Latest news with #JamesRubin
New York Times
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
+Could You Make a Podcast With Your Ex-Husband?
In a career spanning more than four decades, reporting from the ground of the Gulf and Bosnian wars, interviewing world leaders in the wake of Sept. 11 and beyond, Christiane Amanpour has gone where few others dare to go. This month, Ms. Amanpour, the chief international anchor for CNN, broke more fresh ground, unveiling a new podcast that she is hosting with her ex-husband. 'Christiane Amanpour Presents: The Ex-Files With Jamie Rubin' is a weekly foreign affairs show from the media and entertainment group Global that Ms. Amanpour, who lives in London, tapes with James Rubin, a former U.S. diplomat now in Washington, D.C. Separated by an ocean and a 2018 divorce, they mull on crises and conflict zones with an occasional trip down a shared memory lane. Most people would recoil at the prospect of scheduled public dialogue with their former spouses. But at a time when many mainstream figures are looking for a way — any way — into the podcasting gold rush, Ms. Amanpour sees her unorthodox reunion with Mr. Rubin as an example of how to build bridges against the odds. President Trump and President Putin, are you listening? This interview, at her home last week, has been edited and condensed. Whose idea was this podcast? The idea of a podcast was something I'd been mulling since last spring. It's an overcrowded pool, and I'm late to the game, but I thought it would be good for me, as a television veteran, to see what I could do with this medium. Then the U.S. election happened, and my ex-husband, who had worked for the Biden administration in the State Department, was out of a job. I knew I wanted a show that delved into foreign policy and touched on history and shared experience. At a time that has never felt more divided, I wanted to say: 'Can't we all just find solutions and try to get along? Does it always have to be like this?' It felt like I needed a partner. And then I thought, 'Why not ask Jamie and see what he thinks?' There was a chance he might think it was crazy. But he said yes. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Arab News
24-05-2025
- Politics
- Arab News
To navigate a new order, hire a historian not a social scientist
What if you became the most powerful man in the world, the president of the United States of America? What would you do? Obviously, create a new world order. That is what every American president has tried, from Harry Truman to Dwight Eisenhower to George W. Bush to Donald Trump. A new executive order sends everyone scrambling to understand it, sometimes everyone and their ex, like Christiane Amanpour and her former husband James Rubin, who have just started a podcast for that purpose. Their advantage is having lived through major global changes from different angles; while he was in the policymaking business, she was on the ground living the consequences. The stories they will tell are of lived experience deciphered with tools that include their backgrounds, upbringings, and educations, along with some common sense, instinct, and wit. It is more of an art than it is a science and does not have to be either precise or certain. It is a process that includes human interactions and emotions that no algorithm or artificial intelligence can emulate. They are, in fact, acting like traditional historians, telling the story and interpreting the changing world. This will help them understand the present and speculate, with a healthy degree of uncertainty, on what is to come. The rise and fall of empires and nations was very much the domain of such historians, before modern social sciences emerged. But what about the rest of us? Do we have the tools to understand the new world order? The rest of us may well be part of another story — that of the rise and fall of the social sciences. It is a fairly short history of disciplines born out of theological controversies in Europe in the second half of the 19th century and later in the US. The social sciences, which include disciplines like economics, politics, and sociology, dominated the ideas of the 20th century and accompanied the rise of nationalism. Economics, in particular, rationalized or scientifically justified the ever-growing role of the state, on which international affairs and international relations were built. But doubts have been emerging for quite a while about the adequacy of the individual disciplines and whether they are enough to help us understand the changing world. In a recent piece in the Financial Times, the economist Gillian Tett described the rise of a new discipline, geoeconomics, with a recent conference near the White House and with universities and think tanks rushing to create programs in it. Tett