Latika Takes: The Podcast

This week Latika Takes: The Podcast is in London speaking with Ben Judah , who served as special advisor to former UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy. Mr Judah discusses the UK’s relationships with China, Europe, the United States and his failed attempts to kickstart a new CANZUK club, comprising Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. He discusses his fears about the debate around UK Defence Spe...

This week Latika Takes: The Podcast is in Slough, the constituency of Labour MP Tanmanjeet Singh Dheshi, who chairs the House of Commons Defence Select Committee. Mr Dhesi discusses the contents of his Committee’s recent review into AUKUS which found the program is ‘faltering.’ He says the program is ‘plodding along’ and needs a new push from the AUKUS leaders. He calls for an AUKUS visa, a dedica...

This week Latika Takes: The Podcast is in Odesa, Ukraine attending the Black Sea Security Forum. Latika’s guest is Nico Lange, who served as an advisor to former German Defence Minister AKK. Now, as founder of the think tank IRIS, he goes back and forth from the frontline in Ukraine and monitors the changing nature of warfare. In this episode, Latika and Nico discuss how Ukraine has made its gains...

This week Latika Takes: The Podcast is in Prague at the GLOBSEC Forum, now in its 21st year. She interviews Mark Esper, who served as US Secretary of Defence under Donald Trump, between 2019 and 2020. Secretary Esper discusses why he felt ‘offended’ by the European response to the United States and Israel’s decision to launch a war against Iran in February and why it has set back NATO, already und...

This week Latika Takes: The Podcast is at the Lennart Meri Conference in Tallinn, Estonia. Her guest is Kaupo Rosin, the Director General of Estonia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, which is widely regarded as one of the best when it comes to understanding what is going on inside Russia. Latika and Kaupo discuss the unfavourable turn that the war in Ukraine has taken, the effect it has had on Vladi...

This week Latika Takes: The Podcast is at the Yerevan Dialogue in Yerevan, Armenia. Latika’s guest is Armenia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Robert Abisoghomonyan. Mr Absioghomonyan discusses the transformation in Armenia, a post-Soviet state, that is underway, with a societal push to seek EU membership. This week, Armenia hosted the European Political Community to which Canada’s Mark Carney and Ukrain...

This week Latika Takes: The Podcast is in Greece at the Delphi Economic Forum. Latika’s guest is Carla Sands, who served as Donald Trump’s Ambassador to Denmark during his first Presidential term. Carla Sands discusses NATO, why Article 5 is no longer considered iron-clad by MAGA and will change post-Trump. Carla Sands also discusses President Trump’s comments disparaging allied war dead in Afghan...

This week Latika Takes: The Podcast is in London and is joined by the UK’s former Defence Secretary Michael Fallon. Sir Michael served as Defence Secretary between 2014 and 2017 and during part of President Donald Trump’s first term. He discusses why the UK, NATO and Indo-Pacific allies, including Australia should have supported the US war in Iran. Sir Michael also discusses the UK’s defence spend...

This week Latika Takes: The Podcast interviews Greg Grandin, author of America, América. Grandin discusses his book and the creation of the Monroe Doctrine, now adopted by President Donald Trump and many presidents before him. Grandin discusses how America’s relationship with Latin America and Europe created the Doctrine and set in place the US’s modern foreign policy. Latika Takes is a reader-sup...

This week Latika Takes: The Podcast welcomes back Estonia’s Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna, who is travelling to Australia this week. The Estonian Foreign Minister sets out why he supports the US and Israel’s war against Iran, but won’t be involved. He expresses unhappiness with the Trump Administration’s oil reprieve granted to Vladimir Putin in spite of the Russian President’s continued war in...

This week, Latika Takes: The Podcast is in Kyiv, Ukraine, marking the fourth anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s illegal full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Latika interviews ‘Bambi,’ a 20-year-old American who gave up his life in Georgia, US to fight for Ukraine. The pair sit down in Kyiv just hours before Bambi left to return to the Donbas, where he is fighting for Ukraine in the sensitive area of Pokro...

This week Latika Takes: The Podcast is in the Black Sea city of Odesa, Ukraine. The city is covered in ice and snow, a sight not seen by locals for around a decade, reflecting the brutally cold war winter that Ukrainians have endured. In Kyiv, temperatures have dropped to minus 20 degrees Celsius, at the same time, Russia’s Vladimir Putin has deliberately attacked energy infrastructure. Ahead of t...

