Decoding Geopolitics Podcast with Dominik Presl

➡️ If you enjoy this podcast and you want to help to make its existence possible, join our community of geopolitics enthusiasts on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics ➡️ Sign up to my 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.com This is a conversation with Hal Brands, a professor at Johns Hopkins University and one of the most influential and respected thinkers on U.S. foreign policy and global power dynamics of today. In this conversation, we talk about the return of geopolitics. About why are ideas about geopolitics that dominated the world a hundred years ago and that were at the beginning of all the great wars of the 20th century now making a comeback. And threaten to start other great wars in our time and define the 21st century as well. And whether and how, can it be prevented. 

➡️ If you enjoy this podcast and you want to help to make its existence possible, join our community of geopolitics enthusiasts on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics Sign up to my 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.com

➡️ If you enjoy this podcast and you want to help to make its existence possible, join our community of geopolitics enthusiasts on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics Sign up to my 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.com This is a conversation with Jeremy Schapiro, a Research Director at the European Council on Foreign Relations and a former advisor and policy planner at the U.S. State Department. And this conversation is about a single but extremely important question - what will the foreign policy of Donald Trump in the next four years look like. And how is it going to change the world as we know it.  We talked about how Donald Trump’s foreign policies actually created and who are the different ideological groups that shape them which is something that Jeremy wrote on quite a lot. And about what his policies will look like - on Russia and Ukraine, Europe and NATO, Iran and Israel and China and Taiwan.  My goal going into this was to be as unbiased and pragmatic as possible - to try to analyze what Donald Trump’s foreign policy on different issues might look like rather than to judge him as a person because there’s not enough of the first and more than of the latter. Whether it was successful or not, is up to you.

➡️ If you enjoy this podcast and you want to help to make its existence possible, join our community of geopolitics enthusiasts on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics Sign up to my 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.com This is a conversation with General Ben Hodges. Ben is a former high-ranking U.S. general who ended his career as a Commander of the United States Army in Europe and today is one of the most respected commentators on the Ukraine war, defence and European security and a major advocate for the Ukrainian cause. In this conversation we talk about what really mattered in the past year, from the Kursk offensive to North Korea joining the battlefield. About how the war developed and what is the balance of forces today, what can we expect of the year to come and what does Ben expect from the Trump administration when it comes to Russia and Ukraine. And we talk about a lot of difficult, uncomfortable but extremely important questions - from negotiations, to issues with Ukrainian mobilization or the changing Ukrainian public opinion.

➡️ If you enjoy this podcast and you want to help to make its existence possible, join our community of geopolitics enthusiasts on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics Sign up to my 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.com This is a conversation with Lennart Meschmayer. Lennart is a researcher at the Center for Security Studies (CSS) at ETH Zurich who’s focusing on cyber warfare - how states use cyber power against each other both in times of war and peace and what role does cyber play in conflicts today. And that’s exactly what this conversation is all about. We talk about what role does cyber play in the war in Ukraine, why we haven't seen a cyber apocalypse that many have predicted before the war started, why cyber warfare works really differently than most people think, why is Israel a hacking superpower or what would a cyber war between Russia and NATO look like. 

➡️ If you enjoy this podcast and you want to help to make its existence possible, join our community of geopolitics enthusiasts on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics Sign up to my 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.com This is a conversation with Professor Justin Bronk. Justin is a Senior Research Fellow for Airpower and Technology at the Royal United Services Institute, a professor at the Royal Norwegian Air Force Academy, an active private pilot and one of the most respected experts on air power and technology in the world. In this interview we talk about a lot of things. We discussed the F-35s and its criticism, how it compares to its Russian and Chinese counterparts or whether it will be replaced by drone swarms and unmanned technology. How did Ukraine change what role air power plays in conflicts, what kind of impact are F-16s having on the war or whether Ukrainian force will start operating Western-made planes. And we talk about how the near future will air power as we know it - from drone swarms, unmanned fighter jets and collaborative aircraft. It’s a great conversation and I really hope you’ll enjoy it. 

➡️ If you enjoy this podcast and you want to help to make its existence possible, join our community of geopolitics enthusiasts on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics Sign up to my 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.com This is a conversation with Aron Lund. Aron is an analyst at the Swedish Defence Research Agency and one of the world’s leading foreign experts on Syria, its security and politics. And in this conversation, we unpack everything that happened in the past week and what is going to happen now.  We talk about why no one saw the offensive coming and why did Assad’s regime fall so quickly, about who are actually the rebels who took it down, how radical are they and what can we expect of them. We discuss what this means for Turkey, Israel, Russia and Iran and the Middle East at large and what post-Assad Syria will look like - and why things might get a lot worse. 

➡️ If you enjoy this podcast and you want to help to make its existence possible, join our community of geopolitics enthusiasts on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics Sign up to my 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.com This is a conversation with Eliot Cohen. Eliot is a military historian, a dean of the school of advanced international studies at John Hopkins University, a former official at the U.S. department of state and one of the most influential thinkers shaping U.S. foreign policy in recent decades.  But in this interview we talk about one specific topic: why did most analysts and experts completely failed to predict how the war in Ukraine would turn out following the Russian invasion. He recently published an extremely interesting paper dedicated to this issue, co-authored with professor Phillips O’Brien and so we dove deep into it: we talked about why most experts wildly overestimated Russian military capability and underestimated Ukraine’s readiness and resilience, why do we tend to either over and under-estimate Russia, whether the invasion could have actually turned out differently or what do most analysts still keep getting wrong. 

➡️ If you enjoy this podcast and you want to help to make its existence possible, join our community of geopolitics enthusiasts on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics Sign up to my 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.com This is a conversation with Michael Sobolik, a Senior Fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council and an author of the book Countering China’s Great Game. And in this interview, we talk about China’s grand strategy - and what it actually looks like. We discuss what are China’s geopolitical ambitions and why their origins go back way further than most people think, how does China uses the Belt and Road to increase their influence and why it often shoots itself in the foot doing so or why China is in danger of an imperial overstretch and how does Taiwan fit into its global vision. 

➡️ If you enjoy this podcast and you want to help to make its existence possible, join our community of geopolitics enthusiasts on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics Sign up to my 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.com This is a conversation with Kenneth Pollack about one single question - why do militaries of Arab nations, despite often having superiority in numbers and better equipment than their opponents, tend to hugely underperform in modern military conflicts? And often end up losing wars which in theory they should win? It’s a question that has been asked by many but no one  knows more about it than my guest.  He spent 30 years as an analyst in the CIA studying the Middle East and the militaries of both U.S. partners and adversaries. After leaving the CIA he became an academic and dedicated his academic career to answering this question. And so this is what we talk about - what is the real reason that Arab militaries tend to be notoriously ineffective, how does culture, economy or politics influence how they fight or why do organizations like Hezbollah seem to defy this rule and are a lot more effective than many larger and better equipped traditional Arab armies.