Multipolarity

It’s often been accused of being a talking shop. But now, the G20 is looking increasingly like yesterday’s talking shop. With the Brics having stolen their thunder two weeks back, is this week’s G20 meeting about as relevant as an Eagles reunion tour?  The Chinese are being modest again. It took a teardown of the new Huawei phone to reveal the most alarming tech news of the year. The company...

This week, we launch our first premium episode. It's a deep - and lengthy - consideration of two of populism's big challengers. Javier Milei - who now looks set to win the Argentinian presidential election. And Vivek Ramaswamy - who may even come second to Trump. *** To listen beyond this teaser, just jump over to Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=86737989 Sign up for the 5 bucks tier. And s...

This week, the lads are kicking back against the recent pervasive narrative in the financial press: that China is on the verge of a big wobble or recession. As they show, most of the China hawks are high on their own supply in an oriental Copium den. The biggest news of the week is the BRICS summit in Johannesburg. With plans to expand way beyond the famous five, are we witnessing the birth of The...

This week, the lads have latched onto a report in the Financial Times which claims to show that outside of London, Britain is often poorer than the poorest US state - and equally, that it has fallen way behind its European peers like Germany. Our duo argue the toss: is this just bad accounting? Or is there something more fundamental here, to do with how a different kind of bad accounting has allow...

This week, the lads are looking at ESG - Environment, Social & Governance. For years now, companies have been pushing the idea that an 'ESG Score' could be a profitable guide to investing. Yet this latest mind virus for the finance community has produced scrappy results. Now, with Blacrock and Standard & Poor dropping it in the face of tightening markets, Philip Pilkington looks back on th...

As summer tightens its grip, the lads are getting back to basics, hosting a Spaces on "What Is Multipolarity"? Featuring Friend Of The Pod Malcom Kyeyune, aka @Tinkzorg. Enjoy. But don't inhale too deeply.

Ukraine has lost its grain deal. Russian fertiliser is struggling to get to market. Now India wants to ban exports of non-Basmati rice. The ratchet on food prices is by no means over. Now, the ratchet on politics really begins. Where are the next big food riots going to come from?  Call in the plumbers: there’s a big blockage in the UK gilt markets. Why is liquidity suddenly drying up in a tw...

De-dollarisation. We've been warning about it since the start of the show. But it won't happen overnight. To arrive at a place where the dollar is just one of many global currencies is the work of years, maybe decades. In this Special Edition, our duo are taking the long view. We're going right back to Bretton Woods, to Nixon & The Gold Window, to the Emerging Markets Crisis of 97 and 98, and...

Malcom Kyeyune (@Tinkzorg on Twitter) is one of the smartest, most far-seeing commentators out there. Someone the lads have really chimed with. Earlier in this bonanza week, we paired him with Elbridge Colby, for a Twitter Spaces debating whether America could ever take a Realist turn. Now, he's back for a solo show. The lads go deep into Chairman Kyeyune Thought: from the worthlessness of much US...

Can you still get your Germanium on AliExpress? After the US restricted Chinese access to high-end chips, China is looking to ban this vital chip ingredient.  So where do we go from here? Can America ban the stuff that makes Germanium? Or is this the Chinese going one step up in the chip wars?   For months, elements within NATO have been piling on the pressure to open a liaison offi...

This week, we hosted a special Twitter Spaces debate, now re-published as a podcast. The topic was: "Is Realism realistic for America, or will liberal idealists and neocons always control US foreign policy?" Can America's animal spirits shift strategy? We were joined by two of the world's top thinkers on the question, each with a distinct angle. @ElbridgeColby is the architect of the 2018 US Natio...

As France mops up the ashes of the burnt-out banlieues , data shows national food spending is down thirty per cent year on year. It’s not quite Les Miserables, but right across Europe, it seems that hangry might turn out to be the dominant political mode of 2023. China is building a trade superweapon. They’ve just created a brand new foreign relations department that will have the scope to take ch...

The Chinese are backing the Argentinian claims to the Falklands, with hot anti-colonialist rhetoric. With America still neutral, is Britain heading towards a Suez two-point oh moment? And perhaps more importantly: have we reached a sinister new milestone in the multipolar era – where old colonial grievances become brand new proxy wars? Back in Britain, the Bank of England are looking to re-bottle...

