Geopolitics with Policy Tensor

Space Summary

The Twitter Space Geopolitics with Policy Tensor hosted by admcollingwood. Delve into the intricate world of geopolitics with Policy Tensor, the co-host behind thought-provoking discussions on global events and policy decisions. Gain a comprehensive understanding of international relations, power dynamics, and strategic maneuvers shaping the world’s geopolitics. Through deep analysis and interdisciplinary insights, this space offers valuable perspectives on historical contexts influencing contemporary global affairs. Explore the nexus of economics, politics, and international relations through the lens of experienced hosts unraveling complex geopolitical issues.

For more spaces, visit the Alpha Group page.

Questions

Q: What is the primary focus of the discussions in the space?
A: The space primarily focuses on analyzing geopolitical events, their impacts, and relevant policy decisions.

Q: How are global power shifts and alliances addressed during the conversations?
A: The space delves into the intricacies of changing global power dynamics and evolving alliances.

Q: What interdisciplinary approach is evident in the discussions?
A: There’s a clear interdisciplinary approach discussing how economics, politics, and international affairs intersect.

Q: Why are historical contexts important in understanding current global affairs?
A: Exploring historical contexts provides crucial insights into the roots of present-day geopolitical challenges.

Q: How do the discussions shed light on strategic decision-making?
A: The discussions offer valuable perspectives on strategic decisions made by leaders impacting global scenarios.

Highlights

Time: 00:12:15
Impact of Geopolitical Events Analyzing the repercussions of key global events on international relations.

Time: 00:23:45
Global Power Dynamics Understanding the shifts in global power structures and their implications.

Time: 00:35:20
Policy Analysis in Real Time Exploring real-time policy decisions and their effects on the global landscape.

Key Takeaways

• Deep analysis of various geopolitical events and their implications.
• Insights into the dynamics of global power shifts and alliances.
• Exploration of complex policy decisions and their impact on international relations.
• Understanding the intersection of economics, politics, and international affairs.
• In-depth discussions on strategic decision-making by world leaders.
• Insightful commentary on historical contexts influencing current global scenarios.

Behind the Mic

Conversation Start

Okay, I will. I’ve invited policy tensor as a speaker, but he can either accept that or he can simply put in a request here in the bottom left hand corner. Oh, there we go.

Greetings

I can. Hi, Colin. How are you doing? I’m all right, thanks. I’m not bad at all, actually. Believe it or not, despite being a proud Britain, I was playing a little bit of american pool this afternoon. So we had a little bit of a friendly tournament with some people that I know at the bar, and I failed miserably to win. I got to the quarterfinals only, unfortunately.

Discussion of Pool Rules

Oh, my God, you have these weird pool rules in the UK, don’t you? Oh, yeah. Well, here’s the thing. We often play something called black ball, or sometimes english eight ball, and it’s played on a smaller table and the pockets are curved, but I was actually playing on a proper nine foot american diamond. Yeah, yeah, it was a diamond table. So, yeah, a few of us like playing America, but it’s just so much easier than snooker. So for rubes like me, it’s a little bit of an easier game to play.

Meeting Introduction

Anyway, we seem to be filling up quite nicely already, so I think let’s just get started with this. I just like to welcome everybody. This evening we’re going to have a discussion about geopolitics, I think specifically focused on the Middle east, because as far as I can see, there’s a very clear chain of escalation. There’s some very clear, almost game theory style strategy issues at the moment between Israel and Iran and some of Iran’s proxies.

Discussion Plan

Perhaps later we’ll go into the Ukraine conflict and Taiwan and all the South China Sea more broadly and look at the very big picture. But I’d like to welcome policy tensor. By day, I believe he works in finance in New York City, but perhaps I’m wrong about to say this, but the impression I get is that his passion is public policy and especially international relations and grand strategy, although on his superb sub stack, there’s plenty on macroeconomics as well.

Welcoming Policy Tensor

So welcome policy tense. You have a fantastic view on this. If nobody has read his Twitter thread, there’s some great moments of him handing the backsides to certain rather well credentialed individuals when it comes to international relations. So why don’t you give us a summary of where we are in the Middle east at the moment?

Recent Events in the Middle East

Just recently, we’ve seen an iranian attack on Israel in, supposedly in retaliation for the israeli assassination of Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, which is the main iranian proxy in the region and is also, I believe I’m right in saying the government of Lebanon at the moment, this attack on Israel has caused some damage. Its more than I expected at first when I saw that somewhere between 13200 missiles have been fired.

Assessment of Israeli War Efforts

But still, I dont see it as being something that either will do anything to hobble the israeli war effort, which is very much moving toward Lebanon at the moment, or even to establish or reestablish some degree of deterrence. But you might have different views on that, like where are we at the moment and what are your overall views on this?

Heightened Risk of Regional War

So we are at probably the risk of regional war, is now higher than at any time since October 7. We are at a very decisive moment because the Israelis are now convinced that they can finish Hezbollah. This is the basic issue. The basic issue is that the Israelis have gone after Hezbollah and they really, truly intend to finish it.

Israeli Ground Invasion Plans

And they have launched ground invasion. They are saying that it’s a limited incursion meant to push back Hezbollah a few tens of miles. But that is not what the IDF is really planning. They think this is the moment. They think that it’s time to come to finish the job.

Advice from Naftali Bennett

And in fact, they wanted to go to Bennett Naftali. Bennett, who’s the former prime minister, was advising the israeli government that we should go after Hezbollah first and just have a holding action in Gaza, which is not the main scene. But the israeli public opinion was so enraged by the October 7 attack that the Israelis had to go into Gaza and they completely totaled the place.

Impact of the Current Situation

Gaza’s economy has collapsed by 90%. Some 50,000 to 100,000 people have been killed. Everybody is basically on starvation diet with the trickle of food that they let in. But there are good reports from Sai Hirsch, for example, that show that they have finished Hamas.

Successful Goals and Future Moves

Their goal of gutting Hamas is practically successful at this point. This is why they have decided to go after Hezbollah. Now, the issue is that Hezbollah and Iran wanted to make a big symbolic show and dance about supporting Hamas.

Political Ramifications

And you can see how much political capital they were deriving from the israeli genocide in Gaza. This is why, in fact, the Houthis were closing the Red Sea route, because there is so much political capital to be made to be seen to stand up to Israel and the US, especially when they are carrying out a large scale atrocities against defenseless Muslims.

Diplomatic Adaptations

And this has been extremely diplomatically successful. So, for example, the United States has lost Malaysia and Indonesia. Recent reports that survey elites in these places, including government elites and officials and business leaders and media elites and so on.

Shifting Alliances

Now the Malaysians and the Indonesians are saying, if you decide to make us choose between the US and China, we are going to go with China because of Gaza. They say so explicitly, and this is something that they are forced to do no matter how they think about their geopolitics because of domestic political pressure from their largely muslim populations.

US Foreign Policy Challenges

And so diplomatic prices have been extremely high for the US. But the us policy elites are so constrained by the lobby at home that they have no choice but to just let Israel do whatever it wants.

Shifts in Israeli Strategy

And the Israelis, after October 7, have had a complete change of heart, a complete change of grand strategy. They think that now is the time to gut them one after the other.

Bennett’s Insights

I’ll read you something that I just read in the Wall Street Journal, a direct quote from former prime minister Naftali Bennett. Quote, hezbollah and Hamas are paralyzed temporarily and Iran is exposed. Right now. They’re naked. They don’t have the ability to protect themselves.

Opportunities for Israel

Israel has the greatest opportunity in 50 years to change the face of the Middle east. So the Israeli, the hawkish corner, the hawkish half of the israeli policy opinion is now leaning towards going after finishing the job in Gaza, which is almost done, going after Hezbollah, finishing the job in Lebanon, making sure that Hezbollah cannot participate in the lebanese political system and remaking the lebanese political system in the way that they attempted when they occupied Lebanon for 18 years, but failed to do so, which in fact created Hezbollah in the first place.

Future Strategies

So they. And then they’re going to go after Iran. Now, if you read Lawrence Friedman, who’s a very serious scholar of international relations, he wrote the authoritative book on nuclear policy. He wrote recently in the Financial Times that Hezbollah made a strategic mistake.

Hezbollah’s Strategic Mistakes

The strategic mistake was that they were doing the show and tell, symbolic strikes, you know, missiles, a few days, artillery fire, barrages across the border, raids and so on, limited, you know, actions that were meant to signal support to the worldwide muslim population, that they were. That they were helping Hamas, but at the same time meant to not call forth a massive israeli response against themselves.

Consequences of Hezbollah’s Actions

Now that turned out to be a complete failure. Lawrence Friedman writes that was a strategic mistake. What they did was game, theoretically stupid. The best chance of getting at Israel and fighting it would have been while Hamas was still an active fighting force.

Hezbollah’s Vulnerability

Now that Hamas is basically gone as a fighting force, Hezbollah is left to itself. Now, this exact logic applies to Iran. Iran. Hezbollah has been badly mauled by israeli attacks.

Iran’s Strategic Position

And we have seen how Israel spent 18 years building up a very dense intelligence picture of this. There’s a fantastic FD article about this that came out a week or two ago, exactly how these rallies managed to get those pages to go off and carry out these extremely targeted assassinations and ultimately trace Nasrallah, who was like a major, probably the most prominent arab leader in the world, second only to Nasser in the history of the post war period.

Israeli Intelligence Capabilities

So they got him with extremely dense, extremely deep, detailed homework. And of course, Israel is kind of like an extremely competent intelligence power. And the fear in Iran must be that if they were building such a detailed intelligence map of Hezbollah, then they must be doing the same for the.

Iran’s Dilemma

For the Iranians. And so Iran is caught in a rock between a rock and a hard place. They must respond. If they think now that if the opinion in Iran, in Tehran is that war is now inevitable, that Israel is coming after them, then they must go now while Hezbollah still has fighting capacity.

Hezbollah’s Current State

And Hezbollah is about, I would say, 40% degraded. The Israelis say that’s about 60% degraded. We’ll find out in the course of the coming weeks and months as the Israelis and Hezbollah engage on the ground.

Engagement Outcomes

And it’s already looking pretty nasty. The Israelis have already lost a couple dozen soldiers, but the destruction of Hezbollah’s capabilities have been quite significant. So Iran’s choices are, does it let Hezbollah die and proliferate, as in get the bomb?

Risk of Conflict Escalation

That’s also risky. Any move towards that would call forth an american strike on for dough, which is their main enrichment plan, their main nuclear facility, which is deeply butted. Israel can’t get to it. Only the US can.

Potential US Involvement

But if Israel attacks Iran, and Iran responds against Israel and us assets, and american allied assets, for example, saudi oil facilities and so on, the Americans will go after. They need an excuse. We have an administration of hox here.

The US’s Stance on Regional Matters

They need an excuse to go after Iran. There is a large contingent of foreign policy opinion in America that wants to finish the job in Iran. These rallies are trying to convince the Americans this is now the time, as I just read the quote from Naftali Bennett.

Urgency for Action

So if Iran thinks war is now inevitable, then they must fight now. So we are looking at really like the last call to prevent all our regional war.

Israeli Security Calculations

Suppose. Well, okay, so what you’ve done there is paint a picture of quite serious israeli strength in the region relative to its main enemies. At the moment, it seems that they’re engaged in something like a sequencing system.

Sequential Strategy Explained

You know, where first you take Denmark, then you take Austria, and then you take on France. Right. It’s a, first we take Gaza, then we take Hezbollah, then we take Iran.

Concerns on Israeli Capacity

My, I’ve got two issues, two main issues with that. The first is that even if Israel scores tactical successors against Hamas, which I think personally they’ve done, but then Hezbollah, and even they score some success against Iran, which I think is far more open to question.

Underlying Issues Remain

But even if they did this, they still haven’t solved their underlying problem. And I feel that underlying problem is almost insoluble. The main issue is that, as I see it, and I have no, I have to say, I have no dog in this fight apart from the humanitarian disaster and the pain and the kind of the natural human response to the images that we see.

Consequences of Conflict

I have no reference over who wins or loses on this. But as I see it, the situation is that this feeling, this aggression towards Israel is going to continue as long as there is no solution to the issue with Palestine.

Victory’s Limited Impact

The second issue that I would have, and sorry, therefore, I should say, therefore, even a victory against Hezbollah is no strategic victory because the issue will just rumble on it. A victory against Hezbollah would just offer some period of respite for Israel.

Challenges in Regime Change in Iran

So that’s the first issue that I have. The second issue is that I’m not certain that Israel by itself has the capacity to affect some kind of regime change in Iran and certainly not to defeat the iranian state in war in a way that would create a strategic victory for Israel.

Possible Outcomes

You can see a scenario where Israel defeats Hamas, defeats Hezbollah. Iran doesnt really do anything to defend either Hezbollah or Hamas. It doesnt protect its clients.

Iran’s Strategy and Leverage

And therefore Irans policy of gaining strategic power and leverage, first of all, in Israel and more importantly in the broader arab world, through its funding and training and arming of proxies, would thereby collapse.

Military Challenges

That’s a potential outcome. But as far as I can see, launching some cruise missiles or launching some ballistic missiles at Iran, which has quite a lot of strategic depth, is not likely to roll over at the first sign of trouble, is not going to be much more effectual than it was against the Houthis.

Raoul’s Response Requested

Raoul, what would you have to say to those two things?

Israeli Calculations on Conflict

Israel defeats Hezbollah, taking on Iran and achieving anything worth anything against Iran is going to be a whole different order. So let’s talk about the israeli security calculation here.

Long-Term Palestinian Conflict

So I agree with you that the palestinian issue is not going to go anywhere. What do you call that? The peace of the dead.

Israeli Policy Issues

They can’t kill enough Palestinians to achieve a stable apartheid state, which is what they intend to do. This will always generate resistance, and it will keep flaring up like it has since at least 1967.

Internal Security Issues

And so this is not a. A permanent solution to the problem of israeli security in the occupied territories.

Future Israeli Intentions

They intend to annex very large parts of the West bank, larger and larger parts of the West bank, confine the Palestinians to smaller and smaller bantustans, and have a kind of rely on the United States to make sure that there are no diplomatic consequences and consequences for Israel, despite running what is now universally acknowledged, almost widely acknowledged at least, to be an apartheid regime of the same order as South Africa or the American south or Rhodesia.

Domestic Security Dynamics

Now, that’s one internal domestic security issue, if you will. The second issue, which I disagree with you, Colin, is Hezbollah.

