The Economist.
Hello and welcome to Editor's Picks.
I'm Jason Palmer, co-host of The Intelligence, our daily news and current affairs podcast.
Today, in a special episode, we've brought you our defence editor, Shashank Joshi's final edition of The War Room,
our newsletter on defence, published yesterday and read aloud by Shashank himself.
We hope you enjoy listening.
Hello, this is Shashank Joshi and welcome to my final edition of The War Room.
I'm recording this at 3.30pm on the 15th of June 2026. When I started in this beat back in September 2018,
President Donald Trump had met Vladimir Putin in Helsinki months earlier.
The full-scale invasion of Ukraine was not even a twinkle in Mr Putin's eye.
John McCain, the hawkish Republican senator,
perhaps the antithesis of Mr Trump's foreign policy worldview, had just died.
That week's issue of the Economist had scant coverage of defence.
A pair of stories on the Thai and Burmese armies,
one on battling Ebola in Congo, on my first day in the office.
My boss, the foreign editor, asked me what I thought of the Russia-China military exercises that week.
I offered a few half-baked thoughts.
Good, he replied.
You can pitch a leader in an hour.
That was my first terrifying introduction to the tradition of Monday morning meetings in which we debate ideas,