Diplomacy and International Relations

Saudi Arabia's Grand Mufti has explicitly sanctified the campaign against the Houthis as an "act of devotion," days after Riyadh, Islamabad and Ankara mobilized under their new Mecca/Makkah mutual-defense pact. This is a genuinely under-covered angle: a modern, technocratic Gulf state reaching for classical religious legitimation language exactly when it needs Pakistani and Turkish publics — not just their governments — to accept the costs of a wider war. 

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Danish officials are calling this a diplomatic success, not a retreat and the signed text backs them up more than the "permanent US control" headlines suggested: no annexation, sovereignty and Greenlandic self-determination explicitly preserved, environmental and traditional-livelihood protections written in (inherited from the 2004 Igaliku Agreement, now strengthened), and for the first time Washington has put its name to a formal, if NATO-gated, path to Greenlandic independence. The episode argues Denmark got the substance of what Trump was threatening to take by force, without the coercion, and asks what that says about the real balance of leverage between a small, alliance-embedded state and an erratic superpower.

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A new Vatican document, "A Journey of Hope," marks 60 years of Catholic-Jewish dialogue since Nostra Aetate — and admits, in careful diplomatic language, that the war in Gaza has strained that relationship more than anything since 1965. Meanwhile Gaza's only Catholic parish just reopened its school for 1,000 children with no desks.

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Religion is being used as a tool in geopolitics, and have since 9/11 25 years ago.

Listen in and subsribe.

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Trump has doubled down on acquiring Greenland, NATO's Rutte has conceded he "has a point" on Arctic security, and a Greenlandic self-government report on independence alternatives is due by year's end.

This episode goes beyond the headlines into what sovereignty actually means when a great power treats a NATO ally's territory as a bargaining chip.If you like what you hear please follow me on Substack and Instagram for more content.

In this episode I have found sources about the visit by the Vatican's foreign minister to Moscow. Talks circled around Ukraine.

At the same time high level officials from CIA was in town.

Listen in and get a grip on what is going on. Can the Church move the negotiations in a way that the US and EU haven't been able to?

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When 140 ships vanished from the Strait of Hormuz within days, it wasn't warfare that shut the route down — it was the insurance market. This episode traces the collapse of the Islamabad memorandum between the US and Iran, the asymmetric American escalation that followed, and how Iran has since stood up its own governing body, the Persian Gulf Strait Authority, charging tolls of up to $2 million per transit — settled in Chinese yuan to sidestep US sanctions. We examine Oman's role as broker between Tehran and Washington, the parallels to Danish mediation diplomacy during the Oslo process, and the legal questions UNCLOS raises when a strait starts behaving like a border. Is this the birth of a new regional security order, or the first sign of a privatized ocean?

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Millions of people in Bamako are living without power, without fuel, without open roads out of the city. A coalition of insurgents has encircled Mali's capital and is strangling it economically — and almost no one in Western media is reporting it.

In this episode we trace how a rural insurgency in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger became a full-blown urban siege; why the region's military juntas tore up their alliance with France and the West and replaced it with Russia's Africa Corps; and why that trade has produced more civilian deaths at the hands of the state than at the hands of the jihadists it was hired to fight. We also ask a harder question: why does this war — nearly 10,000 dead in a year — barely register in the outlets that decide what counts as news?

This is the war nobody is talking about. It's time someone did.

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In this episode, we analyse the tensing geopolitical situation over Greenland. We do a review of the American demand for control, the threats of punitive tariffs against European allies, and Denmark’s military response.

Hear about the build-up of the Danish defense, the deployment of conscripts as a strategic ‘stumbling block’ and the EU’s countermeasures. Finally, we take a look at the complicated agreement from Davos and ask: What does this crisis mean for Greenland’s sovereignty and future NATO cooperation?

Listen in as we go another route than most coverage of the Hormuz crisis and the Turkey-Pakistan-Saudi defence pact treats it as pure realpolitik. But Shia-Sunni dynamics, Iran's revolutionary-Islamic self-conception, and the religious legitimacy stakes for Gulf monarchies are doing real work underneath the "interests" language. That is what we will look at now.

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