Ukraine Through the Western Bubble #162

The midterms brought a surprise: young men, who swung sharply to the right in 2024, swung back towards the Democrats. It is a welcome sign that power can still be held to account, even if the praise for men who still voted Democratic at lower rates than women says a great deal about whose behaviour our societies choose to notice. It also opens the question we spend most of the episode on. What happened to young men, and why did so many of them find their answers in the manosphere?Prompted by Louis Theroux’s Netflix documentary on the subject, we look past the misogyny everyone already knows about to what struck us most: the emptiness. The influencers selling wealth, women and fitness as the measure of a man seem not to believe any of it themselves. It is not an ideology but a grift, hustle culture sustained by views and the money they bring. Their audiences, meanwhile, face real problems, more likely to die by overdose or suicide, to have no close friend, to leave education early or never start it. Most of these trace back less to injustice than to a deeper dislocation. After thousands of years of patriarchal certainty about what a man is for, that purpose is being dismantled, rightly, and young men have been left with no clear replacement and few role models to show them one.Into that gap step men on a screen who offer a simpler story. A teenage boy rejected for the first time used to sit with the pain and learn from it. Now he is told women cannot think for themselves and that wealth will fix everything, which leads him away from the very relationships, education and work that might have made him happy. The result is a growing cohort of men with little to offer and nobody who wants them, and that should worry everyone.This podcast is an individual project between us, Dario Hasenstab and Balder Hageraats. We are supported by our producer Stefani Obradovic from Western Bubble Insights & Strategy. If you would like to get in touch with us, write us an email at [email protected].

A crowded week of elections, with midterms in the United States a day away, prompts a question we think gets too little attention: what actually makes a democracy work? Voting is the most visible institution, and so it gets overvalued. Without an underlying culture of decency, respect for the other side, protection of minorities and acceptance of defeat, an election can be held without anything resembling democracy taking place. The German ministers handing their successors a bouquet of flowers, or the American president leaving a note for the person who just beat him, can look like quaint rituals. They are in fact load-bearing.We work through five countries where those norms are under strain. In Israel, an election fought between a Netanyahu bloc and an anti-Netanyahu bloc, with no vision on either side, leaves the Arab parties as kingmakers, even as Likud prepared fraud allegations before a single vote was counted. In Serbia, a student-led movement against corruption faces the problem of what comes after removing the people in power. In Spain, a tragic train crash was politicised within hours, a symptom of a democracy that never fully processed its civil war. In Brazil, leaked chats show Meta suppressing one candidate’s reach, a reminder that tech companies now shape public discourse as much as voters do. And in the United States, gerrymandering, subpoenaed election workers and a Senate race with two Dan Sullivans show what happens when the letter of the law survives but its spirit does not.Running through it all is the shrug that says everyone is corrupt anyway, a resignation that lowers the barrier for the next abuse. A healthy system relies on voters prepared to punish their own side when it breaks the rules, putting the health of their country above loyalty to their tribe. Where two large parties both fail that test, as in Spain and parts of the US, citizens are left with no good option at all.This podcast is an individual project between us, Dario Hasenstab and Balder Hageraats. We are supported by our producer Stefani Obradovic from Western Bubble Insights & Strategy. If you would like to get in touch with us, write us an email at [email protected].

Four and a half years into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with ceasefire rumours circulating once again, we return to the conflict that was the subject of one of our very first episodes. This time we want a conversation we can point to in future: the full arc of the war, from Ukraine’s independence and the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 to the stalemate of October 2026, read through the lens of the Western bubble.We trace how the optimism of the 1990s, when the West assumed Russia would simply join the liberal order, gave way to the humiliation of the Yeltsin years and the rise of a Putin who promised to make Russia respected again. We work through Maidan, the annexation of Crimea and the war in the Donbas, and take on John Mearsheimer’s argument that the West is to blame. Our answer is that both camps miss the point. Putin alone made the decision to invade, but NATO’s enlargement, the Anglo-Saxon habit of treating Russia as a horde rather than a country, and the Biden administration’s refusal to offer any off-ramp created the environment in which that decision became easier. If the goal was to prevent the invasion, Washington did the opposite of what it required, which leaves an uncomfortable choice between doubting its competence and doubting its motives.The same pattern repeated once the fighting began. When negotiations looked promising in the spring of 2022, the West encouraged Ukraine to fight on in the hope of defeating Russia outright, without asking whether its own populations would sustain that support or whether Russia could be ground down at all. Hundreds of thousands of lives later, the West has moved on to a new fear of Russian tanks rolling west, without having learned any of the lessons. If we were Ukrainian, we would be furious not only with Moscow, but with the allies who promised a support that was never as real as it sounded.This podcast is an individual project between us, Dario Hasenstab and Balder Hageraats. We are supported by our producer Stefani Obradovic from Western Bubble Insights & Strategy. If you would like to get in touch with us, write us an email at [email protected].

