In a major rebuke to China, Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen won a landslide victory in the country’s presidential election. Despite trailing in the polls mere months ago, record numbers came out to support Tsai in an effort to save the country’s democracy from becoming a second Hong Kong.

Just one day after the historic election, Dany met with Taiwan’s Foreign Minister Joseph Wu to discuss the election results, what they mean for China, and the future of the US-Taiwan relationship. Marc and Dany also reflect on Trump’s Asia-Pacific strategy and whether he has restored deterrence in the region.

Despite various domestic and foreign policy achievements, President Trump made a number of grave mistakes in 2019. He asked the president of Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden, used his emergency authority to circumvent Congress on the border wall, invited the Taliban to Camp David, and gave Turkey a greenlight to invade Syria and attack our Kurdish allies.

With the start of the new year, Dany and Marc once again joined forces to debate the ten worst things that the president did in 2019. But does the bad outweigh the good? Listen to the previous episode on the ten best things the president did in 2019 and decide for yourself!

What does the Trump administration see as the largest foreign policy priority for the upcoming year? Secretary of State Mike Pompeo joined Dany and Marc to discuss national security challenges – and the Trump administration’s successes.

Pompeo reviews 2019 highlights and looks ahead to 2020, with new details on the president’s maximum pressure campaign against Iran and the threat China poses to the next generation of Americans.

In 2018, US-backed forces in Syria annihilated a Russian platoon of mercenaries, killing hundreds after the Kremlin-supported private army tried to take an American position in Deir al-Zour. The Russian government denied knowledge of the shadowy group, which has been spotted sowing discord in Ukraine, Libya, and the Central African Republic, among other countries.

So who are these people? And where exactly are they operating? Michael Weiss joined Dany and Marc to shed some light on the role of private military companies in Russia and explain how quasi-government organizations such as the Wagner Group are executing Putin’s strategic imperatives worldwide.

The months-long protests in Hong Kong continue to escalate, with demonstrators and police officers violently clashing at a university campus this week. As protests continue against Communist China, what lessons does the battle for freedom against the Communist Soviet Union hold for Hong Kong? Former Polish President, Solidarity founder, and Nobel Prize winner Lech Walesa weighs in.

The former President of Poland and founding Chairman of Solidarity Lech Walesa joined the podcast to discuss his experience with anti-government protests and offer advice to the people of Hong Kong. Promising to stand with demonstrators, Walesa states that he would be willing to go to Hong Kong and fight for the democratic ideals that protesters are demanding.

November 4th marked the 40-year anniversary of the Iranian hostage crisis, when a group of Iranian students seized the US Embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans captive for 444 days. Four decades later, has the Islamic Republic of Iran changed its ways? And what role does the hostage nightmare continue to play in US-Iran relations?

Kenneth Pollack joined Dany and Marc to explain what happened on that day 40 years ago, and how the hostage crisis set Iran on a course of enmity with the United States. The three discuss Operation Eagle Claw (the failed US rescue mission), how the crisis contributed toward President Jimmy Carter’s removal from office, and whether President Donald Trump’s Iran approach differs from those of his predecessors.

Everyone in Washington set their hair on fire following White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney’s apparent admission of a quid pro quo for assistance to Ukraine in his news conference last week. But are quid pro quos really that bad? (Depends on the quo.) Has the US government used them before? And shouldn’t foreign aid always be dependent on getting something that’s good for America in return?

Dany and Marc sat down with former Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff director Lester Munson to discuss those fateful Latin words. Munson explains that contrary to what many in Washington are saying today, the United States uses quid pro quos in foreign aid all the time. In fact, Americans should expect the US to use quid pro quos when giving away their hard earned tax dollars to foreign governments. That said, no president should leverage aid on getting a foreign leader to investigate a political opponent.

What the hell is going on with impeachment? Is President Trump about to be removed from office? Or will this backfire on the Democrats? As the impeachment inquiry drags on, new questions about Trump’s conversations with foreign leaders, the Bidens’ involvement in Ukraine, and the future of American politics continue to emerge.

This week, Dany and Marc sat down with Karl Rove, “The Architect” of President Bush’s 2000 and 2004 campaigns, to figure out exactly what’s going on in Washington. The three discuss whether Trump broke the law, how average Americans view the impeachment process, and what all this means for the 2020 presidential race.

Seventy years ago, on October 1^st 1949, Mao Zedong Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party stood in Tiananmen Square in Beijing and proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. Since then, relations between the US and China have developed along an unstable timeline sometimes seeing the two nations working in unison toward shared objectives, while at other times being at odds politically and economically. Through it all, AEI scholars analyze the relationship and provide actionable policy recommendations to Congress and the White House.

The post The People’s Republic of China appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.

Two of Saudi Arabia’s largest oil facilities were attacked on September 14, setting fire to and severely damaging the world’s largest oil refinery. Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels claimed responsibility for the strikes, but the US has said there is no evidence the attacks came from Yemen, instead blaming Iran. So who’s really responsible? And should the US respond?

As world leaders try to make sense of the recent attacks, Dany and Marc sat down with Katherine Zimmerman to learn more about the different actors and rivalries in the region, and the Saudi and Iranian roles in Yemen’s ongoing civil war. They also speculate over how the strikes will affect the US-Saudi alliance and already fragile US-Iran relations.