Fred Kagan is Senior Fellow and Director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute.

He was a professor of military history at the U.S. military academy at West Point from 1995 to 2005.

Fred joins us today to talk about the full range of national security issues facing the United States.

We're having conversations about negotiations in the West that are extraordinarily naive,

including naive about how negotiations actually work, because if you want an adversary to make significant concessions,

the adversary has to believe that he can't get what he wants by force.

And we've told ourselves that Putin has already lost.

Putin hasn't gotten that memo.

We'll be right back after a break. I'm Michael Morrell, and this is Intelligence Matters.

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Download the app today.

Fred, welcome. It is great to have you on Intelligence Matters.

Michael, it's great to be with you. Thanks so much for having me.

So Fred, I just want to start by asking you about the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute,

which you direct. What is the project? What do you guys do in it?

So we are an open source intelligence organization at the American Enterprise Institute.

I founded CTP in about 2009, and we use publicly available information and do our best to apply

intelligence community type trade craft and standards to it in order to inform the public, the media,

policy community, and make recommendations about policy for American national interests.

We have two analytical teams at CTP. One focuses on Iran and increasingly Iran

and its activities in the region, but the team has been very focused historically on Iranian internal

matters. It has been covering the Iranian protest movement with daily updates.

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