Hezbollah as a Threat

Hezbollah has been the major threat to Israel. They dealt them a really bloody nose in 2006. They were responsible in large part of kicking them out of Lebanon in 2000.

Historical Impact of Hezbollah

They have fired and killed dozens of Israelis and struck Israel and have israeli settlers, you know, become internal refugees because of their rocket strikes and missile strikes.

Permanent Threat of Hezbollah

So Hezbollah has been permanent for the past generation, has been a major threat. But it’s not just that Hezbollah is itself a threat.

Iran’s Influence through Hezbollah

It’s that Hezbollah is a weapon, an asset for Iran, one way of Iran, the major way for Iran to hurt Israel.

Israel as Regional Policeman

And so the Israelis see themselves as essentially the principal policemen of the region. For the United States and the arab, sunni arab powers, the oil monarchies, these are essentially allied with the US and Israel.

GCC Powers’ Concerns

They want to stay out of this conflict because they’re scared of iranian attacks on their oil facilities. But the GCC powers, they are militarily weak powers that are threatened by a much larger, much more powerful neighbor.

Iran’s Military Strength

Now, Iran is an extremely large, big, powerful state. Iran is not Iraq. Iran is not Afghanistan.

Comparison of Iran’s Strength

Iran is not even Vietnam. Actually, Vietnam is roughly not a terrible comparison for the strength of Iran. I would say that Iran is even stronger than Vietnam at any time in the american engagement in Southeast Asia.

Challenges in Overcoming Iran

Now, Iran is not something that Israel can defeat. Iran is not even a state that the United States can defeat.

The Requirement for Occupation

You have to understand that in order to defeat and guarantee regime change, you have to send in tens of divisions into a country the size of Iran, the force to space ratios, the force to force ratios, these have to be very.

Occupation Force Size

They call for a very large occupying force. If you want to do anything like 2003, if you want to attempt anything like 2003, you would need a force at least twice as big as, or three times even as big as the one that went into Iraq.

US Reluctance for Military Engagement

So the Americans are certainly not interested in anything like that. If you remember that famous quote about any future defense secretary who wants to send a big american land army into Asia must have his head examined.

Cyclical Nature in Foreign Policy

Right. And this was recycling of an older port after the Vietnam humiliation. So this is a kind of cyclical thing in american foreign policy.

Post-Iraq Military Strategy

But after Iraq, there is no appetite for large scale occupation and regime change. Okay, so if that is out, then what is the option?

Options for Israeli Air Strikes

The Israelis think that they can carry out with airstrikes and command of the air and missile strikes, first disarm Iran’s missile capabilities and then take out their nuclear facilities and humiliate the regime so much that it would undermine the legitimacy of the regime at home, and that might pose an existential threat.

Israeli Hopes for Regime Change

So the great big hope at the upper end of israeli hubris is that they can actually indirectly cause regime change Iran, by humiliating that regime.

Israeli Military Strategy Discourse

So if the Israeli hawks and the sort of most aggressive and of what they are planning, and you have to realize that gallant was almost kicked out by Bibi because he was not fully on board invading Lebanon, but then he signed up to invading Lebanon, was allowed to stay.

Israeli Political Dynamics

Now, Gallant is actually the sort of centrist and the center of israeli foreign policy opinion. To his right.

Vision of Israeli Hegemony

Everybody wants to really change the map of the Middle east. They want to establish israeli hegemony over Lebanon.

Targets for Israeli Military Action

They want to possibly gut all the Shia militias in Iraq, in Syria, in Yemen. They want to go after Iran.

Objectives Against Iranian Influence

They want to deal Iran such heavy blows as to cause regime instability in Iran. Iran must understand that this is a real possibility at this stage.

Recognition of Israeli Capabilities

That is my point about the staggering that the Iranians know that this is a real possibility, that the Israelis could actually pull it off.

Risk of Regional War

And that is what creates the risk for all out regional war. Because if war is inevitable, you want to fight it on the most advantageous terms rather than wait for the enemy to take the initiative.

Accuracy of Reporting During Conflict

Now, just on the. I just want to mention, Colin, on the last strike, there was a lot of misreporting in the west. All the western media reported that it was a failed strike, that it was just bombed and it fell harmlessly, didn’t kill any Israelis and so on.

Misunderstanding Military Efficacy

This is completely wrong. This was the most definite penetration of israeli missile defense we have ever seen since, like, Iron Dome went online.

Missile Penetration Reports

More than half the missiles got through. They obviously censored a lot of information coming out. But from reports that are available and from video footage that is available, it’s clear that they basically took out a very large airbase, among other things, and they got very close to Mossad headquarters and it was just a, it was possibly by intention.

Future Military Responses

They didn’t want to escalate so much by just taking out Mossadae. But the next time, on the next round retaliation, they might send multiple missiles to take out Mossad and impact Tel Aviv, and they might even target Netanyahu.

Ongoing Diplomatic Talks

And it all depends on the israeli response and what these ralis intend to do. I imagine the Americans and the Israelis and the Qataris and the Iranians are right now going back and forth in some hotel rooms in Qatar or Oman or somewhere, because this is, we are in the midst of a very major crisis and we haven’t even begun to talk about the other great powers which are also involved in this discussion.

Exploration of Response Options

Yeah. Right. I mean, I want to talk a little bit about the options that are available to Israel at the moment to respond, because I think their capabilities are somewhat different than would perhaps be imagined.

Israeli Missile Stock

As far as I understand, they don’t have a huge stock of missiles. Their stock of missiles is probably, as far as I understand, considerably smaller than Iran’s stock of missiles.

American Military Support

That is correct. The problem, of course, is that they have access to american arsenal.

Concerns for Taiwan’s Security

Right. Okay. But I’m guessing that the Americans are, given their concerns about the western Pacific, if they give Israel enough missiles to do serious damage to Iran, then the Americans could pretty much kiss goodbye to the western Pacific or certainly to Taiwan.

Defense Implications

How defensible would Taiwan be in two years time or in three years time, if the US, after what they’ve gone through in the Red Sea, to target Yemenite, which I believe was a couple of years or at least a full year of missile production, if they have to give Israel a large enough quantity of missiles to target Iran and do significant enough damage to Iran to affect the outcome that you mentioned, which would be a humiliation, followed by civil unrest, political instability, and potentially regime change.

Israeli Air Force Competence

Then theyre going to give a lot more than that which they targeted Yemen with. Its not going to be a small amount which would leave us with the israeli air force, which, again, as I understand it, is one of the most competent air forces in the world.

Assessment of Air Force Capability

Its perhaps the best air force in the world, pound for pound. That is when accounting for their scale. Obviously, its much smaller than the us air force, but it’s a hugely competent air force.

Challenges of Air Strikes

And for them to go to Iran, they’re going to have to cross unfriendly territory, semi unfriendly territory. They’re also going to have to engage in suppression of enemy air defenses.

Iranian Air Defense Systems

The Iranians have some pretty good russian air defense systems. They have some of their own air defense systems, and then they’re going to have to target Iran.

Difficulty of Military Operation

I mean, this is not an easy task at all, as far as I understand.

Agreement on Complex Task

I agree. But let me note a few sort of detail here.

Military Interceptions

So the reason why we are expending such, the US, I mean, is expanding such large parts of its inventory in with respect to the Houthis and with respect to the interceptions, is because the interceptors are limited.

Challenges with Missile Interceptors

So the Iron Dome, for example, uses tamil interceptors, which is made by one firm which has very specific production capacity that cannot be increased very much.

Costs of Missile Interception

Now, this is true of most advanced, I mean, missile interceptors. Interceptor missiles are the most advanced and expensive missiles.

Cost-Effectiveness of Defense Strategies

So the cost exchange ratio is extremely unfavorable to the defender who’s trying to intercept the missiles.

Missile Cost Comparison

So Israel, Iran sends $100,000 missile. Israel has to spend at least $3.5 million or maybe even more.

Interceptor Production Constraints

It’s unclear exactly how much it costs, but at least $3.5 million each on the arrow three missile to intercept the ballistic missile from Iran.

Rate of Production Limitations

Now that’s an extremely terrible cost exchange ratio. And arrow three production rates cannot keep up with a large scale barrage, especially if Iran is going to be supplied by Russia or China.

Defensive Capabilities Comparison

So we are looking at calculations that are very uncertain. But more importantly, this is not quite the constraint on us israeli offensive capability against Iran or defensive.

Defensive Constraints

It is a constraint on the defensive capability against Iran because these interceptors are expensive and limited.

Offensive Capabilities Evaluation

But in terms offensive capability, here’s how one imagines this goes, right. So you use your greatest long range precision strike munitions to take out the israeli, the iranian retaliatory capability, the Iran’s missile launchers and missiles and so on.

Strategy for Air Force Engagement

Once you have suppressed that and once you have taken out iranian air defenses and so on, enough, then you can unleash the air force on it.

Competency of the Israeli Air Force

And I would contest this sort of hyper competence of the israeli air force. It is competent, but it’s not Mossad.

Comparison with Western Militaries

It’s nothing compared to israeli intelligence capabilities. It’s a competent western military. And they have certainly more competent than the German or the British, but they are not close to the Americans in terms of air capabilities, even pound for pound.

Logistics Support from the US

But they enjoy direct logistics supports from the United States, which makes them extremely effective.

US Fueling Operations

We might see, for example, israeli warplanes take off from Israel, get refueled by american airborne refueling tankers midway through airspace protected by us forces, for example, over Iraq.

Strategic Operations via Jordan

Right. And Jordan. So Jordan’s friendly territory, the Jordanians will do what the Americans tell them to do.

Controlling Iraqi Airspace

And Iraq can be with american force post with a forward leaning force posture. They can control iraqi ties and make sure that the israeli warplanes are refueled on their way and maybe even back from Iran.

Risks of Destruction Levels

But the question is once you achieve air superiority, then the level of destruction that can be unleashed on Iran is comparable to the level of destruction that they have unleashed on Gaza or Lebanon.

Existential Threat to Iran

You have to understand this is an existential threat to the iranian regime.

Military Dynamics Discussion

This idea that somehow Iran has 3000 5000 missiles, Israel has a few thousand missiles. Maybe the Americans resupply some of them and we’ll have this tidy exchange.

Initial Exchange of Fire

Wrong. The missiles are only the opening salvo.

Strategic Reserve Considerations

Some of them might be held in reserve. This is kind of like in many ways like nuclear strategy.

Offensive Options Available

But there are lots offensive options available to the Israelis and the Americans. And the Iranians have to understand this.

Iran’s Strategy Calculations

And if they do understand this, then they want to seek horizontal escalation, if you know what that means.

Horizontal Escalation Explained

Horizontal escalation means not directly responding to where the enemy’s strength, but responding to his weakness and going escalating.

Ground Forces Response Strategy

Not so. Not just trying to gain air superiority or prevent us israeli command of the air over Iran through investments in air defense and importing russian sams and so on, but actually taking the war to Israel by sending ground forces.

Counter Escalation Strategies

It is very. That is the, that is the escalation counter escalation scenario that the Americans and the Israelis have to worry about, which is that Iran could send 1020 divisions.

Geography of the Conflict

It’s a few hundred miles. It’s not impossible. It’s.

Possibility of Conflict with Iran

And it’s many, very much. Most of it is friendly territory. Right. It’s not impossible for Iran to send divisions to Israel.

Anticipation of Escalation

We might be looking at all out regional war that people haven’t anticipated.

Missile Exchange Context

So this simple tactical picture of a pure missile war or a pure air war or a tit for tat exchange may not be quite what we are in for because the risks are so existential for Iran.

Expert Perspective on Military Layout

So I know you’re not a military expert, but I think you have a fair idea of such things.

Terrain Advantages for Iran

My understanding is that Iran is an extremely mountainous country. There would be a lot of places in a country like Iran to fairly effectively hide both air defense installations and missile launchers.

Challenges to Air Superiority

How realistic is it to imagine that you would be able to sufficiently suppress such offensive and defensive missile capabilities in order to successfully achieve air superiority?

Influence in Iraqi Affairs

And secondly, you did mention that the US could force Iraq essentially to accept the israeli air force over iraqi airspace. But Iran has huge influence in Iraq.

Iran’s Robust Position in Iraq

Really big influence in Iraq. It was one of the most prominent outcomes of the George W. Bush invasion of Iraq was to massively increase Iran’s influence in Iraq.

Risk of Iraqi Government Breakdown

Like Iran, I would have thought, could cause a whole world of trouble for any iraqi government that allowed us or israeli air assets over Iraq to attack Iran on behalf of Israel.

Possible Consequences of Military Action

That seems to me to be a recipe for the complete breakdown of the iraqi state.

Iranian Control and US Involvement

So what about those two points?

Influence of Iraq on Military Dynamics

Let me answer this one. It’s a very important and interesting question. Iran has more influence in Iraq than the US does or anybody else.

Consequences of US Iraq Policy

And this is a direct consequence of foreign policy blunders by the Bush administration. So you go in and you destroy the sunni minority regime and open the floodgates to shia majoritarian domination and iranian influence.

Shia Relations with Iran

The Iranians look to the Shia. Iranians look to calm and Tehran as their true spiritual leaders.

Power Dynamics in Iraq

And so the iranian influence is very powerful in iraqi polity. I completely agree.

Discussion of Tactical Control

But this is not the question we are talking about, is a very tactical question.

US Control Over Airspace

15,000ft above ground level is controlled by the United States in Iraq. You have to understand, Iran may have influenced more influence in Baghdad politics, but the United States still controls the skies over Iraq and certainly anything far above the reach of ground based anti aircraft weapons.

Shia Militia Limitations

So the Shia militias can’t take them down. So if the Israelis fly above 15,000ft or cruising altitude, they are not at risk of being taken down from iraqi forces.

Risks of Large-Scale Deployments

Even if iraqi forces were so brave as to try to take down israeli warplanes, which is just not going to happen. The only way in which this becomes a real problem is a very large scale deployment of russian air defense assets.

Russia’s Stance within the Conflict

And that might be the case if the Russians become convinced that they would lose, just as Iran is convinced that losing Hezbollah is going to be a very great setback that calls for bearing a lot of cost to prevent that from happening.

Mutual Calculations of Losing Power

The same calculation is true of Russia. Russia knows that Americans engaged in a Middle east war in defense of Israel, or in support of Israel’s war of aggression, if you will, are less likely to supply Ukraine.

