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This Is Not A Drill with Gavin Esler

Season Finale: Where Do We Go From Here?

This Is Not A Drill with Gavin Esler

Podmasters

News, Society & Culture, Politics

4.91.6K Ratings

🗓️ 26 January 2022

⏱️ 81 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this series we’ve looked at under-reported threats to global stability, from the psychology of Xi Jinping to the coming water crisis to the War on Truth. But what happens next? In this extended end-of-season edition, Arthur Snell steps back to look at the big picture with experts in geopolitics, future warfare and the Chinese, Russian and American superpowers. Can the world pull itself from the brink – or is our Long Peace coming to an end?  Season Two of Doomsday Watch is coming soon. Help us shape it and get new episodes early when you support us on Patreon. •  “What we’ve seen is the loss of the structures that have contained violence.” – Dr Mike Martin •  “Americans are tired – tired of not only of being at war, but also as being perceived as being warmongers.” – Candace Rondeaux •  “People will fight for a cause. That cause can be nationalism, to serve a particular master or to promote a different vision of society.” – Margaret MacMillan •  “You saw it with defeat in Afghanistan: the West does not have confidence in its own values, nor the staying power to implement them anywhere else.” – Ian Dunt •  “We are in a very dangerous situation, where we face the potential of weapons systems outside of human control that perhaps can’t be stopped.” – Margaret MacMillan •  “I worry now that we’re entering a stage where we might have a big war. I think there’s a 50-50 chance.” – Dr Mike Martin •  “All around me I see people wanting to take on populism, who want a better kind of world that makes sense.” – Ian Dunt DOOMSDAY WATCH was written and presented by Arthur Snell, and produced by Robin Leeburn – with assistant production from Jacob Archbold. Theme tune and original music by Paul Hartnoll. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. DOOMSDAY WATCH is a Podmasters production. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

I'm Arthur Snell, welcome to Doomsday Watch.

0:04.0

I think we're in a pretty dangerous time, effectively we're living in the tail end, aren't we?

0:09.0

Of the international system that was put together after the Second World War.

0:14.0

We've seen a lot of the structures that have contained not reduced violence but contained it.

0:21.0

You know they say that stuff that can't go on the way that it is won't go on the way that it is

0:28.0

and I think that that's where we are now. It seems when you look around the world that it can't go on like this.

0:35.0

That was Mike Martin, an expert on conflict and himself a veteran of the UK's war in Afghanistan.

0:42.0

As he said, it can't go on like this.

0:45.0

At the start of the series, we heard how the institutions that were established at the end of the Second World War

0:52.0

regulate global peace seem to be falling apart and literally as we record this the world is watching with baited breath

1:00.0

as a huge military buildup by Russia threatens war against Ukraine.

1:05.0

NATO is divided and ineffective in its response.

1:09.0

We don't know where this will lead.

1:14.0

This series began in America with its democracy under threat from hyperpartisan politics.

1:21.0

America's chaos has created opportunities for autocrats worldwide, especially in Russia and China.

1:29.0

Doomsday Watch has been about a lot of things. The water crisis, mass radicalization failed interventions.

1:36.0

But at its heart, this has been a series about conflict and the different ways that a disordered world is prone to generate more disorder.

1:47.0

So, in this final episode, that leads me to ask, what's next?

1:55.0

We need to think beyond the immediate future.

1:58.0

That one of the core ideas of liberalism is a project to essentially make war impossible.

2:03.0

But long into a social group is a vital matter of survival.

2:07.0

We may be looking to a new chapter in terms of our future technologies where we face the potential

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