Shield of the Republic The Bulwark

Eric and Eliot welcome Illia Ponomarenko, a Ukrainian journalist, formerly with the Kyiv Post and Kyiv Independent (of which he was a founder), and the author of I Will Show You it Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv (New York:  Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024). They discuss how he came to write the book, the buildup to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and Russia's over the top rhetoric and bad assumptions about the nature of Ukraine and the likely course of the war, the criminal nature of Putin's regime, the Russian failure at the battle of Kyiv and whether that means Russia has lost the war, the delay in U.S. assistance, his own experience in the U.S. and why it made him optimistic that the U.S. would do the right thing, the impact of U.S. and western assistance on the war, the Belarus and Istanbul negotiations in March 2022 that some have alleged might have ended the war (spoiler alert: the Russians were not negotiating in good faith), the current battlefield situation, and how this war ends. You can follow Illia on Twitter (X) @IAPonomarenko and you can support his work at http://buymeacoffee.com/saintanger.  

I Will Show You How It Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv:
https://a.co/d/3QxgSKd

Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast co-sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

Eliot returns from his travels and provides a trip report on his visit to Ukraine. He and Eric discuss the state of the fight, the challenges that the Ukrainians face with a hiatus in U.S. assistance, the progress that Russia has made in battlefield adaptation, Ukrainian defense innovation, the U.S. efforts to limit Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil refineries and military bases inside Russia proper, and the recent article in Foreign Affairs that outlines the April-May 2022 negotiations between Russia and Ukraine that failed to yield an end to the war. They discuss Iran's massive, complex uav and missile assault on Israel, the deterioration of deterrence and Israeli options for resetting deterrence in response.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/talks-could-have-ended-war-ukraine

https://x.com/dszeligowski/status/1780183950507262201

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2024/04/kyiv-spring-ukraine-military-aid/678013/

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/04/iran-israel-coalition-malevolent/678069/?utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

https://www.the-american-interest.com/2014/12/10/the-kind-of-thing-crisis/

https://archive.org/details/the-weekly-standard-2014-03-17/page/n11/mode/2up

Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast co-sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

Eric welcomes friend of Shield of the Republic Hal Brands back to the show. Hal is the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the editor of a new book, War in Ukraine: Conflict, Strategy and the Return of A Fractured World (Baltimore, MD:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024), a weekly columnist at Bloomberg.com and also has a recent article on the Foreign Affairs website. They discuss the origins of the new book and 6 overarching themes that emerged from the essays by the distinguished contributors to the volume. They also discuss why America's unique system of alliances may obscure for Americans the potential for disruption that tightening relations among authoritarian regimes presents to the global order and the rise and future of isolationism in the Republican party.

https://muse.jhu.edu/book/122782/pdf

https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/oa_edited_volume/chapter/3881912/pdf

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/new-autocratic-alliances

Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast co-sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

Eric welcomes Will Selber, Military Affairs Fellow with the Bulwark and a 20 year veteran of U.S. military intelligence with multiple tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition to his writing at the Bulwark, you can read Will's substack - Grumpy Combat Veteran - and listen to the podcast he co-hosts, Shoulder to Shoulder. They discuss the recent IS-KP attack on the Crocus City Theater in Moscow, the terrorist threat from both IS-KP and al Qaeda operating from Afghanistan, the difficulties of establishing an over-the-horizon counter-terrorist capability for CENTCOM, the Trump and Biden decisions to withdraw from Afghanistan, the failure to hold the Taliban to the terms of the Doha agreement, the repetition of US failures in VIetnam in training the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF), a post-mortem on the shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, the reputational damage to the U.S. for abandoning its Afghan allies, the importance of military introspection and accountability for some of the failures in Afghanistan, and the ongoing impact of the Afghanistan debacle on military recruiting for the all volunteer force (AVF).

https://grumpycombatveteran.substack.com

https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/al-qaeda-in-afghanistan-how-serious-threat

https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/president-biden-should-talk-about-afghanistan

https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/deeper-reason-for-military-recruitment-woes

Eliot and Eric welcome CNN Chief National Security Correspondent Jim Sciutto to the show. The recipient of multiple awards for his journalism, including the Emmy, Edward R. Murrow, and George Polk awards he is also the author of The Shadow War, The Madman Theory, and recently The Return of Great Powers: Russia, China, and the Next World War (New York: Dutton, 2024). They discuss why as a journalist he writes books, how the shooting war in Ukraine changed the perspective of both journalists and government officials about the danger of great power competition, the role of frontline states like Finland and Estonia and understanding the threat of Russian revanchism, Jim's reporting on the potential for Russian use of nuclear weapons on the battlefield in the fall of 2022 and whether the threat was genuine or an example of Russian use of information operations for "reflexive control," the transformation of Taiwan's defense posture and the threat of disruption and damage to US alliances in a second Trump Presidency.

The Return of Great Powers: Russia, China, and the Next World War:
https://a.co/d/1RVHvZ4

Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast co-sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

Eliot grills Eric on three recent articles identifying some big problems in U.S. foreign policy.  What will happen once Iran is nuclear armed? Will the Ayatollahs undergo "nuclear learning" as some political scientists suggest or will they become more emboldened (not to seek a suicidal nuclear armageddon but to unleash their proxies -- Hezbollah, Iraqi militias, the Houthis, etc)?  Should the U.S. be ready to launch a pre-emptive or prevent strike? Should it accelerate covert efforts at regime change? What about NATO decision-making? Now that the alliance is made up of 32 rather than 12 members should the decision-making move away from the consensus rules that have governed it since 1949? What should be done to avoid Hungary, Turkey or Slovakia from blocking consensus and acting as a Trojan horse inside the alliance? How tough should the U.S. be willing to be with putative allies, particularly in a wartime scenario? Finally, has the Trumpist turn to "America First" isolationism in the GOP rendered it unfit as a political instrument for conservatives who remain committed to internationalism and the US role in upholding the global order?  Is it time for a new conservative internationalist political party?

https://thedispatch.com/article/when-iran-goes-nuclear/ 

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/middle-east/iran-protesters-want-regime-change

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/natos-decision-process-has-an-achilles-heel/

https://sapirjournal.org/friends-and-foes/2024/03/republican-isolationists/

Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast co-sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.