Are the Quad and Aukus Deals Happening at the Expense of Ties to Our European Allies?

We begin with an analysis of whether the moves in the Indo/Pacific with the Aukus deal and Friday’s White House summit with the leaders of the Quad (India, Australia, Japan and the U.S.) to confront the growth of Chinese military and economic power is happening at the expense of long-standing ties to Europe. In other words is an additional 12 Australian nuclear submarines to the 68 the U.S. already has, worth having Germany, France and Europe drawn closer to China?  Joining us is Charles Kupchan, who was director of European Affairs on the Clinton National Security Council who spent the last three years of the Obama administration as Special Assistant to the President for National Security. Now a professor of International Affairs at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service whose latest book is Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself from the World, we discuss his article at Foreign Affairs, “Europe’s Response to the U.S.- U.K.- Australia Submarine Deal: What to Know” and whether the Quad will blunt China’s rise and increase each country’s economic competitiveness and national security. 

 

Evan Osnos on His New Book Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury 

Then we speak with Evan Osnos, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a CNN contributor who is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution about his new book Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury which explores a divided country awash with tribal incomprehension and conspiracy theories whose people have lost their vision of the common good. We take a former foreign correspondent’s journey back to where he grew up in the Republican hedge-fund haven of Greenwich Connecticut, got his first job on a newspaper in Clarksburg West Virginia crippled by the opioid epidemic and gripped by Trumpian politics and to Chicago where guns and gang fratricide on the South Side is a world away from the city’s prosperous downtown.

 

The Cynical Trump and Republican Recounts Lay the Groundwork to Steal the Next Elections

Then finally we get an update from Pennsylvania where the Republican legislature is being sued by the State’s Attorney General to stop a bogus recount of an election Biden won by 81,000 votes. This after the ludicrous and interminable Arizona recount which had to confirm that Biden won and similar efforts underway in Wisconsin and in Texas where Governor Abbott is responding to Trump’s call for a recount even though he won the state.  Will Bunch, the award-winning national opinion columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer joins us to discuss the cynical Trump and Republican strategy to pursue fruitless audits in order to cast doubt about our election so that they can lay the groundwork to steal the next ones.