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This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes, Public Service Fellow Julia Curlee, and Contributing Editor Alex Zerden to talk through the week’s big news in national security, including:
“Skynet’s the Limit.” A Russian drone guided entirely by onboard artificial intelligence—with no human directing the final strike—appears to have killed three civilians at a gas station in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, on July 6, in what experts believe may be the first killings carried out by a fully autonomous Russian weapon. As both armies race toward greater battlefield autonomy—driven in part by electronic warfare that jams the radio links piloted drones rely on—the strike marks a threshold that arms-control experts have long warned about: machines, not people, deciding whom to kill. What do we make of this development, and what does it mean for the laws of war?
“Rial Talk.” Earlier this week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent unveiled a new round of sanctions on Iran and what he called its “enablers,” branding the campaign “Operation Economic Outcast” and promising an “economic D-Day” aimed at severing every financial lifeline that sustains the regime. The measures target a global network of brokers, shadow-fleet vessels, and firms moving Iranian oil, along with Tehran’s access to digital assets, gold, aviation, and shipping—though Bessent conspicuously held back the biggest penalties on some major trading partners like China, favoring “quiet diplomacy” instead. The announcement lands with Iran’s currency at record lows and the U.S.-Iran war grinding into its sixth month after a ceasefire window lapsed. Is maximum economic pressure a substitute for military force—and will it actually work?
“Sorry, Not Sorry.” Trade talks between Washington and Ottawa collapsed late last week, and at the stroke of midnight on Aug. 21st, President Trump’s 50% tariffs on roughly $20 billion in Canadian goods—everything from hockey equipment and furniture to liquor and clothing—took effect. Prime Minister Mark Carney, who blamed the breakdown on last-minute “uneconomic” and “unfair” U.S. demands, vowed to match the tariffs “dollar for dollar” with his own duties on U.S. steel, dairy, appliances, and electronics starting September 8, and went so far as to say Canada is “at war” after being “attacked.” With the future of the USMCA free-trade pact suddenly in doubt, how did two of the world’s closest trading partners get here, and where does the escalation go next?
In object lessons, Ben is not giving away his shot to call out the Daily Caller on not delivering on its headline. Julia is reminding us of her love of all things Lawfare. Scott reminds us that the world may never be the same after seeing it through the eyes of a poet. And Alex is bobbing his head to his reimagining of Bombs Over Baghdad.
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This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Alan Rozenshtein, Michael Feinberg, and Loren Voss to talk through the week’s big news in national security, including:
“Under Pressure.” Over the past two weeks, hackers have breached the industrial control systems of water and wastewater utilities in at least seven states, prompting an urgent joint warning from federal agencies. The intruders locked operators out of internet-connected control devices, changed passwords, and in some cases caused water-pressure drops and flooding, forcing utilities to switch to manual operation and issue boil-water notices. The attacks came just days after federal agencies renewed their warning about Iranian-affiliated cyber activity targeting U.S. critical infrastructure amidst the ongoing war with Iran—though the administration has not formally attributed them, and President Trump has publicly waved off the Iran theory. How worried should we be about the security of our critical infrastructure? And what, if anything, can Washington actually do about it?
“The Shawshank Resumption.” Last week, at the annual Black Hat cybersecurity conference, OpenAI provided a detailed look into the recent high-profile cybersecurity incident in which an AI model being stress-tested by OpenAI broke out of its evaluation sandbox, found its way onto the open internet through a zero-day vulnerability, and hacked its way into the systems of the machine learning platform Hugging Face—apparently in an effort to cheat on the very security test it was being given by stealing the answer key. The account they gave was an extraordinary one, as it described dozens of agents using various frontier and non-frontier models collaborating across a secret messageboard they established to hack an internal software system to access the outside internet—and then doing it again, this time successfully, after OpenAI caught and deleted their first attempt. What does this level of collaboration and persistence mean for the future of cybersecurity? And what can anyone do about it?
