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Hello and welcome back to These Times. I'm Tom McTae. And I'm Helen Thompson. Last week, Helen and I talked about whether the US debt crisis was the driving force of Donald Trump's second presidency. This week and next, we're going to focus on a central theme of this podcast, the geopolitical world orders today, and discuss the apparent arrival of a new multipolarity where the United States can no longer act as the world's sole organizing power.
The question we're going to ask in this two-parter is, does an American acceptance of a multipolar world serve as a thread to explain the geopolitical ambitions of Trump too? America will reclaim its rightful place as the greatest, most powerful, most respected nation on Earth, inspiring the awe and admiration of the entire world.
You hurt us on trade, you do bad things on trade, and then on top of it, we're supposed to pay for your military. NATO is solid, they're strong, but they have to treat us fairly. That is what President Trump is going to do because he doesn't care about what the Europeans scream at us. He cares about putting the interests of America's citizens first.
Before we get going, Helen, we should say that after next week's episode, These Times is going to take a break. Before we do so, we wanted to pull together what we've been discussing since the beginning of the year. And so much of that has focused on this great shift in world affairs, which seems to...
be happening under Donald Trump. In this first episode, we're going to try to explain how multipolarity has come about, because in one sense, it seems that that is beyond doubt. In next week's episode, we're going to discuss Trump's response to this and the
consequences for the rest of the world. So Helen, I think the starting place for this episode has to be this remarkable interview that Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, gave on the Megyn Kelly show on January the 30th, where he addresses this question head on. quote from him directly. Here's what he said.
So it's not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power. That was not. That was an anomaly. It was the product of the end of the Cold War. But eventually you're going to reach back to a point where you have a multipolar world. multi-great powers in different parts of the planet. We face that now with China and to some extent with Russia. And then you have rogue states like Iran and North Korea that you have to deal with. So there's Rubio picking out China.
as the big threat to American power and Russia as a secondary challenge. And I think we're going to take that as the structure for this episode, focusing on China in the first half and then Russia in the second. So, Helen, starting... With China, I think the most obvious place to start has to be in the 1990s, when China is being incorporated into the world economy. And I think, crucially, that is something that is being led by the United States.
You're right, Tom. If we go back to the 1990s and the prelude to China's integration into the World Trade Organization, so that was the bilateral trade.
agreement with the united states that permanently normalized trade between the the us and china what followed from that was frequently called globalization and that was not supposed to be something that was multipolar now you could argue that the whole idea of globalization is a rather ungeopolitical concept and that actually disguise the fact that there's a hierarchical geopolitical world underpinning
the world economy itself. Nonetheless, I think we can say that when the Clinton administration was pushing for that outcome, for China to be more deeply embedded in the world economy.
It thought it was doing so on American terms. We've talked about this, I think, before, where Clinton was saying things like, look, this is win-win for the United States. We're not... giving anything up and in that sense i think that there was a premise at least in the way it was publicly presented that the united states to use actually one of rubio's own phrases was the only power in the world and it could organize
in this case, the world economy on its terms. And if it was for the benefit of the United States to have China more deeply involved in the world economy, that the United States could... bring that about without bringing negative consequences disruptive consequences upon itself i think though it's pretty clear that if you get to the middle of that decade so around 2005 2000 and and six, we can already see that...
actually, China's integration into the world economy to that scale is actually fairly disruptive. And it's not at all clear that the outcomes are beneficial for the United States. Partly that's to do with the internal... politics of the United States around the distribution of benefits who benefits from the the new relationship with China and clearly in terms of those working in the manufacturing sector in the United States there was
deleterious consequences that came while the people who benefited were big corporations let's say like Apple. I think it's also clear that if you look at what someone like Lawrence Summers was saying about the nature of the US-China economic relationship that had come out of this, which was to describe it as a balance of financial terror, essentially where China got the benefit.
of US markets for its exports and US got the benefit of China lending to it and they each had got the ability to impose a lot of economic calm on each other. already begins to sound like something that's multipolar. Because it doesn't make sense, I think, for there to be a balance of financial terror in which the United States is on one side of it in a world in which the United States is the simple organizing power of the world.
Yeah, I think it's funny for me, Helen, to try to understand the psychology of the American governments at this time, the American administrations, or just the American ruling class. Because as you say, on one hand... They seem remarkably confident about this new world that's coming into being. As they say, they're perfectly prepared to bring China into the world economy. In fact, they're pushing for that too. And I think there's sort of the height of...
