We speak to Professor Charles Kupchan, author of ‘Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself from the World’, former special advisor to President Obama (2014-2017) and President Obama’s and President Clinton’s National Security Council director for European affairs. He discusses the isolationist tradition in American foreign policy history and how it has risen and fallen over the years, Trump’s return to a form of isolationism with ‘America First’, the struggle for the US to strike a middle ground between interventionist and isolationist, what Biden’s foreign policy is likely to look like and whether it will be more of the same of Obama’s regime-change foreign policy, how Biden’s relationship will be with the UK and EU, whether there are any hopes for better relations with Russia, the perspective from the global south that the US is not fit to lead, and more! Finally, we speak to Rolling Stone contributing editor and host of the ‘Useful Idiots’ podcast Matt Taibbi. He discusses whether Trump will leave the presidency on his own accord and the media’s concentration over whether he will refuse to hand over power, what Biden’s foreign policy will look like with regards to Israel, Syria, and the wider Middle East, whether his foreign policy will resemble that of Obama, why criminal justice and prison reform is unlikely to happen under a Biden presidency, the ICC and why any US president could be brought in front of it for war crimes if the US was not a superpower, and much more!
