Multipolarity

Coming up this week and next week and the week after…
A massive multi-part episode.
The world is shifting in unpredictable ways. The old order dies of smoke inhalation in a dumpster fire. The new one has yet to be lifted out by C-Section.
Iran, it is now clear, represents the smouldering conflagration that will consume US power. As its strength is sapped, this lumbering giant will make ever-poorer decisions. Bad money will be poured after good. The Falcon F-16 cannot hear the falconer. Which way is up will become ever harder to discern. In the face of this spinning compass, our sense-making apparatus is as useless as a cavalry charge in the Ardennes.
But there is one doomsday weapon that could yet unscramble our circuits. One that has only recently become known to science.
The Pod to End All Pods is a three episode collaboration between Multipolarity, and our two most requested guests – Malcolm ‘Juche Respecter’ Kyeyune - and Amerikanets, the anonymous Substacker who uncovered the implausibility of Trump’s Venezuela Raid.
We’ve assembled this little RAND Corporation, and told them to solve for the next twelve months — and the next ten years.
The results were incendiary and interminable. They spoke for three hours — which we’ve decided to carve into three separate podcasts.
In the first episode, this week, we’re going to talk about the Air War — the debaseification thesis, as laid out by Amerikanets. The Iranians are systematically denying the US its regional airbases by killing personnel and hitting assets on the tarmac. The Reaper drones that put the fear of god into America’s enemies in the 2010s are now undergoing their own holocaust in the skies over Iran. Meanwhile, American generals are struggling to understand what the target even is — in a KPI culture, they’re running out of targets, and pushing towards more and more abstruse success metrics. This is a war being run without a purpose.
Then, In part two, we get round to The Systemic-War Thesis. Like World War I, like the Thirty Years War, or the Napoleonic Wars, this has become a conflict that pulls in every actor within a closed system — and only stops at mutual physical exhaustion. A point only underlined by the Saudis’ decision to hit Iranian targets this week.
Finally, in part three, we take on Europe, America and the political fallout. Is the old world about to be dragged into this, much against their will? Given the spate of fires at EU refineries and munitions plants, are we on explosion watch?
All this and more, as the July Crisis takes shape.
They said it would be over by Christmas — and this show just about will be.
This is The Pod To End All Pods.

You’ve heard of de-Baathification? Now what about de-baseification? The gradual chipping back of US strategic assets in the Gulf as each in turn comes under pressure from drone and rocket fire… till only a handful of super-bases remain.
Iran’s president says country is in ‘full-scale war’ after an expansion of US attacks. They’ve struck US interests in Bahrain, Kuwait - and the Houthis are blockading Saudi ports.
The US was unlikely to win this war - but now it seems it could actually lose it.
Meanwhile…
14%. 18%. 18%
Year-on-year sales drops at Volkswagen, and Audi and Porsche, which it owns, respectively.
Germany’s biggest auto maker is in free fall, with warnings of 50 000 job cuts. But Chinese competition is only half the problem.
Finally, the main public TV station has been shut down overnight. The President has been summarily dismissed by a dubious constitutional amendment. And the opposition leader has been banned from standing for re-election.
The new leader parades round in Mao suits, making agit prop video tours of the former regime’s residences to stoke up his base.
As the airwaves breathe static, will the EU send troops to restore democracy in the little-known far-off nation of Hungary?

This week: two audio essays, on one big Iran cluster-frig.
In the Collingwood corner:
Donald Trump has become an unreadable politician. His credibility has burst through various levels of ‘madman theory’ negotiating prowess, into a place where it may not even be clear to his most intimate subordinates where his true intent begins and ends. The result is that US policy is now a broken sail, flapping in the wind.
Originally, America had four aims: dismantle Iran's nuclear programme, cap its missiles and drones, cut off its proxies, and change the regime. With nil-for-four, the window to credibly settle this beef is getting farther away – not closer.
Meanwhile, chez Pilkington:
The US now believes it can ‘print oil’. That the present attempt to jigger the markets by making use of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and various ‘Whale of Hormuz’ attempts to rig the options market are long-term sustainable. They are not, as Phil points out. What goes up must come down, and the slip-slide will not be pretty. Rather than a war of attrition, Pilko suggests, the oil price war has become the totality of conflict – a Baudrillardian quarrel over supremacy of a number – only secondarily underpinned by the drones and bombs of the Arabian Gulf.
Yes, it’s time to up the escitalopram – enter code HAPPYPILLS26 at checkout to redeem this offer.

It’s an oil rush. Fill your boots, fellers, America is releasing its strategic petroleum reserves, ostensibly to see down Iranian pressure. Good news for voters, great news for foreign countries who want to sponge of the US teat. But in its ducking and diving haste, has the Trump administration inadvertently drunk its own milkshake?
Then in the second half of a two-parter, we’re digging into the brewing Ukranian-Polish conflict. At the earliest days of the Ukraine War, around 2014, their Parliament passed a series of laws which granted official veteran status to a couple of Second World War military groups who had, shall we say, colourful pasts.
Recently, the Polish President withdrew the Polish White Eagle decoration from President Zelenskyy after Ukraine named an elite special unit after one such.
Hundreds of hatchets were buried after Communism, but now, despite the shock of the war, old animosities are bubbling to the surface. And with them, the facade of a united Europe begins to crack.

This week on Multipolarity, we’re taking your questions.
It’s a Q&A episode, involving queries sent in by our loyal listeners.
Questions like:
How did you guys meet?
(Drunk, at a party).

Which EU country will be first to do its own deal on Ukraine?
(The first to fall to the populists)

Where should young Euros emigrate to if Europe is ‘screwed’?
(Find your bliss in the emerging world)

Is the Rouble overvalued?
(Depends on how you count)

Could Turkey become the balancing power in the coming struggle between China and the US?
(Probably not)

What are the mechanics of oil price manipulation?
(Dump a big short position on the market on Monday morning, squeeze the longs out)

Why do we still live with the Boomer model of geopolitics?
(Give it ten years)

And several more. You had questions. We had answers.

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