Michael McFaul: America Is Burning Down Everything It Built. Its Enemies Can't Believe Their Luck

About this episode

Michael McFaul discusses the current state of US foreign policy and its implications for global relations.

➡️ 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 ➡️ Buy your own Geopolitics of the Western Pacific Map Print: https://decoding-geopolitics-shop.fourthwall.com/ ➡️ Sign up to my free geopolitics newsletter: https://stationzero.substack.com/ This is a conversation with Michael McFaul, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia and a special advisor on Russia to president Obama, professor of international relations at Stanford University and one of the most respected American experts on foreign policy and geopolitics. He is someone that I would call a typical transatlanticist - someone who spent his whole career working on build a strong alliance with Europe, promoting democracy abroad and deterring autocratic adversarial regimes - and so it’s really interesting to talk at a time when both US foreign policy and the world looks very very different. And so we talk about his thoughts on the war with Iran, whether it will end up as a strategic defeat for the United States and how it will change America’s standing and influence around the world. About the current crisis in…

People in this episode

Host: Dominik Presl

Guest: Michael McFaul

Topics covered

• US foreign policy
• geopolitics
• democracy vs autocracy
• Iran conflict
• transatlantic relations

Keywords

• Michael McFaul
• US foreign policy
• geopolitics
• democracy
• autocracy
• Iran
• NATO
• transatlanticism

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Stanford University, Obama, NATO

More episodes of Decoding Geopolitics Podcast with Dominik Presl

• Sam Greene: Why Russia’s Elite Is Growing Anxious - And Why Something Is About To Break · June 8, 2026 · 29 min
• Reinier von Lanschot: Europe Has Reached a Breaking Point. The Race to Build a European Army Has Begun. · June 1, 2026 · 28 min
• Henrietta Levin: Something Huge Just Shifted Between The U.S. And China - And It's Very Bad News For The West · May 23, 2026 · 33 min
• Yale History Professor: We Are Sleepwalking Into The Next World War - And We’re Running Out Of Time To Stop It · May 16, 2026 · 31 min
• Ben Hodges: Russia's War Is Collapsing. They’re Running Out of Men and Bleeding Everywhere · May 9, 2026 · 25 min
• CIA Russia Expert on What the West Gets Wrong About Putin's Russia | Sean Wiswesser · May 3, 2026 · 35 min