Velina Tchakarova on China, Russia, and the Future of Geopolitics

Velina Tchakarova — geopolitical strategist and founder of FACE — joins Tyler Cowen for Ep. 214 to argue that the world has already bifurcated into two centres of power, that China will absorb Taiwan by subversion rather than invasion, and that Russia’s horizon extends well beyond Ukraine.

Key ideas

1. The world is bipolar, not multipolar — and has been since 2014. Against the prevailing consensus that we are sliding into a multipolar order with many competing powers, Tchakarova has argued since 2014 that only two centres of power matter — the United States and China — with everything else oscillating in a grey zone between them. Russia aligned definitively with China in 2014 when Western sanctions threatened its economy; the middle powers (India being the clearest example) are still trying to capitalise from both sides, but the underlying structure is binary.
2. China will take Taiwan by ‘death by a thousand cuts’, not by military assault. Tchakarova is unconvinced by the 2027 invasion scenario. The terrain of Taiwan restricts a viable attack window to roughly two periods a year; the terrain itself is more difficult than anything in the current Ukraine war; and the probability of military success is below 50 per cent. A decade-long campaign of political, economic, and social subversion — buying institutional actors, exploiting Taiwan’s democratic openness, using plausible deniability — offers far better odds and fits the strategic temperament of the Chinese leadership.
3. The ‘DragonBear’ is a modus vivendi, not a formal alliance. Tchakarova coined the term to describe the China–Russia relationship: a durable coordination that does not require a signed strategic pact. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was enabled by Xi Jinping’s assurance of comprehensive support, and China has honoured that commitment even while officially professing neutrality. Putin correctly bet that triggering the systemic US–China competition faster than Beijing was ready for it would still secure Chinese backing — and he was right.
4. Russia’s strategic ambition runs beyond Ukraine; the Baltic states are the plausible next test. Putin wants all of Ukraine, not just the territory currently held. A ceasefire would simply legitimise current gains and reset the clock for the next phase. If Russia succeeds substantially in Ukraine, the most probable next provocation is a move against the Baltics — specifically a test of NATO’s Article 5 — timed to exploit divisions within NATO or the European Union, or a change in US leadership. Moldova and Georgia (via Transnistria, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia) are intermediate steps.
5. Foresight is not prediction — and the distinction changes what a strategist does. Tchakarova draws a sharp line between forecasting (assigning probabilities to discrete outcomes) and foresight (mapping trend trajectories across interlinked global systems — energy, finance, trade, agriculture — to identify probable directions over 10–15 years). She anticipated the semiconductor bifurcation six or seven years before it became consensus, on the basis of trend analysis rather than event prediction. The practical output is not a specific call but a structural orientation that allows long-horizon investment and planning.

Content

The Balkans as a geopolitical laboratory

Tchakarova opens with her own backyard: Bulgaria and the broader Balkan region, which she reads as a live demonstration of geopolitical continuity rather than settled history. The term Balkanisation — splitting territories so that external powers can play local actors against one another — she treats as an operational concept still applied globally, not a historical artefact. Nationalist parties are gaining ground across the region on agendas largely unchanged for two centuries; demographic collapse (Bulgaria is among the fastest-shrinking populations in the world) has not dissolved these sentiments but has shifted the terrain on which they operate.

On the question of whether territorial irredentism — the old dream of a greater Bulgaria — could revive, Tchakarova is direct: it will not, so long as the European Union holds, because EU membership or candidacy creates enough incentive structures and resolution mechanisms to contain that energy. The real threat to Balkan stability she identifies is not traditional nationalism but the possible fracture of EU institutions themselves.

What predicts which Eastern European states remain close to Russia? Tchakarova resists generalisations but offers a rule of thumb: the closer geographically to the Russian core, the deeper the penetration and the harder to dislodge. Bulgaria’s relationship is rooted in a genuine popular sentiment — Russia helped create the modern Bulgarian state through the 1878 Russo-Turkish War, and that historical debt persists in political culture even today. Serbia’s proximity to Russia is more transactional: a great-power patron willing to back Serbia’s international position following Yugoslavia’s dissolution. The common thread is that Russian influence operates on multiple layers simultaneously — cultural, religious, economic, and covert — making any single counter-lever insufficient.

China and Taiwan: the slow-absorption thesis

Tchakarova rejects the dominant Western military-analyst scenario of a Chinese assault on Taiwan by 2027. Her case rests on three pillars.

First, geography: Taiwan can only be attacked during approximately two windows per year (roughly April and October), a constraint well-known to Taiwanese defence planners and exploitable in ways that make a rapid fait accompli implausible.

Second, terrain: even without factoring in US military intervention, Taiwan’s physical geography makes the island vastly harder to seize than a continental land mass. The current Ukraine war, fought on relatively open terrain, already shows how costly offensive operations are against a prepared defender.

