We asked Michael Doran, Director of the Hudson Institute's Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East, for our year-end analysis about the world's three major geopolitical conflicts.
The Danube Lectures is a video podcast of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based conservative think tank that asks its guests – decision-makers, experts, academics, and politicians – about their unique ideas.
Host: Tamás Maráczi, a journalist at the Danube Institute.
On the 1st of November 2025, President Donald Trump released a statement about the situation facing Christians in Nigeria. He warned that if the Nigerian government failed to protect Christian communities from rising violence, the US might be “forced to step in” to defend them. The tone was characteristically Trumpian - dramatic, blunt, and escalatory - but it touched on a very real issue.
According to Open Doors, of the roughly five thousand Christians killed worldwide each year for their faith, more than four thousand are Nigerian.
Trump’s remark also came only months after a major structural shift in US foreign assistance: the closure of USAID’s global mission network, which had big effects on Nigeria.
It was between these two developments that the Danube Institute sent a small team of researchers to the country, in June and July.
Our purpose was to investigate the condition of Christian communities firsthand and to explore what a post-liberal development-aid framework might look like in practice.
We approached the question with one notable precedent in mind: Hungary Helps, the Hungarian government’s development agency, which explicitly supports persecuted Christians and other vulnerable minorities worldwide.
In an interesting twist of timing, our paper on the trip was published the same week as Trump’s statement, and we now know that a copy of the report has already been hand-delivered to the US Vice President, J. D. Vance.
Calum Nicholson, who was on that trip, is joined by his fellow lead authors, Nicholas Naquin and Daniel Farkas, to discuss the findings of that research: the realities on the ground, the broader geopolitical context, and what a more honest and effective model of international assistance might require.
We talked to Päivi Räsänen, a Finnish politician, former chairwoman of the Christian Democrats, and former Minister of the Interior of Finland at Axioma Center’s conference in Budapest, about the criminal proceedings initiated against her and the status of freedom of religion and freedom of expression in Finland.
The Danube Lectures is a video podcast of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based conservative think tank that asks its guests – decision-makers, experts, academics, and politicians – about their unique ideas.
Host: Tamás Maráczi, a journalist at the Danube Institute.
The recording was made with the help of Axioma Center.
On a chilly May morning in 1618, four Catholic lords regent, arrived at the Bohemian Chancellery at 8:30 am, to meet their Protestant counterparts.
The agenda was to clarify whether the four regents were responsible for persuading the Emperor to stop Protestant church construction on royal lands.
It did not go well. A fracas followed. At the end of which, two regents, plus their secretary, were defenestrated - literally thrown from a third storey window.
Miraculously, all three survived the 70-foot fall.
Millions would not be so lucky. The Thirty Years War that followed The Defenestration of Prague was one of the most destructive events in human history. By its end, a fifth of the German lands’ population was dead. Far more than the Second World War.
In all, the Reformation’s wars of religion lasted around 120 years, and shattered the peace of the continent.
Surveying the carnage, early liberal thinkers saw the new political ideology of liberalism as a solution: religious toleration, baked into the state.
Yet for every Enlightenment thinker who genuinely sought to promote plurality, there was one who was actively hostile to religion itself.
Voltaire and Rousseau preached religious toleration, but when the French revolutionaries carried their program to what they saw as its logical conclusion, they tried to institute a state-backed Cult of Reason and installed a prostitute in Notre Dame cathedral.
Today, be it on abortion, assisted suicide, or freedoms of association, the debate has turned to whether liberalism and religion are compatible with one another.
Pure liberalism - what you might call hyper-liberalism, has grown increasingly authoritarian in nature. And some are questioning whether it is itself compatible with a pluralistic society.
Liberalism has had a good two hundred years — but as the world moves past US hegemony, is it doomed to become a victim of its own contradictions?
Philip Pilkington is a Visiting Fellow at the Danube Institute, and author of The Collapse of Global Liberalism: And the Emergence of the Post Liberal World Order.
To discuss this question, he is joined by Andrew Koppelman.
Andrew is Professor of Law, Political Science and Philosophy at Northwestern University — and author of several books, including The Tough Luck Constitution; Gay Rights vs Religious Liberty: The Unnecessary Conflict; and Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed.
And by Jacob Williams, a PhD student at Oxford University, specialising in post-liberal thought.
