The Hated and the Dead

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has been the President of Egypt since 2014.  Egypt perennially struggles economically and politically, with high inflation, widespread youth unemployment and military dictatorship. In fact, Egypt has been under military dictatorship for nearly seventy uninterrupted years- nearly, because after the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, democratically elected Mohamed Morsi, of the Muslim Br...

Joe Biden has been President of the United States since 2021. However, this episode, unlike most others in this series, isn’t biographical; rather, what my guest and I examine today, are the prospects for Joe Biden’s re-election as US President next year, almost exactly one year out from the 2024 presidential election. On the surface of it, Joe Biden’s polling numbers aren’t appealing. 538, Americ...

Alex Jones is an American political commentator, new media personality, and conspiracy theorist. Conspiracy theory- which we will here define as attributing the occurrence of events or phenomena to sinister or secret organisations- infects all parts of the political spectrum and exists across the World. However, to a certain portion of the American right, conspiracy theory does not merely influenc...

Today’s podcast looks at one of the most important and intricate stories in recent American history; the role of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the run up to, and aftermath of, the 2016 Presidential Election. The episode's subject, Robert Mueller, was the FBI Director before the election, but became infamous for his role as Special Counsel to the US Department of Justice, for wh...

At the heart of Australia’s security policy lies a crucial question; should Australia, a country situated thousands of kilometres away from the Asian landmass, defend itself by casting out on the Pacific Ocean and pushing militarily towards Asia? As is often said, attack is the best form of defence… This is certainly the view taken by the signatories of AUKUS- a 2021 security partnership between A...

Gabriele D'Annunzio was an Italian writer, journalist and poet who wrote himself irrevocably into history in 1919. In the chaotic aftermath of World War One, D'Annunzio led a small band of irregular Italian forces to the Free City of Rijeka (Italian name Fiume), and seized it in the name of Italian irredentism. D'Annunzio proclaimed the Free City to be the new Italian Regency of Car...

Hugo Chávez was the President of Venezuela from 1999 until his death in 2013.  Despite attempts to harness Venezuela’s enormous oil revenues for the public good, Chávez left behind a country riddled with economic problems and with little to show for the President’s claim to build socialism in the 21st century. Billions of dollars in oil revenues were hoovered up by corrupt elites. Promises of new...

Ariel Sharon served as prime minister of Israel between 2001 and 2006. As a politician and military leader, Sharon always courted controversy. He frequently ignored the orders of his superiors in an attempt to push further into Arab territory and as a politician infamously visited Al-Aqsa Mosque on Temple Mount, sparking riots and terror attacks. Most notoriously of all, he was found responsible f...

Barack Obama served as the 44th President of the United States between 2009 and 2017. For early Gen Zers like me, he was the most recognisable politician of our childhood. For those who voted for him, and for many others around the World, his message of Hope and Change was a vessel for their aspirations; aspirations which, amid the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis, had been dealt a serious b...

Yoon Suk Yeol has been the President of South Korea since May 2022. A public prosecutor until two years ago, Yoon won the Presidency on a knife-edge, having thrown in his lot with the "New Right", a pro-American, capitalist faction which rails against the cultural liberalism espoused by Korean progressives.  His election suggests a degree of cultural polarisation, but debates over econom...

Erich Mielke was the head of East Germany's Ministry of State Security- also known as The Stasi- from 1957 until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.  Given the Stasi has a reputation as perhaps the most meticulous secret police service in history, Mielke, hardened by the communist underworld of Weimar Germany, the Spanish Civil War and a Second World War labour camp, certainly has a lot to a...

Mohamed bin Zayed has been the de facto leader of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) since 2014, and the federation's President since 2022.  Bin Zayed, or MbZ, has presided over a massive centralisation of power into the hands of the Abu Dhabi elite, and particularly his ruling family, the al-Nahyans. This has helped to construct an image of the UAE as being orderly, stable and dependable for glo...

Golda Meir served as prime minister of Israel from 1969 until 1974. Taking control of her country during a period of euphoria after the 1967 Six Day War, Meir was a member of Israel's founding generation.  However, Israel's sense of infallibility was shattered after a surprise attack by Egypt and Syria, in what became the Yom Kippur War. Though Israel defeated its Arab neighbours for the...

