Podcasts

The president's interactions with intelligence and public comments about intelligence are dramatically different in the first six months of the Biden administration than they were during the last presidency. To talk about those differences and why they matter for intelligence and national security, David Priess sat down with Sue Gordon and John McLaughlin. Sue Gordon, for two years during the Trump administration, was the principal deputy director of national intelligence, after decades of service at CIA and at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, or NGA.

Abe Shinzo is second only to Xi as the most consequential East Asian politician of the 21st century. Tobias Harris of the Center for American Progress joins to discuss his new biography of Abe, The Iconoclast.

Tobias and I discuss his dramatic rise, fall and return to power; how he reshaped governance in Japan through bureaucratic reform; how he managed relations with the US and China; and how tasty his wife's izakaya is. 

We’re going to stalk our former Rational Security hosts. We’ll talk about this feed and what we should do with it. And, we’ll chew over how the first hearing of the Jan. 6 commission went. Sort of.

The United States is just over a month out from completing its full military withdrawal from Afghanistan, but as U.S. troops have moved on, the situation on the ground has only gotten more challenging, with the Taliban claiming control of a growing portion of the country. In recent days, the United States even reentered the arena with airstrikes on the Taliban intended to reinforce U.S. support for Afghan security forces and dissuade a major Taliban offensive on Kandahar, Afghanistan's second largest city.