On this month's podcast we're joined by Le Monde diplomatique's new Asia head, Renaud Lambert, who writes in the current edition of the paper about China's global ambitions (‘China: the invention of the roadmap to global power'). The dominant western narrative maintains China is pursuing a master plan to remake the world in its own image, steered by a solitary autocrat, Xi Jinping. Rather than a grand strategy for world domination, Lambert finds a messier reality of devolved power and (…)

Sources Openstreetmap; www.eisenhuettenstadt.de /Stadt-Verwaltung; Petra Pudemat, Nationalatlas Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Institut für Länderkunde, Leipzig, 2002

Our guest on this month's podcast is Eric Alterman, CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College and author of We Are Not One: A History of America's Fight Over Israel (2022). In the February edition of the paper, Alterman writes on the latest phase of that long-running fight in an article entitled ‘Biden's lonely stance on the war in Gaza'. Biden's seemingly unconditional support for Israel is out of step both with much of his own party and, especially, with younger voters. With (...)

Taipei-based journalist Alice Hérait is our guest on this second podcast of the month on significant elections. Alice has a piece in the January edition of the paper entitled ‘Taiwan's divided loyalties' in which she writes about the disagreements over the island's history that still shape its politics and its people's view of their future. In this interview, she discusses the result of the elections on 13 January, a third consecutive victory for the governing – and pro-sovereignty – Democratic (...)