What we now have is the worst of both worlds, which is that we have all of these commitments,

some of them formal commitments, others a little less formal but implicit, and we don't have

the means, the adequate means, to make good on all of those commitments.

There's a gap there and an adversary that can expose that gap that can take advantage of that gap and

exploit it is one that is going to dethrone the United States as the guarantor of you know the guarantor to the guarantee of last resort decisive decade and its rivalry with China.

But are we sleepwalking through this decisive decade? That's the question that Brett Stevens asked in a recent column in the New York Times.

So we thought we'd bring Brett on to have a conversation about all these geopolitical events that

are happening around us and whether the United States and the West are sleepwalking

through them. Brett is a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the New York Times. He

came to the Times after a long career with the Wall Street Journal where he was most recently

deputy editorial page editor and for 11 years of foreign affairs columnist.

Before that he was editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post, where he was based in Israel.

Brett has reported from around the world that interviewed scores of world leaders.

He was raised in Mexico City, earned his BA at the University of Chicago and his masters at the

London School of Economics. Brett is also the editor-in-chief of Superior, a journal

exploring the future of the American Jewish community.

Brett Stevens on sleepwalking through a decisive decade.

This is Call Me Back.

I'm pleased to welcome back to the podcast a friend of the call me back

podcast longtime friend of mine Brett Stevens from the New York Times editor-in-chief of

Superior the Superior Journal which I highly recommend, the link to which we are putting in the show notes,

and, and most notably, in the spring of this year,

...