WAC Houston

A humanitarian crisis doesn’t announce itself — but Ciaran Donnelly, Senior Vice President for Crisis Response, Recovery and Development at the International Rescue Committee, sees the warning signs before most of the world looks up. In this episode of The Greater Loop, host Maryanne Maldonado sits down with Donnelly to tour the IRC’s 2026 Emergency Watch List, from the collapsed peace deal drivin...

A single state election result put a number on Germany's anxiety — 44 percent — but says former European Parliament President Hans-Gert Pöttering, the real story is what comes next. In this episode of The Greater Loop, host Maryanne Maldonado sits down with Pöttering, who led the European Parliament from 2007 to 2009 and spent four decades at the center of European politics, to unpack the AfD's ri...

On the morning of September 11th, 2001, only minutes after the first plane hit the World Trade Center’s North Tower, former FBI Special Agent in Charge (SAC) Christopher Combs was racing to the airport to fly to and assist in New York. As an FBI Counterterrorism leader, he was needed immediately at the Twin Towers; but he received another urgent message – a massive explosion had just hit the Penta...

Ask an American diplomat what he'd tell the next president, and the answer isn't policy — it's relationships. In this episode of The Greater Loop, host Maryanne Maldonado sits down with Tom Selinger, Executive Director of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training and a 27-year Foreign Service veteran, to trace 250 years of American diplomacy — from Benjamin Franklin's fur-cap debut at th...

Trade wars are rarely about trade alone — the real question, says Johns Hopkins SAIS trade expert Dr. Christopher Sands, is whether either side can afford to keep digging in. In this episode of The Greater Loop, host Maryanne Maldonado sits down with Sands to unpack how the US-Canada relationship went from decades of stable alliance to full-blown tariff escalation in just eighteen months, what's r...

Fear of a wider war is easy — the harder question, says defense strategist Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, is how this one actually ends. In this episode of The Greater Loop, host Maryanne Maldonado sits down with O'Hanlon, six months into the US-Iran conflict, to unpack why "short war" predictions almost always fail, what's really happening in the Strait of Hormuz, and whether Iran...

Fear of AI is everywhere — but according to Leon Coe, founder of Amplify Intelligence and president of the Houston AI Club, the only way that fear becomes reality is by doing nothing about it. In this episode of The Greater Loop, host Maryanne Maldonado sits down with "the Houston AI guy" to unpack what AI actually is, why compute is becoming the new oil, and how Houston — with its energy, medicin...

What makes a foreign policy decision great? And what turns one into a historic catastrophe? Jim Lindsay, Senior Vice President at the Council on Foreign Relations, surveyed hundreds of historians from the world's largest professional association devoted to US foreign policy, and asked them to rank the 10 best and 10 worst decisions in American history, spanning from the Declaration of Independence...

Two powerful earthquakes. More than 50,000 people unaccounted for. A death toll still climbing. And a government blocking aid deliveries to maintain control. Venezuela was already one of the most fragile states in the Western Hemisphere. Now it's facing a catastrophe that is exposing and deepening every crack in its political and economic foundation. Maryanne Maldonado sits down with Henry Ziemer,...

Iran's national team can't spend the night in the United States. A referee arrived with a valid visa and was turned back at the border. FIFA promised free movement for all teams. Trump didn't care. Welcome to the 2026 World Cup, the most geopolitically charged sporting event in modern history. Maryanne Maldonado sits down with Dr. Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, Fellow at Rice University's Baker Instit...

The headlines called it a diplomatic breakthrough. A leading China expert calls it something else. Scott Kennedy, Senior Advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and one of America's foremost authorities on the Chinese economy, with 38 years of on-the-ground experience in China, joins Maryanne Maldonado to break down what actually happened at the Trump-Xi summit in Beijing, an...

Washington has fired career diplomats, shuttered USAID, and pulled back from international engagement. Houston is doing the opposite. In this episode, Maryanne Maldonado sits down with Ambassador Chase Untermeyer, veteran of the Reagan and Bush administrations, former US Ambassador to Qatar, and director of the Voice of America, and Nick Sawicki of the Houston Public Library Foundation to announce...