Benefits of Tensions for Russia

It serves their purpose. It distracts. This is like why the Germans wanted the Japanese to attack and beg them to attack the Soviet Union from the east, right?

Implications of War on US Focus

It’s a second front as far as the Russians are concerned. War between the US and Iran is a fantastic idea for them. It is great for them, so they would want to see it.

Military Stationing Concerns

The question is, do they have the stockpiles? Do they have the inventory to spare?

Current Iranian Military Operations

Because they are in fact importing iranian missiles and drones for use. And now they established a drone factory.

Iran-Russia Military Cooperation

The Iranians established a drone factory in Russia. So military cooperation between Iran and Russia has become extremely deep.

Close Intelligence Collaboration

This means that they are closely cooperating intelligence matters and they’re closely cooperating in defense strategy.

Air Defense Asset Replacement

And one signal that Iran would need is a commitment by Russia to resupply air defense assets as they are taken out. They should be replaced.

Terrain and Geographic Impact

Now, going back to your other point about terrain and the difficulty of location.

Geography’s Role in Military Strategy

Terrain and geography interacts interestingly with technology. So some kinds of covers is hard to get around.

Limitations of Military Technology

Right. So if things are buried, you can only take them out if you have the capabilities, the sort of munition capabilities to do that.

Penetration of Defensive Measures

Penetrators. Yeah, penetrators. So bunker busters.

Potential Need for Nuclear Options

Deep penetrators. The United States has developed some really effective bunker busters, but it is not entirely clear whether conventional weapons can take out four door, for instance, Fordo is so deeply budded that many analysts believe that only a tactical nuclear device would do.

Concerns Over Nuclear Weapon Use

And that would be something that would be a completely different red line to crosse, which the Americans, I don’t see even the craziest one. Even if Mullen was president, I don’t see that as an option being seriously considered by anywhere else.

Challenges of Military Effectiveness

But the question of terrain is interesting because if you can. So the precision strike capabilities and the surveillance capabilities are now so far advanced that much of that cover provided by terrain becomes, can be circumvented through cruise missiles that can maneuver around tricky terrain.

Military Campaign Effectiveness

Of course, terrain is obviously, cover is not going away as a military factor because ground campaigns like. Absolutely, this is the main conditioner of the effectiveness of ground campaigns.

Remote Strike Operations

But in terms of remote strike, in terms of taking out, let’s say, a missile launcher that is hidden behind some mountains where the radar penetration is poor, I agree that you can’t take out all of it.

Possible Degrees of Success

It’s not going to be a splendid first strike, but you could degrade it to a very large degree.

Anticipation of Israeli Actions

So my expectation, by the way, of the israeli response is that they’re going to attack Iran’s offensive capabilities, they’re going to take out missile capabilities, because if they attack the oil facilities, that would risk retaliation against us, israeli allies, oil facilities across the Gulf, and basically might generate such a massive oil price jump that Kamala Harris could not possibly win the election.

Political Implications of Military Action

And that is what is the real risk for them. So the Americans right now must be trying to tell the Israelis, look, choose, I mean, Biden blundered by saying oil facilities are a target oil facilities would be extremely escalatory, second only to targeting the senior leadership in Iran.

Consequences of Targeting Leadership

Like if they were to take out Khomeini, that would be the most escalatory possible situation in which you can almost guarantee that there will be divisions heading towards Israel from Iran.

The Iran Nuclear Deal and Saudi Resistance

The Iran nuclear deal, which was the centerpiece of a much larger detente between the US and Iran, was furiously resisted by the Saudis. And then Obama’s vocal support for the protesters against Mubarak and so on and other strongmen in the region was furiously opposed by the Saudis and the other Gulf monarchies. But the decisive moment for a reorientation of Saudi policy and the opening to China was the humiliation in the Yemen war. So the MBS, once he comes into power, goes after the Houthis in Yemen, and essentially they lose that war. And they try, they carry out a brutal campaign with direct US-UK logistics help, essentially British air traffic controllers coordinating all their campaign and even tasking orders. So they carry out this massive campaign. They fund these guys, these proxies on the ground, and they still lose.

The Houthis’ Defeat and Saudi Realizations

The Houthis defeat their proxies comprehensively. They emerge as a much stronger force than before, and ultimately they carry out strikes against Saudi oil facilities. Now, that turns out, that turns into a really turning point moment for the Saudis, who realize now that the Americans just can’t deliver, they can’t protect them, really. They can’t help them crush the Houthis. They have to have some kind of negotiated settlement with the Houthis. Well, if you’re going to have some kind of negotiated settlement with the Houthis, you have to talk with the Iranians. The Americans can’t help you talk to the Iranians because they don’t talk to themselves. So the Chinese come in, this freaks the Americans out.

US Response and Strategic Implications

So the Chinese arranged a detente between Saudi Arabia and Iran, which freaks out the Americans so much that the Biden team comes in and they’re like, okay, we’re going to give security guarantees to Saudi Arabia. And the whole point of that, the attempted extension of the Abraham accords to a large-scale normalization of relations between Israel and the Sunni Arab monarchies. That entire attempt was because they wanted to make the Middle East China-proof. And so the Americans are trying to prevent the Chinese from gaining influence by establishing, by tying together their two main allies in the region, the Saudis. When they respond to it with great enthusiasm and there’s great momentum going into this, are sure that this is that we can completely bracket the Palestinian problem and establish this, get the security guarantee from the United States, then we don’t have to worry about Iran.

China’s Influence and Palestinian Concerns

Then we don’t have to worry very much about China. Or we will tell the Chinese that you will have forever access to Saudi oil. Our deal with the Americans does not mean that China will lose access to the Middle East oil or Saudi oil. So this sort of interlocking calculations are completely upended by something that none of these people had anticipated, which is the October 7 attack, which was a direct response by Hamas to the negotiations going on between the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia over normalization of relations, which meant specifically that the Palestinian issue was not going to stay at the top of the agenda, that the Arab states were moving away and moving on with their lives, so to speak, and normalizing relations with.

Responses from Iran and Hamas

So that was unacceptable to the Iranians, it was unacceptable to Hamas, it was unacceptable to everyone. And it triggered this cataclysm. Right. And so you have this completely unexpected, very large-scale attack by Hamas that completely changes the strategy and calculations in Tel Aviv. Right? And then it opens up a completely new situation. The new situation is that the Israelis are now engaged in massive air war against a defenseless population in like a 25 by five mile zone in an area smaller than Manhattan’s, which is the Gaza Strip. And this inflames public opinion so dramatically that no Arab leader, no Muslim leader in the world can explicitly take Israel’s side in this or even, like, stay neutral.

Political Ramifications for Saudi Arabia

So, of course, the Iranian, the Saudis must say what they’re saying. So the Saudi-Israel deal cannot possibly go ahead while this genocide is underway and possibly for a long time afterwards. But that doesn’t mean that MBS gives a shit. MBS doesn’t give a shit. Their issue is that their domestic political stability is threatened. If they were to be seen as being too cozy with Israel, as they already are, I mean, they run a great risk. Now, in this particular moment, I stand by my assessment that the reason why we are seeing these super detente noises from the oil monarchies is because they want to stay out of it.

Iran’s Threat and Retaliation Strategies

They don’t want to be hurt by proxy. They don’t want Iran to respond to Israeli attacks on its nuclear facilities, oil facilities by attacking across the water, which is much easier for them to attack. This is the attacking Israeli facilities costs them a million apiece. Attacking Saudi facilities costs them 10,000 apiece. The cost exchange ratios are much more attractive, and these facilities are much less defended with the kind of missile defense that Israel has. So Iran, faced with an essential threat like a US-Israeli attack, can definitely retaliate against the oil monarchies. They may have a short.

The Iranian Response Dilemma

They will not, but they must have a price. We don’t know what the price that they extracted was. The Iranians extracted a price for them to say this, but what was that price? It could have been that they would not allow Israeli warplanes to transit their airspace. It could have been other things. We don’t know yet, and we don’t even know if Iran will keep its word when push comes to shove, when they are down on their missile arsenal and so on, their long-range missile arsenal. And they need to hit back. Otherwise, they would look weak and come under extreme pressure, domestically existential threat to the regime, in which case they will respond to places like and the major oil facilities in Saudi Arabia.

Iranian Proxy Warfare and Strategic Calculations

And in fact, the Iranians don’t even need to respond themselves. They can get the Houthis to do it. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I was going to say it’s far easier for the Iranians to attack the Saudi oils, which are all along the Persian Gulf. If anybody has looked at the maps of the major Iranian. And, sorry, Saudi Arabian and Qatar. Well, obviously, Qatar is on the Gulf, but also Kuwait, which is on the Gulf, and even Iraq. All of these major oil fields are pretty close to Iran. And in the same way that it would be easier for Manhattan to attack New Jersey than it would for them to attack Illinois.

Strategic Options for Iran

So it’s much easier for the Iranians to attack these oil fields than it is the Israelis. Look, let’s say I put you in charge right now. Let’s say that I make you Ayatollah of Iran, or let’s say I put you in charge of the Iranian Republican Guard. What does Iran need to do at this stage? Because it seems to me that it’s a pretty powerless situation for Iran, even if they themselves are not attacked, even if they themselves as a regime, are not toppled because of some kind of humiliation in the environs around Israel. That humiliation, potentially, it’s more than a humiliation itself, because Iran’s entire policy within the region to gain power within the region has been the funding, arming, and training of these proxy forces, whether it be Hamas, whether it be Hezbollah, whether it be the Houthis, whether it be countless numbers of militias in places like Iraq.

Consequences of Challenged Proxy Policy

And if that is all brought down by the Israelis, then that’s the end of this Iranian policy. And this policy hasn’t come cheap. Right. For a country whose economy is in the state that Iran is in, this has been a really expensive policy. It seems to have had a lot of success. It seems to have built up to quite a degree of success over the last 10, 15, 20 years. And they risk seeing that whole thing crashing down, even if they themselves, as a country, aren’t touched. So if you were in a position of power in Iran, what is the strategic calculus that you would be looking at? I think you’ve already explained that, but what sorts of steps would you be looking at to prevent that sort of outcome emerging?

Iran’s Strategic Challenges

So Iran is in a very difficult situation. Right. And so they have made overtures. They tried in good faith to get a deal with the Obama administration, which they did. They tried to hold on to it with the other P5 plus one powers, even after Trump walked out of this. They have tried very hard to pursue a policy of deterrent multiple times since Ahmadinejad left the scene, and they have been rebuffed again and again. And now they are facing an existential threat to the regime and to the state formation. If I were an advisor to Khomeini, I would say the number one priority, supreme leader, is making sure we have operational security because of what the Israelis specifically demonstrated in the targeted attacks against Hezbollah, killing Nasrallah, the pager attacks, and so on.

Operational Security and Intelligence Necessity

So on, is extremely deep intelligence penetration. If that is true of Iran, then Iran is at risk of a risk of near decapitation. And so that is priority number one on the security file for this. They probably need not just overtime work by all the million engineers. Iran has a very large number of engineers, almost as many as the United States. And the Iranians are extremely competent in technical matters. You know, this is a civilization with very deep, a deeply skilled population and so on. You should not underestimate it. They have been under pressure from the west and under sanctions, their economy has suffered. But that doesn’t mean that the skill set of the population is anything to laugh at.

Iran’s Strategic Imperatives

That’s the first thing. Going back to the hypothetical, oh, my. Advising. How many the first thing is the operational security question. The second thing is if you’re going to have. If you’re going to get into a war with Israel and the United States, then you need a green light from the Russians. You need a green light from China. You need that backing. You need guaranteed access to the Chinese market so you can survive. You need guaranteed access to Russian air defenses. You need resupply agreements of the sort that the United States has given Israel since 1967. Essentially, you need the full backing of these powers.

Global Power Dynamics and Military Strategies

And there is a certain logic. So I would dispatch top diplomats and intelligence officers and military officers to Beijing and Moscow and get them to sign up to a contingency plan. What happens if we do this? Because, look, if we go down, you guys lose. If Iran is destroyed, if Hezbollah is destroyed, Iran loses a major asset. If Iran is destroyed, Russia and China lose a major asset in their long term struggle with the west. So there is a very good chance that these diplomatic efforts will succeed. And if they succeed, too, well, you could even see direct Russian deployment of the sort we saw in Syria.

Possible Outcomes in the Geopolitical Landscape

Now, you remember the very dramatic moment. Nobody expected Putin to send ground forces and air forces directly to protect Assad. He made that decision because he came to the conclusion that protecting the Assad regime is very important to maintain some kind of position in the Middle East. Now, at this point, if the Israelis are really planning to go after Iran and the Americans are going to help out, take out for do, and achieve their superiority and so on and so forth, then the Russians would be interested in doing this, but then they would need a green light from China. So there’s a hierarchy in this axis of resistance, or whatever you want to call it.

The Hierarchy of Geopolitical Interventions

Right? And the hierarchy is that he gets to decide whether there’s a go ahead. So he gets to greenlight a long-term policy of helping the Iranians and the Russians could possibly deploy their own nuclear weapons, in fact, to Iran. Push comes to shove, even that is on the table right now. So any geopolitical situation that gets hot enough and that gets serious enough invites great power attention and very serious, great power attention. So I have no doubt that we are right now in the midst of very intense conversations on all sides.

Decisions on Military Action

So, yeah, that’s the. So as my. As an advisor to supreme leader I, Khomeini, these are the two things I would say. The third thing I would say is we need to make a decision now, mister supreme leader, because if we let Israel do what it did to Hamas in the sense that it held the line, and it put the north in a holding pattern and took out Hamas. Once that job was done, then it turned to the north and went against Hezbollah. This is what they’re going to do to Iran. Since war is inevitable, it is time to fight now.

Awaiting Israeli Intentions

Right? And so they wait for the Israeli response. They wait for Israeli intentions to be clear in Lebanon. They get the green light from Russia and China, and then they launch, like, a full-scale war. This is kind of one possible scenario. A serious military analyst, security analysts in Tehran could very well argue along these lines. The alternative line, which would be supreme leader, are assets in the region that we had cultivated for these 2030 years. They are getting destroyed. There is not much we can do to prevent that destruction.

Embracing a Different Strategy

It is time to hunker down and embrace a different strategy. And that different strategy, obviously, is to proliferate, to get a nuclear weapon as soon as possible so that there is no existential threat to the regime. We must survive as a state, and for that survival, we need the bomb. But how do we get the bomb? That again goes back to item number one in the security file, which is, do we have operational security? Can we proliferate? Can we actually get the bomb without the Americans first taking out Bordeaux? And that’s a very big question. Important question.

