A Friendly Warning for America from Rory Stewart

Episode 45: A Friendly Warning for America
Mar 12 2024
With November’s election approaching, it feels like the United States is at a crossroads — not just at home, but abroad too. Will the country continue to lead the global order, as it’s done so successfully since the end of WWII? Or will it retreat into isolationism? A distinguished foreign friend of America’s — the British soldier, diplomat, politician, and adventurer Rory Stewart — shares his views on what’s at stake, both for the world and for the U.S. itself.

Go to audible.com/news where you’ll find Peter Bergen’s recommendations for other news, journalism and nonfiction listening.

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38 mins

Combating Antisemitism in Germany and Poland: Strategies Since 1990, New America online

[Online] Combating Antisemitism in Germany and Poland: Strategies Since 1990

DATE: May 2, 2024

TIME: 12:00-1:00 PM EST

In both Germany and Poland—primary locations of the Holocaust—the legacy of antisemitism remains a major obstacle to reconciliation with the past. In his new book Combating Antisemitism in Germany and Poland: Strategies Since 1990, Thomas Just examines how antisemitism has manifested in these countries in the post-Cold War era, and the strategies employed to counter it. Just also examines the effectiveness of various approaches, pointing to a deeper understanding of the disturbing influence of antisemitic hatred worldwide and the best practices to combat it.

Join New America’s Future Security Program as they welcome Thomas Just, for a discussion of his new book Combating Antisemitism in Germany and Poland: Strategies Since 1990. Just is an Assistant Teaching Professor within the Future Security Initiative at Arizona State University, and was previously the inaugural Postdoctoral Fellow with the Martin-Springer Institute at Northern Arizona University. His research earned him the award of Young Ambassador for Peace and Reconciliation from UNESCO. He holds a PhD from Florida International University. The conversation will be moderated by New America Vice President and Arizona State University Professor of Practice Peter Bergen.

Join the conversation online using #CombatingAntisemitism and following @NewAmericaISP.

PARTICIPANTS

Thomas Just

Author, Combating Antisemitism in Germany and Poland

Assistant Teaching Professor, Future Security Initiative at Arizona State University

MODERATOR

Peter Bergen

Vice President, New America

Co-Director, Future Security

Professor of Practice, Arizona State University

The Return of the Great Powers, New America online

[ONLINE] – The Return of the Great Powers
EVENT

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 dawned what Francis Fukuyama called “The End of History.” Three decades later, the global order as we long have known it is now gone. Powerful nations are determined to assert dominance on the world stage. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a part of it, but in reality, this power struggle impacts every corner of our world—from Helsinki to Beijing, from Australia to the North Pole. In his new book The Return of the Great Powers, CNN Chief National Security Analyst Jim Sciutto, marshals globe-spanning, exclusive interviews with dozens of political, military, and intelligence leaders, defining our times as a return of great power conflict, “a definitive break between the post–Cold War era and an entirely new and uncertain one.”

Join New America’s Future Security Program as they welcome Jim Sciutto to discuss his new book The Return of the Great Powers. Sciutto is CNN’s chief national security analyst and anchor of CNN Newsroom on Max, airing Monday through Friday. He has reported from more than fifty countries across the globe, including dozens of assignments from inside Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran. Among the honors Sciutto’s work has earned are Emmy Awards, the Edward R. Murrow Award, the George Polk Award, the Dupont-Columbia Award, and the White House Correspondent’s Association’s Merriman Smith Award for excellence in presidential coverage. Sciutto is also the bestselling author of The Shadow War.

The conversation will be moderated by New America Vice President and Arizona State University Professor of Practice Peter Bergen.

Join the conversation online using #ReturnofGreatPowers and following @NewAmericaISP

Speaker:

Jim Sciutto
Author, The Return of the Great Powers
CNN Chief National Security Analyst

Moderator:

Peter Bergen
Vice President, New America
Co-Director, Future Security
Professor of Practice, Arizona State University

Religious Difference and Mass Violence in Muslim Societies, New America, online

Why do some religious minorities provoke the ire of majoritarian groups and become targets of organized violence, even though they lack significant power and pose no political threat. In his new book Liminal Minorities: Religious Difference and Mass Violence in Muslim Societies, Güneş Murat Tezcür examines this question within Muslim societies, arguing that these faith groups are stigmatized across generations, as they lack theological recognition and social acceptance from the dominant religious group. Tezcür provides a comparative-historical study of mass atrocities against religious minorities, focusing on two case studies—the Islamic State’s genocidal attacks against the Yezidis in northern Iraq in the 2010s and massacres of Alevis in Turkey in the 1970s and 1990s—while also addressing discrimination and violence against followers of the Bahá’í faith in Iran and Ahmadis in Pakistan and Indonesia. Analyzing a variety of original sources, including interviews with survivors and court documents, Tezcür reveals how religious stigmatization and political resentment motivate ordinary people to participate in mass atrocities.

