Is Washington's rescue of the yen an act of friendship, or a sign that the dollar system itself is beginning to crack? I am joined by economist Michael Hudson to unpack the US intervention to save a collapsing yen and why the official story of "solidarity" masks a far more desperate calculation. Michael explains how the yen's weakness threatens the carry trade and capital inflows the dollar system depends on, why the US chose to sell euros rather than dollars to defend it, and how even long-time dollar bulls like Barry Eichengreen now admit the intervention exposes Washington's growing reluctance to let foreign central banks touch their own reserves. We examine the mounting evidence of dollar fatigue, from the ECB now holding more gold than dollars, to the flood of new Treasury issuance the market must somehow absorb, to a Federal Reserve whose credibility is increasingly in question. Michael argues this is not simply a story about Trump's erratic instincts, but about a financial order that is running out of options.

Is China betraying the world's oppressed nations, or is it playing a longer, harder game than its critics understand? Carlos Martinez, author of The East is Still Red and co-editor of Friends of Socialist China, joins me to confront the charge, common even on parts of the left, that Beijing does far too little for Palestine, Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela. Martinez traces China's foreign policy from the internationalism of Bandung and the Non-Aligned Movement, through its rapprochement with Washington and entry into the world economy, to its present balancing act between principled solidarity and hard-nosed realism. We examine why China rejects unilateral sanctions even against Israel, why its UN vetoes on Gaza are strategy rather than betrayal, and why the more urgent question isn't what China should be doing, but what the rest of us should.

Are nuclear war and climate catastrophe two separate crises, or one civilizational threat with two faces? I'm joined by Ivana Nikolić Hughes to discuss why both dangers have faded into public apathy even as they grow more acute. Ivana walks through the isotope evidence that traces rising CO2 directly to fossil fuels, and the physics of nuclear winter, where soot from even a regional nuclear war could block sunlight and collapse global food production for years. We connect both threats to the same underlying driver: capitalism's demand for endless growth, invoking the idea of the "Capitalocene" as a more honest name than the Anthropocene. We close by contrasting the West's refusal to rein in its capitalist class with China's state-led investment in renewable energy, as a sign these crises are still solvable.

Is the AI boom just the latest chapter in a stock market story that was already fiction? I'm joined by Warwick Powell to trace the line from China's Kimi and DeepSeek shock through what I've called America's "sci-fi/fin-fi" model — science fiction promises like AGI dressed up to justify financial fiction, a bubble with roots in the dot-com crash and Reagan's fabricated Star Wars program. Warwick explains how venture capital functions as a closed, rule-bound game for insiders, how Silicon Valley Bank behaved more like a members' club than a bank, and how decades of buybacks and privatised monopolies have concentrated stock ownership until 93% of market value sits with just 10% of Americans. We contrast this with China's state-driven finance system and its decades-long investment in literacy and human capital.

Is Trump's Iran war a bluff, or has the empire simply run out of moves? Professor Seyed Mohammad Marandi, Iranian political analyst, joins me to explain why each retreat only strengthens Iran, whose indigenous defense doctrine and Axis of Resistance have outmatched a US military still fighting last century's wars, leaving Gulf assets battered and the initiative, per the Financial Times, now with Tehran. Professor Marandi dismantles the myth of Western superiority, upheld only by imperial elites as Western publics turn against these wars, and traces how Washington's own aggression has pushed Iran, Russia, and China closer together.

Did Nicaragua really just abolish elections, as headlines from the New York Times to the BBC to the UN claimed last week? I am joined by journalist Ben Norton, host of the Geopolitical Economy Report YouTube channel, and fresh from Managua's 47th anniversary celebrations of the Sandinista Revolution, to separate fact from a deliberately distorted quote. Ben explains that Co-President Daniel Ortega's speech, stripped of context, was not a renunciation of elections but a sovereign measure barring foreign-funded parties from contesting them, following the stolen election in Honduras and Gustavo Petro's accusations of US-Israeli interference in Colombia. We trace this back through the Contra war and neoliberal privatisations to Nicaragua's present accomplishments like free healthcare and education, low crime, and Chinese-backed infrastructure, as Marco Rubio names Nicaragua next in line after Venezuela and Cuba.

Do the Democrats and Republicans really differ, or are they two wings of the same corporate machine? I am joined by economist Michael Hudson to examine why no progress can be made for American wage earners until the whole electoral system is changed. Michael Hudson argues that the DNC's dependence on Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and AIPAC financing has made it as captured by capital as the Republicans it claims to oppose, a capture traceable to the Clinton-era abandonment of the working class and the sidelining of Bernie Sanders. The coming midterms, they argue, are shaping up as a civil war within the Democratic establishment between an emboldened democratic-socialist left and an old guard that would rather lose with a corporate centrist than win with a candidate beholden to ordinary voters.

Is India's youth uprising the beginning of the end for Modi's twelve-year rule? I am joined by Rohit Azad, economist at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Utkarsh Bhardwaj, Delhi-based activist and former Vice President of the Students Federation of India, Delhi, both of whom have been on the ground throughout the protests, to examine the true scale and character of the movement now sweeping India. Azad and Bhardwaj describe a genuinely decentralized, largely leaderless uprising, sparked by the leak of the CBSE board exam papers and named after a dismissive remark by India's Chief Justice comparing unemployed youth to cockroaches, a label the movement has since turned into a badge of defiance. We examine why the government's repression, from the detention of Sonam Wangchuk to the shutdown of Delhi metro stations, has only swelled the crowds rather than dispersed them, why the protests draw from across the class spectrum rather than being confined to the urban elite, and the underacknowledged role of the organized left in sustaining the movement long before it captured national attention.

Iran's four-month war with the US and Israel has entered a new, lower-intensity phase. But is this exhaustion, or Iran's most decisive victory yet? I am joined by Dr. Bikram Singh Gill, lecturer in international relations at Cardiff University, to examine the strategic reversals defining this war. Gill explains how the campaign meant to disarm Iran has instead disarmed US deterrence itself, with Iran now controlling the underlying equation of force in the Gulf through its command of the Strait of Hormuz. We examine why Gulf states like Saudi Arabia keep gambling on Washington even as that alliance stops serving their own capital's interests, and draw the parallel to European elites trapped in the same losing bet. We close on the popular legitimacy underwriting states like Iran and China, and the uprising now shaking India after decades of jobless neoliberal growth. The West has misread these societies before. Professor Gill argues it's doing so again.

Is Ukraine's battlefield momentum actually pushing Europe closer to war with Russia? I am joined by Dr. Oleg Barabanov, Program Director of the Valdai Discussion Club and Deputy Director of the Eurasian Studies Institute at MGIMO, to examine the true state of the war and why Ukraine's tactical successes may be increasing, not decreasing, the risk of wider escalation. Barabanov describes how intensifying Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian oil refineries have driven up gas prices and disrupted daily life, yet have consolidated Russian public opinion behind the Kremlin rather than eroding it, while Ukraine's own political crisis, triggered by the firing of Mykhailo Fedorov, exposes a parallel struggle between a new generation of drone-focused commanders and the old military establishment. We examine why the drone has rendered classical territorial warfare all but obsolete, replacing large-scale offensives with a grinding war of small infiltration units, and why this same dynamic is playing out in the US war on Iran, where a resurgent Iran has shown that middle powers can now inflict serious costs on great powers who can no longer win quickly or decisively. The West's strategy, Barabanov argues, has been to boil the frog slowly, but the danger is that the frog may yet jump out of the pot.