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Three Questions

Three Questions

De : The National Interest
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Welcome to Three Questions—a podcast for a new era of global complexity and uncertainty. Three Questions breaks down key security, trade, energy, and technology challenges in an era of escalating competition among the world’s leading powers and rapid change in America’s approach to the world. Every two weeks, host Paul Saunders, President of the Center for the National Interest and Publisher of The National Interest, sits down with leading American and international experts to ask three focused questions that yield short and accessible perspectives on these critical issues. Three Questions cuts through the chaos to bring clarity on timely topics.

The National Interest 2025
Politique et gouvernement Sciences politiques
Épisodes
  • Turning Up the Dial on America's Nuclear Restart (w/ Ho K. Nieh)
    Jun 29 2026

    After decades defined by survival and preservation, the U.S. nuclear industry has entered a new era of growth. Bolstered by a 2025 presidential executive order and bipartisan acts of Congress, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is undergoing its most comprehensive transformation in fifty years. The stakes are considerable: surging electricity demand from AI and industrial growth has made nuclear power essential not only to America's energy security but to its national security, even as China has brought nearly sixty reactors online in the time the United States has only built three. How does a safety regulator reinvent how it works without compromising what it protects? What will it take for America to deploy nuclear at scale and to lead the world in doing so again? And how does the NRC's role reach beyond domestic plants to shape whether U.S. allies buy American reactors or someone else's?

    In this episode, Paul Saunders speaks with Ho K. Nieh, Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Chairman Nieh was previously VP of Regulatory Affairs at Southern Nuclear and, prior to that, served for more than twenty years as an NRC staff member. While at the NRC, Chairman Nieh served as Director of the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, where he was responsible for reactor safety licensing and oversight programs for operating and new reactors.

    Music by Sonican from Pixabay.

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    33 min
  • Soft Power, Hard Returns: American Investment in Egypt (w/ James Harmon & Cornelius Queen)
    Jun 15 2026

    In 2011, Congress placed $300 million in the hands of private investors with an unusual mandate: grow Egypt's economy on behalf of the American people. Fifteen years later, the Egyptian-American Enterprise Fund has invested in more than 150 companies, helped create over 75,000 jobs, and grown to an estimated value of more than $500 million. And it has managed all this in a country rocked by revolution, political instability, and currency collapse. At a moment when Americans are questioning the costs of hard power in the Middle East and the value of foreign assistance, the Fund's track record raises provocative questions about how the US projects its influence abroad. Can private-sector investment succeed where troops and traditional aid have struggled? Why should taxpayer dollars back ventures in faraway markets? And can this model of "soft power" be replicated across the developing world?

    In this episode, Paul Saunders speaks with James Harmon and Cornelius Queen, two authors of the new book A Daring Enterprise: A US-Egyptian Partnership and the Case for Soft Power. The book looks at the Egyptian-American Enterprise Fund, where Harmon is chairman and Queen is a senior vice president. Harmon, a former chairman of the Export-Import Bank of the United States, previously served as chairman and CEO of the investment bank Schroder Wertheim & Co. and is chair emeritus of the World Resources Institute. Queen has worked on Capitol Hill and managed humanitarian aid programs in Lebanon.

    Order the book.

    Music by Sonican from Pixabay.

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    32 min
  • What Is the National Interest?
    Jun 1 2026

    This year marks the 30th anniversary of the 1996 report of the Commission on America's National Interests, a bipartisan effort to answer a deceptively simple question: what does the United States actually need to do in the world? Far from a dry policy artifact, the report was an attempt to bring discipline to a foreign policy debate in which nearly every cause was being branded "vital." Three decades later, that challenge feels strikingly familiar. The confusion of the early post–Cold War years, when Americans struggled to define their role in a transformed world, has echoes in our own moment, even if the sources of uncertainty have changed. How should America rank its priorities when it can't possibly pursue them all? What truly counts as "vital" versus merely important, and who gets to decide? In this episode, Paul Saunders breaks down the report's framework and makes the case for why this 30-year-old document still has relevance in 2026.

    Saunders is the president of the Center for the National Interest and an expert with more than three decades of experience in U.S.-Russia policy. He previously served in the George W. Bush Administration from 2003 to 2005 as Senior Advisor to the Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs.

    Read the report here: https://cftni.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Americas-National-Interests-1996.pdf

    Music by Sonican from Pixabay.

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    22 min
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