Decoding Geopolitics Podcast with Dominik Presl

Jaksot

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  NATO's Ex-Military Chief: War With Russia Is Coming - And We're Running Out of Time 12.09.2026 38min

  ➡️ Watch the full ad-free interview on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics➡️ Sign up to my free geopolitics newsletter: https://decodinggeopolitics.substack.com/➡️ Check out Adm. Bauer's book: https://www.amazon.nl/You-Want-Peace-Prepare-War/dp/9046833992This is a conversation with Admiral Rob Bauer, a former Chief of Defence of the Dutch Armed Forces and until last year, the Chair of the NATO Military Committee - the most senior military officer role in NATO and one of the leading roles in the organisation. In that role, he has seen the secret intelligence on the Russian build up in 2021 and their invasion of Ukraine in 2022. He has been in the rooms where world leaders discussed the invasion and he was responsible for the Alliance’s response.All that makes this a unique conversation but today, he warns about a different war - a war between Russia and NATO. A war that he believes is likely coming - and that as he believes - we should all immediately prepare for.
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  Ukraine War Expert: The War Just Entered a New Phase - And It's About to Get Really Dangerous 05.09.2026 38min

  ➡️ 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 George Barros, director at the Institute for Study of War and a long time Russia analyst with a deep insight into the war in Ukraine. He and his team believe that over the past 3 years, the war has essentially looked exactly the same with only minor changes - but that has now changed and after 3 years, we have now entered a new and very different phase of the war. And after 3 years of relative stability, things are now quickly becoming a lot more volatile, unpredictable and potentially a lot more dangerous. From the frontlines where both sides are increasingly pushing forward and using new tactics, the long-range campaigns are becoming increasingly destructive and intense to Russia, potentially preparing to attack a NATO member in the coming months and throw hundreds of thousands of new soldiers on the battlefield. And as the final limits that the war seemed to still have so far are increasingly coming off - it seems that things are about to get really out of control.
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  Dalibor Rohac: Something has changed about America. It Will Reshape the World - And There’s No Going Back 31.08.2026 32min

  ➡️ 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 Dalibor Rohac - former fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, now Director of Research at Globsec, and the author of a new book called Unshackled - in which he puts out a pretty serious warning about the future of America, of its geopolitical power and its foundations - and what it means for the world. He argues that more than a military, what makes America a superpower is something else - its alliances, institutions, its soft power, the system of carefully balanced international institutions and relations - and especially its vast economic strength. And that while America still has the military muscle, it’s increasingly losing all the other sources of it - not because of its adversaries but because it is destroying them itself. He thinks this is bigger than Trump - it started before him and it’s not going to go away with him and while it’s already having serious consequences - it’s still just the beginning. And American geopolitical power, its role and influence abroad and in the end, the world without America as we know it, is about to significantly change. 
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  The Professor Who Predicted the Iran War: This Is How America's Era Ends - And It’ll Only Get Worse | Robert Pape 22.08.2026 35min

  ➡️ Watch the full ad-free interview on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics➡️ Sign up to my free geopolitics newsletter: https://decodinggeopolitics.substack.com/➡️ Check out Professor Pape's newsletter:https://escalationtrap.substack.com/This is a conversation with Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago who spent the bulk of his career studying exactly the kind of wars that the United States is now waging against Iran, including why they usually fail and what they typically lead to - which makes him one of the most important people to listen to today.But this is about more than just that.He argues that this war isn't just a random blunder by a chaotic president, but instead, that it’s a result of deeper, systemic changes that were long playing underneath the surface without anyone noticing - from a military revolution that flipped the global balance of power to the end of the global dominance of the United States.He explains why the likely outcome is Iran emerging as the world's fourth great power, why China's lesson from this about Taiwan is exactly the opposite of what everyone thinks and why history will see the Iran war as the time when geopolitics fundamentally changed. 
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  Ex-CIA Analyst: America Is Choosing to Self-Destruct. And It Will Only Get Worse 15.08.2026 34min

  ➡️ 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 Julia Curlee, who spent 25 years in U.S. national security, including 20 years as a CIA analyst, serving at the National Security Council and briefing senior U.S. officials. She recently left government and is now speaking publicly about what she believes is happening inside the system she spent her career working in.The United States has spent decades building an extraordinary system for having the best possible intelligence and using that to make the best possible decisions which was always a big part of what made the U.S. as powerful as it is. But Julia thinks that this system is now breaking down and when that happens, even a superpower with enormous resources can become unable to recognize reality, anticipate the consequences of its own actions and can start to increasingly make self-destructive decisions. She argues that this is what explains the Iran war and why the US failed so badly to achieve its goals but also a lot of other foreign policy decisions - and that this is about to get a lot worse and the United States is about to make a lot more potentially catastrophic decisions. 
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  Ukraine's Top Drone Expert: This War Is Not What You Think - And The Reality Is Far Worse 08.08.2026 35min

  ➡️ 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.
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  Military Intel Officer: Russia Is Losing Crimea - And There's No Way Out 01.08.2026 33min

  ➡️ 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.
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  This Is What Happens if Russia Invades the Baltics - And America Refuses to Help 25.07.2026 32min

  ➡️ 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.
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  Thomas Eder: China Doesn't Need to Fight America. It’s Preparing for Its Collapse Instead 18.07.2026 34min

  ➡️ 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.
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  Most Replayed Moment: Yale Historian on Why 2026 Is Eerily Similar to 1914 15.07.2026 9min

