Geo Political Risk

[warthog]

Energy, Russia and China.

[Panda-NZ-]

The media keep saying that either it's hamas or israel controlling gaza as an option.

These are poor students of history (given many journalists are history majors). It might also be a puppet regime supported by Israel.

Though they will need to change the look of their soldiers, ban israel flags and symbols and respect the local traditions to reduce the imagery of foreign occupation.

[moka]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1A4dMK7S6KE
Capitalism is over and ‘social democracy is finished’ | Yanis Varoufakis

0:00 Amazon is much worse than a monopolist, it's not just a monopolist, it's not a market, it is not a capitalist. It is like think of it as a digital version of a fiefdom in which vassel are laboring for the lord along with the peasants who may even love the lord.

Techno Feudalism: what killed Capitalism is the new book from the bestseller Yanis Varoufakis, the hugely recognizable Greek economist who was his country's Finance Minister in 2015. Yanis thinks there is a new power reshaping the world and reshaping all of our lives. So what is techno feudalism, who is driving it and is it bad for us and bad for democracy? This idea of techno feudalism, the idea that we've sort of reverted to a feudal situation but with tech bosses as the new overlords, it's a fascinating idea tell us about it.

1:06 You know I come from the left, we are the losers of history. We leftists, we used to believe that organized labor would overthrow capital, capitalism or takeover capital.

It never happened, but what has happened instead is a delicious irony. The capital became so triumphant that it mutated like a stupid virus, creates a variant that kills its host. So this is my hypothesis that capital has become so successful and so powerful and so toxic that it has killed capitalism. Now in practice what does this mean and why should people care? It means that whereas profit was the fuel and the lubricant of the socioeconomic system known as capitalism and markets where the mechanism that synthesized all our efforts brought together producers, consumers, organized economic activity, infected our culture, the whole thing.

Now we are moving away from profit, back to rent which is the feudal form of wealth accumulation.

Once upon a time Saatchi and Saatchi the great advertisers would create a poster or TV ad. They would put the idea in your head that you wanted to buy something. Then you went out to a shop and you bought it from the actual shop that gets it from the producer directly. And the producer, the capitalist would make a profit out of it and profit would run the system. Today Alexa sitting on your desk or Siri or whatever some interface with the net. You are training it to train you, to train it to impress upon you how good it is at giving you advice on what to buy. I don't know about you but Spotify really is spot on regarding what I actually like. And once it gets this power over you on the basis that it serves you and it gives you good advice then it can recommend things for you to buy and not only that, but this is the astonishing thing you don't need to go to the shop to buy it.

The same piece of what I call Cloud Capital, that capital that lives in on the cloud sells you the stuff directly through Amazon.com which is the same agglomeration of Cloud Capital as the Alexa that talks to you and interacts with you.

That's not a market anymore, it's not capitalism. What happens is Amazon charges 40% to the capitalist who produces the stuff that you buy. Amazon doesn't produce anything. So it's not just that you do not own stuff that you rent, it is that you have the complete bypassing of markets and the replacement of profit with a new form of cloud rent. And why does this matter? It matters because our society becomes increasingly unstable as a result. Why does it become unstable? Some people would say this is this is great, I get what I get what I want, I don't need to do so much work about it, I don't care whether my money is going to one company. So it goes to Amazon how's that my problem?

Because rent is waste, unlike profit when a producer of bicycles or binocular or cars or whatever gets a profit they have to invest a large part of it in order to maintain competitiveness. So this goes back into the economy.

4:38 If you are a rentier you collect rent in your sleep. Jeff Bezos doesn't need to do anything, capitalists work for him and when he gets this 40% he just puts it away. He uses it to speculate in financial markets, it doesn't go back into investment into anything. For the consumer this sort of thing has feels like it has made life easier, it's made life cheaper. I use it, I can't live without, but it's made life cheaper as well.

So the waste feels intangible but it really does poison our lives because if you think about it when let's say a large chunk of national income is withdrawn from the circular flow of income and is stashed away in some financial circuit and simply feeds this financial game and comes out of people's wages.

Let me give you a very striking example General Motors, Ford Motor Company, Mercedes, Volkswagen all those corporations old style capitalist corporations pay 85% of their revenues as wages salaries and so. On Facebook 1%, Amazon 1.5%, what happens to the rest is withdrawn. The result is that the people out there suffer permanent austerity, not necessarily George Osborne's austerity but austerity in the sense that there isn't enough money going around. That's why we have what David Graeber so scientifically described as buullshiit jobs because there are there's no good investment in jobs.

[moka]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1A4dMK7S6KE
Capitalism is over and ‘social democracy is finished’ | Yanis Varoufakis

6:10 This is why central banks like the Bank of England cannot stop printing money even when they're trying to quantitatively tighten because there's not enough money going around.
So the state has to keep producing money, feeding even inflation. So if we feel today that there's a polycrisis as Adam Tooze has described it, you have multiple crisis including the climate crisis, that in my estimation has to do with the fact that after 2008 governments tried to save the banks and by printing something like 30 to 35 trillion.