We talked to Sara Mohammad Amin Falaknaz, a member of the UAE Federal National Council and Chairman of the UAE-Hungary Friendship Committee, about gender equality, the geopolitical stance of the UAE, and the UAE-Hungary relationship.
The Danube Lectures is a video podcast of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based conservative think tank that asks its guests – decision-makers, experts, academics, and politicians – about their unique ideas.
Host: Tamás Maráczi, a journalist at the Danube Institute.
The recording was made with the help of the UAE Embassy in Budapest.
For years, we were told to obey the science, and seek the facts. Well, the facts are in. No dispute.
Mortality from Covid was .25 percent of the global population. The 1919 Spanish Flu epidemic killed between 2.5 and 5 per cent.
It is an order of magnitude smaller. The same ratio of 10:1 applies to the infection fatality rate.
In fact, for a 40 year old, it had the same Infection Fatality Rate as the now forgotten Hong Kong Flu of 1968.
Factually, we can now see that Covid was serious, but not catastrophic.
So why have those who spoke out in the early days of the pandemic to urge proportionality, remained on the wrong side of history?
In recent weeks, a UK national inquiry into the pandemic reached the second stage of its conclusions.
Their findings? That Britain should have locked down harder, earlier. The inquiry’s chair, Baroness Heather Hallett, even put a number to this claim: locking down a week earlier, she said, would have saved 23 000 lives.
Yet for Daniel Hannan and the small band of Covid-impact skeptics like him, who opposed lockdowns from the off, the right side of history continues to elude them.
Five years ago, there must have been a sense that they only had to wait for the data: that validation would arrive by now.
Sadly, the inquiry has only been a turgid, expensive means to amplify the old narrative.
Its general quality poses broader questions: what is it to inquire, at a national, statutory level? How can we drill down to truth, when so many establishment interests stand in the way? Do we still have an elite class capable of putting aside their priors?
Daniel Hannan now sits in the House of Lords, as Lord Hannan of Kingsclere. He has continued to be a thorn in the side of British bureaucracy, and to speak out on the Covid response.
In this episode of Danube Politics, he talks to Visiting Fellow Gavin Haynes about Covid, inquiries, and the things we have forgotten to remember.
We asked Tomohiko Taniguchi, a Distinguished Fellow of the Ludovika Public Diplomacy Hub, President of Nippon Kaigi, and Former Special Advisor to PM Shinzo Abe, about the geopolitical turbulences surrounding his country, Japan. The Danube Lectures is a video podcast of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based conservative think tank that asks its guests – decision-makers, experts, academics, and politicians – about their unique ideas. Host: Tamás Maráczi, a journalist at the Danube Institute.
We asked Jacques Sapir, a French economist and expert on Russia at the School of Economic Warfare in Paris and at the Moscow School of Economics, about the state of the Russian war economy.
The Danube Lectures is a video podcast of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based conservative think tank that asks its guests – decision-makers, experts, academics, and politicians – about their unique ideas.
Host: Tamás Maráczi, a journalist at the Danube Institute.
It’s a race that has been kept politely out of the mainstream discourse, spoken of only in the tech press. But this week, Jensen Huang, CEO of chip Goliath NVIDIA, decided to lob it into the mainstream, with a warning: “China” he said, “Is going to win the AI race.”
Huang’s warning was directed towards America. He later clarified his comments, saying that he wanted America to win the race. But that resource constraints: around consolidation, energy, and talent, might lead it to stumble, compared to China’s command economy.
In some sense, what he is hinting at is massive government support: a new Manhattan Project. A new Space Race. Winning that will define the geopolitics of the 21st century.
In another sense, though, the race is not a race between two superpowers. It is between them and those who aren’t in it. Not least away from the beleaguered tech-desert of the EU, which must for now watch the prime movers pull ever further ahead.
Europe understands the challenge. It issues directives designed to embrace it.
And in terms of Huang’s challenge, the EU understands dirigisme very well. You might say it understands little else. Yet the fruits just aren’t there.
Its Digital Markets Act continues to draw the ire of US tech firms. Last year, it passed the AI Act - designed to regulate the industry. A piece of legislation that seemed chiefly concerned with the internet chat forum hobbyhorse of AI Safety.
Now, there is talk of special AI factories - consortiums, regional hubs, that will operate at scale, and pass their systems down to smaller companies, SMEs, who could not individually afford to keep up with the coming tech deluge.
