Global Power Shifts

A seven-group coalition, including the TPLF, has declared war on Abiy Ahmed's government. Tigrayan forces have seized regional airports and are pushing toward the Djibouti trade corridor. Addis Ababa has accused Eritrea, Egypt and Sudan of backing the alliance.Cameron Hudson spent years inside the CIA's Africa directorate and later served as Chief of Staff to the US Special Envoys for Sudan. He now runs 54 Advisors and called the collapse of the Pretoria peace deal months before it happened.Jim Stenman sat down with him about a week into the fighting to ask who gains if Ethiopia breaks apart and whether Washington has any leverage left. They also get into whether Abiy still controls the country he governs.00:00 Cold Open00:29 Welcome Back to Global Power Shifts01:22 A Week Into the Fighting03:02 Why the Pretoria Agreement Finally Broke07:02 The Ingredients for a Regional War08:58 Eritrea, Washington and the New Rules of Engagement13:53 Evidence of Egypt and Eritrea's Involvement15:58 Is Abiy Still in Control?18:39 What Leverage Does the West Have Left?22:37 What Cameron Is Watching NextGlobal Power Shifts is a geopolitics podcast hosted by Jim Stenman and Suzanne Kianpour, covering the new multipolar world through conversations with the people who set policy.Watch more: https://jimstenman.com/global-power-shifts/Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1T2CsAK4983mRNmZPfApRyListen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/global-power-shifts/id1791326929#Ethiopia #Tigray #Geopolitics #HornOfAfrica #CIARecorded September 29, 2026.

Washington and Beijing both want a piece of Ethiopia’s massive $12.5 billion Bishoftu airport, but so far, Ethiopian Airlines is the only one actually footing the bill.Originally published on September 15, this is the audio version of Jim Stenman's Horn Horizons article, published before the latest fighting flared up in Tigray.The piece breaks down how Ethiopian Airlines has already poured $3.2 billion of its own equity into land acquisition and resettlement housing, while major lenders like the African Development Bank stay on the sidelines. Then there is the geopolitical tug-of-war: Washington is dangling financing, but with strict conditions regarding Chinese firms, even though Chinese contractors hold a notable share of the shortlisted slots.To unpack all of this, Jim brings together an expert panel:• Sean Mendis (Aviation Analyst)• Mered Fikireyohannes (Addis-based Investment Adviser)• Yufan Huang (Chinese Lending Researcher)• Michael Rubin (Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute)They get into why this mega-project has zero sovereign guarantee, what Washington and Boeing are really after, and the heavy local impacts. This includes the thousands of farmers displaced from their land in Oromia and how global supply chain shifts have impacted regional diesel supplies.Read the full piece on Substack:https://hornhorizons.substack.com/p/bishoftu-airport-financing-us-chinaFollow Horn Horizons on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/horn-horizons-7333815312498200576#GlobalPowerShifts #HornHorizons #Ethiopia #Bishoftu #EthiopianAirlines #Africa

America has never had a second 9/11, and Donald Alway spent over two decades inside the FBI after the attacks trying to keep it that way.

On the 25th anniversary, Suzanne Kianpour and guest co-host Jamie Angus, a former BBC news executive, sit down with the man who was sent from Quantico to the Pentagon after the attacks for what he thought would be four days and stayed 35. He worked the crime scene in New York the following spring, went on to serve in Iraq and Doha and lead the FBI's Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate, and retired as Assistant Director in Charge of the Los Angeles Field Office. He is now Chief Security Officer at Herbalife.

He explains why Europe's returning-fighter problem never took hold in the United States, and what makes a person radicalising alone online harder to stop than a trained cell. He says the FBI never thought it needed a counter-propaganda campaign, and warns that people convicted of terrorism are starting to finish 25-year sentences and may not be on anyone's radar.

