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Can Foreign Aid Be Reformed? Should It Be? · Net Assessment

• 0:00
  Melanie Marlowe: Hello and welcome to Net Assessment where we debate the hard choices facing America's national security and foreign policy communities. Today, we're going to talk about the effectiveness of development assistance. What should be the goals of foreign aid? Can development assistance, as it has recently been done, actually make a meaningful long-term difference in standards of living in the world's poorest countries? What might steep cuts in foreign aid to poor countries mean? And in an era of great power competition, should we look at development assistance as a way to counter the influence of China?
• 0:00
  Chris Preble: Hello, again.
• 0:00
  Melanie Marlowe: I got to say Chris, happy anniversary. Seven years. I hope you don't have the seven year itch!
• 0:00
  Chris Preble: Oh, my god. Melanie Marlowe: You're not leaving us, are you?
• 0:00
  Chris Preble: Seven years, wow! Yeah, that's amazing. Thanks to our listeners for sticking through us through thick and through thin. It’s been great.
• 0:00
  Melanie Marlowe: Yeah, it's been great. Thanks to Zack for joining us. So, what have you been up to?
• 0:01
  Chris Preble: I was in Madison, Wisconsin this past weekend for the homecoming game of Wisconsin-Iowa.
• 0:01
  Melanie Marlowe: Oh, my gosh.
• 0:01
  Chris Preble: Which, if you didn't notice the score, it was 37 to nothing, Iowa. Usually, when you arrange for a homecoming game, you pick a walkover team. But that may be a signal that Wisconsin can't find a walkover team.
• 0:01
  Melanie Marlowe: Well, Chris, you started this. You said it was a beautiful day. And I know that, last week, the episode was on experts and having humility. But I just have to say, I'm really right about this. Autumn is the best season. And October really, really is the best month. And anybody who disagrees is just, like, zero on the foreign policy level here of exams. It is soup season. Smells so good to walk outside. The dusky lights, oh, it's perfect. I love it.
• 0:02
  Zack Cooper: That game was so incredibly terrible.
• 0:02
  Melanie Marlowe: Oh, my gosh.
• 0:02
  Zack Cooper: So, in that game, Justin Fields, the quarterback for the Jets, managed to have, essentially, negative passing yards because he took more yards and sacks than he passed for. He almost had more sacks than completions in that camp.
• 0:02
  Melanie Marlowe: Well, I did see someone say, you know, Mark Sanchez's punishment for his shenanigans in Indiana should be sentenced to the Jets for five years.
• 0:02
  Zack Cooper: Too soon.
• 0:02
  Melanie Marlowe: Zack, what have you been up to?
• 0:02
  Zack Cooper: Yelling at my children. So, I apologize to our listeners. This is what happens when you have a three-day weekend and two young children at home. You end up with a voice.
• 0:03
  Melanie Marlowe: Oh, come on. Chris Preble: A little raspy. A little raspy.
• 0:03
  Melanie Marlowe: Zack's a little sick today. So, we're grateful that he's sticking with us. Okay. Chris, you have the show.
• 0:03
  Chris Preble: I have the show. So, today, we're discussing Adam Tooze’s… actually, the title varies. As the UN's SDGs Falter, Development Efforts Need a Reboot, that's one title that pops up, but the title that shows up on the page is The End of Development: The West’s Aid Model was Always a Mirage. It’s Time for a Realistic Alternative.
• 0:05
  Melanie Marlowe: Sure. I agree with that. And I just want to say at the beginning, I think this is a great topic to be discussing right now with the cuts to USAID, but also, it's not just the United States that is cutting assistance. The Brits are cutting substantially, I think, 40%. France is cutting 35%. Germany is making cuts. This is something that's ongoing. And I think some of it is due to Ukraine. I believe that Tooze mentions that. But a lot of it is just other budgetary pressures. And the high rates of inflation make it much more difficult for these countries to service their own finances. But it also makes it much more difficult to keep lending money to countries that they really don't think might pay some of this money back. But there's just other domestic pressures. People feel like their money is not being spent well, and they want it spent more at home.
