All Your Base Are Belong To Us, The People’s Carcrash, Our Democracy

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?

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Episoder(198)

Iran: The Oil Price War With Conventional War Characteristics

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 the...

16 Jul 44min

Slipping and Sliding, Spit and Polish

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 w...

9 Jul 56min

Pilkington Vs Collingwood: A Multipolarity Q&A Special

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 w...

2 Jul 11min

No Deal Is Better Than An Islama-bad Deal, The Godmother, Two Year Keir

Iran’s 14 points: making the world safe for Shia Theocracy. Obviously, Donald Trump putting his John Hancock to the Islamabad Memorandum at Versailles carries absolutely no historical resonance. But a...

25 Jun 1h 4min

Multipolarity Dialogues: The Other Superweapon - Adventures In Chinese AI, with TP Huang

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 spar...

18 Jun 53min

Strait To Hell, Kim Jong Boom, Armenian Roulette

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....

11 Jun 1h 5min

Two Audio Essays: The Escalation Ladder & Weaponised Interdependence

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 scatt...

4 Jun 11min