The New Rules of Power — with Anne Applebaum and Fiona Hill

What It Covers

Anne Applebaum and Fiona Hill join Scott Galloway for episode 400 of the Prof G Pod to analyze Trump's handling of conflicts in Iran and Ukraine, the erosion of American soft power, Ukraine's drone-driven battlefield transformation, Putin's mounting constraints, and why existential wars consistently outperform wars of choice regardless of military spending.

Key Questions Answered

• •Existential vs. choice wars: Nations fighting for survival consistently outperform larger military powers fighting wars of choice. Ukraine, defending its language, culture, and national existence, has proven as resilient as Russia despite massive resource asymmetry. Pre-war Ukrainian surveys showed low willingness to fight — identical to other nations — yet mobilization transformed once invasion began. The lesson: public sacrifice scales with perceived existential stakes, not military budgets.
• •Ukraine's drone revolution: Ukraine has built a transparent 20-mile-wide frontline zone using millions of reconnaissance and strike drones, making every Russian vehicle and soldier visible and targetable. Long-range drones — roughly dining-table-sized — have now struck virtually every refinery in central Russia, including one in Saint Petersburg during a major Putin economic conference. This decentralized, crowdsourced innovation model, not top-down defense spending, produced the strategic shift.
• •Autocracy's structural fragility: Putin's system has no succession mechanism — no Politburo, no party, no defined process for choosing a next leader. This creates a paradox: an apparently strong centralized state that becomes instantly chaotic without its single leader. Historical precedent from Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union shows these systems appear permanent until they collapse suddenly, with almost no advance warning detectable by outside observers.
• •American soft power as operating system: The US historically derived disproportionate global influence not from military force alone but from voluntary, values-based alliances, institutions, and an operating system that two-thirds of the world's economy ran on. Losing majority participation doesn't halve power — it reduces it by roughly 80%, since controlling under one-third means losing agenda-setting authority entirely. The current administration has accelerated this forfeiture within a single year.
• •Iran's Strait of Hormuz leverage: Iran has inadvertently or strategically discovered that control of the Strait of Hormuz functions as a more durable strategic asset than nuclear weapons development. This choke-point leverage gives Iran negotiating power without requiring a deliverable weapon. The broader lesson for geopolitical analysis: any actor controlling a single critical chokepoint — whether a strait, mineral supply, or infrastructure node — gains asymmetric leverage disproportionate to overall military or economic strength.
• •Strong society beats strong state: Ukraine's battlefield innovation emerged from flattened hierarchies, networked civilian-military collaboration, and hundreds of small competing drone companies — not centralized procurement. Russia's top-down vertical of power actively suppresses the societal mobilization that drives innovation. Gulf states and European nations now seek partnerships with Ukrainian drone firms, with multiple joint ventures forming across Europe, signaling that decentralized innovation ecosystems produce more durable military capability than trillion-dollar consolidated defense budgets.