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At the Water's Edge
Exploring American Security Policy
The At the Water’s Edge Podcast explores national security and geopolitics from an insider’s perspective, looking at how national power, industrial policy, diplomacy, and military might shape our world and America’s place in it.
The Invisible War: How Gray Zone Attacks Work | fmr. NSC director F. David Diaz
Sabotage. Arson. Drone swarms over critical infrastructure. Cyber intrusions into American water utilities. Gray zone attacks are built to look like accidents, fall between agencies, and do their damage before anyone connects the dots. Fmr. NSC Director F. David Diaz, a Marine officer turned State D...
She Didn't Look Like a Veteran in Crisis. That Was the Problem.
Sam Hargrove spent years being known for her smile — while privately battling a rage she couldn't explain, seven rounds of anger management, and a night she nearly drove her car into a tree. A communications specialist caught in an explosion in Iraq, Sam faced a specific kind of dismissal on top of ...
What Happens If the US Uses a Nuclear Weapon on Iran | Robert Pape
University of Chicago professor Robert Pape (Bombing to Win, The Escalation Trap) is back for his weekly read on the U.S.-Iran conflict — and this one goes to a darker place than usual. Pape lays out how Iran is quietly becoming an oil hegemon through the Houthis and Iraqi militias, why the IRGC's t...
The Houthis Just Dragged Europe Into the Iran War
The Houthis just took the entire Red Sea coastline — and it's about to drag Europe into a war it wanted no part of. In ten days, Houthi forces captured Yemen's Red Sea coast, seized the strait's key islands, and helped force the shutdown of Saudi Arabia's emergency oil pipeline — closing the second ...
The Neuroscience of Suicidal Ideation: Why the Brain Can't See a Way Out
What's actually happening in someone's brain in the moments before they decide to end their life? Lindsey Gray, Suicide Prevention Manager at Wounded Warrior Project, breaks down the neuroscience — why the prefrontal cortex goes offline, why the amygdala floods the system with threat signals, and wh...
October 7 Was “A Reenactment,” Not a Rupture | Robert Malley
Rob Malley has spent three decades inside the peace process he now argues was never built to succeed. He negotiated at Camp David under President Clinton, led Obama's Iran nuclear negotiations that produced the JCPOA, served as Biden's Special Envoy for Iran, and ran the International Crisis Group. ...
Iran Now Controls the Red Sea's Only Oil Bypass | Robert Pape
The Houthis have seized control of the Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait — and with the US Navy already stretched thin in the Strait of Hormuz, there's no clear path to reopening it. Professor Robert Pape returns to break down how we got here: Iran's methodical, multi-pronged campaign to choke of...
Bin Laden Lost the War. America is Still Paying the Price
Twenty-five years after 9/11, one question still doesn't have a clean answer: did Osama bin Laden actually win? In this solo episode, Scott Kelly goes goal-by-goal through what bin Laden said he wanted — U.S. troops out of Saudi Arabia, an end to support for Israel, toppled Arab regimes, a global ca...
He Wanted to Die. Surviving Changed Everything
Zach Tidwell enlisted in the Marine Corps wanting to go to war — and missed it. What followed was an affair, a traumatic brain injury, and a depression he refused to talk about, convinced he could just decide his way through it the same way he'd decided his way through infantry training. In March 20...
The Iran War Exposed America’s Real Weakness | Sean O’Keefe
Sean O'Keefe returns for his third appearance on the show — and this time, he's not pulling punches. Three months into the war with Iran, the former Secretary of the Navy and NASA Administrator makes the case that nobody in Washington can articulate what winning actually looks like. Not the White Ho...