Multipolarity

In a very special episode, we’re celebrating our hundred with a walk back along the yesteryears of Multipolarity.  Two yesteryears in particular - 2023 and 2024.  That’s right: we’re old enough to remember the Multipolar world back when it was a glint in Xi Jingping’s extreme-UV lithography factories.  Back when American decline was just a gobbet of drool on Joe Biden’s chin. &...

From Marco Polo to Marco Rubio – the West keeps rediscovering that China is a big Asian landmass with a mind of its own. So is Trump’s hawkish new Secretary of State about to get himself tangled in a Chinese finger trap of tariffs?  Meanwhile, back on the Europe thing, Multipolarity’s pet punching bag Ursula von der Leyen is about to be put through four years of BDSM, as the Trumpists resile...

At the centre of the Global American empire, a storm is coming. But it’s in the European periphery that the effects will be the most acute.  Can anyone steer a path through the rocks?  We’ll be looking at chaos in the German auto industry - as Volkswagen overruns its cost budget by 20 per cent.   At chaos in the European Union - as a heavily dug-in Von der Leyen regime goes ful...

After the BRICS meeting in Kazan, a picture of a bundle of fake BRICS banknotes began to circulate online. Right up to a picture of Putin holding one, like a mobster holds a cigar.  The intent was mocking. But while the end goal of the kind of paper that rappers shove into g-strings is still a long way off - in the background, the bureaucratic elves of BRICS were chipping away at the dense, d...

Moldova has voted to join the EU – A referendum won by less than a single percentage point. It’s less clear when the EU’s citizens get their vote on whether they want to house a very poor, seriously divided, minority-Russian post-Soviet state. Surely this is the moment the eastwards expansion runs aground in the geopolitical reality? Meanwhile, China and India have quietly settled their long-runni...

Oil might be about to fall out of bed, because of an almighty concatenation of the US elections, the Houthis in the Red Sea, the Israelis  striking Iran, and the Iranians striking The Strait of Hormuz. If it pushes toward $300 a barrel, they’ll be laying it down like Chateau Lafite.  Meanwhile, Serbia says it might be joining the BRICS rather than entering the EU. Is it really that impor...

Something a little bit different.  In a crowded news week, we’re bringing you only two stories - but three hosts. Katrina, Sandy, Helene. In the annals of hurricane disasters, the latest storm is looking like it might post a new high score on the leaderboard. But the response has been little short of a new low score from the creaking US federal bureaucracy.  Malcom Kyeyune has been track...

Hezbollah has been decapitated. As the turban falls off Hassan Nasrallah for the final time, we’ll be assessing whether anyone will pick up the crown of Jihad they find lying in the gutter.  Meanwhile, British Foreign Secretary David Lammy is reportedly spending a third of his daily time planning an operation as big as D-Day to resettle displaced Lebanese in Europe.  After the bombs fall...

For decades now, Germany has stood as the doughty centurion at the gates of European civilisation. A nation of recyclers, engineers, and a super-sensible, hyper-dull political class.  But since 2022, German exceptionalism has taken a helluva beating. The country has been haemorrhaging its manufacturing base, and with it, the social consensus that lasted more than thirty years is beginning to...

There’s a changing of the guard at NATO. Down comes the regimental banner of Jens Stoltenberg. Eyes right, salute, the former Dutch PM Mark Rutte. Some say the Treaty Organisation has never been more relevant. But is that a bit like the man who jumps from the 23rd floor still looking very well as he passes the 3rd floor?  Meanwhile, a new OBR forecast accuses pensioners of placing too much bu...

Touted in Eurocrat circles as a document that can square the circles and circle the wagons. Praised to the hilt by the Commission, hotly anticipated by industry, to some this is Europe's last best attempt to recant and repent before it is zapped by Asian competition and the ongoing energy drought. This week, we've cleared the decks to rake over the Mario Draghi report into European competitiveness...

As Pavel Durov remains in French hands, we’re wondering whether Europe can finally develop its own Silicon Valley simply by mass detention of top entrepreneurial talent. Or whether perhaps this is the desperate last whelp of a society increasingly bypassed by the global tech economy.  Meanwhile, in Germany, the story of the day is that the AfD have taken a great swath of Thuringia and Saxony,...

