Chartbook Video #4: Talking COVID and geopolitics with Bruno Macaes and Sophia Gaston

Plus Afghanistan, the New Statesman etc.

Bruno Macaes and I both have books out right now about global politics and the COVID crisis. Bruno’s is with Hurst.

It was a real privilege to read his book ahead of release and to discuss our many points of convergence and also our differences here. Such an interesting pairing with Shutdown.

Bruno is someone I really love listening to. Many thanks to Sophia Gaston and the British Foreign Policy Group for this lovely Labor Day Holiday warm-up to a frenetic release week.

Bruno is a fellow contributing writer to The New Statesman. A geopolitical writer who truly lives on a global scale, Bruno was actually in Kabul days before the Ghani regime fell and penned this remarkable report for NS.

His “on the ground”-piece, makes for quite a cocktail when read in combination with my deliberately distanced effort to make sense of American power post-Kabul.

Loved this reader’s response to the article online.

The highest compliment.

At the weekend I will run Chartbook #36 digging into the Pentagon data a bit more.

To wrap one’s head around the US military budget is a daunting undertaking. I’ll be scratching the surface. You have to start somewhere.

The New Statesman article is all about the mysteriously named “third offset”. In Chartbook’s to come I will be taking up the issue of the “Second offset” and how the American army learned to stop worrying and to love the Wehrmacht.

That was one of the issues I was batting around with Leo Aschenbrenner on twitter yesterday. Leo is one of the super smart young folks to come out of Columbia this year. Not hard to see why I enjoy my job so much!

To finish, a quick word about Chartbook:

Chartbook goes out free to readers all over the world. Obviously, I enjoy putting these posts together. It is a great way of thinking things through. If you are enjoying it and can afford to, why not chip in to support the project.

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Paying subscribers receive Top Links – regular compilations of great reading and viewing from around the web. Plus, later in the fall, exclusive invitations to a series of sessions to discuss Shutdown.

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