Day: March 24, 2025

Trump Greenlight’s Erdogan’s Crackdown While Musk Removes Turkish Opposition Content on X

We begin with massive demonstrations  across Turkey in response to Erdogan’s jailing of the opposition leader which it appears Trump greenlighted and his co-president Musk is playing an active role in helping Turkey’s autocrat and kleptocrat brutally suppress the demonstrators by removing opposition content on his platform X. Joining us is David Phillips, Professor at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, a visiting scholar at Oxford and the former Director of the Peace-building and Rights Program at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University. A former senior adviser and foreign affairs expert to the U.S. Department of State during the administrations of Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama, he chaired the Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation Commission and the Track Two Program in Turkey and the Caucasus, and his books include Unsilencing the Past, Diplomatic History: The Turkey-Armenia Protocols.

The Strategy Behind Netanyahu’s Resumption of His War on Gaza

Then we examine the strategy behind Netanyahu’s resumption of his war on Gaza as the death toll there passes 50,000, half of whom are women and children. Joining us is Asher Kaufman, Director of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and a professor of History and Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Prior to that, he taught at Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Kaufman is the author of Contested Frontiers: Cartography, Sovereignty, and Conflict at the Syria, Lebanon, Israel Tri-Border Region and we will discuss his article at The Conversation, “The Gaza ceasefire is dead − Israeli domestic politics killed it.”

The Pathetic Asymmetry Between Seasoned Russian Diplomats and Intelligence Professionals Negotiating Against Trump’s Real Estate Buddy Witkoff 

Then finally we speak with Olga Lautman, a Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis who is also the creator and co-host of the Kremlin File podcast series, which features expert discussions on the Kremlin’s internal affairs, global operations, and tactics used from their hybrid warfare toolkit to destabilize Western democracies. She has a Substack newsletter covering Russia, Ukraine, Eastern, and Central Europe with a focus on Russia’s intelligence operations available at olgalautman.substack.com. We will assess the asymmetry between the pathetic amateurism of the American negotiating team in Saudi Arabia and the seasoned Russian diplomats and intelligence professionals running rings around Trump’s real estate negotiator buddy and Putin fanboy Steve Witkoff.