The “Out of the Twenty-Twenty-Fourno, Into the Fire” Edition

Summary

Rational Security – “Out of the Twenty-Twenty-Fourno, Into the Fire” Edition

Podcast: Rational Security (The Lawfare Institute)
Date: January 1, 2025
Hosts: Scott R. Anderson, Quinta Jurecic, Alan Rozenshtein

---

Episode Overview

This special edition of Rational Security marks the podcast’s celebratory end-of-year episode, featuring the return of co-hosts Quinta Jurecic and Alan Rozenshtein alongside regular host Scott R. Anderson. Rather than covering the week's news, the team fields an array of listener-submitted questions spanning the globe and key national security issues. Topics include US alliances in Syria, the mechanics of the TikTok ban, overlooked national security crises, the state of crypto sanctions, underrated threats to the US, and the future of the US dollar, as well as lighter “object lesson” recommendations as the team closes out 2024.

---

Main Discussion Points & Insights

1. Balancing US Alliances and Commitments in Syria

(06:07 – 12:53)

• Listener Q: How should the US balance its alliances with Turkey, the Kurds, and Israel in light of recent events in Syria—a region still fractured and unstable?
• Scott: The situation is extremely complex with competing interests. The US, Turkey, Kurds, Israel, and others have overlapping and sometimes contradictory goals. Efforts to produce a secular, democratic Syria are unrealistic in the short term. Instead, a confederational or heavy local autonomy arrangement encompassing various communities may be more feasible, even though anything close to liberal democracy is unlikely in the near future.
  • Notable Quote: “These are miraculous arrangements where they arise, but... rest upon the slow development of a lot of political habits. It’s not just about setting up the right institutions.” (10:10, Scott)
• Inside Joke: The “arm the moderate rebels” quip highlights the challenge of defining and supporting groups in the Syrian opposition.
  • Notable Quote: "If you find one, you arm that guy." (11:07, Scott)
• Quinta: Recommends Arash Azizi's Atlantic piece for a nuanced view of Syrian opposition.

---

2. How Could a US TikTok Ban Be Enforced?

(12:53 – 19:35)

• Listener Q: How would a TikTok ban really work, given the technical limitations and prevalence of the app?
• Alan: It’s not an absolute ban. The law targets app stores (Apple, Google) and cloud service providers (like Oracle). Users with TikTok already installed will lose access to updates; new downloads will be blocked via the app stores. TikTok could try to migrate servers abroad, which is technically challenging and may cause slower service. Over time, user experience will degrade, and, combined with platform competition, network effects will erode TikTok’s dominance.
  • Notable Quote: “If you really want to go and watch communist Chinese propaganda on TikTok, you can still do it… But I think the hope is it’ll go from being the dominant short form video platform to a much less dominant one.” (18:28, Alan)
• Scott: Policy goals are about limiting systemic risk—if "a couple thousand" stubborn users stick around, that doesn't undercut the main objective.
  • Notable Quote: “You don’t need to absolutely ban TikTok...if a couple thousand really committed users still have access…it doesn’t have the same systemic risk.” (19:00, Scott)

---

3. Most Underrated National Security Stories of the Year

(21:21 – 26:29)

• Quinta’s Pick: Climate change is both underdiscussed and fundamental to national security. Though technological progress and market incentives (e.g., via the Inflation Reduction Act) give hope, political will—especially given global rightward shifts—remains uncertain.
  • Notable Quote: “I would be feeling a lot more optimistic about this if the incoming crop of leaders around the world were committed to treating climate as a serious issue.” (25:45, Quinta)
• Alan: Emphasizes climate-driven migration as a destabilizer.
  • Notable Quote: “There are a few things more destabilizing…than having 10 million, let alone 100 million, let alone 500 million people wandering the world trying to escape droughts and hurricanes.” (26:54, Alan)
• Scott: National security and other threats are not exclusive.
  • Notable Quote: “Just because something is a national security threat doesn’t mean it can also be a threat to other things as well.” (28:37, Scott)

---

4. Fifth Circuit’s Tornado Cash Ruling: Crypto, Sanctions, and Legal Complexity

(29:04 – 36:04)

• Listener Q: Should the logic of the recent Tornado Cash sanctions case extend to the entire Ethereum ecosystem?
• Scott: The ruling’s distinction (that the sanctioned crypto mixer isn’t “property” or a “person”) is flawed and misreads key statutes. The heart of sanctions law is about targeting transactions—mixers like Tornado Cash facilitate transactions, so they're clearly sanctionable. The decision may not survive further appellate review.
  • Notable Quote: “If the US government wanted to sanction throwing gold bars to each other through the air, I think they could do that too, because that’s a means of a transaction.” (33:38, Scott)
• Alan: Some influential voices welcome the decision, but the utility of such a win for the crypto industry is questionable.
• Scott: It’s likely Treasury/DOJ will challenge the ruling at higher levels, unless overruled for political reasons in a second Trump term.

---

5. Underrated Threats to the US for the Remainder of the Decade

(40:04 – 48:01)

• Alan: Pandemics are the clear winner for underrated threat status—preparation is cost-effective, but both parties are politically disincentivized to prioritize it. COVID-19 wasn’t as bad as a pandemic could be; far worse is possible.
  • Notable Quote: “The ROI on preparedness for pandemics is… probably higher than almost anything else we could do.” (41:21, Alan)
• Quinta: Political and vigilante violence, particularly on the right, remains insufficiently addressed by federal law enforcement and is being normalized by powerful media and political voices. The risk is not a civil war, but persistent, low-level political violence.
  • Notable Quote: “We’re in a moment of real distrust of institutions among Americans on the right, but also…across the board…[Violence as a solution]—that’s bad.” (47:32, Quinta)
• Scott: Taiwan. The US policy of “strategic ambiguity” has become dangerously autopilot as China builds military capacity to re-integrate Taiwan by 2027. Even a “successful” US defense of Taiwan would have catastrophic costs for all involved.
  • Notable Quote: “Even in a situation where the US succeeds at defending Taiwan, it’s absolutely catastrophic for everyone involved…Levels of US casualties at a daily pace that rival and surpass that of World War II…” (48:58, Scott)

---

6. First Major National Security Misstep of Trump’s Second Term—Predictions

(51:54 – 57:37)

• Scott: The administration might embrace the Fifth Circuit’s pro-crypto ruling early on, to its own eventual detriment, due to pressure from pro-crypto voices.
• Quinta: The breadth of possible missteps is vast, from foreign policy failures (e.g., Syria) to obscure but crucial domestic programs being cut—the surprise is part of the Trump era.
  • Notable Quote: “There’s just no way to know…sometimes crises were created, sometimes there were crises that would have happened anyway but were handled in bizarre and erratic ways.” (55:14, Quinta)
• Alan: Tariffs will likely be a classic “misstep”—confused, poorly designed, and clearly not achieving any coherent objective, while also harming consumers. Deportations under Trump, while more intentional, will also likely be handled badly.
  • Notable Quote: “It’s still completely unclear to me what we’re trying to accomplish [with tariffs].” (56:04, Alan)

---

7. The BRICS Bloc, “De-Dollarization,” and US Economic Power

(57:46 – 65:05)

• Listener Q: How serious is the threat of BRICS nations supplanting the US Dollar with an alternative reserve currency—and what would that mean for US security?
• Scott: There is slow movement away from the USD and Euro for some reserve holdings, but the inertia of existing systems, global trust in US institutions, and the coordination problems among BRICS make a major shift very unlikely anytime soon. The real risk would come from a more fragmented, regionalized world economy, but that’s likely far off (50-100 years).
  • Notable Quote: “[BRICS creating a global reserve currency]… would be crippling to them economically… It’s just not something a bunch of governments can decide to just hop over.” (59:18, Scott)
• Alan: Adds skepticism—China is the only plausible non-US challenger, but other BRICS members have little reason to shift reserves to Chinese control.
  • Notable Quote: “I am very skeptical that there’s any plausible near- or even medium-term competitor to the United States.” (63:39, Alan)
• Book Recommendation: Bucking the Buck by Daniel McDowell for an empirical deep-dive into this issue.

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Alan (on US preparedness for pandemics, 41:21): "The ROI on preparedness for pandemics is ... probably higher than almost anything else we could do."
• Scott (about Taiwan, 48:58): "Even in a situation where the United States succeeds at defending Taiwan, it’s absolutely catastrophic for everyone involved."
• Quinta (on political violence, 47:32): "We’re in a moment of real distrust of institutions among Americans ... [Violence as a solution]—that’s bad."
• Scott (on uncertainty under Trump, 55:14): "There’s just no way to know ... sometimes crises were created, sometimes there were crises that would have happened anyway but were handled in bizarre and erratic ways."
• Alan (on tariffs, 56:04): "With tariffs, it’s still completely unclear to me what we’re trying to accomplish ... None of it follows. So it’s just gonna suck so hard."

---

Object Lessons & Listener Recommendations

(66:06 – 75:00)

Listeners shared recommended books, podcasts, and games relevant to national security. Highlights include:

• Bury Me My Love (game, Middle East/refugee experience)
• We the Revolution (game, legal and historical complexity)
• Not For Broadcast (game, censorship and media)
• Popular Front podcast (underreported conflicts)
• It Did Happen Here podcast (anti-racist skinhead movement in 1980s Portland)
• The Queen of Cuba by Peter Lapp (spy story of Ana Montes)
• President’s Book of Secrets by David Priess (history of the President’s Daily Brief)
• FBI: True (docuseries)
• How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr (US history overseas)
• Ashley’s War by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon (female US soldiers in Afghanistan)

---

Final Thoughts

The hosts close by reflecting on the generally dark tone of both questions and answers, but look ahead to bringing more analysis—and hopefully optimism—into 2025. Listeners are encouraged to keep sending questions and recommendations, subscribe, and support Lawfare for more programming in the new year.

---

Podcast timestamps indicated in (MM:SS) format. All advertisements and sponsor segments have been omitted from the summary.

Transcript

[Alan]

Only Boost Mobile.

[Quinta]

Boost Mobile will give you a free year of service.

[Alan]

Free year when you buy a new 5G phone.