The Importance of Intelligence

So at no time in my understanding, at no time in history, in the history of geopolitics or military affairs, has intelligence been this question of operational security and cybersecurity been as important as it is at this moment, this weekend. Yeah, those are. You know, that’s an extremely difficult situation. It’s also extremely concerning because, as I’ve said, the chain of escalation, almost up to the farthest possible escalation that humankind can imagine is very clear. Like, Iran can’t afford to lose Hezbollah, Russia and China. Can they really afford to lose Iran at this stage, China is increasingly.

Global Implications of Iranian Relations

I mean, perhaps China can afford to lose Iran because now it has Russia to provide it oil, but it would certainly strengthen Russia’s position with China, and it would weaken China’s potential options. Right. So can China really afford to lose Iran? Can Russia afford to lose Iran? And if they can’t, then that could potentially involve those powers in a war against Israel and potentially the US in the Middle East. I mean, this is very serious. Let’s look at the bigger picture, though.

Impending Military Conflicts

Let’s assume for a second, let’s keep our fingers crossed. Let’s be hopeful. Let’s assume for a second that this doesn’t escalate to all out war in the region. It doesn’t escalate to a general war within the region, but the US does have to provide the Israelis with more goodies, with more material. It continues its essentially limitless support for Israel. This war continues. What are the global ramifications of that? You’ve already touched on two things. You touched one thing I touched on, you touched on the fact that Islam and Islamic nations extend beyond the broader MENA region.

Regional Powers and Global Dynamics

They also include countries like Malaysia and Indonesia, which are significant secondary powers in the western Pacific, especially Indonesia. And both of those countries, now, for the first time in history, are pro China more than they are pro US. So that’s one potential outcome. Another is, as I’ve said, the US has given a serious amount of material to Ukraine. It’s expended somewhat less amount of material on the Houthis, but that’s more pertinent. That materiel is more pertinent for any kind of air-sea battle in the western Pacific than much of the material is to Ukraine, although there is some crossover in Ukraine as well.

US Military Commitments and Global Security

If the US starts to have to provide Israel with intermediate-range missiles with which to suppress Iranian air defense and offensive capacity, what are the ramification, therefore, the US ability to maintain deterrence, to maintain the thin blue line in the western Pacific? I think this is the most important, the top level question, as it were. So in this whole sort of ladder of interlocking chain of the powers, the top level question is US commitments in Europe and the Middle East taking away undermining deterrence in Asia. And my position in this is, I’m more concerned than you are, in fact, because I don’t see this as an inventory issue.

Concerns About US Military Capabilities

I don’t see it as a production rate issue alone, although that is a very serious concern because, you know, many of these weapons and weapon systems are substitutable. You don’t need the exact same missile if you run out of those missiles, you can use standoff weapons, you can use air-fired weapons fired from aircraft instead of ballistic missiles. You can use other kinds of strike capabilities. So it’s not simply the inventory that is running low. Although the Ukraine war exposed the limits of US defense industrial base, the 155 ammunition catastrophe is very serious.

Current Military Production Challenges

Russia is out producing the West three to one, five to one on this basic artillery ammunition. Every single war consumes an absurd amount of since for the past 100 years. So we are looking at. My point is broader. The United States has substantial, of course, the world’s largest, most powerful military, but these capabilities are limited they are not unlimited. And when we are committed to a war in Ukraine that consumes a lot of these capabilities, not just inventories, but logistics, intelligence officers, people who are doing remote targeting for the Ukrainians.

Logistical Concerns and Pentagon Involvement

So something like. Satellites, electronic surveillance, all of these kind of assets as well? Yeah, satellites, electronic surveillance, the NSA, CIA, large parts of the Pentagon, something like 100,000 Americans, civilians and military in uniform are engaged in the war in Ukraine. They are full-time working on that. Something like maybe 10,000 to 20,000 are already engaged full time working on the Middle East war. We have limited capability. And the more you commit and all out war with Iran essentially almost exhausts US capabilities in a very broad sense in terms of prosecuting military missions.

Challenges of Multiple Military Engagements

So the idea that we can fight a war in Europe and fight another war in the Middle East and fight a third war in Taiwan, in the Taiwan Strait, is absurd. It is not possible. It is not possible to do this. You are exposing yourself quite acutely if you tie up that many capabilities in secondary theaters and leave the central front essentially unattended. So I’m very concerned about this. I think that they made a massive mistake in trying to bleed Russia and Ukraine.

Strategic Miscalculations in Global Conflicts

I think that was a war of choice that was extremely unnecessary. They should have accepted Ukrainian neutrality, which is the most and only one most important thing that the Russians wanted to. And this war, in fact, in Ukraine is not going to end. They will destroy Ukraine and make it a rump state unless the West accept neutrality for Ukraine. And the West is not ready to do it. So western elites are committed to fighting down to the last Ukrainian. We are almost there. Maybe the Ukrainians will last another twelve months or something.

Opportunities for China in Escalating Conflicts

But this kind of, think about the Chinese calculation. They’re like, okay, we thought we have to wait until 2030-2035 or something to have substantial undersea capabilities and ASW capabilities to have a good chance of taking Taiwan or something. Right? But if the Americans are so stupid as to get completely dragged into two major wars that consumes half their capabilities, maybe the time to, if not invade, at least pressure and carry out a coercion campaign against Taiwan is now, not later, because this moment will never arise again.

Strategic Timing for Iran’s Action

So just like, you know, Lawrence Friedman said of Hezbollah, they made a strategic mistake. They should have fought when Hamas was fighting. Right? The Iranians will have the same calculation. They should fight when the Russians and the Iranians are fighting the Americans. That is the time to fight the Americans. Otherwise you wait another 20 years. Yeah, exactly. That’s what I. That’s exactly what would concern me. I’m sure that’s what’s concerning.

Washington’s Strategic Conundrum

Well, I know based on reading his Twitter feed that’s what’s concerning. Albridge Colby, who might be, if Donald Trump wins the election, the next national security adviser could be, you know, it seems to be what’s concerning. Most of the realists in Washington at. The moment is likely to be a defense secretary. His sort of background and book is very Pentagon. He’s unlikely to be national security adviser, although it’s possible. Well, either way, the realists in Washington, those who see the center of strategic gravity revolving around the western Pacific, they are extremely concerned at the moment that at a time that America needs to be marshaling its forces facing them eastward, instead, they’re facing westward in a series fighting a series of, not even bushfires, actually pretty significant regional conflict in secondary theaters.

Taiwan’s Strategic Calculations

That’s a serious problem for the US. And what must come up now is, I would have thought, not so much Chinese opportunism so much, but simply Taiwan seeing the writing on the, and reaching some kind of motives for Vende, kind of like a best option available with Beijing approaching them and saying like, look, the US is now in no position to defend you. They’ve exhausted, at least exhausted enough their resources and Europe’s eastern approaches and on the Arabian Peninsula and eastern Mediterranean. And now, I’m sorry, but they are in no position to defend you.

Potential Alliances in the Region

Here’s what we’re offering. We’re not going to take over your government, but we’re going to offer you a free trade deal that will tie you to the Chinese economy and increasingly so over the years. And in exchange for this, we’re going to demand that you remove all US bases, all US personnel and all US ties. I mean, that is realistic. And that would see eventually, and you could also have some kind of Finlandization there where Beijing has an ultimate veto over Taiwanese cabinet appointments or administrative appointments. Right.

Rapid Changes in Geopolitical Dynamics

So I would say that this is not a realistic, plausible scenario at this time, but things are changing extremely rapidly. And so in the scenario where the United States is engaged at scale in the Middle East and Europe at the same time, in that scenario, the Chinese would feel that the time has come for at least a coercion campaign. They are not ready to undertake an invasion. An invasion would require the scale of effort of Normandy. And it requires essentially the thing that they’re missing is ASW as anti-submarine warfare.

Challenges for China in Naval Warfare

The problem is that they can’t get their ships across these hundred miles because they don’t know how to track and take out American nuclear attack submarines. So these are not nuclear-powered submarines that have cruise missiles, that are, you know, attack anti-ship missiles and so on. So these are the most powerful undersea assets that the United States possesses. And the Chinese don’t have a solution to it. They are trying to master ASW, but it will take some time.

Geopolitical Situations tied to US Actions

So the invasion scenario is not a serious scenario at this time, and it’s not going to be for a while, no matter what. But I assume, I mean, just to interrupt that. I assume that this has been accelerated by the fact that Washington has driven Moscow into Beijing’s arms. And especially insofar as the more reliance that the Russians are with the Chinese, the more likely they are to help the Chinese because there is some synergy between, you know, for all you know, the Russians are much maligned.

Russian Military Capacities and Joint Ventures

You know, they do have better, as far as I understand anyway, and I’m very inexpert, they have better air defense than the Chinese. They produce better fighter jet engines than the Chinese. They have extremely good electronic and anti-electronic warfare. And most importantly, the Russians are pretty competent when it comes to submarine warfare. Extremely confident. Like ever since Admiral Gorshkov’s expansion of the Soviet fleet, the Russians have focused incredibly on submarine warfare.

Russian Innovations and Technologies

And in fact with certain classes, like I believe the Alpha class, which was made of titanium and had a molten salt, a molten metal cooled reactor, they developed some quite key innovations within submarine technology. This kind of technology is like gold dust for the Chinese, I would have thought. I can imagine a scenario in which China’s progression in some of these areas, perhaps already has been, but certainly will be in the future, really accelerated by the tightening relations between Beijing and Moscow.

Assessing the Russian-Chinese Connection

I completely agree with that assessment. I do want to note a few things. So there’s a tendency in the West, especially early in the Ukraine war, to regard Russia as this paper tiger and it’s a gas station with some nukes or something. You have to understand that Russia was the dominant land power for most of the 20th century. Between 1935 and 1991, there was nobody that could really fight the Red army head to head and going specifically to undersea capabilities.

Strategic Military Tracking Developments

The person to read on this is Ovonkote junior, who’s a security scholar at MIT. He is the top undersea military analyst in the world. And his writings on this question are very interesting. He shows how the Americans figured out how to use sonar to track submarines right across the ocean. So you could track from near the west coast of the United States, as soon as you hit the deep sound channel, you could track submarines coming out of Japan, right? Or like from the other side of the Atlantic, you could track submarines coming out of the Greenland UK gap.

US Strategic Advantages in Submarine Warfare

Now, what this does is for a decade and a half, two decades, the United States has a kind of monopoly. It can track all the Soviet subs and the Soviets can’t track American subs. It takes actually longer for the Americans to learn how to quieten the boats so that they cannot be tracked by sonar. But the Russians figured this out in the seventies, that the Americans are doing this because of their intelligence management. And once the Russians figure this out, they really pour a lot of energy and effort into solving this problem.

The Effectiveness of Russian Submarine Technology

And the problem is solved with the Kula class in 1986, right? When the Gorbachev people are coming in and capitulating. The Kula class is the first class that the US cannot track, right? And they solve that problem like 1986. They are not quite as advanced as the Americans in terms of these technologies, undersea technologies, but they are substantially advanced. And, in fact, they can help the Chinese. And it’s clear from recent reports that they have agreed to give this technology to the Chinese.

Naval Technology Developments and Future Challenges

But on the other hand, operationalizing it and developing these boats takes some time. If you remember the recent accident of the Chinese submarine, the reason why that happened is because they are working furiously to do exactly this. Yes. And so, yeah, you are right. The United States, or in fact, Democrat foreign policy, has forced a marriage between Russia and China. This is absolutely not in the American interest.

Impacts of U.S. Foreign Policy

This has been a catastrophe, the worst geopolitical decision since Bush, at least. And this forcing this marriage. Now, we put together two extremely synergistic great powers to work very closely with each other. And I would suggest that even with all this, even with access to Russian know-how and even actual deployment of Russian naval officers in China, it would still take some time for the Chinese to develop these capabilities. This is not something you can do in a month or two.

Long-term Military Developments

This takes a few years. Even with the greatest of help from the greatest of ours, even if the United States tried to help Australia develop these capabilities, it’ll take years. Look at AUKUS. AUKUS envisions that Australia will get its first delivery in 2040, 2030s or something. These are very long-term things, especially in the naval realm. These are very slow-moving things. It takes a very long time for engineers to learn how to do these things.

Challenges of Naval Operations

It takes a very long time for operational commanders and officers to learn how to operate under newly stringent quiet conditions. So, for example, you can’t even talk. You have to maintain a quiet sub, has to maintain radio silence for months on end. That is not something that is so easy. Only the Americans have so far shown that they can do it. Like outside the USN. Nobody has maintained this kind of radio silence of these submarines anywhere in the world.

Securing Capabilities Against Detection

Like, even the Russians never did it. You could always hear them break radio silence and become detectable, at least intermittently. So this requires a kind of learning process, discipline, lots of engineering solutions, lots of breakthroughs. But the Chinese have such a formidable manufacturing industrial capability now that they are better positioned to do this as quickly as possible than anybody else. So I am definitely worried about that, and I’m worried about what this means.

Future Considerations for China

I think that one of the things that we should expect is if the Chinese are making great progress on this, then they would be more inclined to take the risk of bleeding the United States in the Middle East by helping Iran. Right. And I think it should be clear here, they don’t have to develop their own Virginia class or even Los Angeles class submarines captained by hugely skilled seamen able to go toe to toe with the United States in the deep waters of the Pacific Ocean.

Strategic Assessments of Military Power

All they have to do is develop enough defensive capability to defend the South China Sea and the immediate Pacific slightly to the east of that, right, which might be doable by means of underground sonar systems, by magnetic anomaly detectors, by, you know, frigates, even, I guess, or smaller frigates. It’s not necessarily. They don’t necessarily have to go the full hog as yet and develop fast attack subs that are captained by highly skilled seamen in order to take the US on in the deep ocean or not, perhaps until they’ve ejected the US from a good portion of the first island chain.

Military Objectives and Regional Control

But that’s my understanding, anyway. I tend to agree. Very much so, yes. So the specific problem that they need to solve is a very narrow problem. It’s not. You don’t need to become an American naval peer, which is not on the cards for 20 years, to invade and take Taiwan. What do you need to do? You need to suppress American firepower from two sources. One is the undersea component, so you need to be able to track and take out the subs.