At the same time, in the mid-tech world, the Dutch chip maker Nexperia has been at the centre of a geopolitical tug of war between its Chinese owners and the forces of the West, over who controls these kinds of vital supply lines. Europe let Nexperia fall from its grasp – and now demands to have it back.
So which way will the continent’s tech scene bend in these increasingly harsh headwinds? Will it become little more than a talent pool for America? Can it resist the phalanx of Chinese systems - and the coming wave of native Chinese chips? Is the solution US-style private sector innovation? Or Beijing’s lock-step market making?
Peter Caddle has been a Kremlinologist of the Brussels bubble for a while now. For 2 years, he was a journalist at Brussels Signal, with a beat in tech. He’s now a visiting fellow here at the Danube Institute. He talks to Gavin Haynes about whether we should be panicking.
Just as Boomers like Steve Jobs once remade America in their own liberal image. Just as the Millennials gave us Woke and Hustle Culture: what happens when the Zoomers get into the saddle?
This month on View from the Danube, we’re looking at youthquakes.
In Britain, a younger set seems to be throwing off the old softly-softly of their political culture, calling out migrant crime and brazenly leading the charge towards mass deportations.
Meanwhile, in America, Tucker Carlson has interviewed Nick Fuentes. Fuentes has a massive online audience who call themselves Groypers. But for years, the mainstream right has kept him out of the conversation, because of his bizarre shock jock behaviour, Holocaust denial, and attacks on, quote-unquote, “world Jewry.”
The interview, which was notoriously soft, has caused a ruckus inside the MAGA tent. Tucker says he merely wants to hear the arguments.
But others ask : is there any future for the American right if it lets the likes of Fuentes in? Even on the other side - the election of 34 year old Zohran Mamdani as New York mayor - a man who wants government-run grocery stores and regularly quotes Karl Marx — suggests that the youth are breaking about as far left as they ever have.
Take all this foment and fast forward fifteen years — can the old mode of liberal democracy even hold it together in the face of what’s pushing it from underneath?
The groypers, Mamdani and the future: this time on View From The Danube.
We talked to Hall Gardner, Professor Emeritus in the Department of International and Comparative Politics at the American University of Paris, about the analysis of the three major geopolitical conflicts in the world.
Danube Lectures is a video podcast of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based conservative think tank that asks its guests – decision-makers, experts, academics, and politicians – about their unique ideas.
Host: Tamás Maráczi, a journalist at the Danube Institute.
Professor Jacques Sapir is a leading expert on the Russian economy, and part of the Institute of Economic War in Paris. In this wide-ranging historical discussion with the Danube Institute's resident economist, Philip Pilkington, he talks through the long view on Russia's strengths and vulnerabilities. From Stalin doing the impossible to repel the German invasion, to the possibility that collapse could have been avoided in the late '80s, through the desolate '90s, into the dynamics of the fortress economy that Vladimir Putin has developed, post-2014.
In 1969, Willie Brandt became Chancellor of the German Federal Republic.
A hulking man of immense charisma, he broke the stronghold of Konrad Adenauer’s Christian Democrats, and with it, set his country on a new path with regards to the Eastern Bloc.
Brandt judged the old policy, Adenauer’s staunch anti-Communist Hallstein Doctrine, to have failed.
In collaboration with his aide, Egon Bahr, he reset relations, through something called "Wandel durch Annäherung": Change through rapprochement.
Eventually, this would come to be known as Ostpolitik. Later still, it would seep into broader Western culture as 1970s Detente, and lead to the signing of the historic Helsinki accords.
Brandt’s policy was chiefly political, but it was twinned with a similar one from the Vatican, which also became known as Ostpolitik.
In Rome, first Pope John XXIII, then Pope Paul VI decided that they would work with the Warsaw Pact authorities, to preserve what little the Church still had.
The Vatican had three goals:
• to reopen seminaries and churches where possible;
• to secure recognition for bishops;
• and, to allow limited Church activity under official regimes.
In return, the Holy See would tone down public condemnation of Communism.
But much as with the elections of Thatcher and Reagan, in the late 70s, with the advent of Pope John Paul II, everything changed.
The Polish Pope used funds from Reagan to build up the underground church, and with it, the Solidarity movement in his home country. Eleven years later, Solidarity and the Church were to prove decisive in the overthrow of the Polish dictatorship, and the wider fall of the Iron Curtain.
