If you are the UK or Germany or Paris and you say we need to replace these American enablers,

it will probably take you five to ten years to do this. And so even if you are convinced that

Trump is abandoning Europe, the timeline on which you can plug these holes is much, much longer

than the timeline of Donald Trump's time in office, indeed,

maybe his time on earth. And so in that sense, you can panic, you can worry, but there's no

point in losing your head or in hysteria, because the timeline to fix this is 10 years. And so the

debate we're now having with the Americans as Europeans is saying,

we're not pleading saying, please don't go. We're saying, we recognize you are going to go.

And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.

The war in Ukraine shows no signs of abating.

The Gaza conflict remains as powerless and as deadly as ever.

There is a looming conflict with Iran over the regime's determination to build a nuclear bomb.

And military technology keeps changing very rapidly, with Ukraine recently using drones to stage

a spectacular attack on much more expensive

and sophisticated Russian planes.

The international system is in real flux and significant conflict feels as though it might be around the corner.

To help us think through what is going on in the international sphere, and particularly

with questions of defense, I asked my old friend and grad school classmate Shashank Joshi to come back on the podcast.

Shashank is the defense editor of the economist.

He has written about all of these conflicts and is in close touch with senior officials around the world.

And he is a great thought partner for trying to make sense

of what these developments portent. In the last part of this conversation, Shashank and I try

...