Join New America’s Future Security Program as they welcome Güneş Murat Tezcür for a discussion of his new book Liminal Minorities: Religious Difference and Mass Violence in Muslim Societies. Tezcür is Director of the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University. In his current research, he explores the dark side of humanity with a focus on mass violence. In addition to Liminal Minorities, he is the author of Muslim Reformers in Iran and Turkey and the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Turkish Politics. The conversation will be moderated by New America Vice President and Arizona State University Professor of Practice Peter Bergen.

Join the conversation online using #LiminalMinorities and following @NewAmericaISP.

Speaker:

Güneş Murat Tezcür
Author, Liminal Minorities: Religious Difference and Mass Violence in Muslim Societies
Director, School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University

Moderator:

Peter Bergen
Vice President, New America
Co-Director, Future Security
Professor of Practice, Arizona State University

Biden passed the commander in chief test CNN.com

Peter Bergen: Biden passed the commander in chief test

Not since President George W. Bush delivered his State of the Union months after the 9/11 attacks has the commander in chief had so much at stake about national security issues while delivering the Super Bowl of political speeches.

The Russians are waging the largest land war in Europe since World War II, yet the US Congress’ support for the Ukrainians seems to be wavering; the war in Gaza rages on with little immediate prospect of a ceasefire in sight, and the conflict is destabilizing the Middle East more than any event since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Israel’s conduct of the Gaza war is also alienating a swath of President Joe Biden’s base. Meanwhile, at the border, a record number of immigrants are arriving, which is now the top issue for voters in the 2024 presidential election, according to Gallup.

In his State of the Union speech, Biden had to answer the mail on all of these. So, how’d he do?

Biden gave a very clear defense of his Ukraine policy, that the US should provide the aid and weapons to the Ukrainians to counter Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion and he called out former President Donald Trump – without mentioning him by name – who has opposed sending tens of billions of dollars of additional aid to Ukraine.

Biden also weighed in on the crisis at the southern border noting that there was a bipartisan deal on the table in recent weeks in the US Senate that would have sped up rulings on asylum claims, beefed up law enforcement resources at the border and would have discouraged some migrants from coming to the country. Biden swiped at Trump for dissuading members of Congress from passing the deal to keep the political issue alive for him to use in the 2024 campaign.

And Biden made his clearest public stance so far on behalf of Gazans, saying “More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed. Most of who are not Hamas. Thousands and thousands are innocent women and children.”

All in all, Biden gave a strong performative speech, and on the crucial national security issues he needed to address – Ukraine, Gaza and the border – he did a more than creditable job.

Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University.

The actual hidden truth about UFOs, CNN.com

Opinion by Peter Bergen and Erik German
7 minute read
Updated 1:27 PM EST, Fri March 8, 2024

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room with Peter Bergen,” also on Apple and Spotify. Erik German is the senior producer of “In the Room.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are their own. View more opinion at CNN.

CNN
—
A former Pentagon official — driven, he says, by his duty to the truth — goes public with an explosive allegation. Facing a scrum of TV cameras and members of Congress, this official claims that the US government has been keeping crashed alien spaceships under wraps for decades.

It sounds like a pitch for a Hollywood movie. But last year, Americans saw it happen on the news. The former Pentagon official, David Grusch, had been an Air Force intelligence officer. He told a congressional committee that he’d learned of a decades-long Pentagon program focused on “crash retrieval and reverse engineering” of UFOs from other planets. Grusch also said that remains found at the spacecraft crash sites were “non-human biologics.”

That’s right. Crashed alien spacecraft and dead extraterrestrials, right there in the Congressional Record. If it wasn’t the wildest thing ever broadcasted on C-SPAN, it must’ve been close. Someone should look into this, right?

It turns out that someone already had. In 2022, the Pentagon tapped a veteran scientist and intelligence officer named Sean Kirkpatrick to set up a new office tasked with investigating UFO sightings by the US military. Named the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office by the US Department of Defense, Kirkpatrick told us his team dug into UFO cases and interviewed US service members who said they had knowledge about encounters with UFOs.

Kirkpatrick recently retired from his job at the Pentagon and spoke with us for the Audible podcast “In the Room.” Kirkpatrick and his team investigated every US government UFO sighting going back to Roswell in the 1940s, putting the findings in a report that the Pentagon released publicly on Friday. That report debunks multiple claims of alien visitations to Earth and of any purported cover up of those visits.

