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Mark Moss
this is an iheart podcast guaranteed human
i turned off news altogether i hate
Tanvi Ratna
to say it but i don't trust much of anything it's the rage bait
Mark Moss
it feels like it's trying to divide people we got clear facts maybe we
Tanvi Ratna
could calm down a little nbc news
Ryan Reynolds
brings you clear reporting let's meet at
Mark Moss
the facts let's move forward from there
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Mark Moss
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Ryan Reynolds
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are you really buying a car online
Tanvi Ratna
on autotrader right now really i can
Mark Moss
get super specific with dealer listings and see cars based on my budget you can really have it delivered or pick it up mommy's i think kid is walking up the slide really autotrader buyer
car online really right now the global order is being reset the whole board is being reshuffled and it's all happening in real time but most people they're watching it they see randomness they see chaos and no plan but they're wrong underneath it there's a strategy a deliberate reordering of who controls the world's energy the trade routes and the money now knowing how that plan unfolds could be the difference between building generational wealth on the right side of it or getting wiped out on the wrong side today i'm going to sit down with my guest tanvi ratna now she maps this out for a living she's a systems engineer who advises forty four governments on exactly this kind of reordering so she doesn't see chaos she sees a design so today we're going to reverse engineer the whole board with her we're going to talk about iran china russia europe the dollar by the end i think you'll see the one question that matters most for anyone trying to build wealth in a world being rebuilt from scratch so let's go all right so let's just start off with a big question here so tanvi you're a systems engineer by training when you look at the last year eighteen months and we have tariffs and iran and nato we have closing the borders we have the dollar and a lot of people see random chaos but i think you see it as a systems engineer you see it a little bit differently so what is a systems engineer like you see where do you see design where maybe everyone
Tanvi Ratna
else sees disorder yeah thanks mark and it's a pleasure to be on the show i think it's my systems engineering hat but it's also that i switched into geopolitics after systems engineering i've spent like the last decade in that field and i've worked very deeply inside these decision rooms i'm happy to go over my background later if you want but the way i see the current moment is it is and i saw this very early i think that's when we connected is like after the tariffs but i do believe there is a very fundamental rehaul of the entire global system the economic system and the world order which we hear about a lot but it stemming from a complete change in the philosophy of the united states in terms of how it views its own power and what role it believes it
Mark Moss
plays in the world and not a not a random reordering but an intentional reordering yes yeah very much okay yeah that's what that's what i want to talk about today because i see i see this giant chessboard i see a lot of people who were seemingly i thought smart trying to boil it down to like one word and all of a sudden that that sets off alarm bells in my head so i want to try to unpack this with you but yeah why don't we why don't we hear about your background a little bit so how did you get to working as a think tank working with governments and working on geopolitical geopolitical strategy
Tanvi Ratna
yeah it's quite interesting i think my background it makes a lot of sense looking back it's like steve jobs said you know you can connect the dots looking back but at the moment it seemed very unorthodox so i was a systems engineer and even before that like i think even where i've lived and grown up has helped a lot in terms of my perspective so you know my family immigrated to the us like three generations ago you know our grandparents and so we've always had you know running in the family that belief in the same ideals you know the same values and i apart from that had the chance to grow up across a lot of different parts of the world because my my father was in the oil sector which you know is very interesting now for a lot of people but he lived in the middle east and so i grew up in abu dhab you know the early days of abu dhabi it was in this gwitzi capital and it was sheikh zayed the first ruler so i saw how he transformed the country within one generation pretty much and i was a child there and i moved back to the us for college and i was a systems engineer as you said and my second year i sat through a course and foreign policy which i loved but then you know indian parents so there were like no social studies finish your engineering and so i stuck to engineering and i did a minor in international affairs and i knew i wanted to do work in that field since then so you know after that i actually worked in the supply chain space i worked in the manufacturing supply chain space which also funnily enough is very central to how things are working now and after that i moved to i did grad school i was at georgetown i did foreign affairs and i spent time in singapore at the lky school and that's like the hub of asian policymaking you know a lot of chinese school of thought also arises from there so i had very deep immersion and how this field works and then i started working so i worked in the foreign affairs committee on capitol hill and that's where secretary rubio was a very rising star senator at the time and i was on the hill and this was also a fairly impactful period i think this was when there was a pivot to asia that obama was orchestrating and there were a lot of changes in foreign policy and then i got the chance to because i never actually lived in india and it was very interesting for me me also for you know ancestral reasons i got to actually take a roots journey and i landed up in india and i landed up in the campaign of the first campaign of the current prime minister prime minister modi and that was for me a very educational year because you know emerging economies and the brics countries and you know the the very rising you know half of the world is just so different in the way they think and they work and the scale of things i got to work on was insane and then i stayed on for some years in india i got to work on the india stack which is their tech transformation you know they they built this massive digital payment system id system and things like that i got to work on that and that's when i landed up in crypto i was actually at a consulting firm at ernst and y and i became a blockchain lead there in you know one of their market segments and i spent the next five years in crypto ai quantum regulation and that's when i came back to the us and you know when trump happened suddenly all these threads aligned you know all these threads of my life sort of aligned in the way they were building out their strategy and i was seeing something very different from from what people were seeing and so that's what that's where my where my lens and things
Mark Moss
come from yeah what a background and you know so much travel abroad growing up abroad traveling abroad working abroad really gives you that perspective especially in a geopolitically i talk to so many people and i'm certainly not not near as i haven't covered the world as much as you have but i do travel a lot and i find it i find that most people have a problem trying to understand these global issues because they haven't really been anywhere globally so certainly that boots on the ground perspective is helpful for you you said that you know all these different connecting threads so ai technology crypto politics oil et cetera you said all those threads sort of came together with trump and that you see something that most people aren't seeing and so what is that it's
Tanvi Ratna
hard to articulate in in a short answer you know i mean the administration itself doesn't articulate it but what i saw from the start is you know from the start of the presidency this has been a very different presidency you know and and and after many years you've seen something like this where and the way they went about building that cabinet everyone came in just hit the ground running with a lot of rapid rejigging it's not just geopolitical kevin warsh has taken the helm of the fed look at how in a way revolutionary it is the way he thinks about things it's such a big shift from keynesianism into hard monetarism if you look at stephen moran like you know the way they think about every issue is very different and i think that's why people see a lot of chaos but i see a completely different paradigm in the way they are thinking about their role america's role and what is needed in the us at this moment so the lens was very different and i think that's the first thing that i noticed and i sort of believe which is there's some people commenting to me earlier that just an assumption that this is not just derangement or stupidity changes the way you perceive or interpret the development and i was laughing at that it's so true like you know just just the basic just the basic assumption that you know this is not random you know that that alone has helped me think about things differently and i'm not saying i'm right all the time but there are some scenarios where i feel like i have seen things play out the way i was perceiving so yeah the first thing is the lens