Thomas Fazi has been watching the EU implode for over a decade. He's widely known as a contributor to UnHerd and Compact, and for his 2014 book: Battle For Europe: How An Elite Hijacked A Continent. His work on the corruption of European institutions stretches back to the 2011 Sovereign Debt Crisis. Multipolarity has been consistently arguing that the jesses of central bank policy are being used a...

As Ukraine punches into Kursk, and the world asks whether this is this more Kaiserschlacht, or more Ardennes Offensive, cooler heads are focused on the bigger picture.  Word is Kamala Harris is going to sack Jake Sullivan. Given that Trump would have sacked him anyway, we’re now into a world where the pro-Ukraine top team is, fait accompli, gone. Which means the US pivot to Asia is increasing...

Kamala Harris is ahead in six key swing states - according to several major polls. All of which are categorically wrong.  Could the ghost of the Shy Trumper be about to smite the Dems for the third election running? And why are the usual media suspects pretending it isn’t a thing, never has been, never could be?  Meanwhile, in Malaysia and Indonesia, a new domino theory is starting to st...

The bears are coming. As Japan posts the biggest one day stock market losses since Black Monday, we’re asking whether this dip is a passing blip – or the big ka-blam?  Meanwhile, Argentina’s reserves include almost two million ounces of gold, valued at $4.5 billion. But lately, there’s a question that’s on everybody’s lips: where is it?  The gold seems to have been transferred out of the...

Last weekend, Viktor Orbán travelled to the town of Băile Tușnad, deep in the Transylvanian mountains of Romania, to attend a 'music and ideas' festival. He was on the bill. Amongst the ethnically-Hungarian diaspora who live in the region, Orbán is a regular visitor. In fact, the Tusványos festival was started by Fidesz back when the party was effectively four people. That was in the early-90s. To...

At 4.32pm on the 18th of August the so-called State Committee on the State of Emergency cut the lines of communication to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbacev's dacha - these included telephone communications and the nuclear command and control system. Eight minutes later Lieutenant General Yuri Plekhanov, Head of the 9th Chief Directorate of the KGB, let the group into the dacha where they demanded...

You were only supposed to blow his bloody head off... As Donald Trump is saved by God Almighty, we’re indisputably living in the lucky timeline. But while the country might have dodged civil war, American politics has been changed utterly by the events of Saturday. And still not for the better.  Meanwhile, Trump’s VP pick is lukewarm on Britain, and positively tepid on Project Ukraine. He’s b...

Viktor Orban has been taking secret flights. Dodging the CIA’s aviation monitoring to jet into Moscow.      The Hungarian honcho is now fashioning himself as a shuttle diplomat in the Russo-Ukranian War, just as his country takes the rotating Presidency of the EU Council.  What was the goal of this clandestine trip? And did he still get the air miles?   Meanwhile...

In the halls of modern government the info-wizard is king. Media consultants, political strategists, whatever title they assume they always promise the same thing: magic worked through information control; spells cast by incantation. In the first week of March 2022, only a few days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a slew of articles came out in Western publications announcing the advent of t...

This week, it’s a double header of audio essays on Europe’s elite power-plays.  One From Andrew Collingwood - on the Atlanticists and the Autonomists taking their battle for supremacy into the new EU administration.   And another from Philip Pilkington setting out how a new kind of Trussification may be coming for the states within the ECB…  Is Le Pen mightier than La Banque? ...

As Vladimir Putin meets Kim Jong Un, big trade plans are afoot. Much to the chagrin of Western leaders.  Seems like we’re about to answer an important question: what happens when the collective set of people you’ve sanctioned gets so large that they can all successfully trade with each other? Which invites yet another question - did no one think of this?  Javier Milei decided he would ri...

Military-industrial blogger Malcom Kyeyune spends his life talking and thinking about US war preparations. So what was it like when he finally left his Swedish fortress and visited the capital of the Global American Empire, Washington DC? Malcom is just back from his first international conference. The Lads pick up on his time talking to the generals and the bureaucrats, and wonder whether the num...

Mexico has a new President.  She’s the first woman President. She’s the first Jewish president.  But most importantly, she’s the second Andrés Manuel López Obrador President.  As the outgoing leader’s hand picked successor takes over, what does the continuity version of his wiley non-orthodox socialism look like when it comes to Mexico’s global standing?  Meanwhile, for once Am...