Decoding Geopolitics Podcast with Dominik Presl

➡️ Watch the full interview ad-free, join a community of geopolitics enthusiasts and gain access to exclusive content on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics➡️ Sign up to my free geopolitics newsletter: https://stationzero.substack.com/Probably the biggest trend defining geopolitics today is the global competition between two superpowers: the United States and China. And despite America having many major advantages, China is increasingly managing to catch up with the US - and it has been able to do that from basically nothing and in a record time.My guest today - Dan Wang - explains why was China able to do that and what that means for who will end up winning in the future. He is a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and author of the book Breakneck, where he argues that while the United States is led by lawyers, China is led by engineers. And that as a consequence China is able to build with speed and scale that the US is struggling to catch up - but it’s also why China tends to make pretty catastrophic decisions just as often as it makes the brilliant ones. It is a fascinating explanation of both of these two countries and their global competition and we talk about what it means for their respective futures, who is better positioned to win the new Cold War and much more.

➡️ Watch the full interview ad-free, join a community of geopolitics enthusiasts and gain access to exclusive content on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics➡️ Sign up to my free geopolitics newsletter: https://stationzero.substack.com/This is a conversation with Michael Hirsh, columnist for Foreign Policy and one of the most experienced observers of U.S. foreign policy and national security in Washington. In this episode, we look at a big claim he’s been making: that realism has quietly become the dominant way of thinking about America’s role in the world.We talk about what that actually means, why realism has become so popular, and whether the Trump administration really reflects a realist approach or something closer to chaos and isolationism. We also get into the views of figures like J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio or Elbridge Colby, or why Democrats are adopting their own version of realism as well.And finally, we look at what all this means in practice - for U.S. policy toward Ukraine and Europe, for NATO and alliances more broadly, and for China and the Indo-Pacific - and how this shift could shape the next decade of U.S. foreign policy and the world with it.

➡️ Watch the full interview ad-free, join a community of geopolitics enthusiasts and gain access to exclusive content on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics➡️ Sign up to my free geopolitics newsletter: https://stationzero.substack.com/This is a conversation with Jaak Tarien about two pretty big things that happened recently - the incursion of Russian drones that were shot down by Poland in its airspace and an incursion of Russian fighter jets into Estonia that were escorted by Italian F-35s out of the country. Jaak is a former Brigadier General in the Estonian Armed Forces who served in several high ranking roles in both the Estonian military and in NATO and finished his career as the Commander of Estonia’s Air Force. He retired in 2018 and today he is an executive in an Estonian startup developing military drone technology and so he is the perfect guest to talk to today.With Jaak we discuss what both of those incidents mean - what was his view on how Poland dealt with the Russian drones in its airspace and what’s a better and more sustainable way to deal with that than deploying extremely expensive guided rockets against much much cheaper drones. We talk about how should Estonia and NATO deal with Russian jets flying into its territory - whether they should be shot down like some people argue, who would be actually doing that and how if it were to happen, what does the example of Turkey shooting down a Russian fighter jet in 2015 in its airspace tell us about it or why is Russia actually doing these incursions - what is it trying to achieve and whether NATO shooting its down its jets could be exactly the reaction that Russia is trying to provoke.

➡️ Watch the full interview ad-free, join a community of geopolitics enthusiasts and gain access to exclusive content on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics➡️ Sign up to my free geopolitics newsletter: https://stationzero.substack.com/This is a conversation with Francis Farrell - a reporter for Kyiv Independent and someone who spends a good amount of time directly on the frontline in Ukraine, embedded with various Ukrainian military units. And who, because of that, has a unique, first-hand perspective about what the war on a tactical, ground level actually looks like today and how is it changing day to day. We talk about who’s actually winning today, what is the trajectory of the war and how has that trajectory been evolving. We talk about a number of new tactics and tech that have appeared on the frontlines over the past months and how they have been fundamentally changing the fighting and what new tactics are both Ukrainians and Russians adopting right now. And also about Ukraine’s manpower issues, whether they are being fixed and how much they affect the Ukrainian war effort or what impact the events of this year had on public opinion in Ukraine - and much more.