Mark Moss
you know when it comes to like having expertise especially when you're trying to understand complex things it seems that you have to have a certain level of proficiency to even understand what's going on or understand at what level they're operating so for example just you know for easy use like if you look at like an athlete for example like like the top top top top athlete most people are like oh i could probably do that but because they've never operated at that level they don't understand the difference between just you know the top eighty percent to the top up you know ten or whatever and so it's like when we look at things like trump negotiating on a global stage understanding that he's been negotiating high rises with the mob you know his whole career now he's negotiating the world stage but most people never negotiated a deal before they don't really understand like the level of expertise that's there so it's like really easy to look at these things awash and how he thinks about the fed or besent how he's thinking about the treasury or trump but because you've never even gotten close to that level you don't really actually understand it so to you in your simplistic mind and i hate to use that as a general term but without that level of expertise we don't really understand what's going on at that level and i think maybe that's why a lot of people
Tanvi Ratna
miss what's going on i think it could be that but it's also that these are very hidden layers of the world right most people like even in markets they have not thought about geopolitics maybe their entire career and they are maybe a director at ubs or something and they never thought about geopolitics because they didn't have to right i've had to work in that layer my whole career right so you always think from this national security lens and it's not a linear lens that's the other problem is i think a lot of people are linear thinkers and natural security is very much you know it starts from maybe the third order you know it's not even second order it's maybe fifth or sixth order and that is very you know it's not intuitive for people
Mark Moss
so let's try to dive down this we can start to unpack sort of the way that you're seeing through the different layers and so you know i think if we were from from reading your substack which by the way we'll link to your substack down below it's amazing i think you have a discount going on so people should check that out down below but from what i see you know talking about on on x and twitter and on your substack it seems like you think we're already in a war just not a shooting war and it's really sort of let's say the catalyst for this global change you know sure the trump administration but but more specifically it seems to be that the us used to provide two things for free that they're no longer doing and so by changing so it's a war not a shooting war but it is a war and it's the us basically taking away two core things for the world was that that sort of start the catalyst is that what
Tanvi Ratna
you're saying yes so i think broadly you know one of the frameworks that people have been talking about is this idea of the mar a lago accords and when i think of the mar a lago accords i think of those two elements and that is what i was talking about and you know previous shows and in my writing as well that there's two public goods that the us always provided and that was the security umbrella so you know for for global movement of goods people for peace of what we call pax americana there was always the backing of the us military and the second is the dollar as a public good as a global reserve currency but it's also what has allowed a lot of seamless you know capital movement capital flow trade growth and things like that so these two things which were so like i said they're so in the background of things it's not something that people consciously think of when they transact day to day but the whole belief was that you know the focus of all these years which was building this neoliberal order which is actually that is probably the overarching framework from where things start this neoliberal order which meant the rule of institutions free flow of goods free trade this would create countries that are in your likeness it would create a world where you have common institutions common law free flow of goods people ideas and it creates a sort of global commons right and this worked for some time and this didn't just come out of the vacuum like this is happening after the fall of the berlin wall you know that's when this neoliberal order really picks up more momentum of course you know keynesianism picks up after the second world war but the whole idea of institutions free trade globalization this really picks up after the fall of the berlin wall and it has its grounding and reason that you know all these countries are coming out of the communist era and how do we create an order where we have common values you know we create a sort of global commons so that works actually for for quite some time and then you have that landmark moment when you know when china is getting integrated into the wto and this is this has now been debated quite a bit you know and us media but this the same logic is applied to china and i think that is where now there is a very clear realization that this does not work you know what would the approach that we had before does not work anymore here's a
Mark Moss
question i get asked almost more than any other question mark how much bitcoin should i actually own nothing not should i own it but how much now almost nobody can answer that with a real number the retirement system was built for an era it's gone meanwhile they're printing away your purchasing power while your sixty forty portfolio it limps along trying to keep up now that's exactly where unchained comes in now if you want you can book a free thirty minute session which is a one on one call with one of their specialists and they'll walk you through the retirement calculator all live they'll model you know the bitcoin strategy side by side with a traditional sixty forty portfolio over the next twenty years you'll also see what your balance sheet could look like at retirement how much bitcoin you could be holding and what different tax structures do to the outcome at the end of the call you're going to walk away knowing exactly what your number is and they'll send you a complete personalized link where you can keep it you can revisit it you could share it with your friends your family whoever else needs to see it so book your free session at unchained dot com so the fall of biller and wall and the wto of china so both of those in the nineties so right around the nineties seemed to be this pivotal moment where the ussr collapsed and so all of that sort of came into the global economy but also as you're saying china was brought into the world trade organization at the same time the problem was treating those things the same when the reality is they were different yes and
Tanvi Ratna
this is you know this is the diagnosis that i believe the administration gives for this pivot that they're orchestrating but for china's first decade first two decades almost things are good prices are low growth is good and you don't face the national security threat that now i think every american just instinctively gets you know that there is this massive global competition with china over everything whether it's the security architecture whether it's things like the belt and road carving out different economic spaces whether it's goods industrial goods manufacturing basic economic capabilities and industrialization this is not an issue for a long time and then you also have the us establishment divided over china so you had the china hawks any other china doves and there is always this tussle between who gets hurt right so you see that continue for a long time and this administration has come in with not confusion like a lot of people think but a very clear worldview about what is wrong and what needs to be fixed and it may i'm not saying that it's a perfect worldview or that it's landing exactly as they planned because the real world is chaotic and things do not always pan out as you planned but i do not think that it is just stemming from a sort of whimsical spur of the moment
