Multipolarity

Multipolarity Dialogues is a series of special multipolarity interviews that scan the geopolitical horizon. We talk to some of the sharpest analysts, thinkers, and experts about how they see the world beyond the visible edge of the geopolitical.

In this episode, Steve Hsu.

Where to start with Steve? He’s a member of that tiny sliver of humans who have managed to make significant contributions to multiple fields of academia, including quantum physics, dark energy, and computational genomics.

Outside academia, Steve has founded multiple startups and has been involved in AI and information se...

Coming up this week, last week, and the week before…

A massive multi-part episode.

The world is shifting in unpredictable ways. The old order is with the death doula right now. The new one has yet to go through lamaze class.

The only thing that can save us is podcasting. More of it. Longer. Harder. More esoteric. More riffs on the Thirty Years War. Bigger tangents into the exact mechanics of USAF recruitment in Tallahassee.

As our old sense-making apparatus breaks down, as the world on which unipolarity once relied goes ti...

The world is shifting in unpredictable ways. The old order dies of smoke inhalation in a dumpster fire. The new one has yet to be lifted out by C-Section.

The only thing that can save us is podcasting. More of it. Longer. Harder. More esoteric. More riffs on the Thirty Years War. Bigger tangents into the exact mechanics of USAF recruitment in Tallahassee.

As our old sense-making apparatus breaks down, as the world on which unipolarity once relied goes tits up, we’ve decided it’s time to raise our eyes from the trough of news...

Coming up this week and next week and the week after…

A massive multi-part episode.

The world is shifting in unpredictable ways. The old order dies of smoke inhalation in a dumpster fire. The new one has yet to be lifted out by C-Section.

Iran, it is now clear, represents the smouldering conflagration that will consume US power. As its strength is sapped, this lumbering giant will make ever-poorer decisions. Bad money will be poured after good. The Falcon F-16 cannot hear the falconer. Which way is up will become ever harder to di...

You’ve heard of de-Baathification? Now what about de-baseification? The gradual chipping back of US strategic assets in the Gulf as each in turn comes under pressure from drone and rocket fire… till only a handful of super-bases remain.

Iran’s president says country is in ‘full-scale war’ after an expansion of US attacks. They’ve struck US interests in Bahrain, Kuwait - and the Houthis are blockading Saudi ports.

The US was unlikely to win this war - but now it seems it could actually lose it.

Meanwhile…

14%. 18%. 18%

Year-on-year s...

This week: two audio essays, on one big Iran cluster-frig.

In the Collingwood corner:

Donald Trump has become an unreadable politician. His credibility has burst through various levels of ‘madman theory’ negotiating prowess, into a place where it may not even be clear to his most intimate subordinates where his true intent begins and ends. The result is that US policy is now a broken sail, flapping in the wind.

Originally, America had four aims: dismantle Iran's nuclear programme, cap its missiles and drones, cut off its proxies, and change the regime. With nil...

It’s an oil rush. Fill your boots, fellers, America is releasing its strategic petroleum reserves, ostensibly to see down Iranian pressure. Good news for voters, great news for foreign countries who want to sponge of the US teat. But in its ducking and diving haste, has the Trump administration inadvertently drunk its own milkshake?

Then in the second half of a two-parter, we’re digging into the brewing Ukranian-Polish conflict. At the earliest days of the Ukraine War, around 2014, their Parliament passed a series of laws which granted official veteran status to a couple of Second Worl...

This week on Multipolarity, we’re taking your questions.

It’s a Q&A episode, involving queries sent in by our loyal listeners.

Questions like:

How did you guys meet?

(Drunk, at a party).

Which EU country will be first to do its own deal on Ukraine?

(The first to fall to the populists)

Where should young Euros emigrate to if Europe is ‘screwed’?

(Find your bliss in the emerging world)

Is the Rouble overvalued?

(De...

Iran’s 14 points: making the world safe for Shia Theocracy.

Obviously, Donald Trump putting his John Hancock to the Islamabad Memorandum at Versailles carries absolutely no historical resonance.