➡️ Watch the full interview ad-free, join a community of geopolitics enthusiasts and gain access to exclusive content on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics➡️ Sign up to my free geopolitics newsletter: https://stationzero.substack.com/This is a conversation with Patrick McGee, and it’s perhaps a bit of an unusual episode. Patrick is an author of a book called Apple in China tells the story of how the world’s most valuable company came to China to use it for its own benefit—only to discover, over time, that it was Apple being used, trapped, and effectively working for the Chinese state instead. But despite the title, this isn’t just about Apple. It’s really a story of how China changed over two decades - how it gained leverage over Western corporations, squeezed them for everything from know-how to capital, and used them to build homegrown rivals now competing globally. It’s a story about how China uses economic dependency to build political influence and uses political influence to create economic dependency. And about how aggressive, smart and strategic China can be when pushing for its interests and how the West to its own detriment often fails to see that until it's too late. Even though the story is from the perspective of a private company, the story is just as much about China, the West, and their relationship—which is why I think it’s deeply relevant for geopolitics.

➡️ Watch the full interview ad-free, join a community of geopolitics enthusiasts and gain access to exclusive content on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics➡️ Sign up to my free geopolitics newsletter: https://stationzero.substack.com/This is a conversation with Nick Hare, a former defense intelligence analyst in the UK government and a founder of a forecasting company Aleph Insights. But more importantly, he is what’s called a superforecaster - someone who is exceptionally successful in consistently predicting the future and far better at it than the average population or even government agencies and subject matter experts. It’s not about magic, instead it’s about mastering the science of forecasting based on filtering out the noise, choosing the correct information to focus on, correctly analyzing historical trends, avoiding biases and a lot more, to predict stock markets, global geopolitical events or basically anything else. It’s a fascinating field and we explain how it works, how he forecasted the Russian invasion of Ukraine or why governments and intelligence agencies fail to use these methods and tend to rely more on vibes rather than data. But more importantly, I take Nick’s exceptional forecasting skills and get him to forecast some of the key geopolitical events of the coming years that will end up shaping the world - from whether China will invade Taiwan or how will the war in Ukraine end. It’s a fascinating discussion and statistically, his answers are more accurate predictions of how these things will play out than you can find anywhere else in the world. 

➡️ Watch the full interview ad-free, join a community of geopolitics enthusiasts and gain access to exclusive content on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics➡️ Sign up to my free geopolitics newsletter: https://stationzero.substack.com/This is a conversation with Sergey Radchenko. Sergey is one of the most insightful historians of the Cold War and Russian history. He grew up in the USSR, has spent years combing through Soviet archives, and his latest book offers a rare inside look into how Soviet leaders actually made decisions about war, diplomacy, and the use of power. But this isn’t just about history because the past in Russia is still very much alive - and understanding what drove Soviet foreign policy shines a light on what drives Russian foreign policy today.And so we talk about why Russia’s obsession with being seen as a great power still drives its decisions today, how Vladimir Putin’s worldview was shaped by Soviet collapse, and how much of his strategy mirrors what Soviet leaders did during the Cold War. We look at why Russia keeps acting like it’s still a superpower, whether Vladimir Putin is trying to rebuild the Soviet Union or what lessons policymakers can actually learn from how the West handled the USSR during the Cold War and much much more.

➡️ Watch the full interview ad-free, join a community of geopolitics enthusiasts and gain access to exclusive content on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics➡️ Sign up to my free geopolitics newsletter: https://stationzero.substack.com/This is a conversation with Robert D Kaplan - a legendary journalist, academic, and one of the most influential thinkers on US foreign policy and geopolitics of the past decades. This year, he published a book called Wastelands in which he portrays a pretty grim diagnosis of why the world is increasingly becoming more and more unstable and dangerous, why is the United States but also Russia and China in decline that is only getting faster and why what’s coming is more chaos, more instability, violence and danger - as well, as what can we do to avoid it. We talk about all of that and much more - in what I think is pretty fascinating conversation.

➡️ Watch the full interview ad-free, join a community of geopolitics enthusiasts and gain access to exclusive content on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics➡️ Sign up to my free geopolitics newsletter: https://stationzero.substack.com/This is a conversation with Gregory Smith, a policy analyst at Rand focusing on the influence of AI and emerging technologies on geopolitics. And this was - and I hope I don't offend any of my other guests by saying - one of the most fascinating conversations I’ve ever had on the podcast.Today, we are at a point when there’s a realistic chance that in the next decade or so we might get an AGI - artificial general intelligence or even ASI - artificial superintelligence: a next stage of AI that would be able to do everything that humans can and possibly even significantly better. If that happens it will radically transform every aspect of our lives but while the impact on other areas is widely discussed - how it might reshape geopolitics is largely ignored - even though its impact would be absolutely transformational. Greg and his colleagues at Rand recently published an extremely interesting paper where they for the first time try to explore what that might look like - and they present 8 different scenarios of how AGI can transform the global world order. Most of them are pretty bad but all of them are fascinating - leading to a rise of new superpowers, fall of the old ones and a fundamentally different world. And in this conversation, we discuss what that world might look like.

