Advertise on podcast: Global Power Shifts

A seven-group coalition, including the TPLF, has declared war on Abiy Ahmed's government. Tigrayan forces have seized regional airports and are pushing toward the Djibouti trade corridor. Addis Ababa has accused Eritrea, Egypt and Sudan of backing the alliance.Cameron Hudson spent years inside the CIA's Africa directorate and later served as Chief of Staff to the US Special Envoys for Sudan. He now runs 54 Advisors and called the collapse of the Pretoria peace deal months before it happened.Jim Stenman sat down with him about a week into the fighting to ask who gains if Ethiopia breaks apart and whether Washington has any leverage left. They also get into whether Abiy still controls the country he governs.00:00 Cold Open00:29 Welcome Back to Global Power Shifts01:22 A Week Into the Fighting03:02 Why the Pretoria Agreement Finally Broke07:02 The Ingredients for a Regional War08:58 Eritrea, Washington and the New Rules of Engagement13:53 Evidence of Egypt and Eritrea's Involvement15:58 Is Abiy Still in Control?18:39 What Leverage Does the West Have Left?22:37 What Cameron Is Watching NextGlobal Power Shifts is a geopolitics podcast hosted by Jim Stenman and Suzanne Kianpour, covering the new multipolar world through conversations with the people who set policy.Watch more: https://jimstenman.com/global-power-shifts/Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1T2CsAK4983mRNmZPfApRyListen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/global-power-shifts/id1791326929#Ethiopia #Tigray #Geopolitics #HornOfAfrica #CIARecorded September 29, 2026.

Washington and Beijing both want a piece of Ethiopia’s massive $12.5 billion Bishoftu airport, but so far, Ethiopian Airlines is the only one actually footing the bill.Originally published on September 15, this is the audio version of Jim Stenman's Horn Horizons article, published before the latest fighting flared up in Tigray.The piece breaks down how Ethiopian Airlines has already poured $3.2 billion of its own equity into land acquisition and resettlement housing, while major lenders like the African Development Bank stay on the sidelines. Then there is the geopolitical tug-of-war: Washington is dangling financing, but with strict conditions regarding Chinese firms, even though Chinese contractors hold a notable share of the shortlisted slots.To unpack all of this, Jim brings together an expert panel:• Sean Mendis (Aviation Analyst)• Mered Fikireyohannes (Addis-based Investment Adviser)• Yufan Huang (Chinese Lending Researcher)• Michael Rubin (Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute)They get into why this mega-project has zero sovereign guarantee, what Washington and Boeing are really after, and the heavy local impacts. This includes the thousands of farmers displaced from their land in Oromia and how global supply chain shifts have impacted regional diesel supplies.Read the full piece on Substack:https://hornhorizons.substack.com/p/bishoftu-airport-financing-us-chinaFollow Horn Horizons on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/horn-horizons-7333815312498200576#GlobalPowerShifts #HornHorizons #Ethiopia #Bishoftu #EthiopianAirlines #Africa

America has never had a second 9/11, and Donald Alway spent over two decades inside the FBI after the attacks trying to keep it that way. On the 25th anniversary, Suzanne Kianpour and guest co-host Jamie Angus, a former BBC news executive, sit down with the man who was sent from Quantico to the Pentagon after the attacks for what he thought would be four days and stayed 35. He worked the crime scene in New York the following spring, went on to serve in Iraq and Doha and lead the FBI's Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate, and retired as Assistant Director in Charge of the Los Angeles Field Office. He is now Chief Security Officer at Herbalife. He explains why Europe's returning-fighter problem never took hold in the United States, and what makes a person radicalising alone online harder to stop than a trained cell. He says the FBI never thought it needed a counter-propaganda campaign, and warns that people convicted of terrorism are starting to finish 25-year sentences and may not be on anyone's radar. Jamie puts Britain's decision to strip Shamima Begum of her citizenship to him, and asks what the Gulf's surveillance-heavy model has bought after this week's Houthi strikes on Saudi Arabia, and whether the Patriot Act should ever be rolled back. Suzanne raises the 170,000 pages of Ground Zero air quality records released by Mayor Zohran Mamdani this week and the turnover at the top of the FBI under Kash Patel. She closes on how a former counterterrorism official sees New York's first Muslim mayor, 25 years on. Follow Global Power Shifts and subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts. Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1T2CsAK4983mRNmZPfApRyApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/global-power-shifts/id1791326929All episodes: https://jimstenman.com/global-power-shifts/ Chapters00:00 "A four-day trip became 35 days"00:20 Introduction01:54 Quantico, the Pentagon and the day everything changed05:08 The Mamdani air quality documents: "no one would have stayed home"07:25 Why there has never been a second 9/1109:18 Radicalised alone, undetected11:25 Why Europe's returnee problem never reached America13:03 The IRGC, homegrown plots and terrorists finishing their sentences16:08 Should foreign fighters be allowed home?17:13 Shamima Begum and stripping citizenship19:49 October 7, Gaza and the campuses21:38 Can America's stance on Israel ever change?23:32 The ISIS song and why the FBI never ran counter-propaganda31:25 The Gulf: surveillance, trust and the Houthi strikes33:44 The Patriot Act, 25 years on35:50 "You're not in the bureau anymore. What do you really think?"37:41 Kash Patel and the turnover at the top39:10 Who is left, and the 9/11 museum programme for new agents41:41 A smaller American footprint in the Middle East44:22 New York's first Muslim mayor45:25 Close