• 0:07
  Chris Preble: That's right.
• 0:07
  Melanie Marlowe: But it's easy reading. So, I don't expect him to have, like, a raft of solutions, but a couple of, you know, 1, 2, 3, that could have been helpful here.
• 0:07
  Zack Cooper: I found this piece a bit frustrating for two reasons. The first is, although Tooze is supporting what I think were, you know, some fair critiques of our development results, there are times in the piece where he, sort of, suggests that the intention was bad along the way. And I think, knowing a lot of people that have spent their careers doing international development, who by the way are now looking for new jobs, those people were so incredibly devoted to that mission in a way that I don't think was reflected in this piece. And I think they were remarkably serious, willing to do this at, frankly, very low rates of pay, spend much of their lives abroad, and genuinely trying to make the world a better place. And I don't think that's acknowledged here sufficiently in this piece.
• 0:09
  Melanie Marlowe: Yeah. I was at Trader Joe's on Saturday and something didn't ring up. And the poor girl that was trying to help me was like, “I've only been doing this job for a month.” And then she said, “I got laid off from USAID.” And so, she had just found out and I was like, “Oh, I'm doing a podcast on this on Sunday.” And she's like, “What's your podcast?” And I don't think I told her because I'm like, “No, it's okay. You really don't have to listen. I'm not trying to sell you my, you know, mom. I'm in my mom's basement podcast.”
• 0:10
  Chris Preble: Two quick points related to what we just said. First of all, Melanie referred to the Ukraine question. So, in the article, Tooze says, given the idiosyncrasies of the Trump administration, the effects of this general tendency are illustrated more clearly by the general tendency to move away from aid, are illustrated more clearly by the reaction to the Europeans. France, Germany, United Kingdom all style themselves as upholders of the rules-based international order. They all profess loyalty to the sustainable development goals and would not be caught dead voting against peace and hope at the UN. But like the United States, they have all been slashing their aid budget. Why? Because of Ukraine. And then this is, sort of, the key point. If national security is paramount, then missiles and tanks are better strategic investments than unveiling efforts to bring sustainable development to the Sahel, for example.
• 0:12
  Melanie Marlowe: There's a lot of fish that doesn't know what stuff’s going on in this article, especially talking about the politics. So, about halfway through, he says, the hope was that politics and geopolitics could be transcended by a comprehensive grid of targets and colorful infographics. To this day, enthusiasts wear a colorful wheel to signal their adherence. And I'm showing Chris and Zack right now. I read these sustainable goals, development goals. And there are 17, and they're all brightly colored. There is not a black spot on them. They're all very, very colorful.
• 0:15
  Chris Preble: We’re failing, but do more.
• 0:15
  Melanie Marlowe: Yes, we're failing, but to do more. More integrated and synergistic action towards just and equitable… like, it's all political and you cannot get around that. And if people who are writing these endless documents that are, like, and at Bonn60 and, you know, all these previous conferences, like, all this work, they have got to get a grip on reality or they are not going to be able to accomplish the things that they want to have done.
• 0:15
  Chris Preble: Do you think, Zack, that Tooze appreciates this and doesn't engage it? Or do you think that he misses it?
• 0:15
  Zack Cooper: I mean, my guess is that he appreciates this and it's hard. You know, there's already a long piece, and you've got to make cuts somewhere. But I do think what's frustrating is that, when you get down to the political questions that I think all three of us are interested in, right, and the central one for me here is, look, if you think, as Melanie was just arguing, that development is inherently political and therefore that you have to, sort of, acknowledge those politics if you're going to continue to attract funding for it, then the question is how to do that. And then when he gets down to the back end of the piece, the last couple of paragraphs seem to suggest that Americans might not want to cooperate with China on development, but they're going to have to, which seems like the whole opposite of the point he was making, right? If the point is that development is inherently, to some degree, political, then, you know, he says at the very end, Western liberalism may balk. I am, kind of, balking at this, right? Like, the idea that the U.S. is going to sign up to China's Global Civilization Initiative and Global Development Initiative and Global Security Initiative and Global Governance Initiative as, sort of, the future pathway, that seems, actually, like the opposite of the direction that things are going.
