Danube Institute Podcast

On March 13 of this year, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth signed a memo, directing the Pentagon’s Performance Improvement Officer to reassign all civilian employees of the Office Of Net Assessment. Fifty two years since it opened, the Office is now closed. In one sense, Hegseth’s memo is just one more demolition job, in a blizzard of executive orders that have marked the early days of the Trump restoration.In another, it’s a lot of history to tie up one idle Tuesday. Few outsiders understood the acronym ONA. But it helped forge the strategy that ended the Cold War, reset the Pentagon’s Chinese strategy, and coined the influential concept of the Revolution In Military Affairs. This was the Pentagon’s brain. Its cerebral cortex, in fact, concerned with ultra-long-term thinking. Puzzling out real possibilities from the infinite string of potential futures.And one brain within that brain was Adam Lovinger, whose two decade career at the Office saw him shadow its inspirational founder, Andrew Marshall. In this episode of Danube Politics, he speaks with DI Visiting Fellow Gavin Haynes about the long timeline of ‘net assessment’ – and its potential revival.

As Trump’s Tariffs bite, a whole new reality is about to come to the wider world. Yet at the same time, a sense of unreality is setting in, in Western Europe. There, a series of political elites are doubling down their speech repression, trying to put a stopper in an explosive tide of popular discontent. In Britain, the country is locked in a bizarre national debate over a fictional TV show that the political class claims contains real-world policy lessons. In France, Marine Le Pen has been banished at the waving of a judge’s gavel. In Germany, the fight to smother the AfD goes on in another Grand Coalition. How can Europe slip free of its dream state? Or will it continue to tumble – perhaps into the low-grade civil war recently predicted by King’s College War Studies professor David Baetz in a viral podcast appearance? In this episode, we’re joined by the British political scientist, author and commentator Professor Matthew Goodwin. Goodwin’s substack reaches 80 000 inboxes every week. He’s become renowned for his ability to predict populism’s next turn – and he has some bleak predictions for the future state of his own country. The View From The Danube is the keystone video podcast of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based think tank that aims to bring Conservative perspectives from the Anglosphere together, in the heart of the European capital of Conservativism. It stars Rod Dreher, author of The Benedict Option and Living in Wonder, a senior fellow at the Danube Institute, John O’Sullivan, former speechwriter to Margaret Thatcher, the founder and President of the Danube Institute, and Calum Nicholson, the Director of Research. This month, visiting fellow Gavin Haynes fills in for Calum. With regular guests, we’ll be looking at how Conservatism is changing in a world that is itself changing beyond recognition.

Billionaire fund manager Bill Ackman says Donald Trump is waging “an economic war against the whole world at once”. Trump insiders haven’t put it much less dramatically. As Secretary of State Marco Rubio bluntly said, “Markets are crashing because… companies are embedded in modes of production that are bad for the United States.”For Trump, dismantling global trade interdependence is not a side effect—it’s the point. But the collateral damage is vast. ECB board member Isabel Schnabel warned that what Trump triumphantly calls “Liberation Day” “was not liberating” at all, but rather “marks the end of global free trade.”It is certainly the most dramatic day in global trade since the accession of China to the WTO in 1999. That moment marked the low water mark of tariffs, and the coming of a truly globalised world economy. So if that era is indeed now over, what does that mean for China? And indeed the manufacturing-intensive Eastern rim? Trump’s China strategy has always been bullish. Is this a bull in a china shop? To discuss this Great Leap Forward, Dr Eric Henrdiks is joined by economist Philip Pilkington.

After a disputed election late last year, the ex-Soviet satellite of Georgia was catapulted towards the top of the Western news agenda. Its dominant political party, Georgian Dream, has traded on a peculiar mix of conservatism, nationalism and populism. If ‘all nations are conservative about different things’, then Georgia is a particularly esoteric blend. But as Calum Nicholson discovers, at the same time, Georgian Dream party trades on a formula that goes back over a century. In this episode of Danube Knowledge, he sits down with Danube Institute Visiting Fellow Stefano Arroque, to talk over the history of Georgia’s eternal slogan: “Homeland. Language. Faith.” If you want to read Stefano’s full paper, you can do so at the link here: https://danubeinstitute.hu/en/research/homeland-language-faith-how-georgia-embraced-traditionalist-conservatism

Malcolm Kyeyune, a writer for UnHerd and expert in geopolitics, joins host Philip Pilkington to tackle the pressing issue of Western decline. They discuss how historical precedents, from Oswald Spengler to contemporary challenges, highlight a stagnation in military and cultural narratives. Kyeyune delves into generational disillusionment, examining millennials' struggles with the American Dream. The duo also explores the chaotic impact of the Trump administration and debates whether the West is on a path to recovery or inevitable decline.

