Decoding Geopolitics Podcast with Dominik Presl

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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.

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For over 4 years, Russia has been fighting its full scale war in Ukraine and despite all its efforts it’s not particularly successful at it. But for much longer than that, Russia has been fighting a second war in parallel, one that gets far less attention but which is arguably far, far more successful. It's the war for hearts and minds: in Europe, in Ukraine and across the Global South  - and while it might seem abstract, it’s very much real and it’s bringing Russia very real benefits - often enabling it to win battles without needing to fight a single shot. 

To understand how that war is being fought - and why is the West on the backfoot - I'm talking to Janis Sarts, the Director of NATO's Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence. This is the organisation that sits at the heart of NATO's efforts to understand and counter Russian information warfare, which makes Sarts one of the most informed people in the world on how this domain actually works.

We get into why Russia is so effective at this despite being outmatched in almost every other domain, why Western governments talk about the threat constantly but do so little to counter it, and what it would actually take to fight back - including the lessons from Ukraine, which has done something no Western country has managed: take the information fight directly to Russia.

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This is a conversation with John Bolton - a former National Security Advisor to Donald Trump in his first administration, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and one of the most hawkish public figures in the U.S. foreign policy establishment. 

I wanted to talk with John about the war with Iran because he is in an absolutely unique position. He’s someone who has been long publicly advocating for a policy of a regime change in Iran and who during his time in the White House tried to make it a reality - he is in many ways the ultimate Iran hawk. But unlike almost all the other Iran hawks and despite the fact that this could be seen as the realization of his lifetime goal, he is fiercely critical of the current war with Iran and of how it has been planned and executed. 

And so we talk about why Bolton thinks this war is heading for failure, why was there such a lack of planning and strategic thinking, whether Trump is already looking for the exit even with the Strait of Hormuz still closed - and what that would mean for America's standing in the world - and why, the United States might very likely end up in a much worse position than before the war started.

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In all the analysis of the war with Iran, most of the focus has been on the American side - on what Donald Trump might want or what’s his next move. And somehow, we focus a lot less on Iran itself - the country that might have the final say in all of this and that is now harder to read than ever before. After all, who is even running Iran at this point? Is the regime really as stable as it presents itself or is it falling apart underneath the surface? Is there anyone left to negotiate with - and is a deal even possible? And could this war end up pushing Iran to finally acquire nuclear weapons?

To answer those questions, I'm joined by Professor Ali Ansari, the founding director of the Institute for Iranian Studies at the University of St Andrews and one of the world's leading authorities on Iranian politics and history. He has a view that goes against a lot of the conventional wisdoms and mainstream narratives about Iran and he argues that we largely misread the regime and its stability. And that it’s both much weaker than it seems and more dangerous and irrational at the same time.

We talk about how this war will most likely end, what might happen afterwards and why the situation will be even more unstable once the fighting eventually stops - or why what the regime is afraid of is not war but peace. And much more.

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The Russian economy is in trouble and the trouble is getting bigger - but its problems are different than what most people imagine them to be. Usually, the arguments tend to be that the Russian economy is either doing fantastic or that it’s about to collapse. In reality it’s none of that, but there is something else that is making the Kremlin worried, that will become a bigger and bigger problem for it to deal with and that will influence all of its decisions - and that could potentially present a problem for the stability and survival of the regime. 

I talk about that - and much more, like why the Iran war matters far less for Russia’s economy than most people assume - with Janis Kluge, a foremost European expert on Russian economy and a Senior Associate at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.