In the most extensive media interview he’s given, Kirkpatrick laid out a convincing case that the stories swirling for decades about the alleged government cover-up of alien-related UFOs may well have been fueled largely by true believers inside the US government or with close ties to it.

Since the term “flying saucer” was first coined, much of the conspiratorial thinking about UFOs has been spawned by people catching glimpses of highly secret US aircraft and wanting answers. And when the government doesn’t provide answers, the public imagination takes over.

But, in fact, Kirkpatrick says, his investigation found that most UFO sightings are of advanced technology that the US government needs to keep secret, of aircraft that rival nations are using to spy on the US or of benign civilian drones and balloons.

“There’s about two to five percent of all the (UFO reports that are)… what we would call truly anomalous,” says Kirkpatrick. And he thinks explanations for that small percentage will most likely be found right here on Earth.

The Roswell incident

This is how Kirkpatrick and his team explain the Roswell incident, which plays a prominent role in UFO lore. That’s because, in 1947, a US military news release stated that a flying saucer had crashed near Roswell Army Air Field in New Mexico.

A day later, the Army retracted the story and said the crashed object was a weather balloon. Newspapers ran the initial saucer headline, followed up with the official debunking, and interest in the case largely died down. Until 1980, that is, when a pair of UFO researchers published a book alleging that alien bodies had been recovered from the Roswell wreckage and that the US government had covered up the evidence.

Kirkpatrick says his office dug deep into the Roswell incident and found that in the late 1940s and early 1950s, there were a lot of things happening near the Roswell Airfield. There was a spy program called Project Mogul, which launched long strings of oddly shaped metallic balloons. They were designed to monitor Soviet nuclear tests and were highly secret.

The U.S. Air Force released this photo June 24 of an aeroshell of a NASA Voyager Mars space probe prior to launch at Walker AFB, New Mexico (formerly Roswell AAF) as part of its report on the so called “Roswell Incident” of 1947. The Air Force reported June 24 that “space aliens” who supposedly crashed in the New Mexico desert 50 years ago were only military dummies and that descriptions of research projects involving low altitude tethered objects such as this may have become part of the incident. The 231-page report is aimed at ending longstanding speculation over the incident and denies that the military had recovered bodies from damaged flying saucers in 1947 and had been covering up the incident ever since.

At the same time, the US military was conducting tests with other high-altitude balloons that carried human test dummies rigged with sensors and zipped into body-sized bags for protection against the elements. And there was at least one military plane crash nearby with 11 fatalities.

Echoing earlier government investigations, Kirkpatrick and his team concluded that the crashed Mogul balloons, the recovery operations to retrieve downed test dummies and glimpses of the charred aftermath of that real plane crash likely combined into a single false narrative about a crashed alien spacecraft.

Kirkpatrick also lays out a convincing case that something similar is happening today. He says new technology taking flight now could help explain a lot of the modern era of UFO sightings from the early 2000s on. It’s not just secret government technology, either. Lots of observers get flummoxed when they catch sight of cutting-edge drones and even odd-looking balloons.

“What’s more likely?” asked Kirkpatrick. “The fact that there is a state-of-the-art technology that’s being commercialized down in Florida that you didn’t know about, or we have extraterrestrials?” he said. “And it even makes me scratch my head more when you show them; here’s the company in Florida that builds exactly what you’ve described. And their response is, well, no, no, no, it’s gotta be extraterrestrials, and you’re covering it up.”

Nevertheless, UFOs remain a genuine national security concern mainly because they are flight hazards. As Kirkpatrick put it, “military pilots that are flying at greater than Mach 1; if they run into a balloon with a tether on it, it’s going to rip a wing off.”

Since 2020, the Pentagon has standardized, de-stigmatized and increased the volume of reporting on UFOs by the US military. Kirkpatrick says that’s the reason the closely covered and widely-mocked Chinese spy balloon was spotted in the first place last year. The incident shows that the US government’s policy of taking UFOs seriously is actually working.

The true believers
So in the face of the actual evidence, why are people in and around government promoting the unsupported idea of alien invaders being covered up by the US government?

“True believers are not just outside of government; many of them are inside government,” Kirkpatrick told us, including the late US Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was Senate Majority leader. Another key player was Reid’s longtime friend Robert Bigelow, a Nevada billionaire and the owner of a company called Bigelow Aerospace, both of whom shared a long-running interest in UFOs. Kirkpatrick says, “Senator Harry Reid was a true believer and thought that ‘Hey, the government is hiding this from congressional oversight.’”