The View From The Danube The map of Europe is soon to be re-drawn. At the same time, thanks to Trump, the history of social justice ideology (DEI, and so on) will soon be written by the victors. There are times in the affairs of men when the world must be made anew. That means taking some of our past forward with us - things we remember. But it also means putting some of it away – a collective amnesia, in pursuit of a bigger social goal: moving on. Peace with Russia will mean moving past the crimes and injuries of the past three years, much as British soldiers were suddenly told that Stalin was now our friend in October 1941. What of the Guilty Men (and women)? Will the Euro elite of von der Leyen, Kallas, and co, who have led the continent to this uneasy impasse, be able to get away with their heads? Likewise, will the turning of the tides against social justice ideology — “woke” — mean that we forgive and forget those who were responsible? Or should we exact a more demonstrative justice? The View From The Danube is the keystone video podcast of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based think tank that aims to bring Conservative perspectives from the Anglosphere together, in the heart of the European capital of Conservativism. It stars Rod Dreher, author of The Benedict Option and Living in Wonder, a Senior Fellow at the Danube Institute, John O’Sullivan, former speechwriter to Margaret Thatcher, the founder and President of the DI, and Calum Nicholson, the Director of Research. This week, they’re joined by Peter Boghossian.

Lord Frost Podcast David Frost, Lord Frost of Allenton, was Britain’s Chief Brexit Negotiator. Five years ago, as Britain exited the European Union, David Frost was sent to Brussels, to make a landmark speech, setting out the country’s position on the next the kind of trade policy we’d want, and to some extent the kind of country we’d be. Five years on, it feels as though we’re way off course. Brexit is remembered with bitterness by some, and wistfulness by others. But few think it has fulfilled its purpose. This month, Lord Frost returned to Budapest, to the Danube Institute, to deliver a kind of sequel speech, setting out a vision for Europe’s institutions. For how we lost our way — and how we might recover it. In this exclusive podcast, he talks to the DI’s Director of Research, Calum Nicholson, about the timeline of the past five years. From “Get Brexit Done” to the Windsor Agreement, to Keir Starmer’s subtle Rejoin-ism. Danube Politics is the current affairs strand of Danube Podcasts, a product of The Danube Institute. Connecting Hungarian conservatism to the English-speaking world and beyond.

As the Ukraine War starts to wind down, the next few months willdecide the shape of Europe for a generation.  What happens when the continent is neither master of its owndomain, nor under the aegis of a superpower? And what of the continental elitewho piloted us to the gates of disaster? Professor Doug Stokes explains wherewe might be headed. 

View From The Danube What is the proper order of love?Is it the one thing that irreconcilably separates liberals from conservatives?How much can ordinary retail politics ever be built from deep moral philosophical foundations?And how far are we from Real Existing Post-Liberalism?This month, on View From The Danube, we’re tracking recent events in America, in the context of an intellectually self-confident re-assertion of conservatism. This is “the religious right” thumping their Thomas Aquinas.Host Rod Dreher is joined by his guests to discuss the astonishing executive presidency of Trump’s first month. From DOGE to USAID to DEI to Robert Kennedy, this has been a revolution in the head like little else.But the thing that Rod picks up on is the battle royale of JD Vance versus Rory Stewart over the ‘ordo amoris’. The proper order of love.Is there, Rod wonders, a deeper battle underway between liberalism and conservatism? Are we really injuncted to love everyone equally? Or is the truth that we have special obligations to our family, friends and neighbours?In short, is Stewart the last godforsaken yelp of the disappearing liberal world order?The View From The Danube is the keystone video podcast of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based think tank that aims to bring Conservative perspectives from the Anglosphere together, in the heart of the European capital of Conservativism.It stars Rod Dreher, author of The Benedict Option and Living in Wonder, a senior fellow at the Danube Institute; John O’Sullivan, former speechwriter to Margaret Thatcher, the founder and President of the DI; and Calum Nicholson, the Director of Research.This week, they’re joined by Liliana Śmiech, Director General for International Affairs at the Ludovika University of Public Service. Podcast Episode Chapters

In the first episode of his new podcast from London, David Oldroyd-Bolt, the Danube Institute's Anglosphere Fellow, interviews the former Conservative Party Member of Parliament and Cabinet minister the Rt Hon Michael Gove. After leaving Parliament at the General Election of July 2024, Gove succeeded Fraser Nelson as editor of The Spectator in October and has been widely tipped to received a peerage in Rishi Sunak's resignation honours list. Oldroyd-Bolt and he discuss what makes the Spectator such an enduring success and what he plans to do as editor, before turning to Gove's political career, including his revolutionary education reforms and whether he was correct to take a such hard pro-lockdown line in Cabinet during the Covid panic.