The hubris for me, in a sense, is captured in Clinton's response because he's not only saying that we have nothing to fear from Chinese incorporation into an American-led global economy, into this globalized order. He essentially seems to understand that China will have to accept American norms, not just sort of economic norms. But I mean, that I think is part of the...
premise as well. But it's that China won't be able to do anything differently to the United States. It won't be able to control the world economy. It won't be able to control the internet, you know, as another sort of organizing. So this is Clinton on March the 8th.
at 2000, saying that the internet will mean the triumph of liberty around the world. And he dismisses China's attempts at that point to try and control it. He says, good luck with that. That's sort of like trying to nail jello to the wall. And I think that does get to this, the kind of the tension in a sense, in the American idea of what this world is going to be, that they can kind of see the power in some senses of what China is trying to do. It's like Clinton.
understands that China is trying to do something different to the United States, but he doesn't think that anybody can do anything different to the United States, and ultimately their model will triumph. It is a kind of... It is shaped, isn't it, by the end of history as a sort of frame for understanding history. I think that point that you've just made, Tom, gets to a central feature of this period, which I think is only actually very recently being challenged of...
American technological supremacy and that the United States does not have a technological competitor. And this is where I think actually what happened in the 90s economically... leaving China out of it is actually quite significant because that wasn't really the take in the 80s where it seemed like the United States was being...
economically challenged, including at high-tech and in some areas, not all, like defence, by West Germany and Japan in particular. And then the 90s had changed that because both now Germany and Japan had... relatively poor economic performance during the 1990s, particularly Japan. So in terms of
if you like, its Western rivals economically. The United States was in a significantly stronger position at the beginning of the 2000s than it had been, say, at the beginning or the middle of the 1980s. And underlying that, I think... was the tech success. And some of the companies that were going to become very significant, founded and begin to emerge in that period of late 90s into the 2000s. Amazon, Facebook, Apple goes from being...
Apple had become at that point an incredibly successful company. So there is some sense, I think, in which the assumption that the global economy was one in which American technological supremacy was a given was not. in any way since being challenged by China at that point. I think though the point where you can say by the middle of the decade it just looks really different is actually the energy and the resource.
question because the thing that china's economic development was going to do given this population size of of china in the rapid speed at which that economic development would take place in the immediate years after joining the World Trade Organization was radically to increase Chinese energy consumption. So China's total energy consumption increased by about 160%.
between 2000 and 2010 and we're talking about that happening in the world's most populous country and a world in which in energy terms have been defined since the 1970s by the United States being the world's largest oil importer, was now going to have a country in China that was going to challenge it in some sense as the world's largest oil importer. Now, that was a vulnerability for China, but the United States could not.
actually just simply absorb the consequences of having china's demand for oil increase in the way in which it did and that's the context we've talked about this in a number of like times before that by the time and then we get to middle of 2008 so three months before the layman bankruptcy oil is at its highest level level it's 150 a barrel in nominal like terms at the time and that is a huge problem
for the American economy. And if you take that thought a bit further and look at what the consequences in climate change diplomacy is of this. massive increase in China's energy consumption, a lot of which is actually coal. I think it's in 2009. China takes over as the world's largest emitter of carbon. So now...
In terms of the international politics of climate change, you have multipolarity or bipolarity, really, just actually not maybe multipolarity, between the US and China. And any attempt to deal with that at an international level, China is actually more important.
than the United States. I find it quite difficult, Helen, to try to get a kind of coherent through line throughout this period when we're talking in terms of... thinking about multipolarity or unipolarity merging into multipolarity because it seems to almost... come in waves in a strange sense. So you had what I mentioned at the end of last week's episode, you had the kind of Paul Kennedy rise and falls of great powers published in 1988, where he is saying essentially the job of an American.
administration is to manage the natural decline of American power in the world from something that is just not really sustainable in the long term. The end of the second world had created this moment of outsized power and a sort of natural correction was happening. And that was the job of sensible American administrations.
One year later, you have the fall of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of the end of the Cold War. And then, as you say, you then have this decade where something else entirely seems to have come into a sort of return.
to a unipolar world that seemed to be coming to an end only a few years earlier. And you have these moments that we've picked out where that looks to be exactly the case, that kind of sense of confidence from... the u.s administration or the you have the you know the wars in yugoslavia or the first gulf war where you have a
an American power able to act in the world in a way that perhaps it wouldn't have been able to. During the Cold War, you have Tony Blair giving the Chicago speech in 1999, which is premised on the idea of American. power and effectively what do you do with all of this responsibility that you can go and act everywhere in the world and then as you say by the middle of the 2000s you really have the consequences beginning
to emerge of your decision to incorporate China into the world economy. I mean, maybe that was never... a sort of straightforward kind of decision. Maybe it was always inevitable, and that's something I think is sort of worth bearing in mind. But I think it's worth just dragging that camera towards 2007, 2008. And just seeing the kind of consequences of the decisions that have been taken by that point, because obviously you've had 9-11 at the beginning of the...
And then you have the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And by 2007, 2008, you're looking at the necessity for a surge in Iraq because you aren't able to impose your order. You've got, as you say, oil prices. at record highs and then you have the financial crisis And at that point, it does look like we're sort of going back to that kind of Paul Kennedy world where you're saying American power, it's overstretched. It's not as great as we actually thought it was only a few years earlier.
