Global Dispatches -- World News That Matters

Derek Chollet is the author of the new book The Long Game: How Obama Defied Washington and Redefined America's Role in the World. Derek served in a number of foreign policy positions in the Obama administration, including in the National Security Council, State Department and finally as an assistant secretary of defense for international security so this book serves, very much, as an insider's assessment of 7 years of Obama's foreign policy. We kick off with an extended discussion about his book and Obama's foreign policy more broadly before pivoting to a conversation about Derek's fascinating career path from a college town in Nebraska to the highest reaches of US foreign policy making.

There catastrophe is looming in southern Africa. This year's historically intense El Nino sparked a region-wide drought that has decimated harvests. The area was already prone to food insecurity, but the extreme nature of this El Nino is causing a humanitarian emergency not experienced in decades. On the line with me to discuss the food crisis in Southern Africa are two officials from the US Agency for International Development, USAID: Dave Harden, the Assistant Administrator for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance and and Dina Esposito a deputy assistant administrator and Food for Peace director. The two officials discuss some of the root causes of the food crisis and its implications across a number of sectors. We discuss what the US and international response is looking like and why this crisis differs so substantially from a devastating famine that the region experienced 35 years ago.

Arsalan Iftikhar is the author of the new book Scapegoats: How Islamophobia Helps Our Enemies and Threatens Our Freedoms. Arsalan is a human rights lawyer by training and was one of the original guests on this podcast a couple years ago, when he discussed his career and life journey that lead him to this line of work. Arsalan is on TV a lot. And often times he get's the call after there has been some sort of terrible terrorist attack. To that end, we have an extended conversation about what it's like to be a We discuss his new book, the different strains of islamophobia that can be found in Europe and the United States, and what his process is after there has been another mass murder event and he's called to talk about it on TV

Helen Clark is a candidate to become the next UN Secretary General. She's the former Prime Minister of New Zealand, serving from 1999 to 2008 and is currently the head of the United Nations Development Program. We spoke in mid-July as part of a series of conversations I'm having with the candidates in the race to replace Ban Ki Moon when his term expires at the end of this year.The goal with these candidate conversations is to learn how some of their past experiences might inform the kinds of decisions they would make as Secretary General, and so to that end Ms Clark discusses growing up on a farm in New Zealand in the shadow of World War Two; becoming politicized in high school and university around the anti-apartheid movement; her decision to enter politics and some of the big foreign policy decisions she took as Prime Minister. This is a great conversation with one of the most high profile of the Secretary General candidates.

Priscilla Clapp had a 30 year career in the state department, which ended in 2002 as the top US official in Burma. She also served in top positions in South Africa in the early 1990s during the transition from Apartheid and in Japan and Moscow. Clapp is the co-author with Mort Halperin of what I consider one of the most important books you can read about US foreign policy. It's called Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy, and as the title suggests the book describes the role of the bureaucracy in shaping US foreign policy. We kick off with an extended conversation about that book, and then have another extended conversation about how Clapp, as the State Department official in charge of refugee programs in the late 1980s, used tools of bureaucratic politics to helped engineer the emigration of jewish refugees from Russia to the United States. This is a great conversation--a little longer than most--but well worth it.

If you follow US politics even just slightly you will probably be surprised to learn that Congress actually did something last week. And deeper still, the action they took was broadly in the service of humanity. Just after the July 4th holiday Congress passed the Global Food Security Act, which was a piece of legislation that will inform how the US government fights hunger worldwide. My guest today, Judith Rowland was deep in the trenches of the years long effort to pass this bill. She is the US government relations lead for the Global Poverty Project and we spoke just a few hours before the passage of this bill. Judith discusses what is contained in the bill, including the strengthening of a Obama administration program known as Feed the Future. And we also discuss how in such a polarized political environment, something like the Global Food Security Act could get passed.

Lauren Wolfe is an award winning journalist who covers sexual violence in conflict. She's the director of the Women Under Siege project, which is a journalistic endeavor founded by Gloria Steinem as part of the Women's Media Center to investigate how rape and gender based violence are used as tools of conflict. About a week before we spoke Lauren wrote an article in the Guardian about a Congolese militia that terrorized a small town in the eastern part of the country by systematically raping babies and toddlers. A day after the publication of this article, the militia leader was arrested. We kick off discussing that story. Lauren has spent the better part of her career in journalism reporting on trauma and she is currently a columnist for Foreign Policy. Among other stories, she covered 9-11 and its aftermath for the New York Times and Lauren opens up in a pretty profound way about she feels so compelled to cover violence and trauma. This is a pretty heavy episode, though not without moments of humor. But it was a real honor to speak with her.

On July 9, South Sudan commemorates its 5th independence day. And I say "commemorates" and not "celebrates" because there is not a whole lot to celebrate. The country has been mired in conflict since late 2013, when a political dispute between president Salva Kiir and his deputy Riek Machar devolved into an armed battle and then full blown civil war. The consequences of this war for the people of South Sudan have been immense. Millions have been displaced, and though a peace deal was signed last year violence continues to flare up and the humanitarian situation is as dire as ever. On the line to discuss recent developments in South Sudan, the role of the United Nations Peacekeepers in the country, and the humanitarian situation is Noah Gottschalk, who is the senior humanitarian policy advisor at Oxfam. He does a good job of offering some broader context to understand how South Sudan has so unraveled in the last five years. If you have 20 minutes and want to understand the deep challenges that face the people of South Sudan on the country's 5th birthday -- and the leaders under whom they have been so ill-served -- have a listen.

Both the European Union and the United Kingdom are important players in international development. In fact the EU is the single largest foreign aid provider; and the United Kingdom's own aid programs, run by the Department for International Development, or DfID, are considered some of the more innovative programs in this space. Also, the UK is one of just a few countries to actually have met a commitment to spend 0.7% of its gross national income on global development. So, it would seem the fallout from Brexit could potentially be pretty profound for international development. To go over these big issues, I caught up with Mikaela Gavas of Overseas Development Institute, which is a highly respected UK-based think tank that focuses on global development issues. Mikaela, in particular, works on Pan-European global development policies so she is able to offer some deeply nuanced insights into these questions. (Also, toward the end of the interview, Mikaela expresses some consternation that as a British expert on EU policy, she may soon loose some credibility with her continental peers.) If you are a global development nerd, Mikaela will give you a lot to chew on. If you are a more casual observer of internationals affairs, this conversation offers a good distillation of one way in which Brexit may have some profound global implications.

Stewart Patrick is an international relations scholar with a background in studying human evolution. As you might imagine, that combination makes for some fascinating conversation. Stewart is a Senior Fellow and Director of the International Institutions and Global Governance Program at the Council on Foreign Relations. He's a Rhodes scholar who has studied the intersection of the evolution of culture and international relations and we have some great digressions about how culture contributes to the creation of international norms and international law. In the early 2000s, he received a fellowship to serve on the policy planning staff of Colin Powell's State Department, and he discusses two big lessons he drew from that experience: the power of ideology to shape policy and how bureaucratic politics can influence big decisions. We kick off discussing his newest project, which is The Global Governance Report Card grades international performance in addressing a specter of current global challenges.