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It’s our last episode—at least in our current form. We’ll reminisce about our favorite moments, hear from longtime friends and listeners, and share in a final Object Lesson.
Ben shares some scotch.
Shane remembers an old recorder.
How do Roombas illustrate the promise and peril of translational research? Which valley of death is really the worst valley of death? And how can woolly mammoths save the planet from climate change?
To discuss, I have on:
Yemen remains a mess. Many years of warfare have left it politically fractured, economically shattered and with a true humanitarian crisis of multiple dimensions. And yet there are some small signs of hope, with the Biden administration increasing its engagement to achieve progress and the United Nations resetting its efforts with a new special envoy to the country.
The Biden administration’s effort to counter ransomware may not be especially creative, but it is comprehensive.
It was quite a week in cybersecurity. The Israeli firm NSO Group was outed by a consortium of newspapers and media entities for its snooping software Pegasus, which seems to have gathered data from the phones of a shockingly large number of people. Then, starting Sunday evening and into Monday morning, the Biden administration announced a multi-lateral response to China's Microsoft Exchange Server hack. There were indictments, there was a toughly worded statement, but there were no sanctions. Was it enough?
Chris Miller of Tufts and I discuss our report Labs over Fabs, our case for the US to be spending money more broadly than currently conceived by the CHIPS act. (https://chinatalk.substack.com/p/labs-over-fabs-risc-vs-promise)
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U.S. troops are pulling out of Afghanistan, the withdrawal is almost done and U.S. forces turned over the Bagram Airfield to Afghan forces the other day. Scott Anderson knows something about withdrawals. He served at U.S. Embassy Baghdad shortly after the United States withdrew from Iraq. He joined Benjamin Wittes on Lawfare Live to talk about the Afghan withdrawal, his memories of the Iraq withdrawal and why these things sometimes go better and sometimes go worse. What has the Biden administration learned from the Iraq withdrawal experience?
National security attention rarely focuses for long on Sub-Saharan Africa, and when it does, it's largely on the most populous countries like Nigeria, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Former intelligence community and National Security Council official Judd Devermont, now director of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wants to change that.
On May 24, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law a bill designed to limit how social media platforms can moderate content. Technology companies, predictably, sued—and on June 30, Judge Robert Hinkle of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida granted a preliminary injunction against the law.
Historic protests rock Cuba. The ripple effects of an assassination linger in Haiti. And a former president warns the consequences of withdrawal from Afghanistan will be “unbelievably bad.”
Ben is on his way to Vichy French citizenship.
Tamara reminds you to renew your passport early.