• 0:17
  Chris Preble: Yeah. I did not take his invocation of China in that particular moment as saying the United States will have to cooperate with it. He was saying China has its model. It has its vision. It's executing its plan. If the United States and the West wish to remain relevant, they need to develop their own. Here’s the line: if the rest of the West wants to compete and cooperate, but he says both, with China over questions of global development, it will need to come up with its own more practical and realistic alternative, both to the UN's SDGs, as well as what he calls Trumpian atavism, you know, that is the, sort of, extreme nationalism, et cetera.
• 0:18
  Zack Cooper: Okay. Like, that would make sense to me if he then laid out what any of those principles were, right?
• 0:18
  Melanie Marlowe: Yeah, exactly.
• 0:18
  Zack Cooper: Which is where I struggled with this piece, which is, like, it's… I mean, and look, we do a podcast where we mostly critique work other people have done often without presenting alternate solutions. But we're also not jointly writing a long essay on these issues, right? Like, I think that's what was missing for me here.
• 0:18
  Chris Preble: So, we've already jumped around a little bit from my notes, but I want to go back to this question about why is it that development is hard? We have a sense of what that is. And I learned this most recently in terms of my research into the U.S. mission in Afghanistan over a 20-year period. Here's what Tooze is right. A large injection of aid into a regime lit by a sense of historic purpose and backed by substantial political and social forces can yield real benefits. A sprinkling of tide loans across isolated projects in a corrupt and unaccountable regime will unsurprisingly do little more than feed the aid industry and enrich more or less unscrupulous individuals.
• 0:20
  Zack Cooper: Can I just say this is not a new one, right?
• 0:20
  Chris Preble: Not a new idea, exactly.
• 0:20
  Zack Cooper: I mean, all I was thinking about when reading that part is, you know, go back 20 years and the Bush administration was pushing the Millennium Challenge Corporation. And the way the Millennium Challenge Corporation describes itself is that it “forms partnerships with developing countries who are committed to good governance, economic freedom, and investing in their citizens.” This is something that's been a common discussion. And admittedly, at the time, it was quite controversial, right? Because there was a debate about whether you should only prioritize those countries that actually had good governance, right, or whether you were leaving a lot of people behind. But this is not exactly a new concept. And, you know, the U.S. has invested a pretty substantial amount of money into the Millennium Challenge Corporation since, I think, 2004, when it was initially created.
• 0:21
  Melanie Marlowe: Yeah. I mean, studies that have been done for literally decades. When I was talking about the politics, it's not all the politics of the giving countries, it's the politics of the receiving countries. And a lot of them, in the ruling elites, the people that are in charge of things, they figure out how to make small concessions to the donors in order to keep getting the money towards them. And some of these studies show that the governments get more autocratic, not less, and that things get more corrupt because that money just keeps on coming. It's like student loans. The lenders will keep giving as much as they think the IMF's going to guarantee. And you have all the same kinds of problems that you have elsewhere.
• 0:23
  Chris Preble: So, any form of conditionality. Under those terms, any form of conditionality is an imposition.
• 0:23
  Melanie Marlowe: Going to raise the hair on your back.
• 0:23
  Chris Preble: I mean, so $170 billion in Lebanon country, about 5.5 million people. I mean, so, like, you can see, like, because I do think part of Tooze’s argument is about the scale of what is required to achieve the UN’s SDGs. Or even if you narrow the scope to just a few things that you're trying to solve, like health and infant mortality and things like that, that still would require a massive amount of money. And yet, in isolated cases, when you invest a massive amount of money in a relatively small place and you still don't have anything to show for it, is it a surprise why many people are saying, you know, “What's the point? This is hopeless.”
• 0:23
  Melanie Marlowe: Yeah. I mean, if your point is to get, like, the most marginal utility out of your… if that's the point, why don't you just put it in India, where they have a better government, a lot of people that are poor, but an opportunity to lift more people out of poverty? Why don't you put it in poor schools in the United States?