Jamie puts Britain's decision to strip Shamima Begum of her citizenship to him, and asks what the Gulf's surveillance-heavy model has bought after this week's Houthi strikes on Saudi Arabia, and whether the Patriot Act should ever be rolled back. Suzanne raises the 170,000 pages of Ground Zero air quality records released by Mayor Zohran Mamdani this week and the turnover at the top of the FBI under Kash Patel. She closes on how a former counterterrorism official sees New York's first Muslim mayor, 25 years on.

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Chapters
00:00 "A four-day trip became 35 days"
00:20 Introduction
01:54 Quantico, the Pentagon and the day everything changed
05:08 The Mamdani air quality documents: "no one would have stayed home"
07:25 Why there has never been a second 9/11
09:18 Radicalised alone, undetected
11:25 Why Europe's returnee problem never reached America
13:03 The IRGC, homegrown plots and terrorists finishing their sentences
16:08 Should foreign fighters be allowed home?
17:13 Shamima Begum and stripping citizenship
19:49 October 7, Gaza and the campuses
21:38 Can America's stance on Israel ever change?
23:32 The ISIS song and why the FBI never ran counter-propaganda
31:25 The Gulf: surveillance, trust and the Houthi strikes
33:44 The Patriot Act, 25 years on
35:50 "You're not in the bureau anymore. What do you really think?"
37:41 Kash Patel and the turnover at the top
39:10 Who is left, and the 9/11 museum programme for new agents
41:41 A smaller American footprint in the Middle East
44:22 New York's first Muslim mayor
45:25 Close

A year after Donald Trump pulled the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan into the White House, the peace is holding and wheat is crossing borders sealed for decades, yet the treaty itself remains unsigned. Matthew Bryza, the former US ambassador to Azerbaijan who spent years mediating the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, calls the outcome "a gigantic strategic setback for Russia" and describes the corridor at its center as "promising, nascent, not yet in existence."

He joins Jim Stenman to discuss why Moscow lost its grip on a region it long dominated, how Stalin drew a map designed to perpetuate conflict, what the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity actually is and who will own it, and the Armenian constitutional referendum everything now hangs on, plus how both countries manage Iran next door and where he'd put client money today, including Armenian copper and Azerbaijan's tax-free zone on the Caspian.

Bryza now serves as the Managing Director of Straife Istanbul.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube, and follow #GlobalPowerShifts for more. Full episode list: jimstenman.com/global-power-shifts

Tens of thousands crossed from Morocco into Ceuta on 30 July, the biggest border breach in Europe's history. Verónica Muñoz grew up there. Her dad still lives there alone.

Most of the crossers were young Moroccans hoping for a better life, and the crossings were organized openly on TikTok and WhatsApp. Some drowned off Tarajal beach. Days later most were back in Morocco and the cameras moved on. Verónica joins Jim Stenman and Suzanne Kianpour with the view from inside: her father behind shuttered shops, why "Spanish colony in North Africa" gets 600 years of history wrong, and whether Rabat let it happen. Her answer: "Of course the Moroccan government allowed it."

Also in this episode: Italy's border checks on arrivals from Spain, open talk of suspending an EU member from Schengen, and Pedro Sánchez. He's feuded with Trump, backed Palestine while Morocco allied with Washington and Israel, and legalized 500,000 migrants while the rest of Europe turned right. Now his government is fighting for survival.

Follow Verónica: instagram.com/ajournalistvlogWatch on YouTube: youtube.com/@GlobalPowerShiftsAll episodes: jimstenman.com/global-power-shifts

India is the world's most populous country and a rising power courted by Washington, Moscow, Brussels and the Gulf at once. It is also, in the words of this week's guest, a democracy dying "slowly, quietly." No tanks on the road, no takeover of the TV station. A silent coup.

Josy Joseph has spent thirty years reporting on India's security establishment and its corruption. He is the founder of Confluence Media, co-producer of Black Warrant, the hit Netflix crime series set in Delhi's Tihar prison. His new book, Birth of a Nation, draws on newly declassified archives to tell the story almost nobody outside India knows: how 565 kings and ruling families surrendered their thrones in a matter of months in 1947, what he calls the largest handover of hereditary power in history, and how close India came to breaking apart at birth.