But after the occupation of the Ruhr and the abdication of the Kaiser, what else could the Mullahs possibly put on their shopping list?

We’ll be picking through the carcrash, looking for signs of life in DC.

Meanwhile, to cement his lousy week Donald got into a love tiff with Georgia Meloni at the G7. Was this a passing fugue of Italian pass...

Fable — a short fantastical tale with a moral message.

For weeks, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei was telling anyone who’d listen that he’d invented an AI so powerful it could walk through walls, shoot sparrows from the sky, talk to horses, invent trees. A death star of tech.

Whether this was part of the sales pitch or genuine alarm, the US Government has taken him at his word, and shut off access to it beyond America’s shores.

Suddenly, the biggest tech of the 21st century is at the heart of a new age of...

It’s war in our time. After flirting with peace for a few miserable hours, the US and Iran are back to what they know best: taking uneven chunks out of each other amidst the world’s prime oil pathway.

This week, Iran levelled a terminal of Kuwait’s airport, and attacked the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain. Then there was that mysterious Apache helicopter crash off Hormuz.

Now, after the crisp kinetic strikes of the first few weeks – then the tentative tests of strength – the war is entering a new phase.

One in which Iran...

This week: two audio essays.

First up, they’re calling it the Poor Man’s Tomahawk. Ukraine is firing up to 2000 long range drones a week into Russia. The production facilities supplying them are scattered across Western Europe. These production facilities have an artificial shield, in that they are diplomatically protected. But how long this will last is unclear.

For its part, Ukraine would like the West to be more active in the war. And one way to do that would be to antagonise Russia into responding beyond its borders. There is now a 50% chance of e...

Russia has rained Oreshnik hypersonic missiles on Kiev. Four people killed. 549 missiles apparently shot down. This was a message. The Oreshnik travels at Mach 10. It was designed to deliver nukes.

As fighting season starts in earnest, year five looks like it might be the start of real escalation.

But, if Russian munitions start tiptoeing ever further West, could this be the year of, you know, real real escalation?

Meanwhile, the US-Iran war peace talks are going well:

Iran wants tolls on the strait. US says no.

Iran wants 12 billion...

Donald Trump took Elon Musk and Jensen Huang to Beijing with him for 48 hours. But rather than the frat boy big weekend of their autistic dreams, the trip turned into a sequel to The Hangover.

A dressing down from President Xi on Iran, a few more soybeans flogged, and some Boeings on order: was it worth Jensen’s $17 000 an hour time?

Meanwhile, the Japanese 10 year bond yield has climbed above the Chinese one. This is something of a sorpasso. As the country struggles to keep its debt load manageable, there’s a sense of sag to t...

This week: a tale of two audio essays.

Philip is going deep dive on the coming oil crisis.

He sees a two-wave format emerging. The initial wave - dropping in a month or so, is already baked in.

“The oil infrastructure is like a body,” he says. “if the heart stops pumping, the cells stop oxygenating, after a while they begin to die off.” They're "living chemical engineering systems" that need constant throughput. Shutdowns normally require years of planning and cost hundreds of millions. This will entail real damage to the global oil infrastr...

Remember Olaf Scholz? Just about?

Remember when he sunk to the lowest opinion poll rating in German political history?

Well the good news for anonymous hopeless former Chancellors is that the next beige technocrat in charge of Germany has just beaten his record. Plunging to 89% dissatisfied – with only 11% satisfied.

Even with Macron as the most unpopular President ever, Starmer the least popular Prime Minister, Merz is more unpopular still.

Our lead question this week is very simple: what the flaming fuck is going on in Germany?

Meanwhile, more news ju...

After weeks of Iran drumbeats - time for something a bit different.

George Yeo is the former Foreign Minister of Singapore

Educated at University of Cambridge and later at Harvard Business School, he's a former Brigadier-General in the nation's Air Force, and one of its most distinctive strategic thinkers - a man whose career tracks the rise of modern Asia itself.

Yeo served in government for over two decades, holding key portfolios including Trade and Industry.

