Decoding Geopolitics Podcast with Dominik Presl

Decoding Geopolitics
  • 4.6 (19)
  • 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. Reinier von Lanschot: Europe Has Reached a Breaking Point. The Race to Build a European Army Has Begun.

    2d ago

    Reinier von Lanschot: Europe Has Reached a Breaking Point. The Race to Build a European Army Has Begun.

    ➡️ 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 Reinier Von Lanschot - a Dutch member of the European Parliament - who is a leading figure of a new recent and potentially groundbreaking initiative. He has helped to form a group of European parliament members who are all calling and lobbying for one thing - creation a European Defence Union - basically, the European version of NATO, without the United States. Built so that Europe can fight and defend itself on its own - in the case that the U.S. would not come to its aid when necessary.  This is something that many experts have theorized and called for before, but this is the first time someone in Europe is really trying to turn it into reality - which is why it’s both a fascinating and exciting but also extremely complicated and difficult endeavor - but if they succeed, it would have immense consequences, for Europe and for the world. And so we talk about what a European Defence Union is and how they want to turn it into reality, whether they can succeed or who is doing its best to stop them and much more.

    28 min
  2. Henrietta Levin: Something Huge Just Shifted Between The U.S. And China - And It's Very Bad News For The West

    May 23

    Henrietta Levin: Something Huge Just Shifted Between The U.S. And China - And It's Very Bad News For 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/ ➡️ Buy your own Geopolitics of the Western Pacific Map Print: https://decoding-geopolitics-shop.fourthwall.com/ This is a conversation with Henriette Levin, a senior fellow in China Studies at CSIS. She argues that something very very important has changed in the relations between China and the US - or actually several things - over the past 2 years since Trump returned to the White House. And that those shifts will have - and are already having - enormous geopolitical consequences - even almost no one has realized this change just yet. And that this change will mean pretty bad news for the United States and very good news for China. We talk about what those changes are, which ones we have already seen at the latest China-US summit, why people in Taiwan might have a good reason to start getting pretty nervous and how all that might increase the risk of a potential conflict. And much more.

    33 min
  3. Yale History Professor: We Are Sleepwalking Into The Next World War - And We’re Running Out Of Time To Stop It

    May 16

    Yale History Professor: We Are Sleepwalking Into The Next World War - And We’re Running Out Of Time To Stop 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/ ➡️ Buy your own Geopolitics of the Western Pacific Map Print: https://decoding-geopolitics-shop.fourthwall.com/ ➡️ Get Arne's book: The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict and Warnings from History This is a conversation with Odd Arne Westad, a professor of modern history at Yale University. He recently wrote a book called the Coming Storm which is essentially a very direct and urgent warning - that we are almost to the letter following the exact same geopolitical patterns and trajectories that a more than a hundred years ago led to the the first world war - the greatest and most destructive conflict that the world has ever seen at the time. And that just like then, we are are sleepwalking into another world war, only this time, even more destructive. We talk about how the exact same conditions that fueled the conflict back then are increasingly emerging today - from the global hegemon dismantling the world order it itself once built, a rising power that doesn't want to be contained, its reckless, declining junior partner risking to drag it into a bigger conflict, old alliances falling apart and new ones forming and a global situation filled with an increasing amount of volatility and unpredictability that only needs a spark to start a fire. And about whether and how it can be prevented or whether it’s already too late to do that - and much more.

    31 min
  4. Ben Hodges: Russia's War Is Collapsing. They’re Running Out of Men and Bleeding Everywhere

    May 9

    Ben Hodges: Russia's War Is Collapsing. They’re Running Out of Men and Bleeding Everywhere

    ➡️ 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/ ➡️ Buy your own Geopolitics of the Western Pacific Map Print: https://decoding-geopolitics-shop.fourthwall.com/ This is a conversation with general Ben Hodges, the former commander of US Army Europe and one of the most well informed observers of the war in Ukraine. Ben has always been extremely optimistic when it comes to Ukraine’s chances in the war with Russia - often going against what everyone was saying at the moment - but today, it seems that he was right all along - as Russia is getting into more and more trouble in its war in Ukraine.  And so we talk about what has changed in recent months that allowed Ukraine to seize the momentum and stop Russia’s territorial push or what’s the reason why is Ukraine’s campaign of long-range strikes against Russian strategic targets having such a massive impact. About how Ukraine dealt with its manpower problem, what would allow it to go back on the offensive and why is that so difficult or about what will happen in the war this year - and much more.

