The Wider Struggle for the World

What happens when the West stops writing the rules and every middle power starts playing its own game at the same time?

Peter Apps reunites with Samir Puri, Director of the Centre for Global Governance and Security at Chatham House. From Trump’s transactional peace pushes to China’s mineral land-grab and the growing power of emerging middle powers, they map a world where old empires fade and new ones rise - often in the same contested spaces.

What You’ll Learn

- The Middle-Power Free-for-All: Why countries from Indonesia to Kazakhstan now hedge between Washington, Beijing, and Moscow and what that means for tomorrow’s battlefields.

- The Real New Scramble: It’s not colonies this time; it’s lithium, cobalt, rare earths, Arctic shipping lanes, and the infrastructure deals that lock in influence for decades.

- Climate + Tech + Geopolitics: The triple storm quietly redrawing the global map faster than any single war ever could.

Samir Puri’s big-picture clarity cuts through the noise: we’re not sliding into a new Cold War - we’re stumbling into a hotter, messier, multipolar scramble where everyone wants a seat at a table that keeps getting bigger and less predictable.

Facing Coming Storms is brought to you by the British Army’s Centre for Historical Analysis and Conflict Research, in partnership with the Project for the Study of the 21st Century, and produced by Urban Podcasts.