“Apocalypse Mow.” This week marks one year since President Trump deployed the National Guard to Washington, D.C., as part of his “Make DC Safe and Beautiful” initiative. Twelve months and nearly 10,000 troops later, the deployment has become a normalized fixture: armed Guard members patrol the National Mall, Metro stations, and neighborhoods, while also picking up trash, spreading mulch, and pruning trees. The Pentagon now projects the mission—which Trump has authorized through Inauguration Day 2029—will cost an additional $1.4 billion. But a year in, it remains genuinely unclear what these troops are actually doing, and whether much of it counts as law enforcement at all. What has the deployment accomplished? And what does its open-ended normalization mean for the use of the military at home?
In object lessons, Mike is descending into madness; that is, the Dark Horse Comics manga adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness.” Alan is being sucked into the black hole of binge reading “The Expanse” novel series (and then Alan and Scott nerd out to sci-fi generally; bear with it). Scott is voting “yea” on playing “Yea or Nay” today. And Loren is diving into handwritten primary source documents, and you can, too!
Note: We'll be on vacation next week, so be on the lookout for our next episode on August 27!
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This week, Scott sat down with his colleagues Lawfare Executive Editor Natalie Orpett, Lawfare Public Service Fellow Julia Curlee, and Lawfare Contributing Editor and Vice President of Research, Security and Defense at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs Ariane Tabatabai, to talk through the week’s big national security news stories, including:
“Lateral Thinking.” Five months into Operation Epic Fury, the U.S.-Iran war has flared back to life—and, more importantly, spread outward. Over the past two weeks, the fighting has jumped to new countries, actors, and domains in a textbook case of “horizontal escalation”: U.S. and Saudi jets opened a new front by striking Iranian-backed militias inside Iraq; Iran-aligned forces battered Kuwait’s water and power infrastructure and Saudi oil facilities, with the Houthis apparently firing from Iraqi soil; and a wave of Iran-linked cyberattacks hit water utilities here at home. Then last Friday, President Trump threatened what he called the biggest attack since World War II—before abruptly calling it off, with talks over reopening the Strait of Hormuz now said to be back on. What does this expanding aperture mean for the future of the Iran War?
“Squatter’s Rights.” The intelligence community has a new leader—sort of. On July 28, the Senate confirmed Jay Clayton, the former SEC chair and Trump’s U.S. attorney in Manhattan, as Director of National Intelligence on a 51-47 party-line vote, ending the rocky acting tenure of housing chief Bill Pulte. But in a nearly unheard-of move, the White House left Clayton unsworn for a week while Pulte stayed on—using the extra days to run a fifth round of purges at an agency he’d already cut nearly in half—before Clayton was finally sworn in this Monday. The saga has reignited the fight over Section 702 surveillance authorities, which have now lapsed, and raised pointed legal questions about whether Pulte had any authority to keep acting at all. Where does the ODNI go from here, and what does it mean for U.S. national security?
“Weiss Guys.” A sprawling New York Times investigation published over the weekend pulls back the curtain on how Paul, Weiss—the first elite law firm to cut a deal with the Trump administration back in early 2025 to escape a punishing executive order—actually made that fateful decision. The reporting details how then-chairman Brad Karp enlisted Patriots owner Robert Kraft to reach Trump, agreed to $40 million in pro bono work and to drop the firm’s DEI policies, and was blindsided when Trump spun the deal his own way online. It lands after a wave of star litigators fled the firm, Karp’s own ouster over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, and fresh revelations about the quiet, multimillion-dollar exit of the firm’s first openly transgender partner. What has this capitulation (if that’s what to call it) cost Paul, Weiss? And what lessons should other law firms—and the legal community as a whole—draw?
In object lessons, Ari has a message for competitive spouses: build something together and try Cozy Stickerville. Julia has a message for Secretary Hegseth with her 1950’s CIA poster: “ We Are Looking for a Few Good Women.” Scott has a message for the makers of By Jove to bring back a childhood classic. And Natalie has a message for litigators navigating uncertain waters: she sees you and appreciates you.
