Danube Institute Podcast

We asked Ronen Itsik, an Israeli Senior Researcher and Head of the Military Social Relations Department at the David Institute for Security Policy, about the Gaza ceasefire, the fate of Hamas and Iran, and the possibility of establishing a Palestinian state. The Danube Lectures is a video podcast of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based conservative think tank that asks its guests – decision-makers, experts, academics, and politicians – about their unique ideas. Host: Tamás Maráczi, a journalist at the Danube Institute.--The conversation was recorded on January 20th, when the Iranian protests were still going on.

We asked Mansoor Ahmad Khan, former Ambassador of Pakistan to Afghanistan, Director of the BNU Center for Policy Research in Lahore, and Distinguished Fellow at the Ludovika Public Diplomacy Hub, about Pakistan's geopolitical importance.The Danube Lectures is a video podcast of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based conservative think tank that asks its guests – decision-makers, experts, academics, and politicians – about their unique ideas. Host: Tamás Maráczi, a journalist at the Danube Institute.

We asked Alejandro Peña Esclusa, a Venezuelan writer, political analyst, and Senior Fellow at the Center for Fundamental Rights, about the American intervention to capture President Maduro and its political consequences in Venezuela.The Danube Lectures is a video podcast of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based conservative think tank that asks its guests – decision-makers, experts, academics, and politicians – about their unique ideas. Host: Tamás Maráczi, a journalist at the Danube Institute.

We asked O. Carter Snead, a professor of law and an expert on bioethics, the director of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame, at Axioma Center's conference in Budapest, about the concept of the human being according to transhumanism and Christianity.The Danube Lectures is a video podcast of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based conservative think tank that asks its guests – decision-makers, experts, academics, and politicians – about their unique ideas. Host: Tamás Maráczi, a journalist at the Danube Institute.

We asked Michael Doran, Director of the Hudson Institute's Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East, for our year-end analysis about the world's three major geopolitical conflicts.The Danube Lectures is a video podcast of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based conservative think tank that asks its guests – decision-makers, experts, academics, and politicians – about their unique ideas. Host: Tamás Maráczi, a journalist at the Danube Institute.

On the 1st of November 2025, President Donald Trump released a statement about the situation facing Christians in Nigeria. He warned that if the Nigerian government failed to protect Christian communities from rising violence, the US might be “forced to step in” to defend them. The tone was characteristically Trumpian - dramatic, blunt, and escalatory - but it touched on a very real issue.According to Open Doors, of the roughly five thousand Christians killed worldwide each year for their faith, more than four thousand are Nigerian. Trump’s remark also came only months after a major structural shift in US foreign assistance: the closure of USAID’s global mission network, which had big effects on Nigeria.It was between these two developments that the Danube Institute sent a small team of researchers to the country, in June and July. Our purpose was to investigate the condition of Christian communities firsthand and to explore what a post-liberal development-aid framework might look like in practice.We approached the question with one notable precedent in mind: Hungary Helps, the Hungarian government’s development agency, which explicitly supports persecuted Christians and other vulnerable minorities worldwide. In an interesting twist of timing, our paper on the trip was published the same week as Trump’s statement, and we now know that a copy of the report has already been hand-delivered to the US Vice President, J. D. Vance.Calum Nicholson, who was on that trip, is joined by his fellow lead authors, Nicholas Naquin and Daniel Farkas, to discuss the findings of that research: the realities on the ground, the broader geopolitical context, and what a more honest and effective model of international assistance might require. 

We talked to Päivi Räsänen, a Finnish politician, former chairwoman of the Christian Democrats, and former Minister of the Interior of Finland at Axioma Center’s conference in Budapest, about the criminal proceedings initiated against her and the status of freedom of religion and freedom of expression in Finland.The Danube Lectures is a video podcast of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based conservative think tank that asks its guests – decision-makers, experts, academics, and politicians – about their unique ideas.Host: Tamás Maráczi, a journalist at the Danube Institute.The recording was made with the help of Axioma Center.

