Multipolarity

The Chinese are backing the Argentinian claims to the Falklands, with hot anti-colonialist rhetoric. With America still neutral, is Britain heading towards a Suez two-point oh moment? And perhaps more importantly: have we reached a sinister new milestone in the multipolar era – where old colonial grievances become brand new proxy wars?Back in Britain, the Bank of England are looking to re-bottle the inflation genie with another big rate hike. Are they being too aggressive? When it comes to destroying the British economy, do they just need to finish the job the government started? Finally, for decades Germans have lived by the schwarze null: the so-called Black Zero of a balanced budget. Meanwhile, the likes of Italy lived by the red billion. With interest rates spiking, and a new kind of Eurozone crisis brewing, are we about to see the continuation of what is effectively a culture war across the beer/wine line? 

This week leads on an extraordinary story. A new metric, from the world-leading science journal Nature has put Chinese universities above some of the most famous names in higher ed. MIT, Caltech, Cambridge and Imperial are all ranking lower than the likes of Nanjing and Tsinghua. Andrew Collingwood is interested in how far behind the times our cultural imagination is with regards to China. While Philip Pilkington senses that the gains to being world-best will soon start to turn exponential. Both are mildly baffled as to how we've come up with a ranking system that doesn't prioritise innovative research. With China already producing more STEM PhDs than the US, is the Western university still fit for purpose? In Germany, years of pacifism won't be shucked off as easily as Russian shelling of Kiev. The country's incoming coalition government had threatened to raise the national budget. Instead, its defence minister has had to content himself with 'not having the budget cut'. So is Germany's long-held pacifism turning pathological? Or will they wake up to a multipolar world before it's too late? Meanwhile, it's Iran Nuclear Deal season again. After Trump tore up the Obama era plan, and Biden then won re-election promising to put it back, the going has not been slow. For now, the Iranians are continuing to enrich their party packs of uranium. And in a multipolar world, there is no longer so much that the Americans can offer them to stop. The decisive turn, as Philip Pilkington notes, may come from Israel. As alliances swirl, will they continue their targeted assassinations of top scientists? Or is there even a world in which they come down on the side of the mullahs?

This week, the lads are down the shopping mall... Commercial property is looking increasingly un-commercial. As businesses bail out of downtown post-Covid, it’s threatening to create a downward spiral that drags the banks with it. But will the banks then drag entire cities down with them? America has spent decades taking out Europe’s trash. But if there were a war in Taiwan, a new survey suggests there’s almost no European appetite to back them up. So why don’t young Belgians want to die to prevent two ethnically identical countries merging some 6000 miles away? Finally… Diplomatic ties with Iran; an accord with Israel. The Saudis have been busy making friends. Now, like any suddenly popular kid, they’re ditching their old mates. Is the Kingdom finally taking a step back from its pals in Washington? 

Tim Cook. Elon Musk. Warren Buffet. Jeff Bezos. Jamie Dimon. Lately, a who’s who of American business power has been sent over to meet their Chinese counterparts. With embassy-level diplomacy increasingly in the deep freeze, are they using their corporate rockstars to do what the State Department can’t? Meanwhile, inside China, as the post-Covid recovery slows, we may be about to see the economy of Keynes’ dreams swing into action, as the Chinese get busy building. Will it be a clunking fist, or a jumpstart to the heart? Finally, Germany’s recession dials are blinking red. Will the airbags inflate on their auto industry? Or is this the moment their national chest cavity is speared on the steering column? 

What is Britain's industrial policy? What should it be? In this Anglo-centric Twitter Spaces debate, we're joined by 'rising star of the Tory right', Miriam Cates MP. Talking alongside her is SDP leader William Clouston, and Michael Taylor, who runs Coldwater Economics, and publishes an excellent Substack called The Long March. After several off-beat editions, we'll be back to the normal format on Thursday.