And then again, the sort of irony and what's difficult to try and get a coherent picture about this. is that it's not the world that then emerges out of the crash. In some senses, you have a deepening of American power in the years after these quite calamitous events for the United States. Yeah, I think, Tom, that...
In that period that you're talking about, like the run up to the crash, there were quite a number of reasons to think that the world was turning multipolar. And we'll come to the Russia side of that in the second half.
But I think China's economic weight and its ability to cause really serious, not just general economic problems or macroeconomic problems, but actually... geopolitical if you like economic problems for the United States in that period was absolutely pivotal and I think that the two really important ways of seeing that strain that the United States was under. One comes on the financial side and one comes on the energy side. If we just take the financial one first and what actually happened.
in part during the crash period so from about march 2008 through to september of 2008 the chinese central bank was selling off the debt of these two large American mortgage corporations, congressionally chartered mortgage corporations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And it was because China did that and the japanese central bank as well that those huge mortgage corporations had to be taken essentially into federal receivership and that was the beginning of the quantitative easing
program the quantitative easing program began originally in response to that and buying the u.s treasury bonds came and then the next like part of it so in that sense the balance of financial terror that China triggered a little bit of it against the United States. And the United States had to respond by guaranteeing all that debt by the federal government because of China's...
vulnerability to full scale default from either of the two corporations. If we look at it in terms of energy, I think a really revealing moment. comes in 2006 January 2006 when George Bush Jr stands up at the State of the Union that year And he says this, keeping America competitive requires affordable energy. And here we have a serious problem. America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world. That is saying that...
the United States has a problem in being able to organise the world geopolitically in ways in which it can meet its massive demand for oil. And obviously... immediate context in which he's saying that is the failure of the Iraq war, which in the Bush administration's mind was a way of addressing America's oil weaknesses. What's then so fascinating is you...
kind of suggested, Tom, about the crash is how that changes both of these things on the finance side and on the energy side. If we stop the energy side first, again, with something we've already talked about in a number of episodes. In the immediate years after the crash, the shale oil boom starts. And by the middle, at some point in the 2010s, it's China, which is the world's largest oil importer. And the United States is still importing oil.
but nothing like the volume in which it was. And that gives the United States the ability to try and organise the Middle East a bit more to its liking. I mean, that bid fails, obviously, but the premise in which Obama thinks he can have a more assertive Middle Eastern policy is the shale oil boom. And then on the financial side...
This goes back to what we talked about in part last week, is that the crash creates this world in which we now live, in which the Federal Reserve Board is the international lender of last resort and has this incredible... power in its hands, which is dollar swaps and provision of dollar swaps. And through the 2010s is what the Fed does with interest rates is of huge consequences, not just to all.
but to China in particular. And China gets engulfed in a financial crisis in 2015-16 because it can't cope, if you like, with its dollar problem. So in that sense, at this point, if we just... stop there, we'd say, well, this is not economic multipolarity, which seemed to be what was emerging in the first decade of the 21st century. This is something that looks like more unipolar.
caveat though which i think in different ways changes everything i think we did this in one of our very first episodes made in china 2025 where actually the chinese leadership makes a bid or has a strategic plan to turn China into a high-tech manufacturer over a 10-year period. And in that sense, to challenge American technological power. A couple of things in there, because...
In one sense that, you know, when you stop the clock just a second ago and said, if you sort of took the temperature of the world economy in the early 2010s, you might actually say, hey, you know what? Bill Clinton in all of his hubris was correct that globalization will essentially allow American dominance to remain.
You know, that yes, other countries will become powerful, but sitting atop it all will be the United States with its global currency, the power of the Fed, the power of technology, dominating the internet. dominating sort of technological advancement, cultural power, it all really remains in the United States. And so you could say that that kind of...
easy attitude that Clinton had was right. And if there was anywhere that had hubris, it was places like Europe, where, you know, as Adam Tooze puts it in Crash, in the spring of 2009, France and Germany had lectured the UK and the United States. States about financial stability. A year later, they were reduced to calling on the IMF to help out not just Greece, but the Eurozone as a whole. I think that captures kind of the moment.
And another thing you said was about the assertiveness of Obama's policy in the Middle East. In one sense, I was thinking to myself, was he assertive? But then I think he was assertive about... American sort of comfort in that he believed that America could withdraw. It didn't need to get involved. Also that it could do a reset on Iran. I think that was a crucial thing that he thought he could do. Right. And he was also at the time kind of...
assertive in America's ability to lead a kind of climate change agreement as well. And I think crucially, he's assertive in America's power. and confidence to be able to pivot away from Europe. You know, that he just felt, in a sense, utterly confident that America could manage this shift. in focus towards constraining China. And that is not withdrawal, American withdrawal. That is a position of thinking a United Europe...