A year after Donald Trump pulled the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan into the White House, the peace is holding and wheat is crossing borders sealed for decades, yet the treaty itself remains unsigned. Matthew Bryza, the former US ambassador to Azerbaijan who spent years mediating the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, calls the outcome "a gigantic strategic setback for Russia" and describes the corridor at its center as "promising, nascent, not yet in existence." He joins Jim Stenman to discuss why Moscow lost its grip on a region it long dominated, how Stalin drew a map designed to perpetuate conflict, what the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity actually is and who will own it, and the Armenian constitutional referendum everything now hangs on, plus how both countries manage Iran next door and where he'd put client money today, including Armenian copper and Azerbaijan's tax-free zone on the Caspian. Bryza now serves as the Managing Director of Straife Istanbul. Watch the full conversation on YouTube, and follow #GlobalPowerShifts for more. Full episode list: jimstenman.com/global-power-shifts

Tens of thousands crossed from Morocco into Ceuta on 30 July, the biggest border breach in Europe's history. Verónica Muñoz grew up there. Her dad still lives there alone. Most of the crossers were young Moroccans hoping for a better life, and the crossings were organized openly on TikTok and WhatsApp. Some drowned off Tarajal beach. Days later most were back in Morocco and the cameras moved on. Verónica joins Jim Stenman and Suzanne Kianpour with the view from inside: her father behind shuttered shops, why "Spanish colony in North Africa" gets 600 years of history wrong, and whether Rabat let it happen. Her answer: "Of course the Moroccan government allowed it." Also in this episode: Italy's border checks on arrivals from Spain, open talk of suspending an EU member from Schengen, and Pedro Sánchez. He's feuded with Trump, backed Palestine while Morocco allied with Washington and Israel, and legalized 500,000 migrants while the rest of Europe turned right. Now his government is fighting for survival. Follow Verónica: instagram.com/ajournalistvlogWatch on YouTube: youtube.com/@GlobalPowerShiftsAll episodes: jimstenman.com/global-power-shifts

India is the world's most populous country and a rising power courted by Washington, Moscow, Brussels and the Gulf at once. It is also, in the words of this week's guest, a democracy dying "slowly, quietly." No tanks on the road, no takeover of the TV station. A silent coup. Josy Joseph has spent thirty years reporting on India's security establishment and its corruption. He is the founder of Confluence Media, co-producer of Black Warrant, the hit Netflix crime series set in Delhi's Tihar prison. His new book, Birth of a Nation, draws on newly declassified archives to tell the story almost nobody outside India knows: how 565 kings and ruling families surrendered their thrones in a matter of months in 1947, what he calls the largest handover of hereditary power in history, and how close India came to breaking apart at birth. He joins Jim Stenman and Suzanne Kianpour to connect that violent founding to the India of today: why the wound of Partition never healed and still drives the standoff with Pakistan; Gandhi's final defeat, accepted in silence on the backs of five old envelopes; how an estimated four million security and intelligence personnel became political weapons; Hindu nationalism and what it means for India's 200 million Muslims; why foreign investors are pulling back from Modi's India; how Delhi reads Pakistan's new role as mediator of the Iran war; and why, despite everything, he calls this the golden era of Indian investigative journalism. Josy Joseph is the author of A Feast of Vultures, The Silent Coup (published internationally as How to Subvert a Democracy), and Birth of a Nation. 🎧 Follow Global Power Shifts▶️ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GlobalPowerShifts🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1T2CsAK4983mRNmZPfApRy🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/global-power-shifts/id1791326929📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/globalpowershifts

Andrew Henderson renounced his US citizenship in 2017. He holds six passports, owns homes on several continents, and runs Nomad Capitalist, the firm built around one line: go where you're treated best. He joins Jim Stenman with an uncomfortable argument. Countries now compete for capital and talent, American power is fading at the margins, and loyalty to where you were born is a bad trade. He explains where that takes his own money, from land in Cambodia and Paraguay to a bet on Africa, a continent he calls rich in everything except leverage. The conversation runs through exit taxes, the real cost of a second passport, Dubai after the war, the South Caucasus, and whether democracy still delivers. Listen on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Follow #GlobalPowerShifts for more.

