All right, welcome back everybody to another War on the Rocks podcast.

I'm John Amble.

This is kind of a special edition that we've got here today.

We are launching on Warren the Rocks a new channel called NatC 2016, which which will kind of in which will cover

national security and foreign policy issues as they relate to the 2016 election

cycle and particularly the presidential election.

To kick that off, we are recording a podcast here today with, I've got three guests, great guests with me,

Doug Olivant, the fellow at the New American Foundation,

New America Foundation, excuse me, and who is rich in Sonarest Brog, our regular

listeners will recognize. Greg Jaffrey, a White House reporter, a

National Security reporter from the Washington Post, and Mike Waltz, the author of

a wonderful book called Warrior Diplomat. And so I thought guys that we would just kind of, given that there are so many candidates and this is kind of

our first podcast where we're talking about the politics of national security and foreign policy,

I thought would kind of take a broad survey of the landscape,

the political landscape with respect to some of these issues. So I guess I'll kick it off. Doug, maybe you can start

a stop with some just general thoughts about at this stage, we're 14 months out from the 2016 election now, but it's after Labor Day, which is the time when people are supposed to magically start caring about these things.

So at this point in time, how do you see particular issues of national security and foreign policy

kind of starting to play out?

I think in general we've had very little in terms of foreign policy discourse. I think

that has a couple causes. I think right now the pending Iran vote is just sucking all the oxygen out of the room in terms of foreign policy.

You know, what, we still have the occasional ISIL story breaking through or, you know, Syrian refugees caused by the serious

civil war or you know maybe a bad day in Afghanistan or you know some of the

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