For the first time in nearly four years of war, the U.S. has taken direct aim at the beating heart of Russia’s economy: its oil exports.

The Trump administration’s new sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil, Russia’s two biggest energy companies, block both American and foreign firms from doing business with them. In practical terms, that means any bank or corporation that wants access to U.S. markets now has to choose—us or them.

It’s a major escalation. With these measures, over 75% of Russia’s oil exports are now under Western sanctions. The move comes after months of stalled diplomacy, as Trump reportedly grew frustrated with Putin’s refusal to strike a peace deal in Ukraine. After trying the carrot, he’s finally reached for the stick.

The timing matters. Russia’s finances are starting to buckle. Its once-strong energy revenues are down sharply, its budget deficit is ballooning, and its vaunted “rainy day” sovereign wealth fund has dwindled from hundreds of billions to around $50 billion. The war has turned into a treadmill of attrition—territorially, militarily, and financially—and Moscow is running out of runway.

Unlike the Iraq or Iran sanctions of past decades, these aren’t meant to destroy an economy overnight. They’re designed to bleed it slowly. Russia can still sell oil—to China, India, and a few others—but only at steep discounts and in currencies it doesn’t want, like yuan and rupees. The dollar system, centered on SWIFT and U.S. clearinghouses, still rules global trade. For now.

That’s the hidden risk. Every time Washington uses the dollar as a weapon, it gives the rest of the world another reason to find a way around it. De-dollarization is still a distant prospect, but a real one. The dollar’s share of global reserves has slipped below 60% for the first time in decades. Too much pressure, and countries will start building parallel systems—China already is.

So the new sanctions are both a warning shot and a test. For Putin, it’s a countdown: he has maybe a year before his war chest runs dry. For the United States, it’s a question of restraint: how much can you weaponize a financial empire before you start eroding the very power that makes it work?

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A few days ago, half the internet went dark.

A single botched DNS update inside Amazon Web Services—one bad line of code—took down everything from Slack and Starbucks to Roblox, Zoom, and Venmo. For most of a day, billions of dollars of global commerce and communication froze because a single server cluster in Northern Virginia couldn’t talk to the rest of the world.

This wasn’t a cyber attack. It was a self-inflicted wound. But as we discuss in this episode, it showed how fragile the internet really is. The global network that was designed to survive nuclear war now depends on a handful of private data centers and three American companies. The architecture of resilience has quietly turned into one of concentration.

From there, we zoom out. If AWS going down for twelve hours can paralyze the world economy, what could a deliberate cyber strike do? We talk through Russia’s attacks on Ukraine, North Korea’s Lazarus Group, China’s massive data theft operations, and the long shadow of the U.S.-Israeli Stuxnet worm that sabotaged Iran’s nuclear centrifuges.

So far, the effects of cyber war have looked less like World War III and more like chaos at scale—costly, disorienting, but survivable. Even Russia’s most destructive attack, NotPetya, caused billions in damage but didn’t change the political balance in Ukraine. As Galen puts it, cyber remains an intelligence game: useful for spying and disruption, but not yet for victory.

Still, the tools keep getting sharper. AI systems can now find vulnerabilities faster than humans can patch them. Quantum computing, if it delivers on its promise, could one day shatter encryption altogether. When that happens, the line between security failure and strategic collapse could get very thin.

For now, the internet is still running. But the outage was a warning. Complexity breeds fragility. And in a world where code runs everything, a single update can turn Monday into the day the lights go out.

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After two years of catastrophic war in Gaza, the guns are finally—maybe—falling silent.

This week, Trump announced what he’s calling a historic ceasefire between Israel and Hamas: a 20-point plan featuring hostage exchanges, Israeli withdrawals from parts of Gaza, and an “international peace board” led by Trump himself and Tony Blair. Yes, that Tony Blair.

If it holds, it will be the first sustained pause in fighting since 2023. But as we break down in this episode, almost every piece of the deal looks fragile. Israel’s cabinet barely approved it. Hamas has no intention of disarming. And the details of who actually governs Gaza—Arab peacekeepers, Israeli forces, or the Trump-Blair board—are a blur.

