May 31 - The Untimely Death of American Leadership; Trump to Allow Insurance Companies to Drop Contraception Mandate; Diplomats Desert Afghanistan Following Bombing Likely Directed By Pakistan

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the apparent intention of the Trump Administration to pull out of the 195-nation Paris Accords to deal with global climate change, leaving the U.S. in the company of the only other holdouts in the world, Syria and Nicaragua. Jody Freeman the Archibald Cox Professor at Harvard Law School and the founding director of the Law School’s Environmental Law and Policy Program who served as Counselor for Energy in the Obama White House, joins us. We will discuss this nail in the coffin for America’s global leadership since World War 11 now coming to an end as China and the European Union vow to step up and accelerate their effort to reduce CO2 emissions causing climate change. And while the once-respected United States is fast becoming an unpredictable, unreliable and even dangerous player on the world stage, we assess how the rest of the world will move ahead without the U.S. and whether Trump’s actions will in any way slow innovation and technological change underway to move us to clean and renewable energy.

Part 2

Then we look into another planned reversal by Trump as this unpopular president intends to kill the popular birth control coverage inviting insurance companies to opt out of the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that requires employers to cover cost-free contraception in their health insurance plans. Gretchen Borchelt, the Vice President for Reproductive Rights and Health at the National Women’s Law Center joins us to discuss how the religious and moral objections of a minority will now trump the rights of a majority in terms of access to reproductive health care.  

Part 3

Then finally we analyze the impact of the huge explosion in front of the German and Turkish embassies  in Kabul that killed 90 and wounded hundreds in a terrorist act that the Taliban insist they had no part in. Thomas Barfield, the President of the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies whose office in Kabul suffered damage, joins us to discuss the exodus of diplomatic personnel underway that is a no-confidence vote in Afghanistan’s weak government and the likelihood that Pakistan is behind yet another act of destabilization.