We have not given Donald Trump his own episode since March, partly because the diagnosis rarely changes, but the approaching midterms are exposing something worth examining: the cracks now showing in what is best understood as a cult rather than a political party. The founding fathers built Congress so that representatives would answer to their own conscience and to the people who elected them, and they feared the day a third master, the party, would override both. The modern Republican Party is that fear in its most extreme form, a group that no longer represents Florida or Texas so much as it worships one man.The midterms are where that comes due. Presidents usually lose ground at the midpoint because governing is hard and voters expect more than any government can deliver, but this cycle runs deeper, with deep-red states suddenly in play and Republican money retreating from the battlegrounds into its own heartland. The cancelled plan to live-stream an execution, the reversal on sanctioning Russia within a month of signing them, the inflation and tariff pain landing in voters’ pockets: each traces back to decisions made in an ever-smaller circle selected for loyalty rather than competence.Underneath it sits the argument we keep returning to. No leader, however gifted, makes sound long-term policy inside a closed circle with no light from outside, and a party that strips out its own intellectuals to reward devotion ends up rudderless. The closing worry is a race between two extremes, an authoritarianism of the tech-bro right and a revolution of the populist left, neither of which leaves the ordinary citizen any agency over their own future.This podcast is an individual project between us, Dario Hasenstab and Balder Hageraats. We are supported by our producer Stefani Obradovic from Western Bubble Insights & Strategy. If you would like to get in touch with us, write us an email at [email protected].

The thread this week is a disconnect. Not between the one per cent and everyone else, but between a comfortable top fifth of society and the eighty per cent now waking up worried about the bills, the job and the children’s future. When those two groups stop meeting, even in a supermarket queue, the ground starts to shift towards what we have long called the pitchforks, and our sense is that moment is closer than it was five years ago.We work through four cases. French students and parents protesting schools that no longer deliver the university ticket they promised, against a government too boxed in by its own neoliberalism to tax its way out. The eviction in Spain of an eighty-seven-year-old woman, who has since died, and the fierce counter-reaction now reshaping Spanish housing policy. And Flock cameras in the United States, a hundred and twenty thousand automated plate readers already used to stalk ex-partners and track people near abortion clinics, sold with the line that the company merely exposed abuse rather than enabling it. And, finally, a data centre construction site of Google in Finland.Underneath each case is the same argument. Capitalism within liberal democracy works only with limits on predatory behaviour and a basic level of trust holding society together. Companies that forget they have a social function, and elites that treat life as a game of turning ten million into a hundred, break that trust. And once it breaks, the reaction is rarely polite, whether it arrives as a ballot, a new law, or something a good deal less orderly.This podcast is an individual project between us, Dario Hasenstab and Balder Hageraats. We are supported by our producer Stefani Obradovic from Western Bubble Insights & Strategy. If you would like to get in touch with us, write us an email at [email protected].

Three topics, one mechanism, the Western Bubble. The Anthropic IPO, the Spanish housing market and NATO's war-gaming over Kaliningrad look unrelated, but each runs on a comfortable story we are told and rarely question, and each falls apart when you ask who benefits from the telling.We start with the markets. A two trillion dollar valuation is not a calculation, it is a number that suits the people raising the money, attached to a company with small revenue, no profit and a quarter of its sales resting on two customers. Then Trump's answer to the AI oversight question we raised a fortnight ago, which was to let the companies write their own rules and call it done.The housing segment turns on a single image: an eighty-seven-year-old woman carried out of her Madrid flat of seventy years after an investment fund raised her rent fivefold. The problem built for decades, but it took that spark to put tents on the plaza, which is how humans work, emotional creatures who ignore slow catastrophes until one has a face. And the Kaliningrad segment is manufactured consent in its purest form: a fear of Russian invasion repeated until it feels inevitable, even as NATO's own Secretary General admits Putin knows he could never win. The danger is not that the story is a lie, but that acting on it, through rhetoric, rearmament and belligerence, makes the war it warns of more likely.This podcast is an individual project between us, Dario Hasenstab and Balder Hageraats. We are supported by our producer Stefani Obradovic from Western Bubble Insights & Strategy. If you would like to get in touch with us, write us an email at [email protected].