Tracking Undersea Capacities

I’ll come to that in a second. The other is long-range aircraft firing standoff missiles operating from Guam and Darwin and so on, or other military bases in the region. Now, these long-range aircraft and firing missions, the Chinese have kind of figured out how to solve this problem in terms of, like, their a2 h and anti-access area denial capabilities, they can target even fast-moving aircraft. Only the stealth bombers are really somewhat invulnerable to Chinese attack.

Strategic Military Solutions

So if they were to send an armada across, they would have to send an air armada on top of it and ahead of it to suppress American long-range air-based firepower. That’s the first easier part of the. Part of the problem that needs to be solved. The more difficult part of the problem that needs to be solved is to track and suppress the firepower of undersea US assets, specifically the Virginia class, Ohio. Now, in order to do that, there are multiple pathways, and this is getting very interesting because one of the pathways is to have cheap, expendable tracker automated, like, essentially underwater drones.

Developing New Tracking Techniques

Right. If you can produce large scale drones that are basically just like swimming sensors, and you can flood the strait with them and the regional waters with them, you could develop sensor capabilities that allow you to track even the quietest of submarines just because they’re so close to the movement. Right. So even the quieter submarine scuts the water. Right. And it’s the Taiwan Straits and the South China Sea are like not deep ocean as well.

Challenges and Solutions for Undersea Warfare

I guess there’s not like, say, a thermocline layer that would interfere with the kind of tracking. The problem is that it’s not just a strait that needs to be suppressed. It’s that because these. It depends on the range of the missiles on these I submarines. So submarines operating even 500 miles away are capable of striking ships going across the strait. So there is a large operating zone, which is determined by the range of the missiles, effective range of the missiles on these subs that needs to be covered by Chinese anti-submarine operations.

Strategic Operations and Naval Mines

Right. And so that problem is a difficult problem. But I’m saying that there are asymmetric solutions to that possible problem. One of the things that people often don’t often know is that China is the world’s largest naval mining bar. It has the world’s largest stock of naval mines. And this is called the Chinese mace.

Chinese Naval Capabilities

And it’s like a very asymmetric capability. And it makes it extremely difficult to approach chinese waters, even for the most powerful navy like the US. And they could build on that using these large scale, expendable, cheaper underwater drones to develop a kind of underwater surveillance system that allows them to suppress in this large operating area. And then that would create the operational possibility of getting an army across and landing it on Taiwan.

Taiwan’s Vulnerability to Coercion

But even before we get to this sort of very high intensity conflict level situation, we have to realize that even with the american naval and undersea supremacy, Taiwan remains exposed to a coercion campaign. And this is Owen Cortez Junior’s main point. He’s like, listen, yes, invasion is hard, but they can shell Taiwan, they can strike Taiwan. They can carry out all sorts of operations, special operations, and so on, to harass and coerce Taiwan and assassinate its leaders and so on, to kind of force them to come to terms with the Chinese.

American Deterrent Strategies

And there is very little the Americans can do to protect this except for having options to punish China. Right. A kind of deterrent strategy. The problem is that american foreign policy has become so anti China and american political discourse has become so anti China that we are removing many of the incentives that the Chinese have from refraining from all this. In a sense, China is kind of a quarter of the way where the Iranians are in terms of being sure that the enemy is out to get you.

Perceptions of Threat: Chinese and Iranian Perspectives

Right? So the Chinese are pretty sure. So the Iranians are near certain that the enemy is out to get them. The Russians are almost certain that the enemies are out to get them. And the Chinese are somewhat certain that no deterrent is possible with the United States. If it becomes completely clear to the Chinese that no detent is possible with the United States, then there’s no scenario in which they will not completely back Russia or Iran or, you know, consider, seriously consider a coercion campaign against Taiwan, even just to humiliate the United States.

Current Geopolitical Landscape and US Interests

Yeah, absolutely. Look, we’ve been going for almost an hour and a half. Let’s look at. Just as a final question, let’s look at where you see the situation going at the moment. You have serious packages of us attention, materiel, assets tied down on the arabian peninsula, the eastern Mediterranean, and the eastern approaches to Europe. And yet the primary theater of us interests strategically ought to be the western Pacific.

Iran and the Global Scene

Meantime, Iran is coming under more pressure than it has done, perhaps, since the end of the Iran Iraq war. Russia. We haven’t touched on the Russia situation much. I’m loathed to talk about military developments in Ukraine because I got things completely wrong. I thought, I had no idea that Russia would go in light in February and March 2022 in the way that they did with 100,000 men to try to defeat a country the size of Ukraine.

Military Developments in Ukraine

You know, I thought it would be hundreds and hundreds of thousands. So I’m loath to talk about military developments, but it seems increasingly that Ukraine is on the verge of cracking. Some of the signs are already there on the battlefield, and certainly economically, there are signs of cracks but at the same time, neither the Europeans nor the Americans have seemed to woken up to or realized exactly what kind of peace deal they’re going to have to swallow if they are going to get peace there.

Challenges Ahead for Ukraine and the West

What they’re talking about is going back to something like Istanbul, which they rejected in the spring of 2022, and since which time they’ve made it their explicit aim to bleed Russia to the point of regime change. They’ve made this explicit. And the idea that they can go back to Istanbul and kind of negotiate from there is, to me, preposterous that they’re going to. If they want a peace tale, I get the feeling that they’ll choke on what Russia asks them to swallow.

Background: European Economic Stability

So, yeah, you have all of these situations at the moment where everything’s influx. It’s an extremely dynamic, and it’s one of those moments really. I don’t want to sound kind of tech bro about this, but it’s one of these moments where the nonlinearity is so blazingly obvious and the potential tale of outcomes is so fat that it’s kind of somewhere between baffling and terrifying.

Europe’s Structural Concerns and Overreliance

Look, we’ve been going for almost an hour and a half. Let’s look at. Just as a final question, let’s look at where you see the situation going at the moment. You have serious packages of us attention, materiel, assets tied down on the arabian peninsula, the eastern Mediterranean, and the eastern approaches to Europe. And yet the primary theater of us interests strategically ought to be the western Pacific.

Ukraine’s Military and Demographic Challenges

So I just want to say that one of the most remarkable reports that came out recently was the attrition rates of new recruits in the ukrainian army. It’s not just the territory that the Russians are gaining and the kind of rollback that is occurring routinely now. It’s the attrition rates that are so serious. So the problem, underlying problem is the demographic imbalance and the population pyramid in Ukraine.

Recruits’ Challenges in Ukraine

So Ukraine has very few men of prime military age, if you will, twenties and early thirties. Most of us new recruits are in their forties, even late forties. And the average age of recruit is something like 46. And these people are not being trained properly and they’re being thrust on the front lines and they are dying in very large numbers.

Negotiated Solutions on the Horizon

The reports are really staggering. The attrition rates are so high that they just cannot be sustained for very long. So we are looking at a kind of forced negotiated solution immediately after the american election, because they cant agree to anything before the election itself, but immediately after November, maybe in December, they will try to sue for peace.

Russia’s Demands Moving Forward

But the situation has become so dire that now. Youre right, theyre thinking of going back something like, but why would Russia agree to anything like Istanbul anymore? At the minimum, the Russians are going to ask for removal of all sanctions, or almost all sanctions, at least the ones that were imposed after February 22.

Complications of Sanctions and Ukrainian NATO Membership

And that seems to be an extremely hard thing for an american administration to extract from or to do politically in the United States. So the Congress itself will override the president and keep the sanctions and so on. It’s extremely hard for DC, for the White House to promise to negotiate the lifting of sanctions over which it does not have full control.

Russian Expectations on NATO Membership

The other major problem is, of course, the Russians are not going to accept anything less than Ukraine will never join NATO. Here is a treaty letter signed by every great part of the world. So without neutrality, it’s not clear that the Russians will stop before they must.

Russia’s Adaptation to New Economic Realities

Now they know that their economic flows have completely reoriented. Most of their ties with Europe have severed. We are down to 20% of where were before the beginning of the war, and they have completely reoriented their economy around facing east now. And they feel like they are in a very good position.

Putin’s Strategic Position in Geopolitics

Putin actually feels like he’s in a very good position, and he will try to extract, as you were saying, something that would just leave the British at least completely agape. But what is the alternative? The alternative is to just keep going until Ukraine is completely exhausted and Russia is occupying most of it and leaving a rum state in the west that will be forever a ward of the West.

Consequences of American Attitudes Towards Ukraine

I mean, given that the west really doesn’t give a shit about Ukraine and they just want to bleed Russia, they might just let this happen. The difficulty offering what Putin wants, neutrality and the lifting of sanctions just from the american side, forget about the Europeans. They can be kicked into doing whatever we want.

Political Realities of American Leadership

But from the american side, it’s just hard to see how any offer can be made by anybody other than Trump. So there is a possibility that Trump wins, in which case he will make a deal with Putin.

Prospects of Deadlock and Withdrawal

It may not involve lifting all the sanctions, but it will involve neutrality. And if we offer neutrality, even the sanctions are not a big deal for the Russians. For them, the most important thing, and this has been true for a very long time, ukrainian neutrality has been, if you can say, almost the main goal of russian foreign policy since the Bucharest declaration in 2008.

Russian Perspective on Ukraine

They will not accept Ukraine as a military bulwark of the west on their border. And for them, neutrality is an absolute essential. Otherwise, they will take up the country, and they will destroy the rest. And this is where it seems to be going.

Projected Outcomes in Europe

So my prognosis in Europe is pretty dire, just because I know how politically difficult it is for any american administration to cut a deal with Russia at this point, especially the Democrats. If Kamala Harris wins, I don’t see her as agreeing to something that is acceptable to the Russians.

Political Ramifications of Trump’s Presidency

If Trump wins, that’s a completely different story. And then we could solve the Ukraine problem and move on from that and in fact, even steal Russia back, possibly from China. That’s not out of the realm of possibility in a Trump world.

Middle Eastern Dynamics and Leadership Discrepancies

In the Middle east, it’s the other way around. In the Middle east, the Harrison administration might have some success in limiting israeli ambitions and preventing regional war, but Trump himself is just so completely surrounded by the lobby boys that he’s going to give a complete free reign.

Trump’s Approach to Middle Eastern Policy

US Middle east policy under Trump will be run by Kushner, Jared Kushner, his son in law, who is more zionist than Bibi Netanyahu. These are extremely, like they’re thinking about, this is, no, you just win this. You kill the other guy and you win this.

Implications of US Presidential Outcomes

So we are looking at, if Trump wins, we are looking at a possible expansion of regional war to all out regional war in the Middle east and a possible termination of the conflict negotiated and to the conflict in Europe. But if Harris wins, there is a possibility that they’re able to restrain this.

Unchanging US-China Relations

So a lot is riding on the election in that sense, irrespective of who wins, US China policy is not going to change. So relationship with China will keep deteriorating, and we are creating an enemy that is more powerful than any enemy we’ve ever had in our entire history.

Trade Policy and Its Consequences

And I’m very worried about this. Us trade policy and western trade policy and what they are trying to do about China and the rise of chinese power is, in a sense, creating a self fulfilling prophecy of a cold war that they have not shown that they can win.

Comparative Reflections on Cold War Dynamics

When in 1947, the United States declared a cold war on Russia, the us alliance. And what we already had at that point on our side was formidable enough, was so overpoweringly richer and more advanced than the communist bloc, that cannons sort of policy that was embraced by every president afterwards, made sense in a very basic realist sense.

Historical Context of Power Dynamics

Right? Look, we hold the line everywhere. We contain this dangerous expansionist power, and we run this long term competition where we win because we are more dynamic than they are. This was a fair bet. It was at least a fair bet.

China and Russia’s Growing Influence

It was a pretty good bet in 1947 and the cold War, no matter how brutal it was and whatever weather could be avoided, and so on, and was at least based on a realistic assessment of the balance of power between the two blocks. In the present situation, China is an industrial power already as large as Europe and America.

China’s Influence in Global Markets

Combined. With Russia, they have access to all the raw material resources and military technologies, and between them, they control two thirds of Eurasia. Their influence, chinese influence in the western Pacific region is now very dramatic, as seen, has become the largest trade partner for China.

Assessing the Impact of Competition

Bigger than EU, bigger than the US. It is a very dramatic development. China has influence going very far. They have a great influence now in Latin America. They are invited into the Middle east. They have influence in Africa, much more influence than the westers, by the way.

Dynamics of Western Alliances

Russia and China have much more influence in Africa than we do. So the Biden administration and these people, they make big fuss about how we’ve strengthened our alliances with our old allies. To me, that sounds laughable.

Western Geopolitical Strategy Concerns

You were talking about an alliance that was already there. What game are you speaking of when you say we are now more closely allied with the saudi or with the Germans? These guys were already on your side. They think that they are winning the alliance game, but in fact, they haven’t done the math.

Predictions of Power Dynamics

It is not clear to me that in a long term cold war, with this combination of Russia, China and Iran, that the west can prevail. And this is the underlying hubris of western elites and foreign policy elites who nobody that I care to, that I take seriously, has actually explicitly done the math and said, look, this is the balance between these two blocks that we want to create so badly.

Ineffectiveness of Current US Strategy

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, very much in agreement in the ineffectiveness and actual foolishness and counterproductivity of America’s position with China at the moment. Because first of all, it seems that the efforts to cut China off from the high tech sources of economic growth has achieved two things.

Outcomes of High-Tech Restrictions on China

First of all, it has turbocharged China’s own move up the value added ladder within the economy. But at the same time, it seems to me to have made very clear to China that the United States is unwilling to let China develop its economy in a natural way that would eventually reach some kind of parity with the United States if all goes well.

US Strategy and Chinese Confidence

I mean, there are plenty of issues with the chinese economy, and things might not go well, but that’s not what America’s saying. They’re saying, like, look, even if things go perfectly, we are going to fight booth and claw to prevent you from doing this.

Impact of Chip Ban on Chinese Technology

And this combination of, for instance, the chip ban, it’s created this huge market in China for chinese chips because they now know that’s all that they can trust. They can’t trust buying chips from the US or Taiwan, even those which aren’t sanctioned yet because they don’t know when they might be in the future.

China’s Technological Growth Amidst Restrictions

So chinese production of microchips and research and development into developing their own native infrastructure to produce, to fabricate the highest of high end semiconductor wafers and microchips has gone into overdrive from what I can tell. And of course, as you know, China has more engineers than any other country in the world.

