Security Dilemma

On this week's episode of Security Dilemma, co-hosts John Gay and A.J. Manuzzi spoke with Sarang Shidore, the Director of the Global South Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, about the BRICS Summit and his new brief, "Crying Wolf? The United States and BRICS in the Global Order."

On this week's episode of Security Dilemma, JQA's John Gay and A.J. Manuzzi are joined by Dr. Daniel Zoughbie to discuss U.S. Middle East policy and his book Kicking the Hornet's Nest: U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East from Truman to Trump.
Dr. Zoughbie is a complex-systems scientist, a historian, and an expert on presidential decision-making. He is associate project scientist at the Institute of International Studies at UC Berkeley; a faculty affiliate of the UCSF/UCB Center for Global Health Delivery, Diplomacy, and Economics; and a faculty affiliate at the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge. He is also principal investigator of the Middle East and North Africa Diplomacy, Development, and Defense Initiative and author of Indecision Points: George W. Bush and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

On this week's episode of Security Dilemma, Dr. Emma Ashford of the Stimson Center joined the show to discuss how the 9/11 terror attacks turbocharged the worst impulses of U.S. foreign policy, but that the shift towards interventionism was already well underway in the 1990s.
Dr. Ashford is a Senior Fellow with the Reimagining US Grand Strategy program at the Stimson Center, where her work focuses on questions of grand strategy, international security, and the future of US foreign policy. She has expertise in the politics of Russia, Europe, and the Middle East. Ashford is also a columnist at Foreign Policy, and an adjunct assistant professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University. Her new book, First Among Equals: U.S. Foreign Policy for a Multipolar World (Yale University Press, 2025), argues that America must fundamentally reconceptualize its role in the world, from global hegemon to shared leadership, and proposes a set of pragmatic, realist principles for policymakers. Her first book, Oil, the State, and War: The Foreign Policies of Petrostates, was published by Georgetown University Press in 2022. Prior to joining the Stimson Center, Ashford was a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s New American Engagement Initiative, which focused on challenging the prevailing assumptions governing US foreign policy. She has also been a research fellow in defense and foreign policy at the Cato Institute, a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a nonresident fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point.

Reason article: https://reason.com/2026/08/29/9-11-turbocharged-american-interventionism/
Foreign Affairs: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/guest-pass/redeem/QX6fEgITZHc

On this week's episode of Security Dilemma, co-hosts John Gay and A.J. Manuzzi spoke with Dr. Abigail Hall. Dr. Hall is a Professor of Economics at the University of Tampa and a Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute. She has co-authored several books including Tyranny Comes Home: The Domestic Fate of U.S. Militarism, Manufacturing Militarism: US Government Propaganda in the War on Terror, and How to Run Wars: A Confidential Playbook for the National Security Elite. In this episode, we discussed her recent piece on the post-9/11 growth of the surveillance state for Reason magazine.

On this week's episode of Security Dilemma, co-hosts John Gay and A.J. Manuzzi sat down with Dr. Miranda Priebe to discuss her new article in Orbis (https://orbisjournal.org/commentary/how-to-deliver-on-nato-3-0/) about the changes the Trump Administration needs to make if its NATO 3.0 burden-shifting initiative is to bear fruit.
Dr. Priebe is the Director of the Center for Analysis of U.S. Grand Strategy and a Senior Political Scientist at RAND. Her work at RAND has focused on grand strategy, the future of the international order, the effects of U.S. forward presence, military doctrine, the history of U.S. military policy, distributed air operations, and multi-domain command and control. She is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.