Multipolarity

This week, ordinary geopolitics lads Andrew Collingwood and Philip Pilkington are back on the case of Janet Yellen. A week ago, she made incoherent comments about American foreign policy. Now, she's giving a big speech about China, and the results are only marginally better. Is Yellen being given contradictory objectives by her boss? Or is it simply the case that, with US hegemony haemorrhaging away, all the options are now bad? As China retaliates over the US chip ban, the global microprocessor chess game has become its own form of geopolitics chess. With both the US and its rivals seeking to build self-contained chip processing infrastructure, smaller countries are being asked to pick winners. At the same time, with Ukraine also bisecting the developing world, being a minnow nation has never been trickier. Does America have enough diplomatic gas in the tank to both support Ukraine and sew up the high-end chip market? Philip Pilkington is skeptical. Finally, with Chile nationalising its lithium, Indonesia imposing an export ban on nickel, and the 'OPEC for lithium' idea still floating around, Andrew Collingwood updates us on the race to define how the market for key 21st century metals will operate. After all, if green technology simply results in different cartels and political misadventures in different parts of the world to oil - is it really a win at all?

This week, the lads have been heartened and dismayed by public statements from the two most eminent female economists of our time. Christine Lagarde and Janet Yellen. But while Yellen fell back onto tired old State Department talking points, Lagarde gave a pitch-perfect introduction to the multipolar age. Does the global elite finally get it? And if so, how will they trim their sheets from here on out? While he was dealing with the Irish Republican Army on his foreign trip last week, Joseph Biden was hanging ever more of his domestic credibility on another IRA -the Inflation Reduction Act. Philip Pilkington sees two big takeaways from this $500 billion barrel of pork. First: the return of real dirigiste industrial policy to America. Secondly: the advent of Big Green as a powerful lobbying force on Capitol Hill. Meanwhile, Andrew Collingwood has been watching Lula enter through the Beijing door that Macron just exited - bearing a similar amount of fresh deals and good cheer from President Xi. As they watch China build out Brazil's 5G network, will there, he wonders, be a sniff of buyers' regret from the 'Manhattan charity auction set' for having backed a Chomskyite old-Marxist over the more unpalatable, yet much more US-friendly, Jair Bolsonaro?

This week, the lads are trying not to speculate on the exact nature of the Pentagon 'leak' that came out over the Easter weekend. Is it disinfo or just someone with an axe to grind? It's unclear, which is why we're casting out to what may happen beyond the summer - what if catastrophic collapse does indeed come to Ukraine's teetering defences? Who wins what, and how do we keep the fragile world order together? Before he'd touched down in Paris from his China trip, Emmanuel Macron was back on manoeuvres. He gave an airborne interview to Politico in which he laid out a much more Sino-centric view of the coming order. One that had little time for the US line on Taiwan. What is he playing at? Philip Pilkington reckons this one may end up being 'the story of the year'. And then there's the rare earths. They're in everything now. And 85 per cent of them come from China. With a Chip Ban retaliation on rare earth metals in the offing, Andrew Collingwood recalls what happened when China gave Japan a brief taste of what life is like without these strange magnetic substances. Key finding: not good.

After years of carping from the Remain establishment, Britain has finally come to its senses and joined a big trading bloc. But no - not that one. Will life in Asia’s CPTPP allow the UK to export their famous services economy? And what will Brits do with all the cheap leggings they get in return?As China leans ever-further into an eventual Ukrainian peace, France is looking to broker the brokering. At least, that seems to be the key motive of President Macron’s trip to Beijing. The boys wonder whether he isn't channeling the wily spirit of Charles de Gaulle, in trying to make the country a great power amongst the middle-powers. Meanwhile, in the past year, your local shadow bank has leant out $1.4 Trillion. With private equity loaning their way around the banking system, are we all sitting on a powder keg of off-balance sheet ordnance? Or are we just scared of our own shadow dollars? Philip Pilkington has been doing some digging, and his uncomfortable answer is: we'll only know if and when it blows...

This week, our boys are on the trail of the continuing fallout from SVB. With Credit Suisse the next domino in what is looking increasingly like a chain, Philip Pilkington has been doing some digging on system liquidity, and his findings are hair-raising. This, it would seem, is already the biggest run since 1980. And with a new suite of consumer-facing digital banking products that make removing your money a few clicks, are we about to face runs of a speed and scale previous eras couldn't match? In France, Jupiter Himself is heading to Hades. Macron's dictatorial pension reforms are being forged through a haze of teargas. But are these national riots a uniquely French event? Or are they just the harbinger of what's to come for Europe, as the cost of living crisis becomes maddening? Finally, in Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu's knack for political survival is being tested to the limits by huge protests over his judicial reforms. With the State Department seemingly coming down on the side of the protesters - Andrew Collingwood wonders whether the US's increasingly 'ethical' foreign policy in danger of alienating its greatest Middle East ally.

