FDD Events Podcast

The Risks Ahead for Ukraine

As NATO Foreign Ministers convene and ceasefire negotiations remain unresolved, the state of Ukraine's military — its resilience, its vulnerabilities, and its strategic horizon — demands sober assessment from those who have seen it firsthand. RADM (Ret.) Mark Montgomery just completed two weeks in Ukraine, meeting with senior intelligence and armed forces leaders in Kyiv and Kharkiv, conducting pro-bono training with Ukrainian military units, and participating in an influence operations conference. His observations arrive at a moment when U.S. policy decisions are actively reshaping the conditions under which Ukraine fights.

Previewing the Trump-Xi Summit

As President Trump prepares to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping, the summit arrives not as a diplomatic breakthrough but as a carefully managed pause in an accelerating strategic competition. FDD Senior Fellow Craig Singleton framed the meeting as a continuation of last fall's tactical trade truce — "stalemate with a stage" — in which both sides are protecting the trade and tariff lane while continuing to apply pressure everywhere else. Expected deliverables remain narrow by design: agricultural purchases, Boeing orders, and a Board of Trade mechanism to separate lower-risk commerce from sensitive technology sectors. Elaine Dezenski, senior director of FDD's Center on Economic and Financial Power, identified China's dollar dependency as its structural Achilles heel and flagged the fentanyl front as largely unresolved, with roughly 97% of Chinese precursor chemical manufacturers now accepting cryptocurrency, shifting money flows beyond the reach of regulated financial institutions. On Iran, she noted Beijing's dual-track posture: publicly ordering Chinese firms to defy U.S. sanctions on Iranian refineries while quietly directing its largest banks to suspend new loans to those same entities. RADM (Ret.) Mark Montgomery, senior director of FDD's Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation, identified Taiwan as the summit's highest-risk variable, warning that any restraint on foreign military sales would be deeply damaging given a U.S. arms delivery backlog already exceeding $20 billion. He cautioned equally against any shift in declaratory policy toward opposing rather than merely not supporting Taiwan independence, which Beijing would immediately weaponize in a lawfare campaign against Taipei. Craig Singleton is a senior fellow and senior director of FDD's China Program. Elaine Dezenski is senior director and head of FDD's Center on Economic and Financial Power. RADM (Ret.) Mark Montgomery is a senior fellow and senior director of FDD's Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation. The call was moderated by Joe Dougherty, FDD's senior director of Communications. For more, check out: https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2026/05/07/previewing-the-trump-xi-summit/ [https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2026/05/07/previewing-the-trump-xi-summit/]

AI on the Front Line: Lessons from the Iran Conflict

The conflict in Iran reveals urgent lessons about AI as a weapon of war and statecraft. Led by one of Washington's top experts on Iranian strategy, military doctrine, and the IRGC, this panel provides an assessment of how the Iranian regime has used autonomous systems and machine learning to expand its reach; how AI tools have supercharged propaganda campaigns and cyber-enabled information warfare; and in the financial realm, how emerging technologies have enabled large-scale fraud and illicit funding of Tehran's proxies. What does the Iranian regime's battlefield experimentation reveal? And how can the policy, technical, and intelligence communities respond? To explore these questions and more, join Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior director of FDD's Iran Program; Max Lesser, senior analyst on emerging threats at FDD’s Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation (CCTI); and Max Meizlish, research fellow at FDD's the Center on Economic and Financial Power (CEFP), at the Special Competitive Studies Project's AI+ Expo. For more, check out: https://www.fdd.org/events/2026/05/06/ai-on-the-front-line-lessons-from-the-iran-conflict/ [https://www.fdd.org/events/2026/05/06/ai-on-the-front-line-lessons-from-the-iran-conflict/]

A Gameplan for American Economic Security

Join Elaine Dezenski, CEFP senior director and head; Josh Birenbaum, CEFP deputy director; and Thomas Hill, as they break down a forthcoming CEFP memo, ‘A Gameplan for American Economic Security.’ This comprehensive and actionable economic security framework articulates how the United States can strengthen alliances, reinforce market transparency and accountability, and defend against growing economic coercion from adversarial states exploiting market vulnerabilities. The memo offers policymakers and the private sector new ways of addressing emerging economic and national security threats and opportunities.  The conversation will begin with introductory remarks by Juan C. Zarate, CEFP chairman, and is moderated by the Washington Post's Warren P. Strobel. For more, check out: https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2026/05/04/a-gameplan-for-american-economic-security-supercharging-u-s-statecraft-from-an-economic-pentagon-to-the-near-global-economy/ [https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2026/05/04/a-gameplan-for-american-economic-security-supercharging-u-s-statecraft-from-an-economic-pentagon-to-the-near-global-economy/]

The Ramifications of the UAE Leaving OPEC

The UAE's decision to exit OPEC is not a procedural footnote — it is a structural rupture in the cartel that has shaped global energy markets and constrained American foreign policy for decades. The UAE was OPEC's third-largest producer, and its departure arrives on the heels of prior defections and years of Saudi unilateralism that have steadily hollowed out the cartel's ability to coordinate production and move prices. What remains of OPEC is a diminished institution whose most vulnerable member, Iran, will depend heavily on elevated oil prices to fund post-conflict reconstruction. But the cartel that once enforced that pricing floor is fracturing — and the UAE’s exit accelerates that fracture. That is not a coincidence. It is a strategic opportunity. The UAE's exit is inseparable from the broader regional realignment triggered by Iran's retaliatory attacks against its neighbors and decision to close the Strait of Hormuz. Those actions drove the UAE toward closer alignment with the United States and away from any institutional arrangement that seats it alongside its chief antagonist. Leaving OPEC allows Abu Dhabi to pump freely, erodes the pricing floor Tehran requires, and adds economic pressure to nuclear negotiations at a moment when Iran's financial position is already precarious. For the UAE, this was not a difficult calculation. The implications extend well beyond the Gulf. OPEC's core function has always been coordinating production cuts to artificially prop up the price of oil — a mechanism that has imposed real costs on American consumers and handed leverage to adversarial petrostate regimes for generations. That function requires internal cohesion OPEC no longer has. The question now is not whether the cartel can recover its influence, but whether the United States is prepared to openly welcome its decline and shape what comes next. To walk journalists through the geopolitical, economic, and energy security dimensions of the UAE's exit, FDD hosts three experts: Richard Goldberg, senior advisor and head of FDD's Energy and National Security Program, who previously served on the White House National Energy Dominance Council and the NSC's Iran directorate; Elaine K. Dezenski, senior director and head of FDD's Center on Economic and Financial Power, an expert on economic statecraft, illicit finance, and supply chain resilience; and Bernard Haykel, senior fellow and Princeton professor of Near Eastern Studies. The discussion is moderated by Joe Dougherty, FDD's senior director of Communications. For more, check out: https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2026/04/29/the-ramifications-of-the-uae-leaving-opec/ [https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2026/04/29/the-ramifications-of-the-uae-leaving-opec/]