"We're seeing some good steps recently. One is [Pence] talked about getting test kits out to communities as a priority. That's a good thing. But we are woefully behind when it comes to our ability to test. As a country, we have done a mere fraction of the testing that other countries like the UK and South Korea have done... It's good to give people information, but people need to understand those numbers that [CNN] cited are very likely a substantial [...]
"On January 13, 2017, national security officials assembled in the White House to chart a response to a global pandemic. A new virus was spreading with alarming speed, causing global transportation stoppages, supply-chain disruptions, and plunging stock prices. With a vaccine many months away, U.S. health-care infrastructure was severely strained. "No, I didn’t get that date wrong. This happened: it was part of a transition exercise that outgoing officials from the administration of President Barack Obama convened for the benefit of [...]
"Danny Russel, a former U.S. assistant secretary of state for East Asia who’s now a vice president of the Asia Society in New York, shares his views on how the Chinese government is dealing with the coronavirus outbreak..." Watch the full interview here: Full Interview
"It's a whole of government effort—or ought to be. Homeland Security has a piece of this, but Health and Human Services, CDC, the State Department and Foreign Aid should come into this. The most effective thing we can do to protect ourselves from pandemic disease is to defend forward, as I've described it, which is to help and assist other countries to prevent those diseases before they get to our shores. So this has to be a whole of government effort [...]
"'People ask me if there is a collapse of bipartisan support for Israel. I don’t think so. But I do think there is a rise in partisan tension about what it means to support Israel. Those are not the same thing. I’ll be at AIPAC engaging in conversations with people from a range of backgrounds and with a variety of views, including some that differ from my own. I expect to find a lot of consensus around support for a close [...]
"The agreement just signed between the United States and the Taliban is an important first step in a complex negotiation to end the war in Afghanistan. Under its terms, the Taliban agrees not to fund, train or otherwise support, within the territory it controls, any terrorist groups (including al-Qaeda and the Islamic State) that threaten the United States or the Afghan state it has helped to establish. If the Taliban fulfills this commitment, it will reduce the terrorist threat to Americans [...]
"'It would not be easy for [Senator Sanders] given the legislation,' said Dennis Ross, a former US diplomat who has worked on the Israeli-Palestinian file for decades. "'The waiver was provided to justify why the embassy had not been moved given the requirement to do so. In theory, he might try to say for national security reasons we needed to do so. But what would those reasons be? For peace? What would be the signs this would make a difference?...'" Read [...]
"'You’re seeing a real strain on these institutions and the strain is coming in the form of really challenging the norms under which they’ve operated in the past,' said Lisa Monaco, who served as assistant attorney general for national security during the Obama administration... "'In my 15 years of experience, I have never seen that happen before where the attorney general kind of reaches in to overrule the line prosecutors, and even as they were pursuing what was consistent with Justice [...]
"Once again, the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) finds itself exactly where intelligence officials never want to be: in the headlines and being talked about on cable news —without the ability [to] speak publicly to defend their work or their professionalism. Instead, IC leaders and professionals are left playing defense against a president who routinely demonstrates his lack of understanding of their craft, his disregard—and even contempt—for their work product, and his mistrust of any IC leader who hasn’t affirmed personal fealty [...]
"One of the problems is that the response has been chaotic with lots of mixed messages. On the one hand, you have the experts, our experts here in the CDC, telling us that spread is inevitable. Tony Fauci has said that we are likely on the cusp of a pandemic with this virus. And, on the other hand, political advisers in the White House and the chair of the National Economic Council said we've got this contained. I think we need [...]