The Burn Bag Podcast

Former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull joins The Burn Bag for a candid conversation about Donald Trump, China, AUKUS, Taiwan, and the future of America’s alliances.

Having dealt directly with both President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, Turnbull offers a rare perspective on how U.S. leadership is viewed from abroad. He explains why he believes allies can no longer assume America will return ...

What would American foreign policy look like if the progressive left were in charge?

A’ndre is joined by Matt Duss, Executive Vice President at the Center for International Policy and former foreign policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders, to examine the left’s growing challenge to the Democratic Party’s foreign policy establishment.

Matt traces Democratic foreign policy from the post-9/11 era through the Obama and...

Twenty-five years after 9/11, what did America’s War on Terror actually accomplish?

Peter Bergen, one of the country’s leading experts on terrorism and national security, joins The Burn Bag to take stock of a quarter-century of American war and counterterrorism. Bergen produced the first televised interview with Osama bin Laden in 1997 and is the author or editor of ten books, including his newest, All the President&rsqu...

Immigration is often framed as a domestic political fight — about borders, jobs, identity, and security. But America’s immigration choices also shape how the world understands U.S. power, credibility, and values.

In this episode of The Burn Bag, A’ndre Gonawela sits down with Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, President and CEO of Global Refuge, to examine immigration as a foreign-policy and national-security issue. Dr...

In this episode of The Burn Bag, Gal Beckerman joins us to explore what it means to be a dissident in an age of conformity, fear, and authoritarian drift. Drawing on themes from his new book, How to Be a Dissident, Beckerman reflects on the people who refuse to betray their conscience — from historic rebels and moral witnesses to ordinary individuals forced to decide whether silence is still an option.

This conversation goes b...

In this episode, The Burn Bag speaks with Dr. Gary Slutkin, a physician, epidemiologist, former World Health Organization official, and founder of Cure Violence Global, about a provocative idea: what if violence is not simply a problem of crime, morality, or politics, but a contagious epidemic?

Drawing on his decades of work fighting tuberculosis, cholera, AIDS, and community violence, Dr. Slutkin explains how violence spreads throu...

In this episode of The Burn Bag Podcast, A’ndre Gonawela sits down with Zhengyu Huang — former President of the Committee of 100 and author of Rethinking China — to examine the assumptions driving U.S. policy toward China.

The conversation covers U.S.-China competition across trade, technology, national security, and Taiwan, while examining where current policy debates may benefit from what Zhengyu believes are mor...

For decades, wars targeted oil fields, pipelines, ports, and power grids. But in March 2026, that logic appeared to change when Iranian strikes reportedly targeted commercial cloud infrastructure in the Persian Gulf, damaging data center facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain and disrupting digital services used by millions.

What happens when data centers become wartime targets? How vulnerable is the infrastructure power...

As geopolitical tensions spill into the Indian Ocean, smaller states in South Asia are finding themselves on the frontlines of crises they did not choose. From the sinking of an Iranian vessel off Sri Lanka’s coast to mounting pressure from major powers and a region-wide scramble for energy, countries like Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Bangladesh, and Nepal are navigating an increasingly complex strategic environment.

In this episo...

In this episode of the Burn Bag Podcast, A'ndre Gonawela is joined by Mira Rapp-Hooper, a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and former Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director at National Security Council, to break down the structural forces reshaping the global order.

Rapp-Hooper explains how the international system is undergoing a fundamental transition driven not just by political leaders like Don...

Who is Mojtaba Khamenei — Iran's new Supreme Leader? Who was the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei?

In this episode of the Burn Bag Podcast, A’ndre Gonawela is joined by Vali Nasr, the Majid Khadduri Professor of Middle East Studies and International Affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and one of the leading scholars of Iranian politics and Shia leadership structures.

Nasr breaks down the power structure of the Islamic Republic following ...

As the war between the United States, Israel, and Iran escalates following the February 28 strikes, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper joined A'ndre for a quick chat to assess how the conflict is unfolding and what may come next. Esper discusses how President Donald Trump and his national security team may be evaluating the campaign, the strategic objectives behind the strikes on Iran’s leadership and military infras...

In this episode of The Burn Bag, A’ndre Gonawela sits down with former NSC Senior Director Javed Ali to unpack the rapidly escalating crisis between the United States, Israel, and Iran following the February 28 strikes that reportedly killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the ongoing exchanges of fire.

They examine how Tehran is likely interpreting the strikes, why this moment differs from past U.S.–Iran flar...

Iran is at a critical juncture as it faces a wave of nationwide protests driven by economic strain, political frustration, and societal exhaustion. In this episode of The Burn Bag, A'ndre Gonawela is joined by Alex Vatanka, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, to explore the internal fractures within Iran's regime and the potential for change.

As tensions between Washington and Tehran escalate, the risk of military confront...

Syria is at a pivotal moment. After the fall of Bashar al-Assad, the country’s new leadership under President Ahmed al-Sharaa is working to reunify a fractured state — and the biggest test is unfolding in the northeast, where the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have operated autonomously for nearly a decade.

In recent weeks, a fragile ceasefire and phased integration agreement has put Syrian Interior Ministry ...

In this episode of The Burn Bag, A’ndre Gonawela is joined by Dr. Iulia Joja, Senior Fellow at the Middle East Institute, to examine Russia’s strategy in the Middle East in 2026 following major setbacks in Syria and Iran. The conversation breaks down how Moscow is adapting after the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, Iran’s military losses and internal unrest, and growing U.S. pressure across the reg...

In Part Two of this conversation on Venezuela, The Burn Bag turns to the present — and the shockwaves following U.S. strikes and the arrest of Nicolás Maduro.

Host A’ndre Gonawela is joined again by Tony Frangie Mawad, a Venezuela-based journalist and political scientist, to examine how the United States’ intervention reshaped Venezuela’s political landscape overnight. The conversation explores how power is b...

In this episode of The Burn Bag, host A’ndre Gonawela is joined by Tony Frangie Mawad, a Venezuela-based journalist and political scientist, to unpack how Venezuela reached its current moment. Long before U.S. strikes and regime collapse, Venezuela’s trajectory was shaped by the rise of Hugo Chávez, the ideology of Chavismo, and the steady erosion of democratic institutions under both Chávez and his successor Nicolás Ma...

In the final episode of The Nuclear Threshold, A’ndre speaks with Alexandra Bell, President & CEO of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and one of the leading U.S. diplomats behind recent efforts to strengthen arms control and reduce nuclear risks. Building on the technical and command-and-control foundations laid by Laura Grego and Steve Fetter, this conversation shifts to the political and diplomatic fault lines that...