This episode is brought to you by Twitter Spaces. With an elephantine 2.5 hour running time, we've gone gonzo, and turned one of our regular Twitter Spaces into a hybrid episode of Multipolarity, recorded live. In addition to all the usual Pilkington-Collingwood goodness, we were joined by a range of listener-guests, including the Ireland commentator Peter Ryan, and the Swedish gadfly Malcom Kyeyune (@Tinkzorg).

Peter Zeihan is a big noise these days. He put in a stellar appearance on Joe Rogan. He's got a new book out: The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization. Zeihan is making big-picture geopolitics cool, creating a mass audience for the kinds of things we do at Multipolarity.But the lads also have some issues with PZ. His takes can seem awfully deterministic. And he's obsessed with demography, in a way that seems to miss more subtle factors at play. In this special Q&A episode, we're layered in on one question, sent by a listener, and answered it for over one hour and twenty minutes, as a way of getting to grips with Zeihanism, and what it can teach us. Is America the only true geopolitical fortress state? Is China already in the maw of inevitable population collapse and decline? Is US Naval retreat from the high seas really going to sever the cords of globalisation? Is Europe screwed? The lads take each area in turn, for a full world-view world tour. An odyssey of contra-Zeihan.

In the week after the Bank of England once again raised rates, our geopolitics lads are entertaining the theory that this is about more than just crushing inflation. Britain is being forced to shadow the Fed, as 'carry' becomes ever-more important in an unsettled global forex market. Andrew Collingwood sees Zungzwang in Britain's future: the unpleasant consequences of stagnation and debt overhang are all coming home to roost. In the UK today, when it rains it pours. Meanwhile, California's budget deficit has hit ten percent, and Philip Pilkington sees this as emblematic of a bigger problem in the US: the collapse of the Friends and Seinfeld era. As the city becomes less and less palatable, and as blue state city mismanagement seemingly becomes the norm, how will our economies terraform to a more suburban 21st century? Finally, the lads are giving Giorgia Meloni a bit of rate or slate action. Italy is pulling out of Belt & Road. What does this seismic event tell us about her, and the country's future? Is it possible to be both a populist and an Atlanticist?

Interest rates policy has bedevilled the West ever since Alan Greenspan first put the Fed on the floor in the wake of 9/11. With rates finally returning to realistic levels, we're seeing the impact of what you might call a two decade bubble: banks being squeezed to breaking point. Philip Pilkington is angry at what he sees as central banks using their rates policy as a thermostat 'to turn consumer demand up or down'. Meanwhile, Germany has just recorded a ten per cent dip in industrial output - the largest fall on record. After WWII, Roosevelt's Secretary of State Hans Morgenthau once wanted to return the Ruhr industrial lands to pasture, and make Germany eternally toothless. Will the country's energy policy succeed where he failed? More broadly, is this the moment at which Europe joins Britain in the club of so-called 'service economies': its industrial base outsourced and rotted away? Finally, Andrew Collingwood returns to a long-forgotten conflict: the Syrian Civil War. Unremarked upon, the war is at an effective end, and the country is to be readmitted to the Arab League, more than a decade since it was expelled. Bashar al-Assad will return to a changed Middle East. New alliances. New faces. What does his victory against the odds - and with Russian help - tell us about the failures of Western foreign policy, and what can still be redeemed?

This week, our lads find themselves in the presence of Professor Stephen Walt. A professor of politics at the Harvard Kennedy School, Walt is the arch neo-realist, often bracketed alongside John Mearsheimer. Walt made his name opposing the Iraq War. He has long taken a cautious approach to US and Western foreign policy. He recently wrote that he sees a role for a Sino-American peace plan in Ukraine. Historically, Walt has advocated for looser relations with Iran; he was sympathetic to maintaining Gaddafi's Libya, and is skeptical of the power of the Israel lobby in driving America's Middle Eastern policy. Walt speaks to Europe's role in an increasingly multipolar world - as America looks to pivot to Asia, will the continent be capable of stepping up? Or will that step require more political co-ordination than the present EU can cope with? And how will America actually deal with having to relinquish the reins? Finally, the lads want to know: will the multipolar age more stable, because power is diffused? Or will it be it less so - because two distinct great powers are much more predictable?