This is a special episode where I answer questions from my supporters on Patreon. It's a bit of a free-flowing rant rather than something that would be carefully scripted and thought-out, so keep that in mind. If you want to join our Patreon community, you can do that here: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics
➡️ PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics Sign up to my upcoming geopolitics newsletter: https://station-zero.beehiiv.com/subscribe Might of the Chain: https://a.co/d/633rSOr This is a conversation with Admiral Mike Studeman. Mike spent decades as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy, eventually becoming a Director of Intelligence at the Indo-Pacific Command and until very recently, he served as a Commander of the Office of Naval Intelligence, the oldest U.S. intelligence agency. He speaks Mandarin and throughout his career he has focused on studying and analyzing China and its military. In this conversation, we talk about why the risk of a war with China is much higher than most people think and why Mike thinks that we are on a trajectory towards it. How is the Navy prepared for it, how is it adapting to the changing character of war or why the U.S. is losing to China in information warfare.
➡️ PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics Sign up to my upcoming geopolitics newsletter: https://station-zero.beehiiv.com/subscribe This is an interview with General David Petraeus. General Petraeus spent 37 years in the U.S. Army. Over the course of his career, he led the U.S. Central Command, the U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and after his service in the military, he served as the Director of the CIA. Overall, he's considered one of the most prominent and effective military leaders of this century. In this conversation, we talk about his experience from Iraq and Afghanistan, but mostly about the war in Ukraine - what lessons should we be taking from it, whether we have a strategy to win and what's going to happen next.
➡️ PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics Get access to more episodes of the intelligence brief, support the podcast, get ad-free full interviews ahead of time and ask questions to my guest by becoming a supporter.
➡️ PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics This is a conversation with Dmitri Alpetrovitch. Dmitri is a chairman of a think-tank called Silverado Policy Accelerator and an author of a new book World on the Brink: How America Can Beat China in the Race for the Twenty-First Century about how to win a cold war with China and prevent it from turning it into a hot one. We talked about who's winning the Cold War of the 21st century, why Taiwan is the new West Berlin and whether Xi Jinping will decide to invade or not and much more.
➡️ PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics This is a conversation with Kirill Shamiev. Kirill is a Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations where he primarily focuses on the Russian military - and that's exactly what we talked about. We discussed what is the state of the Russian military today, two and a half years into the war, whether it is able to learn and improve, what was the meaning behind the purges at the Russian ministry of defense, how much corruption affects Russian combat capability or how fast will it be able to rebuild its military to potentially face NATO.
➡️ PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics This is a conversation with Yusuf Unjhawala - a defence analyst from a leading Indian think-tank the Takshashila Institution.In this interview, I wanted to better understand India's foreign policy and security challenges and how India actually sees the world from its own perspective. And so we talked about why India doesn't have allies, why it wants to be friends with both Russia and the West or why a war between India and China might be more likely than a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. I hope you like it and now, enjoy the conversation.
➡️ PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics Jean H. Lee is a journalist and foreign policy analyst renowned for her expertise in covering North Korea and Northeast Asian affairs. She is co-host of the award-winning Lazarus Heist podcast for the BBC World Service and a former Pyongyang bureau chief for the Associated Press news agency. Jean began reporting on the ground in North Korea in 2008. In 2011, she became the first American journalist to join the Pyongyang foreign press corps in North Korea. In 2012, she opened AP’s Pyongyang bureau, the first and only US news bureau in North Korea. Her work in North Korea from 2008 to 2017 included nearly three years working alongside North Korean staff and colleagues in Pyongyang on assignments that took her across the closed nation to visit farms, factories, schools, military academies, and homes in the course of her exclusive coverage.
➡️ PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics Dr. Jack Watling is Senior Research Fellow for Land Warfare at the Royal United Services Institute. Jack works closely with the British military on the development of concepts of operation, assessments of the future operating environment, and conducts operational analysis of contemporary conflicts. In this conversation, we talked about two wars that Russia is currently waging: an overt one against Ukraine and a covert war against the West. Thank you to everyone who supports this podcast on Patreon - and if you want to support what I'm doing, do consider becoming a supporter on Patreon as well.
➡️ PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics This is a conversation with Jake Broe, a former Nuclear and Missile Operations Officer and one of the biggest Youtubers providing daily updates on the war in Ukraine. We talked about why Jake thinks Donald Trump will leave NATO, why the war will end with a political and economic collapse of Russia and much, much more.
➡️ PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics This is a conversation with Mykola Bilieskov, a Ukrainian analyst and a research fellow at the National Institute for Strategic Studies of Ukraine institute under the Ukrainian presidential administration. We talked about why Ukrainians are hesitant to join the military, why Western model of support for Ukraine is not working anymore, why he is more worried about the next year than this one and why NATO might have to join the conflict one way or another.
