Multipolarity

Ukraine has lost its grain deal. Russian fertiliser is struggling to get to market. Now India wants to ban exports of non-Basmati rice. The ratchet on food prices is by no means over. Now, the ratchet on politics really begins. Where are the next big food riots going to come from? Call in the plumbers: there’s a big blockage in the UK gilt markets. Why is liquidity suddenly drying up in a two trillion Pound pool? And what happens next – now that the British government might be forced to double its deficit?Remember the Huawei 5G Ban? For almost three years, sanctions on microchips knocked the Chinese out of the high end phone business. Now, it seems the company has managed to produce its own chips. Is there anything we can’t incentivise them to make better than us? **** Follow us on Twitter: @multipolarpodOr on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@multipolaritythepodcast

De-dollarisation. We've been warning about it since the start of the show. But it won't happen overnight. To arrive at a place where the dollar is just one of many global currencies is the work of years, maybe decades. In this Special Edition, our duo are taking the long view. We're going right back to Bretton Woods, to Nixon & The Gold Window, to the Emerging Markets Crisis of 97 and 98, and to the long sag of post-2008, to trace the internal logic of the dollar system. Then, we're peering into the near future: what could possibly replace it? How long would that take? Are there brakes on this train?

Malcom Kyeyune (@Tinkzorg on Twitter) is one of the smartest, most far-seeing commentators out there. Someone the lads have really chimed with. Earlier in this bonanza week, we paired him with Elbridge Colby, for a Twitter Spaces debating whether America could ever take a Realist turn. Now, he's back for a solo show. The lads go deep into Chairman Kyeyune Thought: from the worthlessness of much US military hardware, to the unrecognised shrinkage of the US economy on a PPP basis, to the cosplaying of Swedes in NATO. "So much of our politics today is just about managing narratives." "Will we act before the bad things happen? The signs are not auspicious..." "I'm optimistic... even if there is a nuclear war, five per cent of humanity will probably survive... and that's enough to repopulate the earth." Cheery guy.

Can you still get your Germanium on AliExpress? After the US restricted Chinese access to high-end chips, China is looking to ban this vital chip ingredient. So where do we go from here? Can America ban the stuff that makes Germanium? Or is this the Chinese going one step up in the chip wars?  For months, elements within NATO have been piling on the pressure to open a liaison office in Japan. The French think that’s a terrible idea. This week, they finally exercised their veto. So as the world becomes ever-more security-centred, what happens to Western powers that aren’t in the North Atlantic?  Finally, the US is sending cluster bombs to Ukraine. Or controversial cluster bombs to give them their full name. Now that even Rishi Sunak has come out against the decision, it seems  a wedge is about to be driven through the Western alliance. More broadly – are we about to move beyond the Geneva convention consensus on what weapons are barbarous?

This week, we hosted a special Twitter Spaces debate, now re-published as a podcast. The topic was: "Is Realism realistic for America, or will liberal idealists and neocons always control US foreign policy?" Can America's animal spirits shift strategy? We were joined by two of the world's top thinkers on the question, each with a distinct angle. @ElbridgeColby is the architect of the 2018 US National Defence Strategy, is the principal of the Marathon Initiative, which develops strategies to prepare the US for an era of sustained great power competition. His book, The Strategy of Denial, caused a sensation in International Relation circles.Malcolm Kyeyune (@tinkzorg) is a Swedish journalist who writes for @compactmag_, @unherd and @AmericanAffrsHis brilliant essay, The Tragedy of Foreign Policy Realism, praised Elbridge Colby's book but suggested that America would struggle to ever accept a Realist foreign policy.Here, they're joined by the lads - Collingwood as moderator, Pilkington as agent provocateur, in a spirited discussion that BLOWS THE LIVING BEJEESUS out of everything you EVER THOUGHT YOU UNDERSTOOD about International Relations. After 90 minutes, the stream was ended suddenly by a technical error, after a toaster blew up in the recording studio, setting fire to the reel-to-reels - apologies for the abruptness.

As France mops up the ashes of the burnt-out banlieues, data shows national food spending is down thirty per cent year on year. It’s not quite Les Miserables, but right across Europe, it seems that hangry might turn out to be the dominant political mode of 2023.China is building a trade superweapon. They’ve just created a brand new foreign relations department that will have the scope to take charge of tariffs and imports. It feels like we’ve arrived at the mutually assured destruction phase of a potential trade war. The question is: will anyone be bold enough to punch in the launch codes?A shock German poll suggests the AfD is within 3 points of the centre-right CDU. With the centre-left SPD of Olaf Scholz lagging behind both, it seems as though the next German election coalition could be between the right and the hard-right.So will the country be able to hold onto its historic cordon sanitaire? Or is this the moment when even the eternally dull German politics finally gets spicy?

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?