China’s Global Technology Leadership

It’s a highly intelligent, highly trained population, certainly in terms of overall numbers, they have incredible manufacturing capacity, talent, the ability to scale up. The old idea that the Chinese just steal from the west and kind of develop their own inferior and cheap versions, which I think is an idea that somehow still remains within certain western policy elites.

Chinese Evolution in Technology and Strategy

Maybe not the actual experts, but certain people who are involved in making decisions. It’s just for the birds. It’s not like that anymore. They are literally the global leaders, the technological leaders in a whole range of fields.

Europe’s Response to Technological Advances

And you see certain surveys and it’s quite shocking what China is ahead of at the moment. I want, though, to kind of move on to Europe at the moment because it seems to me that Europe is an attack.

Discussion on Chinese Battery Technology

Did you see the Bloomberg article on chinese battery tech that recently came out, David, flickering? Very, very interesting, this idea that the Chinese are dumping and the Chinese are the state capitalist system, that they’re unfairly advantaging their firms and so on.

Chinese Productivity Boom

He completely debunks that. He shows what is causing this crazy productivity boom in China, in certain sectors, and why they’ve taken such a dramatic lead on the west in clean technology. I strongly recommend reading that, David, flickering piece that came out last week or something.

Assessing National Power and Institutions

The other thing I want to note about chinese capabilities is that one of the best understood things in terms of overall national power capabilities is that ultimately it’s a function of the competence of national institutions and the skill set of the population. Now, the reason why China and India diverged so dramatically is because China made great investments in the vast bulk of its population in terms of literacy and education and health.

Comparison of Life Expectancy: China vs India

And so their life expectancy already in 1980 was ten years higher than Indias. And this is a time when their gdp per capita was lower than Indias. By now, the Chinese have left India so far in the dust that the chinese economy is like ten times the size of India’s.

Indicators of Skill Development

And this underlying skillset is well measured by what the World bank reports as the harmonized learning outcomes. This is essentially test scores of kids, which reflects their health conditions and their educational levels and how much they’re learning and so on.

Skillsets Available for Mobilization

And the kind of skill set that is available to a nation oncoming skillset that is available to a nation to mobilize for different things. Right? And not just industry and commerce, but also for the military and in the harmonized learning outcome.

Quantitative Comparison of Learning Outcomes

I did this analysis recently. China is at 600, the United States is at 500, India is at 380. Like we are talking about chinese, extreme chinese advantage, already at a per capita level, not even counting the fact that China is four times the size of the US.

Historical Context of US-China Tensions

So we are taking on, we are making enemies through our policies of a power that is of the same scale. I mean, as a historical moment, China has risen to the same scale as the United States.

Comparing Global Powers: China vs. the US

There is no other power that. Whose history, whose rise corresponds to the scale in modern history. Right? China is not the Soviet Union. China is not Germany, China is not Japan.

Comparative Historical Developments

The only comparable historical development of this magnitude was the rise of the United States in the late 19th century. And so we are taking on a power. We are making enemies with that power.

Consequences of Rising Tensions

We are making them. We are forcing them to fight us and to push back against us across the board, across the globe, without doing the math. And I’ve been trying to push back on a lot of analysts who are kind of drunk on this western power.

Misunderstandings in Analysis of Western Power

They think that the west is so powerful that Russia and China and Iran and North Korea, of course we can take out them. They don’t even realize that their math does not add up. We are going to hunker down behind tariff walls.

Consequences of Economic Isolation

Well, if we hunker down behind tariff walls, what exactly happens? We are going to leave the rest of the world economy to chinese domination. We will wake up in five years and find that China is the dominant industrial, commercial part in the world.

Future Dynamics of Global Trade Relationships

Everybody has closer ties to China than us. This is already two in raw numbers. And it’ll become so overwhelmingly true that it’ll be in every nation outside the west, every nation’s strong national interest, to have a closer relationship with the Chinese than the Americans or the West.

Critical Analysis of US-China Policy

I wrote a piece called notes on US China policy, which was the result of months of work. I strongly recommend people to read it. That came out in November last year. But it is still like a very deep dive into productivity growth and long term competition between geopolitical rivals of the scale.

Dissection of Economic Policies

Yeah, I agree very much with that. And there’s far more information rich and erudite than I could offer, so I won’t add anything more. I want to talk very briefly about Europe, though, because it seems to me that Europe is an attack.

Aftermath of Economic Crises in Europe

From after 2008, there was a divergent fiscal response between Europe and the United States. The United States offered their economy far more fiscal stimulus. They ran bigger deficits than Europe, which under the Germans and the European Central bank president at the time, Jean Claude Trichet, engaged in countercyclical fiscal policy and also to a certain degree, monetary policy as well, for a little while.

Continued Challenges of European Recovery

And it really caused the divergent responses between the two economies. The US eventually recovered from that credit crisis, whereas Europe entered a kind of a loss period of lost two decades, very slow growth, persistently high unemployment, especially among the young, in which case you get this process of, I think the economic word is hysteresis, where the young kind of never recover in their career from.

Energy Costs and Ukraine’s Impact on Europe

From that kind of slow start. At the same time, or a little bit earlier, the US discovered and then started exploiting industrially shale gas and oil, which gave them a huge competitive advantage in energy costs, which is one of the most important input costs for manufacturing and industry.

Consequences of Geopolitical Energy Choices

And this has caused a very slow motion deindustrialization and certainly suboptimal economic growth for an advanced economy like the European Union and Britain as well. But this has gone into overdrive since 2022.

Rising Energy Costs Due to Geopolitical Decisions

And the european decision to cut itself off from russian pipeline gas, which has caused another increase in energy costs and also has led to further de industrialization. First we saw the high energy, or the energy hungry industries like fertilizer production and glass manufacture and chemical companies, especially petrochemical companies, leaving.

Cascading Effects of Economic Isolation

But that now seems to be slowly cascading down through the economy. If you look at german PMI figures, they’ve been absolutely abysmal for a long time now, for months and months that they’ve been well below the waterline.

Geopolitical Context and Economic Fallout

So you mentioned before that it seemed potential, I mean, not the most likely outcome, but certainly an outcome that is likely or possible, that rather than accepting a kind of written defeat in Ukraine, the West would just like to. Would rather have it fester on and continue and have the Russians roll over the whole thing and be a kind of saw in the eastern side of Europe.

Structural Weaknesses in Europe

And for there to be no rapprochement between Europe and Russia, which would ultimately mean no cheap energy for Europe. It also seems increasingly and strangely, as US relative power within the world has declined their control over the european elites, both at a national level within individual nations and the kind of the establishment political parties within those nations, but also a supranational level within the EU of figures like us.

US Influence Over European Policies

The von der Leyenkin has never been greater. I get the feeling that it’s almost stronger than it was during the cold war in western Europe. That might be wrong, but it really seems very strong indeed at the moment.

Europe’s Dependence on American Policy

And because of this, Europe is also getting dragged into China’s, sorry, Russia, the United States effort to curtail China’s access to high tech. The most famous example of this was the ASFL company, which produces the very complex and expensive and impressive ultraviolet lithography machines that are essential for producing the most high end chips and semiconductor wafers available.

Impacts of U.S. Trade Policy on Europe

They now can no longer export to China. And whichever way you cut it, that sort of thing is a negative for Europe. I mean, ASML is probably the most valuable, a european high tech asset, and it can no longer deal with one of the biggest markets in the world.

Stagnating Economic Relations with China

And that’s just one example. There’s multiple examples where trade relations are worsening between the European Union and China because of Europe’s capture by the united. I mean, if the US Congress is captured by the Israel lobby, which some people allege and looks increasing, or every time I see Lindsey Graham, anyway, that’s how I feel.

European Elites and U.S. Strategic Interests

And it seems that the european elites have kind of been captured by the US, right? And the US kind of, you know, atlanticist and NGO complex.

Populism in Europe

And while there are some, you know, what’s the word? I’m insurgents in the form of people like Victor Orban and Robert Fizzo in Slovakia, and potentially even in Austria after the recent election there, the Atlanticists within the European Union, and certainly Britain, very much holds sway.

Future Dynamics of Populism

And I don’t think that bodes well for Europe’s future at all. I think I would suggest that the energy cost question is just one aspect of Europe’s relative decline.

Deeper Issues Facing Europe

So you’re absolutely right. The European Union has been left behind in the dust by the United States and China and others. They were quite comparable on the eve of the financial crisis.

Economic Divergence and Policy Failures

And since then, in combination with the austerity of the early poster financial crisis years and the kind of deadlock of the fiscal rules in Europe that has played a role. The gas price shock, the energy cost shock, and the loss of russian energy has played a role in devastating.

Long-term Economic Stability in Europe

Certainly the energy dependent sector in Germany and elsewhere. But this is not the full problem. The problem is much deeper and much.

European Economic Report Recommendations

I strongly recommend the Draghi report, which is kind of like the finest statement, the most important report to come out. Everybody who’s concerned about these questions is reading it, but it is very much a mainstream diagnosis.

Challenges to Economic Growth in Europe

What has gone wrong is productive growth has slowed in Europe because of regulatory burdens and policies that disadvantage startups and. So on and so on. And so the thing that Raleigh points to above all is that, look, it’s so much easier to do a tech startup in California than it is anywhere in Europe.

Stagnation in European Innovation

And that is the reason why we are not developing these dynamic firms. We are stuck with these old industrial firms that are not doing anything new. Everything dynamic and new is coming out the United States, and nothing is coming out of Europe.

European Contributions to Technological Advances

Barely the only european contribution to recent technological advances ozempic. So I am not as bearish on Europe as Draghi and many others are, but I do think that this is a problem of european integration.

Integration Challenges in Europe

This is a problem of the, you know, very specific issues like constitutional courts in Germany putting a brake on any deal that would allow fiscal union in Europe. But European Union, the Europeans need to reform.

Economic Conditions in Britain

And the British are in even deeper trouble, by the way, than the Germans. And so from this side of the Atlantic. Oh, yeah, we know.

Rising Concerns from American Perspectives

So from the side of the Atlantic, we are, you know, I can say from the american side that we are very concerned. Like, we want the Europeans to be dynamic and to be competitive.

Navigating American Influence

And in order to do that, they need a kind of autonomy from american dominance and dictation. Right. So Gray Anderson edited a volume called natofication, which talks about this, which is about this entire question of the resurgence of us power over Europe.

Historical Context of US Influence

And I don’t think that we have seen this scale of this phenomenon. So the relations between the United States and Europe have always been asymmetric because the United States is a security guarantor, and this has been the case in 1945.

Periods of European Autonomy

But there were long periods when the Europeans followed an independent policy. The French followed a very strong independent line for a very long time. The Germans did. They had a whole detent by themselves well before the Americans came in.

Timeline of European Detente

It took like United States ten years to reach the level of detente that the Germans had reached already by the mid sixties. And so there was a lot of autonomy in many ways, even during the, you know, cold war, that the Europeans exercise.

Historical Instances of European Dissent

And they could prevail on the United States and stand up to it in many ways. So if you remember the diplomacy of the western diplomacy around the Vietnam War? You know, the Europeans were much more opposed.

Current European Subservience

Like, even in the Iraq war, you know, major european states were opposed. It was new Europe, eastern Europe, essentially, who are all gango, you know, more pro american than Trump, who followed Bush into, you know, supported Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

Shift in European Political Climate

But the major european powers were opposed. This we no longer see anymore. They’re completely subservient.

Contemporary Reactions to Global Conflict

They will just follow the line. Oh, yeah. Like, if there was an Iraq war today, like, every single european country would be. Well, the elites of those countries would be anyway. There would be no question.

Electoral Impact of Global Events

And I think that this is not the decisive issue for the rise of the populist right in Europe, but it is part of the issue. The part of the issue is that european elites are so disconnected and they are making their policies and following agendas set somewhere else, that the populace does feel disenfranchised, that they don’t have command over their own governments at all.

Emerging Populist Movements in Europe

And that is generating this populist revolt that is gaining strength day by day. This is the strongest we have seen the anti EU right ever in the recent results. In Brandenburg, in Austria, in France.

Political Responses to Populist Movements

It’s very concerning and it’s. But the thing is, maybe this is the way out. Maybe they will be forced.

Trumpism and Political Change

So the problem, as I see it, is this. In the american context, Trumpism kind of broke the mold, right? We had this new liberal consensus when Trump destroyed the GOP, talk about the GOP.

Response of Political Elites to Trumpism

And defeated Hillary Clinton, it kind of broke the world consensus completely. And they kind of, like, sort of flayed around to find answer to Trumpism, right? And their answer was, we will eat Trump’s policy agenda.

European Reactions to Political Trends

We will embrace it. We will embrace Trump’s policy agenda. We will pretend that we are in trouble because China ate our lunch.

Analysis of Political Movements

They know it’s not true, but we will pretend that it is true in order to take on Trumpism. So the kind of polanian counter movement here is very strange.

Polarization of Political Dialogues

Trump has essentially forced american elites, american policy elites and political elites to embrace his stupid agenda, right, which is a mistaken agenda based on a complete misdiagnosis of what is ailing the american working class.

Political Movements in Europe Mirroring US

And I feel that the Europeans will respond and, in fact, are responding to the rise of the populist right by themselves, embracing stupid parts of. Of the populist right agenda, instead of articulating a real diagnosis and a real solution to the problems that actually plague Europe.

Insights into Political Science Frameworks

And so you can’t. Polani is very useful to think about this kind of dynamic political interaction, but there are no guarantees.

Possibilities of Future Political Developments

A very open ended process. Right. We could. So if Trump wins again, we could see a different movement.

Future Directions of Democratic Party Strategy

We could see a democratic party that says, actually, Trump light doesn’t work for us, but they would have to be humiliated electorally for them to come to that conclusion.

Current Trends in German Politics

So far, their conclusion is that Trump light is necessary to even secure power in America. And we are seeing similar things in Germany, where mainstream parties have embraced anti immigration policies because they think that is necessary to contain the right.

Emergence of Left and Right Populism in Germany

In Germany, it’s not just the populist right, it’s also the populist left. The BSW, the Bundesehr Wagenknecht or Wagenknecht, was a party set up only a year ago, and it’s now finishing third in the regional elections.

Recent Trends in Regional Election Performance

In all three regional elections recently, I believe I’m right in saying it finished third. It’s really quite remarkable.

Characterizing the BSW’s Political Agenda

And the BSW is fundamentally opposed to AfD on pretty much everything, except they are anti globalist, they’re in favor of rapprochement with Russia, and they’re not in favor of high levels of migration.

