Podcast
Multipolarity
Hosted by Multipolarity · EN
Charting The Rise Of A Multipolar World Order
Philip Pilkington is an unorthodox macroeconomist.
Andrew Collingwood is an equally skeptical journalist.
Lately, both have realised that - post-Ukraine, post-Afghanistan withdrawal - the old, unipolar, US-led world order is in its death throes.
In its wake, something new is being born. But what shape will that take? That will depend on a combustible combination of economics and geopolitics; trade and military muscle.
Each week, our duo take three off-radar news stories and explain how each is shaping our multipolar reality.
22episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
All Your Base Are Belong To Us, The People’s Carcrash, Our Democracy
6d ago01:05:40Tap to summarizeYou’ve heard of de-Baathification? Now what about de-baseification? The gradual chipping back of US strategic assets in the Gulf as each in turn comes under pressure from drone and rocket fire… till only a handful of super-bases remain.Iran’s president says country is in ‘full-scale war’ after an expansion of US attacks. They’ve struck US interests in Bahrain, Kuwait - and the Houthis are blockading Saudi ports. The US was unlikely to win this war - but now it seems it could actually lose it. Meanwhile… 14%. 18%. 18% Year-on-year sales drops at Volkswagen, and Audi and Porsche, which it owns, respectively. Germany’s biggest auto maker is in free fall, with warnings of 50 000 job cuts. But Chinese competition is only half the problem. Finally, the main public TV station has been shut down overnight. The President has been summarily dismissed by a dubious constitutional amendment. And the opposition leader has been banned from standing for re-election. The new leader parades round in Mao suits, making agit prop video tours of the former regime’s residences to stoke up his base. As the airwaves breathe static, will the EU send troops to restore democracy in the little-known far-off nation of Hungary?
Transcribe →Iran: The Oil Price War With Conventional War Characteristics
2w ago00:44:40Tap to summarizeThis week: two audio essays, on one big Iran cluster-frig. In the Collingwood corner: Donald Trump has become an unreadable politician. His credibility has burst through various levels of ‘madman theory’ negotiating prowess, into a place where it may not even be clear to his most intimate subordinates where his true intent begins and ends. The result is that US policy is now a broken sail, flapping in the wind. Originally, America had four aims: dismantle Iran's nuclear programme, cap its missiles and drones, cut off its proxies, and change the regime. With nil-for-four, the window to credibly settle this beef is getting farther away – not closer. Meanwhile, chez Pilkington: The US now believes it can ‘print oil’. That the present attempt to jigger the markets by making use of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and various ‘Whale of Hormuz’ attempts to rig the options market are long-term sustainable. They are not, as Phil points out. What goes up must come down, and the slip-slide will not be pretty. Rather than a war of attrition, Pilko suggests, the oil price war has become the totality of conflict – a Baudrillardian quarrel over supremacy of a number – only secondarily underpinned by the drones and bombs of the Arabian Gulf. Yes, it’s time to up the escitalopram – enter code HAPPYPILLS26 at checkout to redeem this offer.
Transcribe →Slipping and Sliding, Spit and Polish
3w ago00:56:48Tap to summarizeIt’s an oil rush. Fill your boots, fellers, America is releasing its strategic petroleum reserves, ostensibly to see down Iranian pressure. Good news for voters, great news for foreign countries who want to sponge of the US teat. But in its ducking and diving haste, has the Trump administration inadvertently drunk its own milkshake? Then in the second half of a two-parter, we’re digging into the brewing Ukranian-Polish conflict. At the earliest days of the Ukraine War, around 2014, their Parliament passed a series of laws which granted official veteran status to a couple of Second World War military groups who had, shall we say, colourful pasts. Recently, the Polish President withdrew the Polish White Eagle decoration from President Zelenskyy after Ukraine named an elite special unit after one such. Hundreds of hatchets were buried after Communism, but now, despite the shock of the war, old animosities are bubbling to the surface. And with them, the facade of a united Europe begins to crack.