This week leads on an extraordinary story. A new metric, from the world-leading science journal Nature has put Chinese universities above some of the most famous names in higher ed. MIT, Caltech, Cambridge and Imperial are all ranking lower than the likes of Nanjing and Tsinghua. Andrew Collingwood is interested in how far behind the times our cultural imagination is with regards to China. While P...

This week, the lads are down the shopping mall... Commercial property is looking increasingly un-commercial. As businesses bail out of downtown post-Covid, it’s threatening to create a downward spiral that drags the banks with it. But will the banks then drag entire cities down with them?  America has spent decades taking out Europe’s trash. But if there were a war in Taiwan, a new survey sug...

Tim Cook. Elon Musk. Warren Buffet. Jeff Bezos. Jamie Dimon.  Lately, a who’s who of American business power has been sent over to meet their Chinese counterparts. With embassy-level diplomacy increasingly in the deep freeze, are they using their corporate rockstars to do what the State Department can’t?  Meanwhile, inside China, as the post-Covid recovery slows, we may be about to see t...

What is Britain's industrial policy? What should it be? In this Anglo-centric Twitter Spaces debate, we're joined by 'rising star of the Tory right', Miriam Cates MP. Talking alongside her is SDP leader William Clouston, and Michael Taylor, who runs Coldwater Economics, and publishes an excellent Substack called The Long March. After several off-beat editions, we'll be back to the normal format on...

This episode is brought to you by Twitter Spaces. With an elephantine 2.5 hour running time, we've gone gonzo, and turned one of our regular Twitter Spaces into a hybrid episode of Multipolarity, recorded live. In addition to all the usual Pilkington-Collingwood goodness, we were joined by a range of listener-guests, including the Ireland commentator Peter Ryan, and the Swedish gadfly Malcom Kyeyu...

Peter Zeihan is a big noise these days. He put in a stellar appearance on Joe Rogan. He's got a new book out: The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization. Zeihan is making big-picture geopolitics cool, creating a mass audience for the kinds of things we do at Multipolarity. But the lads also have some issues with PZ. His takes can seem awfully deterministic. A...

In the week after the Bank of England once again raised rates, our geopolitics lads are entertaining the theory that this is about more than just crushing inflation. Britain is being forced to shadow the Fed, as 'carry' becomes ever-more important in an unsettled global forex market. Andrew Collingwood sees Zungzwang in Britain's future: the unpleasant consequences of stagnation and debt overhang...

Interest rates policy has bedevilled the West ever since Alan Greenspan first put the Fed on the floor in the wake of 9/11. With rates finally returning to realistic levels, we're seeing the impact of what you might call a two decade bubble: banks being squeezed to breaking point. Philip Pilkington is angry at what he sees as central banks using their rates policy as a thermostat 'to turn consumer...

This week, our lads find themselves in the presence of Professor Stephen Walt. A professor of politics at the Harvard Kennedy School, Walt is the arch neo-realist, often bracketed alongside John Mearsheimer. Walt made his name opposing the Iraq War. He has long taken a cautious approach to US and Western foreign policy. He recently wrote that he sees a role for a Sino-American peace plan in Ukrain...

This week, ordinary geopolitics lads Andrew Collingwood and Philip Pilkington are back on the case of Janet Yellen. A week ago, she made incoherent comments about American foreign policy. Now, she's giving a big speech about China, and the results are only marginally better. Is Yellen being given contradictory objectives by her boss? Or is it simply the case that, with US hegemony haemorrhaging aw...

This week, the lads have been heartened and dismayed by public statements from the two most eminent female economists of our time. Christine Lagarde and Janet Yellen. But while Yellen fell back onto tired old State Department talking points, Lagarde gave a pitch-perfect introduction to the multipolar age. Does the global elite finally get it? And if so, how will they trim their sheets from here on...

This week, the lads are trying not to speculate on the exact nature of the Pentagon 'leak' that came out over the Easter weekend. Is it disinfo or just someone with an axe to grind? It's unclear, which is why we're casting out to what may happen beyond the summer - what if catastrophic collapse does indeed come to Ukraine's teetering defences? Who wins what, and how do we keep the fragile world or...