Marshall and Sogger here. Welcome back to The Realignment.

One of the most exciting things about working at Hudson Institute is that our history of unconventional policy ideas brings together

experts who often disagree, but engage in really intellectually rigorous and civil debates with one another.

In that spirit, we brought back the senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, Michael Durran and friend of the podcast,

who recently appeared on our show to talk about the failures of the US foreign policy elites,

along with our colleague, Blaze Mistal, whose work focuses on the Middle East, Europe, and the broader strategic picture.

The way this came about is that Blaze and Mike were on a panel here at Hudson shortly after the

President announced troop withdrawal from Northern Syria. They got into it pretty collegially about US

presence in policy in Turkey and Northern Syria, as well as their views on allies and the broader

dynamics in the Middle East. We wanted to have them here to draw out some of those ideas and talk about

shifting US policy in the region, how it should all be looked at the context of the realignment.

Let's dive in.

Michael Durran, Blaze Mistal, welcome to The Realignment. So we're here to talk about US policy

Northern Syria, which is really about a broader conversation we think about our alliances,

how long we should be engaged in the region. It's sort of the broader structural forces that I

was looking at right now. Yeah, so Mike and Blaze, you're both, Mike, you just returned from a recent

trip to Turkey Blaze, you're an expert also in the region. You both disagree quite a bit about what

US policy in Northern Syria is. This is a very complicated situation, lots of moving parts. We

of course have the recent news of the death of Abu Abubakar al-Baghdadi and Idlib province in Syria,

who founded ISIS, he was the founder of ISIS. And we also have this context while the president

has withdrawn US forces from Northern Syria and allowed an inter-kish incursion into the north.

Now Mike, you have been supportive of the presidents move on that. Just give a bit of a background

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