Trump put the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam back on the table at the G7, sitting next to Egypt's President Sisi and framing the dispute around Cairo, even describing his bond with Sisi as a love affair. The US-Ethiopia relationship is warming at the same time, through a Boeing jet deal, financing for Ethiopia's new international airport, and US backing for Abiy against the Tigrayans. Cameron Hudson, formerly of the CIA, NSC and State Department and now at 54 Advisors and CSIS, joins Jim Stenman to work through whether Washington can be an honest broker on the Nile, why Ethiopia will not negotiate, and how Egypt is trying to isolate Addis. They close on the wider risks across the Horn, including Eritrea, Somaliland's tilt toward Israel, and Somalia's fragmentation. 🎧 Follow Global Power Shifts▶️ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GlobalPowerShifts🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1T2CsAK4983mRNmZPfApRy🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/global-power-shifts/id1791326929📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/globalpowershifts

If Trump's framework with Iran lands, Tehran's enriched uranium has to go somewhere. Kazakhstan keeps coming up as the credible candidate, with an IAEA uranium bank already on its soil and nearly 40% of the world's uranium production. Around that question sits a wider shift. Kazakhstan and its Central Asian neighbours are quietly reducing their dependence on Russia, hedging between Moscow and Beijing, and pulling in Gulf and Western capital at scale. Jim Stenman sits down with Ambassador Daniel Rosenblum, former US Ambassador to Kazakhstan, on uranium, oil routes, Russian leverage and the regional repositioning the West has been slow to notice.

Is the UK lost as a country in 2026? Historian and royal biographer Andrew Lownie joins Jim Stenman and Suzanne Kianpour to take apart a Britain that has burned through six prime ministers in a decade, lost the Queen as its unbroken link to the past, and walked away from Europe with nothing put in its place. Lownie, author of Entitled, Traitor King and Stalin's Englishman, has spent his career prising open the British establishment's instinct to bury its own secrets — the cover-ups around Prince Andrew, the appointment of Peter Mandelson, the files that quietly stay closed. We start there, then widen out to the bigger question: has Britain become ungovernable, and does it need an honest new story about itself rather than empire nostalgia? We get into the collapse of the political centre and the Reform surge, why nearly 700,000 people left the UK in a single year — many of them young or wealthy, and many landing here in the Gulf — Poland's economy on track to overtake Britain's, whether the monarchy can survive as "the last unprotected institution," King Charles's soft-power masterclass in Washington, and where a self-described "very minor power" actually fits in a multipolar world. A serious conversation about national decline, identity and the architecture of British power — told through one of its sharpest observers. 🎧 Follow Global Power Shifts:▶️ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GlobalPowerS...🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1T2CsAK...🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/globalpower...

Cameron Hudson has worked the Horn of Africa file from inside three branches of the U.S. government, as a CIA Africa analyst, NSC Director for African Affairs, and Chief of Staff to successive U.S. Special Envoys for Sudan. He now runs 54 Advisors, a political and investment risk firm focused on Africa, and is a non-resident senior associate at the CSIS Africa Program. He joins Jim Stenman to unpack the most consequential and least understood story in geopolitics right now: the scramble for influence over the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa. The conversation covers the Trump administration's quiet move to normalise relations with Eritrea, the collapse of the Pretoria peace agreement and the risk of a new Tigray war, the contradictions inside U.S. policy toward Ethiopia, the rivalry between the UAE and Saudi Arabia playing out across African states, Israel's recognition of Somaliland, the strategic reordering triggered by the Iran war, and the absence of any coherent American strategy for one of the most contested regions on the planet. Hudson predicted the U.S.-Eritrea reset before it broke in the Wall Street Journal in April. His Foreign Policy essay, "Washington's One-Dimensional Chess in the Horn of Africa," lays out the risks of a decision being made without a clear strategy behind it. Essential listening for anyone trying to understand where U.S. foreign policy, Gulf competition and African statecraft are converging, and where the next conflict in the region is most likely to start. Recorded May 18, 2026.

