A U.S.-China war over Taiwan would be catastrophic for all sides and the world. Preventing such a war requires understanding how it might unfold—from start to finish—including worst-case scenarios. 

How much warning would there be? Where might China strike first? Which countries join the fight? Can Taiwan defend its coasts? Would nuclear threats determine the outcome? 

Charles Hooper is a retired U.S. general who served as one of the Pentagon’s top China strategists and spent years living in the country. He joined Jon Bateman on The World Unpacked to give a step-by-step scenario for the war that no one wants.

Find the episode transcript, and get the show direct to your inbox, here: https://carnegieendowment.org/podcasts/the-world-unpacked/how-a-us-china-war-would-unfold 

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The wars unleashed by October 7th have left the Middle East deeply fractured—Iran battered and defiant, Gaza destroyed, Israel militarized, the Gulf insecure and divided. And an even bigger disruption lies just ahead: the oil revenues that built the modern Arab world will halve by 2050, forcing countries to redesign themselves. 

Marwan Muasher—a former foreign minister of Jordan and now a VP at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace—joins The World Unpacked to make sense of a region in flux. He explains why Washington should get tougher on Israel, Gulf countries may already have peaked in power, and the end of oil could be a good thing. 

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Find the episode transcript and streaming audio, and get the show direct to your inbox, here: https://carnegieendowment.org/podcasts/the-world-unpacked/in-the-new-middle-east-no-one-is-in-charge 

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Theo Baker is no ordinary college senior. His student newspaper articles brought down Stanford’s president. Now he’s written a book about the making of the young tech elite.

How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University reveals the “Stanford within Stanford”—the unofficial pipeline linking Silicon Valley investors to top students. It’s a pathway to power unlike any other, fueling the AI gold rush and remaking Stanford itself.

Theo joins Jon Bateman on The World Unpacked to debate the deeper meaning of Stanford’s tech ties. Is it a normal and necessary part of capitalism, or a devil’s bargain corrupting education? And what does Stanford’s story say about other civic institutions fighting for their souls as AI eats the world?

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Russia’s surprising recent Internet shutdown did more than disrupt daily life: it also crippled the regime’s own communications and propaganda. It’s one of a series of strange events—from a diminished Victory Day parade to crackdowns on businesspeople and celebrities—that suggest growing disorder and confusion within the Russian state.

Alexandra Prokopenko, a former Moscow insider who quit over the Ukraine War, says that Vladimir Putin has lost focus on running the country. She joins Jon Bateman on The World Unpacked to explain the erosion of Russia’s social contract and share stories from her new book From Sovereigns to Servants: How the War Against Ukraine Reshaped Russia’s Elite.

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Alexandra Prokopenko: https://x.com/amenka 

There’s been remarkably little public debate about a potential U.S. attack on Cuba.  President Trump said last week that he “will be taking over” Cuba “almost immediately”—and similar threats led to military action in both Venezuela and Iran.

Javier Corrales, a political scientist at Amherst College and the son of Cuban exiles, joins The World Unpacked to game out this crisis. Javier and host Jon Bateman discuss Cuba’s economic vulnerability, its political staying power, and why Trump might wind up making a deal with the Castros very similar to one made by Barack Obama.

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AI-powered bots and slop content are everywhere now, making it harder to tell who’s human. Will the Internet become so bot-ridden that it’s simply unusable? Or will people be forced to prove their identities online—giving up privacy and eroding democracy?

Nick Pickles battled bots at Twitter and is now chief policy officer at Tools for Humanity, the Sam Altman-founded startup that reads eyeballs with an Orb. On this episode of The World Unpacked, Nick joined host Jon Bateman to explore the brewing authenticity crisis, the geopolitics of privacy, and the surprising legacy of a 1993 New Yorker cartoon.

Elon Musk is one of the most influential figures of our era.  He remade the space, car, social media, and AI industries.  He shaped the Ukraine War.  He helped put Donald Trump back in office and became Washington’s most powerful official.  How can one CEO alter the fate of multiple nations—and what does that say about our world?

A provocative new book, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, argues that Musk has pioneered a new form of capitalism that fuses technology with political power.  On this episode of The World Unpacked, authors Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff explore Musk’s historical meaning and debate the politics of technocracy with host Jon Bateman.

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Benn Tarnoff, Quinn Slobodian

The world is still making sense of Viktor Orbán’s historic election loss in Hungary—a small country with outsized global significance.  Why were Orbán’s generational efforts to stack the electoral deck not enough to prevent his landslide defeat?  Is this a warning sign for right-wing populists in America, Europe, and elsewhere who’ve modeled their own movements on Orbán’s?

Tom Carothers, a top democracy scholar with deep ties in Hungary, joins Jon Bateman on a special episode of The World Unpacked.  Tom explains why Orbán lost, why his successor Peter Magyar isn’t the anti-Orbán that many assume, and why “electoral autocracies” around the world are less stable than they seem.

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Think tanks—the non-profit research centers that try to influence policy—are strange and mysterious places.  Depending on who you ask, think tanks are invaluable sources of expertise, intellectual hired guns serving powerful interests, or relics of a bygone era when facts mattered and political leaders actually read things.

Tino Cuellar is president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a premiere foreign policy think tank. He joins host Jon Bateman on The World Unpacked to pull back the curtain on this hidden world. Tino takes on the skeptics and makes an impassioned case for an “idea sector” independent of government and industry—even in the age of AI.

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Tino Cuellar

President Trump was meant to fly to Beijing this week for major trade talks, but instead he’s staying home to manage the Iran War. It’s an apt metaphor for America’s decades-long failure to refocus on Asia and reckon with China’s rise. Does Trump have a plan for dealing with America’s top rival? If so, what is it?

Ali Wyne is a perceptive analyst of U.S.-China competition and author of America’s Great Power Opportunity. He joined Jon Bateman on The World Unpacked to explain why Beijing hasn’t saved Iran; what Washington’s bipartisan “consensus” on China still misses; and how Trump should negotiate when he finally sits down with Xi Jinping.