You may have heard some ruckus about Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s 887-page plan to overhaul the federal government, fire thousands of career bureaucrats and bring in loyalists if Trump wins a second term. But what would this look like in practice? You’ll hear from the author of one chapter of the plan who says curing what ails the US State Department should start with replacing many of its diplomats. And you’ll hear why a couple of veteran US diplomats believe doing so will threaten national security.

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When the CIA got started in 1947 it recruited women for one type of job: typing and filing. Very few women were out in the field gathering intelligence and recruiting foreign agents. But once they finally got the chance, they proved instrumental to obtaining secret codes and tracking down terrorists - despite sometimes facing discrimination and harassment. Women also found ways to use gender stereotypes to their advantage in their spycraft. Peter speaks with a former agent who entered the CIA in 1968, another who got her start just before 9/11, and the author of The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA.

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India is the most popular leader in the world — and he’s poised to win reelection to a third term. With his embrace of religious nationalism, is India’s secular democracy in peril? Or is Modi just giving the country’s 1.1 billion Hindus what they want?

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How could the U.S. lose a war with China? What happens if American political divisions keep getting more extreme? And what in the world will A.I. mean for national security? These are the questions that keep the former commander of NATO, retired Admiral James Stavridis and retired Marine Captain Elliot Ackerman up at night. But unlike a lot of people in their shoes, they haven’t been harrying policymakers with op-eds or whitepapers. Instead they teamed up to write a set of novels showing how badly things could go — and what the U.S. can do to avoid a nightmarish future.

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Mina Al-Oraibi is the editor of The National, an English-language newspaper headquartered in Abu Dhabi. She shares how the post-October 7th news landscape looks inside the Middle East: how Hamas is viewed in the region, how much of a threat Iran poses, and why she calls the conflict in Gaza “Joe Biden’s war.”

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RFK, Jr.’s views on vaccines and his penchant for questioning official narratives have kept him on the fringes of American politics for years. But now, as a third-party presidential candidate he is polling around 10% — enough to affect the outcome of an election that is expected to be decided on a razor-thin margin. In this lengthy sit-down, first published in September, 2023, Peter probes Kennedy’s unrelenting skepticism about a wide range of issues, from the war in Ukraine to the fentanyl epidemic — and whether he buys the official narratives about 9/11 and the moon landing.

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Original Broadcast Date: 9/26/2023

David Sanger thinks so. After four decades at The New York Times, he may be America’s most experienced national security reporter, and he thinks superpower conflict is back. He describes how the U.S. overestimated the democratizing power of globalization, underestimated the ambitions of Russia and China, and what, if anything, can be done to counter the “grand delusion” that kept so many smart observers from seeing this new era coming.

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Busloads of migrants have been arriving in northern cities for the past two years, testing the patience of some residents and bringing out empathy in others. We go to Chicago to find out what the real, local effects of this surge are — not just what the politicians with their megaphones say they are. And we explore some solutions to a problem that has become the number one issue on voters' minds in this crucial election year.

Go to audible.com/news where you'll find Peter Bergen's recommendations for other news, journalism and nonfiction listening.