Danube Institute Podcast

We asked Marwan Abdallah, Head of the Foreign Affairs Department at the Lebanese Kataeb Party, about the rise and fall of Hezbollah and the scope for Christian politics in Lebanon.The Danube Lectures is a video podcast of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based conservative think tank that asks its guests – decision-makers, experts, academics, and politicians – about their unique ideas. Host: Tamás Maráczi, a journalist at the Danube Institute.

Things ain’t what they used to be in Conservatism. By the 1990s, after a decade of Reagan and Thatcher, Conservatives had established an ideology which felt permanent. Markets, individualism, seriousness on questions of debt and security. Then came Blair, Clinton, and through that door, a whole new oppositional force, call it the Third Way. Call it The End of History, the Deep State. This new order re-made us. And with that, Conservatism became a mere servant of broader historical forces. It was only in 2016 that it found its voice again, with the emergence of Donald Trump. Trump was the strange, improbable conclusion to a twenty year struggle for the soul of Conservatism. Though he might not have known it. In the 1990s, in America, a war was underway, between the Paleoconservatives and the Neo-Conservatives. The Paleocons were led by men like Sam Francis and Pat Buchanan. They saw the apparatus of state as having been captured by a managerial class. This class spanned both conservatives and liberals — and took as its fiefs, the underclass, the immigrant class. Those dependent on the largesse of the state, and those who needed its protection. Outside of this welcome embrace was what the columnist Sam Francis called the People From Mars - MAR - the Middle American Radicals. Another term from another time might be Pouijadistes. The workers, solo entrepreneurs, backbone of the petit bourgeoisie.  Small towns and traditional communities. Somewheres, in a later coinage. These were the people who they were fighting for. Opposing them were the Neocons. The children of Reagan and Thatcher, who believed in that individualised, marketised kind of conservatism. Relaxed about immigration. And social mores. In the 90s, the Neocons won. Until they didn’t. One man who has the scars on his back of that initial conflict is John O’Sullivan.From 1988 till 1997, John was editor of the National Review, William Buckley’s organ of reliable, grown up neo-conservatism. Today, John himself has shifted somewhat. He is after all, President of the Danube Institute. John personally remembers Sam Francis and Pat Buchanan as worthy adversaries. Alongside him, is a Young Turk of the coming age. Markus Johansson Martis. Markus is Swedish, a lawyer by training, a Danube Institute Visiting Fellow by day, an advisor to the Sweden Democrats, and a columnist at the Dutch magazine Nieuwe Rechts. Lately, Markus has published a paper for us, Conservative Realism, which binds together the threads between two figures who together predicted the jump between 1996 and 2026. James Burnham and Sam Francis. He argues that Conservatism needs to refine the Burkean bargain — that we shouldn’t simply conserve that which is not itself conservative. Just as the modern city of Rotterdam should not be conserved - because it was rebuilt after the war, with no regard to the city plans that had survived centuries. He calls this Conservative Realism. John, of course, is the father of O’Sullivan’s Law: organisations that are not explicitly right coded will, in time, end up left-coded. Today, we want to ask: how real is our conservatism? And do we need Conservative Realism? If the fight is between conservatives and left-captured institutions, how can we undo the damage, without chopping off the Conservatism that we stand on? 

We asked Paul Salem, former CEO and president of the Middle East Institute, about the changing geopolitical landscape of the Middle East.The Danube Lectures is a video podcast of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based conservative think tank that asks its guests – decision-makers, experts, academics, and politicians – about their unique ideas. Host: Tamás Maráczi, a journalist at the Danube Institute.

Alexandre Lefebvre is a Canadian who lives in Sydney. A professor of political philosophy at the University of Sydney, he is the author of five books. Most recently, Liberalism as a Way of Life , published in 2024, argued that liberalism functions not just as a political system but as an all-encompassing worldview shaping values, psychology, and ethics in Western democracies. Today, though, Alex is sleeping with the enemy. He is in Hungary, home of the post-liberal in the wild. And the site of Viktor Orbán’s oft-misinterpreted remark about building 'illiberal democracy'. He has come here on a kind of pilgrimage, and a kind of anthropological journey. Jane Goodall to the rightist wonk classes. For the past month, he has been working with the Danube Institute, interviewing and investigating, reading and speaking, poking and prodding, in search of the soul of this new turn in political philosophy. Budapest is just the first stop on a multi-country tour, looking at governments who, in very different ways, reject the old orthodoxies of the transactional liberal conception of citizenship, state and place. What he finds will form the basis of a new book, whose contents might be summed up in the title of his recent lecture here: From Statecraft To Soulcraft. In his Noema essay of the same title, Alex puts it like this: ⁠Who are the most articulate and thoughtful representatives of regimes from around the world that are threatening to dethrone liberalism from the political, social, economic and cultural preeminence it has enjoyed for roughly the past 75 years? If it were up to me, I’d send invitations to Aleksandr Dugin of Russia, the philosopher who has been called “Putin’s Brain”; Wang Huning, the shrewd ideologue who has led Beijing for some 40 years; Steve Bannon of the United States, who, whatever his faults, has channeled Trumpism like no one else; Mohan Bhagwat, head of India’s Hindu nationalist movement; Rached Ghannouchi of Tunisia for an Islamist perspective; and finally Viktor Orbán, who is currently the Prime Minister of Hungary and apparently relishes rowdy gatherings. ⁠This week, he is our guest here at the Danube Institute, and we want to know about the cracks in liberalism he points to, the question of whether they can be repaired, or whether the whole thing will simply need to be replaced. 