AfD’s Position in German Politics

But everything else in terms of the AfD, is something of a kind of as much a thatcherite party as a german party could be, if you can understand my meaning.

European Politics and Rivalries

Whereas the BSW is a very traditional german left wing politics, and I think it’s also fair to say that Marine Le Pen is, and her national rally is some way to the left of Emmanuel Macron in terms of economics, in terms of that position on Atlanticism, that’s far more disparate.

Policy Recommendations in Current Context

Of course, the AFW, and, sorry, the AfD and the BSW are in favor of greater european autonomy and a split from the US, the same as Orban, the same as Robert Feetzenhe.

Divisions in the European Political Landscape

But people like, for instance, Giorgio Maloney in Italy, are very atlanticist in their outlook. So there’s a certain kind of split there between these parties.

Establishment Responses to Populist Movements

And at the moment, the response of the european elite has been, or the european establishment parties has been to offer some sops.

Migration: A Central Issue for Europe

Migration is a huge issue, I have to tell you. It is causing a lot of social unrest and, you know, huge difficulties.

Complications of Migration Policies

I think to underestimate, you know, to look at migration in purely economic terms is it can’t possibly work in Europe.

Ethnic Violence in Britain and Its Implications

I mean, Britain now has ethnic violence. The island of Britain has, obviously, Northern Ireland, which is on the island of Ireland and has had ethnic violence for a long time. But Britain now has ethnic violence.

Political Climate Amidst Ethnic Tensions

It never did. I can’t remember it when I was young. And it now has ethnic violence. So there are issues there.

Manipulation of Political Sentiment

But the main response of the european establishment is to use legal and treaty obligations to essentially crush the aspirations of any party. I mean, Hungary has managed to resist to some degree because it’s not a part of the euro.

Political Fear in European Elections

But, for instance, you’ll remember the threat of Maureen Le Pen winning the snap legislative elections that Emmanuel Macron called earlier this year. And immediately the European Union opened up just on the threat that you might win, opened up a stability pact investigation to France’s excessive deficit immediately.

Examining the EU’s Political Strategy

And these are the kind of. Actually, I recommend, if you’re interested in this sort of thing, I recommend reading the left wing political thinker and essayist Thomas Fadzi, or Fazzi, who is an italian and writes extremely interesting kind of the mechanics of the EU.

Political Culture and EU Dynamics

Yeah, exactly. That’s right. But he’s written some pretty good long form essays. So has Wolfenhe Gan Streak, who is a left wing german thinker, I think, from the marxist tradition.

Exploration of EU Mechanisms Against Populism

But both of those have written really interesting long form essays about the mechanics that European Union and national legal and political structures use essentially to attempt to create a firewall against the populist parties.

Political Strategies to Maintain Control

And if they do gain power, to. To bend them to the centrist will, if you like. And it has been quite successful so far.

Indicators of Change in European Politics

But you’re right in saying, I think that eventually there’s going to have to be some change. I just wonder whether this could be forced on them if the US starts to pull out from Europe.

The Power of Lobbying in Politics

So these kind of processes can be quite powerful. I have a question for you. So in the United States, the power of the lobby is so substantial that no politician and barely any media figure would stand up and push back against US Israel policy. But my understanding is that in Europe there is a lot more anger at Israeli policies and war mongering and aggression than there is in the US. Could that interact with this political uprising of the right? Yeah, you just cut out a little bit there. But could that interact with this political. How does that work in the European political scene? Does it have the needle somewhere in the United States? I was saying that there is no chance of it moving any needle anywhere because, you know, it’s all locked up.

The European Political Landscape

Yeah, I mean, just to answer that question that the, first of all, you’re 100% right. So the left of center parties in European countries, especially in the UK, but I believe throughout Europe, have traditionally been extremely pro Palestine. Palestine, certainly for the Labour party in the UK, has been an issue for as long as I can remember, almost as important as, like the NHS or economic policy. It’s a really important thing at the moment. I mean, Europe has a very large Muslim population. Some cities in the UK are, if not majority Muslim, kind of moving in that direction. So, of course, their protests against the current situation in Israel have caught the headlines. But my argument to that is, well, this is just a standard position of the British left, essentially. It has been for a long time, it has been pro Palestine.

Political Tension and Migration Crisis

I don’t think it will interact with the wave of political populism unless. And this isn’t unless that could realistically happen. Israel is in the process of moving into Lebanon at the moment, quite tentatively. But if they start moving in force, there’s going to be a huge number of refugees that move northward. And one of Britain’s better political correspondents, one of the few who actually follow the day to day happenings around Westminster and have pretty tight relations with certain politicians, Tom McTague he reported that a third of new foreign minister David Lammy’s time has been taken by planning on what would happen if a million Lebanese tried to escape the war in Lebanon and come into Europe. Now, let’s imagine for a second you have a wave of right wing populism. And even the left wing populism, such as it is, like Saravak and Connect. Saravagan, connect are not pro migration, they’re anti migrants. Okay? You already have social unrest in Europe because of this.

Migration as a Political Hot Button

It’s already a big political issue. It’s not just among the far right. It’s not just even among the populists. It’s a really big social issue. I think I’m right in saying a recent opinion survey in Britain as the number one issue for people was migration. That’s how serious it is. Now. If you get, because of the actions of Israel, if you get like 3400,000, half a million Lebanese trying to get into Europe and the establishment trying to let them in, they’ll be held to pay. Really, it will go bananas in Europe. And I’m not embellishing there. And what will happen is the right will be against migration because they’re the anti migration part. It’s like Trump, okay? The left, on the other hand, is pro migration, okay? In the same way that the Democrats are in America.

Political Responsibility and Protests

But in this situation, the left would say to the right, oh, well, you’re so much in favor of Israel, guys, this is your problem. Come on. Now. You see the results of your actions. You deal with this. Meantime, the right would say, well, you guys are pro migration, it’s your fault. And then at the same time, you have protests on the street, you have the populist parties going through the roof in terms of opinion polls and election results, and it would cause absolute chaos. And this is a kind of realistic outcome. I mean, if Israel goes into Lebanon, you’re going to get another load of Syrian level. It’s a smaller country, of course, but per capita, that kind of level of refugees, I would have thought if Israel goes the whole hog with Lebanon.

Concerns Over Political Instability

So, yeah, it could really. I just did a podcast, a regular multipolarity podcast, wherever. Yeah. I’m not sure that Europe could survive a full blown Israeli invasion of Lebanon without, like, serious political instability in Europe itself. Right. I do worry about such scenario as well. And I think that my expectation is that even the mainstream parties will put their foot down, just like the sort of consensus that was reached at some point after the Syrian refugee crisis, where welcome culture gave way essentially to a deal with Turkey, you deal with this. Right. They’re going to get ahead of this. So I’m not that worried about this. The angle I was thinking of was something or to be different, which is that, for example, right now you have even in the UN General Assembly, a lot of pushback from some European countries, Ireland above all, but also than others.

International Relations and Political Dynamics

And this could lead to a kind of transatlantic, this could lead to friction and transatlantic relations, like a bit of a weakening of that American hold that you were talking about earlier, because at some point this becomes like too big a deal where the Europeans, even if they completely fell in line on the Ukraine question, might have to split with the Americans just because of the outrage that is causing and the scale of devastation that Israel is inflicting on Lebanon is consistent with their intentions, that what they did with Gaza, that’s what it’s looking like from the strategic bombing. Yeah, but there’ll be no way that causes a split. Like no way at all. First of all, because in general, the same centrists that are pro Atlanticists, while trying to, if they’re centre left, like Sakiya Starmer, they do try to hold their pro Palestine wing, which is the majority of the party, in check.

Political Cohesion in the Face of Conflict

So recently they ended, I believe I’m right in saying they passed legislation to end arms sales to Israel, but at the same time, they will put the RAF, what’s left of the RAF, up in the eastern Mediterranean to help shoot down Iranian bombs. Right. So the centrist parties, both left and right, even if they have a pro Palestine wing, they generally toe the line with regards to, with regard to Israel. Secondly, this has very much been a left versus right situation. There is no consensus in Europe on Israel. So in Britain, we have a tendency to import American political pathologies. And one of the more recent ones to come across has been that the right of censor in Britain has increasingly taken a Republican, pro Israel line on Britain’s relations with Israel at the left for a long time, since the 1980s, probably, but certainly gaining pace in the nineties and two thousands and since the 2010, totally pro Palestine.

The Nature of Public Sentiment in Europe

So don’t think there’s enough consensus in Europe to even as outraged as some people have been, and I think anybody can be upset about what they’re seeing in Gaza. It’s a humanitarian disaster. Even if you’re pro Israel, surely you don’t have a heart of stone. Right. It’s a natural human reaction, but there’s not enough consensus in Europe to kind of go after Israel. I don’t mean go after in a nasty way. But to essentially use the legalistic methods of the United that the United nations and its associated courts and processes have to punish Israel for its behavior. There’s just not that consensus, even after the ICC judgments, that Britain was really uncomfortable with that ICC judgment. No, I don’t think there’s any chance of that happening, but I do think there’s a big chance of. Of, like, serious political unrest.

Negotiation and Contemporary Diplomacy

I don’t think that the centrist parties can get ahead of it. Don’t forget that a big part of the solution to the Syrian crisis was to bring Erdogan on board and just pay him a huge amount of money in exchange for stopping these guys coming across. The refugees coming across. Is that option available now, as it was then, both from the European side and Erdogan side? I’m not altogether. The Turks would extract a very high price. They are furious. Erdogan is on the back foot, like, the pressure is really on. The population in Turkey is extremely angry, as the rest of the world’s Muslim population. But just to step back from that and decide on the Atlantic, there is a sense developing here that the consensus, the Israelite consensus in the United States, is thinner than it looks.

Shifting Political Dynamics in the U.S.

It’s just like the EU consensus in Europe is thinner than it looks, confined to a narrow strata of the elite. Even though it’s wall to wall among the centrist elites, it is still not. Doesn’t go very deep in society. I think something very similar is true in the United States, where the truly pro Israel grassroots communities are the evangelical contingent, which is about a fifth of the US population, or slightly smaller, maybe a sixth and larger Jewish communities, which are two or three percent of the population. But even there, we see some very large splits opening up with, for example, black church is coming out very strongly against the atrocities in Gaza and young Jews taking the lead in the protests here. And so there is movement afoot, and Israel is running a great risk that the guaranteed patronage of the United States is going to come at.

Political Shifts and Affecting Factors

Is going to be put at risk from the tide turning. And if you look at, like, American political opinion polling, it’s very strongly staggered by age. The younger Democrats, especially, are extremely furious that no Palestinian was allowed to speak, or no, you know, nobody opposed to US Israel policy was allowed to speak a single word at the Democratic National Convention. It might be one reason why they might lose Michigan. That is a very large uncommitted vote. I don’t know if you’re following the story, but a large number of Democrat voters demanded that their delegates declare themselves not committed to Biden in the primaries because of Biden’s Israel policy. And that is the first time that has happened in the United States. It has never happened before at the scale. And it’s something that could break out and become very large.

Historical Context of Political Movements

The sort of model I have in mind is the breakthrough for BLM in 2020, where suddenly it went from being a fringe movement to a kind of something that was embraced by mainstream elites because the dam had broken. And so that’s a sort of nonlinearity that you were mentioning that we are watching here. Yeah. I mean, I don’t tend to follow American domestic politics much, but just to give a little bit of anecdote to what you’re saying there about the American support for Israel being wide but not deep, I have a kind of, one of my Twitter contacts is lives in North Carolina and is right in the middle of the hurricane Helena situation. And he’s a really good aggregator of online news. And he kind of pings me regularly. He’s really fantastic.

Public Sentiment and Political Discourse

And obviously, being in the middle of this, he’s been trying to explain to me how catastrophic the whole things been and how poor the federal government response has been, as he says it. And he’s been sending me kind of tweets, essentially, so that I can kind of follow what’s going on. And as I scroll down some of the comments and the tweets, I’m seeing a lot of really, first of all, really nasty antisemitism, which I never used to see in the US, even two years ago. But not just that. A lot of resentment. A lot of resentment about the support that, say, Israel and Ukraine get, as opposed to the support that ordinary Americans that are stuck in a horrific natural disaster.

Perceptions of Media and Political Priorities

I’ve received. And I know Twitter is not real life, but this seems to be an increasing, I don’t want to use the word realization, because maybe it’s not true. I don’t know enough. It kind of looks true from my perspective. But I’m also conscious of the fact that I’m not American. I don’t live there, and I don’t follow American politics closely. But there’s certainly, but there certainly seems to be an increasing feeling that American commitments abroad, and of course, the most prominent American commitment traditionally has been to the state of Israel, are prioritized by the elite over the security and safety of US citizens. That’s a feeling I get.

The Implications of Political Sentiment

It’s a really big shift and it’s sudden and noticeable on Twitter. I don’t know what it might be different. You know, in the soccer mom community and the, you know, the average kind of working class, blue collar Joe who isn’t sitting on Twitter arguing about politics like me, like 8 hours a day. But, you know, it’s just noticeable to me, that kind of shift. And I would have thought that would be exactly the sort of thing that a populist presidential candidate could very easily take advantage of. I’m not sure if you’ve got a populist right wing presidential candidate. So very interesting developments on the Trump front.

Political Statements and Threats

So a few weeks ago, Trump declared that if the Jews don’t vote, if he lose the election because of the Jews, it would not be good or something. It was a very direct threat. Basically, he was saying that Jews should be pro Israel because they’re Jews. And if you’re pro Israel, you should be pro Republican because the Republicans are stronger in Israel. So if you don’t vote for us and looks like you’re all voting for Democrats, we will blame you. And that the antisemitism is right underneath the surface. Right. It goes so deep in Western society and Western history, in European history, that it is always, like, right beneath the surface.

Antisemitism in Political Discourse

It can break out at any time. It’s a real risk. But I would say that much of the antisemitism and claims about antisemitism, semitism that we see are essentially information operations. Same thing. Like this guy’s a pro Russia guy, information operations. If you say an independent, if you take an independent line on Russia policy or Ukraine, they would brand you as a Russian stooge, as something similar is going on with most of the claims that are about antisemitism, we see, especially on college campuses and the left and the pro Palestine protesters and so on, there is some anti Semitism.

