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This is a conversation with John Bolton - a former US ambassador to the United Nations and a former U.S. National Security Advisor in the first Donald Trump administration. He has held some of the highest and most important roles that anyone can achieve and had direct influence on some of the most important national security and foreign policy decisions. And he has also worked extremely closely with Donald Trump - and he knows how he thinks about foreign policy and national security better than almost anyone else.

And so we talk about all of that. About how Donald Trump actually thinks about foreign policy. How does he make decisions, who does he listen to? Why does he like Putin so much and why does it seem he changes his Ukraine policies every 5 minutes? What advice he would give to European leaders for the next 4 years or is he very worried about the fate of Taiwan in the near future and what would Donald Trump do in case of a military conflict with China - and much more.

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This is a conversation with General Ben Hodges - a former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe and one of the most respected commentators on defense and strategy today.

He was kind enough to come back on the podcast to talk about the strategic shifts in the war in Ukraine - about whether Ukraine is starting to turning the tide in the war, why are policymakers in Europe and the US becoming much more confident about Ukraine’s chances, about the impact of Ukrainian new strategies and tactics. Or why he believes that Russia is increasingly bleeding out and might not be able to wage the war beyond next year.

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Probably the biggest trend defining geopolitics today is the global competition between two superpowers: the United States and China. And despite America having many major advantages, China is increasingly managing to catch up with the US - and it has been able to do that from basically nothing and in a record time.

My guest today - Dan Wang - explains why was China able to do that and what that means for who will end up winning in the future. He is a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and author of the book Breakneck, where he argues that while the United States is led by lawyers, China is led by engineers. And that as a consequence China is able to build with speed and scale that the US is struggling to catch up - but it’s also why China tends to make pretty catastrophic decisions just as often as it makes the brilliant ones. 

It is a fascinating explanation of both of these two countries and their global competition and we talk about what it means for their respective futures, who is better positioned to win the new Cold War and much more.

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This is a conversation with Michael Hirsh, columnist for Foreign Policy and one of the most experienced observers of U.S. foreign policy and national security in Washington. In this episode, we look at a big claim he’s been making: that realism has quietly become the dominant way of thinking about America’s role in the world.

We talk about what that actually means, why realism has become so popular, and whether the Trump administration really reflects a realist approach or something closer to chaos and isolationism. We also get into the views of figures like J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio or Elbridge Colby, or why Democrats are adopting their own version of realism as well.

And finally, we look at what all this means in practice - for U.S. policy toward Ukraine and Europe, for NATO and alliances more broadly, and for China and the Indo-Pacific - and how this shift could shape the next decade of U.S. foreign policy and the world with it.

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This is a conversation with Jaak Tarien about two pretty big things that happened recently - the incursion of Russian drones that were shot down by Poland in its airspace and an incursion of Russian fighter jets into Estonia that were escorted by Italian F-35s out of the country. 

Jaak is a former Brigadier General in the Estonian Armed Forces who served in several high ranking roles in both the Estonian military and in NATO and finished his career as the Commander of Estonia’s Air Force. He retired in 2018 and today he is an executive in an Estonian startup developing military drone technology and so he is the perfect guest to talk to today.

With Jaak we discuss what both of those incidents mean - what was his view on how Poland dealt with the Russian drones in its airspace and what’s a better and more sustainable way to deal with that than deploying extremely expensive guided rockets against much much cheaper drones. We talk about how should Estonia and NATO deal with Russian jets flying into its territory - whether they should be shot down like some people argue, who would be actually doing that and how if it were to happen, what does the example of Turkey shooting down a Russian fighter jet in 2015 in its airspace tell us about it or why is Russia actually doing these incursions - what is it trying to achieve and whether NATO shooting its down its jets could be exactly the reaction that Russia is trying to provoke.

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This is a conversation with Francis Farrell - a reporter for Kyiv Independent and someone who spends a good amount of time directly on the frontline in Ukraine, embedded with various Ukrainian military units. And who, because of that, has a unique, first-hand perspective about what the war on a tactical, ground level actually looks like today and how is it changing day to day.

We talk about who’s actually winning today, what is the trajectory of the war and how has that trajectory been evolving. We talk about a number of new tactics and tech that have appeared on the frontlines over the past months and how they have been fundamentally changing the fighting and what new tactics are both Ukrainians and Russians adopting right now. And also about Ukraine’s manpower issues, whether they are being fixed and how much they affect the Ukrainian war effort or what impact the events of this year had on public opinion in Ukraine - and much more.

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This is a conversation with Patrick McGee, and it’s perhaps a bit of an unusual episode. Patrick is an author of a book called Apple in China tells the story of how the world’s most valuable company came to China to use it for its own benefit—only to discover, over time, that it was Apple being used, trapped, and effectively working for the Chinese state instead.

But despite the title, this isn’t just about Apple. It’s really a story of how China changed over two decades - how it gained leverage over Western corporations, squeezed them for everything from know-how to capital, and used them to build homegrown rivals now competing globally. It’s a story about how China uses economic dependency to build political influence and uses political influence to create economic dependency. And about how aggressive, smart and strategic China can be when pushing for its interests and how the West to its own detriment often fails to see that until it's too late.

Even though the story is from the perspective of a private company, the story is just as much about China, the West, and their relationship—which is why I think it’s deeply relevant for geopolitics.

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This is a conversation with Nick Hare, a former defense intelligence analyst in the UK government and a founder of a forecasting company Aleph Insights. But more importantly, he is what’s called a superforecaster - someone who is exceptionally successful in consistently predicting the future and far better at it than the average population or even government agencies and subject matter experts. 

It’s not about magic, instead it’s about mastering the science of forecasting based on filtering out the noise, choosing the correct information to focus on, correctly analyzing historical trends, avoiding biases and a lot more, to predict stock markets, global geopolitical events or basically anything else. 

It’s a fascinating field and we explain how it works, how he forecasted the Russian invasion of Ukraine or why governments and intelligence agencies fail to use these methods and tend to rely more on vibes rather than data. But more importantly, I take Nick’s exceptional forecasting skills and get him to forecast some of the key geopolitical events of the coming years that will end up shaping the world - from whether China will invade Taiwan or how will the war in Ukraine end. It’s a fascinating discussion and statistically, his answers are more accurate predictions of how these things will play out than you can find anywhere else in the world. 

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This is a conversation with Sergey Radchenko. Sergey is one of the most insightful historians of the Cold War and Russian history. He grew up in the USSR, has spent years combing through Soviet archives, and his latest book offers a rare inside look into how Soviet leaders actually made decisions about war, diplomacy, and the use of power. But this isn’t just about history because the past in Russia is still very much alive - and understanding what drove Soviet foreign policy shines a light on what drives Russian foreign policy today.

And so we talk about why Russia’s obsession with being seen as a great power still drives its decisions today, how Vladimir Putin’s worldview was shaped by Soviet collapse, and how much of his strategy mirrors what Soviet leaders did during the Cold War. We look at why Russia keeps acting like it’s still a superpower, whether Vladimir Putin is trying to rebuild the Soviet Union or what lessons policymakers can actually learn from how the West handled the USSR during the Cold War and much much more.