[Quinta]

New 5G phone. Enough.

[Alan]

But I'm your hype man.

[Scott]

When you purchase an eligible device, you get $25 off every month for 12.

[Alan]

Months with credits totaling one year of free service. Taxes extra for the device and service plan online only. So, Scott, I know that you hate B roll about the weather in Minnesota, but it's been such a long time since we've gotten together, just the kind of the three of us. And also it let me get eight inches today. And so I'm just looking out on this beautiful winter wonderland I got to bring out. As folks in the lawfare slack know, I. I got to bring out for. For my youngest. The his new koala onesie is warm onesie. So that's really nice. But yeah, I'm living my best Minnesota life. I feel bad for you guys in D.C. because it's not warm, but it's not snowing. It's.

[Quinta]

Well, yeah, here, here it's been like 38 and rainy, which is the worst option.

[Alan]

That is the worst.

[Scott]

Which is DC winter. Sadly, it is such a tease for my poor little son who is like now old enough to understand what snow is and get so excited. And it did like have flurries maybe two weeks ago, three weeks ago, like I think close to Thanksgiving. It flurried for like a half minute and he ran to the door so excited, looked like at the window for a minute and then just like looked increasingly sad as he realized nothing was accumulating. And it suddenly turned to rain and I was like, I'm so sorry, buddy.

[Alan]

Has Rhys ever gotten to like throw a snowball? I mean, that's like a real problem if you live in the mid Atlantic region.

[Scott]

It's kind of a bummer. Last January we actually got like a big snow in January and so we went out and built a tiny little toddler sized snowman and we thought about sledding and then he got too scared and then I was like, I don't have a sled. I pulled out a cookie sheet and I was like, this is a terrible idea for a three year old. I'm not gonna do this.

[Alan]

Scott, you're the sled.

[Scott]

We didn't do it.

[Alan]

Just put him on your lap and you hurl yourself down somewhere in Rock Creek park and that's sledding.

[Scott]

That was my general plan, but I did actually get him a sled this year. And it's like a big slide that an adult can ride on as well as a kid. So I can, like, ride with him for couple years. But I worry I'm just gonna be like a horrible tease and that we're just never gonna use it because it needs to snow a lot to sled. Particularly for me because I'm a large person.

[Alan]

Will they let you bring the sled onto the airplane when you travel to, like, Vail like, you, like, bring the sledge?

[Scott]

That's the real question.

[Alan]

Yeah, I need to, I promise. Because they have those long, skinny ski bags.

[Scott]

I need a long, flat sled bag. That's what seems unfair that those don't exist. I don't think I can jam that thing through the conveyor belt effectively. I feel like I'm gonna cause an incident.

[Alan]

I gotta say, sledge bag would be a really good insult for someone such a.

[Scott]

It sounds.

[Quinta]

Is there like a company that makes bags of. To put sleds in? I feel like that has to exist someone. I feel like there's one boutique embroidered.

[Scott]

And then 10,000 other companies on Amazon with the name, like one letter that makes $30 versions of it. Yeah.

[Alan]

We would happily be sponsored by big sled bag.

[Scott]

There you go. Big sled bag. Exactly. I will say the weather report still. The thing that made it all worthwhile for the occasional weather reports is when you shared with us when your gas tank froze. Because that was such an insane concept to me that I think about monthly at least since is the idea that gasoline can freeze. That's wild. That doesn't make any sense to me. It's flammable, but it can freeze.

[Alan]

Yeah, I know.

[Scott]

It ruins the whole gamut. It's the whole spectrum.

[Alan]

People are flammable. They can freeze. I'm just saying those are.

[Scott]

I guess that's right. Well, let's put that one to the test.

[Alan]

That got dark. That got weird.

[Scott]

Yeah.

[Quinta]

We now present Fargo by the Coen brothers.

[Scott]

There we go.

[Quinta]

Foreign.

[Scott]

And welcome back to Rational Security, the weekly podcast where you invite you to sit down with members of the Lawfare team to puzzle out what is happening in the national security news this week. But this episode, of course, we are not dealing with this week. We are dealing with the end of the year. Because this is our annual celebratory end of the year episode where we talk about topics and share object lessons shared by you, the listeners with us by phone and by email. And to discuss all of this week, I am thrilled to be joined by. Well, well, well, look who came crawling back. None other than co host emeritus Alan Rosenstein and Quinta, Jurassic was begged to.

[Alan]

Come back by Scott.

[Scott]

But I also begged that you crawl. So I'm not wrong.

[Alan]

That's true.

[Quinta]

That's true.

[Scott]

So it's only fair. Al and Quinta, thrilled to have you guys back. Welcome.

[Quinta]

Thanks for rolling out the red carpet.

[Alan]

Good to be back.

[Scott]

Of course. That's what I'm here for. I feel like have you guys. It feels good to be back in the cans, kind of. You guys are probably in the cans a lot, but. But I haven't seen you guys with like both over ear headphones in a while. This is a screen image of such a part of my life that I miss now.

[Quinta]

But it's great because we're both wearing the big headphones.

[Scott]

Yeah, mine actually. Oh, I got mine too. Let me mine out too. We can really look like a bunch of DJs from the 80s.

[Quinta]

Yeah, I know. I realized this. I think I've had these since the beginning of the last Trump administration and they're starting to fall apart, so. It takes so many things to presidential administrations for me to need to get a new pair of headphones.

[Scott]

It turns out, oddly. That's good quality. I actually just had.

[Alan]

Is it because of the amount of screaming you do and that? Like, is that.

[Quinta]

Yeah, no, exactly. Exactly. No, it's not anger ripping them off.

[Scott]

And throwing them on the ground.

[Quinta]

Yeah, it's like flaking on the inside cushion part so it looks like I have like blue coming off my face. Like I'm a dying Smurf or something.

[Scott]

Or you are a Smurf and the makeup slowly rubbing off to reveal your Smurf. Well, in spite of that, we will try and keep this at least a timeframe for which your headphones will survive for the foreseeable future. As we talk through the good number of object lessons and topics submitted by you guys solicitor. Thank you so much to everyone who wrote in, everyone who shared. I think we actually are going to be able to get to all of them if we don't apologies in advance. But we will try to circle back with you by email or maybe pass along a couple suggestions to our other end of the year Lawfare Ask Us Anything podcast like we've done in the past if we're not able to get to them. But I think we have enough time to be able to get to all of them this year. Alan, I think you are up to present our first question. What do we have?

[Alan]

So Keenan asks, and I'm going to give this one to you, Scott. Given recent events in Syria, how could or Should America balance its competing alliances and commitments to Turkey, Kurdistan, Israel? Maybe there are others. I get that part of the world very confused. Could the US Play a role in creating a secular, democratic Syria without damaging those alliances?

[Scott]

Well, that's. That's a very tall order.

[Alan]

When I read the question solve Syria for Keenan, I think that's what. I think that's what Kenan is actually asking.

[Scott]

We have almost five minutes of topic, so we can definitely take care of that here. On those particular concepts of a plan.

[Alan]

To bring peace to Syria.

[Scott]

I have concepts of a plan. It involves dividing the country into 10 different parts, as it always does with the Middle East. No, I mean, so actually, that actually does relate very directly to Syria. Like, in some ways, the United States and many other countries with an interest in Syria kind of have to come together with some sort of a Syria plan, like Syria as a unified country to address those competing interests. Because I think just about any sort of fracturing of Syria, which is the de facto arrangement now, but to accept that as the permanent norm, that's going to raise the biggest alarm bells among Turkey. With Turkey, with the Kurds in Iraq and elsewhere with Israel, probably with Lebanon too, at that point, although Lebanon doesn't have as much say in the region or with US Policy. Certainly they're all going to be looking for some sort of national framework that can continue to contain the parts of the country they're worried are going to break out to attack them or break off to join with parts of their country or otherwise cause political problems. And they want it all focused on some sort of national framework that maintains that sort of status quo. It is the kind of path dependency of the border arrangements. Even though I think it's a totally reasonable critique that these were pretty artificial borders that really didn't track, particularly in the context of the Kurds, like the actual delineations of where communities lived 100 years ago when they were drawn.

[Alan]

Is Syria one of these? I don't know my British Empire history too much. Is Syria one of these? They took a ruler and plopped it down and it just. The lines are suspiciously straight.

[Scott]

Syria, even by the crazy standards, Middle east and countries, Syria is incredibly diverse, politically diverse, culturally, religiously, was as much so, if not even more so, 100 years ago. And there was not really much of an effort to make the lines draw in a way that really encompassed those communities in a way that was organic to the way people lived there before.

[Alan]

I have currently pulled this up on Google Maps and I can confirm there is an extremely long Straight border in particular at the south of Syria, which.

[Scott]

Is a Telcos just lined up everybody to do it.

[Alan]

This was perfect. Yeah, it's total desert. There's nothing there except a line of Kurds that have been there forever. That's why they drew the line there.

[Scott]

And that's when you go there today, you can't always tell the lines there either. It's still that complicated. But the tall order here is like the idea that this is gonna be a secular democr Syria, that's implied in the question, that's probably not clearly in the offing, and it's probably not going to be on the agenda in the way that it was such a central part of this idea of American interventionism 20 years ago. HTS is a group that most international community seems to come around on, even though they are an Al Qaeda offshoot at the moment. They have a lot of popular legitimacy. It seems they control big parts of western Syria, the SDF controls big parts of eastern Syria, and there are a couple other pockets controlled by other entities, including Israel. But they seem to be playing nice internally, externally, want to be kind of consensus builder, but it's not clear they're going to be particularly democratic and they're certainly not going to be secular. They're a group committed to developing an Islamic state. I think the real realistic outcome that a lot of states really start pushing for there is that you're going to see some sort of confederational or consociational framework where you have a heavy degree of local autonomy that can bring in Kurdish communities from the east, lots of different communities, religious communities, all operating a sort of rough national framework, maybe with certain popularly elected or locally appointed leadership and something along those lines, but probably not the sort of liberal secular democracy that we have, thankfully for the time being at least, and that exists in other parts of the world, but is relatively rare in the Middle East. I think the idea, and I think that's probably right historically, is those are miraculous arrangements where they arise, but they have to arise organically and they rest upon the slow development of a lot of political habits and political mobilization. It's not just a matter of setting up the right institutions. It's a matter of setting up the right traditions and the right incentives and having an authentic political community begin to mobilize and call for those principles. And you can set up the conditions for that by trying to set up exterior conditions about requiring human rights be respected, ensuring that you have opportunities for communities to exercise self governance, things like that, and ensuring that you don't have horrible repression and hopefully those are red lines that people will really start enforcing. But there's a big gap between that and, and the secular democratic Syria. And I don't think, particularly on the secular front, I don't think that's really in the offing right now. We'll see. I could be wrong, but I think people are setting their sights a lot lower than that.