Looking after its own defense is no threat to American power. Russia is no threat to American interests in the West. Nobody is a threat to American interests in the Middle East because we're so powerful at home. And we can.
pull off this shift towards China. Yes, they're becoming more powerful, but we can effectively maintain the status quo. It is a kind of maximalist strategy, I think. Yeah, I think what's interesting about the pivot to Asia, so that's... being pushed by Obama in 2011, so four years before she moves to Made in China 2025. You might see it, I think, as the last attempt to try to save, if not quite unipolarity, at least the idea that the United States is the only global.
power and that the united states more importantly can still be a global power so as you say that it's choices that are being made it's like saying we can reset in the middle east we can be out of iraq
We can get a nuclear arms agreement with Iran. We can move military capability to the Pacific, extra military capability to the Pacific. And although... that there's some, I think, recognition, if you look at the language that not just Obama, perhaps particularly Hillary Clinton, when she was Secretary of State, was using, that the world was changing.
and that the United States was facing what she would call emerging powers, there was still the idea that there was one great power. And that was... the United States and there was still the idea that there were global challenges again using a phrase of hers and that the only state that could try to deal with them
or that any attempt to deal with any of them would still depend upon the United States. And in that sense, I think there's something which comes out in her remark. I think it's in a speech in 2011 on national security strategy when she's discussing the... emerging new powers if you like and she says in a world like this american leadership isn't needed less it's actually needed more and i think what you can see though
From the Trump presidency, and I think it would have happened, to be honest, in the end of Hillary Clinton had won in 2016 too, is that Made in China 2025 really does change that. And that you can see when the Trump administration, the first Trump administration, articulates a new U.S. national security doctrine in December of 2017, it begins by saying.
great power competition has returned. So that idea that there's a single dominant, unquestioned power is not there. And I think, as we've talked about on quite a number of occasions, there is then a thread that runs through Trump won. into the Biden administration, which says that in economic terms, then that the United States has ended up being severely hurt by its approach to China.
The United States has de-industrialized China's expense and something must be done to change that. And in one sense, that's even more emphatic, I think, under Biden. That's the context, as we've talked about on a number of occasions for the inflation reduction. And there is this underlying assumption that if the United States is going to be able to compete economically, it needs to re-industrialise. And in that sense, economic...
Multi-polarity is already there. Now, I think you can still say that when... The Biden administration is putting those sanctions effectively embargo on the sale of advanced chips to China in the autumn of 2022 and getting its allies, Japan and the Netherlands, to follow suit. There's still the assumption. that the United States technologically is in a league of its own and it can really stop China's technological development, can keep China where it is. And then I would say since...
sometime 2023, 2024, there's just been a succession of blows against that assumption. It starts with the success of China's electric vehicle companies. It continues with China's success in... I think we talked about this in the Musk episode where China in 2024 becomes the first state to bring back materials from the far side of the moon. Then there is the moment when DeepSeek, the AI.
The product is launched, which seems to be the case that it challenges the idea that the US is going to win the AI. Now, I think that in practice, like whether deep seek is quite what it seems at the time in terms of not least how cheaply it seemed to have been. done and the issue of like where the chips like came from either the china was able to do it technologically itself or it was able to evade us sanctions on tech whichever those was the case the underlying reality was the american bid
In that tech war that Joe Biden had intensified to stop China technologically in his tracks had spectacularly failed. Again, Helen, I think it is still difficult to tell a straightforward. story about this period, which is either one of just relentless Chinese rise in which the United States starts off from this position of having kind of... Obama is a kind of Emperor Hadrian type figure who builds walls and holds American power as it is. It sort of lines off Europe.
tries to build up its defenses there, turns to China to try and hold Chinese power at bay and America's supremacy. And then... successively from that moment it has found that China's power is actually continuing to rise and it's having to react to that and that is like one story there are some downsides for China throughout that period and I think you can see them even in the relationship between China and the UK where China is trying to
at least at some point, is trying to globalise its own currency. And it's trying to use London as its offshore centre. for its currency in the same way that it happened for the dollar in the run-up to 2008, which is why, as you've made... clear that the americans were so powerful they emerged from this crisis of american capitalism in a way even more powerful than they were going into it and then you have other sort of setbacks i guess for china in that you know the the belt and road initiative
Can we judge that yet as a defining success? Has it brought Europe, has it sort of successfully brought Europe away from the United States and built this kind of Eurasian? economy in which it is kind of the leader. I think a lot of these things are unclear, but I think it is interesting, Helen, to look at the kind of rhetoric.
that's coming out of Washington now compared to that period of Obama, that period of kind of American confidence. And I think one of the most interesting figures is this guy, Elbridge Colby, who has... been brought into the Trump administration, seen as one of the most important thinkers and published a book in 2021 called The Strategy of Denial, which gives you a clue of what he thinks.
