Episodes
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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, dull, paperwork of a new payments system.
This was never going to be a big bang. More like popping the world’s biggest roll of bubble wrap.
After all, like the nuclear secrets themselves, the mechanism for making a new international method for the settlement of accounts is an obscure and technical thing. And it is eighty years since anyone tried to do it from scratch.
Few people are better placed to be the Robert Oppenheimer to this kind of project than Warwick Powell.
Powell is Adjunct Professor at Queensland University of Technology and the author of "China, Trust and Digital Supply Chains”, and "Dynamics of a Zero Trust World".
At his Substack, he blogs about China, trade, and the dense subterranean plumbing network that underlies the global payments system.
This week, he joins us… to explain how to make a new global currency.
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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-running border dispute in the Himalayas. Far from the recent era where rival troops would run at each other with sticks - or even the notorious 2020 microwaving incident - this bizarre superpower friction seems to have been cleared up inside a few paragraphs. Is this proof positive that the BRICS are turning their attentions outwards?
Finally, the story that the Trump campaign has launched a complaint against the British Labour party has spooked the Starmer regime. Staffers campaigning for their Democratic Party cognates seemed like a cute idea and a nice holiday. But if these naive limeys wanted to know how strictly Americans take their electoral laws, they should have dropped a dime to Steve Bannon’s prison cell. Is this the greatest example yet of how the disinformation NGO blob is rapidly destroying its handlers?
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Episodes manquant?
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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 important to get away from Croatians? Or is it more to do with the increasingly centripetal force of its Russia relationship? Luckily, Great Power competition in the Balkans has very few bad historical connotations.
Finally, 153 Chinese military aircraft, plus drones and warships encircled Taiwan on Monday, as the Chinese python gave its rebel province a friendly squeeze. But this is more than just another shot across the bows. It’s a clue that far from the Private Ryan D-Day fantasy, the Chinese would choose to take the island by siege.
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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 tracking the fallout. He thinks it’s the perfect example of an end of empire US elite prioritising foreign aid over domestic help.
Finally, not long after the bombs fell over Lebanon, the Iranian bombs began to fall over Tel Aviv. And no information blackout could hide the multiple online clips of strikes.
It was fine for Hamas bottle rockets, but now that big regional players are showing their technological hand, the Iron Dome seems more like a porcelain potty.
But beyond the he-said she-said of the Israeli wars. Is there something seismic happening here?
Are we in fact witnessing a massive real-time evolution in the eternal balance between missile defence and missile attack?
***
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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, the refugee deluge dawns. After Ukraine, after Syria, can Europe even cope with the latest wave? And what does it say about Lammy that he can plan D-Day with only a third of his time?
Finally, in Austria, the party that spurred Europe’s original Nazi panic, Jorg Haider’s Freedom Party, has come top of a national election, fifteen years after his death.
This should be a moment of high moral drama. But in the year of Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen, it just feels like today’s deja vu. Are we inured? And should we be?
Of course, what with it being premium week and all, most listeners will be more like a European social democratic party - excluded.
So get it while you can. Or get on Patreon and sign up.
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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 unwind. What are the long roots of this crisis?
This week, The Lads are joined by Philipp Mattheis to discuss Germany's downward spiral. And its future.
Today, the trains literally do not run on time. So with the rise of the AfD, will the country soon hire a leader who can make those trains run on time?
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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 burden on the British treasury - tripling the national debt by mid-century. At the same time, The Labour government is fast-tracking euthanasia through parliament. Is Killer Keir’s latest economic strategy just The Day of the Pillow?
Finally, there hasn’t been a Trump assassination attempt in at least forty eight hours. Unless there has by now - in which case please ignore this message. What does the never-ending conga line of would-be nation-destabilisers say about the health of the US polity?
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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.
Can this arch-insider come up with the special sauce that sets the VW plants humming? Can he weave a "European Google" out of thin air? Or how about just a European Temu?
400 pages and 170 proposals later, The Lads have their answer...
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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, while Sara Wagenknecht has gobbled the rest. This is democracy in action – so can it be stopped?
At the same time, the EU is redefining its central budget. For member states, that 1.2 trillion annual pocket money is no longer free - it will be conditional on economic reforms. We’re about to find out what exactly Slovenia is prepared to do for its slice. Better yet, what will Hungary do?
Finally, as Turkey applies to be the latest BRIC, we’re wondering: is this the point when it’s quicker to build a new acronym from states who aren’t in the club?
As you may have noticed, this week is an extended, four-story gutbuster of an episode.
That’s because it’s Premium Week – and we believe in giving our Patreons a little extra on the side. And round the back.