also mentioned the idea that companies should hire a chief geopolitical or geoeconomics officer to help navigate the changing world order, especially after the disruptions brought about by President Trump. Geopolitics, geoeconomics, and geostrategy are imprecise and sometimes meaningless words. In a nutshell, they mean that the cult-like social scientists are out of their depth and have no clue what they are talking about. They are a product of theological debates resulting from Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, which attempted to explain the origin of species through science and scientific observation, as opposed to the religious belief of divine creation. The contradictions between Darwin's theory of evolution and the biblical story of creation sparked huge controversy. This quickly expanded into a heated debate about science versus faith. Disciplines like eugenics were an offshoot of the scientific study of society. For that was the key question: can scientific methods be applied to the study of society? To understand the intensity of such debates, we should bear in mind that it was not until 1871 that old universities like Oxford and Cambridge started offering degrees to people who were not members of the Anglican church. It was also expected that any fellows of a college would resign their position at the university if they so much as developed doubts about any of the 39 articles of the Anglican faith. A future historian may evaluate the extent of the damage done by the 20th-century doctrine of social sciences. Nadim Shehadi An Oxford education generally consisted of studying the classics in their original Latin and Greek and developing philosophical ideas. It was considered that reading the likes of Plato, Aristotle, and other classical philosophers, along with historians like Herodotus and Thucydides, was enough to prepare a young man for any pursuit, be it in the natural sciences, mathematics, medicine, or a career in the church, the army or in the rule of India. Darwin himself had such an education before turning to medicine. The works of Adam Smith and other political economists were introduced as part of moral philosophy and the political economy component was meant to help understand history, which was only really introduced as a faculty in the 1850s. The social sciences as we now know them were therefore a result of the trend toward using the scientific method to understand the world. To believe in its results and recommendations, it is therefore necessary to have faith in science. Elite education — conferring the tools that were considered necessary and sufficient to equip decision-makers in the art of statecraft — evolved with that trend toward science. The basic degree in classics, or greats, became modern greats and evolved into the study of philosophy, politics and economics, the Oxford 'PPE' degree. These subjects replaced the classics as the necessary intellectual tools to understand the world. In fact, the discipline of economics is still not a stand alone subject for an undergraduate degree in Oxford. It must be combined with something like history. At the more scientifically inclined Cambridge University, it became a subject in 1905. Economics, which dominated the post-Second World War world, became established as a dominant discipline in the interwar period. It was akin to a religious cult using faith in science instead of faith in God. Its theories were based on quite rudimentary mathematics to advance its principles. The growth of the state's role, for example, was justified by arguments like increasing marginal returns to scale or the multiplier effect. Simply put, this argues that the larger the scale, the larger the profit. And because state control would work on a larger scale, it would become more efficient and profitable. These were dangerous tools in the hands of power-hungry politicians. A future historian may evaluate the extent of the damage done by the 20th-century doctrine of social sciences. A cult of economists, political scientists, and sociologists ran the world and provided the justification for politicians to expand their power and that of the state. When such 'scientific' theories did not fit with reality, it was reality and people that needed to change, not the theories. This was in the name of science, which is synonymous with indisputable fact. In fact, it is not Trump's chaotic disruptions that are the problem. In days when we are on the verge of surrendering our lives to mega-processors and AI, and in which we interact more with our screens than with each other, it is not too late to introduce a serious element of doubt into the disciplines we feed these machines. As a repentant economist, I put my trust in Amanpour and Rubin and would hire a historian over an economist anytime.