Mark Moss
thought process i want to want to come back to china but maybe we'll take a different route you know you talk about the administration in trump's first administration they did start the tariffs against china so that seemed to where like things really started kicking off although you know the biden administration also continued the tariffs as well as started the chips act which was sort of taking away the microchips from china so that the biden administration also seemed to kind of continue that and then the next trump administration has turned the heat back up but let's come back to china because if i zoom out and if i'm paying attention i look at some of the things that moran said you know before trump even came in and i look at some of the things that trump said and you can look at some of the interviews that trump's been giving since the eighties talking about terrorists talking about iran so this is like not new random like we can see they're talking about this you see them talking about the monroe doctrine and sort of like locking down the western hemisphere and then you start to see the panama canal being taken you see the closing of the borders and then you see venezuela and it like it all seems like this is what they've been talking about this is the plan they've been saying and i can see these dots being connected and then iran happens and i think for iran you're calling it sort of like this climatic sort of like pressure node where things changed and i'll reluctantly admit that over the last several months a lot of really smart people that i interview and i've talked to privately dinners et cetera had kind of convinced me that man maybe i don't know the history that well and maybe it is all about israel and then all of a sudden the iran war breaks out and all these podcasters and smart people and people i know are like israel and i'm like it's certainly not that like i can see the monroe doctrine i can see the geopolitical game board and i can see what's going on with you know the like i said the panama canal and venezuela and cuba and greenland and like like it's not just that so when people started boiling it down to that little piece i thought hmm that kind of seems like a psyop it's got to be much bigger and so anyway i guess i guess number one push back on that if you don't agree with that but i guess what i'm asking is it seems to be that iran is sort of like the piece that really starts reshuffling this game board and starts to put the pressure back onto china which i said i want to kind of come back to so is that sort of how you look at the iran situation it's not just about the small thing it's about the bigger geopolitical implications there yeah i
Tanvi Ratna
think that's a big question so before i take iran i think it makes sense to look at where we were in the chessboard before this war started so i believe with the tariffs there was yes a lot of chaos and you know there was a lot of concern economically that it will lead to tariff and things like that and then there was constant tweaking of the tariff levels and at the end you know a lot of economists were surprised as to why it didn't create as big an impact as they expected but the tariffs were basically giving trump a lever to really calibrate pressure you know and tie it to very fine tuned issues so you would see things like there was suddenly concern over in south africa for example you know he would tweet something about south africa and it would just have no basis in anything that americans were watching it would seem like oh this is a civil issue or things like that but what i was
Mark Moss
trying to the white farmers were being slaughtered in south africa that's what he was tweeting about and i wouldn't say that it was nothing that americans were watch watching but anyway yeah yeah i
Tanvi Ratna
mean it was it was just a it didn't seem to have a grounding and you know the bigger issues of the moment a lot of things like that seem to just come out of nowhere you know like but what i was really tracking were where were the big so south africa is actually very big maritime not you know people are thinking of hormuz and the malacca strait but really when everything reroutes and especially if you have a lot of american goods getting shipped they're going to go via durban and they're going to go via the cape of good hope and a lot of the mineral wealth of africa which oh by the way is another thing that nobody seems to have paid attention to there's just a lot that has happened with africa in terms of american foreign policy but whether it's cobalt or it's lithium or a lot of these goods their transport and things like that will need access via south africa or they have to come via the red sea where the houthis are and all of this conflict has been raging for a long time so there's a lot of things that were random and you know they didn't make sense it seemed like everybody was in the crosshairs and there was always some issue popping up today it's indonesia tomorrow it's south africa tomorrow it's russia vietnam you know yeah but if you look at the map behind these things and that is mostly what i was working on there was a very clear strategy that they were following in terms of their countries where they would go in they would start investing there would be a lot of change in hands in terms of ownership of mines or you know and there's some of this stuff that i have written about in terms of port ownership remember the initially when they took over and they were talking about panama and you know greenland and things like that but they actually use they use everything as stable setting is what i would say and i think it comes to your point about trump being a negotiator and people not really understanding what that is really you know it means that everything is leveraged and everything whether it's the military or political actions or his social media everything is used to create leverage when he needs it you know and so i'm just saying that this this is tactically what i saw happening but in terms of their overarching foreign policy goals i think the most key overarching foreign policy goal for the us is to separate russia and china they need to do it if they do not do it this is a very formidable alliance whether it's security or resource partnerships or this whole industrial and resource cluster that you know this this partnership creates for russia and china it is very formidable and you also have the you know the old heartland theory you know brzezinski and it's been a very established chain of thought and foreign policy that whoever controls eurasia they control the world right so this you can see from the start as being one of his overarching goals is he does need to separate russia and china and i think a lot of things you're seeing right now tie very much to russia everything ties to china but a lot of things he's doing now in hormuz they tie into russia and the second is very much that we seem to be trading in american soft power which was very integral to keeping the rule of law and institutions alike that seems to be getting traded in for hard power in terms of supply chains and physical supply lines and industrial might and economic security which now they're coming out and saying economic security is national security but what you are also seeing is a sort of trade off happening because there's no doubt that american soft power has taken a hit like i will i'm not going to hide behind that and say that this is not happening it is happening i see it everywhere what do you mean by
Mark Moss
that soft power is taking a hit give me an example of what you're
Tanvi Ratna
talking about i think there is a lot of global concern about america there is a lot of concern about where are you guys going you know what is happening you know there doesn't seem to be it seems to be you know the whims of certain people it does not seem to be a country ruled by you know driven by established laws established norms and things like this so i think this is a concern within america not even outside but it's even more acute outside and i think there's just been a lot of concerns with the tariffs in countries that have been dealing with the us which we don't really see from within america but it has created a lot of concern and you know with long term allies it is to hear all so when
Mark Moss
you're saying soft power you sort of mean like influence like the influence without the hard power so without having to have the might it's sort of like more influential is that what you mean with soft power and the soft power
Tanvi Ratna
