Decoding Geopolitics Podcast with Dominik Presl

Decoding Geopolitics
  • 4.5 (17)
  • POLITICS
  • UPDATED WEEKLY

Decoding Geopolitics is a podcast that tries to make sense of today's dangerous world by talking with real experts on international relations, strategy and security.

  1. #84 Estonia’s Ex-Air Force Chief Jaak Tarien: This Is How You Really Deal With Russian Violations

    1D AGO

    #84 Estonia’s Ex-Air Force Chief Jaak Tarien: This Is How You Really Deal With Russian Violations

    ➡️ 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.

    35 min
  2. #83 Francis Farrell: The New Ukrainian Fighting Strategy That Could Decide War

    6D AGO

    #83 Francis Farrell: The New Ukrainian Fighting Strategy That Could Decide War

    ➡️ 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.

    36 min
  3. #82 Patrick McGee: How China Is Using American Companies to Trap the West

    SEP 13

    #82 Patrick McGee: How China Is Using American Companies to Trap the West

    ➡️ 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.

    39 min
  4. #81 Nick Hare: World's Top Forecaster Predicts How Will the Ukraine War End and If China Will Invade Taiwan

    SEP 6

    #81 Nick Hare: World's Top Forecaster Predicts How Will the Ukraine War End and If China Will Invade Taiwan

    ➡️ 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.

    48 min
  5. #80 Sergey Radchenko: What Really Drives Russia’s Foreign Policy – From the USSR to Putin

    SEP 1

    #80 Sergey Radchenko: What Really Drives Russia’s Foreign Policy – From the USSR to Putin

    ➡️ 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.

    36 min
  6. #79 Robert D. Kaplan: The Fall of the American Empire and The Coming Era of Chaos

    AUG 23

    #79 Robert D. Kaplan: The Fall of the American Empire and The Coming Era of Chaos

    ➡️ 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.

    24 min
  7. #78 Greg Smith: Rise and Fall of Nations - How Superintelligence Will Reshape Geopolitics

    AUG 17

    #78 Greg Smith: Rise and Fall of Nations - How Superintelligence Will Reshape 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 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.

    39 min
  8. #77 Anne Applebaum: What Putin Really Wants & How Ukraine War Will End

    AUG 8

    #77 Anne Applebaum: What Putin Really Wants & How Ukraine War Will End

    ➡️ 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.

    35 min
See All (95)

4.5
out of 5
17 Ratings

About

Decoding Geopolitics is a podcast that tries to make sense of today's dangerous world by talking with real experts on international relations, strategy and security.

Information

You Might Also Like