Third, strategic logic: China’s leadership has historically preferred patient, indirect accumulation over high-risk gambles. What Tchakarova calls death by a thousand cuts — agents of influence, economic interdependencies, political subversion, exploiting Taiwan’s democratic openness — costs less, fails more gracefully if it goes wrong, and has a higher expected payoff than an invasion that, even if militarily successful, would trigger global isolation and economic catastrophe.

She acknowledges the black-swan scenario: a domestic political crisis in China so severe that Xi Jinping is forced to manufacture a foreign policy adventure to restore legitimacy. That possibility she treats as real but unlikely to be his first move.

Russia’s war and what comes next

On Ukraine, Tchakarova discloses a forecasting miss of her own: in December 2021 she was confident war was coming but expected it to begin in the east and south as a limited operation, not the five-direction full-scale assault that materialised in February 2022. Her explanation for what she got wrong: a confluence of global factors — the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, political vacuums during key European elections, Europe’s worst energy and food-price crises in a decade — made the wider gamble look rational to Putin. Most importantly, he had secured Xi Jinping’s assurance of comprehensive support, which removed the constraint he most needed to manage.

Going forward, she rejects the scenario in which Putin accepts a partial Ukraine as a durable outcome. Each ceasefire since 2014 has been used as a pause to regroup and advance; the pattern is rinse-and-repeat, not conclude. A ceasefire that legitimises current Russian territorial gains is therefore not a stable endpoint but a waypoint. The subsequent agenda, if Russia succeeds substantially in Ukraine, runs through Moldova and Georgia first (existing Russian footholds in Transnistria and the separatist territories make these lower-cost moves), then to a potential test of Article 5 against the Baltic states. The timing of a Baltic provocation would be calibrated to moments of NATO or EU disunity — and Tchakarova treats such moments as increasingly likely over the next several years.

She is sceptical of the Poland-next scenarios some analysts raise: Poland’s likely acquisition of nuclear weapons makes that a categorically different risk calculus.

Nuclear risk: where the threshold is lowest

On nuclear weapons, Tchakarova holds two positions simultaneously. First, Russia’s nuclear blackmail over Ukraine has not materially raised the probability of actual use — nuclear threats have been a tool of legitimising territorial conquest, not a precursor to deployment. Russia has abundant conventional weapons systems; it does not need a tactical nuclear weapon to fight Ukraine. Second, if forced to nominate the single most plausible use case, she picks Russia against Ukraine — the one scenario where a desperate leadership might reach for the option — over North Korea (which would be annihilated by the two patrons whose survival depends on keeping Pyongyang as a controlled source of regional instability) or the United States (which has a decades-long track record of absorbing military defeats without nuclear escalation). She raises the Middle East as a speculative outlier: Iran’s nuclear programme means Israel might pre-emptively use its own arsenal, but she treats this as intellectually possible rather than probable.

The DragonBear: bipolarity diagnosed early

The episode’s most distinctive intellectual contribution is Tchakarova’s account of her own analytical method and how it generated the China–Russia modus vivendi thesis a decade before it became mainstream. She began developing the concept of a unified global system — interlinked networks of finance, energy, trade, and food — in 2014, and from that vantage point could see that what looked to most analysts like a multipolar world with several roughly equal great powers was in fact a binary structure with a large grey zone. Russia’s alignment in 2014 was the decisive move; the subsequent decade has been the grey zone gradually losing the freedom to stay neutral.

The DragonBear, as she defines it, is not a formal military alliance — both partners would deny it and it requires no treaty — but a durable operational alignment in which each partner supports the other’s core interests without formal co-ordination. It functions precisely because of its informality: each party retains plausible deniability while the practical effects of mutual support accumulate.

Foresight as a discipline

The final section is methodological. Tchakarova distinguishes foresight — her practice — from prediction and forecasting. Forecasters assign probabilities to specific events; she instead maps the interaction of large-scale socioeconomic trends to identify the structural direction of travel over 10–15 years. The semiconductor thesis is her worked example: she invested in semiconductors six or seven years before the decoupling became visible in tariffs and export controls, on the basis that global system bifurcation would concentrate demand for strategic components. The methodology requires, she argues, freedom from personal biases and a willingness to be right in ways that cannot be demonstrated to clients until the reality catches up — a long period of working in apparent isolation from the consensus.

She distinguishes her work from the daily political consultancy most clients are familiar with (tracking specific actors, interpreting yesterday’s events) and from the quantitative geopolitical risk indexes that attempt to aggregate news sentiment algorithmically. Her method is qualitative and structural; its outputs are not point predictions but orientations.

Related

• Velina Tchakarova — speaker; geopolitical strategist and founder of FACE
• Tyler Cowen — host
• Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other — related episode; complements Tchakarova’s China analysis with a granular account of Chinese industrial and political culture