Disorder

In this bonus episode, Jason discusses his mom’s Thanksgiving stuffing recipe as he is joined by our roving correspondent – David Patrikarakos – who missed Turkey Day in London choosing to go to Ukraine and Gaza instead...

Disinformation and culture wars are an existential problem for democracies. They foster negative feedback loops: whereby internal divisions inside democracies make us more vulnerable to hostile external actors spewing misinformation, who then exploit those divisions to create more vulnerability to misinformation, culminating in culture wars. These kind of negative feedback loops are another symptom of our era of Global Enduring Disorder...

Climate change is the perfect example of what happens on a pressing global challenge when no one leads, or even takes responsibility, for a collective action problem – nothing happens, the crisis builds until it becomes seemingly unmanageable/unfixable. Without strong collective action and tough compromises, climate change will get more and more geopolitically intractable making life saving compromises even harder...

In a special Thanksgiving bonus episode of the podcast, Jason is joined by Alessandro Politi, the Director of the NATO Defense College Foundation in Rome...

In this week’s episode, Alex and Jason are joined by former US congressman Tom Malinowski (D-NJ). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Malinowski...

Diplomacy is a game, and geopolitics is a psychological sport. Though we may root for the ‘democratic good guys’, it is often the disordering ‘autocratic bad guys’ that achieve their aims through effective use of psychological tactics like bluffing and intimidation.    In this episode, we meet Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s former Chief of Staff, who helped negotiate landmark treaties like the Good Friday Agreement...

In this episode, Alex Hall Hall talks to Tom Fletcher, the former British Ambassador to Lebanon. Tom and Alex discuss the Palestinian refugee and surrounding Arab states narratives as an entry point to examine whether there’s any risk of the war spreading...

As the Israeli-Hamas war enters a new phase, Alex and Jason discuss how hard it is to speak publicly and diplomatically about an issue that’s become so partisan and so emotive. Plus: the pair talk about Jason’s idea for interim post-war governance of Gaza involving a Qatari-Saudi-Egyptian-Emirati condominium which would need to be mediated by American and British diplomats...

Across the world, there are vast swathes of the planet (especially our oceans and atmosphere) that have been left without governance, and into that space have stepped terrorist groups, disordering non-state actors, drug cartels, and polluting and exploitative corporations...

From London to Miami, illicit cash has been flowing through the West’s financial systems. Coordination failures have allowed disruptors like Russia to prop up a transnational kleptocracy – while groups like the UN, IMF and NATO are ill-equipped to deal with this problem, especially as key players in Britain and America, actively encourage the financial deregulation on which the kleptocrats thrive...