  ➡️ 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/
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  Eric Heginbotham: How China Could Take Taiwan Without Firing a Shot - And Why It Could Catastrophically Backfire 11.07.2026 38min

  ➡️ 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.
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  Most Replayed Moment: Ben Hodges Explains How Ukraine Turned the Tide of War 08.07.2026 9min

  ➡️ 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/
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  The Reporter Embedded with Zelensky: This Is His Real Plan to End the War 04.07.2026 38min

  ➡️ 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. 
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  James Paterson: Why a New Islamic State Is Silently Rising in Africa - And Why Europe Will Pay the Price 01.07.2026 35min

  ➡️ 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 With James Paterson, a research associate at the Lowy's Institute, focusing on terrorism and jihadist organisations, about a new threat that is almost entirely ignored by the entire world but that is increasingly tearing through large parts of Africa - a growing jihadi insurgency, that is the fastest-growing terrorist threat in the world and that is threatening to literally overtake entire states in West Africa - and establish a new terror empire, overshadowing even the Islamic state.We get into how the leading organisation and al-Qaeda affiliate, has built a shadow state across Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger and grown strong enough to strike the capital and kill a sitting defence minister, why the region is now sliding toward outright state collapse, and how the West got pushed out only for Russia's mercenaries to move in and then fail - and why Europe is directly exposed to the fallout from all of this - from spreading instability to a new wave of migration.
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  Most Replayed Moment: Michael McFaul on Why the Iran War Is Such a Huge Blow to America’s Credibility 29.06.2026 10min

  ➡️ This is a clip from an interview with Michael McFaul. 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/
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  Mark Galeotti: Why Russia Is Finally Starting to Crack - And Kremlin Is Running Out of Options 27.06.2026 32min

  ➡️ 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 Mark Galeotti, director of Mayak intelligence and one of the greatest living experts on modern Russia - and we talk about why, after years of remarkable stability, a lot of things in Russia are now beginning to crack. We get into what’s behind the sharpest fall in Putin's approval since 2022, why is there an increasing public criticism of the war and debate over whether it’s time for it to end or why the Kremlin's attempt to seize control of the internet triggered the biggest popular backlash of the entire war - and what's left holding the system together now that the old social contract between Putin and the Russian people is gone.
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  Most Replayed Moment: John Bolton on The Real Reason Why the Iran War Became a Such a Disaster 24.06.2026 5min

  ➡️ This is a clip from an interview with John Bolton. 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/
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  Nigel Gould-Davies: Russia’s War Is Becoming Unsustainable. Now The Real Crisis Is About to Begin 20.06.2026 32min

  ➡️ 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➡️ Full Nigel's report: https://www.iiss.org/research-paper/2026/05/the-coming-crisis-in-russias-political-economy/➡️ Sign up to my free geopolitics newsletter: https://stationzero.substack.com/This is a conversation with Nigel Gould Davis - a Senior Fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the IISS. Nigel recently published a really interesting report about why Russia's war, on its present course, has reached a breaking point - when it is no longer economically and demographically sustainable. What Nigel argues is that this will almost inevitably result in a major crisis, both political and financial, that is about to hit Russia within about a year from now - and why in order to keep fighting, the Kremlin will be forced to strip away the last freedoms Russians have and drag the country back toward a Soviet-style governance and economy, with all the social upheaval that it would bring. It’s a fascinating analysis that follows a clear logic and a chain of events - and it’s definitely worth listening to.
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  Ravi Agrawal: The Iran War Is Trump's Biggest Failure Yet. The World Is Watching America Lose 13.06.2026 34min

  ➡️ 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➡️ Check out Ravi's FP Live: https://open.spotify.com/show/4pbzJRK0uPozoTxxSZhpQS➡️ Sign up to my free geopolitics newsletter: https://stationzero.substack.com/It’s now been a year and a half since Trump returned to the White House and in that short time, he managed to turn decades of U.S. foreign policy on its head - although differently than what people maybe expected.  And so in this conversation with with Ravi Agraval - the editor in chief of the Foreign Policy, the host of the FP Live podcast and someone who has as they say the finger on the pulse of the U.S. foreign policy - I wanted to take a look at how is he doing at this point, what will be the consequences of his policies - and what might come next.We speak a lot about Iran and about why it is Trump’s biggest failure yet and why it might be the most important mistake of his presidency, what options Trump has at this point to get out of this and why even the best ones are still really really bad or about how this war will fundamentally change the U.S. relations with Israel. But also about the big picture - about the ways in which the impact of his decisions will be around much longer than him - or about why at the same time the changes in the U.S. foreign policy are much bigger than just him alone - and why the whole world should realize that very fast. And much more. 
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  Sam Greene: Why Russia’s Elite Is Growing Anxious - And Why Something Is About To Break 08.06.2026 29min

  ➡️ 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/It seems that something is changing in Russia and quite a lot. With Ukrainian strikes on Russian cities, the economy under a growing strain and the war increasingly being felt by regular Russians, it’s harder to pretend like everything is normal. And at the same time, the approval ratings of the Russian president has reached lowest numbers in years, we have previously unseen signs of public discontent and reports of a growing anxiety among Russia’s elites. But what will all of this lead to? Are we entering a new era of Russian politics and what will that mean for the stability of the country, its future trajectory and what the country will look like in this new era? To answer all that I am speaking with one of the greatest Western experts on Russia’s politics and society, professor at King’s College London - Sam Green.