May 18 – Will Foreign Policy Matter in the General Election?; The Growing Economic and Political Crisis in Venezuela; With Republicans Bitterly Divided over Trump, Democrats Engage in Fratricide

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with how much of an advantage Hillary Clinton will have over Donald Trump in terms of her foreign policy expertise and whether that will matter and be a focus of the general election campaign. Dr. Stephen Walt, Professor of International Relations at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government joins us to discuss his article at Foreign Policy “The Donald vs. The Blob: The foreign policy establishment is backing Hillary Clinton. And that may not be such a bad thing for Trump”. We also examine the recent failures of the foreign policy elite and the lack of accountability for their mistakes which may explain why people are supporting a “xenophobic nativist… vulgar and impulsive bomb-thrower” as Stephen Walt describes Donald Trump.

Part 2

Then we look into the growing economic and political crisis in Venezuela where the oil-rich country is beset by staggering inflation, uncontrolled violence, food shortages, looting, power cuts, social polarization and political paralysis. David Smilde, a senior fellow at the Washington Office of Latin America specializing in Venezuela joins us from Caracas, Venezuela along with Miguel Tinker Salas, a Professor and Chair of Latin American History at Pomona College and author of “Venezuela, What Everyone Needs to Know”. Together they discuss what has gone wrong in Venezuela and whether it can be fixed from the outside as long as Venezuelans are not engaged in dialogue and negotiation.

Part 3

Then finally, while Republicans remain bitterly divided over Donald Trump as the GOP’s standard-bearer, we will examine the growing fratricide on the Democratic side between Bernie Sanders and his supporters and Hillary Clinton who is mathematically all but certain to be the party’s presidential nominee. Ed Kilgore, a political columnist for New York Magazine and the Managing Editor of The Democratic Strategist, joins us to discuss the current squabble between the Sanders campaign and the head of the DNC who is accused of “throwing shade” on Bernie from the beginning, and the call by the Sanders campaign for another debate between the two candidates on Fox News before the June 7 primary in California.