This week Balder defends his own people. A YouTube video titled "Economists are full of shit" and the hundred-plus likes underneath it sparked this episode, and the underlying complaint is understandable: a generation that was promised growth has watched that growth show up everywhere except their own bank accounts. But the target of that anger is wrong. Economists study economic behaviour. Politicians decide what to do with that knowledge. The neoliberal consensus that dominated policy from the 1980s onwards was a political choice, not an inevitable conclusion handed down by the discipline of economics itself.

The data makes the disconnect impossible to miss. GDP and median household income moved together until the 1990s, then diverged sharply. Productivity and hourly compensation tell the same story from 1970 onwards. Nearly 40 percent of Americans could not cover an unexpected expense without significant strain on their savings, despite a quarter century of consistent GDP growth. None of that is a failure of economics as a science. It is a failure of politics to ask economists the right questions, namely how do we improve human wellbeing, rather than how do we maximise growth and assume the rest follows.

We also dig into Gary Stevenson's viral critique of how economics is taught, which gets the methodology problem mostly right while building an oversimplified enemy out of an entire profession, and a Novara Media clip on China that shows exactly the same instinct from the opposite political direction: reaching for a tribe instead of an analysis. Economics is a soft science. It will sometimes get things wrong. That does not make it worthless, and confusing the discipline with the politicians who misused it is its own kind of Western Bubble thinking.

This podcast is an individual project between us, Dario Hasenstab and Balder Hageraats. We are supported by our producer Stefani Obradovic from Western Bubble Insights & Strategy. If you would like to get in touch with us, write us an email at [email protected].

In this week's Autopsy, we react to JD Vance's commencement address to the graduating class of the US Air Force Academy.

The substance of the speech is troubling. Vance's central message on AI and warfare is essentially: trust us, we have it covered, humans will stay in charge. What that actually means in practice is a single person approving strike after strike without the ability to verify the intelligence behind any of them, because if a human could verify it, AI would not be needed in the first place.

This podcast is an individual project between us, Dario Hasenstab and Balder Hageraats. We are supported by our producer Stefani Obradovic from Western Bubble Insights & Strategy. If you would like to get in touch with us, write us an email at [email protected].

The FIFA World Cup 2026 opened last week. The United States had, on paper, the greatest soft power opportunity in World Cup history: a 250th independence anniversary, three host nations, 48 competing teams, and the eyes of the world. Instead, hotel bookings in host cities are running 70 to 80 percent below expectations, a FIFA-certified Somali referee was turned away at the border, the Iraqi team had a striker detained for seven hours and their photographer denied entry, and the Iranian squad is permitted to enter only on match day and must leave the same day.

We examine why the American capitalist model is structurally incapable of understanding what a World Cup is actually for. Dynamic pricing that pushed tickets to seven hundred euros and beyond, hotels charging a thousand euros a night, and an immigration policy that has made millions of people genuinely afraid to travel to the United States. Qatar, for all its problems, understood the point: soft power is not about short-term profit, it is about who the world associates you with in twenty years. The United States is using the world's attention to remind everyone why they do not want to come.

The only country emerging from all of this with its reputation enhanced is Mexico, whose welcome of the Iranian and Iraqi delegations has generated more genuine goodwill than any marketing campaign could buy.

This podcast is an individual project between us, Dario Hasenstab and Balder Hageraats. We are supported by our producer Stefani Obradovic from Western Bubble Insights & Strategy. If you would like to get in touch with us, write us an email at [email protected].

In this week's Autopsy, we react to a debate from the Munk Debates in Canada, featuring Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer against Mike Pompeo and Victoria Nuland on the question of Iran. The full video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntiLygd0ihE

On paper this is a clash between academia and policy. In practice it is a demonstration of exactly how Western Bubble thinking shuts down serious analysis the moment it feels threatened.

Walt and Mearsheimer do what good analysts are supposed to do: follow the evidence. The JCPOA worked. The IAEA inspectors were on the ground. Iran was not stockpiling. Iran was not, by any serious measure, this close to a nuclear weapon, despite thirty years of Western politicians insisting otherwise. The academics make these points clearly, without drama, and with data.

Pompeo's response is essentially: don't trust the inspectors, don't trust the international institutions, trust me. I was Secretary of State. I had information. Iran are monsters. That is the full argument. It is the same logic that preceded the invasion of Iraq, delivered with the same confidence, by someone who has apparently learned nothing from that episode.

