Hi everyone, Glenn Dyson here and I'm joined today by Alexander Mercuris and Alistair Crook.

So, yes, Alastair Crook, you have, well, decades background in as a diplomat, a British diplomat, but also from EU politics.

So I hope you can bring some insight here because it feels now that the West reputation

in the world appears to be, if not in freefall, at least in steep decline.

And at the same time, we often hear politicians use this very remarkable language of liberalism

and combined with a sense of moral superiority.

So the contrast can be quite remarkable at times.

And I see this, of course, both with reference to Israel as well as the crisis with Ukraine.

And someone might, well, sometimes one might get the impression that no one's really behind the wheel.

And I think we've been seeing that we've been moving towards a very predictable crisis,

if not wars, in regards to both the Israel-Palestine question, but also with Russia for

decades.

One can also put China in this camp, of course. And every time we see that there's no real course correction.

So, you know, these are crises which we don't really want,

but we could have prevented them.

Yet we see no real corrective action.

So it appears we ignore problems, unable to merely address them, and they build up.

And I was just wondering, how do you see this phenomenon, if you will?

And what is the direction of geopolitics this day?

I think all of these crises, first of all, are escalating together in an integrated whole.

Does that mean that they're directly linked? Not yet, but it's quite possible that they may become directly linked.

But I think the two that are escalating most obviously at the moment is in Ukraine, where all the signs are that the West has opted for a very dangerous process of, if you like, what I call, walking the precipice of escalating as far as it can without perhaps going into a major war.

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