Archives for July 2016

Episode 120: Derek Chollet


derek cholletDerek Chollet is the author of the new book The Long Game: How Obama Defied Washington and Redefined America’s
Role in the World.

Derek served in a number of foreign policy positions in the Obama administration, including in the National Security Council, State Department and finally as an assistant secretary of defense for international security so this book serves, very much, as an insider’s assessment of 7 years of Obama’s foreign policy.

We kick off with an extended discussion about his book and Obama’s foreign policy more broadly before pivoting to a conversation about Derek’s fascinating career path from a college town in Nebraska to the highest reaches of US foreign policy making.

How El Nino is Affecting Food Supplies in Southern Africa

Southern Africa is poised for catastrophe. And it’s mostly because of El Nino.

This year’s historically intense El Nino caused the region’s worst drought in 35 years. Harvests have been decimated and livelihoods imperiled. The area was already prone to high levels of food insecurity, but the sheer intensity of this year’s massive El Nino has sparked a humanitarian emergency not experienced in decades.

On the line with me to discuss the food crisis in Southern Africa are two officials from the US Agency for International Development, USAID: Dave Harden, the Assistant Administrator for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance and and Dina Esposito a deputy assistant administrator and Food for Peace director.

The two officials discuss some of the root causes of the food crisis and its implications across a number of sectors. We discuss what the US and international response is looking like and why this crisis differs so substantially from a devastating famine that the region experienced 35 years ago.

This is a shamefully under-reported story in western media, so I was glad to be able to shine a spotlight on it.

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Arsalan Iftikhar Battles Islamophobia

arsalanArsalan Iftikhar is the author of the new book Scapegoats: How Islamophobia Helps Our Enemies and Threatens Our Freedoms.

Arsalan is a human rights lawyer by training and was one of the original guests on this podcast a couple years ago, when he discussed his career and life journey that lead him to this line of work.

Arsalan is on TV a lot. And often times he get’s the call after there has been some sort of terrible terrorist attack. To that end, we have an extended conversation about what it’s like to be a <uslim public intellectual these days.

We discuss his new book, the different strains of islamophobia that can be found in Europe and the United States, and what his process is after there has been another mass murder event and he’s called to talk about it on TV

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UN Secretary General Candidate Conversations: Helen Clark

Helen_Clark_UNDP_2010Helen Clark is a candidate to become the next UN Secretary General. She’s the former Prime Minister of New Zealand, serving from 1999 to 2008 and is currently the head of the United Nations Development Program.

We spoke in mid-July as part of a series of conversations I’m having with the candidates in the race to replace Ban Ki Moon when his term expires at the end of this year.The goal with these candidate conversations is to learn how some of their past experiences might inform the kinds of decisions they would make as Secretary General, and so to that end Ms Clark discusses growing up on a farm in New Zealand in the shadow of World War Two; becoming politicized in high school and university around the anti-apartheid movement; her decision to enter politics and some of the big foreign policy decisions she took as Prime Minister.

This is a great conversation with one of the most high profile of the Secretary General candidates.

Episode 118: Priscilla Clapp

Priscilla-Clapp_0Priscilla Clapp had a 30 year career in the state department, which ended in 2002 as the top US official in Burma. She also served in top positions in South Africa in the early 1990s during the transition from Apartheid and in Japan and Moscow.

Clapp is the co-author with Mort Halperin of what I consider one of the most important books you can read about US foreign policy. It’s called Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy, and as the title suggests, the book describes the role of the bureaucracy in shaping US foreign policy. We kick off with an extended conversation about that book, and then have another extended conversation about how Clapp, as the State Department official in charge of refugee programs in the late 1980s, used tools of bureaucratic politics to helped engineer the emigration of jewish refugees from Russia to the United States.

This is a great conversation with a foreign policy trail blazer, who is currently a senior advisor to the U.S. Institute for Peace. 

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Congress Actually Does Something Good

If you follow US politics even just slightly you will probably be surprised to learn that Congress actually did something last week. And deeper still, the action they took was broadly in the service of humanity.

Just after the July 4th holiday Congress passed the Global Food Security Act, which was a piece of legislation that will inform how the US government fights hunger worldwide.

My guest today, Judith Rowland was deep in the trenches of the years long effort to pass this bill. She is the US government relations lead for the Global Poverty Project and we spoke just a few hours before the passage of this bill.

Judith discusses what is contained in the bill, including the strengthening of a Obama administration program known as Feed the Future. And we also discuss how in such a polarized political environment, something like the Global Food Security Act could get passed.

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Episode 117: Lauren Wolfe

Lauren-Wolfe2When Lauren Wolfe reported on a war crime in eastern Congo, she could hardly have expected that her piece in The Guardian would result in an arrest. Wolfe is an award winning journalist who has been covering trauma and sexual violence for the better part of her career. She’s a columnist for Foreign Policy and director of Women Under Siege, which is a journalistic endeavor founded by Gloria Steinem as part of the Women’s Media Project to investigate how rape and gender based violence are used as tools of conflict.

About a week before we spoke Lauren wrote about a Congolese militia that terrorized a small town in the eastern part of the country by systematically raping babies and toddlers. It is a gut wrenching read, but her piece had an immediate impact on the ground–the militia leader and his men were arrested hours later.

We kick off discussing that story, and go back to discuss Wolfe’s life and career, which has been mostly devoted to reporting on trauma. Among other stories she covered 9-11 and its aftermath for the New York Times.

This is a pretty heavy episode, but not without its lighter moments. Lauren opens up in a pretty profound way about why she feels so compelled to cover violence and trauma.  It was a true honor to speak with her.

The World’s Newest Country Turns Five and There’s Not Much to Celebrate

On July 9, South Sudan commemorates its 5th independence day. And I say “commemorates” and not “celebrates” because there is not a whole lot to celebrate. The country has been mired in conflict since late 2013, when a political dispute between president Salva Kiir and his deputy Riek Machar devolved into an armed battle and then full blown civil war.

The consequences of this war for the people of South Sudan have been immense. Millions have been displaced, and though a peace deal was signed last year violence continues to flare up and the humanitarian situation is as dire as ever.

On the line to discuss recent developments in South Sudan, the role of the United Nations Peacekeepers in the country, and the humanitarian situation is Noah Gottschalk, who is the senior humanitarian policy advisor at Oxfam. He does a good job of offering some broader context to understand how South Sudan has so unraveled in the last five years.>

If you have 20 minutes and want to understand the deep challenges that face the people of South Sudan on the country’s 5th birthday —  and the leaders under whom they have been so ill-served —  have a listen.

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