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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 as political levers to keep the EU's wayward member states together - in contravention of both the letter and the spirit of its treaties.
Fazi has been another voice, consistently been making a similar critique, but from a Marxist perspective.
This week, the lads invite him on, to compare notes.
You can find Thomas' popular Substack here:
https://substack.com/@tfazi
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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 increasingly nailed on.
Meanwhile, two years after Joe Biden’s signature Inflation Reduction Act, it turns out the thick end of four trillion dollars buys you a huge boom in the construction of factories – but not much by way of a green economy. As new research shows many of the pop-up LLCs the IRA spawned are popping into Chapter 12, we’re sifting through the debris, looking for recycling.
Finally, Azerbaijan is the latest BRIC in the BRICS. After their short and decisive war with Armenia, this rising former western ally is now binding itself to Russia. In the global carve-up bigger picture, should we really keep on getting Armenia in the divorce?
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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 stack up. In the world of friendshoring and belt-and-road, the Pacific rim was always going to be the key prize - and China is gaining the upper hand.
Finally, Twitter-X is being pitched into a classic royale — between the mobile forces of capital and the fixed forces of national politics.
Not content with fighting a flame war against Keir Starmer, Elon Musk now being set upon by Thierry Breton - Europe’s information commissioner. Which is like being savaged by not one dead sheep, but two.
In the most mobile industry in the world, thirty years of globalisation theory suggests there can be only one winner. One look at Musk’s meme game says he could still flub it.
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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 country. But why, no one can say.
Is this some sublime economic master-stroke from the wacky professor Milei? Or just the equivalent of a desperate gambler taking his wife’s gold rings up to the pawn shop?
Finally, in a subscriber-only super-section, we’ll be covering the British race riots.
The events of the past few days have shaken the British establishment to its core. With no clear narrative, and an increasingly balkanised society, the country’s leaders now seem clueless and visibly scared, as they face down the fruits of eighty years of immigration policy failure.
For our Patrons, we’ll be taking the long view - tracing the history of British immigration; then extending into the far future - looking at the demographic realities of the UK from here on out. And, of course, we’ll be hashing through the story of the day.
What can an already wobbling Starmer regime do in the face of the tectonic forces being unleashed?
Be warned, this one’s a black pill so big it might be a black suppository.
But to listen, you’ll need to be signed up to our Patreon.
Just go to Patreon.com, search Multipolarity, and pay 5 dollars, pounds or euros a month. You can cancel any time.
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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. Today, it has swelled to accommodate over 10 000 people.
The place is billed as an 'open university', with talks by a range of academics, thinkers and politicians.
Traditionally, Orbán gives his own 'series of lectures' , just like many of others speakers. The difference is that Orbán speaks from the main stage, in front of a crowd of a few thousand.
In recent years, these speeches have become philosophical key notes to understanding the Hungarian perspective. In previous years, his talks have made world headlines, including the one where he said he regarded Hungary as an 'illiberal democracy' (though this was partly mis-translation).
Rarely does a world leader get as philosophical as Orbán does in these talks. He lays out a deep vision of the future as he sees it for the upcoming year, one that connects history, economics, and metaphysics.
This year's speech was among the deepest - and the spiciest -ever. Not only did it catch the headlines, with its barbs against Poland, and naming US intelligence as the saboteurs of the Nordstream pipeline, it could even justifiably be called 'historic'. Orbán talked openly of Hungary's coming pivot to China, of the decay of the Western soul, and of the shape of the peace that must come beyond the Russo-Ukraine War.
Gladden Pappin is the President of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs. A prominent academic and leading light in the post-liberal movement, Pappin is perhaps one of the hidden architects of Hungary's dynamic foreign policy.
This week, The Lads ask him about the deeper meaning of Orbán's Big Talk.
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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 that Gorbachev either declare a state of emergency in the Soviet Union or resign.
The previous month twelve Soviet public figures, mostly artists but also some politicians and military officials, signed a letter entitled 'A Word to the People' in the anti-perestroika newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya. The letter was drafted by the writer Alexander Prokhanov.
"An enormous, unforeseen calamity has taken place," it told readers, "Motherland, our land, a great power, given to us to ward with the nature, glorious ancestors, it is perishing, breaking apart, falling into darkness and nonbeing."
On July 10th 2024, the actor, director and film producer George Clooney published an essay in The New York Times entitled 'I Love Joe Biden. But We Need a New Nominee'.
"The one battle [Biden] cannot win is the fight against time," Clooney wrote, "None of us can. It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe “big F-ing deal” Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate."
Where Prokhanov's letter was infused with Soviet patriotism, Clooney's was shot through with party loyalty. Prokhanov pleaded with Soviet leaders to save the Soviet Union; Clooney pleaded with Biden to save the Democratic Party. Yet the functional outcome was the same: a coup - of sorts.