And I think Colby sits at this kind of point between what they call in the United States the kind of primacy obsessed people who think that you can protect American. primacy in the world permanently and those who think that you have to have a period of retrenchment. And Colby is arguing that what the Americans need now is something called strategic restraint. which is effectively you cannot protect the primacy you once had. You don't need to accept...
multi-polarity as a kind of America alongside equals. But it's something in between. It's something in which America has to pull back from all of its global commitments because it is not powerful to project its power. everywhere. And it has to focus on China. And that is principally because in his argument, it is not in a position
to go to war with China if China was to launch an invasion of Taiwan. It cannot defend Taiwan from its current position. So he is arguing effectively that America needs to go through almost like its own kind of maiden.
China 2025. It needs a kind of 10-year plan to get itself into a position where it can retain its position as the world's number one power. But that in effect is what he is saying. That is up for... debate whether it's going to retain so it's almost like i don't know whether there is a halfway house between unipolarity and multipolarity but that is effectively now the limits of what the americans are trying to protect i think that the the question of
US-China relations over Taiwan really gets to the heart of the question of multipolarity in a military sense because Taiwan is the point of obvious conflict between the US and...
China militarily or potentially militarily. And the question of whether the United States could defend Taiwan doesn't necessarily, from the American's point of view, have an optimistic answer to it. This is a final thought on... china tom because i think it runs through some of the things we've been saying in this episode
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I've been using Readly to keep up with the latest news and discoveries and it's been a game changer whether I want to dive into deep discoveries from the BBC science focus or just unwind with my favourite sports magazine Readly has it all right now you can get an exclusive And discover more of what you can do. you love what if your bank did more than just bank with hsbc premier it's like carrying your own entourage in your wallet premier wealth management check premier health perks all clear
Premier Travel Benefits, you're covered. And Premier International Banking, see, we, you, yeah. In fact, everything's Premier when your bank account is. Search HSBC Premier. HSBC UK. Opening up a world of opportunity. Apply with £100,000 annual income or £100,000 savings or investments with HSBC UK or Premier status abroad. I think there is also this thread of resource multipolarity.
What was true, as we said, about the 2010s was they were very good for the United States on the fossil fuel energy side of things because of shale. And it did increase the United States geopolitical leverage, not least in relation to... And we'll touch on that in next week's episode. But if we look at metals, and it isn't just about metals and minerals that are required for the energy transition, but more generally.
It is very clear that China is the world's dominant power in this area. And Trump, who, as we know, has got very little interest in the energy transition, nonetheless declared effectively a national mineral. emergency during his first term in the last few weeks he's issued another executive order on critical minerals and not being dependent on what he calls like foreign adversaries this was a running theme through like The Biden presidency is if you looked at control of these resources.
you would say that China was the dominant power. And it's not even about multipolarity. It's just China's advantages here are very clear. And they're really problematic for the United States because the United States is itself dependent upon... imports either directly from china in the case of like rare earths or
from countries where the supply chains are dominated by China. So the actual, if you like, resource consumption in the broadest sense of China's economic rise has, I think, like fundamentally changed the nature of the... the geopolitical world. And that is a running thread that's run through this whole story. Yeah, Colby talks about America's problems being logistical.
It's about the size of your merchant shipping. It's about who controls the minerals that you require. As you say, it's about the sort of these absolutely fundamentals that he effectively thinks have been left to rot. and that has left America in this position. And I think maybe this is where we draw this half to a close, because even if we say that America can retain its primacy over China,
As I mentioned before, the limit of the ambition has changed. And what that necessarily means now is a genuine focus on its own weaknesses to be able to compete with China. turning its attention directly to China and an acknowledgement that it is going to have to allow other centers of power or the regional powers to emerge and i think that is then where you can see russia most clearly the united states is effectively making a decision that
It cannot fight against the return of Russian power. And we'll return to that question, Helen, after the break. Welcome back, everybody. So, Helen, we're turning in this half to the Russia story in relation to American power and the emergence of this multipolar world that we've been talking about. And in one sense... Unipolarity only makes sense when you are considering Russia or the Soviet power and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.
And the emergence of this period, which, as I mentioned in the first half, didn't look obvious at all, even in the late 1980s, that you were going to have this period of American unipolarity. Because we should just sort of stress, because I think...
For some people, the idea is that this is a kind of natural state of affairs, unipolarity. I mean, that didn't exist. That's what Rubio is saying, it wasn't a natural state of affairs. Yeah, and it didn't even exist, did it, between 1945 and 1991. You know, very clearly, there was another... pole in the world. We sort of underplay how significant it was as a military and energy superpower, a genuine superpower. But the 1990s are this completely different world.