On a chilly May morning in 1618, four Catholic lords regent, arrived at the Bohemian Chancellery at 8:30 am, to meet their Protestant counterparts. The agenda was to clarify whether the four regents were responsible for persuading the Emperor to stop Protestant church construction on royal lands.It did not go well. A fracas followed. At the end of which, two regents, plus their secretary, were defenestrated - literally thrown from a third storey window. Miraculously, all three survived the 70-foot fall. Millions would not be so lucky. The Thirty Years War that followed The Defenestration of Prague was one of the most destructive events in human history. By its end, a fifth of the German lands’ population was dead. Far more than the Second World War. In all, the Reformation’s wars of religion lasted around 120 years, and shattered the peace of the continent. Surveying the carnage, early liberal thinkers saw the new political ideology of liberalism as a solution: religious toleration, baked into the state. Yet for every Enlightenment thinker who genuinely sought to promote plurality, there was one who was actively hostile to religion itself. Voltaire and Rousseau preached religious toleration, but when the French revolutionaries carried their program to what they saw as its logical conclusion, they tried to institute a state-backed Cult of Reason and installed a prostitute in Notre Dame cathedral.Today, be it on abortion, assisted suicide, or freedoms of association, the debate has turned to whether liberalism and religion are compatible with one another. Pure liberalism - what you might call hyper-liberalism, has grown increasingly authoritarian in nature. And some are questioning whether it is itself compatible with a pluralistic society. Liberalism has had a good two hundred years — but as the world moves past US hegemony, is it doomed to become a victim of its own contradictions? Philip Pilkington is a Visiting Fellow at the Danube Institute, and author of The Collapse of Global Liberalism: And the Emergence of the Post Liberal World Order. To discuss this question, he is joined by Andrew Koppelman. Andrew is Professor of Law, Political Science and Philosophy at Northwestern University — and author of several books, including The Tough Luck Constitution; Gay Rights vs Religious Liberty: The Unnecessary Conflict; and Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed. And by Jacob Williams, a PhD student at Oxford University, specialising in post-liberal thought.

We talked to Sara Mohammad Amin Falaknaz, a member of the UAE Federal National Council and Chairman of the UAE-Hungary Friendship Committee, about gender equality, the geopolitical stance of the UAE, and the UAE-Hungary relationship.The Danube Lectures is a video podcast of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based conservative think tank that asks its guests – decision-makers, experts, academics, and politicians – about their unique ideas.Host: Tamás Maráczi, a journalist at the Danube Institute.The recording was made with the help of the UAE Embassy in Budapest.

For years, we were told to obey the science, and seek the facts. Well, the facts are in. No dispute. Mortality from Covid was .25 percent of the global population. The 1919 Spanish Flu epidemic killed between 2.5 and 5 per cent. It is an order of magnitude smaller. The same ratio of 10:1 applies to the infection fatality rate. In fact, for a 40 year old, it had the same Infection Fatality Rate as the now forgotten Hong Kong Flu of 1968. Factually, we can now see that Covid was serious, but not catastrophic. So why have those who spoke out in the early days of the pandemic to urge proportionality, remained on the wrong side of history? In recent weeks, a UK national inquiry into the pandemic reached the second stage of its conclusions. Their findings? That Britain should have locked down harder, earlier. The inquiry’s chair, Baroness Heather Hallett, even put a number to this claim: locking down a week earlier, she said, would have saved 23 000 lives. Yet for Daniel Hannan and the small band of Covid-impact skeptics like him, who opposed lockdowns from the off, the right side of history continues to elude them. Five years ago, there must have been a sense that they only had to wait for the data: that validation would arrive by now. Sadly, the inquiry has only been a turgid, expensive means to amplify the old narrative. Its general quality poses broader questions: what is it to inquire, at a national, statutory level? How can we drill down to truth, when so many establishment interests stand in the way? Do we still have an elite class capable of putting aside their priors? Daniel Hannan now sits in the House of Lords, as Lord Hannan of Kingsclere. He has continued to be a thorn in the side of British bureaucracy, and to speak out on the Covid response. In this episode of Danube Politics, he talks to Visiting Fellow Gavin Haynes about Covid, inquiries, and the things we have forgotten to remember.