[Quinta]

Scott, I have just one question for you, please. Should the US Be arming the moderate rebels?

[Scott]

I think finally, it is time to arm the moderate rebels. Hey, look, if you find one, you armed that guy.

[Quinta]

That joke killed in 2014.

[Alan]

I don't get it. This just went over my head. Someone explain this joke to me.

[Quinta]

So when the Syrian civil war, when the Syrian civil war started, there were all of these different rebel factions and all of these questions about how the United States, how the Obama administration should be engaging. And there was this idea that the US should arm the moderate rebels, which of course might sound good, but depends on what is moderate. How do you make sure that the moderate rebels don't give the guns to the less moderate rebels and so on and so forth.

[Alan]

So it just like Thomas Friedman op ed or something? Is that what we're all laughing about?

[Quinta]

No, it was like a real politics discussion.

[Scott]

There was a whole law passed over it to try to do it, and it was. It didn't go great. Here's the thing about rebels, right, and revolutionaries. If you're the type of person who's going to take up a gun to shoot other people about it, you're inherently not moderate. That's not a moderate thing to do.

[Quinta]

You're right. That's kind of the inherent joke of the arming the moderate rebels.

[Trevor]

Got it.

[Quinta]

I will just say I would definitely recommend for anyone who's looking to learn more about this piece in the Atlantic, written by a friend of mine, Arash Azizi, about sort of the different opponent groups to Assad and how HTS is kind of positioning itself and what might come out of this. It was very, very helpful to me in organizing my thinking.

[Scott]

It's a phenomenally complicated situation. I haven't looked at that exact piece, but I like his work and I'm sure it's good. And I'm actually going to look at it afterwards and we're going to do a lot more work on Lawfare in the weeks to come. I'm already getting lots of questions. We just released a piece on sanctions Alex Erdt and I released. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. For the crazy legal issues, not to mention policy issues that are going to revolve around this. So there's all stuff I thought about a lot 10 years ago and I'm dusting it off and bringing it back out. So looking forward to sharing it more with the attorney.

[Alan]

Internal return that is Middle East.

[Scott]

Yeah, exactly. Never totally out of business, just out of fashion. With that, Alan, let me turn the tables back on you with a question that has been percolating. David wrote in with an interesting question about the TikTok case, something you have been following very closely, asking how the ban will actually be enforced. I'm actually going to read this a little bit because he puts forward a lot of data which I think is essential to his question, how he's puzzling with this. The TikTok app is already installed on the phones of 120 million Americans. Presumably the government will try to remove it from their phones. Can they instead force the app and Google to remove the TikTok app from their app stores? Does the law ban app distribution or just access to TikTok? You can access TikTok as well in your browser, on your phone or your laptop. Will the government force ISPs like AT&T and Comcast to block TikTok.com? is that even legal? Even then, you can easily get around blocks by using a VPN to appear like you're in Canada or Mexico or some other jurisdiction that does allow for TikTok. If the United States doesn't. There are also mirror sites that echo blocked websites. You can still access them if you really want to. So in short, how is the government actually going to enforce an absolute ban if that's what it's really trying to do?

[Alan]

Yeah, that's a great question. So the short answer is it's not an absolute ban. And so that's not what the law is and that's not what the government is trying to do. The law does not criminalize TikTok in some sort of. It's not like a sanctions on TikTok. It does not criminalize trying to access TikTok. It does not put any obligations on Internet service providers. It applies narrowly to two groups of people, app stores. And here, this is basically Apple and Google. That's kind of the duopoly of app stores and then cloud service providers that would actually host TikTok on their servers. And the specific one that TikTok uses for its US operations is Oracle. So it punishes them for doing business with TikTok up to. I think it's $5,000 per user and there are 170 million American users. So you can do the math. That's, that's a lot of money. So the question is like, what happens on January 19th? Let's assume that the Supreme Court upholds the law, as I think most people, whether you're for or against it, I think at this point most people suspect the Supreme Court will uphold the law. So that happens on January 19th. So presumably Apple and Google take the app off of the app stores so you can no longer download the TikTok app, nor can you update your TikTok app if you have it. Now, David is absolutely right. The 120 million million people, if that's the number that have the app, will still have the app, but at the very least they won't be able to get updates to it. In addition, Oracle will presumably shut off or stop hosting TikTok in the United States. Now, TikTok will understand this. And there are other cloud service providers. There are plenty that are outside the United States. Not the entire Internet infrastructure is in the United states. So presumably TikTok is currently making or entering into sort of negotiations with European or Asian or whatever other cloud service providers to switch the TikTok infrastructure. Now, technically that's a doable thing. Companies routinely have, you know, distributed infrastructure all around the world. I mean, it's not a trivial thing just because TikTok is huge and just the sheer amount of videos and bandwidth. So it's not a trivial thing to do. And I don't expect it would happen without hiccup, but it will happen. Now, on January 19, there's a technical question that I don't know which is when you open up TikTok on your iPhone, your phone has to connect to a TikTok server, right? That or to an Oracle server that has TikTok to download the information you want. Is that information hard coded into the app or is there or does the app reach out to some other server to know what actual server to go to? The reason this is important is because if it's hard coded in, it's going to be very bad for TikTok users because now they're going to reach out to the US Oracle server and nothing is there. If it's not hard coded in or if TikTok pushes an update to everyone the week before the bid the ban goes into effect, like saying, hey, on January 19th, point to this European server, then I think nothing will happen on January 19th from the perspective of the users, you know, the tick TikTok might get slower because you're accessing it now abroad, but you're still going to use it. So then the question is, okay, well, so what are we doing here then, right? What is the point of all of this? And I think the point is, is this over time the TikTok user experience will degrade because you're going to always have to go outside the United states to access TikTok, which means that the whole thing will be slower and kind of clunkier. And also the app will not upgrade. And so as TikTok pushes out new features, as TikTok fixes, bug fixes, those will not flow down through to Americans. Now, if TikTok was the only game in town for this sort of short form video content, that might not matter, but you have several excellent competitors. YouTube shorts, Instagram Reels. They are very good. Right? If you're into this sort of stuff. I find all of this is kind of ridiculous, but if you're like into.

[Scott]

Quinta and I have fallen asleep, in case you're wondering.

[Alan]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Quinta]

Well, I would say I find the first. I find the First Amendment issues interesting.

[Alan]

Don't worry everyone. The next question is about standards. So get really excited.

[Scott]

Ooh.

[Alan]

Oh, so, so, so, you know, in a world where the, you know, the kind of number two and number three are almost as good, like they have a lot of stuff on it. The algorithms are like basic algorithms are pretty commoditized at this point. I think the government is hoping that over time people will start moving from TikTok to these other platforms and because of network effects, which is to say a platform is popular, the more people use the platform. It's also the thing happens in reverse. So at some point there's an inflection point where everyone just jumps off of TikTok kind of in the same way that we saw or are seeing people jump off of X and to blue sky. So at the end of the day, TikTok is always going to stay. I mean, at the very least, you'll always be able to access it through your web browser. Right? But I think the hope is that it'll go from being the dominant short term video platform to a much less dominant short form video platform, and that therefore it will be a meaningfully less. If you believe the data privacy and content manipulation concerns, which I do, but you don't have to. But if you do believe that, then TikTok becomes just a much less important player. Now that's. That raises an interesting legal question about underbreath. Which is a doctrine in First Amendment law where sometimes the courts will strike something down on First Amendment grounds because it does too little to justify the First Amendment cost. Interestingly, I don't think that came up in the argument or in the D.C. circuit opinion, but it is like a. Maybe it did, I have to reread it. But it is a fair point to think through. But, but anyway, this is how the TikTok law is meant to operate over several months. And what it also means is that if, you know, Trump or Congress or someone can come in and, and help TikTok, you know, in the first half of 2025, TikTok will probably survive because TikTok can probably survive kind of degraded user experience for several months before everyone just says, screw this, I'm going to go take my business or take my eyeballs and my attention to Instagram.

[Scott]

And Alan, there's like just to take it up to a 10,000 foot level. There's also a objectives element of this, right? Because to accomplish the national security objectives, that's motivating Congress and the Biden administration. This ban, you don't need to absolutely ban TikTok, right? The risk comes from the broad and systematic use of it, both from terms of collecting US User data and being a vehicle for manipulating political speech. So if a couple of, a bunch of really committed users, a couple thousand tens of thousand of them still have access, it's illegal, it's not ideal. They still maybe find a way to crack down on it. But ultimately that doesn't mean the policy objectives of the law aren't met because that's just a small kind of self motivated subset of what and doesn't have the same systemic risk.

[Alan]

Yeah, that's, that's true. But the problem is there's a, there's a trade off here, right? In order to not be too heavy handed and raise real First Amendment concerns like, you know, Congress could have passed a law criminalizing accessing TikTok. Like that would have really done it. But that probably wouldn't, that would not have survived First Amendment scrutiny even under the national security context. So instead Congress says, okay, we're going to do this in the least obtrusive way possible, right? And if you really want to go and watch communist Chinese propaganda on TikTok, like you can still do it because you can just go to TikTok.com and which is now located in wherever it's located. But the problem is that means that even after this law is in effect, it's not going to be a thousand or ten thousand or one hundred thousand hardcore TikTok users. Like, it'll still be like potentially tens of millions of Americans. And that's the trade off. Right. So, and the question is, is, you know, if, if the residual is 10 million American users using TikTok, has the law done its job? I still think it has, but, but it's a fair, it's a fair criticism of the law. And this is just a kind of a, an inescapable trade off of the government was faced with.