We asked Trita Parsi, Executive Vice President of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, about about the results of street protests, the pillars of the Islamic regime, and the chances of another Iran war.The Danube Lectures is a video podcast of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based conservative think tank that asks its guests – decision-makers, experts, academics, and politicians – about their unique ideas. Host: Tamás Maráczi, a journalist at the Danube Institute.

We asked Radek Vondráček, Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee at the Chamber of Deputies of the Parliament of the Czech Republic and Deputy Leader of the ANO party, about Ukraine's possible EU membership, the future of the V4, the program of the Patriots, and the secret of the ANO party.The Danube Lectures is a video podcast of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based conservative think tank that asks its guests – decision-makers, experts, academics, and politicians – about their unique ideas. Host: Tamás Maráczi, a journalist at the Danube Institute.

At Davos, a thin sheen of normality was pulled over what was the most abnormal World Economic Forum in its history. It felt less like a swish cocktail party for the global elite — more like the moment in a dive bar before closing, when someone turns on all the lights. America has decided it’s going it alone. Europe might finally be waking up to its folly — but that’s a helluva hangover. At Davos, Donald Trump dominated, with his threats over Greenland. But it was Mark Carney who said what everyone was thinking: the American led world order is an order, not a request. Choose accordingly. This is not a transition, Carney suggested. This is the state of anarchy that comes before a transition. Small nations like Hungary, who have both tied their stock to the US, and found themselves at odds with the Brussels bureaucracy, now straddle a wider divide than ever. More broadly, how does the European right continue to argue for national self-determination and the transatlantic alliance, in the face of an America that is cooling on both? At a practical level, Europe can no longer defend itself, AND maintain elaborate welfare states — and that’s a revolution in the head no one on the old continent is yet ready for. The continent’s cosy sophistication is ebbing away. Now, Europe stands naked before the coming global headwinds. After Greenland: America First, the end of illusions, and the coming nude world order. This time, on View From The Danube.

 2026 got off with a bang, some sirens, several subsequent explosions. The were of helicopters, the AK of gunfire and the crisp patting of waves against a destroyer class warship. Three days into the new year, Venezuela's dictator Nicholas Maduro found himself boat bound for New York, where he was paraded through the streets before being arraigned at a district court on charges of narco terrorism.The capture of Majuro seems to have marked the advent of a new era in foreign policy. Some have called it multipolarity, some have called it. You can just do things, but the key point is that we can no longer rely on the post 1945 architecture of the global world order. The biggest gorilla in the room is flexing its muscles, thumping its chest, and grabbing bananas from here on out.Nations must calibrate their policy to the ages they wish to be under. They must know their place. For some, this is a story of unraveling the gloom that comes from a centre that can no longer hold. For others, this is an exciting time, a moment when the real work of ordering and shaping the international system can re-begin after a long stasis. Father Mario Portella is by nature an optimist. He sees the Trumpist foreign policy that is emerging as a chance to set up win-win deals by thinking of foreign policy in the language of the market. Not that of the political plenary. He points to this as a distinction from the previous US eras, times of Nation building, the Post 1945 era, in particular when communism was opposed by strengthening Capitalism and then the less successful post-Cold War era, which threw up a range of follies committing troops to Iraq being the most notable.Father Portella is a priest of the Cathedral of Santa Maria Del Fre in Florence, Italy, where he served as Archdiocese chancellor. He's also a visiting professor of Canon law at ITI Catholic University, and a visiting fellow here at the Danube Institute. Lately he's published a piece in the Hungarian Conservative, which points to the long continuum within American diplomacy that encloses Trump's instincts.He writes of Teddy Roosevelt and Cuba in 1906 of Calvin Coolidge in Panama in 1926, and of the original transactional foreign policy, Thomas Jefferson's corporate takeover of the Louisiana Purchase. America, he says, has always done best when it has done business. He calls this the transactional approach.If the transactional approach is indeed the new paradigm, how will the next few years play out? How can smaller countries like Hungary make deals that don't feel like muggings? What indeed is the future for Greenland under the stars and bars?

We asked Ronen Itsik, an Israeli Senior Researcher and Head of the Military Social Relations Department at the David Institute for Security Policy, about the Gaza ceasefire, the fate of Hamas and Iran, and the possibility of establishing a Palestinian state. The Danube Lectures is a video podcast of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based conservative think tank that asks its guests – decision-makers, experts, academics, and politicians – about their unique ideas. Host: Tamás Maráczi, a journalist at the Danube Institute.--The conversation was recorded on January 20th, when the Iranian protests were still going on.

We asked Mansoor Ahmad Khan, former Ambassador of Pakistan to Afghanistan, Director of the BNU Center for Policy Research in Lahore, and Distinguished Fellow at the Ludovika Public Diplomacy Hub, about Pakistan's geopolitical importance.The Danube Lectures is a video podcast of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based conservative think tank that asks its guests – decision-makers, experts, academics, and politicians – about their unique ideas. Host: Tamás Maráczi, a journalist at the Danube Institute.