Geopolitical Futures Podcast

States and non-state entities outside the region are beginning to take a greater interest in Myanmar's Rohingya crisis. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: goo.gl/2aknAv

Turkey knows it needs to balance both friend and foe - Kamran and Xander talk about what considerations it must make. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0

Senior Analyst Kamran Bokhari walks us through the underlying forces dictating the US-Pakistan bilateral relationship and outlines the different roles and interests of other major stakeholders in South Asia. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0

Allison Fedirka and Xander Snyder detail how we incorporate history, maps and forecasting to create our geopolitical model. Learn more about our methodology with our free report: goo.gl/KbkUpp

Jacob L. Shapiro and Xander Snyder take stock of two months of developments on the Korean peninsula while exploring the unique challenges North Korea poses to GPF's geopolitical method. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0

Xander Snyder and Kamran Bokhari talk about the distinct goals of different jihadist groups and how those differences influence the geopolitics of Middle East. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0

Xander Snyder and Jacob L. Shapiro talk about the geopolitical consequences of new U.S. sanctions against Russia, North Korea and Iran.Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: goo.gl/hfTxMX TRANSCRIPT: Jacob L. Shapiro: Hello, everyone, welcome to another Geopolitical Futures Podcast. I’m Jacob Shapiro. I am joined once more by Xander Snyder. Xander, it’s always good to talk to you. XS: Thanks, good to be here. JLS: We’ve been trying some different things with the podcast in the last couple weeks. Last week, Kamran and I had a little discussion about democracy and geopolitics. We appreciated all your feedback on that. Before that, we were doing some talk about history and battles and geopolitical contingencies. This week, we’re going to go in a little bit of different direction. We’re going to just try and take a sense of what’s been going on this week in geopolitics in 30 minutes and try and talk through some of the major issues and the things that have happened this week that might actually ha

Jacob L. Shapiro and Kamran Bokhari think about the relationship between power and ideology, and whether political forms are predestined. Learn more about our methodology with our free report: goo.gl/KbkUpp TRANSCRIPT: Jacob L. Shapiro: Hello everyone and welcome to another Geopolitical Futures podcast. It’s a beautiful day here in Austin, Texas. I think we’re going to hit 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Kamran, how’s it going in Washington? Kamran Bokhari: It is hot and muggy here, Jacob. JLS: Well we are going to try and cool things down here with a little bit of a podcast. So, we’ve been experimenting with different kinds of podcasts of late. Sometimes we go around the world and sort of talk about the week in geopolitics. We’ve been doing some interesting stuff about history and contingencies especially in old military battles lately. Today, Kamran is joining us on the podcast because Kamran has been thinking about democracy, one of those topics that I think everybody talks about and maybe people don’t understand

George Friedman and Jacob L. Shapiro talk about playing an old Avalon Hill board game of D-Day and what these types of games teach us about the nature of war in general. Get a free weekly email from George Friedman here: goo.gl/GxbSu8 TRANSCRIPT: Jacob L. Shapiro: Hello everyone and welcome to another Geopolitical Futures podcast, I am Jacob Shapiro. George Friedman is joining us this week. Thanks for making the time George. George Friedman: My pleasure. JLS: And we’re broadcasting live from George’s dining room table where George just kicked my butt in a war game. We played a board version of D-Day made by the Avalon Hill game company. It’s copyrighted 1961 but we used some newfangled rules from 1977, which were a little different than you remembered them, weren’t they George? GF: Well I spent my youth instead of doing drugs being totally stoned in war games and in those days, they used to have these wonderful war games that were historically real and realistic I should say and they came in boxes and I would

