Aloha and Namaste, everyone, and welcome to Impolitic with John Hylamine, Puck, and Odyssey

Joint, featuring lively, in-depth conversations with the people who cruise the corridors of power

in America, sculpting and shaping the ebb and flow of our politics and culture.

So, rolling into this new year, our plan over here at Impolitic, sculpting and shaping the ebb and flow of our politics and culture.

So rolling into this new year, our plan over here at Impolitic Headquarters had been to

bring the first full week of 2026 to a close with the final installment of the show's

retrospective series on 2025.

A combination look back and look ahead at U.S. foreign policy in the Trump 2.0 era with former U.S. ambassador to Russia, Stanford University Academic Big Shot, and author of the new book, Autocrats v. Democrats, China, Russia, America, and the new global disorder, Michael McFall.

The conversation that Mike and I had for that episode took place just before Christmas, and if I do say so myself, it was really interesting, provocative, sweeping, thoughtful,

and even occasionally amusing all at once.

So I was psyched for everyone to get to hear it.

And then, as is his want, Donald Trump fucked everything up.

Dude goes and sends the troops into Venezuela.

He kidnaps Nicholas Maduro and starts laying out, you know,

a kind of like imperialist poo-poo platter of countries that the U.S. might soon be scarfing down.

It's like, we'll eat Colombia, we'll take Mexico, we'll chew up Cuba.

And yeah, we'll even, you know, gobble up fucking Greenland.

And so that episode, the originally planned episode that we were going to do, blown out of the water,

like one of those Venezuelan fastboats that Pete Hegeseth gets a heart on from incinerating.

Anyway, I thought we were all screwed up and that I didn't really know what to do.

I was away, far, far away.

Mike McFall, far, far away.

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