Wait a Minute, Mr. Postman

Bombshell

News, Politics, Military, War, History

4.8 • 691 Ratings

🗓️ 23 October 2018

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week Tamara Cofman Wittes joins the Bombshell ladies to discuss the fallout of the Khashoggi assassination and the future of US-Saudi relations. We get further bogged down in Afghanistan and try to understand the migrant caravan moving north from Central America. Then Radha tries to cheer us up by explaining the intricacies of the Universal Postal Union. For icing on the cake, we dive deep into the INF treaty and wonder if the Defense Department really being asked to cut its budget.

Saudi

Emma Ashford, "The U.S.-Saudi alliance was in trouble long before Jamal Khashoggi's death," War on the Rocks

Keeping up Foreign Relations

Caravan

Delphine Schrank, "Thousands of caravan migrants take shelter in southern Mexico," Reuters

Afghanistan

Dan Lamothe, "U.S. general wounded in attack in Afghanistan," Washington Post
Thomas Ruttig, "The Killing of Razeq: Removing the Taleban's strongest foe in Kandahar, an indirect hit at elections," Afghanistan Analysts Network
Ashley Jackson, "The Taliban Just Won a Key Battle for Afghanistan's Future," Foreign Policy
Matthieu Aikins, "The Master of Spin Boldak," Harper's
Maija Liuhto, "Regional leaders are defying Afghanistan's president. The latest is a police chief who was once a close U.S. ally," LA Times

It's Aghast

Jen Kirby, "Here's why Trump threatened to pull out of a 144-year-old postal treaty," Vox
Daniel W. Drezner, "The Trump administration's brinkmanship with *checks notes* the Universal Postal Union," Washington Post

White House Mayhem

INF Treaty

Amy F. Woolf, "Russian Compliance with the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty: Background and Issues for Congress," Congressional Research Service
Jacob Heim, "Missiles for Asia? The Need for Operational Analysis of U.S. Theater Ballistic Missiles in the Pacific," RAND
Julian Borger and Martin Pengelly, "Trump says US will withdraw from nuclear arms treaty with Russia," Guardian
Steven Pifer, "The Trump administration is preparing a major mistake on the INF Treaty," Brookings

Budget

Aaron Mehta, "Trump appears to call for defense spending cuts," Defense News

Pop-Culture

Caroline Hallemann, "Everything We Know About the New Masterpiece PBS Adaptation of Les Miserables," Town & Country
"Death Comes to Pemberley," PBS

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the bombshell. I'm Erin Simpson.
0:12.0	I'm Lauren Deion Schillman. And I'm Roda Aynagar. And we have an excellent guest with us today. We have Tamara Kaufman-Wittes from the Brookings Institution. Hi, Tamara.
0:23.0	Hey, ladies. How are you this day? So thrilled to be on bombshell because I missed the amazing
0:29.8	Rational Security bombshell crossover. And now I get to make up for it. And now we've had all of the
0:35.8	Rational Security people on the podcast.
0:37.8	That's right. Ben was here during our anniversary. We had the crossover. And now with you,
0:43.1	we have now, this is now our bucket list is checked. Do we have all the infinity stones?
0:47.4	Yes, we have all the. Excellent.
0:51.3	Collect all four. That's right. What is everybody drinking?
0:55.9	I'm drinking a wonderful mug of hot tea trying to recover from a terrible cold I have,
1:00.9	so I will also try not to like cough and generally be gross in the general vicinity of this podcast.
1:06.4	You're welcome in advance.
1:07.4	Thank God you're on Skype.
1:16.6	I'm dry over here in the Wittes household, sadly,
1:22.4	but not to remain so for the entire evening, I hope. Erin gave me a random beer from her fridge.
1:28.9	That's great. It is the Joseph's Brow-Radler lemon beer. I don't know what any of those words mean except for beer, so it's fine.
1:35.6	And I'm drinking a glass of bourbon out of a jam jar because I haven't run the dishwasher yet this week.
1:38.4	But that's like the most hipster thing you could possibly do right there.
1:43.1	I'm not very good at being a hipster, so I guess this is my entry.
1:46.8	So we have lots to discuss and we have some very serious topics to discuss with Tammy. But let's start with our bombshell questions. Lauren, do you
1:52.9	want to kick us off? Yes. And these are slightly out of order because I could not remember them
1:57.2	all the time. Starting with frankly the, the most important one, actually, is
	...

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