Decoding Geopolitics Podcast with Dominik Presl

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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.

➡️ 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

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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.

➡️ 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
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➡️ 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.

➡️ 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
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