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This is a second part of the conversation with Sarah Paine, a professor of History and Grand Strategy at the U.S. Naval War College. You can find the first part on Youtube and other podcasting platforms.

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This is a conversation with Zineb Riboua, a Middle East expert and a research fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East - about the ongoing conflict between Israel and Iran. We talk about what are really the Israeli goals with this operation, whether they can succeed in completely destroying Iranian nuclear weapons ambitions or how much damage they already did.

About what has been the role of the Trump administration and whether Trump was in on this from the start or if he’s now just trying to take credit - whether Israel is really pursuing a regime change and how likely that is or how vulnerable is Iran to a domestic coup, revolution and what the most likely scenarios are. And about much, much more.

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This is a conversation with Christopher Kirschoff. Chris founded and led the Defense Innovation Unit, also known as Unit X - an organisation within the Pentagon tasked with finding the most innovative emerging technology - anything from flying cars to microsatellites - and implementing it into the military.

That makes him a unique person to talk to about where this innovation is going but also about why is it often so hard for governments to keep up with pace of technology and why organisations like governments and militaries often fight against innovation rather than embracing it - or how do the United States, Europe, China or Russia compare in their ability to innovate and who’s winning the new tech race of today.

The theory goes: China’s in decline, so if it ever wants to invade Taiwan, it has to do it soon.

But what if that theory depends on the wrong assumption?

And who does Beijing actually see as the declining power?

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There’s probably no other bilateral relationship in global politics today that is as significant—and draws as much speculation—as the partnership between Russia and China. Together, these two countries might be capable of reshaping the global order, challenging the U.S. dominance, and influencing almost every global geopolitical issue. But there's still a lot of questions about what actually drives their cooperation, how deep or shallow their partnership truly is, and whether it’s more likely to grow even closer or fall apart in the future. And so in this conversation, I speak with Elizabeth Wishnick, an expert on Sino-Russian relations and a researcher at the Center for Naval Analyses and at Columbia University. 

I try to understand how do the two countries actually see each other: what does China think about the war in Ukraine, whether Russia was expecting more help from China in the war, what would Russia do in case of a war over Taiwan, or  whether the West can succeed in driving a wedge between them and much more.

The age of human infantry is slowly inching to its end. And it's closer than you might think.

Ukraine is already running drone-only assaults. Commercial sector is quickly ramping up development and production of sophisticated humanoid robots. And when the next major war breaks out, the first thing to disappear might be human soldiers on the front line.

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With the war in Ukraine still ongoing, it’s not surprising that conventional warfare usually dominates the headlines but underneath this traditional battlefield there are other types of conflict taking place as well that are a lot more quiet but just as consequential. From covert influence operations, proxy militias to economic pressure and cyberattacks, countries like Iran, Russia, and China have become extremely good at waging wars that don't look like wars in the traditional sense. But that can be just as powerful and sometimes even more effective. And while this kind of warfare isn’t new, it feels like we’ve entered a golden age of it.

And so in this conversation, I spoke with Seth Jones, Director of the International Security Program at CSIS, and one of the leading experts on irregular warfare on the different tactics and strategies of the three leading hybrid warfare powers —Iran, Russia, and China. We discuss the strengths and vulnerabilities of each country's approach, the effectiveness of their influence operations, why the U.S. seems to lag behind in this area or what role hybrid warfare plays in the war in Ukraine and much more.

Viktor Orbán, Hungary's Prime Minister, has a big problem.

After dominating Hungary for the past 15 years, unchallenged, unbothered, and admired by populists everywhere, polls now show that he’s losing to a new opponent, with elections less than a year away.

And it looks like his challenger found a strategy that - if successful - many European politicians might be tempted to try as well.

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In the current war in Ukraine, there is likely no other topic that would be both so important and so wildly misunderstood as the issue of the Russian economy. The importance is quite obvious - without a functioning economy, Russia wouldn't be able to finance the war. But in terms of how the economy is actually doing and how will it do in the future, that’s much less clear - and the views range from Russian economy being an unstoppable juggernaut with sanctions only making it stronger to the Russian economy collapsing since the first day of the war - neither of which are actually accurate. After all, most people are not economists and this is largely an unprecedented situation.

And so, I decided to speak with someone who both knows more about this than anyone else and who is able to give a very pragmatic and objective view of where we stand: an expert on the Russian economy Janis Kluge, from the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. And so in this conversation, we talk about how the Russian economy is actually doing. How long can Russia actually afford to finance the war, what kind of economic damage it would take to force to rethink its plan for Ukraine and whether that is likely to happen, whether the Russian economy is overheating and what does that really mean or what would happen if the war ends and the money stops flowing into the economy - and whether the Russian government can afford that.