He joins Jim Stenman and Suzanne Kianpour to connect that violent founding to the India of today: why the wound of Partition never healed and still drives the standoff with Pakistan; Gandhi's final defeat, accepted in silence on the backs of five old envelopes; how an estimated four million security and intelligence personnel became political weapons; Hindu nationalism and what it means for India's 200 million Muslims; why foreign investors are pulling back from Modi's India; how Delhi reads Pakistan's new role as mediator of the Iran war; and why, despite everything, he calls this the golden era of Indian investigative journalism.

Josy Joseph is the author of A Feast of Vultures, The Silent Coup (published internationally as How to Subvert a Democracy), and Birth of a Nation.

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Andrew Henderson renounced his US citizenship in 2017. He holds six passports, owns homes on several continents, and runs Nomad Capitalist, the firm built around one line: go where you're treated best.

He joins Jim Stenman with an uncomfortable argument. Countries now compete for capital and talent, American power is fading at the margins, and loyalty to where you were born is a bad trade. He explains where that takes his own money, from land in Cambodia and Paraguay to a bet on Africa, a continent he calls rich in everything except leverage. The conversation runs through exit taxes, the real cost of a second passport, Dubai after the war, the South Caucasus, and whether democracy still delivers.

Listen on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Follow #GlobalPowerShifts for more.

Trump put the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam back on the table at the G7, sitting next to Egypt's President Sisi and framing the dispute around Cairo, even describing his bond with Sisi as a love affair. The US-Ethiopia relationship is warming at the same time, through a Boeing jet deal, financing for Ethiopia's new international airport, and US backing for Abiy against the Tigrayans.

Cameron Hudson, formerly of the CIA, NSC and State Department and now at 54 Advisors and CSIS, joins Jim Stenman to work through whether Washington can be an honest broker on the Nile, why Ethiopia will not negotiate, and how Egypt is trying to isolate Addis. They close on the wider risks across the Horn, including Eritrea, Somaliland's tilt toward Israel, and Somalia's fragmentation.

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If Trump's framework with Iran lands, Tehran's enriched uranium has to go somewhere. Kazakhstan keeps coming up as the credible candidate, with an IAEA uranium bank already on its soil and nearly 40% of the world's uranium production.

Around that question sits a wider shift. Kazakhstan and its Central Asian neighbours are quietly reducing their dependence on Russia, hedging between Moscow and Beijing, and pulling in Gulf and Western capital at scale.

Jim Stenman sits down with Ambassador Daniel Rosenblum, former US Ambassador to Kazakhstan, on uranium, oil routes, Russian leverage and the regional repositioning the West has been slow to notice.

Is the UK lost as a country in 2026? Historian and royal biographer Andrew Lownie joins Jim Stenman and Suzanne Kianpour to take apart a Britain that has burned through six prime ministers in a decade, lost the Queen as its unbroken link to the past, and walked away from Europe with nothing put in its place.

Lownie, author of Entitled, Traitor King and Stalin's Englishman, has spent his career prising open the British establishment's instinct to bury its own secrets — the cover-ups around Prince Andrew, the appointment of Peter Mandelson, the files that quietly stay closed. We start there, then widen out to the bigger question: has Britain become ungovernable, and does it need an honest new story about itself rather than empire nostalgia?

We get into the collapse of the political centre and the Reform surge, why nearly 700,000 people left the UK in a single year — many of them young or wealthy, and many landing here in the Gulf — Poland's economy on track to overtake Britain's, whether the monarchy can survive as "the last unprotected institution," King Charles's soft-power masterclass in Washington, and where a self-described "very minor power" actually fits in a multipolar world.

A serious conversation about national decline, identity and the architecture of British power — told through one of its sharpest observers.

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