[Scott]

That's really interesting.

[Alan]

All right, so the next question is from Thomas, and Thomas asks what is one national security story from this year that deserved more attention? And he gives some examples. For example, the civil war in Myanmar, Burma, which I was not aware of, Ecuador's crackdown on gang violence, Ethiopia's disruptive activities in East Africa. These are all things I don't know about because I am a. What's the word I'm looking for? A. An American. What is the word? Parochial. I'm a terribly parochial American who just studies short form video platforms, apparently. But Quinta.

[Scott]

In some depth, however.

[Alan]

Yeah, yeah. When I do. Yeah. Not in short, ironically, I study short form video platforms, not in short form. So, Quinta, you can choose those examples. You can pick your own example. What do you got?

[Quinta]

Well, I will say the civil war in Burma, Myanmar, whatever you want to call it, is something I have not been paying close attention to. But the last I checked, the rebels were winning. So that's fascinating. And maybe we should pay more attention to it. I will say I'm going to be boring and put as my nominee climate change, which we have not talked about enough. But there has been a huge amount of activity in this space, both in terms of designing policy to combat it and adapt to it and limit it, and also in terms of electing leaders who are affirmatively not interested in that. So of course, I'm referring here to the sort of ongoing rollout of the Inflation Reduction act by the Biden administration and sort of the way that that piece of industrial policy, I think is arguably really the first piece of sort of systematic climate policy rolled out by the United States that I think we're really starting to see that take effect in terms of all of the incentives that it gives for companies to start developing products with clean energy electric vehicles. Obviously, if you look at the last few years have really been on the uptick in a pretty astonishing way. There's some amazing statistics about solar panels getting exponentially cheaper to produce. And so I think that we're sort of in this weird place in climate where on the one hand, if you roll back the clock to 2015 or so and I teleported or travele in time from then to now, on the one hand, things look worse in the sense that things are warmer, there are more superstorms, there are more kinds of devastating effects of climate all around the globe. On the other hand, I think it seems like we actually seem to have the technology and also importantly, the sort of economic drivers to actually force a transition to clean energy in a way that will actually be effective in terms of combating and adapting to climate change. So all in all, I think that there's really been a massive, massive explosion in the technology that we need to combat and adapt to climate change. And also the sort of movement of market forces driven by industrial policy that is sort of finally moving in the right direction. And that I think actually makes me feel a lot more optimistic than I was five, 10 years ago. The flip side is, of course, that I would be feeling a lot more optimistic about this if the kind of incoming crop of leaders around the world were committed to actually treating climate as a serious issue and one that merits serious attention. I think it is kind of a puzzle what the Trump administration will do. There were noises made about rolling back the Inflation Reduction Act. I am hopeful that that will actually be quite difficult to do because of the way that the IRA is designed to kind of pump money into the economy, building factories, you know, manufacturing plants in red areas. So that Republicans who might be ideologically opposed in theory to the idea of government action to address climate change, might be more kindly disposed toward legislation that's really helping the economy of their district. And so it might be harder to roll back. Of course, there is the Elon Musk factor in that. He runs an electric car company. But Trump has made a lot of noise about producing more fossil fuels, this, that and the other. There's also, I think, in Europe an indication that sort of an incoming right leaning crop of leaders in this sort of global toppling of incumbents this year might be less interested in pursuing European climate policy than the previous cohort was. And so all of that makes me a lot more nervous than I was before. But I do think that it's tempting to say something is a national security story just to get people to pay attention to it. Often climate really is a national security story in so many ways that I don't have time to go into here. And I think the Pentagon certainly treats it as such. And so the Changes that we've seen over the last year in terms of both the positive and the negative are going to be extremely important to watch over the next year to see what direction it looks like we're headed.

[Alan]

The thing I was going to ask you, Quinta, was the thing you said at the very end, which is I was curious in what ways you see climate change as a national security story beyond the sort of generic, you know, you can attach security to the end of anything. Because, like, I mean, for me, I see it largely. I mean, for me, the most obvious tie is migration, which is like, there are a few things more destabilizing. And this is a descriptive point. Like, I'm not trying to get into the arguments over climate aside.

[Quinta]

No, it's just like, as a descriptive.

[Alan]

Point, and it's unbelievably disruptive to have, you know, 10 million, let alone 100 million, let alone 500 million people, you know, wandering around the world trying to escape droughts and hurricanes and stuff like that.

[Quinta]

Well, and. And the economic devastation that follows from climate. Right. So a lot of the. My understanding is that some portion of migration from Central America is, you know, from Guatemala, for example, is caused by the fact that climate change has really been a problem for the coffee crop there, which causes problems for the economy, people's ability to make a living, and so on and so forth. And so people pick up sticks and try to move. So I think climate migration is absolutely. That touches on many, many security issues. I mean, I think that the questions of competition over resources and what new resources might be unlocked. So competition in the Arctic, for example, as the Arctic starts to melt, unfortunately, there's been a lot of discussion about what that looks like, particularly with regards to Russia. And then in terms of, you know, just the literal security of the country. If you have, you know, catastrophic storms like Superstorm Sandy or the hurricane that really decimated western North Carolina, like, that is going to be a problem for the country that the country needs to think about addressing in terms of disaster response. And so, you know, the Pentagon has said repeatedly that it does. It thinks of climate as a security issue. And I think that, you know, it's. This one is not a stretch, essentially.

[Scott]

And just because something is a national security threat doesn't mean it can also be a threat to other things as well. They're not exclusive categories necessarily.

[Quinta]

It can be bad in multiple ways.

[Scott]

Exactly. It can suck all across the board.

[Alan]

Over the last decade, Lawfare's tagline hard national security choices just is like metastasizing it just gets, like, bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.

[Scott]

Hey, man. Hey, man. We got lots to write about. It's cool.

[Alan]

We just love people to write. We just follow. We just follow the misery wherever it leads.

[Scott]

There you go. There you go.

[Quinta]

Next, we have a question from Sean, who has a question about the recent 5th Circuit ruling about tornado cash. And he says, when following the logic laid out in the opinion, shouldn't the conclusion be to extend the sanctions to the entire Ethereum network? I'm going to be completely honest. I have not followed this closely enough to fully know what it means. So, Scott, I know that you have. Can you first off, explain what Sean is referring to here? Sean, thank you for the excellent question. And second off, answer it.

[Scott]

That is such a smooth and flawless handoff. How are your segues so terrible when you're a ghost? And yet here do this so effortlessly.

[Alan]

From one bad thing to another bad thing. I'm Quinta Jurassic.

[Scott]

No. It's incredibly complex and I have only wrestled my brain around this. I have a lot of crypto nerd friends, so I have, like, you're always.

[Alan]

Whining, Scott, about how much tech we do and how boring you find it, and then, like, you're like, riding in on this, like, blaze of crypto glory right now.

[Scott]

Don't get Ben and I started talking about AV equipment either. It's honestly like, you're in high school in the 80s and the cool kids are back in the AV closet. Regardless, I have my pockets of nerd dom and this is kind of one of them. I won't claim to be a full crypto expert because parts of it still beguile me, but the essence of this mechanism that was sanctioned is it's a mixer. So basically it's this automated algorithm that exists in kind of the Ethereum system on the blockchain that can't be changed. Everyone's agreed to lock it down and commit to it, and it can't be changed. Although I think the questioner introduces a good caveat about this. And because of that, the fifth Circuit, in what I think is a flawed opinion, concluded, hey, you can't sanction this thing because you can only sanction people and property. And it's not a person, obviously, because it's not a natural thing or a corporate entity which are considered persons for purposes of the law in most cases. And it's not property because nobody owns it. Everybody just signed away their ownership rights to embed it in the blockchain this way. I think what Sean says is Right. Like Ethereum, that kind of leads to suggestion that, well, if it's about who can mute this thing, you can change the whole rules of the system it's embedded in. Right. You wouldn't say, because you locked something in a lockbox and threw away the key in a bank and nobody has that key. That's no longer property. Right. Because you could just say the bank could eventually claim ownership over it because it has its own entity and exercises physical control. There are elements of the Ethereum network that might not be easy to break down. And as the questioner noted in the question has already come up when the current Ethereum model broke off from Ethereum Classic, the kind of original network and its blockchain as part of an effort to recover stolen funds less than a decade ago, I think in late 2017. It says here in the question, I'm not sure, not fully understanding, being confident in my understanding of the full technicalities of it. I think there's lots of ways you could break down that very critical distinction they draw between property and persons. I think the question is quite right. I think it's a very savvy take on this from a crypto perspective. What I will say, though, from the perspective that courts, I think, are a little more comfortable with, which is from the statutory side and I talked about this, I think in national security, either this past week or the week before. The opinion also just misreads iipa, the International Emergency Economic Powers act, which is the law at issue here, because it misreads it as saying you can only regulate or sanction persons or property. That's straight up, not what IIPA says. IIPA says you can regulate transactions in persons or proper property. And that's very different because we implement sanctions through designations because that's the easiest way to bar certain types of transactions. The government then all the time says, we're going to sanction entity Y. But, oh, by the way, here's XYZ licenses on it to allow different types of transactions. Right. Because they can permit transactions. They don't have to regulate everything as a binary for a designated entity. They just say, we're going to designate this person and bar people from transacting with them. That's what an asset freeze is. You're not actually doing anything to that person. They're not facing any criminal or civil penalties. You're saying, no transactions can be pursued with them, and if anybody transacts with them, that's what we penalize. Well, if that's the case, then I think tornado cash becomes A much clearly sanctionable entity because it is a process by which you engage in transactions. It's a mixer. It's a way people put in contractual arrangements in cash and pull out cash, and it mixes all the assets together to conceal where they're coming from as a privacy measure. And that's why it got sanctions, because people were worried that among other North Korean attackers who had stolen hundreds of billions of dollars from different countries around the world was using it to help launder the money. But there's clearly foreign interest transactions happening through tornado cash. And so I think you can sanction it. If the United States government wanted to sanction throwing gold bars to each other through the air, I think they could do that too, because that's a means of a transaction.

