You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on Strategy Defense and Foreign Affairs.

My name is Ryan Evans, I'm the CEO of War on the Rocks.

In this episode we have a wide-ranging conversation on America's alliances using Mirra-Pooper's new book, Shields of the Republic,

The Triumph from Parra of America's alliances, as a starting point.

We're also joined not just by Mira, but by Paul Miller of Georgetown and Emma Ashford of the Cato Institute.

Mira Pupor, you wrote a book about Alliances.

Why would you do such a thing?

Well, Ryan, I decided that such a thing

needed to be done in 2016, unsurprisingly,

watching the Republican nominee for President Donald Trump

repeatedly attack America of Alliance is as

expensive and useless. But the reason it struck me that it was probably

necessary to write a book on this subject was that these attacks actually weren't entirely unreasonable.

That is to say that seven years after the system had been formed and for generations of Americans

who had not lived through to World Wars, it probably wasn't at all

evident why the United States had several dozen alliance commitments flung around

the globe, much less the fact that the system was actually put in place for America's self-defense

and had been quite successful in that regard. It struck me that if this record

wasn't on earth, that is it didn't become easier to explain what exactly America's

alliances we're doing and how they'd serve the country they would probably be in

even worse shape several years on so I said about to write this book after the 2016 election, but it's worth

noting that this is not a book about Trump or the Alliance damage that Trump alone

...