The “Long Middle Finger of Europe” Edition

This week, Alan, Quinta, and Scott were joined by Ravi Agrawal, Editor in Chief of Foreign Policy Magazine, to talk through the week’s big natsec news, including:

• “Pledge Week.” In a sign of strength, NATO held its annual summit in the capital of Vilnius this week, just kilometers from Lithuania’s border with Belarus. But those hoping to join the club have gotten mixed receptions, with NATO members securing a clear path for Sweden to join the alliance without presenting a clear way forward for embattled Ukraine. What did we learn about the state of the alliance from this week’s historic meeting?
• “Cluster Ruck(us).” Late last week, the Biden administration made the controversial decision to provide U.S. cluster munitions—a type of weapon that many U.S. allies have banned by treaty, due to concerns about civilian casualties—to its ally Ukraine. Is it the right move? And what might it mean on the battlefield—and after the war is over?
• “Needling and Threads.” Mark Zuckerberg appears to have finally gotten under the skin of tech billionaire Elon Musk, as his recently launched competitor to Musk’s beleaguered Twitter, Threads, launched last week and soon secured over 100 million users. Has Twitter finally met its match? And what will Threads and other competitors mean for the future of the information (and disinformation) economy?

For object lessons, Alan went back to his college roots and endorsed the music of banjo virtuoso Bela Fleck. Quinta celebrated the weirdness of the Barbie nine-dash-line controversy. Scott urged listeners to check out Kim Stanley Robinson’s sci-fi masterpiece, the Mars Trilogy. And Ravi plugged the Foreign Policy Live video and podcast series he hosts for a weekly fix of smart thinking about the world.

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