[Alan]

Menendez style.

[Scott]

Menendez style, yeah. Dropping your gold bars, a suit jacket.

[Alan]

They call that the full Menendez is when you sort of. You could just throw bars back.

[Scott]

Yeah, there you go. But I mean, like, that's very. Assuming the other jurisdictional requirements, like, you know, foreign interest, et cetera, are met. Like, that's totally sanctionable too, because it's a type of transaction. It's a stupid one because you're going to get hit in the head and it's going to hurt. But, like, you know, it's the way you do it.

[Alan]

I've done dumber.

[Scott]

I know this opinion is like a very fun read. Like, clearly the judge or judges, like, had a good time writing it. It has a lot of very colorful diagrams. It goes deep, deep in the weeds on how the mixer works in a way that I think strikes me as mostly right, 95%. Although it doesn't capture this point that the questioner that Sean raised, which I think is a very good one and would have complicated its analysis if they.

[Alan]

Thought of it, some law clerk had like, a really good time.

[Scott]

Yeah, exactly. But it's a problematic opinion. I don't think it's going to withstand. I'd be surprised. It might withstand en banc. I don't know if the fifth Circuit's unpredictable. I'd be surprised if it hangs around for good.

[Alan]

Do you think it's going to go up? I mean, Scott, I'm curious. I mean, is this a big enough disaster for the government that like, between this and just like the underlying like, loper bright Chevron issue, which now every case has this, like, hangover of. It's like they get. They have to take this up.

[Scott]

Yeah. I think if I were it were continue to be by administration, I'd say Yes. The incoming Trump administration has, like, lots of relationships.

[Alan]

What will cryptos are David Sachs say?

[Scott]

Yeah, exactly. I mean, remember, we, like, we have Andreessen, Horowitz and other folk. Mark Andreessen of Andreessenowitz, I should say, like, and other folks, you know, accusing the government of, like, quashing strategically crypto holders and targeting them. And like, they welcomed. A lot of people welcome this decision because they see it as a rollback on regulation on crypto. It is in that sanctions will no longer be applicable to crypto. Has no bearing whatsoever on the other regulations people actually care about. I mean, these are only sanctioning crypto entities that are used in, like, pretty nefarious things. So if this is where you're betting your money, Mark, like, do not.

[Alan]

Are we sure? I don't, I don't want to. I don't want to pull a full Nick Weaver here, but are we sure that's not 100% of crypto at this point?

[Scott]

You know, I'm, I'm been persuaded by my weird nerd friends that there are valid applications of crypto. I find it interesting one of them tried to give me a Bitcoin 20 years ago. I wish I'd said yes now. But it's like, at the same time. That also means it's just an instrument of which there are lots of nefarious uses that are totally appropriate for regulation. And these are the ones we use to target the most nefarious ones as a matter of policy. Maybe it's bad policy, but track that through policy routes, you don't knock down the whole tool to do it. So I think this has to be revised at some point. I think they will do it on either national security deference or on the statutory rereading. Whether it happens at the Fifth Circuit en banc or at the Supreme Court, I don't know. I'd be very shocked if. If other circuits follow this reading. So maybe they let the fifth Circuit stand, they wait for a circuit split, and then they resolve it. Or just. No other circuit follows the Fifth Circuit's guidance on this. And the Fifth Circuit, I think, is one. I don't know exactly how the crypto architecture works jurisdictionally, but maybe the fifth Circuit can have this opinion and that's fine, and they don't have to worry about it because they can pursue it in other jurisdictions that are more consequential. But. Let's see. But I don't think this opinion can stand, at least willingly, by the treasury and Justice Department, unless they're just overruled by the Trump administration for broader policy reasons. Hey folks, Scott R. Andersen here. Things are finally beginning to cool down here in Washington, dc. There's a nip in the air. The days are getting shorter. Football is back on tv. All the signs are here. Autumn is coming. While the kids are sad to be back in school, it's a favorite season for those of us who are bearded, burly and sartorially inclined to as it's finally a chance to bring back the flannels, sweaters, denim and tweed we had to put away for the summer. But if you need a little help getting your closet ready for the season, don't sweat it. Quince has you covered. From new denim jeans to leather jackets to woolen sweaters, Quince has everything you need for cooler days ahead. And all of it is comfortable, classic and high quality. The types of items that will stay in rotation for years to come. The Mongolian cashmere sweaters, which go for an incredibly reasonable 60 bucks, are what got me into Quint's in the first place, and a few are going to be back at my regular rotation this fall. I also picked up an Italian wool overshirt that's set to be my main light layer when things get nippy, and an organic cotton long sleeve polo that's already begun to make its way back into my regular outfits. Plus, Quince is now offering more than just clothes. From houseware to luggage to rugs, Quince has tons of the everyday items you need. Personally, I'm thinking some flannel sheets may be just the thing to get before the temperatures really drop. And the best part is that by cutting out the middlemen, Quint offers all these high quality products at half of what they would cost you at other stores. Plus, Quint only works with factories that use safe, ethical and responsible manufacturing practices. So keep it classic and cool this fall with long lasting staples from quince. Go to quince.comsecurity for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q U I N C E dot com security to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Again, that's quint.com security. Now let's get back to the show.

[Alan]

Only Boost Mobile Boost Mobile will give you a free year of service. Free year when you buy a new 5G phone.

[Scott]

New 5G phone?

[Quinta]

Enough.

[Alan]

But I'm your hype man.

[Scott]

When you purchase an eligible device, you get $25 off every month for 12 months with credits totaling one year of.

[Alan]

Free service, taxes extra for the device and service plan Online only.

[Scott]

Hey, folks, it's Marc Maron from wtf. Today. I want to talk to you about Boost Mobile offering reliable nationwide coverage backed by a 30 day money back guarantee. Love your service or get your money back, no questions asked. Boost Mobile offers the coverage, network speed and service you're used to, but at more affordable prices. Why pay more if you don't have to? You can get an unlimited plan for $25 a month that will never increase in price, ever. No price hikes, no multiline requirements, no stress. Visit your nearest Boost Mobile store or find them online@boost mobile.com After 30 gigabytes, customers experience slower speeds. Customers will pay $25 per month as long as they remain active on the Boost Unlimited plan. All right, next up, Alan for you, although I think we can all take a crack at this one as well. But we'll turn it over to you in the first instance, what are the most underrated threats to the United States in the latter half of the decade?

[Alan]

So I think there's a, to me, there's a clear winner here, and that is pandemics, which you would think, given Covid would not be underrated because we'd be talking about it all the time, except that we're not talking about it nearly enough. And both parties are actually both ideological camps in this country are not super well positioned. So the big problem, of course, is that you have the Republican Party and Donald Trump who have a I'm not even sure I can characterize what exactly their relationship is to pandemic preparedness and response, except that they seem to be very upset about this one good thing that came out of the Trump administration, which of course was Operation Warp Speed and the development of the truly miraculous COVID vaccine. But of course, Trump had to essentially disavow that because the Republicans and his base turned so much against vaccines. You now have have RFK Jr. As incoming HHS secretary, and don't even get me started on what that means. Right. And you have just a general turning against a lot of public health measures, a lot of skepticism towards public health. I mean, it's just America is going to be extremely poorly positioned if bird flu comes up. On the other hand, you have Democrats who I think have a much, much better approach. It is fundamentally grounded in science and trying to do something. But who themselves, I think, feel like they're kind of vulnerable on this issue. I mean, you know, I think at the end of the day, we handled Covid okay. Right. But we could have handled it better. And the public health Establishment made some real missteps. Right. And squandered a lot of trust. And that's a problem and something that I think, frankly, they still have not fully come to terms with. And so I think Democrats also don't view this as like, a big winner for them either. So you have a situation in which no one is incentivized to do the sort of preparedness that would be necessary. And this is a situation in which, you know, the ROI on preparedness for pandemics is like, it's not quite infinite, but, I mean, it's probably higher than, like, almost anything else we could do. It's so cheap at the end of the day to prepare for pandemics relative to what you. The benefits of that and the fact that we're not doing it, we're not talking about, really freaks me out because, you know, there's nothing special about COVID And we got. And the other thing is, we got so lucky with COVID right? I mean, Covid was. It was terrible. It was horrible. It killed God knows how many people.

[Scott]

Right.

[Alan]

It was a tragedy. But it was, as far as mass pandemics go, about as gentle, honestly, as it gets. And, you know, if we have something with a 2%, 3%, 5%, 10% mortality rate, that is 70. I mean, it's not quite civilization ending, but that's something that we will be talking about a thousand years from now, and we're just not ready for it, and it freaks me out.

[Scott]

Quinta, what about you? What do you have as the most underrated threat in the latter half of the decade?

[Quinta]

Pandemics is definitely a strong entry and one that I would have nabbed if Alan hadn't gone first. In the spirit of naming things that seem really obvious but are somehow being under covered by the political establishment, at least I'm going to go with political and vigilante violence. We are, as we are recording this exactly four years. Congratulations, everybody. From the day that Trump sent his tweet, be there on January 6th will be wild. Big moment for America. Congratulations.

[Scott]

Great podcast title. So bummed they got that.

[Alan]

At least we can all say that we learned our lesson.

[Quinta]

Exactly.

[Alan]

We certainly are not going to make the same mistake twice, right?

