Geopolitical Shifts: From NATO to Canada the world is changing with Jacob Shapiro

About this episode

Vance's second recorded conversation with Jacob Shapiro, director of research at the Bespoke Group and Stratfor-trained geopolitical forecaster, covers an unusually dense week of foreign policy news: the US-Europe rupture triggered by Pete Hegseth's NATO remarks and JD Vance's Munich Security Conference speech, Trump's direct outreach to Putin over the Ukraine war, DOGE's dismantling of USAID, and the Canada/Mexico tariff standoff. Shapiro's most substantive framing is a "be careful what you wish for" warning about pushing Europe toward remilitarization — noting the historical irony that post-WWII US policy deliberately kept Germany demilitarized as a stability mechanism, and that a newly militarized, resentful Germany "lectured at" by the US may not act as a reliable ally against China or Russia. He offers a nuanced methodological discussion of forecasting (drawing on Philip Tetlock's fox/hedgehog framework and his own practice of stating his biases upfront rather than claiming false objectivity), and a specific, testable claim that geopolitics indicates Russia will lose the Ukraine war on a 5-10 year horizon regardless of near-term battlefield outcomes, drawing a historical parallel to Russia's 1904-05 war with Japan preceding the 1917 revolution by about 12 years. On USAID, Shapiro delivers a structural critique that DOGE "broke something they don't quite understand" by targeting the administrative agency rather than the policy-setting apparatus (State/CIA/Defense), and separately warns — echoed by Vance — that ending USAID contracts outside normal legal/judicial process undermines the constitutional rule-of-law framework that has historically prevented authoritarian consolidation in the US, a point Vance concedes even while celebrating the cuts' substance. The Canada segment produces the episode's clearest falsifiable predictions: Shapiro argues Trump's "51st state" rhetoric toward Canada is bluster with "no chance" of materializing within 20 years (though he allows a 50-year horizon is conceivable), and separately frames the tariff standoff as leverage-building in a broader USMCA renegotiation rather than a genuine national-security posture, predicting Trump will move on to the EU and China once North American terms are locked in. Vance, notably candid about his own bias throughout ("I find myself cheering for a team... I keep saying like, I feel like I have a team I'm rooting for here"), raises Western Canadian secession (Alberta/Saskatchewan) as a live possibility given internal tariff removal pressures on Quebec's dairy supply management system, which Shapiro treats as a legitimate self-determination question he has no stake in either direction. The conversation closes on China, with Shapiro cautioning against reflexive "bad China" framing and warning that the worst-case outcome for both men's children would be a US-China war — alongside his own updated read that Trump, contrary to his first-term isolationist profile, now looks more like "an imperialist" given Panama Canal pressure and territorial tariff threats.

“The United States, it's not prioritizing security in Europe anymore, that we've got bigger fish to fry with migration and quote unquote communist China.”

“If you don't have government support for those industries or retraining programs... you better be willing to offer us government support for these industries at the very early stages because if you just slap tariffs and think, oh, we're gonna flip the switch and the United States is gonna go back to making things, no way.”

“The founders would be rolling over in their graves to know that Elon Musk thinks he can run around ending contracts by himself... We're a country of contracts. The constitution treats contracts as sacred.”

Key moments

• Shapiro's framing of a historic US-Europe "sea change" via Hegseth's NATO remarks, Trump's unilateral Putin outreach, and JD Vance's Munich speech.
• Shapiro's "be careful what you wish for" warning about remilitarizing Germany.
• Shapiro's Russia-loses-Ukraine-war-long-term forecast with the 1904-05/1917 historical parallel.
• Shapiro's structural critique that DOGE targeted USAID's administrators rather than the policy-setting agencies.
• Shapiro's rule-of-law warning about Elon Musk ending USAID contracts outside judicial process, conceded by Vance.