Transcribe →Pilkington Vs Collingwood: A Multipolarity Q&A Special
4w ago00:11:50Tap to summarizeThis week on Multipolarity, we’re taking your questions.It’s a Q&A episode, involving queries sent in by our loyal listeners.Questions like:How did you guys meet?(Drunk, at a party).Which EU country will be first to do its own deal on Ukraine?(The first to fall to the populists)Where should young Euros emigrate to if Europe is ‘screwed’?(Find your bliss in the emerging world)Is the Rouble overvalued?(Depends on how you count)Could Turkey become the balancing power in the coming struggle between China and the US?(Probably not)What are the mechanics of oil price manipulation?(Dump a big short position on the market on Monday morning, squeeze the longs out)Why do we still live with the Boomer model of geopolitics?(Give it ten years)And several more. You had questions. We had answers.Of course, this week is a Pay Week - 1 in 4 episodes are gated for the folk who support our work. So if you want to get in amongst the Real Multipolarity Heads, you’ll need to sign up on Patreon or Substack. Substack gets you our print journalism too — head over, and get access to the entire back catalogue.
Transcribe →No Deal Is Better Than An Islama-bad Deal, The Godmother, Two Year Keir
Jun 2501:04:20Tap to summarizeIran’s 14 points: making the world safe for Shia Theocracy. Obviously, Donald Trump putting his John Hancock to the Islamabad Memorandum at Versailles carries absolutely no historical resonance. But after the occupation of the Ruhr and the abdication of the Kaiser, what else could the Mullahs possibly put on their shopping list? We’ll be picking through the carcrash, looking for signs of life in DC. Meanwhile, to cement his lousy week Donald got into a love tiff with Georgia Meloni at the G7. Was this a passing fugue of Italian passion? The flamethrower of a woman scorned? Or was it the beginning of the end of what we’ve dubbed the ‘Euroslopulists’ – fake populists kept on a long-short leash by Brussels and the European Central Bank? Finally, Donald Trump – remember him – managed to scoop the world’s press to the news that Keir Starmer would resign as British Prime Minister, being sure to spell his name wrong as a final boot in the teeth. Sir Keir has evoked the kind of visceral loathing among Brits normally reserved for child killers and queue jumpers. But who will they have left to blame when his affable dimwit successor blows up in half the time?
Transcribe →Multipolarity Dialogues: The Other Superweapon - Adventures In Chinese AI, with TP Huang
Jun 1800:53:18Tap to summarizeFable — a short fantastical tale with a moral message. For weeks, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei was telling anyone who’d listen that he’d invented an AI so powerful it could walk through walls, shoot sparrows from the sky, talk to horses, invent trees. A death star of tech. Whether this was part of the sales pitch or genuine alarm, the US Government has taken him at his word, and shut off access to it beyond America’s shores. Suddenly, the biggest tech of the 21st century is at the heart of a new age of mercantilism. The world is waking up. But some of the world was already awake. TP Huang is one of the best China watchers out there. A programmer and tech specialist, he sees an even bigger battle coming. The divergence of chip supply chains, ever since the Biden Administration’s October surprise in 2022, now stands ready to produce a space race over not just the chips, but the software itself. In that aspect, China is perpetually six months to a year behind. But is six months really decisive, when you can do everything at a fraction of the cost of your rivals? And when you’re not just bowing down before a brain in a jar, but embedding AI in factories and robots? While the world focuses on AGI psychodrama in California and flat-footed despair in Brussels, this week, TP is talking to Andrew Collingwood about the flint-eyed Chinese strategy to build a truly insulated supply chain within the next ten years. You can read his full piece, published in two parts, on the Multipolarity Substack. https://multipolaritypod.substack.com/p/the-struggle-for-mastery-of-the-21st
Transcribe →Strait To Hell, Kim Jong Boom, Armenian Roulette
Jun 1101:05:29Tap to summarizeIt’s war in our time. After flirting with peace for a few miserable hours, the US and Iran are back to what they know best: taking uneven chunks out of each other amidst the world’s prime oil pathway. This week, Iran levelled a terminal of Kuwait’s airport, and attacked the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain. Then there was that mysterious Apache helicopter crash off Hormuz. Now, after the crisp kinetic strikes of the first few weeks – then the tentative tests of strength – the war is entering a new phase.One in which Iran shows that the US will not be able to achieve on the negotiating table what it did not achieve on the battlefield. Meanwhile, it’s a thriving Asian tiger, the skyscraper skyline of its capital shows the bustle and optimism of the Rising East. Mobile phones. Electric cars. That’s right — North Korea is this year’s big economic success story, according to a new piece in the Wall Street Journal. Turns out the Hermit Kingdom is