Yahoo
30-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
‘There's an information war, and we've disarmed ourselves' — ex-US diplomat on Trump cuts to counter Russian disinformation
Russia has used information warfare to promote its interests and undermine opponents across the world as a part of its foreign policy for decades. The Russian state was spending an estimated $1.5 billion annually on its foreign disinformation campaigns, Christopher Walker, National Endowment for Democracy vice president for studies and analysis, told Congress in 2023. These campaigns skillfully take advantage of already existing divisions in society, inflaming tensions to divide and destabilize countries around the world, according to experts. In the U.S., the State Department's Global Engagement Center (GEC) had acted as the main tool to expose Russia and China's disinformation campaigns abroad since it was reformed in 2016. But in 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump's administration shut the center down, citing concerns about free speech and the rights of American citizens. The Kyiv Independent spoke with James Rubin, a former diplomat who led the GEC for two years starting in 2022, about the consequences of Trump's decision, as well as Russia's continued information operations worldwide. During Rubin's tenure, the center, which focused exclusively on what Russia and China information campaigns outside of the U.S., exposed four major Russian disinformation operations around the world, including in Latin America, Africa, and Moldova. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. The Kyiv Independent: How do Russia's disinformation campaigns work? James Rubin: Russian disinformation operations, or what we used to call covert operations, mean they're putting messages into the information system in Europe, in Ukraine, in Africa, that are lies and that are unattributed. They're hiding their hand. The most important thing we did was last September, when we showed that the Russian television network RT and its parent company were a clearinghouse for covert intelligence operations in the information domain. Our highest intelligence director told me it was one of the most comprehensive intelligence downgrades. Find out who's telling you something. Don't just believe it. (The RT network) used its business model to do computer and cyber sweeps, where it would generate money for the Russian army. They used their cyber intelligence tools to suck up information. And they used Russian television all over the world to discredit any country that disagreed with them. We exposed that with the help of our intelligence community. The most important thing we did was sanction RT's parent company so that it could not use dollars anywhere in the world. It had a real impact. In my understanding, these sanctions are still in place under Trump's administration. The lesson here for everyone is: find out who's telling you something. Don't just believe it. Wait and see who the source of the information is. In (the United States), we got into a big debate about censorship. Who could say what, when? But the issue is not censoring information. It's providing more information. It's being sure that someone knows that it's the Kremlin apparatus that's coming up with these crazy ideas. The Russians spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to skew the election in Moldova. And they failed partly because European countries, the U.S., and the Moldovan government got together and shared information on what Russia was doing, who they were paying, and how they were using phony politicians to pay off local journalists who then put out phony information. They lost that election, which shows that we can beat them. There's an information war going on around the world, led by the Russians, including the Chinese. But in the U.S., battling it is especially hard now that we've unilaterally disarmed one of our tools — the ability to expose Russian covert operations in the information domain. The Kyiv Independent: With Russia spending nearly $1.5 billion annually on its foreign disinformation campaigns, how do you think the U.S. will fare in this disinformation war with Russia and China now that the center that countered it is shut down? James Rubin: I think that number is low and that it's much more than that. It depends on how you count it and if you include all the facilities they created through RT, and you include all the people who are in the business. I read a book called 'Active Measures (:The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare' by Thomas Rid), which was about what the Soviet Union did with Eastern European countries during the Cold War. (The authors of the book) were able to get real information because when the Cold War ended, the Eastern European countries opened their files and showed how much effort went into what were called 'active measures," meaning forgeries or other covert operations in the information space. Back in the 1970s, they were spending $4 billion (annually) on that program. It didn't go away. It just changed its location. It's changed its form. So I think (Russia is spending) tens of billions of dollars all over the world (on disinformation). The Kyiv Independent: What other goals does Russian disinformation pursue worldwide? James Rubin: We learned that these people take information warfare very, very seriously. They wake up in the morning and they say: 'OK, what can we do today, somewhere in the world, to undermine the U.S., undermine the West, undermine democratic institutions?' They took this idea from the novel and tried to implant it into the minds of the people. One of the things I was most proud of, in addition to (exposing the work of state-controlled) RT media, was what we did in Africa. It was particularly pernicious there because the Russians were going to create a phony argument, using an idea that came out of a John Le Carre novel, that biological weapons were being used on innocent Africans by the big pharmaceutical companies. And so they took this idea from the novel and tried to implant it into the minds of the people in Africa, so that they wouldn't go to the Western medical centers and wouldn't use Western medicine. Then the U.S. and the West wouldn't get the so-called "soft power" benefit of helping the people of Africa. We were able