• 0:24
  Chris Preble: There's an argument for what?
• 0:24
  Melanie Marlowe: For putting it in somewhere…
• 0:24
  Chris Preble: Somewhere where it's actually going to be effective.
• 0:24
  Melanie Marlowe: Where there it's a country poorer than the United States, but where there are poor people that could be helped.
• 0:24
  Chris Preble: One thing I wanted to come back to, Zack, I think this is for you, this is what Tooze writes about, sort of, this notion of development as it relates to power, right? And connecting development assistance to power. He notes that China, you know, is one of the most successful development stories in human history, just measured by the number of people who went from crushing poverty to something approaching middle class status, which is an incredible achievement. But he notes that part of the reason why the rest of the world hasn't really signed up for that is because the things that China did to achieve that level of development is anathema to many who have some sort of connection to notions of liberalism.
• 0:26
  Zack Cooper: Yeah. I really don't think Tooze has thought through that argument about a greater development equating to more multipolarity. The places in the world that are the most developed are the ones that are most aligned with the United States and the least multipolar.
• 0:28
  Melanie Marlowe: No. Zack Cooper: People always dramatically overestimate how much money this actually was. So, I guess I'm not so sold on this, like, dark assessment of Americans, right? Like, I think Americans actually are pretty altruistic. I think the amount of money that has been provided hasn't been as large as most people think. But I do think that Tooze is right to point out that, going forward, it's pretty clear that this is going to be much more difficult. I can't imagine five years from now having an operational development assistance program that the U.S. is running that is really doing a lot of good, just because I think, politically, it's going to be really, really hard to rebuild all of this.
• 0:29
  Chris Preble: So, on that point, my colleagues, Evan Cooper and Alessandro Perri, they published a piece with Stimson last month — I'll include a link in the show notes — where they look out 10 years from now, and they try to imagine where the global aid landscape may be. And it's, you know, a forecasting exercise. And I think it's very clever and thoughtful.
• 0:30
  Melanie Marlowe: I think that's really an interesting exercise. When I was reading the article, I thought, you know, what if Donald Trump had gone to a really poor country and said, you know, “Look what the United States does,” and held up a bag of rice or something. You know what? A lot of people would've thought, “They are so proud of that.” The United States, when there's a tsunami and you see the food getting unloaded from an American ship, there's something to be proud of there, that the United States is capable of alleviating suffering of people, especially in extreme emergencies, and doing so immediately.
• 0:32
  Chris Preble: Interesting. Yeah. I mean, we've seen it, Donald Trump can make…
• 0:32
  Melanie Marlowe: Ukraine.
• 0:32
  Chris Preble: He can make things that were unpopular with his base popular. I mean, even, of course, Donald Trump pushed through a version of an expansion of aid in his first term, again, to compete with China, mostly in Africa. And it hasn’t entirely, sort of, played out the way that he wanted it to. But that was an instance in which even Donald Trump could make the case for why we might consider increasing aid under a certain set of circumstances. And there wasn’t this huge backlash from MAGA saying, "We’ve been sold out by the president." And I think, you know, Melanie, you make a really good point. I mean, for all the president’s attention to getting the Nobel Peace Prize and, sort of, stopping, allegedly, what are we up to now, eight wars that he’s allegedly stopped?
• 0:32
  Zack Cooper: It is 8. I listened to the President's Knesset speech.
• 0:32
  Melanie Marlowe: Yeah, I know.
• 0:32
  Chris Preble: I heard a little bit of it. It was just awesome — so awesome. But Melanie, to your point, if Donald Trump were to take this on as one of his projects and really get behind it, I don't think there'd be a huge backlash from his base. I think he, of all people, could sell it to his base.
• 0:33
  Zack Cooper: And he has started to do this, right?
• 0:33
  Melanie Marlowe: Yeah.
• 0:33
  Chris Preble: Yes. That's right. Yes.