➡️ PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics This is a conversation with Minna Alander - a research fellow at the Finnish Institute for International Affairs who's focusing, among other topics on Finnish security and defence policy, Nordic defence cooperation and Arctic security. Finland is quite an exception among European countries - because while today many are panicking and trying to make up for years of underfunding, Fins seems to be quite calm - as they have been ready to fight Russia on their own for decades - as they have done in the past in multiple iconic conflicts. In this conversation we talk about why is Finland prepared for war better than almost anyone else, what is the Finnish perspective of the Russian threat, how did Finland joining NATO completely changed the calculus for both NATO and Russia and what would a Russian invasion fo Finland look like. Thank you to everyone who is supporting this podcast on Patreon - it's incredibly helpful. And now, enjoy the conversation.
This is a conversation with Thomas Van Linge - a freelance journalist and a researcher covering the world's forgotten conflicts, including the civil war in Myanmar. Recently, he came back from a research trip to the rebel-held areas in Myanmar where he stayed with the rebels, visited the frontlines and saw up close what the war looks like. In this conversation, we talk about why is the military starting to lose and how close it is from a final defeat, why is Russia supplying the military dictator, what is China's role in the conflict and what will happen to Myanmar once the dictatorship falls.
➡️ PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics This is a conversation with Ben Hodges, a retired three star general of the US army, the former Commander of US Army Europe and someone who spent more than three decades as a military officer and achieved one of the highest posts in the US Armed Forces. In this interview, we discussed what the latest military package means for Ukraine, why the West seems to prioritize avoiding escalation more than defeating Russia, whether we should send troops to Ukraine, how could Ukraine retake Crimea or whether we should worry about the fall of Putin's regime. Thank you to everyone who supports this podcast on Patreon - and now, enjoy the conversation.
➡️ PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics This is a conversation with Lukas Milevski, a professor at Leiden University and an expert on strategy and defense and security of the Baltic countries. In this interview, we talk about what would happen if Russia invades the Baltics, how prepared they are, if they could be successful and how big of a risk it actually is. Thank you to everyone supporting this podcast - and now, enjoy the conversation.
➡️ PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics This is a conversation with Brian Hart - a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and an expert on China's military and its foreign and security policy. We talked about what is the real capability of China's military, whether it's a paper tiger or if it's prepared and ready to take Taiwan by force, if 2027 is the year when we should expect the war to happen or how ready is Taiwan to fight back.
This is a conversation with David Gioe. David has two decades of experience as an intelligence officer, starting his career in the FBI and then joining the CIA, first as an analyst and later as an field-qualified operations officer. He deployed a number of times overseas and worked on counter-intelligence, clandestine operations and covert action. After retiring from the CIA, David has moved to academia and today he works as a professor of History at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and he is a visiting professor of Intelligence and and International Security in the Department of War Studies at King's College London. We talked about how the world of intelligence really works, how it has changed since the cold war or how agents working in the field do their job at a time when anonymity is increasingly disappearing. And how the CIA manages to stay ahead of the Russians, why Chinese spies work differently than anyone else and much much more. Thank you to everyone who supports this podcast on Patreon. If you want to follow David you can go to his Twitter or website and now, enjoy this conversation.
➡️ PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics This is a conversation with Mark Galeotti - an honorary professor at UCL, a senior associate fellow at Royal United Services Institute, director of Mayak Intelligence and one of the most renowned experts on Russia and Russian politics. We talked about the attacks in Moscow - whether he thought it could have been a false flag, or whether the Russian propaganda will succeed in shifting blame to Ukraine. And about the broader picture - when might the war in Ukraine end and how, whether Russia is weaker than it looks and much more. Thank you to everyone who supports this podcast on Patreon, and now enjoy the conversation.
➡️ PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics Support this podcast on Patreon, help me make more episodes and get bonus content, early access and ask questions to the upcoming guests. Dr Ulrike Franke is a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations who's focusing on German Security, Foreign and Defense policy and has a deep insight into the inner workings of German political and security institutions. We talked about how Germany has changed since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, why it struggles so much to rebuild its military, why it still refuses to provide Taurus missiles to Ukraine, whether the German public has abandoned its pacifism or whether Germany should get a nuclear bomb. Thank you to everyone who's supporting this podcast on Patreon and now enjoy the conversation. Follow Dr. Franke on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RikeFranke
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics This is a conversation with Alex Vatanka - a Tehran-born expert on Iranian domestic and foreign policy and a director of the Iran program at the Middle East Institute. In this conversation we talk about Iran's geopolitical strategy - what is it trying to achieve, what are its motivations and goals but also about whether it would benefit from a large regional war, to what extent it controls Hamas, how stable is the Iranian regime and much much more. Thank you so much to everyone for supporting this podcast. And now enjoy the conversation.