The UAE just left OPEC. Weeks of Iranian missiles and drones, around 2,800 strikes absorbed by the Emirates, and a quiet realisation in Abu Dhabi that the old playbook is finished. Tareq Alotaiba, a former UAE government official now at Harvard's Belfer Center and AGSIW in Washington, joins Jim Stenman and Suzanne Kianpour on Global Power Shifts to break down what the OPEC exit really means, why the Emirates feels let down by parts of the Arab world, and how the war has changed the country's posture toward Iran, Israel, and Washington. In this episode: → Why the UAE leaving OPEC was inevitable, war or no war → Anwar Gargash's verdict: appeasement of Iran has failed → The disappointment in Arab neighbours, and the ones who showed up → Why Tareq believes the IRGC, not Iran, is the real enemy → The Strait of Hormuz, Fujairah, and what comes next for trade → Israel, the Abraham Accords, and the UAE's balancing act through the Gaza war → The Muslim Brotherhood, Qatari funding, and Emirati students in Europe → Why the UAE will rebuild ties with Iran but never trust it again Tareq's recent piece for AGSIW predicted the OPEC announcement four days before it broke. This conversation is the wider story behind it. 🎙 Global Power Shifts is hosted by Jim Stenman and Suzanne Kianpour. Follow on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Israel says it has weakened Hamas, pushed back Hezbollah, and left the Iranian regime more exposed than at any point in 47 years. So why does it feel like the country is losing ground everywhere else? Jonathan Conricus, the former IDF International Spokesperson and now Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, joins Suzanne Kianpour and Jim Stenman on Global Power Shifts. He makes the Israeli case directly. Iran's ring of fire is no longer what it was. Hezbollah is on the back foot. Hamas is degraded but still standing. The regime in Tehran is the weakest it has been in decades. None of the enemies, in his view, have been finished off. Suzanne and Jim push on what the case leaves out. Has Israel won the military rounds while losing a generation across the West? What does the Gulf actually think now that Iranian missiles, Houthi drones, and shipping disruption have become a regional cost rather than an Israeli one? Why are young Jews in London and New York genuinely afraid for their physical safety? And how does any of this end with Iran, where Suzanne's own family is on the receiving end of a regime under more pressure than at any point since 1979? Conricus also concedes something many Israeli officials will not say in public: reckless rhetoric from parts of the Israeli political class is making the country's job abroad much harder. The conversation moves across Gaza, Lebanon, the Gulf, Europe, the United States, and the future of the Iranian regime. Serious, sometimes uncomfortable, and aimed at an audience that wants more than headlines.

Sixteen years of Viktor Orbán ended at the ballot box. Ambassador Tibor Nagy, a Hungarian-born former US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs and acting Under Secretary of State for Management, returns to Global Power Shifts to explain how it happened and what comes next. Jim Stenman and Nagy work through the real story behind Péter Magyar's win: the stench of cronyism that voters could no longer stomach, a leaked Orbán–Putin phone call that landed badly in a country with Russia in its DNA, and a two-track Hungary where regime friends got world-class healthcare while ordinary citizens waited in line. They also cover what Magyar's two-thirds majority means in practice, why Brussels is likely to move fast on 22 billion euros in frozen funds, how the Kremlin loses its most reliable voice inside the EU, what happens to China's battery plants and imported Asian workforce, and why JD Vance showing up to campaign for Orbán may have hurt more than it helped. The conversation closes on the Horn of Africa: the Trump administration's reported exploration of lifting Eritrea sanctions, the strategic case for deepening ties with Somaliland, and the risks of an Ethiopian election held without Tigray at the table. A clear-eyed look at how long authoritarian runs actually end, and what the signal from Budapest means for capitals from Washington to Addis Ababa. Follow Global Power Shifts on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Mauritius tends to get filed under "luxury travel destination." That framing misses almost everything that matters about it right now.The Indian Ocean is becoming one of the most contested strategic spaces on the planet. Chinese naval assets, French military presence, the US base at Diego Garcia, Indian positioning, and the fallout from the Iran war are all converging in waters that run through some of the world's most critical trade corridors. Mauritius sits in the middle of it.Ameenah Gurib-Fakim was Mauritius's first female president, a scientist and academic who came to power without going through traditional party politics. She joined Jim Stenman and Suzanne Kianpour on April 1 to talk about what Mauritius actually represents at this moment: a small state with serious strategic weight, caught between great powers and trying to use that position deliberately.The conversation covers the long-running dispute over the Chagos Islands and Diego Garcia, including the ICJ ruling, the unresolved deal with Britain, and what it means that Iran attempted to strike the base with two ballistic missiles on 20 March, in an unsuccessful attack confirmed by the UK's Ministry of Defence. Since that interview, the United States, Israel, and Iran have agreed to a two-week ceasefire, effective early Wednesday, April 8, making this conversation a sharp record of where things stood at the edge of that shift. It gets into Africa's debt burden, the $1.3 trillion that keeps the continent borrowing at 15% while the West borrows at 2%, and why that matters more than most Africa coverage admits. Gurib-Fakim is direct about what the African Continental Free Trade Agreement could unlock, where the real development pockets are, and why Africa still does not have a media voice that speaks from its own vantage point.She also pushes back on the information disorder problem in a way that goes beyond the usual hand-wringing: who controls the algorithm, whose agenda it serves, and what it would actually take to build something credible enough to compete.A sharper conversation about the Indian Ocean, African agency, and the real stakes of a world in which data, minerals, and maritime access are becoming the currencies of power.