Brief mention of it, Helen, in the first half, the famous Tony Blair speech in Chicago, where he sets out the criteria for intervention in world affairs, which is... based on a presumption of unipolarity, as I said, and it comes after, crucially, the war in Kosovo and NATO's intervention there and the emergence of an independent Kosovo, something that was unthinkable.
during the Cold War and is only really able to come to pass because of the weakness of Russia at the time. But I think we have to sort of look at that moment in 1999 and... A few months later, the emergence of Vladimir Putin as president of Russia on the 31st of December 1999. I mean, it's both sort of symbolic, but it's not just symbolism. i think you can there is a reasonable argument for dating the end of this particular period to the very last day of that decade
It's not just the last day of the decade, it's the last day of the millennium. I think what's really striking about the 90s in this respect, talking about the United States as a military... power now and how that power was used in the aftermath of first the weakening of the Soviet Union with the fall of the Berlin Wall and then the demise of the Soviet Union from the end of 1991.
is that the united states was able to use air power in ways where it could achieve its ends and there was not it was not going to be right Soviet Russian resistance to that so even if you just take the first Gulf War which happened before the dissolution of the Soviet Union it could be done under the United Nations authorization because there was no Soviet
If you take the Kosovo war, Russia was in no position to support Serbia. And indeed, by the end of that air war that the United States fought, it was the Russians who were doing the Americas.
Americans bidding for them in getting Milosevic to surrender. So the whole context, I think, in which the United States was able to... project military power entirely almost entirely reliant on the air was one in which russia could not resist and i think what happens in those years after let's say the first four or five years
after putin's arrival in office is that the china resource energy demand story and russia's resurgence as a great power or as a wanting to be a resurgent great power under abusing like come together because what are the conditions in which Putin can rebuild the Russian state in a geopolitical sense. The ones in which the price of oil and gas, particularly after like 2005, is rising pretty dramatically. And those revenues, they both allow Russia to pay off.
the IMF loan pretty rapidly, which has been part of its subordination. Its relationship with the INF has been part of its subordination to the Americans in the 1990s, but also provides a platform in which... russia can be more assertive in relation to the former soviet states particularly obviously consequentially in the long term to ukraine so actually
The emergence of multipolarity on the Russian side and on the Chinese side through those years leading up to the crash actually working like tandem with each other. And then what's striking if we think about the... If you like the complication that China runs into, which is the 2007, 2008 crash and China's like response to it and not being able really to escape from deepening dollar, a deepening dollar relationship. That isn't Russia's.
problem actually in that period in the years after the crash all the way through one could argue to russia's invasion of ukraine in february 2022 russian power And we can see it, I think, like most clearly in the Middle East. But it's there in a moment that we've talked about several times when he knows that the French and the Germans will will veto.
NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia in 2008. So in that sense, is that Russian power is more, I think, like straightforwardly rising. And then when it gets to the Middle East. from really the point in which Obama withdraws from his red line in Syria. We can just see almost a straight line of ascendant Russian power all the way through.
fall of the Assad regime. But again, going back to this, to what we sort of were talking about in the first half, which was this period of American confidence in its own...
power and to understand the pivot to Asia being one that is based on this sense of confidence. You can also see that in Obama's attitude to Russia and to its... what looks like an obvious rise in its power because he is essentially saying look the united states the world's supreme economic and military power has had a terrible time in afghanistan and iraq
and in Libya, and trying to order, you know, the world. And actually, that is incredibly difficult. And what you need is a smart presidency, don't do stupid stuff, I think was the sort of the essence of his, the phrase of his presidency. And he is saying, effectively, Russia is doing stupid stuff. It is not as powerful as us. It's overextending itself throughout the Middle East into North Africa and eventually into...
Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, and it is going to pay an enormous price for this because it does not have the economic power to do so. So he was quite calm about this prospective Russian.
power or certainly this emergence of Russian power in all of these areas. I mean, he thought it was effectively not going to last. I do think that it is, and you've helped me understand this, Helen, that to just sort of... not look at the fundamentals of Russian power in the world that exists today and just say, well, it is a nuclear power.
and a martial power you know with a whether its forces are comparable with the united states or not is beside the point it is an enormous military power protecting an enormous resource that is in increasing demand as you set out in the first half from not only Europe but China. So China is growing in its demand for a resource that Russia controls and it controls it behind an enormous army.
That in itself obviously offers the clue that perhaps Russian power is not a mirage, that they can project power, that there is no reason to think that they can't project power. And Obama's attitude was, in a sense, complacent. And it's on this point, I think, Tom, that the Middle East is absolutely crucial to the story because it's revealing not only about...
the Russian side of it, but it's revealing about the American side of it too. And I think you could actually trace it back to 2011 and the Libya intervention, which is something that was... like UN supported initially, it sort of effectively has like Russian support, but not for regime change against Gaddafi. And then the Americans, the British and the French go further and Putin's pretty angry.
about it interestingly like Merkel sort of takes his side about that and if you looked at it in terms of the language that Obama's using about Russia stretching its power too far well actually no where Libya's concerned It's the US, Britain and the French. Particularly Britain and France. And then Obama tries to wash his hands of it and say, well, the British and the French have got to sort it out. But clearly...
