Archives for April 2018

Venezuelans are Fleeing their Country in Record Numbers

Latin America is experiencing its worst-ever refugee crisis. By most estimates, several thousands of Venezuelans are fleeing the country every single day.  In recent weeks the pace and scale of this refugee crisis has sharply increased. There is no end in sight.

My guest today, Andrei Serbin Pont, explains why Venezuelans are leaving their country in such profound numbers. He is the research director of the regional think tank Cries and recently undertook a study of the Venezuelan refugee crisis with the Stanley Foundation

As Andrei explains, most of these refugees are fleeing to Colombia and Brazil and those countries are having a difficult time handling the influx. Still, many are fleeing elsewhere, including to nearby Caribbean Islands which have virtually no capacity to handle a sharp increase in population. The bottom line is that this is becoming a very intense regional crisis and it is accelerating.

Download this episode to listen later. You can subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify or get the Global Dispatches mobile app. 

Paula Dobriansky, Revisited

In the hierarchy of the State Department the Secretary of State, of course, sits on top. Below the Secretary of State is the Deputy Secretary of State and below the Deputy Secretary is the number three post at the state department, the Under-secretary of State for Political Affairs.

According to a recent report in Bloomberg by the journalist Nick Wadhams, Paula Dobriansky has be tapped to serve in that number 3 spot. Wadhams cites three sources “familiar with the decision,” though neither Dobriansky nor the white house have commented at time I’m recording this.

If, indeed, Paula Dobriansky becomes the Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs she will be the highest ranking official in the Trump administration who has appeared on this very podcast, so I thought it would be worthwhile to revisit my conversation with her.

We spoke in June 2015. At the time, Dobriansky was at Harvard having having served in the George W. Bush administration as Undersecretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs.

In our conversation, we spend a good deal of time discussing her background, her academic interests, and her career serving in four administrations. She is of Ukrainian descent and entered college interested in studying the Soviet Union. She earned her PHD writing about Soviet foreign policy and was a well regarded Sovietologist and later Russia expert.  We kicked off discussing what at the time was an escalating situation in Ukraine before having a longer conversation about her career.

What I find interesting looking back at this interview in the context of her possibly joining the Trump administration is that she comes from a fairly traditional Republican foreign policy background. She’s consistently opposed Russian aggression and has embraced the value of spreading democracy and human rights as in the national interests of the United States. She could probably be fairly considered to a neo-conservative. She certainly is very thoughtful and was very gracious with this interview.

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How the US Can Get its Multilateral Groove Back

My guest today, Paul Stares, is the author of the new book Preventative Engagement. How America Can Avoid War, Stay Strong, and Keep the Peace.

The book identifies what Stares calls “the American predicament” in which United States remains the principal guarantor of global peace and security, but that in the process of maintaining global peace and security the United States becomes overly extended and prone to costly military entanglements.

Stares offers a way out of this trap that does not involve retreating from the world, but rather embraces what he calls “preventative engagement.” We discuss what that concept entails and why even the Trump administration might be willing to implement it.

This is a good, high minded conversation about US foreign policy and about the value of the United Nations and multilateral engagement to US national security interests. Have a listen.

Download this episode to listen later. You can subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify or get the Global Dispatches mobile app. 

The View from Europe

We are now one and a half years into the Trump presidency and diplomats around the world are learning how to adjust.

So what does the domestic instability in America look like to Europeans right now? How has diplomacy with the United States changed since January 2017? How are America’s allies in Europe interpreting this unique moment of US history?

Prudence Siebert
German Ambassador Klaus Scharioth speaks to Command and General Staff College students and faculty Sept. 16 in the Lewis and Clark Center’s Marshall Auditorium.

I put these questions and more to veteran German diplomat Klaus Scharioth. He has served in the ministry of foreign affairs since the 1970s. He was the German ambassador to the United States from 2006 to 2011, spanning both the Bush and Obama administrations. He is now a professor of practice at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. Ambassador Scharioth is a member of the board of directors of Humanity in Action-Germany.

We kick off with a conversation about the ways in which the day-to-day practice of diplomacy with the United States has changed since Trump took office. We then have a wider discussion about the evolving nature of transatlantic relations and how the fundamental worldview of Europe is clashing with that of the Trump administration.

I recorded this conversation a couple of days ago and one thing that has stuck with me was the Ambassador’s emphasizing that America’s capacity for self-correction is among its most widely admired attributes in Europe. The implication here is that the outcome of the Mueller investigation will have a profound impact on America’s image abroad.

This is a great conversation that offers a European perspective on the intense and unfolding political drama here in the United States.

Episode 190: Suzanne DiMaggio

Suzanne DiMaggio specializes in what is called Track Two Diplomacy with countries that have limited or no diplomatic relations with the United Stats. In practice, this has meant that she’s spent countless hours over the last nearly twenty years in meetings with North Koreans and Iranians and those encounters have lead to some major diplomatic breakthroughs.

