Decoding Geopolitics Podcast with Dominik Presl

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➡️ Full Nigel's report: https://www.iiss.org/research-paper/2026/05/the-coming-crisis-in-russias-political-economy/

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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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➡️ Check out Ravi's FP Live: https://open.spotify.com/show/4pbzJRK0uPozoTxxSZhpQS

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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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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.

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This is a conversation with Reinier Von Lanschot - a Dutch member of the European Parliament - who is a leading figure of a new recent and potentially groundbreaking initiative. He has helped to form a group of European parliament members who are all calling and lobbying for one thing - creation a European Defence Union - basically, the European version of NATO, without the United States. Built so that Europe can fight and defend itself on its own - in the case that the U.S. would not come to its aid when necessary. 

This is something that many experts have theorized and called for before, but this is the first time someone in Europe is really trying to turn it into reality - which is why it’s both a fascinating and exciting but also extremely complicated and difficult endeavor - but if they succeed, it would have immense consequences, for Europe and for the world. And so we talk about what a European Defence Union is and how they want to turn it into reality, whether they can succeed or who is doing its best to stop them and much more.

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This is a conversation with Henriette Levin, a senior fellow in China Studies at CSIS. She argues that something very very important has changed in the relations between China and the US - or actually several things - over the past 2 years since Trump returned to the White House. And that those shifts will have - and are already having - enormous geopolitical consequences - even almost no one has realized this change just yet. And that this change will mean pretty bad news for the United States and very good news for China.

We talk about what those changes are, which ones we have already seen at the latest China-US summit, why people in Taiwan might have a good reason to start getting pretty nervous and how all that might increase the risk of a potential conflict. And much more.