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This is a conversation with Gregory Smith, a policy analyst at Rand focusing on the influence of AI and emerging technologies on geopolitics. And this was - and I hope I don't offend any of my other guests by saying - one of the most fascinating conversations I’ve ever had on the podcast.

Today, we are at a point when there’s a realistic chance that in the next decade or so we might get an AGI - artificial general intelligence or even ASI - artificial superintelligence: a next stage of AI that would be able to do everything that humans can and possibly even significantly better. If that happens it will radically transform every aspect of our lives but while the impact on other areas is widely discussed - how it might reshape geopolitics is largely ignored - even though its impact would be absolutely transformational. 

Greg and his colleagues at Rand recently published an extremely interesting paper where they for the first time try to explore what that might look like - and they present 8 different scenarios of how AGI can transform the global world order. Most of them are pretty bad but all of them are fascinating - leading to a rise of new superpowers, fall of the old ones and a fundamentally different world. And in this conversation, we discuss what that world might look like.

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This is a conversation with Anne Applebaum -  a historian focusing on Russia and Eastern Europe and one of the most respected thinkers on international relations, democracy and foreign policy in the world.

I used the opportunity to speak with her to make sense of what’s going on and where are we heading - from the US foreign policy and whether Trump is really turning on Putin, the future of US-Europe relations and about Russia and Ukraine: what’s driving Putin and what we still fail to understand about him, what can convince him to stop the war and how that might happen or what does the future of Russia look like.

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This is a conversation with Jakub Jajcay. Jakub has a very unique experience and perspective. He has served in several elite units in the Slovak military, once the Ukraine war started he volunteered and joined the Ukrainian military, serving as an infantry soldier and later in a drone unit on several combat tours. And today, he uses his own experiences from combat in Ukraine to draw analytical insights - about the war itself, about the changing character of warfare or about the lessons that NATO should be learning from it. The combination of his highly analytical mind and experience is quite special and it makes for a very rare and fascinating conversation.

We talk about why he thinks that FPV drones are overrated as someone who actually worked with them, how the reality of war differs from the media perception and what misconceptions most analysts have about what the war looks like, what’s the real level of quality of both Ukraine and Russian militaries, how would a typical NATO military perform if it was forced to fight in Ukraine against Russia, the real reason for why the Ukrainian big counter-offensive in 2023 failed and much, much more. 

➡️ 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 John Dotson, director of the Global Taiwan Initiative,  former U.S. Navy officer and an expert on Taiwanese defense and security policy. There are a lot of discussions on Taiwan and its role in a potential conflict with China but quite often in these discussions, Taiwan actually is seen as a passive actor. We talk about a potential war between China and the U.S. over Taiwan - and overlook what role would Taiwan actually play - but its role and its decisions would be pretty fundamental. 

I wanted to explore it in more detail and so with John, we talk about how Taiwan is preparing for a war with China, why do people in Taiwan seem a lot less concerned about this than policymakers in the U.S., why is Taiwan criticized for not doing enough or for doing the wrong things or how likely is it that China could get Taiwan without actually needing to fight for it.

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This is a conversation with Ali Ansari, a professor and a founding director of the Institute for Iranian Studies at the University of St Andrews.
Professor Ansari has incredible insight and views on Iranian foreign policy, its domestic politics and the future trajectory of the Islamic Republic. And so we talk about how the 12 Day War changed the country, how will Iran change its grand strategy after the approach that it has pursued for three decades seems to have failed, whether it will now race to get a nuclear weapon or why he believes that a fundamental change of the Iranian regime has already started - and why the coming years will see the end of the regime as we know it.

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This is a conversation with Szabolcs Panyi, a Hungarian investigative journalist. I wanted to talk to Szabolcs because something remarkable has been happening in Hungarian politics. Viktor Orban, the prime minister who has ruled Hungary for over almost two decades is now for the first time ever, losing by a large margin in the polls to a new challenger.

The elections are less than a year from now and it’s starting to look more and more likely that Viktor Orban’s rule might be coming to an end. And so we discuss why - who is Orban’s new challenger, why is he able to succeed where so many before failed, and what would his victory mean for Hungary but also for Russia, Ukraine and European politics at large. 

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This is a conversation with Fabian Hoffman, a Doctoral Research Fellow at the University who’s focusing on missiles of all kinds and he’s been doing a fantastic job popularizing and explaining this quite niche topic on his Twitter and Substack.

It’s quite a sobering conversation. Missiles in general are becoming increasingly important part of warfare in conflicts from Ukraine to the Middle East and their importance is only gonna grow - and Fabian talks about why he believes that Europe is extremely unprepared for this - why it lacks both air defensive and offensive capabilities, why its falling miles behind Russia which has drastically increased its production and why he believes that Russia is actually stockpiling their missiles for a contingency of a war with NATO, rather than just using them in Ukraine. 

We also talk about how Israel’s Iron Dome actually performed in its war with Iran, whether the plan for a golden dome that the Trump administration is planning to spend hundreds of billions of dollars makes sense, why Europe’s air defense policy is completely wrong and it’s never gonna work and much, much more. 