Xander Snyder and Allison Fedirka explain the purpose and utility of the GPF report card and discuss why some forecasts were not entirely accurate. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0 TRANSCRIPT: Xander Snyder: Hi and welcome to the Geopolitical Futures podcast. I’m Xander Snyder. I’m an analyst here at Geopolitical Futures and I am joined today by Allison Fedirka, a senior analyst here at Geopolitical Futures. How’s it going Allison? Allison Fedirka: It’s going well Xander, how are you? XS: Doing good. So today we’re going to talk about something that really makes Geopolitical Futures what it is, which is our annual forecast and specifically our mid-year report card on that forecast. So Geopolitical Futures publishes every year a forecast on what events we believe will transpire throughout the year and we also have a long-term forecast so you can understand how those annual forecasts fit into larger trends in the world. And then we evaluate our performance both mid-year an

Jacob L. Shapiro and Xander Snyder reflect on some key historical battles and whether they challenge GPF's model of how the world works. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0 TRANSCRIPT: Jacob L. Shapiro: Hello everyone and welcome to another Geopolitical Futures podcast. I’m JLS, your usual host. I am joined by Xander Snyder, and Xander I believe you are all the way in Iceland, aren’t you? XS: Coming at you live from Reykjavik. JLS: How about that? And today, we want to do something a little different than we’ve been doing. Instead of going around the world and recapping some important part of something happening in geopolitics, we want to take a little bit of a different direction. So George a couple weeks ago wrote a piece about the Battle of Midway and thinking about what would’ve happened if the Japanese had won the Battle of Midway and the United States had lost it. And one of the reasons George wanted to look at this particular battle, and one of the reasons he talks a

Jacob Shapiro and Kamran Bokhari discuss some recent anomalies in the Middle East and consider the relationship between sectarianism and nationalism in the Muslim world. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0 TRANSCRIPT: Jacob L. Shapiro: Hi everyone and welcome to another Geopolitical Futures podcast. I’m sorry that we missed last week but we’re back this week and I am joined once again by Kamran Bokhari, who is one of our senior analysts. Nice to have you back Kamran. Kamran Bokhari: It’s good to be back Jacob. JLS: And we’re going to pick up a little bit where we left off last week, or not last week, two weeks ago. Two weeks ago, we were talking about the situation between Saudi Arabia and Qatar and we thought we’d just have a more general conversation this week about the Middle East, Islam, maybe some nationalism to throw in there. And but Kamran before we get started, we just noticed a report before we were recording that the al-Nuri mosque in Mosul, Iraq apparently has b

Jacob L. Shapiro and Kamran Bokhari make sense of the numerous geopolitical developments that occurred in the world's most volatile region this week. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0 TRANSCRIPT: Jacob L. Shapiro: Hello everyone and welcome to another Geopolitical Futures podcast. I am joined this week by Kamran Bokhari, thanks for joining us Kamran. Kamran Bokhari: Good to be here. JLS: What we’re going to do this week is we’re going to try and sort out some of the mess that’s been going on in the Middle East. It’s been a very chaotic week in the Middle East and we thought we’d take a step back and try to explain it to listeners in about 30 or 40 minutes. It’s a tall task but we’ll see how we go. Kamran, I think the first thing that you might be able to help out with our listeners understanding is understanding a little bit more about the history of Qatar – the history of Qatar’s relationships in the region, how it’s always sort of been on the outside looking in – but w

Xander Snyder and Jacob Shapiro get down to specifics in what a potential war would look like, and ask each other why the US always seems to fight its wars in the same place. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0 TRANSCRIPT: Jacob L. Shapiro: Hello everyone, welcome again to another Geopolitical Futures podcast. I’m Jacob Shapiro, I’m the director of analysis. Xander Snyder, one of our analysts, is joining me again today to talk this week. Xander, how’s it going? Xander Snyder: It’s going well Jacob, how are you? JLS: I’m doing alright. We’ve been very busy at Geopolitical Futures. There’s a lot of stuff going on in the world and the first thing we wanted to do was follow up – George joined us on the podcast last week to talk a little bit about certain indications that we’re seeing in terms of a potential U.S. strike on North Korea in the coming weeks. The USS Nimitz, which was in port in Washington state, actually left yesterday and is headed for the Western Pacific. There w