This week Latika Takes: The Podcast is at the Munich Security Conference in Bavaria, Germany. Latika interviews Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Richard Marles about his debut appearance at Europe’s largest security and defence conference in Munich, Germany. Mr Marles discusses the future of the war in Ukraine, why rules still matter in the global order and China’s military b...

This week Latika Takes: The Podcast is in Washington DC and interviews the former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence Jim Townsend. Mr Townsend, now at the Centre of New American Security, completed more than two decades of work on European and NATO policy in the Pentagon, at NATO and at the Atlantic Council. His work spanned the Cold War, post-Cold War political reconstruction in Europe and...

This week Latika Takes: The Podcast interviews ARSEN OSTROVSKY who was shot during the Bondi terror attack at Bondi Beach on December 14. An international human rights lawyer, Ostrovsky relocated back to Australia just 2.5 weeks before the attack, to take up a position as Head of Sydney Office of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, a leading Jewish communal advocacy organisation. In thi...

This week Latika Takes: The Podcast interviews former Liberal Treasurer and prominent Jewish figure Josh Frydenberg. Mr Frydenberg served as Treasurer between 2018 and 2022 but lost his Melbourne seat. He is widely tipped to return to politics and seek the leadership. Since leaving Parliament and October 7, he has been an avowed campaigner on antisemitism and produced a documentary on the surge in...

This week Ukraine’s former foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba joins Latika Takes: The Podcast. In this wide-ranging and candid interview, Mr Kuleba reveals Kyiv’s strategic mistakes, including how his attempts to cultivate Jared Kushner as a contact for Ukraine were blocked by President Volodymyr Zelensky’s now-resigned but then-all-powerful chief of staff, Andriy Yermak. He discusses how Russia gaine...

This week Latika Takes: The Podcast interviews Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the woman widely regarded as having won Belarus's elections in 2022, who now lives in exile in Lithuania. Tsikhanouskaya, a mother of two, discusses being an opposition activist, inspiring other exiled movements, a woman political leader in a patriarchal society. She discusses on the work with the Trump Administration in free...

This week, US Ambassador John Bolton joins Latika Takes: The Podcast to discuss US national security and global security under the second Trump Administration. Ambassador Bolton served as one of Donald Trump’s national security advisers in the US President’s first term. His memoir of that chaotic time, The Room Where It Happened , details Trump’s incoherent approach to foreign policy and China. Am...

This week, Australian-Chinese writer and journalist Cheng Lei joins Latika Takes: The Podcast from London, where she appeared at PEN International’s Day of the Imprisoned Writer. In this emotional and heartfelt discussion, Lei and Latika are moved to tears as Lei details her journey as a Chinese-born Australian, who heads back to Beijing in the 2000s when the mood about China’s entry into the glob...

This week Latika Takes: The Podcast is in in Washington DC and meets Alex Butterworth and chef Bart Hutchins, a former staffer to US President Barack Obama. Alex Butterworth at one point attempted to run for the West Australian federal seat of Pearce for the Liberal Party. He moved to the US to work for Uber Eats as an attorney. He became frustrated with the quality of restaurants in Washington DC...

This week Latika Takes: The Podcast interviews General David Petraeus, the leading military analyst of the war in Ukraine. General Petraeus discusses how the war in Ukraine has evolved, what the future of combat looks like and how much training of the West Ukraine now needs to do. He discusses whether the innovations in drone warfare make AUKUS obsolete or not, as well as the implications of the w...

In this episode of Latika Takes: The Podcast, Latika dropped by a Superhumans pop-up in New York City’s Ukrainian quarter to interview Virgin co-founder Richard Branson. Superhumans is an NGO that specialises in prosthetics and rehabilitation for veterans and wounded civilians, to interview Virgin co-founder Richard Branson. The pop-up had a video booth, in which participants were invited to imagi...

This week Latika is back in Kyiv attending the Yalta European Strategy (YES) Conference and interviews Kurt Volker, former US diplomat, including NATO Ambassador and Donald Trump’s former Special Representative to Ukraine. Latika quizzes Mr Volker on the Trump Administration’s positions on Ukraine, why Donald Trump fails to use force against Russian President Vladimir Putin and whether the Coaliti...

This week Latika Takes: The Podcast interviews Jan Lipavský, the foreign minister of the Czech Republic. Mr Lipavský was the keynote speaker at the International Institute of Strategic Studies’ Gala Dinner at the Prague Defence Summit. Mr Lipavsky discusses the upcoming Czech elections, which the government is projected to lose, the prospects for peace in Ukraine, why Donald Trump wasn’t wrong to...