sort of been dwindling so power it isn't just influence it's the idea of norms you know how much can you enforce certain norms so could the us enforce the idea of free market economics across the world it did have the power to do that whether it was through institutions or through its own model or through you know influence that they have over the political class in many countries i think that has that has changed substantially in the last year so it's also you know if you want to go to the traditional you know definition of soft power it's america was always the most aspirational power you know for a lot of countries and it was where you know people would you know the want to immigrate there they would you know look up to the way america tackled issues you know on a global stage like i remember when i worked in crypto regulation there were years of work done by so many countries but they would always wait and see now what would america do like how will america tackle us and we will look to that and then calibrate our approach so there was a certain stature you could say that america occupied in the imagination of people of governments things like that and that has changed a lot i think it's more a function of there are tangible issues that many countries face during the tariff negotiation process there's a lot that seems unjustified to two people but it's also the confusion you know it's the lack of clarity of what is happening you know why is america doing do you think
Mark Moss
do you think that you know i've also looked at it like where america led right especially re industrializing after world war two and i think like it sort of led through these aspirational things like you said where you had the american dream and you could rise from nothing and we had creativity and we had you know all these businesses and it attracted attracted like your families to come over and like be part of that and like it it was like this aspirational lens right and you're talking about this like war a war without shooting and then you talk about the soft power and it almost seems to me that the counter war against the us from within and and from without is really a war of demoralization and you have what now are they're calling the podcastic ends going around just talking about well the us is not going to be a superpower anymore well the us might as well just accept multipillars and well the us dollar is just going to lose its place place well the us just isn't great anymore and you have like this this beating drum and whether you want to call it this alexander dugan ism that's been coming over but like maybe it's like this attack so it's like while the us is trying to push its ideals out to the world the rest of the world is also pushing back by trying to destroy those ideals or or diminish
Tanvi Ratna
those aspirations i actually disagree with that i do the funny thing for me is that there is no counter ideal in the world at the moment well
Mark Moss
isn't so is it socialism what bernie sanders just said on twitter yesterday isn't that the counter ideal let's just envy and steal from other people i think
Tanvi Ratna
in america yes but that's not a model that anybody in asia or elsewhere is going to embrace right so for a lot of american young people it is an alternative it's not something that the emerging markets even consider you know i mean china itself is being communist very market oriented and it's not something
Mark Moss
that has appeal okay yeah okay maybe i just i what i was trying to i guess then the question is is you're saying that those aspirations that brought your family over really aren't there as strong as they used to be the us isn't really pushing those free market ideals and aspirations to the rest of the world like they used to be so then the question is why is it just i don't know the us got tired of it or like like i was suggesting maybe it was a little bit more of like this counter attack it seems to be sort of from within so why did why did we lose the american dream and why do people not want to move here aspirationally to have be a be be a part of that anymore yeah
Tanvi Ratna
i get your point so i think you're saying from within the us i see a lot of the socialism versus capitalism even though it's an economic debate i see it more as a political debate because economically i believe what really happened is you lose the ability to guarantee this american dream to people because there is this hollowing out of the american industrial base which they say is for national security reasons primarily but it also creates the lopsided economy where you don't have really we've ended up in a k shape economic recovery for a while there's been the discussion of the k shaped economic recovery so that is not the society that guarantees you upward mobility fair opportunity there is polarization and i believe in terms of this administration they believe the root cause of that is the economic model that the us embarked upon it is not sustainable the idea of providing these public goods which eventually hollow out your own economy is not sustainable triffin's dilemma and yes but i don't think there was anyone you know this was really a choice it was a choice of the people in power to go down this path and i think there isn't when i was saying there isn't an alternative it's very strange to me that if the us is vacating the space in terms of soft power why don't you have a challenger model from china getting pushed actively on the world stage why isn't china more aggressive on the world stage they're not really going out to different countries and selling a model you know they're very inward focused everyone's huddled except for
Mark Moss
except what you talked about the belt and road initiative which is the exact opposite yeah the belt and road initiative
Tanvi Ratna
is expansionary no but it's a very old project like there isn't like a new phase that they're actively pushing right now there's nothing that right now they're very aggressively pushing they could i mean they have the stage for it but they're not pushing it and there is no other alternative you know people talk about de dollarization i don't believe that's going to happen by the way i do see if you look at the thought process of you know kevin marsh or stephen myron or besson i mean it's i don't think there there is a chance of that happening but i'm happy to talk about it separately but whether it's in the dollar or it's in terms of the world model or washington consensus or things like this there isn't an alternative that's getting actively pushed i mean this would be the time for it but it isn't happening and that is very surprising for me as a geopolitical analyst okay so i got
Mark Moss
to tell you what i've been doing with my money lately i moved my cash over to river river and before you ask yes i still pay all my bills in dollars everything works the same but here's the real difference you see river pays me three point three percent on my cash and they pay it in bitcoin so my money that was just sitting there doing nothing at all in the bank it's now stacking bitcoin while i sleep and i started thinking like my bank takes my deposits they loan those deposits out they make twelve seventeen twenty four and they pay me zero point zero four percent i mean honestly that's kind of a shakedown when you think about it now rivers fdic insured they use full reserve they charge no fees so i don't know why i didn't do this sooner so click the link down below and get a hundred dollars in bitcoin just for getting started that is certainly a whole topic that we could dive down it would be fun my brent my friend brent johnson centrico capital has his theory the dollar milkshake theory how it soaks up all the liquidity of the rest of the world first and that seems to be what's happening and that's a whole topic that i'd love to dig into but i wanted to try to to unpack kind of more of these current things that we're dealing with right now so going going back to the iran situation then for a second like i said a lot of people are like oh well it's just israel some people are like well no it's more about the oil well maybe it's the oil that's being used as leverage against china because they have the rare earth elements that the us needs oh maybe it's about europe or russia i don't know maybe it's about all of those things so how do you look at that piece which is a pretty big piece right now now in light of sort of this whole geopolitical reshuffling that we've been talking about in this in
Tanvi Ratna