The United States was central to the intervention in Libya. And that is part of the story of the rise of ISIS, which we talked about several times. And then I think if you just move the story, as I say, we're leaving... the fall of Assad aside, which we're going to have to come to, just move the story from the moment when Obama effectively asks for Putin's help.
to get the Assad regime to remove chemical weapons after Obama's not acted on his red line. Through the point when Obama is getting Putin's help. to persuade the Iranians to reach a nuclear program deal with the Americans, which Obama publicly thanks Putin. Through then the fact that just three months after that, the Russians move into Syria themselves. And by the next summer, so now in the summer of like 2016, the Obama administration and the Russians are planning on joint operations against...
And that in practice, if you look at the battle, the war that was fought against ISIS, then it's actually the Russians ally, the Iranians, who do a lot of the heavy lifting on the ground. the American president making himself really rather dependent upon the Russians. And as that's all happening... What if your bank did more than just bank?
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central to the projection of US military power in the Middle East, then Russia was doing an arms agreement. It was purchasing the S-400 air defense missile system from Russia. I think that's the preliminary. part of that deal was like signed in like 2017 in also that year russia gets its near 50-year leases on a naval base and an air base in Syria. Those bases were quite critical in providing the means for Russia to engage in its operations in Africa, including since the coup in Niger.
for the new government there and all this is happening so the story that we just run from like say 2013 through to like 2017 through Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014, an annexation that brings from the Americans some sanctions, certainly I think consequential sanctions in terms of... Russia's future oil and gas developments, but no sanctions whatsoever on the Russian ability in the present to export energy.
abroad and there isn't really i think any sense from the obama administration or indeed running into the first trump administration that american power is going to be used to challenge russian control of crimea
I'm going to make the point that I made in the first half in relation to China, where I was trying to say that there is this difficulty in... telling the story of an emerging power and, you know, in one sense, a sort of declining power in the United States, in that you have these waves where...
it's almost like the story inverts and you suddenly have a sudden rise of American power again and it looks as though unipolarity has returned or has emerged in an even more dominant position, you know, both in the 1990s. and after the financial crisis in 2008. And I think you can see a similar pattern of kind of waves in the relationship between the United States and Russia because...
This period between 2012 and let's say 2022, you can clearly see this story of rising Russian power and America and the West. in retreat and effectively making failed interventions and not seeming to have the stomach to compete with Russia for influence in these parts of the world. I think, Helen, you can then tell a different story from... 2022 almost to today from the moment Russia.
uh invades ukraine in february 2022 and it goes wrong in those first few days because to begin with you know you have the united states making the assessment the correct assessment that there is going to be an invasion you know i think the french had not concluded that. The Americans and the British had. But the Americans and the British had made the incorrect conclusion that they would then win, and quite comfortably and quite quickly. And to go back to that point...
You see the British and the Americans withdrawing their diplomats from Kiev and moving them west. And then you see this moment where... Again, it almost looks a little bit like how Bill Clinton's vision seemed to come true in the aftermath of the financial crisis. The Obama vision of Russia suddenly being overstretched and the sort of hubris eventually overwhelmed.
It seemed to come true in those moments after 2022, where you have the invasion grinding up against Ukrainian resistance, American support starting to come. on tap the ukrainians able to to push back then you have uh in 2023 the wagner group pushing effectively the coup trying the attempted coup marching on
Moscow, where it looked for a moment as if Putin's grip on power was going. And then in 2024, of course, you then have the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria. And again, what looked like the Total collapse of Russian power and influence. All the money, all the resources that it had piled in to Syria had been for nothing. And perhaps you could then make the argument, well, Obama had been right. Not that. American power shouldn't have been asserted in Syria, but that in the end...
You cannot order the Middle East. And perhaps that is this, you know, one of those moments of real politic where he was proved foresighted. That's the kind of argument from 2022 to 2024. that Russia sort of came a cropper again. You then tell it almost looks completely different now in 2025, not just because the situation seemed to turn. The Russians seemed to get on the advance in Ukraine. The Ukrainian position seemed to start deteriorating. And then, of course, you had the election.
Donald Trump. So I find it so difficult to sort of tell a simple story and you have to almost pick out some kind of pattern amid the chaos of the ups and downs of the relationship between these powers. I think what's really interesting about what happened after the Russian invasion was that the initial American position, as you said, Tom, was actually quite pessimistic, despite the fact...
that both the Trump administration, first time around in the Biden administration, had been providing training for the Ukrainian army and weapons. It doesn't seem a lot of confidence.
at the moment of the invasion, that the Ukrainian army is going to be an effective fighting power against the Russians. And then you can see, despite the fact of how much territory is taken by Russia in the first months of the war, and the fact... at that point that Russia's control of the Black Sea is near complete, that because no knockout below is delivered in terms of taking power in Ukraine, in Kiev, that...
people in the Biden administration start talking the language of delivering a strategic blow to the Russians. And that would mean effectively... putting back in play Russian control of Crimea. And that would mean putting in play Russian control of Sevastopol, which has been central to Russian strategy since the end of the 18th century. I think the story then on Ukraine is the point in which it becomes clear that that strategic blow is undeliverable.