Beneath the headlines lies a deeper question: what comes next?

* If Hamas keeps its weapons, Israel won’t withdraw.

* If Israel stays, the fighting resumes.

* If Gaza falls under an “international mandate,” whose interests will it serve?

Even if the ceasefire holds, both hosts argue the long-term political picture is grim. Israel’s leadership and population seem uninterested in a viable peace process. The Palestinian factions are divided and decimated. And the United States—the only power capable of imposing a real settlement (maybe)—appears unwilling to try.

As Galen puts it, “This isn’t a peace deal. It’s a timeout.”

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What if the 20th century’s three great struggles—World War I, World War II, and the Cold War—were all really about the same thing?

That’s the argument in Hal Brands’ new book The Eurasian Century, which we dig into this week. Brands traces the warnings of early geopoliticians like Halford Mackinder and Alfred Thayer Mahan: never let a single power dominate Eurasia. History, he argues, proved them right. Germany tried twice. The Soviet Union tried once. Each time, the United States eventually intervened—and each time, the global balance of power was at stake.

Today, in this book, Brands warns of a “second Eurasian century”, with China rising, Russia aligned, and the U.S. at risk of pulling back just as the stakes are highest. He frames the coming decades as Cold War II, and argues that containment, primacy, and forward defense are the only viable American responses.

We push back on some of this. Was German hegemony ever really possible in World War I? Could the Soviets have rolled Western Europe? And is it really impossible for the U.S. to strike political accommodations with autocracies? History suggests otherwise.

Still, the book is a sharp reminder that geography, power, and politics don’t go away. Whether Washington chooses confrontation, accommodation, or hemispheric defense, the consequences will shape the 21st century—just as they did the last one.

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Remember when Barack Obama stood in Prague in 2009 and called for a world without nuclear weapons? That feels like another planet.

Today, the United States faces an aggressive nuclear peer in Russia, with another antagonist racing towards full peer status in China—while North Korea and others expand their arsenals on the margins. The assumptions that guided policy for decades—stable deterrence, manageable arms control, a world where nukes fade into the background—no longer hold.

We sat down with Brendan Green, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Cincinnati and author of The Revolution That Failed: Nuclear Competition, Arms Control, and the Cold War, to unpack what this means.

Some highlights:

* China’s buildup: Beijing is no longer content with a “minimum deterrent.” It’s building a triad to match the U.S. and Russia.

* Russia’s unraveling: Relations are at rock bottom, arms control is dead, and Moscow is leaning on nuclear threats to manage its conventional weakness.

* MAD under pressure: Mutually assured destruction once promised stability. But advances in counterforce, missile defense, and command-and-control raise doubts about whether MAD still holds.

* Allies on edge: If Washington can’t credibly guarantee protection, partners like South Korea, Japan, and Germany may rethink their own nuclear options.

The upshot: nuclear weapons are back at the center of world politics. The U.S. may not need to double its arsenal, but “relatively modest adjustments” in posture—new theater options, modernized warheads, and credible damage-limiting capabilities—could decide whether deterrence holds in the coming decade.

As Green puts it, arms racing isn’t just about warheads. It’s about politics, reassurance, and the credibility of America’s commitments. And in this “new nuclear age,” credibility is what counts.

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Nineteen Russian drones crossed into Polish territory this week, triggering a scramble of jets, the shutdown of airspace over the country’s east, and one drone crashing through the roof of a civilian home. No casualties, no explosions—but Warsaw was rattled enough to invoke Article 4 of the NATO treaty, calling for urgent alliance consultations. That’s only the eighth such invocation in NATO’s 75-year history.

Moscow insists the drones were misdirected by Ukrainian jamming. Poland and its neighbors aren’t buying it. They see a deliberate probe: gray zone tactics, the kind designed to test NATO’s “every inch” security guarantee without tripping Article 5.

Why now? Several possible signals overlap:

* To NATO: your defenses are thin, and your promises aren’t ironclad.