this new administration yeah so where where i was what i was talking about before is they need to separate china and russia dragon bear alliance right they need to they need to split it or they need to constrain it they cannot have that alliance thriving or working as an alternative because it is it is going to undercut every lever they're trying to move right now right so that if you have that as your starting point then look at what happened right up to the you know january of this year in this one year what happened right they had achieved i think the big breakthrough they did achieve was in gaza with the with the board of peace when it had happened it was a big deal because the the big thing with the middle east because the middle east is at the center of the world you have any corridor whether it's the belt and road or it's this challenger corridor of the imac which the us israel india were proposing it has to pass through the middle east if you're trying to create a new order if you're trying to create a parallel order you need to settle the middle east and there was also this belief i believe in the administration that with europe slowing down with china sort of becoming you know a little more off limits you know less integrated with with america you need these big large rising markets if you're going to have american growth you need the markets for it and the large markets in the world are india you know latin america the middle east the middle east is huge for this and there was also this belief of could you create the new eu and the middle east you know these are wealthy countries which are fast growing they have young rulers who are progressive and so i believe there is this idea of you know we can create a new middle east and i think this is something that trump has championed from a long time which is why he created the abraham accords in his first term and why do you need the abram accord accords why do you need what he's doing right now which he suddenly brought up this condition of well you all have to recognize israel and only then do we go ahead because israel if that issue is not resolved you are not going to have a peaceful middle east ever you cannot have economic growth without settling that region you cannot have economic growth not just there but also in all the you know the adjacent areas whether it's the middle corridor turkey balkans you know the the roots from india it all becomes insecure because the middle east is the center of the world geographically yes so why the abraham accords mattered is because israel was always on the outside of the arab world you've always had israel this one small region on the outside and the root of so much conflict in that region just coming from that right and it's not the americans who put israel there right this is the engine hobby home of the jews but also was things that happen at the end of british you know colonial rule is that there was this carving out and if that is not settled you cannot have peace in the middle east and i think this is something that trump understood very early on and that's why the abram accords that he negotiated in his first term were a very big deal because that's the first time that israel is actually brought in to the architecture of the arab world of the region you know with an arab ally which is the uae but they could not bring in saudi and unless you bring saudi unless you have a rapprochement between israel and saudi which is the regional hegemon you are not going to have lasting peace in that region so at the start of the year with that gaza deal they had managed to get almost all the arab world and israel into the board of peace and board of peace was actually an extension of the abraham accords because it's pretty much the same architecture you're having a economic reconstruction alliance which later will serve also as a peace keeping body in the region and things like that so when this happens i believe it's a great breakthrough because and i bring this up to you mark because if you if the iran war was only about iran i believe they would have done it in july of last year because they already had they already had the momentum you know they had bombed the nuclear sites the rupee you know the sorry the the iranian real was free falling and they had all the protests building up you know they had the momentum so it was if it was only about iran i think they could have just done it last year but they don't do it last year because things are going fine the board of peace is happening they're getting their deals with the eu and things like this and they got put into alaska right and they started having meaningful negotiations with the russians and they were trying to work towards a ukraine deal and things like this then by december i think everything goes awry right by december saudi is is pulling out and in some ways from the board of peace because public opinion in saudi arabia becomes very negative against any kind of deal with israel or being in any kind of alliance with israel and so you know saudi starts turning sour on this on this deal and that starts unraveling the architecture and at the same time europe you know the russia ukraine peace is not moving and europe is really not interested in trump's agenda you know whether it's paxilica or it's realigning nato or things like this it's just becoming very confrontational and then you have the striking down of the tariffs by january so i believe it's all these things that eventually set the stage for they don't have a lever anymore if they don't have the tariffs even now it's taking them time to build that section three or two architecture things are not aligning it's not working out the way that they've envisaged the peace plans working and they're also running out of time because they have to go into midterm mode and by july i think if they don't settle this chessboard they're not going to be able to settle it because the us is not like russia it cannot drag on a war indefinitely there's a lot of other cycles they have to deal with and so i believe it's with all these things in the background and the fact that they are also progressively moving in their larger planning where now they also release their defense strategy where they're actually laying out that well by the way we're pulling out of europe and russia is a problem but europe you're richer and more populous and you can deal with russia yeah it says it's not something we are there to support you but it's not our problem we are going to focus on the indo pacific and we are going to regear our security architecture towards the indo pacific but how do you focus on the indo pacific if you have a raging ukraine war and you have an unsettled middle east because the us is always getting sucked into the middle east and europe europe and i believe this is why i wrote my framework the way i did that the iran conflict actually like i said it because so when you see starting with venezuela you see that they are actually pushing out russia and china from latin america right the biggest hub was venezuela and same
Mark Moss
with the panama canal right both panama
Tanvi Ratna
canal and venezuela same with the panama canal same with cuba from the western hemisphere using very unorthodox operations they seem to have very quickly wound up the operational base for russia and china so russian and chinese projection in latin america is greatly reduced come to the other theater where else does russia have massive projection it is it was via syria and in iran right and this is iran is so important geopolitically because it's not just energy channels that run through there every alternative corridor whether it's from the belt and road or it's the instc or all these corridors they all run through iran because how do you get from the land mass of asia and middle east into the sea how do you get your you can make a belt and road but you ultimately need to ship those things and it was always iran which is the ultimate link because it's linked to europe it's linked to asia and it has you know so many ports and so iran is actually very probably the most important certain forward post you know for the russians and the chinese for power projection yes if they lose it they actually lose power projection in the middle east they only have their trading relationships that they have with uae or saudi with uae and saudi are traditionally always security allies of the us so they will not and security matters ally with china so syria you also see trump turn when he's doing the gaza peace deal stuff because he recognizes the former terrorist who is now in charge of syria and this created a lot of furor within dc when he did that but that also was something i recognized as his ploy to settle the middle east you know he wants to get there fast because he wants to settle these regions and then move on to the indo pacific yeah and so that's why i think iran is so important because it's not just for energy it's for geopolitics and power projection it is for all the corridors that are challenger corridors to american ones and israel is very important to settle within the region or there cannot be the imec which i think is seen as the ultimate challenger to the belt and road which is the india middle east europe corridor so it's with that setup that i believe the iran war begins there's so much
Mark Moss