➡️ Watch the full interview ad-free, join a community of geopolitics enthusiasts and gain access to exclusive content on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics➡️ Sign up to my free geopolitics newsletter: https://stationzero.substack.com/This is a conversation with Anne Applebaum -  a historian focusing on Russia and Eastern Europe and one of the most respected thinkers on international relations, democracy and foreign policy in the world. I used the opportunity to speak with her to make sense of what’s going on and where are we heading - from the US foreign policy and whether Trump is really turning on Putin, the future of US-Europe relations and about Russia and Ukraine: what’s driving Putin and what we still fail to understand about him, what can convince him to stop the war and how that might happen or what does the future of Russia look like.

➡️ Watch the full interview ad-free, join a community of geopolitics enthusiasts and gain access to exclusive content on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics➡️ Sign up to my free geopolitics newsletter: https://stationzero.substack.com/This is a conversation with Jakub Jajcay. Jakub has a very unique experience and perspective. He has served in several elite units in the Slovak military, once the Ukraine war started he volunteered and joined the Ukrainian military, serving as an infantry soldier and later in a drone unit on several combat tours. And today, he uses his own experiences from combat in Ukraine to draw analytical insights - about the war itself, about the changing character of warfare or about the lessons that NATO should be learning from it. The combination of his highly analytical mind and experience is quite special and it makes for a very rare and fascinating conversation.We talk about why he thinks that FPV drones are overrated as someone who actually worked with them, how the reality of war differs from the media perception and what misconceptions most analysts have about what the war looks like, what’s the real level of quality of both Ukraine and Russian militaries, how would a typical NATO military perform if it was forced to fight in Ukraine against Russia, the real reason for why the Ukrainian big counter-offensive in 2023 failed and much, much more. 

➡️ Watch the full interview ad-free, join a community of geopolitics enthusiasts and gain access to exclusive content on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics➡️ Sign up to my free geopolitics newsletter: https://stationzero.substack.com/This is a conversation with John Dotson, director of the Global Taiwan Initiative,  former U.S. Navy officer and an expert on Taiwanese defense and security policy. There are a lot of discussions on Taiwan and its role in a potential conflict with China but quite often in these discussions, Taiwan actually is seen as a passive actor. We talk about a potential war between China and the U.S. over Taiwan - and overlook what role would Taiwan actually play - but its role and its decisions would be pretty fundamental. I wanted to explore it in more detail and so with John, we talk about how Taiwan is preparing for a war with China, why do people in Taiwan seem a lot less concerned about this than policymakers in the U.S., why is Taiwan criticized for not doing enough or for doing the wrong things or how likely is it that China could get Taiwan without actually needing to fight for it.

➡️ Watch the full interview ad-free, join a community of geopolitics enthusiasts and gain access to exclusive content on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics➡️ Sign up to my free geopolitics newsletter: https://stationzero.substack.com/This is a conversation with Ali Ansari, a professor and a founding director of the Institute for Iranian Studies at the University of St Andrews.Professor Ansari has incredible insight and views on Iranian foreign policy, its domestic politics and the future trajectory of the Islamic Republic. And so we talk about how the 12 Day War changed the country, how will Iran change its grand strategy after the approach that it has pursued for three decades seems to have failed, whether it will now race to get a nuclear weapon or why he believes that a fundamental change of the Iranian regime has already started - and why the coming years will see the end of the regime as we know it.

➡️ Watch the full interview ad-free, join a community of geopolitics enthusiasts and gain access to exclusive content on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics➡️ Sign up to my free geopolitics newsletter: https://stationzero.substack.com/Thank you Conducttr for sponsoring the podcast. Take a look at Conducttr's services and its crisis exercise software at: https://www.conducttr.comThis is a conversation with Szabolcs Panyi, a Hungarian investigative journalist. I wanted to talk to Szabolcs because something remarkable has been happening in Hungarian politics. Viktor Orban, the prime minister who has ruled Hungary for over almost two decades is now for the first time ever, losing by a large margin in the polls to a new challenger. The elections are less than a year from now and it’s starting to look more and more likely that Viktor Orban’s rule might be coming to an end. And so we discuss why - who is Orban’s new challenger, why is he able to succeed where so many before failed, and what would his victory mean for Hungary but also for Russia, Ukraine and European politics at large. 

