The “Chestbursters Roasting on an Open Fire” Edition
Rational Security
The Lawfare Institute
4.8 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 17 December 2025
⏱️ 82 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, Scott down with his Lawfare colleagues Alan Rozenshtein and Ari Tabatabai to talk through a few of the week’s big national security news stories, including:
- “Once You Pop, You Can’t Stop.” The Trump administration has given a green light to Nvidia to export its powerful H200 chips to China, opening a potentially significant new market while jumpstarting China’s strategically significant AI industry—or, perhaps, making it reliant on U.S. technology. What explains this decision? And how does it align with the Trump administration’s broader reframing of strategic competition with China as a primarily economic problem, as reflected in its recent National Security Strategy?
- “Lavatories of Democracy.” Late last week, President Trump signed an executive order setting up a number of mechanisms intended to assert federal preemption over and otherwise deter state efforts to regulate the development and use of AI—an executive branch-only effort that followed a failed push to insert a related legislative provision into year-end omnibus legislation. How effective is this measure likely to be? And how wise is it to try and bar the states from regulating AI development and use in the first place?
- “Some Things You Can’t Make Light Of.” Over the weekend, a pair of gunmen inspired by the Islamic State executed a brutal massacre at a Hanukkah event on Australia’s Bondi Beach, killing 15 people and injuring 40. The violence has shocked Australia, a country with strict gun control laws where incidents of anti-semitism have been on the rise, as in much of the world. What is there to learn from the attack and its aftermath? And what could its ramifications be, both in Australia and further abroad?
In object lessons, Alan tells us what the buzz is—seeing Jesus Christ Superstar live. Scott, heavy with Christmas spirit, shares his grandmother’s recipe for sour cream coffee cake (remember, during the holidays, dense=delicious). And Ari keeps us grounded with a recommendation of “Don’t Let’s Go To the Dogs Tonight,” a South African film about a White Zimbabwean family following the Rhodesian Bush War.
Rational Security will be having its traditional end-of-year episode later this month, which will focus on listener-submitted topics and object lessons! If you have topics you want us to discuss and object lessons you want to share—whether serious or frivolous—be sure to send them to rationalsecurity@lawfaremedia.org by Dec. 21!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, folks, Scott R. Anderson here. It is the end of the year, and that means that we will be doing our special end of year episode where we talk about the topics and discuss the object lessons that you share with us. |
| 0:12.4 | So if you have some topics you want us to hash through, or if you have some object lessons you want to share with other listeners, send them our way at rational security Security at Lawfaremedia.org. Again, that's |
| 0:22.3 | Rational Security at Lawfaremedia.org. Just send them to us by the end of the day on Sunday, |
| 0:27.2 | December 21st, so we can work them into this year's episode. Thanks so much and have a happy |
| 0:31.4 | holidays. I continue to be sick because my children are Geneva Convention violations. Yeah, I have a similar. Technically, the Geneva Convention, I don't think, said a lot about biological weapons. I think that's subsequent treatment regimes, but yes, that's fair. Well, you know what? Fentanyl possibly. There are war crimes anyway, anyways, license. I believe me, man. I'm coming off the worst week I think I have ever had involving me missing every single holiday celebration of this season, more or less, because of sick children, and including canceling one of my own. And I never actually got sick, but I tested positive. So therefore, I had to cancel all my plans to be a responsible citizen. |
| 1:08.2 | The key is, if you never test, you can never test positive. That was, |
| 1:12.3 | I believe, America's strategy until about 2021. And we're going back to that. So, you know. |
| 1:19.2 | Yeah, kind of. I guess that's right. I guess that's right. I felt like I did. I took so many tests. |
| 1:25.5 | I like realized, I didn't realize you could get flu tests, |
| 1:30.4 | honestly. I didn't, like, didn't have a process that you can do them just like COVID test now. |
| 1:41.3 | So I spent a small fortune on flu tests all last week and tested a bunch. And I did three in a row that were negative in one day because my whole family had the flu, but I felt fine. And I was like, I think I can do this. |
| 1:43.1 | I think I can go out in the world. |
| 1:44.2 | So I actually went to an event with a senior foreign official |
| 1:47.0 | that was really got invited to. And then I went to a holiday office party. And then the next morning, I tested positive for the flu. And I'm like, okay, so I may have just infected my colleagues. I may have caused an international incident by getting someone sick. |
| 1:59.4 | I could take out a part of the senior foreign dematic corps. |
| 2:03.5 | I mean, who knows exactly what could happen as a result of this. |
| 2:06.2 | But then I never, it's by canceling all my weekend plans, I never actually got sick. |
| 2:09.6 | I just got tested positive. |
| 2:10.8 | I felt fine. |
| 2:11.5 | Most of the weekend. |
| 2:12.2 | It's infuriating. |
| 2:13.3 | We need an EO on Scott Anderson also being a weapon of mass destruction. |
... |
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