Dario spent Sunday running a Berlin polling station, which is the closest either of us gets to democracy as a physical process rather than an argument. The count added up. What stayed with him was the man who voted, called the whole thing rigged on his way out, and stared down the volunteers as though counting his ballot were an act of defiance. That scene, repeated across three regional elections, is where this episode starts.The results were a blow to the centre. Merz's conservatives fell below the threshold in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the AfD took a plurality in Saxony-Anhalt, and Berlin swung left. The German press met this with hyperbole rather than analysis, warning of caliphates and a returning GDR, which tells you more about the frailty of the system than about the voters. We draw the distinction we keep returning to: the far left may pursue policies that damage liberal democracy, such as expropriating housing, but it is not trying to end the system, whereas the far right says openly that it will. And we put more blame on neither extreme than on the centrist parties of the last thirty years, the Clintons and Blairs who mistook managing markets for governing and produced the disenfranchisement now feeding both flanks.Underneath it runs the harder question of what voting is even for. Not an individual right that benefits you, since one ballot changes nothing, but a mass check on power that only works if people keep making the effort and keep a basic trust in each other. That trust is nearly gone, which is why gerrymandering, party bans and self-dealing all look tempting and all corrode the thing they claim to defend. Liberal democracy may simply not be built to last, and whether it does now rests on voters choosing to keep it alive.This podcast is an individual project between us, Dario Hasenstab and Balder Hageraats. We are supported by our producer Stefani Obradovic from Western Bubble Insights & Strategy. If you would like to get in touch with us, write us an email at [email protected].

Over two weeks, the AI industry started warning about itself. Employees resigned with doomsday statements, and within hours Amodei, Altman and Musk agreed the technology they build needs slowing down. The alignment was suspicious enough to be worth taking apart.We start with the fear itself. The threat of a machine turning on its makers is not a 2026 discovery, it is a century of science fiction, so anyone waking up to it now was not paying attention. But the Skynet question distracts from the nearer one. An AI that is not malicious at all, merely a more efficient Wikipedia, is enough to rot our capacity to think, and that erosion is already visible. The deeper problem is not the technology but who controls it. A handful of billionaires with a direct financial stake now propose to regulate themselves, with Musk suggesting Friday-night drinks to stay responsible. That is not how a society contains a threat its own leaders call existential, and the question that runs through the whole episode is a simple one: where is the government?From there we work through why those warnings appeared when they did. We lay out four scenarios, from the honest reading that they mean it, through buying time before two large IPOs while the revenue never materialised, to the possibility that AI is simply hitting a ceiling and someone needs an excuse. The scenarios overlap, but they share a conclusion. Something this powerful cannot be left to a small group who answer to their investors, and a liberal democracy too hollowed out to step in is a liberal democracy failing at the one job that matters.This podcast is an individual project between us, Dario Hasenstab and Balder Hageraats. We are supported by our producer Stefani Obradovic from Western Bubble Insights & Strategy. If you would like to get in touch with us, write us an email at [email protected].

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 became the destination itself. Actors were told to stop asking what they were for and simply manage their metrics: shareholder value, GDP growth, the next quarter. The result is a purpose gap that runs from governments with no vision beyond the next election to companies that will make children addicted to a product because the alternative is a smaller bonus. We work through how that model hollows out not just institutions but the sense of purpose underneath them, why it leaves the political centre unable to answer populists who at least offer a direction, and why a company riding high for fifteen years is nowhere near as permanent as it feels.Project Rediscovery is our attempt to turn that analysis into something usable. It starts with a set of deceptively simple questions an organisation can ask itself. We would like to hear your answers. The project lives at wb-insights.com and it is a living document, so this is the beginning of the conversation rather than the end of it.This podcast is an individual project between us, Dario Hasenstab and Balder Hageraats. We are supported by our producer Stefani Obradovic from Western Bubble Insights & Strategy. If you would like to get in touch with us, write us an email at [email protected].

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 reveal less about Russia than about how the West now absorbs news, through emotion and conspiracy rather than evidence. From there we look at how the threat gets put to use. Britain war-games a Russian attack because the part of freedom's defender still suits its self-image. Norway drills for oil and gas in the Arctic and files it under security. The Dutch government cuts welfare to fund defence spending it could not otherwise justify. In each case a fear that cannot be specified is enough to license policies a confident society would refuse, much as the war on terror did after 2001.We close on the missed opportunity. As the transatlantic alliance falls apart and Iceland votes against joining, the European Union has offered no vision worth signing up to. And we leave you on a cliffhanger, because next week we launch a new project from Western Bubble Insights & Strategy.This podcast is an individual project between us, Dario Hasenstab and Balder Hageraats. We are supported by our producer Stefani Obradovic from Western Bubble Insights & Strategy. If you would like to get in touch with us, write us an email at [email protected].