Decoding Geopolitics Podcast with Dominik Presl

Decoding Geopolitics
  • 4.5 (20)
  • 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. 6d ago

    Ukraine's Top Drone Expert: This War Is Not What You Think - And The Reality Is Far Worse

    ➡️ Watch the full ad-free interview on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics ➡️ Sign up to my free geopolitics newsletter: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1804519707 ➡️ Sign up to my free geopolitics newsletter: https://decodinggeopolitics.substack.com/ This is a conversation with Illya Sekirin and in my view, one of the most unique conversations I’ve had on the podcast so far. Illya is Ukrainian-Canadian who in 2022 joined the Ukrainian military and served in the war, first in infantry and later as a drone pilot, operating drones in combat in countless operations and campaigns throughout the war. Through those experiences he came up with a lot of ideas on how to use drones in the most effective and innovative way possible many of which were adopted and this later brought him to the Ukrainian General Staff, where he ended up advising the Ukrainian top leadership on drone warfare. And most recently he wrote about those ideas in a book called Rise of the Machines. Illya has a unique and quite rare combination of several things: extensive experience on the ground in frontline combat, the perspective from the highest levels of command, knowledge of military strategy and highly analytical mind which results in a fascinating conversation - on what is it like to be a drone operator in the war today, how is the drone warfare actually organized on a tactical level, what are the actual tactics and strategies that are being used and how are they changing, what is that decides who ends up winning in drone warfare or what do Western and military experts fundamentally misunderstand about the war - and much more.

    Ukraine's Top Drone Expert: This War Is Not What You Think - And The Reality Is Far Worse

  2. Aug 1

    Military Intel Officer: Russia Is Losing Crimea - And There's No Way Out

    ➡️ Watch the full ad-free interview on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics ➡️ Sign up to my free geopolitics newsletter: https://decodinggeopolitics.substack.com/ This is a conversation with Philip Ingram, a former high ranking officer in the British military intelligence. In his career, Philip has planned and executed countless operations around the globe and that’s why he’s the perfect person to talk about the recent changes in the war in Ukraine. We talk about Ukraine’s campaign of long-range strikes on targets in the Russian rear, from refineries to warehouses, about the campaign to cut off Crimea and about what are these operations really about - whether their desired effect is psychological or it’s about something else, how do strikes on a warehouse effect what’s happening on a frontline 1000 miles away and what’s the bigger Ukrainian plan and thinking about all this. And we talk about Russia’s growing problems - from the impact to the public morale or whether it will be forced to declare a mobilization in the fall - and much more.

    Military Intel Officer: Russia Is Losing Crimea - And There's No Way Out

  3. Jul 25

    This Is What Happens if Russia Invades the Baltics - And America Refuses to Help

    ➡️ Watch the full interview ad-free, join a community of geopolitics enthusiasts and gain access to exclusive content on PATREON: https://dub.sh/Patreon-Ruben-Stewart ➡️ Sign up to my free geopolitics newsletter: https://decodinggeopolitics.substack.com/ This is a conversation with Ruben Stewart, Senior Fellow for Land Warfare at the IISS, about a a single question: what would happen if Europe had to fight Russia tonight, as it is, entirely without the United States. It’s a question that is both an increasingly likely possibility given the continuous withdrawal of the United States from Europe - but that also almost no one has really seriously modelled so far.  And so we get into how deep Europe's hidden dependence on America actually runs, how much it would constrain Europe if it had to fight alone and what would that actually look like - from the satellites and intelligence that would leave it half-blind, to the fact that NATO’s leadership is by definition mostly made up of American officers. Into why Europe would be forced into a completely different way of fighting than what most European commanders and officials envision or whether it could overcome its own political disunity fast enough to actually put up a fight.

    This Is What Happens if Russia Invades the Baltics - And America Refuses to Help

  4. Jul 18

    Thomas Eder: China Doesn't Need to Fight America. It’s Preparing for Its Collapse Instead

    ➡️ 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 ➡️ Buy your own Geopolitics of the Western Pacific Map Print: https://decoding-geopolitics-shop.fourthwall.com/ ➡️ Sign up to my free geopolitics newsletter: https://decodinggeopolitics.substack.com/ This is a conversation with Thomas Eder, Research Fellow at the Austrian Institute for International Affairs, about how China actually sees the world - and why Beijing is increasingly confident that America is a superpower in decline. We get into this worldview - that the East is rising as the West unravels, and that China is on the way to take the top spot the way the US once took it from the British Empire - and why this belief is now driving Chinese strategy. But we also dig into why China's own deep economic and demographic problems complicate that confidence - and why the conclusion Beijing seems to be drawing isn't to fight America, but to outwait it, using patience, pressure and incentives to win the contest, and even Taiwan, without a war.

    Thomas Eder: China Doesn't Need to Fight America. It’s Preparing for Its Collapse Instead

  5. Jul 15

    Most Replayed Moment: Yale Historian on Why 2026 Is Eerily Similar to 1914

    ➡️ This is a clip from an interview with Odd Arne Westadt. You can access the entire interview ad-free on my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics ➡️ Sign up to my geopolitics newsletter: https://decodinggeopolitics.substack.com/

  6. Jul 11

    Eric Heginbotham: How China Could Take Taiwan Without Firing a Shot - And Why It Could Catastrophically Backfire

    ➡️ 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 ➡️ Buy your own Geopolitics of the Western Pacific Map Print: https://decoding-geopolitics-shop.fourthwall.com/ ➡️ Sign up to my free geopolitics newsletter: https://decodinggeopolitics.substack.com/This is a conversation with Eric Heginbotham, a principal research scientist at MIT's Security Studies Program, about a scenario that’s often sold as China’s safer, lower-risk alternative to an invasion of Taiwan - and one that’s also increasingly likely to happen. Eric and his colleagues ran a major war-gaming study on exactly this - what would a blockade actually look like and whether it would be successful.We get into why the war games suggest that an easy win is a dangerous illusion: how a blockade would be more likely to spiral into a full US-China war rather than remain controlled, why China may not actually be able to coerce Taiwan to a surrender, and what everyone misunderstands about what would it actually look like.

    Eric Heginbotham: How China Could Take Taiwan Without Firing a Shot - And Why It Could Catastrophically Backfire

  7. Jul 8

    Most Replayed Moment: Ben Hodges Explains How Ukraine Turned the Tide of War

    ➡️ This is a clip from an interview with Ben Hodges. You can access the entire interview ad-free on my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics ➡️ Sign up to my geopolitics newsletter: https://decodinggeopolitics.substack.com/

  8. Jul 4

    The Reporter Embedded with Zelensky: This Is His Real Plan to End the 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://decodinggeopolitics.substack.com/ This is a conversation of Simon Shuster, a journalist and an author of The Showman, a biography of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky. Over the past years, Simon has a unique opportunity - he spent years in close vicinity of Zelensky, including weeks when he was embedded with him inside the presidential compound. And so he got to know him better than almost anyone else except for maybe a few people in Zelensky’s family and inner circle - giving him unique insight into the mindset, ideas and personality of Ukraine’s leader. In this conversation we get into who Zelensky really is behind the wartime image, what four and a half years of war have done to him, his dramatic relationship with Donald Trump, and most importantly how is he actually thinking about ending the war: whether he's holding out for total victory or quietly looking for a way out and what’s his plan and strategy to achieve that - not what he says publicly but what he really believes in the privacy of his own mind.

    The Reporter Embedded with Zelensky: This Is His Real Plan to End the War
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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.

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