Foreign and domestic policy in the United States seem to have melted down.

The President’s major domestic policy initiative – repeal and replace Obamacare – has failed. Infighting inside the White House is especially open and vicious.

Abroad, President Trump has upset almost all of America’s traditional allies, but has not reset relations with either China or Russia. He withdrew the United States from the Paris agreement and resisted appeals from 19 other G20 leaders to reconsider. He talks again and again about renegotiating trade deals that are unfair to the United States and, at times, has threatened to walk away from them entirely.

Most important, President Trump is openly attacking the liberal international order that the United States has painstakingly built over the last seventy years. When other complains that he is shattering a consensus that took 70 years to build, Trump celebrates his disruptive behavior.

To put this pivotal moment into context and to look ahead to the future, I welcome Thomas J. Wright, the author of the provocative new book, All Measures Short of War: The Contest for the 21 st Century and the Future of American Power.

Thomas Wright is the director of the Center on the United States and Europe and a senior fellow in the Project on International Order and Strategy at the Brookings Institution. He has written for The Washington Quarterly, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, and The Washington Post.

Digital technologies and platforms are connecting people across space and time in new and disruptive ways.

Amazon is the world’s largest shopping platform. We buy books, clothes, shoes, and shortly groceries on the Amazon platform, and we do it with this powerful computer that we hold in our hand, our smartphone. We have access to more information, and goods and services, more quickly and more easily than we have ever had in human history.

But there’s a dark side to all this digital activity. We are sharing more information about ourselves, our likes, and dislikes, our activities, with digital providers. What is private is no longer clear.

We are, in other words, leaving a digital footprint every time we go on the web. And we are vulnerable to those who seek to spy on us, to ensnare us into digital traps with a simple click of our mouse.

Who’s watching? How are they watching? And are our democracies and human rights at risk?

To help us answer these questions, Janice spoke with Ron Deibert, the Director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto.  For years, the Citizen Lab has sounded the alarm about the abuse of commercial spyware. It has shown how surveillance technology, allegedly restricted to government agencies for criminal, terrorism, and national security investigations, is used against civil society.

The Citizen Lab recently released a new report, “Reckless Exploit: Journalists, Lawyers, Children Targeted in Mexico with NSO Spyware.”  The Report documents how the Government of Mexico spied on its own citizens using commercial software.

The Middle East is now principally an exporter of conflict to the rest of the world. It has lost its strategic position in world oil markets as the US has become a global exporter of oil.

The world is also moving rapidly to develop renewable energy. Although that will take decades, Crown Prince Mohammed of Saudi Arabia knows that Saudi Arabia can no longer depend on exporting oil to build its economic future.

Politics in the region are no more promising. The Israel-Palestine conflict is stalemated with no progress in sight.

Syria is a failed state locked in factional fighting that has sucked in neighbours and great powers alike. Iraq is still bitterly divided and struggling with the aftermath of the US invasion and the Islamic State.

Class warfare is back, as Michael Lind told us in an earlier podcast, if it ever went away. And recently, a long-simmering conflict between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, on the one hand, and Qatar, on the other has boiled over, yet again pulling in neighbours who lined up on opposite sides.

Where is the Middle East heading? And is it likely to continue to export its internal conflicts to the rest of the world?

To help answer these questions, Janice speaks with Mark Perry, the author of The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur and the forthcoming, The Pentagon’s Wars.

President Trump continues to challenge his allies as well as his adversaries.

He withdrew the United States from the Paris agreement and resisted appeals from 19 other G20 leaders to reconsider. The final communique was the 19 versus 1 on climate change.

He talks again and again about renegotiating trade deals that are unfair to the United States and, at times, has threatened to walk away from them entirely.

He responded to Assad’s use of chemical weapons with a missile strike and has warned Kim Jong-Un of North Korea of very severe consequences if he continues to test long-range missiles that can carry nuclear warheads.

When other complain that he is shattering a consensus that took 70 years to build, Trump celebrates his disruptive behaviour.

In this, and in almost every other way, his foreign policy differs from that of his predecessor Barack Obama.

To help us evaluate Obama’s foreign policies, their strengths and their weaknesses, Janice spoke with Joe Klein, who recently wrote "Yes, He Did: Judging Obama’s Legacy" in Foreign Affairs. Klein is a columnist for Time magazine.

American democracy is under siege, or so it seems. The president consistently attacks the legitimacy of the courts and the media -- two essential pillars of a well-functioning democracy. The White House no longer holds regular press conferences. Intelligence agencies have concluded Russia interfered in the U.S. election. Opinion is polarized and partisanship is intense.

Could democracy in the United States collapse?

Other democracies have. To help us answer this question, Janice spoke with Uri Friedman. Uri just published the essay Is American Democracy Really under Threat?He is a staff writer with the Atlantic.  

