Day: May 4, 2026

Leaks From European Intel Say Putin is Increasingly Paranoid and Afraid of His Own Military

We begin with leaks to CNN from European Intelligence Services suggesting Putin is increasingly paranoid and hunkered down in a bunker in Kraznodar in Southern Russia apparently afraid of his own military while taking extreme measures to ensure his cooks don’t poison him. Joining us to discuss whether these leaks are meant to influence Trump’s bromance with Putin to break the Russian dictator’s hold over the American president by suggesting Putin won’t be around for much longer is Michael Kimmage, Director of the Kennan Institute who is a professor of history and department chair at the Catholic University of America. From 2014 to 2017, he served on the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio. He is the author of The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy and Collisions: The War in Ukraine and the Origins of the New Global Instability, and he has an article at Foreign Affairs, “The Transatlantic MAGA Fantasy: How Trump Misread Europe.”

Trump Pulls Troops Out of Germany After a Spat With Chancellor Mertz

Then with Trump pulling troops out of Germany because Chancellor Mertz observed that the Iranians were “humiliating” the United States, we speak with Thomas Berger, Professor of International Relations at Boston University who specializes in German politics, International Relations and Comparative Government in East Asia and Political Culture. He is the author of War, Guilt and World Politics After World War II and Cultures of Antimilitarism: National Security in Germany and Japan.

Trump’s Triply Illegal War on Iran Just Got More Dangerous

Then finally, with US warships entering the Persian Gulf to escorts ship that are trapped out via the Strait of Hormuz, we examine how Trump’s illegal war could get much more complicated and speak with Oona Hathaway, a Professor of International Law at Yale Law School and a Nonresident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She has been a member of the Advisory Committee on International Law for the Legal Adviser at the United States Department of State since 2005, and, from 2014 to 2015, she took leave to serve as Special Counsel to the General Counsel at the U.S. Department of Defense, where she was awarded the Office of the Secretary of Defense Award for Excellence. She is the coauthor with Scott Shapiro of The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World and she has an article at Just Security we discuss, “At the 60-Day Mark, the Iran War is Triply Illegal.”