Multipolarity

Fable — a short fantastical tale with a moral message.
For weeks, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei was telling anyone who’d listen that he’d invented an AI so powerful it could walk through walls, shoot sparrows from the sky, talk to horses, invent trees. A death star of tech.
Whether this was part of the sales pitch or genuine alarm, the US Government has taken him at his word, and shut off access to it beyond America’s shores.
Suddenly, the biggest tech of the 21st century is at the heart of a new age of mercantilism.
The world is waking up. But some of the world was already awake.
TP Huang is one of the best China watchers out there. A programmer and tech specialist, he sees an even bigger battle coming.
The divergence of chip supply chains, ever since the Biden Administration’s October surprise in 2022, now stands ready to produce a space race over not just the chips, but the software itself.
In that aspect, China is perpetually six months to a year behind. But is six months really decisive, when you can do everything at a fraction of the cost of your rivals? And when you’re not just bowing down before a brain in a jar, but embedding AI in factories and robots?
While the world focuses on AGI psychodrama in California and flat-footed despair in Brussels, this week, TP is talking to Andrew Collingwood about the flint-eyed Chinese strategy to build a truly insulated supply chain within the next ten years.
You can read his full piece, published in two parts, on the Multipolarity Substack.
https://multipolaritypod.substack.com/p/the-struggle-for-mastery-of-the-21st

It’s war in our time. After flirting with peace for a few miserable hours, the US and Iran are back to what they know best: taking uneven chunks out of each other amidst the world’s prime oil pathway.
This week, Iran levelled a terminal of Kuwait’s airport, and attacked the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain. Then there was that mysterious Apache helicopter crash off Hormuz.
Now, after the crisp kinetic strikes of the first few weeks – then the tentative tests of strength – the war is entering a new phase.
One in which Iran shows that the US will not be able to achieve on the negotiating table what it did not achieve on the battlefield.
Meanwhile, it’s a thriving Asian tiger, the skyscraper skyline of its capital shows the bustle and optimism of the Rising East. Mobile phones. Electric cars. That’s right — North Korea is this year’s big economic success story, according to a new piece in the Wall Street Journal.
Turns out the Hermit Kingdom is less hermetic these days. North Koreans have made good money providing weapons to Russia in Ukraine, and China has turned on the trade taps. Pyongyang no longer rations electricity to a few hours every day.
So what happens when North Korea is no longer a Potemkin village but a Potemkin megalopolis?
Meanwhile, lose a war, get voted back in. Three years after the catastrophe in Nagorno-Karabakh, what inspired the Armenian people to re-elect Nikol Pashinyan? Perhaps it was precisely because of how vulnerable the country feels itself to be.
The strategy is to buy off and shore up: peace with Azerbaijan, EU candidacy, and normalisation with old enemy Turkey. But how low can you lie in a region that Russia sees as its backyard?
Do check out our Substack if you can - https://multipolaritypod.substack.com/

This week: two audio essays.
First up, they’re calling it the Poor Man’s Tomahawk. Ukraine is firing up to 2000 long range drones a week into Russia. The production facilities supplying them are scattered across Western Europe. These production facilities have an artificial shield, in that they are diplomatically protected. But how long this will last is unclear.
For its part, Ukraine would like the West to be more active in the war. And one way to do that would be to antagonise Russia into responding beyond its borders. There is now a 50% chance of erratic strikes into Europe proper within the next year, as Philip Pilkington makes clear in The Escalation Ladder.
Meanwhile, Andrew Collingwood has been supping on a 2019 masterwork of geopolitics. Weaponized Interdependence is the title of a Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman paper, in which the pair argue that states with political authority over the central "hubs" in global economic networks: such as those for finance, data, and trade, can exploit this position to gain a strategic advantage. States sitting atop those nodes can exploit two effects: panopticon (information dominance) and choke point (cutting off access to irreplaceable hubs).
Hormuz is one hub. Russia has its commodity hubs. And China has its manufacturing hub dominance.
Put it all together, and the new Iran war has revealed a structural shift in global power, says Andrew Collingwood.
Of course, this is a pay week — if you want access to this episode, you’re going to have to go on Patreon, and sign up. Simply type Multipolarity into the search bar and do the needful. Alternatively, you can now get premium episodes and our regular print work over on Substack for 12 USD a month. The choice is yours, but don’t get caught in no man’s land.

Russia has rained Oreshnik hypersonic missiles on Kiev. Four people killed. 549 missiles apparently shot down. This was a message. The Oreshnik travels at Mach 10. It was designed to deliver nukes.
As fighting season starts in earnest, year five looks like it might be the start of real escalation.
But, if Russian munitions start tiptoeing ever further West, could this be the year of, you know, real real escalation?
Meanwhile, the US-Iran war peace talks are going well:
Iran wants tolls on the strait. US says no.
Iran wants 12 billion in reparations. US says no.
Nuclear weapons? They’re being kicked into another round of talks-about-talks.
So why is Little Marco still predicting a deal within days?
Finally, Huawei say they have figured out a new approach to chip design that doesn’t require them to be smaller.
“What happens when you’ve got a silicon chip the size of a dinner plate?” is one key question. Another is what happens when chips are no longer the ace card for Western leverage.
Do check out our Substack if you can - https://multipolaritypod.substack.com/

Donald Trump took Elon Musk and Jensen Huang to Beijing with him for 48 hours. But rather than the frat boy big weekend of their autistic dreams, the trip turned into a sequel to The Hangover.
A dressing down from President Xi on Iran, a few more soybeans flogged, and some Boeings on order: was it worth Jensen’s $17 000 an hour time?
Meanwhile, the Japanese 10 year bond yield has climbed above the Chinese one. This is something of a sorpasso. As the country struggles to keep its debt load manageable, there’s a sense of sag to the economy. Does the Japan of our techno-futurist imaginations now bear the same degree of relation to reality – as the Italy of our Fellini fantasies?
Finally – another sorpasso – Mexican birth rates have dipped below those of America for the first time. Problem being, if the Mexicans don’t have sex, they can’t supply the US with a constant source of surplus labour.
US conservatives have long been scornful of European immigration patterns, falling back on the cultural compatibility of their southern neighbours – but unless Pablo and Maria get back in the bedroom, they’ll soon be receiving the same rich blend of Africans and Middle Easterners as the EU.
Do check out our Substack if you can - https://multipolaritypod.substack.com/