As Singapore’s Foreign Minister from 2004 to 2011, he played a central role in shaping the co...

The hot question this summer: Can you bring your own jerry can of diesel onto an EasyJet?

As all the major airlines begin to cancel flights, bump surcharges, and post losses, the looming fuel crisis is finally hitting landfall - in the skies.

Meanwhile, Hungary’s Prime Minister elect, Péter Magyar, has decided he wants to unilaterally remove the country’s President and the head of the Constitutional Court. Another win for Democracy and the Rule of Law.

As his administration takes flesh, Magyar has declared that he will arrest Benjamin Netanyahu – last se...

Trump blockades a blockade.

The world holds its breath: will the Iranians blockade the blockade of the blockade?

Are we destined for battleship Tetris piling up in the Gulf?

Or is this just one more instance of the real war being the PR one?

Then, with his Fidesz party reduced to a rump, what happens when the lynchpin of anti-Brussels energy falls out?

The EU threw everything at Orbán, and it has paid off handsomely.

Ursula von der Leyen clearly had her speech about moving to q...

Annihilation - no more.

On Tuesday, the world was saved at five minutes to midnight.

For the next two weeks, at least…

But while the power plants are safe for now, the tragi-comic spectacle conflict in Iran has poked bigger holes in the global defence-industrial system.

No one knows this better than Malcom Kyeyune, the Mad Mullah of Malmö, who is back on the pod to take a victory lap, after predicting much of what was to come in the first week of the war.

This comes fresh on the...

1973.

Beyond the war, we’re hacking into the coming implications of the major energy crisis that’s brewing - as the last tankers to leave the Gulf trundle into the ports of Europe.

From Volkswagen to venture capital, we’ll be charting what life looks like with oil at 150 or 200 dollars a barrel.

Energy lockdowns. Rationing. Bond crises.

All of these are being whispered in the press right now. As much as our leaders dare.

But this is still the Ardennes Forest in spring 1940. Eerily quiet.

Soon enough...

 Multipolarity Dialogues is a series of interviews that scan the geopolitical horizon. We talk to some of the sharpest analysts, think as an experts about how they see the world beyond the visible edge of the geopolitical.

Now, is Iran actually winning this war, or is the US slowly pounding it to bits with its air power? Will there be a land invasion? Could a land invasion even succeed? How are the oil markets gonna react? What are the likely economic consequences of this war? How will it affect the US midterms? All these are questions that ar...

The dog that didn’t bark.

China is cooling its heels on the war in Iran. As America’s entanglement deepens, it’s not Sun Tzu they’re turning to, but the wit and wisdom of Napoleon Bonaparte: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

Meanwhile, even closer to Beijing, US weakness is showing up the true nature of the slow war in the South China Sea. If America can’t open the Strait of Hormuz, how can it maintain the Taiwan Strait?

Finally, is Bibi booboo? A new wave of rumours has...

As Iran smoulders, ships burn in Hormuz, and TACO traders search for signal in the thunderous noise, we’re celebrating the end of the world in the only way we know how - two audio essays.

Philip Pilkington on the economic consequences of the war. And Andrew Collingwood on the political mess we’re in.

The Netherlands has its youngest ever Prime Minister. Liberal technocrat Rob Jetten is also openly gay - a big win for diversity. But can the VVD survive in coalition without meaningful agricultural reforms?

Meanwhile, in Kazakhstan, wheat futures are up almost nine percent since September. We’ll be asking whether transitory commodities inflation in the Stans is the big story we’ve all been missing.

Finally, the little known African country of Bapetikotsweti has signed a memorandum of understanding with Peru. It includes bilateral tariff reductions on soy beans and electric toothbrushes. What does this mean...

The US State Department advised its citizens in Northern Mexico to ‘shelter in place’, as the cartels took their reprisals, following a major Mexican security forces operation against gang kingpin El Mencho - and then another called El Tuli.

It’s all LOL, until you realise that this is just the start. By targeting the cartels, the US has poked a hornet’s nest; And the hornets are on cocaine.

