Open Source with Christopher Lydon

We’re engulfed by war, rumors of war, videos of war, crimes of war—are we looking at ‘end times’ approaching? Or just the dead end of the forever wars? Our conversation this hour is about the seven-year war in Yemen. Our Yemeni guest sets it in the Ukraine context this way: “Yemen,” she says, “is the war we can stop.” It is called the worst humanitarian catastrophe on the planet, and still it gets scant news coverage. It is older than Ukraine’s war, vicious in its own way, an autocrat’s war much deadlier than Russia’s hammering of Ukraine, so far. The Yemen war, too, is a mismatch: Saudi oil wealth pounding the poorest nation in the Arab world, and using American planes dropping American bombs to do the pounding.

The hellscape and heartache of war come very close these days: atrocities and naked war crimes, on Youtube and Twitter, and not just from Ukraine. Our guest this hour—in the latest episode of our limited series called In Search of Monsters, made in collaboration with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft—is a young Yemeni-American teacher of teachers at the Ed School of Michigan State University. Shireen Al-Adeimi was born in Yemen, raised in India, then Canada. She got her education doctorate in the States and became an American citizen so as to vote against US support of the Saudi war on her homeland. “Yemen,” she said a week ago, “is the war we can stop.” And then, strange to tell, came a ceasefire.

This week’s show is the latest installment of In Search of Monsters, our limited-series collaboration with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Try this, to get a fresh grip on the war in Ukraine, and its effects still to come: we’ve got a food war in the breadbasket of the world, on the vast Eurasian prairie that’s been feeding Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa for ten thousand years. It’s the last in a long line of historic bread wars – remember Marie Antoinette’s quip in the French Revolution, when the bread ran out? “Let them eat cake,” she was said to have said. Food war today is about controlling those fabled Black Sea grain ports like Odessa, and the bounteous grain fields inland. This is the story you haven’t heard told: when Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24th, the world price of wheat doubled, overnight. Next come shortages, hunger, food riots, maybe worse.

Scott Reynolds Nelson.

The war in Ukraine is a war, not least, for the wheat and corn that has fed the world, back to the Stone Age. Could that be a main line of the war story, the reason Putin invaded, the key to some awful consequences? Our guest, Scott Nelson, is a scholar of useful stuff, raw materials, food commodities, over time. He says: in fact those nutritious and shippable grains between Ukraine and Russia are very nearly the whole story, underlying Russia’s long lust for empire and Ukraine’s claim to its share and its identity. What it takes to size up a food war, Scott Nelson says, is the memory and the imagination of a grain dealer, and he says the ruthless President Putin has it all. Oceans of Grain is Scott Nelson’s provocative account of the history that brought us to Ukraine.

This week’s show is the latest installment of In Search of Monsters, our limited-series collaboration with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Twenty questions this hour on the war in Ukraine. For starters: will the war end in April? May? Maybe June? Who gets to announce the good news? An essay question: Can a war look more grotesquely cruel week to week, and look at the same time like a war without end? Can you have a war without a winner? Assume Putin and Company have lost this war in hearts and history; then, count the damage also to Ukraine in thousands of innocent lives lost, and some loss of territory too. Whose idea was this war, anyway? Multiple choice: the war will turn finally on A: NATO weaponry; B: the human spirit; or C: the sanctions on Russian business. Who gets to convene the war crimes trial, to punish the atrocities in this war, and who gets the defendants to show up?

Stephen Walt.

The war in Ukraine, so far, is our subject this hour. The angle of observation is “realist,” so-called: it’s a way of thinking about world affairs that is founded on the vital interests of nation states—like security and survival—in an often tragic arena of rise-and-fall competition. Steve Walt, from the Kennedy School at Harvard, is among the most respected and quoted of realists. He’s been coaching us in conversation for 20 years, since George W. Bush prepared to invade Iraq. “Not in the US interest,” Steve Walt and the realists declared flatly. The war in Ukraine has been more complicated. “Not in Russia’s interest, or Putin’s,” Steve Walt thought before it happened. Since then the question has been whether realist thinking ever caught up with what Putin was doing and why: was he really feeling threatened by NATO’s expansion toward Russia? Was Putin bent on a new Slavic empire? Was he out of touch with reality?

This week’s show is the latest installment of In Search of Monsters, our limited-series collaboration with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Memorial Day can feel different every year, bittersweet at its best. It’s been the last Monday in May since 1868, first as Decoration Day, for marking the graves of our Civil War dead—lest Americans forget, it was said, those who had paid the price of a free and undivided republic. Again this year it is a somber day of reflection: 22 years into a young century of extravagant losses, and troubling numbers. The first shock is not that so many have died but that so few have served: one percent of the population in our US fighting forces through the “forever wars” since 9/11. Then, how do we explain that among American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, suicide has taken many more lives than combat did?

Memorial Day is paired with the Fourth of July in American sentiment: the loss of patriot lives linked to the new birth of freedom. The old farmers’ adage in New England was: Get your peas planted by Decoration Day, and you’ll have fresh peas on the table for the Fourth. So we honor the memories of all our war dead this long Memorial Day weekend, and in particular this hour we ask some war survivors to talk back to some of those memories—in dissent, as they choose. In partnership with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, we are drawing on a sparkling collection of short war memoirs from 15 soldiers who served in what they remember now as misguided or misbegotten American wars in two decades since 9/11. Our guests went to Iraq or Afghanistan, some to both wars: enlisted and officer class, black and white, bitter and proud. Paths of Dissent is the title, from Metropolitan Books. Andrew Bacevich, who co-edited it, will have a comment on our conversations.

This week’s show is the latest installment of In Search of Monsters, our limited-series collaboration with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.