Decoding Geopolitics Podcast with Dominik Presl

#96 Chun Han Wong: China Is Entering a New Phase - And Nobody Knows Where It Leads

➡️ 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 Chun Han Wong, a reporter at the Wall Street Journal, author of the book Party of One covering how Xi Jinping transformed China and its political system and an expert on China’s internal insider politics. Few people understand what actually goes on inside China’s politics better than him - how decisions and policies are made and what drives those who make them.  We talk about what does Xi and other people in the communist party leadership actually believe in, what do they want, what are their deepest fears and what do they really want to achieve. About how China changed by Xi dismantling the collective decision making system, about whether China has a grand strategy to become the number one superpower or whether it’s just improvising, how Beijing thinks about confrontation with the United States or what the purges in the Chinese military reveal about its confidence and preparedness to take military action - and much more.

#95 Linas Kojala: This Is How The Baltics Are Preparing For War with Russia

➡️ 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 Linas Kojala - the director of the Geopolitics and Security Studies Center - and an associate professor of international relations at Vilnius University. Linas is from Lithuania and an expert on Baltic security among other things - and so this is what we talk about.  About what have the past 4 years looked like from the perspective of NATO’s frontline states - three countries with small populations that are often spoken about as the primary and most likely target for any potential Russian escalation towards NATO. How much more real does that threat feel here compared to Western Europe, how have they spent the 4 years since the war in Ukraine began to prepare and how prepared are they today. How do they view the possible departure of United States from Europe and why Germany is starting to become an alternative security provider in the region instead - and much more.

#94 Gabrielus Landsbergis: Europe Is Being Humiliated By Everyone. This Might Be Our Last Warning.

➡️ 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 Gabrielus Landsbergis. Gabrielus is a visiting fellow at the Stanford University’s Institute for International Studies and former minister of foreign affairs of Lithuania - a role that he held between 2020 and 2024. Like many of his Baltic colleagues he held and holds a very hawkish view on Russia, on supporting Ukraine and on European defense and security.But what makes him unique is that he’s also extremely openly critical of European leadership on all these issues - criticizing what he calls Europe’s appeasement of Trump, weak lack of support for Ukraine and indecisiveness in facing Russia - all the while he has personal first-hand experience with the same leadership he’s criticizing. He has been in many of the rooms where the decisions and policies were made and he knows the leaders taking them.  And so we discuss the ongoing negotiations over the U.S. 28 point peace plan proposal, the European response to it, what’s going to come out of it and what Europe should be doing instead. And we also talk about Europe’s geopolitical strategy or the lack thereof in general - why does Europe seem to be stuck in a strategic impotence unable to take the lead or responsibility for itself, whether it’s starting to change or how it should be dealing with America led by Donald Trump and much more.

#93 Victor Davis Hanson: Trump Is West’s “Tragic Hero”. He's Bad News for Russia and a Hope for Europe.

➡️ 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 Victor Davis Hanson - a classics professor, military historian, a Senior Fellow at the Stanford’s University Hoover Institution and one of the most prominent advocates and supporters of Donald Trump, especially within the academic think-tank world.  If you’ve listened to this podcast before, you probably noticed that I am pretty critical of Donald Trump’s foreign policy. While I don’t reject everything he does, I have some pretty fundamental issues with how he treats Europe, NATO or America’s allies and its international commitments in general. And you also might have noticed that many of my guests are very critical of Donald Trump’s foreign policy as well - just in recent months I spoke with John Bolton, Anne Applebaum, Francis Fukuyama all of whom have been even more critical than me. However, I don't want to close myself off in my own bubble, and I think it’s good to be open to ideas of people with other views, especially if they argue in good faith and if we agree on some basic values. And that’s why I'm speaking with Victor today. He is a pretty staunch Trump supporter but he also has many views that are not typically associated with Trump - he strongly supports NATO, he is a major supporter of Ukraine, he is hawkish on Russia and advocates for the U.S. to arm and he is overall the type that most Donald Trump supporters might call a “neoconservative” with views that Donald Trump himself has frequently criticized. And so we speak about how all those things go together. How does protecting the postwar-liberal order go together with Trump talking about annexing Greenland and Canada, why didn't Trump end the war in 24 hours as he promised or whether he was naive in his plan for how to do that, how can Europe be in an alliance with a U.S. president who doesn't believe in alliances or why he thinks that Trump is the most pro-European U.S. president in history. To clarify, I don't agree with many of the views that Victor has talked about on European or Americans domestic politics but that’s not what the podcast is about and I didn't want to focus on. And I’m still not sure whether I agree with anything that he said - but despite that, I think that it’s a fascinating conversation that I was really glad to have. And I heard a perspective that might not be the same as mine but that I still found to be really interesting - I hope you’ll feel the same way.

#92 Francis Fukuyama: Why the “End of History” Never Happened - And Why Global Order Is Breaking Down

➡️ 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 Fukuyama, a professor and research fellow at Stanford and one of the most famous and influential scholars of political science and international relations of our time. Although he has decades of scholarship behind him, he is by far most well known for one book, titled the “End of History and the Last Man” which is both highly influential and highly misunderstood and in which he argued that following the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 90s, humanity has reached the final stage of human government in the form of liberal democracy.  We talk about what the argument of the book actually was, why it is so often misunderstood,  and why the End of History did not happen. About why history seems to have taken a turn backwards and why we are witnessing democratic backsliding and return of large scale wars and conflicts, why democracies everywhere seem to be going through major crises and how to fix that, or what - if the history is not ending - is ahead of us now. And what still gives him hope that liberal democracy is not going anywhere just yet.