Multipolarity

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.

Samo Burja, sociologist and founder of Bismarck Analysis, studies geopolitics, demographics and tech. He explains live vs dead players and how post-Cold War choices shaped global power. He discusses China–Russia synergies, limits of sanctions and trade wars, and the three megatrends: a graying planet, stagnant energy demand, and AI-driven automation.

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...

Turkey has the best performing stock market in the world this year. In part, this is to do with how it has under-performed in previous years. But, as our duo point out, it's also to do with a country taking advantage of the present multipolar fracture. The classic trade and politics hinge-nation, Erdogan's Turkey is finally in a position to exploit its rich advantages. What makes an army powerful? Where's the Big Mac Index on military strength? Philip Pilkington has been digging deep into the data on who has what materiel, and what it's actually worth, and his findings will make for uncomfortable reading in the Pentagon. Is the West hooked on expensive high-tech gadgetry that might have been impressive in a Desert Storm-style campaign, but, as Ukraine shows, doesn't deliver on a brutal WWI-style battlefield? Finally, the Chinese have been on a charm offensive of both charm and offence - their top diplomat has been wooing Europe, and making special entreaties towards Britain - even as the Chinese foreign ministry has been publishing Mao-style denunciations of the Great American Satan on its website. Is there method in the madness? Or is this just diplomacy by confusion? Andrew Collingwood tries to piece together the inscrutability.

In the week that Ireland is gripped by widespread anti-migrant protests, resident Celt Phil Pilkington explains why the present wave of populist sentiment might no longer be containable by the political elite. As Andrew Collingwood points out, the 1950s migration treaties that still run our world were designed for a post-WW2 world long consigned to history. Yet to national bureaucracies, they're still a fundamental part of the 'rules-based international order'. So will that order finally absorb the change, or will it simply crack first?A new Cambridge study unveils a world where Anglo-Saxon 'soft power' is dimming. In the great global popularity contest, the rising powers are beginning to win the hearts and minds of potential allies in developing countries. But does being liked ever actually matter in geopolitics? As Pilkington points out, popularity tends to follow events - not the other way round. As if to illustrate this, one of America's greatest allies in the Pacific has recently had a change of regime. With China fan President Duterte out, and the US-supporting Bongbong Marcos in, American bases are sprouting again in the Philippines. Yet even as Uncle Sam wins one back, the long-term trade trend with the country still strongly favours China. Who will win this tug of love?

Like so many other social media addicts, our duo were in thrall to the rogue Chinese weather balloon over the weekend. But while the rest of the commentariat were fuming at the security implications, Philip Pilkington and Andrew Collingwood are far more mystified at all the performative screeching. As Collingwood points out: "A balloon is a hundred year old technology..." In Nigeria, an attempt to vault over its range of monetary problems by using a so-called 'stable coin' digital currency has quickly descended into farce: riots and bank runs. With the Fed and the Bank of England both on the stable coin bandwagon, the Multipolarity team are curious as to why central bankers the world over are trying to foist these imperfect solutions onto us. Meanwhile, one year on from the invasion of Ukraine, can we finally conclude that the much-heralded sanctions on Russia have not only failed, but given the West itself a bloody nose? And is the political establishment finally softening up the public to confront this unpleasant truth? Code: tYv3C8aT0EdQKS1b3sYm

Philip Pilkington came of age in the shadow of the great Irish property bust of 2008 - it was one of the key reasons he became a macro-economist. Now, as he warns, history is about to repeat itself. The market indicators are flashing red on both sides of the Atlantic. As we hurtle down the real estate rollercoaster for a long-overdue correction, can the West deal with this reversal? Or are we now too over-leveraged to have any financial. weapons left in our arsenal? Meanwhile, in China, as the rest of the world founders, the challenge to growth is growing more acute. We dive deep into recent Chinese economic history, to locate a golden zone in the 1990s, to which the country may be about to return, and explain why the gamified approach of AliExpress may be finally reversing decades of sluggish domestic consumption. Finally, Andrew Collingwood picks up news of a major new investment pact between Russia and Iran that aims to outflank traditional trade routes by building a series of roads, rails and ports connecting Russia to India, via Iran and Azerbajain. As Philip Pilkington points out, longer-term, the economic implications may be dwarfed by the cultural ones.

Latin America's giants have come together. The Brazilian Real and the Argentinian Peso are to be joined together in a prospective currency union - or at least a “regional unit of account". The prospect of one of the world's most consistent debt defaulters coming together with the often chaotic Brazilian economy has been greeted by some European economists as 'a terrible idea'. But as Philip Pilkington argues, the upsides of controlling inflation make this a very different prospect to the growth-crushing Euro. Meanwhile, Andrew Collingwood is just as interested in what this means for US hegemony over the region. Is the so-called Monroe Doctrine dead? Or will America retaliate, if this tiny seedling eventually sprouts? Whichever way this goes, it seems that getting off the US Dollar is becoming more feasible for emerging economies. We've ripped up the week's agenda to focus on currency unions: considered dead ten years ago, are they making an unlikely comeback?