Multipolarity

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?

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...