We kick off defining our terms. She explains what track two diplomacy means, as opposed to, say “back channel” diplomacy. We then preview an upcoming major summit between the Kim Jong UN and South Korean president Moon Jae-in. And that meeting, of course, will lay the groundwork for the Trump-Kim meeting, which we discuss in detail.

As diplomacy with North Korea intensifies in the coming months, Suzanne DiMaggio is someone you will see quoted often on TV and radio and so I also wanted to use our conversation to learn how she first got involved with this kind of unique diplomatic endeavor. She has some great stories to tell.

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PODCAST: What Happened to Iraq’s Oil Wealth?

What happened to Iraq’s oil wealth? That is the central question of the book: Pipe Dreams: The Plundering of Iraq’s Oil Wealth by my guest today Erin Banco.

Erin Banco is an investigative reporter at the Star Ledger in New Jersey, where she covers the intersection of money and government. She has reported from the middle east for years and puts her investigative skills to use by examining documents and cultivating sources who explain the sordid tale of corruption surrounding Iraq’s oil wealth, particularly in the Kurdish region.

Iraq sits on the world’s fifth largest oil reserves, but oil wealth has not trickled down to the Iraqi people. Erin Banco explains why.

 

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Episode 189: Steve Coll

 

Journalist Steve Coll is a staff writer at the New Yorker, dean of the Colombia School of Journalism and former president of the New America Foundation think tank.

Tn 2005 he wont he Pulitzer for his book Ghost Wars, which examines the secret history of the CIA in Afghanistan from the Soviet invasion to right before the September 11 attacks. It is the foundational text that provides the history and context for understanding America’s involvement in Afghanistan in the era leading up to the September 11 attacks. When published, it took DC by storm and became a canonical text for the national security community.

Needless to say, official Washington and beyond was eagerly anticipating his sequel to Ghost Wars, which was published just a few weeks ago. The book, Directorate S: The CIA and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan picks up where Ghost Wars leaves off, spanning from the September 11th attacks to the first few months of the Trump administration.

We kick off with an extended discussion of these two books and what went so wrong for the United States in Afghanistan. We then discuss his own life and career as a journalist, including how an accident of assignment lead him to South Asia at a very critical time.

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Bosnia is Vladimir Putin’s Next Target

A few weeks ago I was having lunch with a former high ranking US diplomat whose work focused on Russia and Europe. I asked him where he thought Vladimir Putin might target next to sow instability and without missing a beat he said: Bosnia.

A scattering of recent think tank and press reports offer some insights into Russian meddling in Bosnia. It is an extremely under-covered global story, but one that has the potential to cause unrest not only in the Balkans, but across Europe.

On the line with me to discuss this situation is Michael Carpenter. He is a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Eastern Europe and the Balkans and is now Senior Director for Diplomacy and Global Engagement at the Penn Biden Center

Carpenter explains some of the motivations driving Vladimir Putin —  above all, he describes how fomenting unrest in Bosnia is Putin’s best insurance policy against perceived threats by the West. Bosnia, as Carpenter puts it, is the soft underbelly of Europe that is ripe for exploitation.

If you have 20 minutes and want to learn the implications of Russian meddling in Bosnia for all of Europe, have a listen.

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Episode 188: Rais Bhuiyan

On September 21, 2001, Rais Bhuiyan was working behind the counter at a gas station outside Dallas, Texas when a man named Mark Stroman walked in brandishing a sawed-off shotgun.

Stroman was a self-proclaimed white supremacist in the midst of a deadly hate crime spree. Seeking revenge for the recent September 11th attacks just days earlier, he roamed the area looking for what he believed to be Arabs to kill. In that killing spree Stroman took the lives of an Indian immigrant named Vasudev Patel and Waqar Hassan, a Pakistani immigrant.

Stroman shot Bhuiyan in the face. But Bhuiyan, who was a former Bangladeshi air force pilot, survived the attack. Stroman was eventually arrested, convicted of murder and sent to death row.

As Stroman awaited execution, Rais Bhuiyan embarked on an improbable campaign to spare the life of his attacker. 

This story was masterfully told in the 2014 book The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas by Anand Ghirdiharas. A major hollywood movie based on the book is currently in production.

Today, Rais Bhuiyan is the founder and president of the NGO, World Without Hate. When we caught up, Rais had recently returned from a trip to Canada, sponsored by the US State Department, where he told his story. That trip also included a visit to the Islamic Center of Quebec City which was the scene of a mass shooting hate crime just one year ago. We kick off discussing this trip and Rais’ work with the State Department before entering into a long and powerful conversation about Rais’ experience.

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