 20th century. It is also the reality that the military has dragge...

It is now less than three months until the November presidential election and we are in one of the odd cycles in which neither candidate is an incumbent — the last time being when Donald Trump won his seat over Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016.  One of the biggest question marks in these races is how the winner will staff his or her administration, and in my case, I’m interested in foreign policy...

According to analysts , if the Military Industrial Congressional Intelligence Media and Think Tank Complex gets its way, the total defense budget will reach $1 trillion by 2027. That’s not hard to imagine given that the budget request for 2025, which all includes our nuclear weapons programs and other defense related activities not under the DoD appropriations, is close to $900 billion already.  C...

I’ve been reporting in Washington DC for over 20 years, which means I was here for the crazy 2000 election and 9/11, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a political news cycle quite like this one. If this episode isn’t published within the next 12-24 hours it may be at risk of expiring. The presidential election is in full swing right now and the wars abroad and the U.S. involvement in them, are on o...

One of my favorite topics is the military industrial complex because it encapsulates the absolute corruption of centralized power as it grows and metastasizes beyond human scale — at which point it becomes not only painfully ineffective, but a threat to the very people it is supposed to be working for.  Add weapons and war to the mix and you have a lethal, out-of-control institution that does ever...

It’s been less than a week since that infamous presidential debate and it is shocking how little the wars in Ukraine and Gaza played in the discussion. Worse, when they did spend 11 minutes total talking about the two conflicts, both candidates were largely incoherent and evasive . If the American taxpayer is going to spend tens of billions of dollars on these wars – which we have already: $6.5 bi...

As we’ve said many times, all is not what it seems when it comes to Washington headlines. Well, this story has to be the epitome of that warning. In March, President Biden announced that the U.S. military would be building two piers — one floating, the other attached to the Gaza coast — to surge aid into the embattled and beleaguered Palestinians living there.  The project was supposed to have the...

Some 88 years ago, an economist and concerned citizen by the name of Bruce Knight published a book, How to Run a War, to warn essentially, about Washington’s ability to marshal all of the tools of the federal government to mobilize the nation for war. Written in a highly ironic tone, Knight was drawing on the history of the first World War in anticipation of the growing push for conflict in Europe...

We’ve promised you that each week we will be lifting up the rocks in D.C. to see what is crawling around underneath and this week we won’t disappoint, as we lift up a very big rock – the dome of the U.S. Capitol - and see Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu swaggering around underneath.  Yes, the majority and minority leaders of both the House and Senate, meaning both parties, including Mitc...

Today I have two special guests to talk about a real unfolding foreign policy failure happening right before our eyes. According to the most recent reports, the Biden Administration is closer than ever to signing a deal with Saudi Arabia that the White House thinks will eventually lead to Saudi-Israeli normalization a la the Abraham Accords that were first set into motion by the Trump Administrati...

Today, we talk to  Brandan Buck  — Buck is not only a veteran of the Afghanistan War, but a writer and academic who studies war propaganda through the 20th and 21st Centuries, and wow, does he have a tale to tell.  We discuss, among other things, an article he did for Responsible Statecraft,  “Feeling manipulated? How Uncle Sam perfected the information state,”  to launch into a conversation about...

Did you know that your hard earned tax dollars were going to a program in which the U.S. military embeds senior officers in private companies to ostensibly learn business practices? Did you know this has been going on for the better part of 30 years and that a disproportionate number of these embeds go to major arms contractors like Boeing and Lockheeed Martin where they return, essentially as fre...

In this episode, my friends Dan Grazier and Julia Gledhill are two ace military analysts who recently shifted their work over to the Stimson Center. The pair have been critical in challenging the status quo in the military industrial complex and the monitoring the goings-on of what we call Beltway Bandits – the major defense contractors in Washington sucking our taxpayer dollars up like a hoover f...

My friends  Jim Antle  and  Curt Mills  join Trip the Beltway Fantastic this week to shed light on a familiar but mostly misunderstood subject: the schism in the conservative movement over foreign policy. Mainstream media has deliberately (or due to a lack of laziness and ignorance) set the divide up thusly: Traditional hawks vs. Isolationists. We break down the false premise, but more importantly...

Our guest this week is old friend Scott Horton, who is the longtime host of The Scott Horton Show , editorial director of Antiwar.com, and author of several books, including, “Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism.” Scott and I have been talking about endless U.S. wars since the mid-2000s, hammering at American policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, then later Libya and Syria. I ask him to i...

Our guest for this episode is Michael Vlahos, a writer, a historian of military strategy and history, and author of the book  Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change . Over several decades, he has taught war and strategy at Johns Hopkins University and the U.S. Naval War College, and has conducted strategic analysis for Johns Hopkins Applied Physic Laboratory. He is a weekly contributor to ...

Our guests for this episode are Katrina vanden Heuvel and James Carden , who are joining us to speak on progressives and the anti-war movement in the age of Russia gate and Trump. Vanden Heuvel and Carden experienced first-hand the brutal schism on the left over Russia, beginning with the 2014 overthrow of the pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych all the way through the Trump impeachment and th...

Kelley Vlahos is back behind the mic in this exhilarating new series!