➡️ If you enjoy this podcast and you want to help to make its existence possible, join our community of geopolitics enthusiasts on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics Sign up to my upcoming geopolitics newsletter: https://station-zero.beehiiv.com/subscribe Thank you Conducttr for sponsoring the podcast. Take a look at Conducttr's services and its crisis exercise software at: https://www.conducttr.com This is a conversation with Kenneth Pollack about one single question - why do militaries of Arab nations, despite often having superiority in numbers and better equipment than their opponents, tend to hugely underperform in modern military conflicts? And often end up losing wars which in theory they should win? It’s a question that has been asked by many but no one knows more about it than my guest. He spent 30 years as an analyst in the CIA studying the Middle East and the militaries of both U.S. partners and adversaries. After leaving the CIA he became an academic and dedicated his academic career to answering this question. And so this is what we talk about - what is the real reason that Arab militaries tend to be notoriously ineffective, how does culture, economy or politics influence how they fight or why do organizations like Hezbollah seem to defy this rule and are a lot more effective than many larger and better equipped traditional Arab armies.

➡️ If you enjoy this podcast and you want to help to make its existence possible, join our community of geopolitics enthusiasts on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics Sign up to my upcoming geopolitics newsletter: https://station-zero.beehiiv.com/subscribe Thank you Conducttr for sponsoring the podcast. Take a look at Conducttr's services and its crisis exercise software at: https://www.conducttr.com This is a conversation with Ryan McBeth. Ryan is a former infantryman in the Marine Corps, an intelligence analyst, software architect and most importantly, a Youtube legend and one of my favorite creators. In this conversation, we talk about a lot of things - from his background to what he thinks that Trump’s presidency will mean for the world of geopolitics. And also what’s his view of the situation of the war in Ukraine and how he thinks it might end, why does he believe that we are already living through WW3, whether China will invade Taiwan and much more.

➡️ If you enjoy this podcast and you want to help to make its existence possible, join our community of geopolitics enthusiasts on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics Sign up to my upcoming geopolitics newsletter: https://station-zero.beehiiv.com/subscribe Thank you Conducttr for sponsoring the podcast. Take a look at Conducttr's services and its crisis exercise software at: https://www.conducttr.com This is a conversation with Matthew Savill. Matthew is a Director of Military Sciences at the Royal United Services Institute and he has over 20 years of experience of working on defense, intelligence and national security in leadership positions in the British civil service. And in this conversation we talk about the current state of the British military which according to many is not great. We discuss whether the British military is in crisis and how bad it is, why is the British army becoming smaller than ever before in the last 200 years at a time of a growing threat to Europe, whether Britain can still afford to maintain a global blue-water navy or why does it have smaller armed forces than France despite spending more money on it.

➡️ If you enjoy this podcast and you want to help to make its existence possible, join our community of geopolitics enthusiasts on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics Sign up to my upcoming geopolitics newsletter: https://station-zero.beehiiv.com/subscribe Thank you Conducttr for sponsoring the podcast. Take a look at Conducttr's services and its crisis exercise software at: https://www.conducttr.com This is a conversation with Dr. Ali Ansari, professor at St Andrews University and an expert on Iranian history and foreign policy. In this interview we talk about Iran's conflict with Israel - why both countries race against the clock to win, how the past months changed the balance of power between the two, about what it means for Iran's proxy groups in the region, about the great paradox of Iran's foreign policy and much more.

➡️ If you enjoy this podcast and you want to help to make its existence possible, join our community of geopolitics enthusiasts on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics Sign up to my upcoming geopolitics newsletter: https://station-zero.beehiiv.com/subscribe Thank you Conducttr for sponsoring the podcast. Take a look at Conducttr's services and its crisis exercise software at: https://www.conducttr.com This is a conversation with Tim Marshall. Tim has a long career as foreign correspondent, covering wars and revolution from the Balkans to the Middle East but he's mostly known for his series of books starting with Prisoners of Geography, in which he argues that more than anything it's geography that determines international relations. I'm a fan of the books but at the same time I'm not sure if I agree with the theory and so in this interview we talk about whether this argument holds water, whether geography influenced Russia to invade Ukraine and whether we should even accept this premise and how it shapes the world from China to the Middle East.