    25 min
  5. CIA Russia Expert on What the West Gets Wrong About Putin's Russia | Sean Wiswesser

    May 3

    CIA Russia Expert on What the West Gets Wrong About Putin's Russia | Sean Wiswesser

    ➡️ 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/ ➡️ Buy your own Geopolitics of the Western Pacific Map Print: https://decoding-geopolitics-shop.fourthwall.com/ ➡️ Get Sean's book: Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks: Russian Intelligence and Putin's Secret War This is a conversation with Sean Wiswesser, a veteran CIA operations officer who spent almost three decades working for the agency deployed in various places around the world. And a majority of his career was working on and in - Russia - and in particular on Russian intelligence services - basically he was a spy, recruiting other spies. He recently wrote a book detailing what he has learned about how Russian intelligence actually works, including everything from the Russian illegals and assassinations program, their preparations for invasion of Ukraine, their many failures and what almost everyone fails to understand about them - or what does someone with decades of experience of working on Russia think about the stability of the regime and where the country is going.

    35 min
  6. Kate Bondar: Russia Is Quietly Building a New Army - And NATO Is Completely Unprepared

    Apr 26

    Kate Bondar: Russia Is Quietly Building a New Army - And NATO Is Completely Unprepared

    ➡️ 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/ ➡️ Buy your own Geopolitics of the Western Pacific Map Print: https://decoding-geopolitics-shop.fourthwall.com/ Over the past year, something has been happening inside the Russian military that received very little attention but that will have - and is already having - pretty significant consequences. While the world has been focused on casualty numbers and frontline movements, Russia has been building an entirely new kind of army - one based on drones, autonomous weapons, and AI. It has been pouring enormous resources into it - and it's not a project for some distant future - it's already being widely used by Russia in Ukraine right now and it’s already changing how the Russian military fights a war. And even more importantly, it’s putting Russia way ahead of most NATO members in ways that should be setting off alarm bells in European capitals - but largely isn't.  My guest today is Kateryna Bondar, a fellow at the CSIS Wadwhani AI Center who just wrote a major new report on exactly this - detailing how Russia is building this new military ecosystem, how far it's gotten, what will be the consequences of and how The West is mostly failing to notice and react to it.

    36 min
  7. Jack Watling: The Next Great War Is Already Taking Shape. What Happens Next Decides Everything

    Apr 20

    Jack Watling: The Next Great War Is Already Taking Shape. What Happens Next Decides Everything

    ➡️ 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://stationzero.substack.com/ This is a conversation with Jack Watling, a Senior Research Fellow at RUSI and one of the most brilliant defence analysts in Europe. He is the author of Statecraft — a book about how the rules of global powers have radically changed over the last decade and what the West needs to do to survive what’s coming next. We get into why a beaten-down and much weaker Iran may end up coming out of its current war with the much more powerful United States in a stronger position than before, and what that says about American power. We talk about Taiwan, and why Jack's assessment of what's coming there is much darker than what you usually hear. We talk into Russia and Ukraine — why the West has consistently misunderstood about Moscow’s behavior and what are the costs of that, and why 2026 is the inflection point of the war and where will we go next - and much more.

    34 min
  8. Michael McFaul: America Is Burning Down Everything It Built. Its Enemies Can't Believe Their Luck

    Apr 11

    Michael McFaul: America Is Burning Down Everything It Built. Its Enemies Can't Believe Their Luck

    ➡️ 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://stationzero.substack.com/ This is a conversation with Michael McFaul, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia and a special advisor on Russia to president Obama, professor of international relations at Stanford University and one of the most respected American experts on foreign policy and geopolitics. He is someone that I would call a typical transatlanticist - someone who spent his whole career working on build a strong alliance with Europe, promoting democracy abroad and deterring autocratic adversarial regimes - and so it’s really interesting to talk at a time when both US foreign policy and the world looks very very different. And so we talk about his thoughts on the war with Iran, whether it will end up as a strategic defeat for the United States and how it will change America’s standing and influence around the world. About the current crisis in the relations between Europe and the U.S., Trump’s desire to leave NATO, whether it's going to happen and whether it wouldn't be for the best in the end. And about the fight between autocracies and democracies that he writes about in his new book and how this fight changes if the world’s leading democracy doesn't seem that sure on which side it actually is and what it means for the rest of us - and much more.

    36 min
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4.6
out of 5
19 Ratings

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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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