• 0:33
  Zack Cooper: I mean, the test case will be the Gaza Riviera, right? Like, if you had told Donald Trump’s base that he was going to put significant amounts of money into Gaza, you probably could not pick a place in the world that would've had less support a year ago, right?
• 0:33
  Melanie Marlowe: Yeah.
• 0:33
  Chris Preble: Yep.
• 0:33
  Zack Cooper: So, we'll see whether he can actually do this, whether it can sustain political support. I'm pretty skeptical, but we have a test case.
• 0:33
  Chris Preble: And a couple hundred troops, by the way, too. It’s not just the money. We have a couple hundred troops, which we have resisted doing in the past.
• 0:34
  Melanie Marlowe: So, we didn’t really distinguish at the beginning the difference that’s, kind of, technical for people between developmental aid and, kind of, what people mostly think of as foreign aid. So, developmental being like long-term infrastructure projects and better governance and that kind of stuff. And you know what? I would actually focus less on that than I would on the kind of foreign-aid-y kind of normal things that we tend to think about — PEPFAR, you know, health issues, drug trials for people.
• 0:36
  Zack Cooper: It's interesting. I have a slightly different take, Melanie, which is really dark.
• 0:36
  Melanie Marlowe: Oh, okay.
• 0:36
  Zack Cooper: But I think, maybe, the reality of where we’re headed, which is that, I think part of what we’re seeing in the Trump administration is a very public willingness to acknowledge that certain parts of the world don’t matter to the president or to the president’s supporters. Like, we used to talk a fair amount about, you know, U.S. engagement in Africa. There is just zero engagement.
• 0:36
  Melanie Marlowe: Nothing.
• 0:36
  Zack Cooper: Right? And so, I think I’m not saying that this is what should happen. I’m just making an analytical judgment about what I think will happen. I think the trend will be that the U.S. will shift its priorities geographically, not based on where the U.S. can do the most good, but based on some other calculus about, you know, which parts of the world the U.S. wants to engage with. And I think the clear result of that will be to decrease engagement in Africa.
• 0:37
  Melanie Marlowe: Oh, sure.
• 0:37
  Zack Cooper: And I think that’s probably going to have a lasting impact. Even if you have a new president that has different views, I think that view within parts of the Republican Party will last. So, do you still get, you know, support for development efforts in the Americas? I think the answer is yes, because the Trump administration is refocusing some of its efforts more in the Americas. But I think Africa, as a location for U.S. development assistance, is really going to be decreased, which means, in some ways, because there are so many countries that need so much assistance in Africa, that other places are probably going to end up being more prioritized.
• 0:38
  Melanie Marlowe: And another security perspective is, there’s a lot of minerals there that we desperately need.
• 0:38
  Chris Preble: Right. Melanie Marlowe: Now, again, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing to focus on the Americas if we want to do that, but I wish we would do more. Like, Bolivia might be a good opportunity. It has a more right government. It might be more aligned with Trump. There’s a lot of poverty there. There are other opportunities. But you’re right, I don’t want to lose a continent because we just decide we don’t care anymore.
• 0:38
  Chris Preble: I do think that we're going to see some engagement on the part of the Trump administration in Africa, but it will not be primarily aid. They're excited about arms.
• 0:39
  Zack Cooper: Beyond engagement with Afrikaners.
• 0:39
  Chris Preble: Arm sales. No, beyond the engagement with the Afrikaners. I mean, you know, arms sales and things like that, I think they're continuing that. The mineral extraction and deals for minerals, I think we're going to see some of that. But I think, Zack, you're certainly right, that, sort of, selling them on alleviation of poverty for the sake of alleviating poverty or curing diseases that are curable, they're just not going to have a focus on that.
• 0:39
  Melanie Marlowe: No. No.
• 0:39
  Chris Preble: Right? Those are private initiatives.
• 0:39
  Melanie Marlowe: Right.
• 0:39
  Chris Preble: And private charity and private philanthropy is still hugely important. You know, just one example, the Gates Foundation-
• 0:39
  Melanie Marlowe: Yes.