➡️ If you enjoy this podcast and you want to help to make its existence possible, join our community of geopolitics enthusiasts on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics Sign up to my upcoming geopolitics newsletter: https://station-zero.beehiiv.com/subscribe Thank you Conducttr for sponsoring the podcast. Take a look at Conducttr's services and its crisis exercise software at: https://www.conducttr.com This is a conversation with Juliana Suess, the Research Fellow on Space Security at the Royal United Services Institute and in this episode, we talk about war in space. We discuss why space is increasingly becoming the most important warfighting domain, the new space race between China and the U.S., how is space warfare playing out in the Ukraine war, why is Russia putting nukes in space and much more.

➡️ If you enjoy this podcast and you want to help to make its existence possible, join our community of geopolitics enthusiasts on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics Sign up to my upcoming geopolitics newsletter: https://station-zero.beehiiv.com/subscribe Thank you Conducttr for sponsoring the podcast. Take a look at Conducttr's services and its crisis exercise software at: https://www.conducttr.com This is a conversation with Zbigniew PISARSKI, a leading Polish foreign policy and security analyst, President of the Casimir Pulaski Foundation and founder of the Warsaw Security Forum. In this conversation, we talk about Poland and specifically, about its rise as a new geopolitical and military power. We discuss why does Poland spend far more on defense than any other NATO member, how did its military transform since 2014, and Poland's rise as a new European geopolitical heavyweight - and much more.

➡️ If you enjoy this podcast and you want to help to make its existence possible, join our community of geopolitics enthusiasts on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics ➡️ Sign up to my upcoming geopolitics newsletter: https://station-zero.beehiiv.com/subscribe ➡️ Thank you Conducttr for sponsoring the podcast. Take a look at Conducttr's services and its crisis exercise software at: https://www.conducttr.com This is an interview with Ankit Panda. Ankit is an expert on nuclear strategy, arms control, missile defense, nonproliferation, deterrence and he is a Stanton Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.And in this conversation, we talked about everything related to nuclear weapons. Why are they coming back to fashion, why are we living through the beginning of another nuclear arms race, why are countries and leaders becoming increasingly more comfortable with the idea of a limited nuclear war and much much more.

This is a special episode where I answer questions from my supporters on Patreon. It's a bit of a free-flowing rant rather than something that would be carefully scripted and thought-out, so keep that in mind. If you want to join our Patreon community, you can do that here: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics

➡️ PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics Sign up to my upcoming geopolitics newsletter: https://station-zero.beehiiv.com/subscribe Might of the Chain: https://a.co/d/633rSOr This is a conversation with Admiral Mike Studeman. Mike spent decades as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy, eventually becoming a Director of Intelligence at the Indo-Pacific Command and until very recently, he served as a Commander of the Office of Naval Intelligence, the oldest U.S. intelligence agency. He speaks Mandarin and throughout his career he has focused on studying and analyzing China and its military. In this conversation, we talk about why the risk of a war with China is much higher than most people think and why Mike thinks that we are on a trajectory towards it. How is the Navy prepared for it, how is it adapting to the changing character of war or why the U.S. is losing to China in information warfare.

➡️ PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics Sign up to my upcoming geopolitics newsletter: https://station-zero.beehiiv.com/subscribe This is an interview with General David Petraeus. General Petraeus spent 37 years in the U.S. Army. Over the course of his career, he led the U.S. Central Command, the U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and after his service in the military, he served as the Director of the CIA. Overall, he's considered one of the most prominent and effective military leaders of this century. In this conversation, we talk about his experience from Iraq and Afghanistan, but mostly about the war in Ukraine - what lessons should we be taking from it, whether we have a strategy to win and what's going to happen next.

