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Departures with Robert Amsterdam

May 29, 2020

The United States spends trillions on its military, but is it really achieving stronger national security?

Not really, says Sean McFate, the author of the book "The New Rules of War."

In his conversation with Bob, McFate argues that the US has been obsessed with outdated conventional warfare, has fetishized technology...


May 26, 2020

There are a lot of pundits out there declaring democracy promotion to be dead on arrival in the Trump era. But there's still an important community of activists fighting for the cause against the odds.
 
"Democracy matters and democratic leadership matters, even in the face of a fast-moving crisis like the coronavirus,"...


May 22, 2020

The default mode of thinking in U.S. foreign policy circles is that more countries should be like us, and that with the right support, new democracies can bloom and flourish all across the world. Except history shows us again and again that it doesn't work like that.

Stephen Krasner, a professor at Stanford University...


May 20, 2020

Kim Dotcom is no stranger to lockdowns.

For more than 8 years, the Megaupload founder and tech entrepreneur has been fighting an extradition request to New Zealand from the United States following an over-the-top FBI raid on his home in 2012 ... bizarrely over accusations of third-party copyright infringement.

Robert...


May 6, 2020

Is it better to fight an authoritarian government and lose, or work with that government and survive to fight another day? Bob interviews Joshua Yaffa, Moscow Correspondent for the New Yorker and author of Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin's Russia, about the mentalities of the people who...