Danube Institute Podcast

As the Conclave begins to elect a new spiritual leader to a billion Catholics, Rod Dreher finds himself looking towards the deeper meaning and purpose of the Papacy, the Church, and religion, in a secular world. Do Catholics need a moderniser, or a traditionalist? Constancy, or renewal? The theme mirrors the great secular debate between populism and the establishment. How much do we need our leaders to be 'relatable'? What is the source of their power: is it ordinariness, or the extraordinary?After all, populist insurgent Nigel Farage is presently toasting big UK wins for his Reform Party in the UK; while establishment conservatives Pierre Poilievre and Peter Dutton were both dumped out of their respective election battles in Canada and Australia. Finally, we turn to Trump’s film tariffs. The latest front in his war for American jobs. Could it ever work? What would it even mean? And what does the global roster of film scripts say about the liquid capital that the modern film business represents? This month, Rod is joined by Lord David Frost of Allenton, former Conservative peer. And Anthony O’Hear, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Buckingham, and Visiting Fellow at the Danube Institute. *** 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, Anthony O’Hear 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.

What world order will emerge after the decline of American hegemony? What is China's big strategy, its foreign policy plan? Why is Hungary significant to China? We asked Yan Xuetong, a prominent Chinese foreign policy expert and the Director of The Institute of International Studies at Tsinghua University.Danube Lectures is a video podcast of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based conservative think tank that asks the Institute's guests, decision-makers, experts, academics, and politicians about their unique ideas.Host: Tamás Maráczi, a journalist at the Danube Institute.

What is the geopolitical significance of Central Asia? Why did Turkic states form a regional organization? And what is Hungary’s role in it? We spoke with Kubanychbek Omuraliev, the Secretary General of the Organization of Turkic States about national identity, economic interests, and connectivity.The Danube Lectures is a video podcast of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based conservative think tank that asks the Institute's guests, decision-makers, experts, academics, and politicians about their unique ideas.Host: Tamás Maráczi, a journalist at the Danube Institute.

The new Syrian administration began life with supreme tactical daring. But it will take more than military prowess to hold together this fractured state. To keep together a tapestry of Alawites, Kurds, Yazidis, Druze and others, it will require a grand pax between the region's biggest players. Hungary claims a certain status as a 'keystone state' in central Europe. In other words: a country that punches above its weight geopolitically, and is super-connected to the region. Ibrahim Mammadov, a Researcher at the Danube Institute, is a citizen of what he considers to be another keystone state within its own region: Azerbaijan. Together, Mammadov points out, the two countries represent a unique geopolitical circuit that encompasses all the key players in any potential Syrian peace deal: Iran, Israel, Russia, Turkey, the US, and to some extent the EU. Could Hungarian-Azeri shuttle diplomacy be the best way to bind together the bigger players? After all, as the Danube Institute's Director of Research, Calum Nicholson, finds out, the key skill set of mid-ranking keystone states is precisely that they are honest brokers. They can touch the third rail of power without raising the suspicion of others. You can read Ibrahim's original paper on the Danube Institute's website, here: https://danubeinstitute.hu/api/v1/companies/381/files/5122155/download

Hugo Martin wants to turn Hungary into a linguistic superpower. Inspired by Balázs Orbán’s state strategy of ‘connectivity’, he foresees Hungary using its central place in Europe to leverage language-learning. He proposes creating a specialised diplomatic corps, to make Hungarians fluent in obscure languages and dialects, giving the country a prime advantage in small or obscure foreign markets that, taken together, represent a big important market. As he points out, learning foreign languages outside of English or German has become an unaffordable luxury for many of the nation's youth. Here, he chats to the Danube Institute's Director of Research, Calum Nicholson, about his recent paper sketching out the 'Connectivity Corps'. You can read Hugo's original paper here: https://danubeinstitute.hu/api/v1/companies/381/files/5122223/download

How was Donald Trump's vice president discovered in 2016? Why did JD Vance go from critic to Trump supporter, and what led him into politics? We asked Rod Dreher, a senior fellow at the Danube Institute, about American conservatives' antipathy towards the EU elite, the threat of soft totalitarianism, and the film based on his book. The Danube Lectures is a video podcast of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based conservative think tank that asks the Institute's guests, decision-makers, experts, academics, and politicians about their unique ideas.Host: Tamás Maráczi, a journalist at the Danube Institute.

In an environment of low interest rates and low returns, private equity was advertised as a clever means to increase returns in a difficulty investment environment. Private equity allows investors to get access to assets that are not traded on the public markets and so, in theory, can offer them exclusive, higher returns. But the private equity structure also risks that a lack of transparency can be used to cover up bad investments and this could even create financial and economic instability. Is private equity driving property bubbles in multiple countries by allowing for a loophole to get around post-2008 bank regulations? Is private equity a blessing or a curse? Analyst David P. Goldman talks to Danube Institute Visting Fellow Philip Pilkington.

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.