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 res...

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 t...

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 ef...

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...

Malcom Kyeyune is a writer for UnHerd and many other titles. He is a big thinker in the realm of geopolitics, military strategy, and social organisation. In the first episode of Unknown Knowns, Kyeyune sits down with host Philip Pilkington to discuss the biggest arc of all: Western decline. After all, it is no longer a question of if, or even when, but how Western decline occurs. The past five yea...

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 amn...

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. Bre...

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 s...

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 peera...

As the Trump 2 era dawns, the talk is all of a price on Greenland and the kowtowing of Canada. The Mar-a-lago world view that is emerging is one based on shoring up America's geographical power. We're back into the world of hemispheres - of the Monroe Doctrine, and implied spheres of influence. So what happens when America pulls away from the abstractions of the 'rules based international order',...

Sáron Sugár, a researcher at the Danube Institute, sits down with Or Yissachar, the Head of Israel Defence and Security Forum's Content Division and Research Department, to discuss what lies ahead for Israel’s security strategy as tensions with Iran and its proxies continue to simmer. The discussion explores the prospects for US-Israel relations under President Trump’s second term, controversies a...

Michelle Watson, Senior Visiting Fellow at the Danube Institute, sits down with "Mimi" Roy, Visiting Fellow at Ludovika University of Public Service in Budapest, Hungary, to discuss her latest research topic. The conversation delves into two key questions: how India’s tech strategy is shaping its role in the new era of techno-competition, and how the country is positioning itself as a prominent st...

“Every epoch is a sphinx that tumbles into the abyss once its riddle is solved” - Heinrich Heine, 1833 It was only as the reality of Trump’s win began to sink in that the enormity of the change ahead began to dawn on us. With control over the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court and the executive, Trumpism 2.0 has the all means to make good on its outlandish promises; early nominations suggest it...

When the Washington Post failed to endorse the Kamala campaign, the reaction was off the scale. Journalists resigned. The rest of the liberal media blew a fuse. But this was only one paper and one guy, Jeff Bezos. What was going on? As Rod Dreher explains, The Washington Post’s non-endorsement was the moment the Harris campaign and their supporters sensed that the deep narrative was finally drifti...

Lord Frost, joined us on the Danube Institute Podcast to explain how a hard-fought Tory leadership contest has changed the whole tenor of the British Right. Here, he explains why Robert Jenrick is his pick.

Prof Doug Stokes and journalist Gavin Haynes join the podcast to discuss the state of British politics, whether we are living in a truly multipolar world, and the significance of the coming American election.

Though Chinese-Israeli relations had taken off and were set for great heights, China turned away from Israel immediately after October 7, not even condemning the Hamas terror attack. Chinese-US rivalry is a factor. What is going on? Dr Eric Hendriks, who previously worked at Peking University and is now a fellow at the Danube Institute, interviews Elie Pieprz, Director of International Relations o...

Discussion on the outcomes of the French elections and their implications. Prof Daniel Mahoney and Dr Soós Eszter join the podcast to reflect on the surprising results of the French election, and their implications for the future of france, and the french right in particular.

"There is simply no way to know what comes after liberalism", according to political economist and journalist Philip Pilkington, but he is convinced that "the world system that liberalism created after the Second World War is collapsing". In this episode of Buda Hills Podcast, we discuss some of the most striking claims in Pilkington's next book, The Collapse of Global Libe...

Next weekend French voters go to the polls in the second round of elections to the French National Assembly after the "far Right" National Rally headed by Marine Le Pen scored a strong but not decisive success in the first round. France's President Emmanuel Macron had called the elections in a response to its victory in the European elections to demonstrate that the Euro-results were...

Overview and predictions for the first round of the French elections. Over the next two weekends French voters will be going to the polls to select a new national government. France's President Emmanuel Macron called the elections in an emergency response to the victory of the "far-right" National Rassemblement,, in elections to the European Assembly. Apparently he intended to demons...

Új, angol nyelvű ismeretterjesztő kötet jelent meg a Batthyány Lajos Alapítvány és a Danube Institute gondozásában „Theologians on Modern Politics” címmel. A közeledő nemzetközi bemutató apropóján a Danube Institute vezető kutatójával, a kötet társszerkesztőjével, Dr. Darabos Ádámmal Dallman Kristóf egyháztörténész beszélgetett az intézet podcast sorozatának legújabb epizódjában. A diskurzus során...

In this special episode of Reflections from Budapest, we had the honour to have a discussion with Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani, International Media Spokesperson of the Israel Defence Forces. We started our conversation by asking Lieutenant Colonel Shoshani about his military background and his role in telling the IDF’s story to the world. Lieutenant Colonel Shoshani reacted to a question abou...

In this episode of Reflections from Budapest, we continued our discussion with Shirel Liberman, an Israeli activist and the co-founder of Shift, a women-led impact network aimed at supporting women in public diplomacy and enhancing Israel's positive global influence. In this part, Shirel walked our listeners through her own experiences on the October 7th massacre and highlighted the lack of in...