Decoding Geopolitics Podcast with Dominik Presl

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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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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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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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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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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.