less hermetic these days. North Koreans have made good money providing weapons to Russia in Ukraine, and China has turned on the trade taps. Pyongyang no longer rations electricity to a few hours every day. So what happens when North Korea is no longer a Potemkin village but a Potemkin megalopolis? Meanwhile, lose a war, get voted back in. Three years after the catastrophe in Nagorno-Karabakh, what inspired the Armenian people to re-elect Nikol Pashinyan? Perhaps it was precisely because of how vulnerable the country feels itself to be. The strategy is to buy off and shore up: peace with Azerbaijan, EU candidacy, and normalisation with old enemy Turkey. But how low can you lie in a region that Russia sees as its backyard?Do check out our Substack if you can - https://multipolaritypod.substack.com/
Transcribe →Two Audio Essays: The Escalation Ladder & Weaponised Interdependence
Jun 400:11:36Tap to summarizeThis week: two audio essays. First up, they’re calling it the Poor Man’s Tomahawk. Ukraine is firing up to 2000 long range drones a week into Russia. The production facilities supplying them are scattered across Western Europe. These production facilities have an artificial shield, in that they are diplomatically protected. But how long this will last is unclear. For its part, Ukraine would like the West to be more active in the war. And one way to do that would be to antagonise Russia into responding beyond its borders. There is now a 50% chance of erratic strikes into Europe proper within the next year, as Philip Pilkington makes clear in The Escalation Ladder. Meanwhile, Andrew Collingwood has been supping on a 2019 masterwork of geopolitics. Weaponized Interdependence is the title of a Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman paper, in which the pair argue that states with political authority over the central "hubs" in global economic networks: such as those for finance, data, and trade, can exploit this position to gain a strategic advantage. States sitting atop those nodes can exploit two effects: panopticon (information dominance) and choke point (cutting off access to irreplaceable hubs).Hormuz is one hub. Russia has its commodity hubs. And China has its manufacturing hub dominance. Put it all together, and the new Iran war has revealed a structural shift in global power, says Andrew Collingwood. Of course, this is a pay week — if you want access to this episode, you’re going to have to go on Patreon, and sign up. Simply type Multipolarity into the search bar and do the needful. Alternatively, you can now get premium episodes and our regular print work over on Substack for 12 USD a month. The choice is yours, but don’t get caught in no man’s land.
Transcribe →Crossing The Orange Line, Hard Bargain, Sino Silicon
May 2801:03:41Tap to summarizeRussia has rained Oreshnik hypersonic missiles on Kiev. Four people killed. 549 missiles apparently shot down. This was a message. The Oreshnik travels at Mach 10. It was designed to deliver nukes. As fighting season starts in earnest, year five looks like it might be the start of real escalation. But, if Russian munitions start tiptoeing ever further West, could this be the year of, you know, real real escalation? Meanwhile, the US-Iran war peace talks are going well: Iran wants tolls on the strait. US says no. Iran wants 12 billion in reparations. US says no. Nuclear weapons? They’re being kicked into another round of talks-about-talks. So why is Little Marco still predicting a deal within days? Finally, Huawei say they have figured out a new approach to chip design that doesn’t require them to be smaller. “What happens when you’ve got a silicon chip the size of a dinner plate?” is one key question. Another is what happens when chips are no longer the ace card for Western leverage. Do check out our Substack if you can - https://multipolaritypod.substack.com/
Transcribe →Huawei With The Fairies, Land of The Falling Bond, Montezuma’s Other Revenge
May 2100:51:21Tap to summarizeDonald Trump took Elon Musk and Jensen Huang to Beijing with him for 48 hours. But rather than the frat boy big weekend of their autistic dreams, the trip turned into a sequel to The Hangover.A dressing down from President Xi on Iran, a few more soybeans flogged, and some Boeings on order: was it worth Jensen’s $17 000 an hour time?Meanwhile, the Japanese 10 year bond yield has climbed above the Chinese one. This is something of a sorpasso. As the country struggles to keep its debt load manageable, there’s a sense of sag to the economy. Does the Japan of our techno-futurist imaginations now bear the same degree of relation to reality – as the Italy of our Fellini fantasies?Finally – another sorpasso – Mexican birth rates have dipped below those of America for the first time. Problem being, if the Mexicans don’t have sex, they can’t supply the US with a constant source of surplus labour.US conservatives have long been scornful of European immigration patterns, falling back on the cultural compatibility of their southern neighbours – but unless Pablo and Maria get back in the bedroom, they’ll soon be receiving the same rich blend of Africans and Middle Easterners as the EU.Do check out our Substack if you can - https://multipolaritypod.substack.com/
Transcribe →