➡️ Watch the full interview ad-free, join a community of geopolitics enthusiasts and gain access to exclusive content on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics➡️ Sign up to my free geopolitics newsletter: https://stationzero.substack.com/Thank you Conducttr for sponsoring the podcast. Take a look at Conducttr's services and its crisis exercise software at: https://www.conducttr.comThis is a conversation with Fabian Hoffman, a Doctoral Research Fellow at the University who’s focusing on missiles of all kinds and he’s been doing a fantastic job popularizing and explaining this quite niche topic on his Twitter and Substack. It’s quite a sobering conversation. Missiles in general are becoming increasingly important part of warfare in conflicts from Ukraine to the Middle East and their importance is only gonna grow - and Fabian talks about why he believes that Europe is extremely unprepared for this - why it lacks both air defensive and offensive capabilities, why its falling miles behind Russia which has drastically increased its production and why he believes that Russia is actually stockpiling their missiles for a contingency of a war with NATO, rather than just using them in Ukraine. We also talk about how Israel’s Iron Dome actually performed in its war with Iran, whether the plan for a golden dome that the Trump administration is planning to spend hundreds of billions of dollars makes sense, why Europe’s air defense policy is completely wrong and it’s never gonna work and much, much more. 

➡️ Join the community of geopolitics enthusiasts and gain access to exclusive content on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics➡️ Sign up to my free geopolitics newsletter: https://stationzero.substack.com/Thank you Conducttr for sponsoring the podcast. Take a look at Conducttr's services and its crisis exercise software at: https://www.conducttr.comThis is a conversation with Sir Lawrence Freedman, a legendary British historian of war, strategy and foreign policy and a frequent commentator on war and strategy of today, as well. I took this opportunity to sort of pick his brain on the main conflicts - starting in the Middle East and trying to understand whether Israel can consider the 12 day war against Iran a success, whether it made sense for the US to join in or what would he do now if he were the supreme leader in Tehran. And then we talk about the big picture in Ukraine. About why Russia is stuck fighting the war with no real good way out, whether we will see a negotiated settlement and what it might look or whether the result will be decided on the battlefield, how long can the war possibly go on or why drones are not really the future of war the way we think they are. 

➡️ The Substack post I mentioned: https://stationzero.substack.com/p/why-dictatorships-actually-fall-and?r=568dwe➡️ Join the community of geopolitics enthusiasts and gain access to exclusive content on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics➡️ Sign up to my free geopolitics newsletter: https://stationzero.substack.com/

Watch the full episode: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4vQiQmqq38Ymia0LYZiAzs?si=qkL_PYGkTvSYzVz98wZTNw➡️ Sign up to my free geopolitics newsletter: https://stationzero.substack.com/Sarah Paine discussess what is actually China's Grand Strategy - and what it means for the rest of the world.

➡️ Join the community of geopolitics enthusiasts and gain access to exclusive content on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics➡️ Sign up to my free geopolitics newsletter: https://stationzero.substack.com/Thank you Conducttr for sponsoring the podcast. Take a look at Conducttr's services and its crisis exercise software at: https://www.conducttr.comThis is a conversation with George Barros from the Institute for the Study of War who leads a team that has been monitoring and reporting on the war in Ukraine every day for the past 3 and half years. I freely admit that I did not expect the war to last nearly as long as it has and so we talk about how long it can realistically go on, when does George expect it end and what is the most likely scenario in which that happens. We talk about what reaching 1 million casualties actually mean for Russia, how sustainable is for Russia to keep this rate of losses, what are the main pressures on its war effort and what’s likely to break first - or why the narrative of the Russian infinite manpower pool is a myth. Or how sustainable all of this is for Ukraine and whether Ukraine can afford to fight this way for years to come. 

➡️ Join the community of geopolitics enthusiasts and gain access to exclusive content on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics➡️ Sign up to my free geopolitics newsletter: https://stationzero.substack.com/Thank you Conducttr for sponsoring the podcast. Take a look at Conducttr's services and its crisis exercise software at: https://www.conducttr.comThis is a second part of the conversation with Sarah Paine, a professor of History and Grand Strategy at the U.S. Naval War College. You can find the first part on Youtube and other podcasting platforms.