so much i'd love to dig in on that but man we're already going really long and i have one more question topic i want to bring up with you but if i'm going to summarize sort of what you're saying i i think i would just summarize it where it's like they just want peace in the middle east so that the world could just move on like constant disruptions is not helping the world and so like if we could just get peace over there by any what means necessary but the abram accords and we sort of break apart china russia and things could the pipelines could start working again and not constantly being being disrupted over and over then sort of then that agenda could move on so if we sort of break it down to that and it kind of goes back to to what kamala said and what hillary clinton said and even what trump said which is like iran can't have nukes we can't have somebody constantly threatening and disrupting things so maybe we could just summarize it like that the reason we want peace is so that the the world could sort of move on in this global trade trump being a businessman he's used to bringing all these people from different parties together and making sure everybody gets something out of it and like that's for the world right i'd love to dig in but i
Tanvi Ratna
would i wouldn't say it's just to settle things and move on i think it's to change the balance of power in the world you're basically shifting the ability of the china russia bloc to project themselves beyond their borders you wouldn't
Mark Moss
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Tanvi Ratna
yeah i mean i don't know if i i want to necessarily comment on that but i do think there is an access that i i've seen some people call it what is it the globalist islamist communist access you know there is that sort of alliance which does have shared agenda and you know there's conspiracy theories that they are behind the immigration rapid immigration you know we had almost thirty years worth of population you know shifts from just three years of immigration and that this axis is actually behind a lot of domestic shifts within europe and the us especially but you know i'm not really that focused on conspiracy theories i do think that yes definitely it did not help that there was a you know this putin agent sort of a framing it definitely prevented trump from you know being able to break apart that alliance for a while i think actually i feel similarly about the israel framing because and the reason i say it is i'm not coming from a moralistic space but think about it i mean the countries that you know fundamentally share your security interests and they share common values and they will back you in conflicts there's very few of those countries in the world right so europe is is very dear to the us not just because of the common or the common values are very important there's not many countries for example you know the middle east people will trade with china and the us and they will keep ties on both sides there's not many people who will take an unpopular stand and like back one side you know the same way with india it's probably the only country that will really stand up to china in that region and you know if you are taking a tough stance on supply chains and things like that against china it would was actually india was most proactive not even japan or australia you know even though they are now
Mark Moss
so
Tanvi Ratna
i think i think there is even the the the the the whole thing against indians and israelis as i also think economically motivated propaganda yeah so again
Mark Moss
like i said there's so many things i'd love to dig into we didn't get into you know potentially you know sort of how this puts pressure onto europe and potentially changes the power center of europe which you have some thoughts on which i think are really interesting and then and then i mean trump going to meet with xi and bringing thirty of the best you know entrepreneurs in the world seemed to be a pretty big deal what g said like hey let's make china great and let's make america great again like wow like geez maga carney seems to be shifting his focus so there's so much we could dig into on all that so maybe we'll have to have another show but the question i to want one maybe last ended on was you've talked about the physical supply shocks like we've been seeing and obviously so many analysts are saying if if the straits aren't open you know by whatever date we're past the whole world's going to end but but we're not seeing that so i think your position is that physical supply shocks matter less than who controls the benchmarks like settlement and liquidity and right now i think you believe that new york is still sort of the power center of that that not beijing
Tanvi Ratna
oh i think that's correct i i think there in terms of benchmarks it's more london than beijing that that has the parallel infrastructure to new york and i think new york has caught on that significantly in the last few years whether it's libor and so for or you know it's it's moving the gold out of london to new york now maybe the benchmarks the insurance you know maritime insurance and all those things so i do think there is some truth to the benchmark piece but i don't think the hormuz crisis is getting prolonged only for those reasons i think there's a lot of table setting it's doing in terms of the dollar in terms of the american economy and debt versus other countries it's doing a lot to create long term economic conditions in asia which i think will have second third order you know implications for the us in terms of getting their deals and getting their indo pacific strategy working so that is its own pandora's box but i do think the primary realignment from hormuz was with europe and i think they have succeeded in that and i think the other was the deals with india because india is was the biggest alternative consumer of russian oil and they seem to have turned that around into signing deals for american energy over russian energy so if that happens they fundamentally change the balance of power with russia and china and then you move on to the next phase of the game
Mark Moss
with that amazing amazing such good stuff like i said we could just sit here and talk about this stuff for so long because there's so many more little holes to open up but obviously you write about this like i said you have your sub stack that's great i'm going to link to it down below we'll link to your x account as well which is really good good why do people care to read your substack why do people care to read x like for the average person who's you know working i'm trying to save and i want to retire one day and i'm trying to build wealth like why do you think these subjects are important to them what should they be paying attention to how should they be looking for signal through all this noise
Tanvi Ratna
yeah i think it's it's important because it might not have been important like a year ago but i think now the forces shaping our economies are no longer just markets markets it's actually governments in their driving seat not just in the us but everywhere and if you want to be able to predict how things are going to play out you have to dig deeper than the you know the the layer of opinion and editorial pieces you have to start really thinking of systems because this is a moment of systems recession and it is not very easy to grasp because like i said a lot of these were hidden systems but this is the moment where you could create generational wealth you could create a very different future and you have to think very critically about your future because there's so many big shifts coming at us whether it's ai or geopolitics or other other such things that i don't think people have a choice i think it's the time to think very critically and deeply about what's happening things are not a coincidence and i think the more people clue up on those things the better they will fare in terms of their success their overall well being and their whole future
Mark Moss
