Strategy&Future

Lose the war - win the peace? Jacob Shapiro welcomes Jacek Bartosiak of Strategy&Future onto the show to discuss the Russia-Ukraine war and the evolution of the multipolar geopolitical system. Jacek makes his case that a systemic, global war has already begun – and warns the U.S. what will happen if it indulges in hubris and pushes too hard on President Trump’s “America First” rhetoric.

Jacek Bartosiak talks to Julian Lindley-French on the grim future of Europe.

Jacek Bartosiak and Jacob Shapiro in Geopolitics Talks – on Ukraine, Poland and US extended deterrence in Europe.

The Times of the Troubles has one additional feature: the erection of an enormous and sophisticated system of fortifications and military bases along the entire geopolitical zone of contact, that stretched hundreds of kilometres. The concentration of defence lines and fortifications was maybe the greatest in Europe.

The Eternal Return of Eastern Europe, or the tidal fluctuations of turmoil and wartime (Times of Trouble), can be outlined through five fundamental principles.

December 2024. Chancellery of the Prime Minister, Warsaw, Aleje Ujazdowskie. A few days before Christmas. One o’clock in the morning. The outgoing President of the United States is trying to call the Prime Minister of the Republic of Poland to let him know that war has broken out in the Western Pacific.

I present an alternative course of history. What if the Russians had achieved their goals and seized Kyiv in February 2022 in a brilliant four-day campaign and, as a result, established a sympathetic government fully implementing Moscow’s will? The story begins on 28th February 2022.

Military strategy is how the military is prepared, deployed, trained and exercised. Above all, it consists in the long-term development of broadly understood capabilities, which nowadays are more appropriately referred to as the “state resilience system” — so that these activities have a positive impact on our foreign policy, i.e. on our “room for manoeuvre.” For a military strategy to be credible in times of war and anarchy of the international system, when military violence is the final arbiter, a kind of supreme court between states that are in a dispute over which of them will push through its agency (and such times have come), our politicians in Warsaw must have the characterological and mental ability to make a decision, for example, about the killing of Wagnerians carrying out an armed raid on one of the towns of Podlasie.

Jacek Bartosiak and Albert Świdziński of S&F – View From Poland: World in Turmoil, part 1 (January 2023).

Poland is the only country of the former Eastern bloc where no nuclear power plant was built. Although power units had been under construction in Żarnowiec since 1983, the decision of the government of Tadeusz Mazowiecki stopped work on them in 1990 and real actions aimed at building nuclear power stations will start only now. However, it is worth considering how it happened that for so many years in the People’s Republic Poland (Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa, or PRL), no government managed to create Polish nuclear power plants.

We have long proposed at Strategy&Future to increase Poland’s activity “in the eastern direction”, in particular in Ukraine. We’ve written about the importance of a policy aimed at keeping Russia outside the European system, which Poland would not be able to achieve on its own without Ukraine’s participation. We’ve emphasised the importance of supply chains and control over the flows of goods and commodities.

According to Forbes Ukraine, TDEK Energo, owned by the largest Ukrainian oligarch, Rinat Akhmetov, is currently worth around $580 million due to the war, while before 24th February it was valued at almost $2 billion.[1] The company lost one of its heat and power plants in Luhansk, but this is not the main reason for the “discount”.