• 0:39
  Chris Preble: … all by itself, has done so much to deal with problems like malaria and things like that. So, I think that will continue even if the United States does what Zack does, and I think he's probably right, sort of, backs away from it.
• 0:40
  Melanie Marlowe: But there is, I think, an appealing case for the United States to do some of this. And the coordination can be more effective. So, I mean, you're right. I think that it's a prudential balance of what is done, yeah.
• 0:40
  Chris Preble: Yeah, I mean, I’ll say I didn’t put my thoughts on the table. I do agree with Melanie that you draw a distinction between, you know, those relatively short-term injections of assistance after a natural disaster or in the face of a famine that’s sometimes caused by natural causes, other times not, of course. If you can identify those things that can make an impact and save lives, that’s good. But if you have some sort of grandiose objectives beyond that, that you’re actually fostering development, that doesn’t happen again. You know, Melanie and I are on the same page on this.
• 0:42
  Melanie Marlowe: Yeah. Great.
• 0:42
  Chris Preble: Okay. We've covered a lot of ground. We've resolved nothing, which is typical of our show. Seven years and counting. So, here we go.
• 0:42
  Melanie Marlowe: Okay, Chris, give us a grievance.
• 0:42
  Chris Preble: All right. So, my grievance is with the plan to host the Qataris at a base in Idaho. Now, when I first heard this story, my reaction was, “Huh? Is this another The Onion headline, and I’m being punked here?” But no, it’s actually true. The Qataris are going to build a facility on a base in Idaho to train. They fly F-15s. And the explanation is that the terrain and the topography around Idaho is close enough to the terrain and topography in Qatar, that this is useful for them. It is not completely unprecedented that foreign troops train inside of the United States. And yet, in addition to all the other U.S.-Qatar news, like, for example, if you hadn’t paid attention, we now have an executive order that allegedly affords the Qataris the same kind of protection that other countries receive under the rubric of a Senate-ratified treaty, for example.
• 0:44
  Melanie Marlowe: Yeah, as a proud Idahoan, and honestly, I'm not going to lie, little stunned. I invite them to go into the wilderness area, the designated wilderness area in Idaho, see how they like that topography. Okay, Zack?
• 0:44
  Zack Cooper: Well, my grievance is with the Trump administration having, I think, really badly mishandled China policy over the last few months, which I’ve mentioned before, but now leading themselves into a place where they have threatened sort of nuclear escalation again in the economic realm - a 100% tariff on China, which is supposed to start on November 1st, roughly two weeks from when we’re recording.
• 0:46
  Melanie Marlowe: Yeah, okay. Well, my grievance goes to senators who voted against a bipartisan measure to block the Trump administration’s lethal strikes against alleged Venezuelan drug smugglers. Rand Paul, of course, not surprisingly, voted to restrict the president’s authority there, but it still fell short because most Republicans want the president to be able to continue this.
• 0:48
  Chris Preble: Well, my atta goes to Rand Paul for being one of only two Republicans, as Melanie already alluded to, who appear to understand the Constitution as it relates to war powers. The excerpts from Senator Paul’s speech on the floor of the Senate making the case on war powers grounds, that an AUMF was required to authorize the strikes against Venezuela, or even a wider war against Venezuela, which only one other Republican, I think, Lisa Murkowski, was the only other person that voted for it.
• 0:49
  Melanie Marlowe: Okay, I'm going to take the next atta. I'm going to elbow in before Zack here. And I just want to say that my atta, my primary atta, goes to President Trump and Finnish President Alexander Stubb for coming to an agreement on building 11 new icebreakers, which the United States desperately needs. Under the agreement, writers reports that Finland will build four arctic security cutters at ship yards in Finland and that the United States will leverage Finnish expertise to construct up to seven in shipyards located in the United States.
• 0:50
  Chris Preble: Yeah, bravo.
• 0:50
  Melanie Marlowe: Zack, your atta.
