Month: April 2022

A Report From Kyiv Ahead of the Decisive Battle For the Donbas

We begin and go to Kyiv and speak with Simon Shuster, a reporter for Time Magazine based in New York City, by way of Moscow, Kyiv and Berlin. He has previously covered Russia and the former Soviet Union for Reuters, The Associated Press, The Moscow Times and Foreign Policy, and his latest article at Time is “A Visit to the Crime Scene Russian Troops Left Behind at a Summer Camp in Bucha.” We discuss the decisive battle about to begin in the Donbas which the Ukrainians have to win and the Russians can’t afford to lose and assess whether Russia will go ahead as they have threatened to do, and start targeting NATO supply convoys and chartered 747 flying into Kyiv with weapons and ammunition Ukraine’s military needs. And given that Putin will need some face-saving “victory” he can show to the Russian people as a result of his disastrous war, we speculate as to what that might be.

Amid Republican Anti-immigrant Grandstanding, a Case for Diversity and an Inclusive Patriotism

Then with Texas Governor Abbott grandstanding as imports of fruit and vegetable rot on the Mexican border and immigrants are bussed to Washington DC as pawns in Abbott’s presidential ambitions as he grovels to the Republican right, we speak with Yascha Mounk, a Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University and the founder of Persuasion, an online magazine and podcast on the threats to the free society.  A contributing editor at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, he is the author of The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It, and we discuss his latest book, out this week, The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure.

The Rise and Fall of Neoliberalism

Then finally we examine America’s two political orders of the last 100 years, the New Deal and its enemy Neoliberalism, and speak with Gary Gerstle, the Paul Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus and Paul Mellon Director of Research at the University of Cambridge. He is the author and editor of more than ten books, including American Crucible and Liberty and Coercion. He is currently a Guardian columnist and has also written for the Atlantic Monthly, the New Statesman, Dissent, The Nation, and Die Zeit, among others. We discuss his latest book, just out, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era.