[Quinta]

Yeah, exactly. No, but so in. In all seriousness, the situation has obviously changed since J6. I am pretty worried that federal law enforcement, for a variety of reasons, many of them political, has really failed to learn the lessons that it needed to learn in terms of the importance of combating domestic violent extremism on the right. And that particularly under a second Trump administration, that this will continue to get worse. I had a conversation with a terrorism expert in the early years of the first Trump administration that I think about a lot where we were talking about, you know, what should the government be doing to address violent extremism, you know, counterviolent extremism program, cbe, something else, this, that. And at a certain point, he kind of said, look like, you know, you can try, but ultimately, if Trump is in charge, there's just a limit to what you can do here when the President is out there, you know, encouraging, giving a thumbs up to vigilante violence. And this was before Charlottesville. And so I think that we need to take that threat more seriously. I also think it's worth taking more seriously because of the kind of increase in adoption of this as a affirmative tactic on the right and as a tactic that is encouraged in some cases quietly, in some cases explicitly by voices in right media and state governments, that there's a real reason to think that this kind of permission structure for engaging in extrajudicial violence is there. It's getting stronger. I was pretty disturbed by the valorizing on Fox News of Daniel Penney, the person who was related in an altercation that resulted in the death of Jordan Neely. So Penney was found not guilty of, I believe, I want to say, manslaughter. But whatever happened, valorizing his action as a kind of noble action of vigilantism, I think is really concerning. If you want to, you can put Luigi Mangione, the United Healthcare shooter, in there as well. Although I think Mangioni is. There's nothing that indicates that he was extreme ideologically other than the fact that he shot someone.

[Scott]

He also read the Unabombers. Like the Unabomber, right?

[Quinta]

No, I just mean that whatever you call it, he doesn't fit neatly in the category that I'm describing of people on the far right. Nor. Nor does Penny, to be clear.

[Alan]

Yeah, no, I agree. But I think with Manjoni, what's interesting is, like, whether or not Manjoni is like a pretty ideological person, like when Elizabeth Warren or AOC are like, I'm against violence, but, oh, that's not good. Like, like, that's a. That's a bad formulation, and it's bad on the right and it's bad on the left as well.

[Quinta]

Right. So I think that overall, I would say, you know, we're in a moment of real distrust of institutions among Americans on the right, but also increasingly, I think, on the left and really across the Board and the extent to which people see, you know, in a country with a lot of guns, the extent to which people see extrajudicial violence as a solution, I will take a strong stand and say that's bad. And I particularly worry about it when it is adopted by one political party as a tactic to be used again and again and again to threaten and harass their perceived enemies. And I just feel like, you know, the. The idea of like, you know, United States Civil War ii, something like that is silly. But what we should be a lot more concerned about is the idea of just sort of low level political violence. Perhaps like the 1970s, right. When it was coming from the. The far left, strings of bombings and so on and so forth. Perhaps like the antebellum United States and bleeding Kansas. Right. Like there are examples in our own history that we can look to here of what this looks like, and they're not good. And in the absence of any real constituency for sort of governance in a way that would address these problems and.

[Alan]

Would.

[Quinta]

Not only prevent violence from happening, but would address the root causes that sort of lead people to be drawn to that violence. I don't see any likelihood of that, and I'm worried it will continue to go in a bad direction for mine.

[Scott]

I'm going to say something that sounds counterintuitive because it sounds like not at all underrated or under acknowledged, but I think it is in a weird way that I'll explain, and that is Taiwan. So Taiwan is this topic that's been a hot flashpoint in US Chinese relations for decades, more than half a century now. In a lot of ways, it's such a perennial issue on the geopolitical landscape that I think we have become really inured to it. The United States policy has remained relatively constant with small variations since the 80s. To some extent, at least as a public statement, the last few years we've seen this ratcheting up, which I'll get to in a minute, but that may not be less problematic. But the basic principle is one of kind of deliberate ambiguity, strategic ambiguity, it's called, where we don't say whether we're going to come to Taiwan's defense or not, but we suggest strongly that we might, and we reserve the option to. And we build up our regional capacity to do that. And that's always been enough of a deterrent to China. But China is now approaching a point where they could militarily challenge that by most assessments and basically has expressly set a goal of 2027 of being able to militarily retake Taiwan, even over US opposition by 2027. I don't know if they're on track for it or not. And that's really, really scary, the idea that they would even try. There's a really astounding study put together by Mark Cancian and a few other folks at CSIS called the First Battle of they published in 2023 that did, like, a couple dozen war games that were like very detailed operational war games, trying to figure out what would it look like operationally if we actually had a war over Taiwan. And they concluded basically, a, it's actually really hard for China to succeed at this, and maybe that'll be enough of a deterrent. But B, even in a situation where the United States succeeds at defending Taiwan, it's absolutely catastrophic for everyone involved. Levels of US Casualties at a daily pace that rival and surpass that of World War II in the first 30 days of this conflict alone. And that leaves both the China and the United States seriously crippled. And perhaps most problematically, but China on a better trajectory, with a better industrial capacity to actually recover faster. It's a really, really, really scary scenario that I think is not taken seriously enough because we have a lot of autopilot on Taiwan policy, predominantly from Congress, who really, really buys into a strong Taiwan policy without fully understanding its implications, without fully being willing to commit either to coming to Taiwan's defense. They embrace the strategic ambiguity as well as even the most hardcore pro Taiwan congressmen are hesitant to take that step. And that may be right. I'm not sure that is the right step. I don't have a good policy answer, the best way to handle it, except that we're in a trajectory now where we are counting on deterrent capacity and building up our military capacity to serve as a deterrent. But China is also building up theirs. And it is leading to the point where if they decide they have parity or to take the risk and they roll the dice and miscalculate and we feel obligated to respond, it's just an absolutely catastrophic war of a sort that we've never seen before. And no matter whose hand is on the tiller, I would feel nervous about that. In some ways, Donald Trump's kind of instinct away from conflict might be a service in this regard, in that it might lead to more transactional approaches that may encourage de escalation. But I don't know. Certainly that was not the approach they took at the end of the last Trump administration towards China. If anything is dramatically escalatory, I really think what you need in this situation is good diplomacy and engagement and a lowering of heat, an escalation around Taiwan. And that's what we've needed for years. And neither party has delivered it. No administration has delivered it. And it's a huge problem. And I'm very scared that we're going to pay the costs in the next four years, but hopefully I'm wrong. But we'll see. That's the thing that keeps me up more often at night. And I'll say Mark and his group at CSIS that did these phenomenal studies. It's a scary study, but worth reading. Phenomenally interesting. They just updated a new one that incorporated a factor they left out of their original games. That's nuclear weapons. So I haven't read that one yet. I'm sure it will be even more terrifying, but worth checking those both out.

[Alan]

Goody. Nuclear weapons.

[Scott]

Great holiday reading to say the least. With that, Alan, I think you are up with our next question.

[Alan]

Yeah. So our next question, kind of on a similar theme is from Peter and Peter asks also to all of us, what would you each predict would be the first major national security misstep of Trump's second term that we need to laugh at or else it's just painful. So I think let's go, let's go. The reverse order goes Scott Quinta, and then I'll chime in.

[Scott]

So I'm going to lean really hard on this being the first because I think that's a key part of the question here because I'm not sure it's the biggest necessarily. And I'm kind of leaning into things I think would be a misstep that might lean in. And this relates to our prior question because I really think actually the tornado cash decision may be the very first one this administration actually goes in by trying to quell just sort of appeal. The timing works out kind of well. I looked this up. I think in the first Circuit you only have two weeks to apply for enbox. So. So maybe the Treasury Department and Justice Department will apply for en banc review prior to that. If the fifth Circuit doesn't take it up, then you're going to need to make a decision on whether to petition for cert within 90 days. So that'll be assuming they decide to en banc relatively quickly. Actually, they would have already had to file for en banc. So I don't know if they actually did that or not. I should look into that if they have or haven't. Regardless, the timeline for having to petition for cert if the Fifth bank doesn't reverse the the trial court is in the first month of the new administration. And in the meantime, we know President Trump and a lot of his advisors are at Mar a Lago out of government, being talked to a lot by a lot of folks who have very strong feelings about crypto, a lot of whom has said things very friendly towards this opinion which was written by a libertarian leading former Trump appointee from his last time in office on the fifth Circuit, which is kind of a court that has a lot of Trump appointees and has done things that are pretty unorthodox. I think there's a chance that they may be talked into making a position saying they support the fifth Circuit's view on this. And that's something that's going to come back to bite them really hard in the butt because there are problems with crypto. IEAPA is the tool to use it. It's really going to be really hard to get new authorities out of Congress. Really awkward to ask for new authorities out of Congress to target crypto after you come out as a pro crypto position. And it's not good for crypto as an industry again because this is a tool that targets the absolute worst things associated with crypto but doesn't really apply to the other generally benign stuff that most people is what they want crypto for. And so this is not not the Hill to fight over. This is the giveaway to give and compromise for the other things in my view. But because of the timing, I kind of think that might be one of the first one that is both a little laughable because I think the opinion gets it so wrong and going to really, really bite them in the butt as they try and make policy in this space in the next four years.

[Quinta]

I just don't think there's any way to know. It could be anything from something that is a sort of traditional national security crisis. Like something, something goes wrong in Syria, right? Something goes wrong with the ongoing Israeli incursion into Syria from the Golan Heights. And it's handled in some insane way because the administration has not put into place the kind of leadership that you would want to see. The decision making process is weird. Trump's advisor on Middle east issues, Mossad Bolas, who is the father in law of one of his daughters, is not qualified for the role. Anything like that. Or something completely insane because Trump has decided that actually it's really important to cut some program that I've never heard of but is actually crucially important for whatever defense priority and will leave the planet in tatters. I think that there's just no way to know. And we had better get used to sort of remembering what the chaos of four years of Trump was like, where you would wake up and every day there was a new crisis. Because sometimes crises were created, sometimes there were crises that would have happened anyway, but were handled in bizarre and erratic ways. So who knows? We'll see what the spin of the roulette will brings us.

[Alan]

Yeah, so for me, I can't decide whether it's going to be deportations or tariffs. I'm going to pick tariffs, even though I think deportations will be handled even worse because I think that deportations are not going to be a misstep. Exactly. In the sense that Trump doesn't like immigrants and he wants them all out of the country. And the only way to do that is to brutally round them up and expel them out of the country. So I think it's very bad. I am against it, but it's not. I don't think it's gonna be a misstep in the sense of like sheer incompetence, though I'm sure there'll be plenty of that. It'll just be off awful. Whereas tariffs, it's gonna be so. It's gonna be so messed up. Like, it's, it's. At least with, at least with deportations, it's clear what the goal is and how deporting immigrants means you have less. Like, it's very clear. Right. Like, I understand what's going on here with tariffs. It's still completely unclear to me what we're trying to accomplish. Like, are we trying to save domestic industries? But if so, how is that going to work if you end up in a tariff war? Are we trying to increase the American economy? But how does that work? You've never been a tariff war. Like, it doesn't. None of it follows. And so I think tariffs, because they're so incoherent, will actually be a misstep. Right. Like, even if you agree with the policy goals, this does not achieve the policy goals. Like you. I mean, like, the three of us are going to be fine. We're like upper middle class knowledge worker types. Right. Like, you know, for us it's going to suck because, you know, our Amazon purchase is going to get more expensive, whatever. Right. So, like, we can sit here and laugh at it. Although.

