In this week’s These Times Tom McTague and I give Rishi Sunak’s defence pledge some recent and long history, especially around the recurrent gap between British defence commitments and geopolitical events.

It was good to talk stuff with David Runciman again, this time gold, silver, and what happens when there is just money either backed by states or created by banks.

In this week’s These Times Tom McTague and I turn to Venezuela’s bid to take two-thirds of Guyana, the world’s fasting growing economy, and what the history of this conflict reveals about a world in which both China and Iran are challenging the US in the western hemisphere.

In this week’s episode of These Times Tom McTague and I reflect upon Iran’s attack on Israel and what is now coming from the Middle East at an administration in Washington that began in 2021 determined to resurrect the path to normalisation with Tehran.

In this recording of a first live These Times, Tom McTague and I try to pull some of the threads in the Middle East together by starting with the geopolitical competition through the First World War for control of the oil-rich south-eastern Ottoman Empire.

One way of telling the story of the UK's macro-economic problems is by what happens when the domestically-produced energy basis erodes, radically increasing external vulnerability. (Energy Trends March 2024)

In this week's episode of These Times Tom McTague and I turn to the return of ISIS and what it reveals about the geopolitical moment.

How Europe survived Putin's gas weapon because it could pay more for ship-borne gas than emerging-market Asian countries, and what dependency on American imports means in an age of democratic political turbulence.

In this week's These Times Tom McTague and I talk with Paul Morland about population: what it explains about geopolitics from the Industrial Revolution and where present demographic change might lead.

In this week's episode of These Times Tom McTague and I bring Turkey into our ongoing discussion of the geopolitical conflicts across Eurasia and Washington's relationship to them: 'look at a map' said Harry Truman.

🚨 These Times Live 🚨

Please join us at the UnHerd Club on 8th April for our first live event

'War and Peace in the Middle East'

Tom McTague and Helen Thompson POLIS are diving deeper into the geopolitics of the Middle-East...

Don't miss it!

🎟️ Tickets👇
club.unherd.com/event/these-ti…

In this week's episode of These Times Tom McTague and I pull the threads together on western Europe, asking why has it been one crisis after another since 2007 and what it means when the geopolitical plates are simultaneously shifting from the north, south, east, and west.

While Macron’s speechifying makes it hard to discern actual strategic shifts in French policy, rising Russian influence in west Africa may well be part of his hardening words for Moscow.

In this week’s These Times Tom McTague and I turn to French President Emmanuel Macron: would-be man of European geopolitical action in a world that keep shocking him.

This attempted energy transition away from fossil fuels already has a history of serious difficulty.

The difference between Macron’s recent rhetoric and French action on Ukraine suggests the subtext is a call to Germany to do what Macron has determined France cannot afford.

In this week's These Times Tom McTague and I turn to the approach British governments pursued to the globalised economy of the 2000s and the failure to adjust to a world in which Britain quickly once again became a net energy importer.

It is far from clear how a Net Zero strategy that depends on electrification, as other states do the same, can shrug at what is happening to UK electricity generation and say imports are 'reducing the need for UK-based generation'.

I will be speaking at two events at the inaugural The Weekend of Mistakes at Hay Castle on Saturday 2 March with tickets now available for the individual sessions.
haycastletrust.org/m-1-hay-castle…

In this week’s These Times Tom McTague and I turn to the German economy and what happened when the German faith in low-risk globalisation hit the new openly geopolitical world made by Russia, China, and the US.