An expert warns that we should all prepare for Russia to invade Europe and for President Donald Trump to continue to bring down not just the American economy but the world economy.
Dr. Sarah Paine, a renowned geopolitical strategist, historian and retired professor from the U.S. Naval War College, spoke to Steven Bartlett for his "Diary of a CEO" podcast about the "reckless people running some very large and important countries and they're all lying about it."
Paine, who specializes in Russian and Chinese imperial history and maritime strategy, explained that history is now moving very quickly and no one really knows where it will go.
Bartlett pulled out Paine's stack of books she's written and said that he's never spoken to someone who has such an immense amount of knowledge about world wars. He said that he very quickly realized that he had no idea what was going on.
Paine explained that Trump's "recreational war" with Iran has "trashed this economy, blown the U.S. alliance system, but it also had some collateral damage of taking down the world's economy. And this is the problem with having these dark personalities running countries."
She began with "negative and positive objectives": a positive is when you make something happen like snatching the president of Venezuela and putting him in a New York prison. Whereas a negative objective is when you do something and something doesn't happen. Like holding a child's hand so they don't run into traffic and get hit by a car.
Governments, she said, are primarily responsible for negative objectives like preventing buildings from collapsing, preventing lettuce from making people sick with inspections and issuing licenses to professions so customers can ensure they're protected.
"People have probably said throughout history 'there's going to be a war' a lot," said Bartlett. "And so is there particular writing on the wall at this moment in the timeline?"
Paine agreed, saying that the Iran war is "one of the most incompetent wars in human history."
For a real war, she said that the costs are all put "on the person you're fighting and then you minimize costs yourself." That didn't happen in Trump's war. Instead, he did more harm to the U.S. and American allies along with it.
"So this now transforms the United States to an annoyance to just about everyone's primary adversary for threatening their economies. That's breathtakingly incompetent," she explained.
Before an attack, she said the strategy is to assess your opponent's strengths and weaknesses. However, one should also know their own strengths and weaknesses and be prepared to mitigate them. The other piece, however, is to anticipate the strengths and weaknesses of anyone else who might be interested in getting involved. Like Russia supporting Iran.
None of that was done, in large part because of the lack of experience at the very top. During the first administration, she said, "we had people like General [Jim] Mattis around. Now we have Major Pete." Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been responsible for removing some of the top generals and military officials in the United States.
"So, these people are historically unqualified for the job. That makes them profoundly dangerous," Paine said.
After Trump pulled out of the nuclear agreement, the lesson became that not working together with other countries is not taken seriously; it became that everyone is for themselves, and countries should obtain a nuclear weapon as fast as possible for their own defense.
"We have incentivized proliferation," Paine said. "It's profoundly self-defeating."
When they moved to talk about the Russia vs. Iran conflict, she said that it was clear to her that Putin is "going to go for it." Bartlett recalled speaking to Volodymyr Zelenskyy and saying that in his patrols, he happened upon a Russian trench where there were hundreds of bodies and it was clear that all of them had been brutally tortured. Zelenskyy said that there will never be a day that the Ukrainian people don't fight to avenge that.
Calling Putin "Vlad the Bad," she said that under the Soviet Union they "wanted to overthrow the capitalist order and Putin hasn't changed."
She mentioned the "continentalists," those like Trump, Putin and Xi Jinping who want to divide the world into spheres of influence. It's why Trump speaks out about the "western hemisphere" being his and says he can control Greenland and take Venezuela.
When they pivoted to talk about the 2026 election, she called it an "IQ test for Americans": How the U.S. votes will determine what can be stopped that the Trump administration is doing.
"Every time they go to the pump, they know prices have gone up," she said. "And whether you like the guy (Trump) or don't, it's his fault. And it's the fault of the party that has enabled him at every point. And Pete Hegseth, who's a major, right? It's an okay rank, but not to run the Pentagon. The Republican Party confirmed him. It was an act of supreme dereliction of duty to do that. They could have demanded another Gen. Mattis and we might not be in Iran today. And if Trump loses or the Republicans lose the midterms, essentially what it means is they are going to have to cooperate a lot with the Democrats because they're not going to cooperate. They've made clear they're not cooperating with Democrats."