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This is a conversation with Sir Lawrence Freedman, a legendary British historian of war, strategy and foreign policy and a frequent commentator on war and strategy of today, as well. I took this opportunity to sort of pick his brain on the main conflicts - starting in the Middle East and trying to understand whether Israel can consider the 12 day war against Iran a success, whether it made sense for the US to join in or what would he do now if he were the supreme leader in Tehran. 

And then we talk about the big picture in Ukraine. About why Russia is stuck fighting the war with no real good way out, whether we will see a negotiated settlement and what it might look or whether the result will be decided on the battlefield, how long can the war possibly go on or why drones are not really the future of war the way we think they are. 

➡️ The Substack post I mentioned: https://stationzero.substack.com/p/why-dictatorships-actually-fall-and?r=568dwe

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Watch the full episode: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4vQiQmqq38Ymia0LYZiAzs?si=qkL_PYGkTvSYzVz98wZTNw

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Sarah Paine discussess what is actually China's Grand Strategy - and what it means for the rest of the world.

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This is a conversation with George Barros from the Institute for the Study of War who leads a team that has been monitoring and reporting on the war in Ukraine every day for the past 3 and half years. I freely admit that I did not expect the war to last nearly as long as it has and so we talk about how long it can realistically go on, when does George expect it end and what is the most likely scenario in which that happens.

We talk about what reaching 1 million casualties actually mean for Russia, how sustainable is for Russia to keep this rate of losses, what are the main pressures on its war effort and what’s likely to break first - or why the narrative of the Russian infinite manpower pool is a myth. Or how sustainable all of this is for Ukraine and whether Ukraine can afford to fight this way for years to come. 

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This is a second part of the conversation with Sarah Paine, a professor of History and Grand Strategy at the U.S. Naval War College. You can find the first part on Youtube and other podcasting platforms.

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This is a conversation with Zineb Riboua, a Middle East expert and a research fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East - about the ongoing conflict between Israel and Iran. We talk about what are really the Israeli goals with this operation, whether they can succeed in completely destroying Iranian nuclear weapons ambitions or how much damage they already did.

About what has been the role of the Trump administration and whether Trump was in on this from the start or if he’s now just trying to take credit - whether Israel is really pursuing a regime change and how likely that is or how vulnerable is Iran to a domestic coup, revolution and what the most likely scenarios are. And about much, much more.

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This is a conversation with Christopher Kirschoff. Chris founded and led the Defense Innovation Unit, also known as Unit X - an organisation within the Pentagon tasked with finding the most innovative emerging technology - anything from flying cars to microsatellites - and implementing it into the military.

That makes him a unique person to talk to about where this innovation is going but also about why is it often so hard for governments to keep up with pace of technology and why organisations like governments and militaries often fight against innovation rather than embracing it - or how do the United States, Europe, China or Russia compare in their ability to innovate and who’s winning the new tech race of today.

The theory goes: China’s in decline, so if it ever wants to invade Taiwan, it has to do it soon.

But what if that theory depends on the wrong assumption?

And who does Beijing actually see as the declining power?

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There’s probably no other bilateral relationship in global politics today that is as significant—and draws as much speculation—as the partnership between Russia and China. Together, these two countries might be capable of reshaping the global order, challenging the U.S. dominance, and influencing almost every global geopolitical issue. But there's still a lot of questions about what actually drives their cooperation, how deep or shallow their partnership truly is, and whether it’s more likely to grow even closer or fall apart in the future. And so in this conversation, I speak with Elizabeth Wishnick, an expert on Sino-Russian relations and a researcher at the Center for Naval Analyses and at Columbia University. 

I try to understand how do the two countries actually see each other: what does China think about the war in Ukraine, whether Russia was expecting more help from China in the war, what would Russia do in case of a war over Taiwan, or  whether the West can succeed in driving a wedge between them and much more.

The age of human infantry is slowly inching to its end. And it's closer than you might think.

Ukraine is already running drone-only assaults. Commercial sector is quickly ramping up development and production of sophisticated humanoid robots. And when the next major war breaks out, the first thing to disappear might be human soldiers on the front line.

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With the war in Ukraine still ongoing, it’s not surprising that conventional warfare usually dominates the headlines but underneath this traditional battlefield there are other types of conflict taking place as well that are a lot more quiet but just as consequential. From covert influence operations, proxy militias to economic pressure and cyberattacks, countries like Iran, Russia, and China have become extremely good at waging wars that don't look like wars in the traditional sense. But that can be just as powerful and sometimes even more effective. And while this kind of warfare isn’t new, it feels like we’ve entered a golden age of it.

And so in this conversation, I spoke with Seth Jones, Director of the International Security Program at CSIS, and one of the leading experts on irregular warfare on the different tactics and strategies of the three leading hybrid warfare powers —Iran, Russia, and China. We discuss the strengths and vulnerabilities of each country's approach, the effectiveness of their influence operations, why the U.S. seems to lag behind in this area or what role hybrid warfare plays in the war in Ukraine and much more.

Viktor Orbán, Hungary's Prime Minister, has a big problem.

After dominating Hungary for the past 15 years, unchallenged, unbothered, and admired by populists everywhere, polls now show that he’s losing to a new opponent, with elections less than a year away.

And it looks like his challenger found a strategy that - if successful - many European politicians might be tempted to try as well.