Experts in the News

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Washington Post

If Biden wins, his vice president could determine the success of his presidency

The political world has turned its attention to Joe Biden’s vice presidential selection, which the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee promised to make next week. That choice will have a significant impact on a potential Biden presidency, thanks to one of his former Senate colleagues: Walter F. Mondale. As President Jimmy Carter’s second-in-command, Mondale blazed a new path for the vice presidency. Although Carter failed to win reelection for a second term, the changes these two men made to the vice presidency have endured.
Steven M. Gillon
Newsweek

Washington Must Address Turkey's Rising Aggression Amid COVID-19 | Opinion

Most of the headlines about COVID-19's global upheaval focus on how adversaries like China have begun acting more belligerently against U.S. interests. But increasingly, Turkey, formally a NATO ally, is also taking advantage of the pandemic to expand its influence in very destabilizing ways across the Eastern Mediterranean, an area of growing importance to the United States.
Eric Edelman
JINSA

Reshaped After the Pandemic: Turkish Aggression in the Eastern Mediterranean

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic’s shake-up of domestic politics and international relations across the globe, Turkey is expanding its influence in the Eastern Mediterranean and creating challenging new conditions on the ground and offshore that the United States could struggle to address, and which threaten regional partners like Greece, Cyprus, Israel and Egypt. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan summarized these destabilizing ambitions last month when he announced “Turkey will be one of the outstanding countries in the world that will be reshaped after the pandemic.” Washington’s own lack of focus on the region has helped invite Ankara’s growing aggressiveness, which in turn worsens security competition in an energy-rich region that increasingly resembles the South China Sea – with Turkey more and more playing the role of China.
Eric Edelman
Los Angeles Times

News Analysis: ‘Something’s got to give’: Trump stirs old racial hatred, but this time feels different

Russell Riley, a historian at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, said that since the civil rights struggles of the 1960s and ’70s, Americans have come to expect something different from what Trump has offered so far — at the very least, a show of common cause with those demonstrating for racial progress. “When Lyndon Johnson — a Texan — went before Congress and said, ‘We shall overcome,’ that changed the job description of every president since,” said Riley, who co-chairs the Miller Center Presidential Oral History Program at UVA. “Even with Nixon and Reagan, who trafficked in the seamier side of politics, there was some acknowledgement of the need for racial equality.”
Russell Riley