An expert on geopolitics is warning that the world should prepare for Russia to invade Europe and for President Donald Trump to continue dragging 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, shared the assessment during an appearance on "Diary of a CEO," the podcast hosted by Steven Bartlett. She spoke about the "reckless people running some very large and important countries and they're all lying about it."

The U.S. Naval War College, founded in 1884 in Newport, Rhode Island, educates American military officers and national security professionals in strategy and international relations.

Paine, who specializes in Russian and Chinese imperial history and maritime strategy, explained that history is now moving very quickly and that no one really knows where it will go. The conversation covered questions now central to security debates on both sides of the Atlantic: the reliability of U.S. alliance commitments, the spread of nuclear weapons, and the risk of a wider war in Europe.

Bartlett held up the stack of books Paine has written and told her he had never spoken to someone with such an immense amount of knowledge about world wars. He said he very quickly realized that he had no idea what was going on.

Paine argued 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 structured her analysis around "negative and positive objectives." A positive objective, she explained, is when you make something happen — like snatching the president of Venezuela and putting him in a New York prison. A negative objective is when you do something so that something does not happen, such as 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 through inspections, and issuing licenses to professions so customers can be sure they're protected.

"People have probably said throughout history 'there's going to be a war' a lot," Bartlett said. "And so is there particular writing on the wall at this moment in the timeline?"

Paine agreed, calling the Iran war "one of the most incompetent wars in human history." In a real war, she said, the costs are all put "on the person you're fighting and then you minimize costs yourself." That did not 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. But one should also know their own strengths and weaknesses and be prepared to mitigate them. The other piece 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, she argued, in large part because of the lack of experience at the very top. During the first administration, "we had people like General [Jim] Mattis around. Now we have Major Pete," she said. 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 — that everyone is for themselves, and countries should obtain a nuclear weapon as fast as possible for their own defense.

The agreement in question is the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, under which Iran accepted limits on its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief before Trump withdrew the United States from it during his first term. Paine's argument touches on a long-standing concern in nonproliferation policy: when security guarantees from allies look less reliable, more countries come to see an independent nuclear arsenal as the surest guarantee of their own defense.

"We have incentivized proliferation," Paine said. "It's profoundly self-defeating."

When the conversation moved to the Russia-Iran conflict, she said it was clear to her that Putin is "going to go for it."

Bartlett recalled speaking with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and said that during his patrols, Zelenskyy 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 there will never be a day that the Ukrainian people don't fight to avenge that. Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and trench warfare has defined much of the fighting since.

Calling Putin "Vlad the Bad," Paine said that under the Soviet Union the leadership "wanted to overthrow the capitalist order and Putin hasn't changed." Putin, a former KGB officer, has been at the top of the Russian government since 1999.

She also pointed to the "continentalists" — figures like Trump, Putin and Xi Jinping who want to divide the world into spheres of influence. A sphere-of-influence approach treats entire regions as zones of exclusive great-power control, the logic that governed 19th-century imperial politics. That, she said, is why Trump speaks out about the "western hemisphere" being his and says he can control Greenland and take Venezuela.

The discussion then turned to the 2026 election, which Paine called an "IQ test for Americans": how the U.S. votes will determine what of the Trump administration's actions can be stopped. Midterm elections decide every seat in the House of Representatives and roughly a third of the Senate, and the party holding the White House has historically lost ground in them — a pattern that determines how much of a president's agenda can advance.

"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."

This article is based on reporting from Alternet.