• 0:51
  Zack Cooper: So, I was tempted to give my atta to the actual Nobel Peace Prize winner, María Corina Machado, who I think is well-deserving of an atta from all of us and was quite the deserving Nobel Prize winner. But I'm going to give my atta to President Trump for actually having delivered, at least for the moment, on something that he's been talking about for a while on the peace front, which is a Gaza deal. We could have a long conversation about whether this should have happened earlier and about all of the horrific things that have happened over the last two years in Israel and Gaza. But I think it's a positive sign that he was able to get a deal. And, you know, we should give the president credit when he's able to follow through on these commitments. So, hopefully, that deal will hold. I think there's a lot of work to go around, but Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff and others on his team, they do deserve an atta on this one.
• 0:52
  Melanie Marlowe: Okay, I elbowed in front of Zack so we could have just a minute more discussion on this. Chris, thoughts?
• 0:52
  Chris Preble: I agree that this is potentially a great achievement. And as with other past peace agreements or ceasefires between the Israelis and the Palestinians, we hope this one holds. The long-term future of Gaza remains, to me, a great question mark. And, you know, I think that this is a first step, not the last step. And so, I'm going to treat it as such.
• 0:52
  Melanie Marlowe: Yeah, I'll say I'll give my atta to President Trump. And had he received the Nobel Peace Prize for this, I would've been just fine with that. I think it's very well-deserved. Or maybe even Jared Kushner, I'm not going to lie. I was a big Jared Kushner skeptic in the first administration. Part of me doesn't want to know how he and Steve Witkoff got to this agreement and the pressure that was put on other governments. But, you know, I think that there was more involvement, as we're seeing from the New York Times, from other governments in the last couple of months.
• 0:54
  Chris Preble: So, between the time we record and the time this airs, I will have already traveled to Chicago and back. But I'm giving a talk at the University of Chicago this week. And then, next week, I will be in Traverse City, Michigan for a talk on Thursday the 23rd. It's hosted by the International Affairs Forum. For all of our listeners at Traverse City, if you'd like to come out and hear me speak, the event is free. And I will include a link in the show notes for you to register.
• 0:54
  Melanie Marlowe: That's great. Zack?
• 0:54
  Zack Cooper: There's so many speaking events, but I've got one for you, Melanie.
• 0:54
  Melanie Marlowe: Oh!
• 0:54
  Zack Cooper: Which is the Federal Society.
• 0:55
  Chris Preble: Nice! Zack Cooper: I don’t know f I make it out of that, of a room with that many lawyers.
• 0:55
  Melanie Marlowe: Yes.
• 0:55
  Zack Cooper: Yeah. There you go. I have a piece that I think will be out when the show comes out in Foreign Affairs on the challenge of war termination, basically arguing that the Trump administration's denial strategy is really good for preventing or stopping an invasion of Taiwan but really bad for actually terminating a conflict after that. And then, next week, I'm going to be in Japan. So, I have no idea who the Prime Minister will be. At the moment, still looks like Takaichi is the most likely candidate, but we will see what happens.
• 0:55
  Melanie Marlowe: Yeah. Yeah, good luck with that. So, I haven't been to Fed Soc event for a long time, but I was mentioning to somebody the other day, maybe they would like my thoughts on AUMFs because those are, you know, apparently a big thing, or maybe not a big thing anymore.
• 0:56
  Chris Preble: A reunion.
• 0:56
  Melanie Marlowe: But Chris and I were traveling, and we figured Zack would be, too. And Zack did just confirm that he is going to be gone. So, the next war or foreign policy movie that comes out, we need to have a Net Assessment showing. But anyway, that was really fun and I told Dan that I was really happy I got to watch it ahead of time because my biggest news besides AUSA and all the other stuff is I'm going home to visit my mom. And I had told her that we could watch this movie. She loves these kinds of movies. And honestly, I wanted to make sure there weren't any, you know, naughty bits I had to fast forward through. And there are not any naughty bits. You can watch this with your mom, everybody. Yeah. So, that was very good. I have a feeling that this is the movie that's going to launch 1,000 classes. It's a good movie. Someone said it's unsatisfying, only because it's not like what you might be thinking when you walk into it, not because it's not a good movie. It was a very good movie. And it was super fun to see Brian.