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This is a conversation with John Bolton - a former National Security Advisor to Donald Trump in his first administration, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and one of the most hawkish public figures in the U.S. foreign policy establishment.

I wanted to talk with John about the war with Iran because he is in an absolutely unique position. He’s someone who has been long publicly advocating for a policy of a regime change in Iran and who during his time in the White House tried to make it a reality - he is in many ways the ultimate Iran hawk. But unlike almost all the other Iran hawks and despite the fact that this could be seen as the realization of his lifetime goal, he is fiercely critical of the current war with Iran and of how it has been planned and executed.

And so we talk about why Bolton thinks this war is heading for failure, why was there such a lack of planning and strategic thinking, whether Trump is already looking for the exit even with the Strait of Hormuz still closed - and what that would mean for America's standing in the world - and why, the United States might very likely end up in a much worse position than before the war started.

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In all the analysis of the war with Iran, most of the focus has been on the American side - on what Donald Trump might want or what’s his next move. And somehow, we focus a lot less on Iran itself - the country that might have the final say in all of this and that is now harder to read than ever before. After all, who is even running Iran at this point? Is the regime really as stable as it presents itself or is it falling apart underneath the surface? Is there anyone left to negotiate with - and is a deal even possible? And could this war end up pushing Iran to finally acquire nuclear weapons?

To answer those questions, I'm joined by Professor Ali Ansari, the founding director of the Institute for Iranian Studies at the University of St Andrews and one of the world's leading authorities on Iranian politics and history. He has a view that goes against a lot of the conventional wisdoms and mainstream narratives about Iran and he argues that we largely misread the regime and its stability. And that it’s both much weaker than it seems and more dangerous and irrational at the same time.

We talk about how this war will most likely end, what might happen afterwards and why the situation will be even more unstable once the fighting eventually stops - or why what the regime is afraid of is not war but peace. And much more.

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The Russian economy is in trouble and the trouble is getting bigger - but its problems are different than what most people imagine them to be. Usually, the arguments tend to be that the Russian economy is either doing fantastic or that it’s about to collapse. In reality it’s none of that, but there is something else that is making the Kremlin worried, that will become a bigger and bigger problem for it to deal with and that will influence all of its decisions - and that could potentially present a problem for the stability and survival of the regime.

I talk about that - and much more, like why the Iran war matters far less for Russia’s economy than most people assume - with Janis Kluge, a foremost European expert on Russian economy and a Senior Associate at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

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This is a conversation with General HR McMaster - one of the most experienced, respected and impressive military and national security thinkers and practitioners of our time. He is a military historian, Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, former National Security Advisor to Donald Trump in his first term and a former three star general in the U.S. Army - who among other things commanded US troops during the Gulf War in the biggest tank battle since the 2nd world war and who has been called the “best brigadier general of our time” and “the pre-eminent warrior-thinker of the 21st century”.

As we're recording this, the United States and Israel are two weeks into a war with Iran, and the war in Ukraine is still grinding on. And General McMaster has been warning for years that these - and other conflicts - aren't separate crises - but that they're part of one connected, escalating struggle between the West and an axis of authoritarian aggressors. In this conversation, we get into why he thinks the West is dangerously underestimating this threat, what's really driving Putin's strategy and why does Trump keep refusing to increase pressure on him, whether starting a war with Iran war was a good decision and how will it end, whether the West still even exists if U.S. president threatens to take Greenland or why is the momentum of escalating and cascading events only picking up steam - and what comes next.

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➡️ Take a look at Nigel's IISS analysis here: https://www.iiss.org/online-analysis/online-analysis/2026/02/russiaukraine-war-escalation-not-stalemate

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For a long time, the war in Ukraine resembled a bit of a stalemate. Russia gradually pushed into Ukrainian territory, Ukraine fought back and Russia, although suffering great costs, managed to keep going. But that is now changing - as the dynamics of the war are undergoing major shifts - and as those shifts are quickly picking up pace.

Ukraine has a new strategy to win the war. The gradual Russian push has been slowed to a halt and Ukraine has increasingly been able to go on the offensive, capturing lost territory and pushing back Russian forces. And Russia is increasingly struggling with something that was never really expected to become a major issue - and it’s getting so bad that it’s quickly approaching an inflection point where something will have to break - one way or another.

I talk about all that - and much more - with my guest, Nigel Gould Davis, a Senior Fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

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This is a conversation with Mujtaba Rahman, Managing Director of Eurasia Group Europe and an insider and one of my go to sources on European politics. It has been a very dramatic year for Europe and it only seems to get more dramatic - and so we go through how has Europe been holding so far and where are we gonna go from here.

We talk about the U.S. war with Iran - specifically about the chaotic European reaction to it and how that has shown how much Europe is still lacking any common unified foreign policy or about why are European powers willing to shoot down Iranian drones in the Gulf but not in Western Ukraine. And why Mujtaba believes that Greenland is still a major underpriced risk and why crisis over Greenland might have only paused and restart at any point. About Friedrich Merz in the White House and whether European unity towards Trump has started to fall apart - and much more.

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This is a conversation with Jeremy Schapiro - the research director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, focused on US foreign policy. We talk about one thing - Trump’s war in Iran - one of the biggest US military operations in two past two decades which - the longer it goes on and the more we find out about it - seems to get more and more confusing.

We talk about what was the primary reason to start the war and why now and how to make sense of the variety of contradicting reasons that Trump and his team gave on this and about the equally confusing war aims of this operation and whether this is a regime change or not .

About whether the U.S. was just following Israel in its decision and if that’s the case why, what are the chances of success of this operation and what does success actually mean, or whether Trump will now seek to de-escalate and retreat or whether he will double down - and much more.

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This is a conversation with James D Lindsay, a Research Fellow at University College London and an author of a book on what’s called a Madman theory - a foreign policy strategy in which a leader attempts to present himself as completely irrational and willing to inflict great damage on themselves and the others in order to improve their negotiating position and create fear around possible escalation - even if in reality, they are actually a lot more restrained and not as mad as it may seem. The pioneer of this theory was Richord Nixon but the person who is often speculated to truly master the theory is Donald Trump - although there is a big debate over whether he is playing a madman to get what he wants - or whether that’s just really who he is.

With James we talk about how Nixon tried and failed to use this strategy and pioneering this approach but we mostly focus on Donald Trump - about his first term and threatening North Korea with fire and fury, assassinating the Iranian general Qaseem Soleimani and threatening to leave NATO and his second term and his tariff war and attempt for Greenland takeover.

To be honest, I don’t actually agree with most of James’s conclusions. I’m not nearly as sure that Donald Trump is just playing a madman and that it’s all part of a rational, negotiating tactic as he is - I can think it could just as well be a genuine chaos and irrationality. And even if it is a rational strategy, I really don’t think that it has been nearly as successful as James argues, especially in Trump’s second term. And that - whether it is a rational strategy or not - it causes more damage to US interests than it helps them. And so in the podcast, we disagree and argue about both of those things. But nevertheless, I do think that the theory and the concept, the arguments and this whole conversation is really interesting.