In 2007, Senator Reid got funding for a US Defense Intelligence Agency program that paid $22 million to his buddy Bigelow’s aerospace company — money the company spent on investigations into paranormal phenomena. Among other investigations, Bigelow’s team looked into sightings of UFOs by US military personnel and proposed setting up laboratories to study the purported physical remains of alien spacecraft. (On “60 Minutes” in May 2017, Bigelow said he was “absolutely convinced” that aliens exist and that UFOs have visited Earth.)

Reid told a reporter in Nevada in 2021 that even though this was a secret program to look into UFOs, Bigelow didn’t benefit from “some sweetheart deal … it was put out to bid.” Reid also told The New York Times, “I’m not embarrassed or ashamed or sorry I got this thing going…I think it’s one of the good things I did in my congressional service.”

Yet, Kirkpatrick points out, “none of that actually manifested in any evidence” of alien spacecraft. But stories about these secret programs spread inside the Pentagon, got embellished and received the occasional boost from service members who’d heard rumors about or caught glimpses of seemingly sci-fi technology or aircraft.

And Kirkpatrick says his investigators ultimately traced this game of top-secret telephone back to fewer than a dozen people.

“It all goes back to the same core set of people,” Kirkpatrick said. This is both deeply weird and richly ironic. Because, for decades, UFO true believers have been telling us there’s a US government conspiracy to hide evidence of aliens. But — if you believe Kirkpatrick — the more mundane truth is that these stories are being pumped up by a group of UFO true believers in and around government.

Sadly, for all the UFO lovers out there, that may be the biggest takeaway from Kirkpatrick’s report to Congress, which is expected to be published later this month. Plenty of outsiders have long speculated about whether the Pentagon’s alien-focused programs were coming up empty and perhaps were suspiciously self-perpetuating.

But now, highly credible people inside the Pentagon — with really high-level security clearances — are finally saying, we looked at every single piece of secret evidence about supposedly alien UFOs. And as far as we can tell, it’s humans all the way down.

Although Kirkpatrick concedes that for those who truly believe that there are alien visitations here on Earth, little will convince them otherwise: “There is absolutely nothing that I’m going to do, say, or produce evidentiary that is going to make the true believers convert … It is a religious belief that transcends critical thinking and rational thought.”

This article has been updated with the Pentagon’s release of a report on UFOs.

How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, New America.,Online

[ONLINE] – How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler
EVENT

In the summer of 1941, Britain was struggling to combat Hitler’s powerful propaganda machine. British claims that Hitler was dangerous had little impact against Germany’s wave of disinformation. Except for the broadcasts of someone called Der Chef, a German who questioned Nazi doctrine whose listeners included German soldiers and citizens, as well as politicians in Washington DC who were debating getting into the war. And–most importantly–Der Chef was a fiction. He was a character created by the British propagandist Thomas Sefton Delmer, a unique weapon in the war. In How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, Peter Pomerantsev provides an inventive biography of Sefton Delmer while also confronting hard questions about the nature of information war: what if you can’t fight lies with truth? Can a propaganda war ever be won? In flashes forward to the present day, Pomerantsev weaves in what he’s learning from Delmer as he seeks to fight against Vladimir Putin’s tyranny and lies.

Join New America’s Future Security Program as they welcome Peter Pomerantsev, to discuss his new book How to Win an Information War. Pomerantsev is a senior fellow at the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, where he co-directs the Arena Initiative. He is the author of Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia, which won the 2016 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, and of This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality.

Join the conversation online using #HowtoWinanInfoWar and following @NewAmericaISP.

PARTICIPANTS

Peter Pomerantsev
Author, How to Win an Information War
Senior Fellow, SNF Agora Institute at John Hopkins University

MODERATOR

Peter Bergen
Vice President, New America
Co-Director, Future Security
Professor of Practice, Arizona State University
When
Mar. 11, 2024
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Where
Online Only
WEBCAST LINK
RSVP
New America

740 15th Street NW, Suite 900
Washington, DC 20005

China is Stalking its Dissidents — Even on U.S. Soil

China is Stalking its Dissidents — Even on U.S. Soil
In the Room with Peter Bergen

The United States is home to countless dissidents from around the world who have fled repression in places like Iran, India, Russia and, increasingly, China.

Did Oppenheimer’s Atomic Bomb Make the World Safer?

Did Oppenheimer’s Atomic Bomb Make the World Safer?

The wild success of Oppenheimer, with 13 Oscar nominations and nearly $1 billion in ticket sales, has revived a debate about the most destructive weapon ever created — and renewed concerns about how close the world might be to nuclear war.

Why America’s Biggest Terror Threat Is Homegrown

In the Room with Peter Bergen

The January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol was the culmination of political trends in the United States that have festered for decades. And it may be a dress rehearsal for what comes next.