What makes the debate particularly revealing is the moment Nuland effectively ends the conversation by saying "there you go" when Walt and Mearsheimer decline to describe Iran as a monster. That two words. In those two words you see the entire problem with Western foreign policy thinking: the moment someone refuses to accept the good versus evil frame, they become an invalid conversational partner. Not wrong, not misguided, simply irrelevant.

We also discuss what the debate says about the difference between policy and academia, why Iran's weapons development makes considerably more rational sense than Pompeo wants to admit, and why North Korea's survival as a state tells you everything you need to know about the real incentive structure around nuclear weapons.

This podcast is an individual project between us, Dario Hasenstab and Balder Hageraats. We are supported by our producer Stefani Obradovic from Western Bubble Insights & Strategy. If you would like to get in touch with us, write us an email at [email protected].

This week covers three topics that, at first glance, have nothing to do with each other. They are all the same story.

We start with Germany's failure to secure a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council, losing out to Austria and Portugal in a vote that sent shockwaves through German politics but barely registered anywhere else. That gap tells you everything. Germany spent decades building one of the most effective soft power strategies in the world: non-threatening, generous, culturally present, and economically indispensable. Since 2022 it has been systematically dismantling that strategy in favour of rearmament and hard power posturing, and the world has taken note. The foreign minister reportedly considered resigning. The German media focused on campaign timelines and lobbying failures. Nobody asked the more important question: why is the country that everyone used to want to hug now being treated like everyone else?

From there we move to the Iran-US-Israel situation, now in its fourth month with no resolution in sight. Trump's relationship with Netanyahu has visibly soured. The ceasefire that was supposed to take a few weeks is nowhere near complete. The one genuinely significant diplomatic achievement, Iran's agreement to stop stockpiling and enriching uranium, was thrown away before it could be signed. Meanwhile oil prices remain at levels last seen during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the OECD projects global growth slowing from 3.4 to 2.8% even in an optimistic scenario, and approximately 45 million additional people have been pushed into extreme hunger as a direct consequence of the conflict.

We close with Ebola and the Hantavirus, and what the Western obsession with both says about a political culture that would rather identify an invisible external enemy than ask the questions that actually matter. The Federated States of Micronesia issued a public health warning about diseases with zero confirmed cases on the island. It is a small detail. It is also a perfect summary of where we are.

As Joseph Nye put it: soft power is the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments. Germany used to know that. The West used to know that. They have both forgotten.

This podcast is an individual project between us, Dario Hasenstab and Balder Hageraats. We are supported by our producer Stefani Obradovic from Western Bubble Insights & Strategy. If you would like to get in touch with us, write us an email at [email protected].

In this week's Autopsy, we dissect a panel discussion from the Munich Security Conference 2026 featuring Hillary Rodham Clinton. Dario attended the same conference and observed her in person, which is part of what prompted this episode. The video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqed2Dw-wVQ

Clinton is one of the most experienced politicians of her generation. Senator, Secretary of State under Obama, presidential candidate. Her policy track record is long and her influence remains significant. That is precisely why the thinking on display in this panel matters, because it is not just Clinton's thinking. It is the thinking of an entire establishment that has governed the West for the past twenty-five years and still has not grasped why the world has moved on.

This podcast is an individual project between us, Dario Hasenstab and Balder Hageraats. We are supported by our producer Stefani Obradovic from Western Bubble Insights & Strategy. If you would like to get in touch with us, write us an email at [email protected].

This week we take stock of a world in motion. Not in the dramatic, headline-grabbing way of the past few months, but in the quieter, structural way that tends to matter more in the long run. Countries are rearranging. Alliances are forming between actors who would have looked to Washington ten years ago. The global order is not collapsing so much as reorganising around the absence of a centre.

We start with the Iran-US negotiations, now firmly in Groundhog Day territory. Both sides want out, neither can afford to let the other claim victory, and Trump's shifting language on the Strait of Hormuz suggests he may be tired enough to accept an ending that does not come with a press conference. The catch, as always, is whether he can contain himself long enough for that to happen.

From there we move to the main event: a tour through the countries quietly building new relationships in the space that Western decline has opened up. Vietnam and Thailand on defence and supply chains. Japan and the Philippines on intelligence sharing. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan formalising a security relationship that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. South Africa's foreign minister saying, at a major regional summit, almost word for word what we have been arguing on this podcast for years. The world is not waiting for Western permission to reorganise itself.

We close by asking what all of this means for citizens, corporations, and governments, the three forces that will ultimately determine whether the chaos of the next decade produces something better or simply more of the same. The answer, as Eisenhower might have warned, depends entirely on whether any of them are willing to get off the tracks.