As part of our tenth episode celebrations, we've taken soundings from the loyal listeners, and come up with a list of questions to ask Andrew Collingwood and Philip Pilkington. The boys cover all the ground in the world. The Mexican cartel wars. The potential for Polish supremacy in Eastern Europe. What to do about foreign aid. Declining Western living standards. And the prospects for Multipolarity's Souvenir Shipping Choke Point Tea Towels. Hosted by Comedy Gavin, the show's producer, this is Multipolarity after hours: with its hair ruffled, its suit crumpled, a glass of gin in one hand, and a well-thumbed paperback of MacKinder in its back pocket.

This week, we're celebrating our recent tenth show with a double-header. Breaking out of the usual format, we have an interview with a thought leader, plus a special listener Q&A with Ladsie & Boysie themselves, Andrew Collingwood and Philip Pilkington, featuring another very unusual guest. Today is part one of that double-header. We're delighted to welcome Samo Burja to the pod. Samo is a sociologist who has risen to prominence on the analyst scene in the past few years, mainly via his popular and influential Substack. A fellow at the The Long Now Foundation, and senior research fellow at Foresight Institute, his Bismarck Analysis consultancy deals in the geopolitics, technology, demographic and cultural trends that will define the 21st century. He analyses at the scale of 'mega-trends', and has contributed a range of useful coinages to the lexicon, from "Intellectual Dark Matter", to "Live And Dead Players". Naturally, the lads have plenty to dig into - from China's deliberately backwards agricultural policy, to the diplomatic fulcrum that might be breaking Europe away from the US.

The Multipolarity group chat exploded over the weekend, as news of the Silicon Valley Bank implosion began to break. Andrew Collingwood is angry at what amounts to a subsidy for rich depositors. Philip Pilkington reminds us that simple deposit insurance could have solved this - and warns that this rule change is now effectively permanent. What does the world of banking look like, now that the rule: 'all deposits are covered at all sizes' has been instantiated into US orthodoxy? Back in Britain, a Defence Select Committee has heard that it will take ten years for the country to replenish the arms it has already sent to Ukraine. If our enemies won't wait, then surely now is the moment to do something no government has done in half a century - protect and develop British manufacturing? Finally, is Xi Jinping in line for the Nobel Peace Prize? As miraculous bolts from the blue go, the Iran-Saudi deal might be more than Nelson Mandela ever managed. If the Middle East's two duelling regional powers are actually making peace, then how will those left out of step by this reorientation fare? Can Israel still trust America? Or will it too have to carve a new, multipolar path.

Tech-wise, lithium is in everything from electric vehicles to mobile phones. And for an element so high up the periodic table, it's surprisingly hard to find. So, much like oil in the 1970s, are we on the brink of the major lithium miners forming their own cartel? Who's holding the cards here? Which nation might be about to become the next Saudi Arabia? And how will this changing strategic resource picture affect the decade to come? Recent war games, simulating a great power conflict with China, resulted in US simulators being blown out of the bathtub. As Andrew Collingwood explains, America has spent twenty years gearing up to fight insurgencies. Now that the spectre of great power warfare has returned, it's not clear they have the right tanks and the right guns to take on a China that is going hammer-and-tongs for more materiel. Finally, Hungarians have kept warm this winter by engaging in strategic ambiguities over Ukraine. They've invited the ire of the EU, but is their foreign policy just a reflection of the sort of strategic pivots that will required more and more of small states as the multipolar world becomes a reality? Philip Pilkington seems to think so.

This week, Philip Pilkington is hammering a term he claims will soon be everywhere: "The Great Divergence". What becomes of the global balance of power when, as seems likely in 2023, there is simultaneously a recession in the West, and a boom in the East? It's never happened before. So how will we learn to live on a two speed planet? Meanwhile, the chip ban has failed. Touted only months ago as a major new plank in Biden foreign policy, the figures are now in: the only real impact has been to allow China to dominate the Russian semiconductor market. Trade, like life, finds a way. But didn't we already know this? As the duo point out, it holds lessons for economists, who seem ever-more off their brief since the pandemic. Finally, suave technocrat Tony Blair has decided that the West needs to combat rival poles like Russia and China, as they gobble up influence in Africa. The democratic powers seem to be on the back foot, but as Andrew Collingwood points out, given Africa's long-standing instability, the route to influence is anything but straightforward. On this continent at least, coups will continue to dominate the great game...