Conversations about Foreign Policy and World Affairs
Jillian York is on the line this week. She is the online freedom of expression activist, writer and thinker, now with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Jillian tells Mark how she was in the right place at the right time to help the world understand how social media was propelling the Arab Spring Protests.
Turkish foreign policy is always a fascinating case study. As the sunni insurgency in Iraq is gaining steam, how are Turkish foreign policy elites responding? What are Turkey’s near term strategic goals for Iraq and Syria? And how does this impact Turkey’s sometimes hostile relationship to its Kurdish population? Mark speaks with professor Louis Fishman who answers these questions and more.
Be sure to check out Prof. Fishman’s blog, Istanbul-New York-Tel Aviv.
Something different on the podcast this week! I recent sat down with a number of officials at the United Nations as part of Talk Radio Day 2014. This is an annual event hosted by the United Nations Foundation in which talk radio hosts from around the country broadcast from the UN for the day. I spoke with about a dozen officials, both from the United Nations secretariat and from member states. Each of the interviews focuses on topical issues related to the work of my very interesting guests.
Here’s the first batch of interviews. Look out for part two in the near future.
John Ashe, President of the General Assembly
Courtenay Rattray, Jamaica’s Ambassador to the UN
Le Hoai Trung, Vietnam’s Ambassador to the UN
Kurt Chesko, UN Mine Action Service
Andrew Hudson, UN Development Program
Chris Whatley, United Nations Association of the USA
From the perspective of the United Nations, the crisis in Iraq cannot be disaggregated from the crisis in Syria.
In this special edition of Global Dispatches, I speak with the United Nations Deputy Secretary General Jan Eliason who shares his deep concern that ISIS’s offensive in Iraq and Syria’s escalating conflict could plunge the entire region into sectarian war.
I also speak with Bettina Luescher, spokesperson for the World Food Program, who discusses the UN’s humanitarian response to the Iraq and Syria crises. Have a listen. Look out for more of these conversations from the United Nations on Monday.
Amb Thomas Pickering has had a front row seat to some of the most important foreign policy events of the last 50 years. The career foreign service officer and widely respected diplomat served as US Ambassador to the United Nations, Israel, Jordan, Russia, India, among others places. He speaks with Mark about the faltering Israel-Palestine peace process, his role in shaping US policy during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and an awkward phone call with President-elect George H.W. Bush, who tapped him to serve as US Ambassador to the UN during the run-up to the Gulf War.
In 2022 Qatar will host the World Cup. Migrant workers, mostly from Southeast Asia, are living in harsh conditions and dying in large numbers as they construct the infrastructure for the World Cup in the Gulf Kingdom. Mark speaks with journalist Pete Pattisson of the Guardian who takes us inside the migrant worker industry to expose horrid conditions, stolen wages, and corrupt practices faced by Nepalese workers in the Gulf.
Jessica Tuchman Mathews is on the line this week. The longtime head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and foreign policy trendsetter discusses the crisis in Ukraine, growing up with a famous mother, her unconventional path from molecular biology to foreign policy; and how two of her Foreign Affairs articles forever changed how we think about the world.
It’s a great conversation! Have a listen and let me know what you think.
Egypt’s ex Army Chief Abdel Fatah al Sisi won election this week (with an astounding 96% of the vote!) The ascent of this Mubarak-era military functionary speaks to the profound failure of Egypt’s 2011 Arab Spring revolution.
Who is al-Sisi? Why did the Muslim Brotherhood and Mohammed Morsi fail so spectacularly? And what can prevent Egypt from lurching from one political crisis to the next? Here to provide the context for Morsi’s fall, al Sisi’s rise and What It All Means is Issandr al Amrani of the International Crisis Group. If you have 20 minutes and what to understand what’s going on in Egypt, have a listen.
International Crisis Group chief Louise Arbour is on the line this week. Ms Arbour is a true human rights pioneer, perhaps best known as the war crimes prosecutor who served Slobodan Milosevic his indictment for genocide. In this episode, she tells Mark about her amazing journey from law school in Quebec to the war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda — and how one dark episode of Canadian history propelled her to fight governments who abuse their citizens.
