July 18 – Will the Capture of a Mexican Drug Lord Provoke a Bloody Backlash?; Putin Jails a Potential Rival; Washington Dithers While Syria Burns

Full Program

Part 1

We begin and go to Mexico City to speak with veteran correspondent Dudley Althaus the senior correspondent in Mexico for Global Post where he has an article “Mexico’s Zetas boss nabbed. Cue the brutal backlash”. We discuss the capture of one of Mexico’s most wanted men and whether this will spur the rival Sinaloa Cartel to seize control of the Zetas’ drug smuggling routes into the United States.

Part 2

Then we speak with Ambassador Steven Pifer, an expert on Russia at the Brookings Institution who served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director of Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia at the National Security Council. We discuss the five year jail sentence of Russia’s charismatic young anti-corruption crusader Alexei Navalny who Putin is afraid could be a potential opposition leader so is railroading him on trumped up charges to prevent Navalny from running for mayor of Moscow.

Part 3

Then finally, with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs acknowledging today that “currently the tide seems to have shifted in Assad’s favor” in Syria, we look into calls from key Senators who are pressuring Obama to use force to defeat Assad as the Syrian opposition loses ground and shows deepening signs of division. Henri Barkey, who served as a member of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff on the Middle East, the Eastern Mediterranean and Intelligence, joins to assess the increasingly bloody stalemate that has the U.S and its allies dithering while Syria burns.