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This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Benjamin Wittes, Tyler McBrien, Anastasiia Lapatina, and Kevin Frazier to talk through a couple of the week’s big national security news stories, including:
“Kyiv Peace a Chance.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was in the Oval Office on Tuesday for closed-door talks with President Trump, roughly 17 months after their first Oval Office meeting collapsed into a televised shouting match. But this meeting went rather differently. Zelensky said the two discussed licensing Ukrainian production of Patriot interceptors, and pressed the case for reinvigorating diplomacy—and hours later, after both men attended the funeral of the late Senator Lindsey Graham, the Senate voted 86-12 to advance a Russia and Iran sanctions bill now bearing Graham's name. Behind the scenes, Washington and Kyiv have been quietly assembling a new package of proposals for Moscow built around a partial ceasefire. Is there anything real behind this renewed diplomatic push? And what, if anything, has changed that might make the Kremlin say yes?
“Thinking Outside the Box.” Last week, Open AI and the AI hosting platform Hugging Face confirmed that, while being run through an offensive cyber benchmark with their safety refusals switched off, GPT-5.6 Sol and a more capable unreleased OpenAI model escaped their supposedly isolated sandbox through a zero-day in a package installer, reached the open internet, and hacked Hugging Face's production database to steal the answer key to a test they were taking. It is the first publicly confirmed case of an AI system executing a sophisticated, multi-stage cyberattack against a third party on its own initiative. What does the incident tell us about how well anyone can control frontier models? And who should be on the hook when a model goes rogue?
We were going to cover a third topic but simply ran out of time!
In object lessons, Tyler is revisiting a renewed classic with the 4k restoration of the 1986 documentary, “Sherman’s March: A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation.” Nastya returns to George Orwell’s “Homage to Catalonia,” as a reminder that both physical and information warfare are not unique to our time. Ben enlists an old friend—Claude—to investigate one of American law's enduring mysteries: how many federal crimes actually exist. Kevin is celebrating student-led conversations on how AI should be governed. And Scott revisits Max Weber on the nature of science while also celebrating emojis other than the hugging face.
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This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Public Service Fellow Julia Curlee and Senior Editors Eric Columbus and Molly Roberts to talk through the week’s big news in national security, including:
“The Manchurian Candidates.” In a primetime address to the nation last Thursday, July 16, President Trump declassified a trove of intelligence documents that he claimed prove America’s elections are dangerously vulnerable to foreign interference—particularly by China—and revived his long-standing, evidence-free assertions that the 2020 election was “rigged” against him. He ordered the Justice Department to prosecute those he claims were involved. But intelligence officials past and present, as well as the documents themselves, draw a sharp line between foreign influence campaigns and actual interference with vote counts—and none of the material supports the claim that any votes were changed. What is actually in the documents that President Trump has declassified? And what does his speech tell us about his intentions for the midterm elections and the 2028 elections beyond?
“Leak and Ye Shall Find.” The Trump administration has dramatically escalated its campaign against leakers, culminating in grand jury subpoenas served to New York Times journalists, some at their homes, over their reporting on security concerns relating to the new Qatari-gifted Air Force One. The Pentagon and the Justice Department have stood up a joint task force to “identify and prosecute leakers,” and the New York Times is now fighting the subpoenas in court, calling them an attempt to intimidate the press that treads on First Amendment rights. The administration insists that reporters aren’t the targets—only the people who actually leaked—and said that the reporters are simply witnesses. How much legal jeopardy do the reporters—and the media more broadly—actually face? And is this a genuine national security effort or an assault on press freedom?
“Advise and Dissent.” Two of the administration’s most consequential nominees—Jay Clayton, who has been nominated as Director of National Intelligence, and Todd Blanche, who has been nominated as Attorney General—sat for their Senate confirmation hearings last week. Clayton, currently U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, repeatedly declined to say that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, while Blanche was grilled over the now-“dead” anti-weaponization fund, the Epstein files, and the very NYT subpoenas he authorized. Both face unexpectedly narrow paths to confirmation, complicated by the sudden death of Sen. Lindsey Graham. What did we learn from the hearings? And what are each nominee’s prospects for confirmation?
In object lessons, Julia strums to the strifes it seems we can’t escape. Eric compliments the coordinated collection of compost. Scott salutes Mr. The Frog and friends who are back on the small screen (and then gets scooped on another Muppet story). And Molly marvels at one of her many military morale patches.
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