You might say both strategies played their part. The first establishing a base. The second, leveraging it.
But which was better? Or indeed, more moral? To gain influence with – or to resist totalitarianism?
It’s the horns of the dilemma the Church still faces, with regards to the world’s surviving Communist monolith – China.
Since 2018, a secret agreement between Pope Francis and the CCP has governed the election of Chinese Bishops. Rome can veto - but it cannot propose.
In return? Well, not much. The Church must still display pictures of Xi Jinping, pictures of Christ are deprecated, and young Catholics are barred from attending until their 18th birthday.
Father Mario Portella has been watching this new Concordat play out. He’s a visiting fellow at the Danube Institute. He’s also former Chancellor of the Archdiocese of Florence and Priest of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore.
In a new piece for the Hungarian Conservative magazine, he argues that, when it comes to Xi Jingping, it is better to resist than to play along. This week, he joins Gavin Haynes on Danube Politics, to make his case.
We talked to Márton Ugrósdy, Deputy State Secretary at the Office of the Prime Minister's Political Director, about the political significance of Viktor Orbán's White House visit.
The Danube Lectures is a video podcast of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based conservative think tank that asks its guests – decision-makers, experts, academics, and politicians – about their unique ideas.
Host: Tamás Maráczi, a journalist at the Danube Institute.
Since 1990, every July, across the Carpathian basin, from Sopron to Szeged, from Kaposvar to Koloszvar, Hungarians pile into friends' cars, or slow trains, and set out on a long journey East. From Budapest itself, the Hungarian capital, they will travel more than 800 kilometres.
Actually, it is less a journey, and more like a pilgrimage. And it is one that will take them ‘across the forest’ - Trans-Sylvania - and deep into the wooded, winding, and rather uncanny valleys of the Eastern Carpathians in Romania. But for Hungarians, while this is to enter another state, it is also to enter a world by a different name: Nagy Magyarorzsag - greater or historic Hungary.
For these distant, green valleys are the home of a Hungarian minority known as the Szekelys. Around two million of them still live in what was, until 1919, Hungarian soil.
They go to take part in Tusvanyos. Or to give it its full title, is the Balvanyosi Summer Free University and Student Camp. This year was the 34th Tusvanyos.
To foreign eyes, Tusvanyos is an unusual hybrid: part literary and cultural festival, with panel discussions running all day, and part music and drinking festival in the evening, all enclosed by a fence to keep the 25-30 000 attendees off the menu for the bears that prowl the woods around the site.
But it is also a political rally of sorts. On the last day, one bear always breaches the fence: Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian PM arrives to deliver what amounts to his ‘State of the Nation’ address, to a crowd of ten thousand.
Despite its remoteness, and indeed despite being held in another country, Tusvanyos is perhaps the most significant fixture in the calendar in the life of Hungary’s conservative political establishment.
How did such an odd hybrid come to be? Answering that means going back: to the chaotic early 90s freedom era. To the heady days of the ‘rendszervaltas’ – the ‘system change’ or the ‘regime change’ – that came with the end of communism in 1990.
It’s a surprising story - of a revolution, a young activist from Hungary, a British writer, and the strange afterlife of young dreams.
In 1989, Zsolt Nemeth was mid-20s, and nine weeks before an election where he’d become a member of parliament.
David Campanale was also that age, an English journalist, working for the BBC in Eastern Europe, covering the fall of the Iron Curtain and what came after.
In this episode of Danube Culture, they explain to Research Director Calum Nicholson how the festival was born out of a strange ragged road trip into Romania, as the embers of Communism still smouldered.
We asked the former Minister for Foreign Affairs of Singapore about everything you always wanted to know about the geopolitics of the Pacific, but were afraid to ask.The Danube Lectures is a video podcast of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based conservative think tank that asks its guests – decision-makers, experts, academics, and politicians – about their unique ideas. Host: Tamás Maráczi, a journalist at the Danube Institute.
We asked Curtis Yarvin, political philosopher, entrepreneur, computerscientist, and CEO of Urban Tiger about the ideological causes and politicalconsequences of Charlie Kirk's assassination.The Danube Lectures is a video podcast of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based conservative think tank that asks its guests – decision-makers,experts, academics, and politicians – about their unique ideas.