to expose that before it took hold. And that's the real lesson here — if we ever get serious again about the information war, you have to act early, ideally before the operation starts, but certainly in the first few days and weeks. Because once information takes hold, it's very hard to put it back into so-called Pandora's box. By preventing Russia from doing that last year, we were able to convince Africans not to avoid Western medicine, but to take advantage of it. And we know that that has helped save lives. I suspect they'll work in Latin America and try to play off the fact that President Trump is unpopular, and try to change people's minds about the war in Ukraine using President Trump's own arguments. The real tragedy of it is that the Trump administration has accepted some of the arguments about who caused this war. Unfortunately, some in the Trump administration have used the arguments Putin and his friends use. The cause of the war is in the Kremlin. But somehow, some people have persuaded other people that this war is somehow Ukraine's fault, the United States' fault, NATO's fault, although it was Vladimir Putin's choice to wake up one morning and invade his neighbor. And I suspect Russia is going to try and spread those official American statements to try to change minds. Hopefully, the world has already made up its mind about whose fault the war is, and nothing anyone says is going to change the fact that Russia invaded Ukraine. Read also: How US right-wing podcasters shape pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine sentiments The Kyiv Independent: Speaking about official U.S. statements, would you agree that the Trump administration dismantled the Global Engagement Center (GEC) that you were leading, which helped expose Russian propaganda, in part because it currently aligns with some of the Russian statements? James Rubin: I don't know exactly why they did this. But I can say that in the time I served in government, it was certainly true that some American congressmen would repeat Russian arguments. They would repeat Russian lies about Zelensky's yachts, or corruption in Ukraine, or biological weapons (allegedly developed in Ukraine with NATO to target Russia). When we rejected those arguments as untrue, some in the Republican Party, I'm sorry to say, felt that we were censoring Americans who agreed with Russia. Let me say this clearly: Americans have a right to agree with Russia. Americans were being paid by Russia to promote the idea that instead of giving arms to Ukraine, we should be shutting down our southern border. We don't control American points of view. But there's nothing wrong with telling people that it's also a Russian argument. And then people can decide for themselves whether the fact that they're repeating the argument of a country that invaded its neighbor is relevant. I'm sure that one of the reasons they closed down these efforts to stop disinformation is because they began to feel that by opposing Russian information operations, we were somehow opposing the points of view of certain members of the Republican Party. We found out that a group of Americans were being paid by Russia to promote the idea that instead of giving arms to Ukraine, we should be shutting down our southern border. Those arguments were actually used by members of Congress to delay aid to Ukraine. Outside of my work in the State Department, I happen to know that Russia believes that these groups were serving effectively as useful idiots for Russian propaganda inside the U.S., persuading American congressmen to focus on immigration rather than aid to Ukraine. It harmed the speed at which we were able to provide aid to Ukraine, when it took six to nine months under (former) President Joe Biden to get the military aid through Congress. The Kyiv Independent: Within the U.S., what tools do you think Russia uses to influence the American public other than paying bloggers and influencers? James Rubin: All sorts of social media, all sorts of communications tools are being deployed all over the world to try to undermine Western support for Ukraine. Let's face it, it happens every day, because the only way Russia can win this war is if everyone quits. But with all the work they're doing, they failed to stop Western support for Ukraine. We've been working hard to bring you independent, locally-sourced news from Ukraine. Consider supporting the Kyiv Independent.
Russia Today
05-04-2025
- Politics
- Russia Today
US research highlights RT role in media landscape
The New York Times published over 500 RT-related articles over the course of a decade, research published by Johns Hopkins University this week has claimed. The Russian multimedia organization RT has faced unparalleled levels of scrutiny and limitations imposed by Western nations in recent years. Actions directed against the broadcaster escalated between 2022 and 2024. According to the review, RT, as well as Chinese national broadcaster CCTV, 'tend to dominate both popular and scholarly discourse about propaganda.' 'Since 2014, the New York Times has published more than five-hundred articles about RT alone, while the vast majority of articles about propaganda published in top political science journals explore the effects of media run directly by the state,' the review stated. Read more EU denies Russian news agency accreditation Washington imposed new sanctions against RT in September, with then US Secretary of State Antony Blinken accusing it of engaging in 'covert influence activities' and 'functioning as a de facto arm of Russian intelligence.' The head of the State Department's Global Engagement Center (GEC), James Rubin, told reporters that the 'broad scope and reach' of RT was one of the reasons many countries around the world did not support Ukraine. The GEC itself was closed in December 2024. Also in September 2024, RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan and three other senior RT employees were sanctioned by the US over alleged attempts to influence the 2024 presidential election. Moscow branded the crackdown on Russian media, including RT, 'a declaration of war on free speech.' In March, the former head of RT America, Ben Swann, called on US President Donald Trump to drop restrictions that his predecessor Joe Biden imposed against several Russian media outlets, including RT and Sputnik.
