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"Russia and China are eternal neighbors, they're not eternal friends. They have been their worst enemies over the years." - Sarah Paine [00:00:18]
"I can picture one ending to the Ukraine war where China gains a lot of territory in return for putting the screws on Russia to end things in the west." - Sarah Paine…
"What America has and which no other country has ever had to the same extent is it has soft power... it's selling modernity and freedom and if you work hard and if you graft you can be like Americans and you can live the American dream." - James Holland [00:00:00]
"History doesn't repeat itself because of course it can't because that was then and…
"The problem for us is we need things that the Iranian regime either refuses to deliver, cannot deliver, or cannot sustain over a period of time, and so we're sort of negotiating with ourselves at this point." - Stephen Kotkin [00:02:44]
"What a regime is—we think a regime is just a bunch of people at the top... but a regime is a society... 10…
Note: Video recorded live on May 6, 2026.
"The interesting twist in his argument is that what we're seeing now is we're ending up with a version of neoliberalism that's stripped of its international component." - Janet Gornick [00:02:07]
"The first sort of reduction of inequality between the countries has in some sense produced the conflict between China and the…
"Saying that it's an honest broker is silly and stupid... The United States is supportive of Israel period." - Nasser Alkidwa [00:32:21]
"Either you want democracy or you don't want democracy. If you want democracy you will go for elections and you accept the results of the elections." - Nasser Alkidwa…
"I define a sphere of influence as a geographic region where one powerful state seeks to dominate the foreign policy orientations of weaker states within the region and also to exclude other great powers from significantly intervening in that territory." - Dr. Lindsey O'Rourke [00:02:06]
"This is a concept that quote should be relegated to the…
"If the only human reality was brute force we would still be living in tiny hunter gatherer bands in the African savannah because the whole of human history is about how do you get more people to cooperate and to trust each other and you cannot do that only with brute force." - Yuval Noah Harari [00:02:58]
"Nationalism at its core is about loving and…
"dictators are enormously strong and enormously weak at the same time a dictatorship can be enormously weak because they're illegitimate... and at the same time they're strong because they control the apparatus of the state" - Darren [00:00:00]
"there's this hybridization that happened in certain parts of the Shia Muslim world through the…
Note: This episode was recorded on Thursday, May 7, 2026. Burns discusses the issues that will take center stage when Trump meets Xi—from trade and technology to Iran, Taiwan, and Ukraine—and the enormous stakes for U.S.-Chinese competition going forward.
"I've always thought, and certainly confirmed by my years in China, it's structural this competition. No matter who's in power in Washington and in Beijing…
"The past teaches us that there are some evil elements out there and they're not really representative ordinary people... we do have such people out there and often in very important and powerful positions." - Richard Werner [00:03:39]
"You need if you're planning for world war you also need to make sure the opponent is built up first to have a…
"If you're a solitary regional hegemon, you just don't face many threats to your vital interests from other great powers." - [Joshua Byun] [00:06:17]
"No matter how bad or intense security competition gets in a world with one regional hegemon, it won't be as bad as it will be in a world where you have two regional hegemons." - [Joshua Byun]…
"Ultimately the change that has driven our politics to be so vitriolic is one that centers on how we live our everyday lives." - Marc Dunkelman [00:04:02]
"We went from having very thick middle rings... to having very thin middle rings and instead investing that social capital, those hours and that attention, in the inner and outermost." -…
"If you don't do anything about Russia, Russia would take over Ukraine and Russia then would build an alliance with China and Iran... this is the entire Asian continent." - Professor Jiang [00:04:24]
"A war of attrition is a game of uncle... where we don't have enough power to destroy each other so what we try to do is we try to create pain points, leverage points to…
"In 1945, the European era ended. The first global system, geopolitical system, was the European imperial system... 1945 it collapsed." - George Friedman [00:02:36]
"The entire economic system that was built around the Cold War became obsolete in the 2020s... because Russia was not a major power." - George Friedman…
"This is a trap because what it means is we can have tactical military success bombs hit target bombs kill leader and strategic failure... that leads to more doubling down that's that moving up the escalation." - Dr. Robert Pape [00:11:43]
"A fourth center of global power is now emerging. It hasn't fully emerged but it's being built in real time…
"Now it's 27% of every croner or you know we spend on budget is financed by the return from the sovereign wealth fund and I remember back in 1996 it was zero and it has gone from zero to now 2 trillion" - Jens Stoltenberg [00:02:45]
"The regulatory environment is allowing scaled consolidation and there is so much change coming with the…
"Putin may think that he's a world historic individual... Xi definitely thinks of this but boy is Trump trumping all of them because he really has gone into that" - Fiona Hill [00:57:48]
"He really just thinks he can roll the dice over and over again and that he will never have some kind of setback." - Fiona Hill…
"2,300 years before John Nash sat down at Princeton and wrote the 27-page thesis that would win him the Nobel Prize in economics... a man in Pataliputra wrote the same theorem. Not a similar idea, not a philosophical forerunner—the actual theorem." - Ronny [00:00:00]
"He names the players in the system... entirely by their structural relationship to…
"The entire Gulf region is exposed to missile fire from Iran... we know that the desalination plants in the Gulf region, the oil and the gas fields, the port facilities are not protected systematically." - Jeffrey Sachs [00:04:48]
"It's the right way to save the world, and it's the responsibility of grown-ups to try to save the world—not to save…
"The United States has shown that it's not going to consult with its allies any longer that it's going to just go in unilaterally and start wars... our credibility is absolutely now gone." - Monica Duffy Toft [00:04:34]
"This war has turned into a proof of concept for any Iranian government going forward and that's not necessarily a concept we wanted…
"The first rule of economic warfare is simple: don’t weaponize false chokepoints."
" The United States ushered in the age of economic warfare by learning to weaponize chokepoints. Now, other countries have learned to do the same. Its advantages have eroded not only because others have built competing forms of leverage but also because Washington has too often used its own advantages carelessly."
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