#83 Francis Farrell: The New Ukrainian Fighting Strategy That Could Decide 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://stationzero.substack.com/This is a conversation with Francis Farrell - a reporter for Kyiv Independent and someone who spends a good amount of time directly on the frontline in Ukraine, embedded with various Ukrainian military units. And who, because of that, has a unique, first-hand perspective about what the war on a tactical, ground level actually looks like today and how is it changing day to day. We talk about who’s actually winning today, what is the trajectory of the war and how has that trajectory been evolving. We talk about a number of new tactics and tech that have appeared on the frontlines over the past months and how they have been fundamentally changing the fighting and what new tactics are both Ukrainians and Russians adopting right now. And also about Ukraine’s manpower issues, whether they are being fixed and how much they affect the Ukrainian war effort or what impact the events of this year had on public opinion in Ukraine - and much more.
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#82 Patrick McGee: How China Is Using American Companies to Trap 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/This is a conversation with Patrick McGee, and it’s perhaps a bit of an unusual episode. Patrick is an author of a book called Apple in China tells the story of how the world’s most valuable company came to China to use it for its own benefit—only to discover, over time, that it was Apple being used, trapped, and effectively working for the Chinese state instead. But despite the title, this isn’t just about Apple. It’s really a story of how China changed over two decades - how it gained leverage over Western corporations, squeezed them for everything from know-how to capital, and used them to build homegrown rivals now competing globally. It’s a story about how China uses economic dependency to build political influence and uses political influence to create economic dependency. And about how aggressive, smart and strategic China can be when pushing for its interests and how the West to its own detriment often fails to see that until it's too late. Even though the story is from the perspective of a private company, the story is just as much about China, the West, and their relationship—which is why I think it’s deeply relevant for geopolitics.
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#81 Nick Hare: World's Top Forecaster Predicts How Will the Ukraine War End and If China Will Invade Taiwan
➡️ 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 Nick Hare, a former defense intelligence analyst in the UK government and a founder of a forecasting company Aleph Insights. But more importantly, he is what’s called a superforecaster - someone who is exceptionally successful in consistently predicting the future and far better at it than the average population or even government agencies and subject matter experts. It’s not about magic, instead it’s about mastering the science of forecasting based on filtering out the noise, choosing the correct information to focus on, correctly analyzing historical trends, avoiding biases and a lot more, to predict stock markets, global geopolitical events or basically anything else. It’s a fascinating field and we explain how it works, how he forecasted the Russian invasion of Ukraine or why governments and intelligence agencies fail to use these methods and tend to rely more on vibes rather than data. But more importantly, I take Nick’s exceptional forecasting skills and get him to forecast some of the key geopolitical events of the coming years that will end up shaping the world - from whether China will invade Taiwan or how will the war in Ukraine end. It’s a fascinating discussion and statistically, his answers are more accurate predictions of how these things will play out than you can find anywhere else in the world.
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#80 Sergey Radchenko: What Really Drives Russia’s Foreign Policy – From the USSR to Putin
➡️ 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 Sergey Radchenko. Sergey is one of the most insightful historians of the Cold War and Russian history. He grew up in the USSR, has spent years combing through Soviet archives, and his latest book offers a rare inside look into how Soviet leaders actually made decisions about war, diplomacy, and the use of power. But this isn’t just about history because the past in Russia is still very much alive - and understanding what drove Soviet foreign policy shines a light on what drives Russian foreign policy today.And so we talk about why Russia’s obsession with being seen as a great power still drives its decisions today, how Vladimir Putin’s worldview was shaped by Soviet collapse, and how much of his strategy mirrors what Soviet leaders did during the Cold War. We look at why Russia keeps acting like it’s still a superpower, whether Vladimir Putin is trying to rebuild the Soviet Union or what lessons policymakers can actually learn from how the West handled the USSR during the Cold War and much much more.
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#79 Robert D. Kaplan: The Fall of the American Empire and The Coming Era of Chaos
➡️ 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 Robert D Kaplan - a legendary journalist, academic, and one of the most influential thinkers on US foreign policy and geopolitics of the past decades. This year, he published a book called Wastelands in which he portrays a pretty grim diagnosis of why the world is increasingly becoming more and more unstable and dangerous, why is the United States but also Russia and China in decline that is only getting faster and why what’s coming is more chaos, more instability, violence and danger - as well, as what can we do to avoid it. We talk about all of that and much more - in what I think is pretty fascinating conversation.
About Decoding Geopolitics Podcast with Dominik Presl
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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