obviously you studied geopolitics governments are not monoliths right so there's hundreds of people that all have different views but you know the administration the trump administration i think one i would i think what you're saying and i agree with is that they are maybe looking at the us doesn't need the reserve currency and maybe we could have multiple reserve currencies as i've heard bassen say and so maybe they do understand the damage of having that reserve currency to the point that you're making and and and maybe they could see that we don't need that anymore we could have competing ones and and i think maybe that's why they're favorable to bitcoin as far as the us doesn't want stable coins the us certainly does the administration does bent certainly does as someone who's who's trying to trying to sell treasuries and i think the us also does who doesn't is the banks and the reason why the banks don't want the stable coins that pay yield is because it will destroy banks right because bank banks are built on a model of taking in your deposits and then issuing loans out against those so they have these duration mismatch and so if if if if if my stable coins can earn you know whatever five percent yield or four percent yield i can move them to the speed of light we're just moving money all around i don't even need the banks to store my money if you think of banks they have they store money they make payments and they issue loans but if i don't need them to store or make payments then banks are gone plus if i can earn four percent yield i'm just moving my money around but banks are out at you know five year auto loans and and thirty year house loans and like they can't do that so the whole banking system gets destroyed if they allow that to happen so the banks don't want it to happen but you know who does besent wants it to happen but you know who else wants it is the merchants want it right so if you look at like walmart what do they do i don't know sixty billion dollars a year in transactions they're paying two and a half percent of of transaction fees plus they have six thirty thirty cent transaction fees plus two and a half percent plus six months subtle settlement just the just the just the chargebacks alone is like a multi billion dollar problem so if walmart if walmart could say hey we're gonna we're gonna incentivize you to start using stable coins because now they pay no processing fees there's no chargebacks none of that like walmart's gonna push it target amazon's gonna push it so the merchants want it you and i will want it the banks don't want it besent wants it it's the banks that don't
Tanvi Ratna
want it i i don't disagree with you i'm just speaking from the lens of the state so these these arguments like because i worked in crypto regulation for five years so i've heard every version of this debate you know in almost forty different countries and what i would say is from the perspective of a state and national security and from you know close reading of whatever i see from the three people who i think matter quite a bit which are warsh besson and iran i don't think there they do not going to dethrone the dollar and no government can take a real hit to the banking system as long as we are in this kind of a monetary economic system because the money multiplier is so necessary for them for the growth of the economy and the us needs rapid growth so yes it can come with tokenization but there's so much that has to be made robust in our crypto ecosystem for it to be reliable for that massive scale of transactions like we cannot have the hacks we cannot have the massive cyber security risk because if all your economy moves into this rail your whole economy can have a cyber attack you know and it's a very dangerous position as well so i think it would happen but it will happen gradually but i do think the dollar the dethroning of the dollar is the existential problem and that's where i think the role of crypto is a little different from the way people are maybe thinking about
Mark Moss
when you say that dethroning the dollar is an existential problem but then i think you're also saying that having the world's reserve currency is also an existential
Tanvi Ratna
problem no i don't think it's a problem i think it's one of the biggest assets for the because if we
Mark Moss
have the reserve currency i thought what you were making the case which i said the triffin's dilemma is that now we have to supply the world with dollars which means then we have to import everything and we don't have any
Tanvi Ratna
industrial base at home yes but i think the challenge the the the strange economic landscape they're entering is they want to have balanced trade and they still want a reserve currency got it and i don't i haven't met any economist even the man who originally proposed this i had a long sit down with him and in china i think but i don't see a way outside of crypto that they can achieve and i think that is why they've embraced it so deeply yes they might believe in it and yes you know there's a lot of business deals to be had in it but i think it's also fundamental from the architecture they need because if you don't have much room to play with monetary policy you're not going to do funky things in terms of printing currency and you still need to sustain demand for the dollar like it is crypto you know like there there there is there is something very deep there i'm still unpacking it but i think i'll have my full like perspective
Mark Moss
on it well the the dollar i think we both agree that the death of the dollar is greatly exaggerated the dollar is only getting stronger right now stable coins are only going to help it get stronger the network effects of the dollar so and and then i mean come on most people know know i don't think anybody in the us thinks they're supposed to save all their money in dollars like everybody knows they have to invest the money like no one's using the dollar as like a savings mechanism it's not a store of value it's a medium of exchange so i think the dollar can continue to be the medium exchange and can continue to have the network effects of the medium exchange that will continue to grow through stable coins but then we could just use gold and bitcoin as store values sovs right so i think i think that happens but what i'd say about the i'm just actually curious your take on this because a lot of people talk about the reserve currency in the hollowing out of the american middle class as you talked about the k shaped recovery i look at things through a technological lens and the way i look at it certainly there's a national security problem if we can't make munitions for example shoot we can't rely on china to stock our military that's a problem so there's certainly a national security piece of that but like the halloween of the middle class was partly with china coming into the wto sure but it's also that we got technology and so through the industrial era you know from whatever nineteen oh eight with ford's assembly line through the you know industrialization of the whatever the seventies we had you know massive manufacturing assembly lines and what assembly lines do is they make smart people and dumb people equal right so everyone and they're just on the assembly line plugging in their their their widget and so then you get this massive middle class because you have this massive industrial economy but today we're not in the industrial era anymore right we went to the information era now we're probably in the intelligence age whatever you want to call it and in the information age you no longer have massive manufacturing anymore those are those are cheap jobs those are equivalent to now picking cotton in a field or something right so so it's natural for those to go to move to another country country and in an information age somebody like you that can just run a sub stack and a blog can like make a lot of money more than somebody that like and so now people are graduating college with this industrial era lens looking for this industrial era tool set where they need to go be told what to do but like that world's gone so to me it's not like sure we could bring manufacturing back and we certainly should and through automation and robotics ai we could be competitive in a lot of things and for national security we should do that that but i don't know if that massive middle class will ever come back because we're not in that industrial era anymore i guess is what i'm saying it is
Tanvi Ratna
technology but i think it's also if if i put like i see everything from a policy lens so i guess it's it's a different weed but we might come to the same conclusions i think it's also this it's it's it's the the economic landscape we've been on where there are all this there's all this inflation of assets set wealth and that is what has really killed the middle classes you don't have you have a financialized economy versus a real economy right if you have a real economy people are going to progress and they are going to make increasing amounts of wealth if you have economy that favors asset ownership over real economic activity then the asset owners are just constantly going to get richer as a compounding effect effect and so i think that is going to get attacked but what you're
Mark Moss
saying is the policy which i agree with you what you're saying but but that policy is increasing the money supply so i believe inflation is not cpi inflation is monetary inflation right rothbard said it's always a monetary phenomenon right so when you increase the money supply the prices of goods and services go up at different amounts which is why it's like well we don't know why college went up and you know tacos went down and we don't know right well because the money supply but the demand that it creates the marginal utility value of a dollar changes right so like it's always the money supply so the government's policy since nineteen thirteen through the federal reserve have increased the money supply has created those conditions of a financialized economy have created the conditions where wages don't keep up with the cost of living going up and that that's a massive problem a massive societal problem which is different i think than the job