This podcast is an individual project between us, Dario Hasenstab and Balder Hageraats. We are supported by our producer Stefani Obradovic from Western Bubble Insights & Strategy. If you would like to get in touch with us, write us an email at [email protected].

In this week's Autopsy, we dissect Obama's May 1st 2011 announcement of the killing of Osama bin Laden. On the surface, a moment of closure. Underneath, a masterclass in how the Western Bubble sustains itself even when the person delivering the message is intelligent, measured, and personally decent.

The problem is not Obama the man. It is the logic he inherited and chose to continue. Hunting down the perpetrators of 9/11 was a defensible objective with a clear endpoint. Declaring war on terror, an ideology rather than an organisation, is a commitment with no boundaries, no measurable success, and no exit. By 2011 that distinction should have been obvious. Instead, Obama doubled down.

We also examine what the speech reveals about America's relationship with war itself. A country that has not experienced violence on its mainland since 1812 approaches armed conflict with a set of assumptions that no European, Middle Eastern, or Asian country shares. War is noble. Soldiers are heroes. The costs are abstract. That disconnect does not just shape public opinion. It shapes foreign policy, and the results have been catastrophic, for the United States as much as for the countries on the receiving end.

The killing of Osama bin Laden was the moment to draw a line. Instead it became a comma.

This podcast is an individual project between us, Dario Hasenstab and Balder Hageraats. We are supported by our producer Stefani Obradovic from Western Bubble Insights & Strategy. If you would like to get in touch with us, write us an email at [email protected].

This week covers a lot of ground, but a single thread runs through all of it: the West's remarkable ability to undermine itself while convinced it is doing the opposite.

We start with Trump's visit to China, a summit that was months in the making and amounted to little beyond beef export quotas and Boeing orders. While Xi received Trump, Putin, and twelve other world leaders this year in Beijing, the United States arrived without preparation, without serious agreements, and without a strategic framework. The gap between American destructive capacity and American diplomatic influence has rarely been more visible.

Then we turn to Israeli Minister Ben Gvir's decision to film and publish a video of himself touring a detention facility where flotilla activists were held, taunting them for an audience back home. Netanyahu's response, sandwiched between references to Hamas terrorist supporters and deportation orders, managed to make things worse. We examine what this moment reveals, not just about Ben Gvir, but about where Israel is as a country, and why its current trajectory is a threat to its own security far more than to anyone else's.

Finally, Modi's European tour ran into the predictable obstacle: a continent that wants new partners but cannot resist lecturing them first. Europe succeeded only in signalling moral superiority to a domestic audience while making it more difficult to connect with India.

This podcast is an individual project between us, Dario Hasenstab and Balder Hageraats. We are supported by our producer Stefani Obradovic from Western Bubble Insights & Strategy. If you would like to get in touch with us, write us an email at [email protected].

In this week's Autopsy, we dissect a recent DW News segment featuring Eugene Rumer, a Russia and Eurasia expert from the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, reacting to Russia's claim that Ukraine is launching drone strikes on Russian territory from Latvia.

The segment is a near-perfect specimen of Western Bubble analysis: selective, one-sided, and structurally incapable of asking the questions that actually matter. Rather than interrogating why we are where we are, or what NATO's increasingly entangled relationship with Ukraine means for Baltic security, Rumer defaults to the comfortable framework of vulnerable small states versus an existentially threatening Russia. The fact that NATO outspends Russia by a factor of ten to one receives considerably less attention.

We break down the subtle but telling rhetorical trick at the heart of the segment: the word "alliance" shifts meaning depending on the sentence, referring sometimes to NATO's collective defence obligation and sometimes to the broader coalition supporting Ukraine, two very different things with very different implications. This blurring is not accidental. It is precisely how the Western Bubble sustains its own internal logic.

We also discuss what a Carnegie Endowment for Peace analyst should actually be doing: not cheerleading for one side, but seriously engaging with Russia's strategic calculus, Ukraine's interest in drawing NATO deeper into the conflict, and the very real consequences of discriminating against Russian minorities in the Baltic states. Understanding is not sympathy. Complexity is not propaganda. And an institution with "Peace" in its name arguably has an obligation to at least try.

This podcast is an individual project between us, Dario Hasenstab and Balder Hageraats. We are supported by our producer Stefani Obradovic from Western Bubble Insights & Strategy. If you would like to get in touch with us, write us an email at [email protected].