Politics across the developed world has been boiling over with anger and frustration.

People are angry about the growing gap between the very rich and the poor. Inequality has been growing since the 1970s. Stagnant or dropping incomes for the bottom third along with exploding gains for the top 1% have sharpened the sense of unfairness.

It is not only the top 1%, however, who have made huge gains relative to the bottom third. It is the top 20%, or the upper middle class, who have done disproportionately well.

Richard Reeves tells us that the top fifth of the income distribution in the United States, with an average annual household income of $200,000 has seen its pretax income increase by 4 trillion since 1979, compared to just over 3 trillion for everyone else.

Class warfare is back, as Michael Lind told us in an earlier podcast, if it ever went away.

What explains this relentless growth in inequality across most of the developed world? And what are its consequences?

To help us answer these questions, Janice spoke with Richard Reeves, who recently wrote “pretending-youre-not-rich.html?_r=0">Stop Pretending You’re not Rich” in the New York Times. Richard Reeves is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of the new book, Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why that is a Problem, and What to do About It. 

We all sense that the international order that emerged at the end of the Cold War is fracturing. The United States is turning inwards, China is flexing its muscles in Asia, Britain is exiting, and Europe is preoccupied with rescuing its project of integration.

But what comes next? There is no agreement on the shape of the future. Our guest on this episode tells us to pay attention to the new class war that has erupted. A transatlantic class war has broken out, he claims, between elites in the corporate, financial and professional sectors, and working-class populists.

Already this transatlantic class war has produced Brexit and the presidency of Donald Trump. This is only the beginning. More shocks are on the way. Class warfare is back, if it ever went away. Michael Lind is the author of the essay The New Class War. He is the Co-Founder of New America and Policy Director of their Economic Growth Program. He writes frequently for the New York Times and the Financial Times.

We live in angry times.

People are angry because they don’t share the prosperity and opportunities that other have.

They’re cynical because they no longer believe political leaders as a class will keep their promises to fix it.

They distrust authority because, after all, what have scientists and economists delivered to them? How has science made their lives better?

The search for truth, so fundamental to science, has become a contest of opinions, where your opinion is as good as mine. My facts and your facts are merely alternatives to each other and there is no way to distinguish between them.

All this has rolled into a larger wave of skepticism about experts who claim that, as a result of years of study, they know better and are better able to set priorities for society. The long-standing deference to expert knowledge is slipping away, claims Tom Nichols, in his new book, The Death of Expertise.

Terrorists, acting in the name of Daesh or the Islamic State, attacked Britain three times in three months, targeting young girls and civilians on bridges and markets. Prime Minister Theresa May, her voice laced with frustration told the British public that “Enough was enough” and promised to do more. But: What more can she do? British intelligence services are already overwhelmed by the number of suspects that they track and monitor, and would need to triple or quadruple the number of agents they have in order to monitor the people on their list. Da’esh is losing territory in Iraq and Syria. The battle for Mosul is in its final stages. When it falls, Da’esh will no longer control a major city in Iraq. The capital Raqqa is now surrounded on three sides. The khilapha, or caliphate declared by the Islamic State, will not survive long when it no longer controls territory.

But Da’esh fighters are moving to Libya and Yemen, and some are returning home to Europe now that defeat seems imminent. They bring with them skills and anger at their defeat.

Is a new wave of terror attacks about to begin? It is hard to argue that the three attacks in Britain constitute a new wave, since British intelligence and police have disrupted 16 attacks since 2013.

Nobody is better equipped to grapple with that question than Joby Warrick, the author of the gripping new book, Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS. The

book won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 2016. The Pulitzer jury described Black Flags as “a deeply reported book of remarkable clarity showing how the flawed rationale for the Iraq War led to the explosive growth of the Islamic State.”

Joby Warrick is a reporter for The Washington Post and the author of the 2011 best seller, The Triple Agent.

Driverless cars are coming. Google already has prototypes and other companies are in hot pursuit. Experts tell us that within a decade, driverless cars will be common in our cities and on our highways.

How do you feel about driverless cars?

Some of us look forward to giving up the wheel and relaxing while cars drive us more safely than we could ourselves. These sophisticated machines with a capacity to sense and learn will not make the common mistakes that almost all drivers make. Car accidents will go down, insurance costs will drop, and we’ll be better off.

Hold on. Not so fast. Others worry that “smart cars” will quickly become much smarter than people, and along with many other smart technologies, will threaten our autonomy and independence. And, what happens to the 3.5 million people in the United States who drive cars and trucks for a living? Do their jobs disappear? And do they join the chorus of angry voters who lose their jobs and are shut out from the benefits from the exponential growth in smarter and smarter technologies.

It is no accident that Vivek Wadha titled his new and provocative book, The Driver in the Driverless Car.

Vivek Wadha is a Distinguished Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University and lives in Silicon Valley.