* To Belarus: don’t get ideas about cutting a deal with the West.

* To Trump: Russia retains escalation cards outside Ukraine, and can play them at will.

The immediate NATO response looks modest—some European jets and ships, not much more. Without U.S. weight, the symbolism is greater than the military effect. But that symbolism cuts both ways. If Russia can steadily erode NATO’s credibility with low-cost drones, credibility itself is what’s in play.

It won’t spark World War III. But history suggests that the real danger is not in the provocation, but in the miscalculation that might follow.

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We’ve seen enough to believe that the Xi Jinping - Vladimir Putin bromance has staying power. Heads of state (even neighboring ones like Russia and China) simply don’t officially visit with one another with the frequency these two have since Xi rose to power in 2012. Further, strongmen tend to eschew friends, much preferring toadies, supplicants and sycophants. The relationship must be real.

The dictators — recently seen side by side at China’s 80th Victory Day parade celebrating Allied victory in WW2 — have bonded over a shared affinity for absolute personal power, as well as a burning hatred of how the United States has managed the world since the end of the Cold War.

To that end, they declared a “No Limits” partnership in early 2022, just a few weeks before Russia turned global security (and Chinese foreign policy) inside-out by invading Ukraine. It’s not clear that Putin warned Xi beforehand, but that’s all water under the bridge: China is underwriting Russia’s war and keeping its economy afloat, hoping to keep the West pinned down there to gain a freer hand in Asia.

The relationship, which appears to be going swimmingly, is more troubled than it seems, however. These two countries have been at odds far longer than they’ve cooperated. Without a mutual enemy in the form of the U.S., those old cracks could resurface in a hurry…

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Why, exactly, has the Trump Administration dispatched 2200 Marines, several guided missile destroyers, and at least one nuclear attack sub(!) towards the northern coast of Venezuela?

Ostensibly to interdict drug traffickers based in Venezuela on their way to the United States… except that explanation makes no sense. The Coast Guard can do that. So what’s really going on?

We don’t know for sure, but we can make some educated guesses, based on the history of U.S. interference in the internal affairs of Latin America, the (odious) nature of the Maduro regime, Venezuela’s autocratic allies, the various foreign and domestic priorities of the second Trump Administration… among other factors.

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Long one of the largest, most populated and most powerful states in the Middle East, Iran is a natural potential hegemon for the region, and indeed has enjoyed that title for centuries on end over its 2500-year-plus history.

Its most recent attempts have come under the revolutionary banner of the Islamic Republic, established in 1979. The theocratic regime has grown brittle over time, but retains every bit of the anti-American and anti-Western virulence upon which it was founded.

Prior to that, though, Iran was first a constitutional and then an absolute monarchy under the Pahlavi Dynasty. For about 25 years, with the Cold War in full swing, the Shah adopted a very aggressive and highly authoritarian pro-U.S. approach.

In some ways, then, the Shah and the Ayatollahs were two sides of the same coin, with their attitudes towards America being Iran’s fulcrum. How and why did the coin flip? And can it ever flip back again in the foreseeable future?

Thumbnail photo by Akbar Nemati on Unsplash

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Unassuming, colorless, charisma-free, a cipher, a bureaucrat: early in his career, first at the KGB and then working for the city government of St. Petersburg, Vladimir Putin was deceptively easy to ignore… even as he was climbing the ladder of post-Soviet chaos at lightning speed.

It was this ephemeral quality that led the oligarchs that really controlled Russia to make him the second President of the Russian Federation in 2000, under the assumption that he would be unable to act independently… until he turned on, dispossessed and disposed of them.

And now, after a quarter-century in control of Russia, Putin has grown into one of the wealthiest, most powerful, and least constrained rulers on Earth. Putin is synonymous with Russia, and for the the costs he has incurred in Ukraine and elsewhere, there is no ignoring either the man or his country now.

Setting aside the optics and wisdom of inviting Putin to Alaska unconditionally, as President Trump did yesterday, peace in Europe stands no chance without him. But what kind of peace is Putin after, exactly? Can we find any clues over the course of his long career?

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