[Quinta]

Well, easy. Easy to laugh until you can't get replacement parts for your car.

[Alan]

Yeah, no, exactly. Right. But I'm just I'm just saying, like, it's just gonna. It's just gonna suck so hard is all I'm saying. I feel like it's all gonna suck so hard. Like, if someone could make a T shirt, I will wear that T shirt. It's all I'm gonna say.

[Scott]

We have happier things coming in the hospital. Don't worry, guys.

[Alan]

Pull up, pull up.

[Scott]

But let's turn to our. I think our last question now.

[Quinta]

Our last question is from Connor, who gave us an excellent section title for the question, which I'm going to read. And it is BRIC by BRIC and that's B, R I C in all caps, listeners. BRICs, along with the possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan, keeps me awake at night. It's a growing coalition and at their most recent conference, talks resurface about the future of an alternative reserve currency that would unseat and usurp the US Dollar as the world reserve currency. This would have a detrimental impact on the US And Western economies as well as national security. President elect Trump has recently threatened brics amidst his policy that would certainly bring a second trade war with China. What is the reality of an alternative currency unseating the US Dollar? Is it plausible? And what should the US do to combat this rhetoric or strengthen the dollar? Scott, over to you, because I don't know the answer to this one.

[Scott]

There's a really interesting question. It's come up a lot. If you've been working on economic statecraft stuff for the last few years. This is the background terror, the thing that you worry about every time somebody deploys sanctions or threatens to seize, for example, Russian assets to compensate Ukraine. This possibility is really the big bogeyman hanging over the debates about all those sorts of actions. Because the concern is that we have seen, there's clear empirical evidence of it, a gradual diversification of global reserve currencies away from the euro and the dollar, which are by far the two dominant ones, to other currencies. Now it's mostly to Canadian, Japanese and Australian currencies from the last time I looked. So it's still kind of friendly in the zone and it's relatively small amounts, but there is a growing slice of renminbi of Chinese currency. Gold and other more conventional reserves have taken off a little bit around the margins. Then there's this idea, this idea that a bunch of countries will agree, hey, let's stop putting our reserves in the dollar, or at least, at least predominantly in the dollar, which many of them do now, or the dollar or the euro or the pound. Sterling or other things, the conventional reserve currencies. And let's form our own. The reason we want to do this is because all these countries that run the reserve currencies we use right now use that control to manipulate us politically. They impose sanctions. And the reason sanctions work is because so many people deal in US Dollars they can't avoid the US economy. And all of a sudden almost everybody can be hit by US San most effective global sanctions regime ever, the US bilateral sanctions. All of a sudden you're at risk of the fact that you have tens of billions of dollars in a reserve currency in the United States, which the United States Congress has now given authority to seize Russian assets here, although it's not that many really, and has occasionally in the past allowed plaintiffs to sue to attach central bank assets for victims of terrorism claims against Iran, for example, and other countries. The reason why this is always hard to do is strict path dependency. It's because there's so much of the world already so used to dealing in dollars, there's such an infrastructure for it. There's so many dollars already out there circulating, so many people already have the reserves in $. It's just not something that just a bunch of governments can decide to just hop over and start doing it. They could, but it would be crippling to them economically. Because the reason you want reserve currencies is because other people accept them. Not just foreign governments or governments within your little block, but lots of buyers and sellers. Now, part of the reason that's important now is because we're in a highly globalized and relatively liberal global economy. If you move to a world, and this is a world we're moving to relatively quickly in a lot of ways that's much more block based. That's where you don't have global economic relations. Instead you have kind of clubs of different sort, maybe with some overlap, but where they're really focused on relations with each other economically, not at the global level. And I think that's a while I understand the trajectory of that for various national security reasons, major power competition with Russia and China being the big one in the short to medium term, I actually think it's a bad place to get in the end. If you're talking about the whole range of goods, maybe it makes sense for certain national security sensitive goods, but not for everything. There's just a lot of lost efficiency that rebounds to consumers and lower prices and helps poor people afford more things and sort of other really good things for the rest of the world. It's not the Just greedy businesses, although they benefit too. So long story short, maybe down the road this becomes a more feasible option, but not in the immediate term. And I will say around the debate about seizing Russian assets for compensate Ukrainians, something I am sympathetic with, deeply at the core, foundational moral logic of, but have reservations about in part because of policies like this and the impact they'd have if reserve governments were perceived as suddenly seizing assets. Those governments stopped. They haven't taken that step yet. And they've gotten really close. And they frankly have a lot of legal arguments saying they could. And they have a lot of policy arguments say there's a reason we're only going to do this for a restaurant, we're not going to do this for others. And in the end I think maybe they think they probably should. But instead they found this very clever workaround that I wrote about in Lawfare a few months ago. But the key point of it is this was a huge counterweighting concern for them. So even though we see sanctions, we have all these little things that add another straw onto the camel's back. And people always point to those and say, no, we really need our own reserve currency. You would have to see such a huge jump to drive these governments to eat the painful cost of shifting over from the current status quo. And you see actually reserve currency governments being nervous about it to the point they're not willing to do it as long as those governments remain relatively responsible. I don't think this is likely in the current status quo. The real concern is we move to a much more regionalized economy. Global trade declines, the value of global reserve currencies, meaning the utility of global reserve currencies becomes less pronounced and then it becomes cheaper to do. But that is an outcome that. I'm pulling this stuff out of my ass. But I'd say it's like half a century, a century away. We're ways around before we can get to that level of localization. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe it can come sooner. But my sense is that we're not quite there yet. But Alan, you said you had thoughts. I'd be curious about your thoughts on this.

[Alan]

I feel like my thoughts are now much, much less sophisticated than your thoughts. I am, I will admit I don't respect.

[Scott]

I don't believe that. I never believed that, Alan. I've never thought for my life. I'm hurt and offended. You accused me of everything, of your thoughts that way.

[Alan]

Wow. I've. Sweetheart, I will say my. I am very skeptical that there's any plausible near term or even medium term competitor to the United States. I mean, there's just this part of this path dependency. Part of it is that the US is by far the world's most dynamic economy and is outstripping, you know, I think the only real potential competitor we're here, which is the euro, the EU zone. You know, I think China has, is a much weaker economy, frankly, than people appreciate. And also the fact that it's an authoritarian government should make people very nervous about putting too much of their assets in renminbi. I also think there's a big coordination problem among the BRICs themselves. Like why, why would Brazil or India want to put all its reserves in Chinese currency? Maybe Russia would. Just because Russia is basically a client state of China. And then as to other countries, like, you know, if you're Japan, you can invest. You're going to put all your money in. It's just, I don't see it. Now. That doesn't mean we should be jerks about it. That doesn't mean we should be careless about it. Doesn't mean we should, you know, throw our weight around and exploit that too much. We should exploit it somewhat. And so I think there's actually quite a bit of juice left to squeeze in the. To really make a weird metaphor in the lemon that is the U.S. reserve currency. Okay, I'm done.

[Scott]

There you go. I love it. I will say, just as a one last plug, there's a great book on this. It's, I think the best book I've read on this by a guy named Daniel McDowell called Bucking the Buck. My copy was just recalled by Brookings Libraries. Whoever took it away from me. Damn you, Brookings colleague. That's okay. I may just buy one because it's that good. It's phenomenally useful on this. And then lots of empirical data showing the reality that this is actually a thing that's happening. De dollarization is kind of what people usually call it, but also that it's the scale timing out some of the scale issues. I think you would agree with me on this. I hope I'm right. Daniel, if you're listening, I think you follow me on Twitter or whatever we're using these days. Blue sky. Let me know if you disagree, but I'd be curious. All right. Well, folks, those are all the topics you sent to us this year for us to talk over. It was a bit of a downer. It has been declared by our producer the darkest episode of rational security he's listened to and he's listened to almost all of them the last year or two. Sorry about that guy. But don't worry, we have some holiday cheer coming. There's still lots to be cheerful about coming up, including our object lessons. For our first one, let us go to a voicemail we received from Trevor.

[Trevor]

Good morning, afternoon, evening, whatever time you are listening to this Scott Allen Quinta and the Gang. My name is Trevor. I work for our local historical society in Ohio, and I've got not one, not two, but three object lessons. Because originally before Rational Security 2.1, 3.0, whatever iteration we're on now, I had picked out these three video games for our three co hosts because each video game is a game that we at the Historical Society have used to help educators connect national security topics to their classrooms. And they are all available on mobile devices, computers, consoles, wherever you get your entertainment. And pretty much all of them can be found for under 10 bucks. And each of these games matches the interests for our co hosts. So for Scott, I picked Bury Me My Love, which was really hard to choose over some of these other Middle east international law games that came up, but with the events in Syria, it just seems kind of apartment so if you haven't played Bury Me, My Love, it is a game based on the real story of Syrian refugees that itself was taken from an article in Le Mans. The whole game is played through a WhatsApp interface or like a mimicry of it, and it takes place in real time. So you are taking the game and playing the game over weeks as you help your partner leave Syria and get to Europe. And it's really heartbreaking because you're helpless. Like many loved ones are texting their partners to intervene, except by giving advice. He doesn't always listen. And it's really well written. We use it all the time to help explain refugee crises and the Middle east conflict. And overall it's just a really great game for some social, emotional connections. For Alan, I had to find something that was a good mix of history and law. So as a French Revolution historian, my mind immediately went to we the Revolution. We the Revolution is set in revolutionary France, where you take the role of a judge on the Revolutionary Tribunal. Now, like a judge of the tribunal, you have a lot more powers than a regular judge. So it's not just as simple as deciding, you know, during the trial you can find evidence, question witnesses, etc. But you also have the law and multiple interest groups that you have to placate, like the aristocracy, the commoners. There's also still a jury that you can Also decide against because it's revolutionary. France. Right. Which also means you could be accused and thrown on the scaffold at any moment if you make too many bad calls. And so then it oftentimes comes down to doing the question of what's right or doing what is safe and agreeable to the public, even if it doesn't match the law. And it's a really great game to get students thinking about how the judicial system works and all of its complexity. And then finally for Quinta, I knew exactly what I wanted to choose for a game about censorship and the law. I went immediately to not for Broadcast.