➡️ PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics Get access to more episodes of the intelligence brief, support the podcast, get ad-free full interviews ahead of time and ask questions to my guest by becoming a supporter.

➡️ PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics This is a conversation with Dmitri Alpetrovitch. Dmitri is a chairman of a think-tank called Silverado Policy Accelerator and an author of a new book World on the Brink: How America Can Beat China in the Race for the Twenty-First Century about how to win a cold war with China and prevent it from turning it into a hot one. We talked about who's winning the Cold War of the 21st century, why Taiwan is the new West Berlin and whether Xi Jinping will decide to invade or not and much more.

➡️ PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics This is a conversation with Kirill Shamiev. Kirill is a Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations where he primarily focuses on the Russian military - and that's exactly what we talked about. We discussed what is the state of the Russian military today, two and a half years into the war, whether it is able to learn and improve, what was the meaning behind the purges at the Russian ministry of defense, how much corruption affects Russian combat capability or how fast will it be able to rebuild its military to potentially face NATO.

➡️ PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics This is a conversation with Yusuf Unjhawala - a defence analyst from a leading Indian think-tank the Takshashila Institution.In this interview, I wanted to better understand India's foreign policy and security challenges and how India actually sees the world from its own perspective. And so we talked about why India doesn't have allies, why it wants to be friends with both Russia and the West or why a war between India and China might be more likely than a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. I hope you like it and now, enjoy the conversation.

➡️ PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics Jean H. Lee is a journalist and foreign policy analyst renowned for her expertise in covering North Korea and Northeast Asian affairs. She is co-host of the award-winning Lazarus Heist podcast for the BBC World Service and a former Pyongyang bureau chief for the Associated Press news agency. Jean began reporting on the ground in North Korea in 2008. In 2011, she became the first American journalist to join the Pyongyang foreign press corps in North Korea. In 2012, she opened AP’s Pyongyang bureau, the first and only US news bureau in North Korea. Her work in North Korea from 2008 to 2017 included nearly three years working alongside North Korean staff and colleagues in Pyongyang on assignments that took her across the closed nation to visit farms, factories, schools, military academies, and homes in the course of her exclusive coverage.

➡️ PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics Dr. Jack Watling is Senior Research Fellow for Land Warfare at the Royal United Services Institute. Jack works closely with the British military on the development of concepts of operation, assessments of the future operating environment, and conducts operational analysis of contemporary conflicts. In this conversation, we talked about two wars that Russia is currently waging: an overt one against Ukraine and a covert war against the West. Thank you to everyone who supports this podcast on Patreon - and if you want to support what I'm doing, do consider becoming a supporter on Patreon as well.

➡️ PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics This is a conversation with Jake Broe, a former Nuclear and Missile Operations Officer and one of the biggest Youtubers providing daily updates on the war in Ukraine. We talked about why Jake thinks Donald Trump will leave NATO, why the war will end with a political and economic collapse of Russia and much, much more.

➡️ PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics This is a conversation with Mykola Bilieskov, a Ukrainian analyst and a research fellow at the National Institute for Strategic Studies of Ukraine institute under the Ukrainian presidential administration. We talked about why Ukrainians are hesitant to join the military, why Western model of support for Ukraine is not working anymore, why he is more worried about the next year than this one and why NATO might have to join the conflict one way or another.

➡️ PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics This is a conversation with Minna Alander - a research fellow at the Finnish Institute for International Affairs who's focusing, among other topics on Finnish security and defence policy, Nordic defence cooperation and Arctic security. Finland is quite an exception among European countries - because while today many are panicking and trying to make up for years of underfunding, Fins seems to be quite calm - as they have been ready to fight Russia on their own for decades - as they have done in the past in multiple iconic conflicts. In this conversation we talk about why is Finland prepared for war better than almost anyone else, what is the Finnish perspective of the Russian threat, how did Finland joining NATO completely changed the calculus for both NATO and Russia and what would a Russian invasion fo Finland look like. Thank you to everyone who is supporting this podcast on Patreon - it's incredibly helpful. And now, enjoy the conversation.