Media Manipulation and Perception

Well, I mean, look, just to say something like the comments I was seeing, like, I mean, maybe they are people who are, like, paid for by certain intelligence agencies to be deliberately anti Semitic, but and therefore rubbish any kind of, you know, by association rubbish the response to any kind of criticism of the establishment of that or criticism of US Israeli relations, you know, by putting these, like, obvious, like, anti Semites, kind of, you know, the sort of comments that you would see in asturmer or something, like, you know, maybe that’s deliberately done to rubbish it. But I can say that these weren’t kind of claims of antisemitism, that, you know, this wasn’t Trump saying that, hey, Jews should vote for us because we’re pro Israel, or else this was like, you know, literal racial slurs like, there’s no other way to put it.

Spotting Patterns in Political Rhetoric

There were racial pejoratives, for instance, that like, the head of FEMA, I believe, is a Jewish lady. And, you know, there were comments about the size of her nose. It’s always them, isn’t it? Like, of course you don’t want to help conservative Christians, you’re Jewish, you hate us, you want us dead. Like, this is the sort of level that we’re talking about. And the comment section is like packed with these things. Like packed. And it wasn’t like two years ago, it wasn’t ten years ago, certainly, but not just that. It was packed with also non-antisemitic, like just the ordinary resentment and frustration, seriously unpleasant stuff.

Understanding Information Operations

Can I just say one thing? So going back to sort of like intelligence circles and military circles, this question of information operations is very important to understand our media environment and our social media environment. So a lot of what we see on social media is being engineered, and it is being engineered with a view to control the risks that were revealed with Arab uprisings, the Arab Spring. Right? So social media, do you know Martin Gudy? Martin Gudi is a former CIA career CIA officer, CIA analyst, who published this book on the revolt of the masses. Very, very interesting book in which he argues that social media kind of turbocharged, kind of broken the old monopoly of the control of information and opinion making and kind of created a really explosive network effect possibility, which was responsible in large part for what we are seeing in the green movement in Iran.

Social Media and Modern Activism

The revolts, in the uprisings, and not uprising, but the protests in Israel, certainly the protests and the uprising in Egypt and Tunisia and so on, and all the way up in America to the anti Wall Street protests, occupy Wall Street, that these things are connected through the new enabling social media technologies. In my understanding, one of the responses of the military and the intelligence services across the board, not just in America but elsewhere as well, has been to sensor at large scale what is being posted on social media. And we saw this with the Twitter files, very large scale systems being put in place to surveil and censor. But more than that, active influence operations, information operations.

The Landscape of Information Control

So they do a lot of, there’s a lot of discourse about, like, disinformation campaigns right, by the Russians and so on. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. That’s what the Russians are doing. We are also doing it. And we are doing it a much larger scale, and the Israelis are doing very large scale. There are hundreds, there are probably one or 2 million people involved, at least a couple of million people working full time on information operations. So we are looking at a very. Yeah, I mean, I always laugh at the, you know, the accusation that the Russians are doing this, Chinese are doing it.

The Complexity of Modern Information Warfare

Like, these guys are like Bush league compared to the west when it comes to gray zone warfare and cyber and social media. It’s not even, it’s like comparing your your little League team is playing baseball, but, you know, they’re not quite the New York Yankees, are they? It’s a whole different thing. I mean, the Israelis are masters of this. I mean, so the Ukrainians also very advanced. We have to realize that this is a very large part of the struggle that is being raised at multiple levels. Social media has turned information operations into one of the central features of modern warfare, intelligence operations.

Insights into Information Strategies

And there is a large literature, the open source Pentagon literature, on the right way to carry out information and strategies around information operations. A very interesting. Makes for very interesting reading. This used to go under like this used to be back, you know, classified back in the day when the CIA was doing this. But then they moved it out of the CIA to what is called the National Endowment of democracy, which is essentially the word information operation. In the pre-social media age, this was voice of America and all that stuff. Regular propaganda, you know, against the communists and so on.

The Evolution of Propaganda Tactics

But now it has acquired a much more micro targeted character. And this micro targeting makes it much more effective, makes, creates like the possibility of completely neutralizing public opinion by spreading, you know, by basically directing attention of people’s attention to the latest flashy thing or the latest outrage or whatever, so as to keep them out of. Keep them away from paying attention to the real issues. So we are talking about an information environment that is more complex and that is more doctored than at any time in our lifetimes.

Insights into Social Control Mechanisms

Yeah, I mean, I recently stumbled across somebody called Mike Benz, who I believe is a former State department employee. And I’m not sure how much credence to put into what he says, but even a quarter of what he says is true. The scale is vast. I’m not sure if he read. A year ago, Victor Orban made a speech in Zurich for the anniversary of a conservative magazine published from Zurich. I think it was one of the Swiss towns. And he made a really interesting point, as Alban often does in his speeches. He said that during the Cold War, Europe was entirely occupied.

Cold War Influence and Historical Narrative

Its western part was occupied by the United States and the eastern part was occupied by the Soviet Union. And he said that the western occupation was infinitely more civilized than the Soviet in terms of the forms that it took and also the advantages that it offered to its kind of its satellite state. But he said then, essentially, he said then a funny thing happened on the way to freedom. After 1991, the Soviet tide entirely receded. The mechanisms of their influence in Europe disappeared completely almost overnight. Whether it be the raw muscle of the military and the KGB, or whether it be more subtle means, it just entirely disappeared, whereas the American means of influence didn’t just remain, but they expanded geographically and in terms of their scope, especially with regard to the Internet.

The Shift in Global Influence

And I thought that was very interesting. And I think perhaps it’s quite a true point going back to the point you made earlier about know, in the early two thousands it was possible for France and Germany to resist American calls to join the coalition for an invasion of Iraq. And now it just wouldn’t happen at all. And I think, as you say, this kind of the US efforts with regard to social media, the National Endowment for democracy, the kind of the, I don’t know, sometimes direct, but some times quite incohate network of non governmental organizations and civil society groups and media organizations, think tanks, this really offers the US the tremendous influence.

Undisputed Power in Information Sphere

And I think nowhere is that more powerful than in Europe. And it’s an area really where people might decry the fact, as you did earlier, that it’s unable to out, it’s being comprehensively out produced in terms of 155 millimeter shells by Russia. People decry the fact that the US is extremely short of oilers and other support ships, which would be really needed in any kind of war in the western Pacific. Yeah, sure, these are all issues for the US, but one area where it’s still the kind of undisputed leader is this kind of, I wouldn’t call it soft power. It’s in that kind of space between soft and hard power.

Hierarchy of Power and Influence

Some of it is quite hard, some of it is pretty soft. But the US is really as kind of awesome power in this sphere, whether it be, as we say, charities, NGO, civil society, social media. It’s really hegemonic. Yeah. The UK is not far behind. It’s a joint operation. So this goes by the name of information dominance. I agree. Like the United States is, it’s like. Information supremacy at the moment. It’s not just superiority, like supremacy. I would call, and I would push back a little on the efficacy of these things. So if you look back a bit, like in the Cold War, Chomsky and Herman wrote this fantastic book called manufacturing consent.

Manufacturing Consent and Media Strategy

Right where they lay out this propaganda model and the role that the media elites are supposed to play, the flat generating think tank kind of organization is supposed to play and the official pronouncements are supposed to play. And the way it’s reproduced or the production of consent, essentially, right, through many mechanisms, only one of which is actual, technically intelligence operations in the military sense. That model, that model laid out in manufacturing consent needs to be updated for the social media age. Nobody has really done this work. But Guri’s work says, essentially, this is over, right? You can’t control it.

Adapting to the New Media Landscape

I think that even Gudi is already out of date, right? They’ve figured out different ways of controlling it. It looks very different from what it did earlier. But part of the core issue is the kind of system of elite consensus that underwrites this kind of hegemonic ideology at the top, right? And so basically, everybody who works at the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, CNN, in the State Department, and so on. I mean, just talking about the American side, all of these people went to the same schools, you know, took the same classes, almost kind of got immersed in the same worldview.

Uniformity in Ideological Perspectives

And that shared world picture or ideology is kind of like the thing that connects it all together and makes it possible for non-control, like so, you know, in an authoritarian country like China, Beijing would, like, actually issue specific directives about what is allowed to say, what you’re not allowed. To say, and so on. This is not quite the American system, right? People do their own thing. They are free to. They are free to do their own thing. They are rewarded or punished if they don’t say the right things. Yes, but nobody’s telling them exactly what to do, except for when it comes to highly sensitive, electorally related questions.

Collusion in Repressing Dissent

When you want to, for example, suppress the Biden laptop story, then a definite directive goes out and says, you know, this cannot be, this has to be. This has to be suppressed completely, right? So we’ve kind of blurred the line between authoritarian tactics of public opinion control and democratic practices, the old democratic practices of public opinion control. But we are now in a very different environment. I don’t think people have fully understood the full implications of the power of specific tech companies. And in terms of. Actually, this is very important for transatlantic relations, because the American tech companies are a big headache for the European Union.

Challenges of Influence in the Tech Age

For the Europeans, the dominance of American tech companies means that they have full spectrum vision of everything that the Europeans are saying to each other. But the Europeans don’t right? So in a sense, Google is a massive resource for the US state because the US can force it to do certain things and not others in a way that other states cannot. So this is a struggle that is going on in every country in the world where everybody is struggling with the tech giants and essentially carrying out diplomacy with them or trying to control what they can and cannot do.

Interactions with Global Tech Entities

And so that’s why you find, like, you know, Musk complaining about Argentina and the Modi government dictating Meta’s. Somebody wants to talk. Rajiv, can you allow Colin? Rajiv? I don’t see anybody. He just raised a speaker requesting. He raised his hand. Oh, really? I don’t even see anyone called Rajiv. I do not even see somebody called that on my list. So if Reggie can put in a speaker request if he wants to speak, I’m sure I’ll see it. I’ll keep an eye on it.

Conversation and Reflection

I mean, on this question, by the way, there’s a great. Somebody once told me that, you know, a funny joke, that on the plane from Moscow to New York, an American and a Russian are sitting next to each other. And the Russian introduces himself and said, are you going back home? And the American said, yeah. And the Russian said, what were you doing in Russia? And the American says, well, I’m an oil executive and working on an oil field in Russia. And the American said, what about you? Why are you going across to the US? And the Russians said, oh, I’m going across the US to study American methods of propaganda and media control.

Comparisons of Propaganda Techniques

And the American said, and the American says, what? Like, I see no propaganda or media control in America. It’s not like Russia. And the Russian says, exactly. And this kind of reminds me a little bit of the current situation. This kind of old joke is that you don’t see this media control. And I think you hit the nail on the head that the Americans have been allowed to do it in a very, you know, a very hands-off method of controlling media narrative and finding this way of controlling social media, in part because of the socio-economic background and education pathways are so similar among elites, and they’re even similar across Atlantic, among Elita.

Shared Backgrounds Among Elites

Someone like Annalena Berbach, the foreign minister of Germany, I’m sure, has far more in common with people who do the Manhattan charity auction sets and people who spend most of their time inside the department circle than she has with the citizen with a working class of Lower Saxony, for example. And, you know, I think this is a really powerful means of control. I mean, the British did it, right? They’re like, you know, how many Middle Eastern officers and the, you know, the children of the Middle Eastern royal families were educated at Oxford and Sandburst, right? Like, you know, when Boris Johnson calls up Qatar and says, hey, can we have some of your LNG? We’re really struggling at the moment, but that’s like a personal relationship, right?

Continuity in Elite Relationships

And I think something similar has happened with regards to the kind of hate to use this word elite because it sounds so conspiratorial, but you know exactly what I mean. This kind of Western elite, they’re far more similar to each other than they are to the. A lot of their voters. Actually. If I may recommend another piece I wrote on this elite reproduction. It’s called something about class reproduction of the professional class that I wrote a few years ago. This was my take on Daniel Markowitz’s book on the meritocracy.

Elites and Their Institutions

Essentially the central site of reproduction of the American investment elites are these elite institutions, these elite prestige schools. So at the top is Harvard, and you go down that list, right? And what is happening is this is the ticket you get in there. You have a ticket to the prestige media firms, you have a ticket to the prestige tech firms, the consulting firms, the Wall Street banks, and so on, so forth. So you have these elite institutions, elite superstar firms, and so on. And you have this pipeline from the prestige schools to these elite institutions.

The Control of Information and Elitism

And these are the people who get to run the show everywhere, from the New York Times to Goldman to the State Department to the CIA. This system is not exactly replicated in Europe, everywhere. But it is certainly true in the UK. It’s certainly true in France. It’s not true in Germany. It’s not true in Italy. And part of the reason why we see a different kind of system in these places and more freedom, if you will, honestly. And more voice for people not among the elite in these places is because they don’t have this system of elite reproduction.

The Complexity of Political Control

But this is a much larger conversation for another time. I think we’ve exhausted our audience’s patience. I agree. I could talk about this sort of thing for a long time as well. Look, before you go, I mean, I really recommend people go into the policy tensor sub stack. If you just type in policy tensor sub stack, it’s kind of like it’s a goldmine for intellectual esoterica, I would say. It’s really interesting. I found an essay of yours about human evolution, actually, and what it might about the state of humanity and to be honest.

Exploring Complex Topics

I found myself typing define and several of the words into Google because of my scientific ignorance. But I just found it. No, that’s fine. That’s my problem, not yours. That’s what you get for not having a degree. Right? So if people go to that, there’s loads of stuff about international relations and especially geopolitics and grand strategy, I would say. But there are also fascinating examinations of macroeconomics and of other intellectual tidbits and nuggets. Some of them are kind of almost academic. I would like academic paper style, I would say, whereas others are more essay style.

Invitation for Further Engagement

But anyway, policy tensor substack is really worth a going into. I’m not sure if there’s anything else you want to draw attention to. No, I think we have had a long conversation and thank you. Thank you for the word of confidence. I appreciate it. We should do this again. It’s an absolute pleasure. Yeah, please. Yeah, I’d love to do it. I’d love to do it again. Because my wife thinks that politics in general is faintly ridiculous.

Personal Insights on Political Discourse

She kind of laughs at the idea. I would talk for almost 3 hours without politics with somebody, so she thinks of far more important things in life. So I don’t. Outside the pubs, I don’t get to chat so much. So please, I would love to do it again. And thank you, everybody, for joining us. Thanks to policy tensor. This has been recorded, so if anybody wants to catch up with bits they’ve missed, they can do. And if you think it’s valuable, please share it.

Concluding Remarks

Please follow policy tensor. I am Andrew Collingwood. I co-host the multipolarity podcast. I will see you all next time. Have a good Saturday evening, everybody. Take care, guys. Cheers.