Meanwhile - have you paid a US steel tariff in recent months? Was it over 30%? If so, you could be due a refund. Just dial 1-800-WHI...

At the Munich Security Conference, Marco Rubio offered Europe a peace in our time.

The Americans sprayed on the charm. But looking between the fine words, it seems like Marco was on his way out the door.

Do Europe’s friends need to tell her this is a break up speech?

Meanwhile, rumours of the destruction of Iran remain premature.

We’ve run the numbers, and it turns out it would take ten per cent of all the Tomahawks in the world to flatten three mullahs and an oil derrick.

Bu...

Firas Modad is back for his second turn on the pod.

After talking about Neo-Ottomanism last time, he is turning his attention to Iran, and its faltering regime.

With rumours of an imminent attack continuing to swirl, what future is there for a post-Khamenei world?

What part could be played by the exiled Shah? Is there perhaps a different faction that could take the reins if the mullahs fell?

Even then: do Iran’s neighbours even want the regime to fall - given that it could unleash an oil rich industrialised st...

Today we bring you two audio essays from your favourite geo-political podcasters.

First up Philip is looking at the recent attempt to short the precious metals market.

Perhaps the push to lower the interest rate is not to juice the economy but rather an attempt ultimately stop the Sell America trade?

Meanwhile Andrew’s shouting from the rooftops "it’s right there in the document!".

The Donroe Doctrine… Trump wants to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and the evidence has been there the whole time.

Remember you can ge...

After Greenland, the rupture in the Transatlantic Alliance was made visible at the WEF conference in Davos.

Mark Carney said the quiet bit aloud. But the real implications are beginning to be felt in the deep financial plumbing that undergirds the global economy.

Now, a Japanese bond market sell-off is unsettling larger forces. If Japanese interest rate then rocket, they may need to liquify their massive US Treasury bond holdings. Beyond the geopolitics, this is going to turn nasty – economic levels of nasty.

We’ll be exploring the full low road prospectus in this...

In 1991, the philosopher Jean Baudrillard published a series of essays in Libération and The Guardian entitled The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Baudrillard's argument was effectively twofold. Firstly, since the American military overwhelmed the Iraqi army so easily and barely sustained casualties, what took place for the West was not really a war per se.

Secondly, the new medium of cable news television meant that viewers in the United States were able to watch the war unfold in real time, albeit through a lens of carefully curated propaganda. Viewers were told that they were being g...

Reza Pahlavi is packing his toothbrush again. As protests grow in Iran, the exiled Crown Prince has been popping up for media appearances, from his home in the Maryland suburbs near DC.

As we enter yet another cycle of Persian proto-revolution, we’re saying he shouldn’t count those air miles just yet.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump says that Greenland’s defences are two dogs and a sled. Handy, because America has three dogs and two sleds.

The Danes have been humiliated already – but can anything useful still come from the biggest gorilla in the room...

They got the Ace of Spades.

The annual dictator kidnapping season got underway in fine style this week as the US bagged a big one, 1.9 meter Nicolás Maduro.

But while the President and his exposer were taking a tour of the Gulf of America by Black Hawk, back on Planet Earth the geopolitical plates were shifting as never before.

In 2026, it looks like we're about to answer the greatest question of them all.

Can you just do things?

We might not like the answer.

Expanding on t...

And to all a good night.

Need a last minute gift? Or want to treat yourself to something you actually want?

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Every day until Christmas, Philip and Andrew open a window, revealing an object that speaks to the geopolitical year that was.

Every day until Christmas, Philip and Andrew open a window, revealing an object that speaks to the geopolitical year that was.

Every day until Christmas, Philip and Andrew open a window, revealing an object that speaks to the geopolitical year that was.

Every day until Christmas, Philip and Andrew open a window, revealing an object that speaks to the geopolitical year that was.

Every day until Christmas, Philip and Andrew open a window, revealing an object that speaks to the geopolitical year that was.

Every day until Christmas, Philip and Andrew open a window, revealing an object that speaks to the geopolitical year that was.