[Scott]

Trevor, I'm sorry you got cut off at the end there. Talking about not for Broadcast. A truly, truly fascinating looking video game that you recommended for Quinta that you didn't get to talk about. But it looks like essentially you are having read the description online. You are now in charge of a. I think technically you are a janitor now in charge of a broadcast news station's production room as there is an election and apparently lots of dangerous global events happening. It looks fascinating with like live video. So interesting. I've heard of Bury Me My Love, the recommendation you made for me, which is supposedly beautiful and stunning and I have not had the heart to play it because it looks a little bit too devastating. But it's a great recommendation I've heard about. That's an issue set that I've worked on the past and I care a great deal about. So phenomenal recommendations. Thank you. This reminds me, I think we are all still due from our first holiday lesson to play a number of other video games people recommended to us. Other video games or tabletop games? I can't remember. So someday when we're in the same country, maybe we can. Or the same place. Place we can finally get our tabletop game or video game session together. Get one of the plug in our old desktop computers like we used to in middle school.

[Alan]

Land party.

[Scott]

Land Party. That's what we're looking for. Land Party. I'd never actually attended one, but that's okay. It seems fun.

[Alan]

Yeah. Had I had friends, I would have definitely gone to a lot of land parties.

[Scott]

That's kind of how I feel about it exactly. For our next object lesson, this is from Thomas, who recommends Popular Fronts, a podcast by British journalist Jake Hanrahan focused on conflicts and international issues that don't get much airtime in western media. It looks absolutely fascinating. I poked around a little bit and actually Thomas wrote back to point out that Poplar front actually isn't just a podcast, it's actually a whole media company focused on underreported conflicts at Popularfront Co. They've done several documentaries on YouTube, published two magazines. But the podcast is the main thing. He says it reminds him of Vice News with a particular focus on this aspect of international affairs. It looks absolutely fascinating. I'm definitely going to check this out. Thank you for the great recommendation tomorrow.

[Alan]

So our next object lesson suggestion is from Keith as I'm going to read what Keith sent under the popular topic of locally produced podcasts with great stories and solid production. Why thank you. The podcast, It Did Happen Here, was produced a few years ago by an independent nonprofit. It tells an incredible and incredibly forgotten story of the rise of the anti racist skinhead movement in Portland in the 1980s in response to a growing skinhead neo Nazi movement. So well done. And it hasn't gotten the acclaim it deserves. You can Access it at www.itdidhappenherepodcast.com and I will say, when I first read this description from Keith, I was not sure if it was anti racist skinheads or anti racist skinheads. And I googled and they were actually skinheads who were anti racist. So they're actual anti racist.

[Quinta]

It's both. Yeah.

[Alan]

And skinheads, which is. Yeah, they are anti racist skinheads who are anti. The racist skinheads. And I just, I like that. That's fun.

[Quinta]

All right, I am up next. This is from Connor, who recommends the book the Queen of Cuba by Peter Lapp, an inside account of the hunt for Ana Montez, written by the special agent who pursued her. Since it's written from his perspective, it has more informal first person language, but it's a terrific account that offers an interesting perspective into pre Internet and pre ring camera investigative techniques, especially in the wake of her release from prison and return to Puerto Rico. That sounds fascinating.

[Scott]

Interesting. And for our next object lesson, also from Connor, he recommends of all things, the President's Book of Secrets by David Priest, a complete stranger to all of us, us who none of us have heard of before. An obscure author. No, of course, this is lawfare alumnus David Preece, current podcast host and former colleague of all of ours at lawfair. Connor says of the book, it is a detailed book about the origin history of the President's Daily Brief, giving a look into the intelligence consumption habits of presidents from Ike to Obama. A very interesting read for those in the intelligence or military spaces. I agree, it is a great resource. It's really like the only thing I found that really digs into this topic, which I had a reason to for reasons I cannot remember digging to a year or two ago. So kudos to you, David. It's a great book. I can't say I've read it cover to cover, but I remember reading several chapters for whatever project I was working on and maybe this is good incentive to get a few more copies this holiday season.

[Alan]

Our next suggestion is also from Connor. FBI. True. If you're looking for a break from books or podcasts, and who isn't, look no further. A compelling docu series for national security and true crime junkies alike. The series examines several marquee cases by individual interviewing the case agents, intelligence analysts and law enforcement personnel involved. For some cases, it explains an otherwise unknown side of the story, for example Whitey Bulger. While for others. Can I just say, for years I thought it was Whitey Bulger, like the wheat. And it is not. If anyone, if anyone made that statement.

[Scott]

Isn't the wheat Bulger, is it Bulger?

[Alan]

Okay, I think the wheat. Clearly I don't understand how any of this is pronounced. But back to Connor's suggestion. For some cases it explains an otherwise unknown side of the story, that is Whitey ancient grain, while for others it allows those agents to get their side of the story out. For example, Waco and Ruby Ridge can be streamed on Paramount Plus. The other thing that can be streamed on Paramount plus, if I'm editorialized, is the Agency, which is the remake of.

[Scott]

The Save your own optic lessons when you come back on the podcast.

[Alan]

Infinitely superior.

[Scott]

This is about the listener.

[Alan]

French French drama Le Bureau. But I'm just saying, like you need a reason to sell who subscribes to Paramount plus is my point. For one show. I'm doing the listener listeners a favor here.

[Scott]

Yeah, all the Star Treks.

[Alan]

That is true. All the Star Treks. That is true. That is true.

[Scott]

All the Star Treks.

[Quinta]

Next object lesson is from Keenan, who recommends the book how to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwer and says this is a great read about the United States outside the continental US and goes into American influence abroad, starting with US territories and ending with US cultural domination in the 20th and 21st century. Alan is nodding. Have you read this one, Alan?

[Alan]

I have indeed read this one. It is great. Super interesting. Yeah, really interesting book.

[Scott]

I read this one as well a couple of years and it's been out for a while now, I think. I read this a couple years ago, I feel like. But it was interesting. I also love saying Daniel's last name who I think I gave, so I'll give a talk once or twice. So it is. In fact, you nailed it. Quintet's imoir I would have been a little. I was a little paralyzed when I first tried to say it. At least that's how I remember him saying it. Maybe I'm misremembering now, but it's also very fun to say. So Daniel, thank you for the great name and great book. And Keenan, thank you for the suggestion and for our last suggestion here. This one came in under the wire from our old friend Liz W. Who submitted a few of these in the past, as I recall, who says that in lieu of Pete Hegseth's nomination as Secretary of Defense. I have thought a lot recently of a book I read this year called Ashley's War by Gayle Zamak Lemon. In Ashley's War, the Cultural Support Team program embedded female soldiers with elite special operations units such as the Army Rangers and Green Berets in Afghanistan. These women were tasked with engaging Afghan women and children in culturally sensitive ways, something male soldiers could not do due to local customs that prohibited interactions between unrelated men and women. It is a really fascinating story. We had Gail on the podcast a couple years ago and when we talked about this project, I cannot remember whether it was after publication of the book or maybe she was working on it at the time. It was a really good conversation. This was like a while ago. I think it was like four or five years ago at this point. But absolutely fascinating. She does really phenomenal work. It's a crazy story. I've actually had the opportunity to meet one or two of these women on occasion back a long time ago and I used to work on stuff more in this space. Really, really compelling stories, really interesting stuff. So I'll double down on that recommendation as well. Just a fascinating, really powerful story about an incredible community of public servants who did some really challenging work in Afghanistan. And with that, it's been a lot of fun to sit down with my co host emeritus. Not all my co hosts emeritus, my most recent co host emeritus, Quinta and Alan from RAT Tech 2.0. I think we're calling this RAT Tech 2.1. That's why I decided now. But we will have lots of opportunities to be back with you in the weeks and months to come because Rational Security is not going anywhere. We will be with you weekly or almost weekly anyway. We're starting to take a couple little time off here and there, but almost weekly as we wrestle, the whole array of questions are no doubt coming at us in 2025 and we have a couple of really exciting announcements for some flavors, some programming that we have coming from the Lawfare team perhaps as soon as in the next couple of weeks. Until then, that brings us to the end of this week's episode. Route Security is of course a production of Lawfare, so be sure to visit lawfaremedia.org for our show page with links to past episodes for our written work and the written work of other Lawfare contributors, and for information on Lawfare's other phenomenal podcast series, including Escalation. Coming soon to a podcaster near you. Be sure to follow us on Lawfare and on social media wherever you may choose to socialize your media. Also, be sure to leave a rating review wherever you might be listening and be sure to sign up to become a material supporter of Lawfare on Patreon for an ad free version of this podcast and other special benefits. For more information, visit lawfaremedia.org support our audio engineer and producer this week was Nomaz Band of Goat Rodeo and her music, as always, was performed by Sophia Yan and we are once again edited by the wonderful Jen Patcha. On behalf of my co hosts emeritus Alan and Quinta, I am Scott R. Andersen. We will talk to you next week and next year. Until then, goodbye.

[Alan]

If this back to school season talking.

[Quinta]

To your teenager sounds like this with.

[Alan]

Boost Mobile make it sound like this.

[Quinta]

Come to your Boost store, get a line and take home a tablet for only $99.99. Perfect for staying connected and studying and.

[Alan]

Anywhere they're happy and you safe.

[Scott]

Visit your nearest booth.

[Quinta]

Store requires ID verification, new $20 per.

[Scott]

Month tablet plan and $35 device setup fee. Taxes extra.