Less than two weeks later, on the 21st of July, President Biden issued a letter stating that he would not run for president again in 2024. Everyone knew that Biden had written this against his own will. Some accepted that he had simply caved under pressure, others whispered of a backroom deal or even threats.
Gorbachev survived his coup attempt, although afterwards he faded into the background as the new President of Russia Boris Yeltsin came to the fore. The coup attempt definitively sped up the dissolution of the Soviet Union, however, precisely the opposite of what the plotters had intended.
Likewise, the coup against Biden will likely speed up the collapse of the Democratic Party in the United States. The leaders of this party told the American people that Biden was capable of doing his job but now, after the coup, they have tacitly admitted that he is not. This is an obvious breach of trust - and one that voters will be unlikely to forgive.
But what does it matter? The collapse of a political party is nothing compared to the collapse of a great power like the Soviet Union. Another political party, perhaps. But just as the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was until 1991 the party of the state, so too is the Democratic Party of today.
The Democratic Party in 2024 is the skeleton of the American ruling elite. Without it, this elite collapses into a gelatinous heap. Can the American state function without its party? Can the current world system survive if the American state starts to falter? These are questions that will be answered in the following 18 months - they are questions that are now being asked across America and the world in response to this very American coup.
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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 being sold as a successor. Someone who can bring real intellectual heft to the MAGA project. But isn’t the intellectual wing of a populist party rather like the library in a whorehouse?
Finally, Private Equity was once sold as the honest, hard work, real-projects end of the financial services sector. Take a company. Make it better. So why are they suddenly robbing Peter to pay Paul? And what happens when Peter’s cash runs out?
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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 French parliamentary elections, Emmanuel Macron’s calculation was effectively like the old puzzle about a man who has to get a fox, a chicken and a bag of grain from one side of a river to another. Today, he’s like a man stood on the far bank of a river watching a fox murder a chicken as it swallows all the grain. Whoops.
Finally, in Britain the maths was easy. An epochal nuking for the Tories has brought Labour to power on a one-word slogan of Change. But with the coffers bare, is the change Starmer’s looking for spare?
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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 the anti-Russian infowar.
To say that this infowar was launched with much fanfare would be an understatement - within days of the Russo-Ukraine war beginning various Western publications were already suggesting that victory was on the horizon.
The effect was eerie, with multiple outlets running the exact same headline. "Ukraine is winning the information war against Russia", proclaimed different writers at CNBC, Slate, and The Financial Times.
No doubt this proclamation of victory was itself part of the infowar that the various authors purported to analyse - a self-licking ice cream cone if there ever was one.
Yet as time went on it became clear that the anti-Russian infowar was not targeted at the Russian people, much less the Russian military - rather it was targeted at a Western domestic audience.
The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard once declared that The Gulf War Did Not Take Place - it was merely broadcast as a sort of simulation on television screens across the world. If only Baudrillard had lived to see the anti-Russian infowar launched in early-2022.
Partisan politics in the United States had long been drowned in a bathtub of propaganda by the time the anti-Russian infowar came along.
As the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal raged in 1998, the American public asked themselves whether the President did or did not have sexual relations with that woman. The question was a factual one: did he or didn't he. Today such a reference to reality seems quaint.
The factuality of various political attacks barely matters anymore as everything is treated as being part of some partisan "narrative" or "talking point".
And so, when some people raised the possibility that President Joe Biden might be completely incapable of doing his job due to severe cognitive impairment, the factuality of this claim was never really addressed - it was simply dismissed as an obvious partisan attack, a "right-wing talking point".
Last week we saw reality climb back in through the window: the President tried to debate his opponent on television and the world saw that America is being led by a man who is clearly not in command of his faculties.
In this week's episode of Multipolarity, we are joined by Malcolm Kyeyune to discuss the saturation of the information space with propaganda of various forms.
Are these really the savvy tricks that consultants and strategists claim them to be? Or are they a symptom of a political system experiencing deep decline - a system that can no longer deal with reality and finds itself instead retreating into fantasy?
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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?
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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 rip the band aid off Argentine inflation.
Now, finally, beneath that band aid, we can see… a gaping wound.
Inflation is coming down - but in this case, what comes down must go up.
We’ll be explaining why The Crazy One’s apparent success in containing the money supply is about to lead to another run on the peso.
Finally, last week, the EU was assailed by a wave of populists. It all felt suitably dramatic. A blow against the blob.
But have you ever punched a blob before?
As the permanent Brussels mandarin class regroups, it's time for the Empire Strikes Back.
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- Montre plus