Host: Tamás Maráczi, a journalist at the Danube Institute.
In February of 2024, Vladimir Putin sat down with Tucker Carlson for a long-form interview.
This was billed as a titanic clash. After years of hearing about the Russian leader, now, Western audiences were to hear from him, shattering a taboo that had held since the outbreak of the Ukraine War.
The world waited to hear. And what we heard was… baffling. Boring.
With only his opening question, Carlson came up against a sheer wall of history. Suddenly, we were in the 10th century, in Kievan Rus, with Volodymyr the Great. Then Peter the Great. Catherine The Great. Knitting these nodes into a grand arc that proved to him that Ukraine was always part of Russia.
On and on, Putin propounded a view of the past that Westerners had never heard. Didn’t particularly care about, and on aggregate did not care for.
Many saw the interview as Putin throwing up a smokescreen. They dismissed it as cheap parlour games.
But some commentators saw something else.
They said that Putin was at least telling a history he had been told. And that if we were to understand why Russia fought, we should investigate the long view they held. In short, as much as an actual war, Putin was also on one side of a Culture War.
Perhaps most enlightened version of this thesis was that we had moved from the gentle world of history, into the hard turf of historiography.
History is to do with facts. Historiography, to do with how cultures interpret those facts. It’s often said that he who controls the past, controls the future.
But it is not so often said that we don’t always have control over the past. It emerges, from a collision of scholarship, national identities, and the vagaries of time itself.
Often, we lose sight of that dynamic. But historiography is all around us. Would we just see it.
For Danube Knowledge, Gavin Haynes is joined by two men who possess just such X-Ray vision. Dr Eric Hendriks. And Stefano Arroque. Both are fellows at the Danube Institute. Eric is a Dutch sociologist. Stefano is a Brazilian researcher, with a specialism in EU and European politics.
They’ve recently published a paper for the DI, along with our academic Daniel Farkas, which addressed the question of clashing narratives. But in the context of the intra-European culture wars. The war between liberal anti-nationalist interpretation of history and the anti-totalitarian nationalist one.
The paper is called: Why Europe Needs Historiographic Tolerance
They argue that if we want to make the European Union work, we have to acknowledge that there are different legitimate interpretations of the darkest chapters of 20th century history.
And that work started in one of the least historically dramatic of all Europe’s coves, but one that seems to hold the key to explaining Europe’s own culture war … Luxembourg.
We spoke with John Whittingdale, former Political Secretary to PM Margaret Thatcher, about the Iron Lady's life and legacy at the Danube Institute's Thatcher conference in Budapest.
The Danube Lectures is a video podcast of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based conservative think tank that asks its guests – decision-makers, experts, academics, and politicians – about their unique ideas.
Host: Tamás Maráczi, a journalist at the Danube Institute.
Sweden. Europe’s eternal model of the right path. And increasingly, also its vision of the wrong road.
Since the year 2000, Sweden has run the mass migration experiment at hyper-speed. And equally, it is now running a counter-revolution at similar pace. Anyone familiar with the country will be aware of the Law of Jonte and the concept of the Thought Corridor.
Swedes are herd-like: it is very hard to break with Orthodoxy. But when the herd moves, the herd moves.
In 2022, populism came to Sweden. The country fractured its historical cordon sanitaire, to elect a coalition of the centre-right Moderate Party, with support from the hard right Sweden Democrats, led by Jimmy Akkeson.
Akkeson has been a fixture in Swedish politics for over 15 years. His career is a classic case of First they laugh at you, then they denounce you, then you win. From national joke, into the Riskdag. Akkeson has modified his positions somewhat, presented a more clean-cut image. But in the main, it is public opinion that has done the real pivot.
The Sweden Democrats are now three years deep into a coalition that has not faltered. And, as a result of the historic Tidö Agreement, has made great strides in regulating immigration.
Yet despite delivering what they promised on that score, the public appetite does not appear to be sated. Indeed, Swedes today are drifting further right than they ever have on questions of culture. With an election due in 2026, it now appears that Akkeson could not only bolster the traditional parties - he could lead a government.
What happens next? Could Sweden now point the way to a sophisticated dismantlement of the mass migration project? And could Akkeson prove central to that?
To explain, Gavin Haynes is joined by visiting fellow at the Danube Institute, Markus Johansson-Martis.