“You have to look at the strange new thing about US foreign policy. It’s not being made by diplomats. It’s not being made just by Marco Rubio. It’s being made by this group of businesspeople connected to Trump.”

So argues Pulitzer Prize winning historian Anne Applebaum in a wide-ranging Conversation about how private business interests connected to Trump are shaping US foreign policy towards Russia, Ukraine, Venezuela, and elsewhere. Drawing on her recent reporting from Venezuela, she describes how the administration propped up Maduro’s vice president and partnered with one of the country’s most notorious regime cronies. Pointing to the recent electoral success of an anti-corruption political movement in Serbia, and the defeat of Flávio Bolsonaro in Brazil, Applebaum argues that grassroots anti-corruption movements can prevail against the corruption and kleptocracy of authoritarian leaders.

"For the first time ever, the United States homeland cannot be taken for granted as a secure rear area against non-nuclear attacks."

So argues Steve Rosen, professor emeritus of government at Harvard, in a bracing Conversation on the radically new security environment created by AI, precision strike weapons including drones, and cyber capabilities. Because these technologies give a distinct advantage to the offense, Rosen contends the US must "think about ways of similarly putting adversary assets at risk." He also explains what twentieth-century history can teach us about mobilizing the nation's resources in government, industry, and the wider community of experts, to counter critical threats to America and the free world.

Where do things stand in the wars in Ukraine and Iran? What are the implications of these wars for military technology, the future of warfare, and our highly fluid geopolitical environment?

In this Conversation, Phillips O'Brien, the distinguished military historian and author of the indispensable Phillips's Newsletter on Substack, shares his perspective on the two major wars. O’Brien also considers the ramifications for US-China military and technological competition, the future of the Middle East, and the faultlines in Europe. This is an unusually incisive analysis of both the facts on the ground and the larger and gathering geopolitical threats we face.