The Western Bubble

Last week we left you on a cliffhanger. This week we launch Project Rediscovery, the first public project from Western Bubble Insights & Strategy, and the reason the August Deep Dives on liberal political ideology were never a coincidence.

The starting point is a diagnosis. Somewhere in the eighties and nineties, the West decided it had finished the argument. Capitalism and democracy stopped being vehicles towards something and ...

We are back from the August break, and after a month away from current affairs we take stock of what happened while the Deep Dive series ran. The thread running through most of it is a familiar one: a vague but insistent fear that Russia is about to invade Europe, unattached to any concrete scenario, and the damage that fear does to the societies gripped by it.

We start with Ceuta and the drones at Leipzig airport, two stories that ...

The fourth and final Deep Dive of the season arrives at the 21st century, the point where our four-part history of liberal political ideology turns from triumph to neglect. Unleashed in the 18th century, consolidated in the 19th, triumphant in the 20th, liberal democracy now enters what we call the Age of Apathy. Its victory in the last century was not the end of an inevitable path, but the product of specific conditions: the sprea...

In the third episode of our Deep Dive series on liberal political ideology, we arrive in the 20th century: the most violent, destructive and ultimately transformative hundred years in the history of the West.

The century opens with the collision of the old and the new. The great power politics of absolute monarchies met the ideological energy of the 19th century's mass movements, and the system had no framework capable of containing...

In the second episode of our Deep Dive series on liberal political ideology, we move into the 19th century, the most turbulent, violent and intellectually fertile period in the history of the modern West.

The 19th century was not a comfortable place to live. Factories belched smoke over overcrowded cities, children worked in mines, colonial violence was being inflicted on much of the world, and ideological conflict between communist...

This is the first episode of our second Deep Dive series, in which we explore the rise and fall of liberal political ideology in the West. Over four episodes published throughout August, we trace how ideas, and the intellectual cultures that produced them, built the world we live in today, and why the abandonment of that tradition is at the heart of the crisis the West now finds itself in.

We begin in the 18th century. Europe was ge...

This week we look at two stories that share a single underlying logic: the people running things have stopped pretending to care about the original purpose of the institutions they control, and are now just taking what they can before the music stops.

The first is FIFA. Gianni Infantino announced this week that FIFA, a nonprofit organisation founded to promote and regulate football around the world, will create a for-profit subsidia...

In this week's Autopsy we react to an interview the Economist published with Elon Musk, conducted by Editor-in-Chief Zanny Minton Beddoes. We focus on the section where Musk talks about artificial intelligence, because it contains three logical steps in quick succession, none of which hold up to even basic scrutiny.

The tragedy is not Musk himself. It is that a man whose reasoning on these questions is this visibly incoherent is one...

This week we start with the World Cup final. Spain beat Argentina, Argentina's players started fights during the game, declined to return the guard of honour as Spain lifted the trophy, and the internet went into overdrive. We are not a football podcast, but what happened afterwards is worth examining: within days, the anti-Argentina sentiment online had reached a scale that Argentinians themselves found bewildering and disproporti...

In this week's Autopsy we react to two travel influencers who responded to a UN General Assembly vote on slavery by advising their followers which countries are unsafe to travel to based on how those countries voted. The video is well-intentioned and the sensitivity behind it is entirely understandable. The analysis is not.

The resolution in question called the trafficking of enslaved Africans and the racialized chattel enslavement ...

This week we look at a pattern that has been building for years and is now accelerating: the establishment panicking, and the increasingly desperate measures it is reaching for in response. The AfD ban report in Germany, the EU Parliament procedure against the Europe of Sovereign Nations party, the removal of Hungary's president, and the Le Pen conviction all arrived within weeks of each other. They are not the same story, but they...

In this week's Autopsy we react to the controversy that followed the England-Argentina World Cup semi-final, when Argentine players held up a sign referencing the Falkland Islands. We are not a football podcast, and this episode is not about football. It is about what happens when empty nationalism spills into international relations and makes a country look unreasonable to the rest of the world.

Whatever the legal arguments of the ...

Three topics this week, none of them reassuring. Trump threatened to cut off all trade with Spain at the NATO summit in Ankara, apparently unaware that EU trade is negotiated through Brussels rather than individual member states. Mark Rutte sat next to him in silence. We discuss what that silence costs Europe in the long run, and why Spain, of all countries, is quietly emerging as one of the diplomatic winners of the current moment...

In this week's Autopsy we react to Count Binface, the satirical independent candidate and self-described space warrior, facing off against Nigel Farage in a local by-election. Count Binface, the alter ego of British scriptwriter Jonathan Harvey, has previously stood against Theresa May as Lord Buckethead and against Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, and Andy Burnham as Count Binface. His manifesto includes building one affordable house a...

For our 150th episode we set aside the week's news cycle and talked about still does not get the attention it deserves: climate change, and why our political systems are structurally incapable of dealing with it.

The problem is not a lack of information. The Club of Rome warned about unsustainable economic growth in 1972. Nobel laureate Svante Arrhenius wrote about it in 1908 in his book "Worlds in the Making". Average heat days in...

In this week's Autopsy, we react to a DW News segment reporting that German prosecutors have concluded Ukraine ordered the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage. You can watch the full segment here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXy4wMdE1Hc. We analysed this in episode 27 back in February 2023, when a stakeholder analysis based purely on capability and motive pointed away from Russia and towards Ukraine and the United States as the most ...

This week now news story is exploding and everything is on fire. Ukraine, Iran, US politics: three stories, three cycles, all stuck. Also, we recorded four years to the month since our first episodes on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which felt like the right moment to take stock.

On Ukraine, the war of attrition is slowly shifting. Ukrainian strikes deep into Russian territory, including a refinery fire producing a visible black ...

In this week's Autopsy, we react to NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte's visit to Donald Trump at the White House. Dario calls him the Trump brown nose. Balder, as a Dutch person, feels a particular kind of shame.

The visit features Rutte presenting Trump with a poster, in Trump gold and red, showing European defence spending going up. The numbers are accurate. The framing is not. European rearmament is happening because the transatl...

This week Balder defends his own people. A YouTube video titled "Economists are full of shit" and the hundred-plus likes underneath it sparked this episode, and the underlying complaint is understandable: a generation that was promised growth has watched that growth show up everywhere except their own bank accounts. But the target of that anger is wrong. Economists study economic behaviour. Politicians decide what to do with that k...