In this week’s episode, Policy Tensor joins us to talk about great power systems, and whether or not Iran qualifies as a great power. The associated substack highlights a neglected part of China-US news. Not good news.
Ukraine might be doing better than it was last year. But last year was pretty catastrophic. It’s time to push peace, not more war. Today’s conversation with Ruairi also inspired a substack post on the Chechen wars of the 1990s, which you can find here…
You’d think that war against a common enemy would bring Saudi Arabia and the UAE closer together, but in fact it’s the opposite. They are having a falling out that’s putting them both in danger. Today’s video asks, who’s more doomed?
In 1956, the Suez crisis showed that the British Empire was basically over. A lot of people are suggesting, both in a mournful and a gloating way, that Trump’s Iran fail may be something similar. They’re wrong. This is why.
China is the biggest winner from the Iran war. But the US Deep State is a close second. You didn’t think I’d make it through a whole Iran war without making an MIC video did you?
This Donald Trump thing has been going on for quite some time now, hasn’t it? Back in 2017 I did a survey of past times of turmoil in US history. My conclusion was that folks in Trump’s first administration were blowing things out of proportion. Do I still feel the same way today? Not so much. We’ve been in worse places on some metrics, but our situation today can no longer be explained away. Check out today’s video for my detailed analysis.
We don’t hear much about Taiwan semiconductors anymore. This often happens in national security circles. The point is to make you scared, not to make any meaningful changes to the strategic vulnerability that is claimed to have been identified. Solving this problem would be counter-productive. It’s declining importance means I’ll probably never do a produced video talking about Taiwan chips, so I thought it made sense to throw together an unproduced version. I hope you find it useful.