Background Briefing: August 18, 2024
Will Biden Come Up With a Strategy For Ukraine the Absence of Which is an Excuse For Trump And the Republicans Not to Support Its Defense Against Russia?
We begin with a letter from top military and State Department officials to President Biden urging him to come up with a strategy for Ukraine to win rather than give opponents like Trump and Speaker Johnson an excuse not to support Ukraine. We discuss Ukraine’s incursion into Russia causing a postponement of talks between Russia and Ukraine on a deal for Russia to stop attacking Ukraine’s electrical grid in exchange for Ukraine to stop attacking Russian oil refineries and depots. Joining us is Michael Kimmage, a professor of history and department chair at the Catholic University of America, chair of the Kennan Institute Advisory Council and a fellow at the German Marshall Fund. From 2014 to 2017, he served on the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio. He is the author of The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy and Collisions: The War in Ukraine and the Origins of the New Global Instability.
The Irony That Saudi’s MBS “Prince Bonesaw” Now Fears Assassination
Then we look into concerns the Saudi leader MBS has expressed to members of congress that he could be assassinated like Anwar Sadat was by Islamist radicals furious at his attempts to make the Abraham Accords alliance with Israel as it kills Palestinians in Gaza. Joining us is Sarah Leah Whitson, the executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) who was formerly the executive director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa Division, where she oversaw 19 countries, with staff located in 10 countries. We discuss her latest article at Responsible Statecraft, “Biden’s New Weapons Deal With Saudi Arabia’s Prince Bonesaw.”
An Assessment of the Harris/Walz Economic Plan
Then finally we get an assessment of Vice President Harris’s just announced economic plan and speak with Dean Baker, senior economist and co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a progressive economic think-tank based in Washington DC. He is the author of Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer, and he writes the popular economics blog, “Beat the Press.”