And I think it's the autumn of 2023. And I don't think it's a coincidence that it's at that point that you have, even the Hawks in the Senate, we made this point before, who are willing to tie future funding. for Ukraine to concessions from the Biden administration about the border with Mexico. And in that sense, from that moment on, and this is where Trump is symptom rather than like cause that there's been a recognition in Washington that.
The Ukrainians can't win the war, not in the way in which it was conceived that they could from somewhere like spring of 2022 through to the summer of 2023. And in that sense... that what has happened is a recognition in Washington of Russia's enduring strengths. And you might say that actually some of that was evident even in those months.
when the Americans had got a grander strategic aim for the war and that energy was central to that because actually the world economy didn't do without Russian oil. It just... reconfigured who was buying it from whom and whether who was buying crude and who was buying refined petroleum products. And even if you look at the situation with the sale of gas to European states, it was Putin who cut the supply of gas.
to european states of not the other way around it was reputing from like june of like 2022 is is there weren't sanctions being placed on the sale of like russian gas during the course of 2022 and no point i mean certainly for the first few years of the war could stand corrected more recently but the russians continued to sell and rich uranium to the americans so if we go back to the perspective that
part of multipolarity or part of trying to think about multipolarity is trying to think about resources, then I think here's another instance where we can say that the world is multipolar. That doesn't change the fact, though. that something pretty dramatic has happened, as you said, to Russia's position last year, which is not just the fall of the Assad regime, because that's part of a bigger story, which is the weakening of Iran.
Because one of the things, obviously, that Russia was doing through the 2010s was cultivating its relationship with Iran and strategic blows against Iran, either by the United States and or by Israel, also affect the... the Russian position. On Syria, you could say it looks for the moment anyway they're going to actually hold on to those bases with the new regime. Nonetheless, it's clear that Syria is a very, very unstable place now in the continued existence of...
Syria as a singular territorial state must be in question. In fact, you could argue that Syria hasn't been such a state for a decade or so now. But it doesn't look, I think, like you can say, that the United States has escaped in any way the consequences, not just of Russia's resource power, but the relationship of Russia's resource power to China. See, I think this question of trying to deliver a strategic blow to Russia is really fundamental to what we're...
Because we're discussing the emergence of a multipolar world as set out by Marco Rubio. And that that is primarily the emergence of China as a... peer competitor with the United States and a secondary power, Russia, that cannot be knocked out that it is a it will remain a a power with real influence independent of china its own influence i think this is worth saying because i think there is a sort of idea that it will just become a totally subservient
power to China, you know, almost sort of economically annexed by China. But that is not... The picture that Rubio is painting is not the picture that seems to have emerged at this point. I think it's worth kind of contemplating another one of these waves where... American power seems to accelerate once again. I think that is something that we are going to turn to in the next week's episode when we discuss Trump's response to this world, because I think it's far from clear that he is.
accepting multipolarity in the Rubio sense. I'm not saying he's not doing that. It's just not clear that that is the ultimate strategy or his ultimate instincts. And when in some senses he is... seeking to assert American dominance.
everywhere he thinks he can well i think it's asserting in the we're going to come to this obviously i think it's asserting in the western hemisphere and i think that that's that that's the crucial way that we have to think about what multipolarity means is that it means that we also stop thinking about global geopolitics in that sense and have to.
think about, like, what's the balance of power in Eurasia and what's the balance of power in the Western Hemisphere? Yeah, but with this, what we were discussing last week with the Mar-a-Lago plan, there is a... an attempt to sort of impose a power relationship on Europe still. And I think in the way he seems to be treating Yemen, Houthis and things like that, he feels some kind of instinctive sense that he can... Bully.
other countries into accepting subservience to the United States. He obviously doesn't think like that with China. And he's very clear that when he's asked about China, he essentially says, I don't want to talk about Taiwan because I don't go there. I don't want to be effectively...
bound by any commitments. But the very idea of delivering a strategic blow to Russia almost feels now outdated, and not just because it wasn't delivered in the way that the most optimistic proponents of this idea felt, but that it kind of presumes that Russia is the sort of, you know...
a peer competitor, the main threat to American power, that you want to deliver a strategic blow to this rival, when actually things have shifted and we're into a different world now, where Russia retains a resource that... United States and its allies, such as they are at the moment, still require. And the main competition is with China, which is a completely different, it requires a completely different strategy to deal with China because it is a net.
importer of energy and all the things that you've talked about and we're going to turn to these specific questions in next week's episode and trump's response to both russia which we will deal with first and to China. So I think we'll bring this episode to a close this week. Please do tune in next week where we'll really dig into the consequences of this emerging multipolarity. So thanks very much for listening. See you again next week.
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