Tanvi Ratna
problem i think so i just i it's just that my reading on this is is more from a policy lens and i feel like they are trying to correct the policy issues if this is what you feel is fueling the issue is money supply it does seem like that is what warsh wants to correct but technology i think is i don't think it's a force that any policy making has really mastered how to deal with i think we're still struggling to properly regulate or deal with the internet era so i don't you know i i know it's it's going to be difficult with crypto and ai coming and i haven't seen any government like deal with that successfully yeah no they're
Mark Moss
behind they can't keep up the technology just evolved way too fast which is why we need more free markets less policy more free all right we're going to sign off with that like i said maybe another time we'll come back and we can talk about some of these technologies like ai and blockchain and crypto bitcoin etc because i think those i always think of like technology sort of reshapes the world when you look through along the lens of history and so it certainly disrupts geopolitically so that'd be a really fun conversation to have at some point yeah and i think
Tanvi Ratna
their role in the american strategy is very important i don't think explored enough because people who get the old world don't get the new world and you
Mark Moss
know and the trump administration seems to be really pushing that that forward which is really interesting because i always thought the dollar homogeny would be the last one to move on that so it's interesting so anyway yeah we'll have to have another conversation about that anything you want to point to people that they can follow or learn more anything that you're doing that you want to talk
Tanvi Ratna
about yeah i mean i'm i'm writing i write first in my substack and i would really encourage people to check that out i mean there's a lot of things on the iran conflict that i am putting out over there which i'm not really pushing in public domain some of these are very contrarian but they are drawing from real data and real events that i'm observing very closely and also i'm doing these in first person so i'm not just writing on my desk i've actually actively been covering the state visits of sequoia rubio white house delegations to europe tornado and things like that i write a column in fox so i actually cover them for the news so i'd encourage people to check that out you can also check out my writing on fox and x and i'm quite reachable there yeah all
Mark Moss
right well you're a wealth of information i love your perspective on it so so helpful we'll wrap it up with that thanks so much thank you
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Podcast: The Mark Moss Show | iHeartPodcasts
Date: June 15, 2026
Host: Mark Moss
Guest: Tanvi Ratna (Systems Engineer, Geopolitical Analyst, Advisor to 44 Governments)
This episode explores the seismic shifts reshaping the global order, focusing on the deliberate strategies and hidden architectures behind recent economic and geopolitical upheavals. Host Mark Moss sits down with Tanvi Ratna—a systems engineer turned high-level geopolitical advisor—to “reverse-engineer” the current reset of the world order, looking at the roles of the U.S., Iran, China, Russia, and Europe. Together, they break down how global trade routes, reserve currencies, and the very principles of power are being recast before our eyes, why these changes matter for anyone seeking to build or safeguard wealth, and why understanding these moves can be the difference between prosperity and ruin in today's volatile landscape.
Mark Moss:
“Right now the global order is being reset… most people see randomness… but underneath it there’s a strategy, a deliberate reordering of who controls the world’s energy, the trade routes, and the money.”
Tanvi Ratna:
“It is not a random reordering but an intentional reordering… stemming from a complete change in the philosophy of the United States in terms of how it views its own power.”
Tanvi narrates her journey:
Mark Moss:
“If you’ve never operated at that [global] level… you don’t actually understand what’s going on at that level. So to you, in your simplistic mind, you don’t really understand it.”
Tanvi Ratna:
“It’s not random… just the basic assumption that this is not derangement or stupidity changes the way you perceive or interpret the development.”
Tanvi Ratna:
Identifies two “public goods” the US used to provide to the world:
a. Security umbrella (Pax Americana, US military backing)
b. The Dollar as a global reserve currency
Both are being withdrawn or recalibrated, forcing a major rethink of global order.
(15:56)
“There’s two public goods that the US always provided… the security umbrella… and the dollar as a public good and a global reserve currency.”
The neoliberal order (institutions, free trade, globalization) that flourished post–Berlin Wall is now being actively reevaluated as inadequate for the new era—especially post-China’s entry into the WTO.
(15:56–20:29)
Tanvi Ratna:
(26:20)
“If you look at the map behind these things… there was a very clear strategy… The most key overarching [US] foreign policy goal is to separate Russia and China.”
(42:02)
“They need to separate China and Russia… they cannot have that alliance thriving or working as an alternative because it is going to undercut every lever they’re trying to move.”
Mark Moss & Tanvi Ratna:
“Iran is probably the most important forward post for the Russians and the Chinese for power projection… if they lose it, they lose power projection in the Middle East.” — Tanvi Ratna (51:52)
US soft power (the aspirational “American Dream,” global appeal, norm-setting institutions) is weakening due to unpredictability, polarization, and shifting global perceptions.
While hard power (supply chains, industrial might, direct leverage) is rising, soft power “stature” is suffering, making alliances and influence harder to sustain.
(31:24–34:38)
“There’s global concern about America… what is happening? There doesn’t seem to be… established laws, established norms… it’s even more acute outside [the US].”
China is not filling the soft power void with a rival ideological model; Belt & Road is an old, infrastructure-driven outreach, not a global-values project.
(36:06)
“There is no counter-ideal in the world at the moment…”
Mark Moss & Tanvi Ratna:
Dollar’s global role is under scrutiny, but “de-dollarization” is exaggerated; neither Beijing nor a new Chinese-led order is ready for reserve currency status.
The future may feature multiple reserve currencies and a blended system where crypto and digital assets supplement but do not dethrone traditional finance.
(62:12–71:38)
The death of the dollar is “greatly exaggerated”; its network effects — especially via stablecoins — will likely extend its dominance as a medium of exchange, even if gold or Bitcoin become popular as stores of value.
“I think the dollar can continue to be the medium of exchange… and can continue to have the network effects… but then we could just use gold and Bitcoin as stores of value.” — Mark Moss (71:38)
The big risk to banks and the future of finance is stablecoins that pay yield and threaten the current banking/lending model; merchants and consumers will push for them, but states are careful about the risk to their own economic systems. (66:13–70:11)
The old “industrial era” middle class is unlikely to return; we are in an “intelligence age” and will see technological change (AI, automation, cryptocurrencies) as the primary force shaping jobs and wealth-building.
Policy responses are still behind, especially in regulating the tech revolution.
“Technology is a force no policymaker has really mastered how to deal with; we’re still struggling to deal with the internet era, and it’s going to be even tougher with crypto and AI…” — Tanvi Ratna (75:58)
This is a “moment of systems recession” — a rare chance to build generational wealth by understanding the macro reset rather than being a passive victim.
“This is a moment where you could create generational wealth… You have to think critically and deeply about what’s happening — things are not a coincidence.” — Tanvi Ratna (64:44)
“This is the moment where you could create generational wealth… I don’t think people have a choice.” — Tanvi Ratna (64:44)
Tanvi Ratna:
Mark Moss:
By seeing the “system” behind the global reset—and the policies, alliances, and economic architectures being built—you position yourself not just to survive but to thrive. Now is the time to look beyond the noise, question the narratives, and map your own path through the reordering of the world.
End of summary.