Most people travel to see the world. WAC Houston members travel to understand it. In this episode, Maryanne Maldonado sits down with travel expert Ilyas Hokkaci to preview two of the most geopolitically charged trips the World Affairs Council has ever offered: Uzbekistan, sitting at the center of a quiet new great power competition between Russia, China, and the West, and South Korea & Taiwan,...

In only four eventful and momentous years, numerous major geopolitical events have shocked global oil markets and redefined how oil is, and may be, traded around the world in the years to come. Those events and the leaders still shaping them have contributed to often staggering and unpredictable swings in global oil prices. In the longer term, even if prices stabilize again, what may prove to be t...

Every time a president walks into a room, hundreds of decisions have already been made — the route, the handshakes, the camera angles, and the escape plan. And sometimes, despite all the planning, things go sideways. Jean Becker spent nearly 25 years as Chief of Staff to President George H.W. Bush — running his post-presidential office, managing his state funeral, and living inside the machinery o...

Most people travel to see the world. WAC Houston members travel to understand it. In this episode, Maryanne Maldonado sits down with Ilyas Hokkaci, WAC Houston's travel program lead, to talk about what intentional travel really looks like — from the just-completed cherry blossom season trip through Kyoto and Tokyo, to the upcoming October journey through Morocco that has members already booking th...

The war in Iran has dominated every headline. But in Gaza, there is no ceasefire. The suffering didn't pause; it just stopped being covered. In this episode, Maryanne Maldonado sits down with Dr. Alice Rothchild, physician, author, filmmaker, and one of the most unflinching voices on the Gaza crisis. A former Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School with nearly 40 years of practice as an OB-G...

The peace talks in Islamabad lasted just 21 hours. Hours later, the U.S. Navy began a full blockade of Iranian ports. And yet, a former Iranian Ambassador says this wasn't a collapse. It was progress. So what's really going on? Maryanne Maldonado sits down with Dr. Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former Iranian ambassador and one of the most closely watched voices on Iran-West relations, to decode the...

The fall of Assad. The capture of Maduro. A ceasefire in Iran. On the surface, it looks like Russia is losing ground, but is it? Dr. Angela Stent, one of the world's leading experts on U.S.-Russia relations and author of Putin's World, says the picture is far more complicated than the headlines suggest. In this episode, Maryanne Maldonado sits down with Dr. Stent to unpack what's really happening...

Check Wafik Beydoun IN PERSON at our upcoming event on April 29th 2026. https://wachouston.org/event/1080-global-oil-in-chaos-with-otc/   The Strait of Hormuz carries over 20% of the world's oil — and right now, it's at the center of a global energy crisis. Gas is hovering around $4 a gallon, emergency reserves are being tapped, and analysts warn that even if the conflict ends tomorrow, recovery c...

India is rewriting the rules of global power, and nobody does it quite like New Delhi. In this episode of The Global Lens, host Maryanne Maldonado sits down with Ambassador Rahul Chhabra, a 40-year veteran of Indian diplomacy, to break down how India is simultaneously managing its relationships with the United States, Russia, and China without fully committing to any of them. From buying Russian o...

Check out the upcoming live event that will cover these and many more topics on the 2026 World Health Day. https://wachouston.org/event/2026-world-health-day/ Billions of people around the world lack access to basic healthcare — and most of us never hear about it. In this episode, we speak with Walter Ulrich, CEO of Medical Bridges, a Houston-based nonprofit redistributing surplus medical supplies...

In a polarized era, history can become a subject of political contention. Many see America as perfect; many others argue that the national experiment is fundamentally flawed. The truth, Meacham shows, likely lies between these extremes. America has had shining hours, and also dark ones. In American Struggle, Pulitzer Prize-Winner Jon Meacham illuminates the nation’s complicated past. This rich and...

The Arctic is melting — and the world's powers are racing to control what's left.   In this episode, we sit down with Kenneth R. Rosen, national security correspondent and author of Polar War, to explore how climate change is triggering a dangerous new era of geopolitical competition at the top of the world. From Russia's push to dominate Arctic shipping lanes, to China's quiet near-Arctic ambitio...

In The Architect of Espionage, Samuel M. Katz masterfully chronicles the life of Meir Dagan, a visionary covert warfare veteran who revolutionized the art of intelligence and espionage. Born in the shadows of the Holocaust, his life personified the modern history of the Jewish people and the State of Israel. Dagan’s journey embodies decisive action, innovative thought, and bold leadership under fi...