Hafizullah Amin was the communist leader of Afghanistan for three ill-fated months in 1979. The end of his time in power- also the end of his life- marked the start of Afghanistan's descent into a forty year war. So disastrous was Amin's time in power that my guest considers him possibly the worst man in modern Afghan history.  Amin reveals that most things in politics, and in war, are n...

Kais Saied has been the President of Tunisia since 2019. Just a few short years ago, Saied was a constitutional law professor, and Tunisia was seen as the only success story of the uprisings known as the Arab Spring. Now, Tunisia is slipping back into autocracy. Why didn’t Tunisia’s flirtation with democracy work? Should we be surprised it didn’t work? What lessons do the last twelve years hold fo...

The Arctic Five are the five countries with coastlines on the Arctic Ocean. They are: Canada, Russia, Norway; through Alaska, The United States; and through Greenland, Denmark. This collection of five countries we will use as a bridge to discussing the geopolitics of one of the world’s least visited, least talked about and least understood regions. Due to its remoteness and its emptiness, the Arct...

In a special episode of the podcast, I speak to three former guests about the divergent fortunes and trajectories of the governments in Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Russia.  In Turkey, Erdogan is emboldened following an election victory unexpected in some quarters; in Saudi Arabia, MBS is cautiously reforming the country's domestic and foreign policy in a bid to extend its longevity; in Russia, V...

Rauf Denktash was the President of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus from 1983 until 2005. Given its crucial geopolitical position in the Eastern Med, Cyprus has been contested by different powers for centuries. In the modern day, this contestation occurs between Greece and Turkey, something compounded by the fact that Greeks and Turks both lived on the island and make up the Island’s two la...

Khorloogiin Choibalsan was the leader of Communist Mongolia from 1939 until 1952. Known as "The Stalin of the Steppe", his life changed in 1933 when he agreed to become Stalin's lackey under the threat of execution for supposed collusion with Japanese spies. This led Choibalsan to execute three percent of the Mongolian population in Purges commensurate with Stalin's. His career...

James Callaghan was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom between 1976 and 1979. He is also the only person to have held the UK's four Great Offices of State: Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary, and Prime Minister.  This episode is the next in the "Rather Less Horrible" Series, where my guest and I discuss politicians less unpleasant than most of the o...

Amfilohije Radović was Metropolitan- a high ranking position in the Orthodox Church- of Montenegro and the Littoral from 1990 until his death in 2020.  Amfilohije was a member of the Serbian Orthodox Church, which also wields considerable influence in Montenegro. Serbia and Montenegro were joined in federation until 2006, when Montenegro voted to become an independent country.  He was one of the k...

Muhammadu Buhari served as the President of Nigeria between 2015 and 2023, having left office three weeks ago. Buhari is a longstanding character in Nigerian politics, having run for President five times, and led the country as a military dictator in the 1980s.  The administration of Nigeria is made almost impossible by the intertwined issues of ethnic, linguistic and religious division, corruptio...

Dragan Čović is one of the most powerful politicians in Bosnia and Herzegovina.  Bosnia's political system, the most complicated anywhere in the World, is designed to give the country's three ethnic groups- Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats- equal representation in government. This sounds reasonable- until one considers that Croats only make up 15% of the population. Čović is the man who has, f...

Christopher Hitchens was an Anglo-American writer, journalist, literary critic and essayist. Not a thinker who one can characterise easily, the one thing linking all Hitchens’ writing and his utterances- he was a formidable debater- was his opposition to totalitarian thought. This often sparked controversy- especially his views on Islam and his support for the War in Iraq- but for all the descript...

Józef Piłsudski was the founding father of modern day Poland, and the country’s most significant political figure from its formation in 1918 until his death in 1935. Initially a committed democrat who wished to see a Poland free for ethnic minorities to live in, Piłsudski eventually decided that his fellow Poles were not enlightened enough to accept his vision of a free and multi-ethnic Poland, an...