Remember Gordon Brown April 2009 bringing together the G7 Central Banks. They started the printing processes. Now that money was never invested in anything except Cloud Capital by the Bezos in big tech and the other big tech conglomerates. Revolution of course took place in China. In my book I tried to explain the new cold war between the US and China. I ignore issues of Taiwan and so on. That I think this is absolutely irrelevant, just a red herring. It's the clash of the two forms of cloud capital that are taking over the world - the American and the Chinese. And we here in Europe and in Britain are becoming increasing sad irrelevant entities.

7:42 Does this make you nostalgic for capitalism? I'm nostalgic about poetry, about drama, about art. I'm never nostalgic about a dead socioeconomic system so if this was the 1770s, 1800s would we be nostalgic of feudalism which was dying? No, let's move on.
I'm just nostalgic of the idea of the liberal individual and that I'm saying as a leftist because the idea of nice ring fencing between your work life and your leisure that's all gone now.

In an important sense social democracy's bank is finished. I say this without any glee. I'm not a Social Democrat but I do believe that socialism played a very important civilizing role in the 1960s and 70s. Harold Wilson in this country, Willy Brandt in Germany, Bruno Kreisky in Austria, what they did was they played the role of referee they brought into one large room the captains of industry, leaders of the auto industry, of steel making and so on one side and the TU organized labor on the other. And they cut a deal between them whereby a chunk of the surpluses would fund the state NHS and so on and wages and that cannot happen now.

9:45 Well look at what happening in the United States today. Lona M Khan who is the chair of the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, I think she's very well-meaning and she's a very smart woman and I wish her very well, she's starting a legal battle against Amazon. But I think she's doing it the wrong way because she's treating Amazon in the way that Teddy Roosevelt treated Standard Oil and Rockefeller back in the 1920s, as a monopolist that needs to be broken up. Amazon is much worse than a monopolist it's not just a monopolist, it's not a market, it is not a capitalist. It is like, think of it as a digital version of a fiefdom in which vassel capitalists are laboring for the lord along with the peasants who may even love the lord.

You were the Greek Finance Minister for five and a half months in 2015. Having just been elected to Parliament with your country in deep recession and your party was promising to renegotiate Greece's debt and curtail its austerity measures and ultimately you resigned from your position and then from Parliament having not been able to achieve what you what you'd set out to do.

11:27 Does the kind of do the kind of developments you're talking about in this book make you think differently about that time?
No not at all because that was very brutish and antiquated kind of clash. Greece for 20 years after we joined the Euro Zone we became the typical the archetypal case of vendor financing. So to put it in crude but not misleading terms you know Mercedes-Benz or Volkswagen were giving us the money to buy their cars. That's vendor financing. It was their way of getting rid of surplus products and surplus money and it was the way of the Greek bourgeoise, the ruling class state to pretend that we were growing. And of course this was never going to end well.

12:22 The moment Lehman Brothers went under, Deutsche Bank went under the financing stopped and the bubble burst and then we were bankrupt and then the European Union in its infinite wisdom and our ruling class in its cruelty decided to cover up the bankruptcy by taking all more loans to pretend that we could repay our previous loans, which we couldn't on conditions of austerity, of harsh austerity, unbelievable austerity which was depleting the incomes, the little incomes that couldn't repay the previous loans.
And I stepped in there for one purpose, to cut this process dead, to stop this, to say we need to embrace our bankruptcy. We need to suffer the consequences of our bankruptcy but no more loans, no more credit cards, pretending we're repaying the previous credit cards, and that is the only way of rebooting and restarting and you don't need to be a left winger to believe that.

How do you look back on that period? Do you look back on that period as you did the best you could do? Do you look back that you that you succeeded in or you entirely failed? I entirely failed, entirely failed. But I don't regret for a moment. I have to say that I have a certain amount of pride in the sense that I went in there to do the right thing. I was prevented from doing the right thing by my own prime minister especially on the night of the 5th of July 2015 when the Greek people very heroically gave us a 62% referendum mandate to do the right thing. The Prime Minister succumbed, surrendered and I resigned and I think that there's something to be said about politicians who resign when they realize they cannot do what they promised their electorate they should do.

[moka]

An excellent analysis of the complexities of the Hamas - Israeli war by Ian Bremmer. And it does matter to us because:

19:26: Israel's response to Hamas could lead to a broader war in the Middle East – high oil prices.
37:25: The priority now is to contain the violence and prevent a war in the West Bank.

40:05: There is confusion and disinformation in the media coverage of the attacks, making it difficult to trust and understand the situation.
40:36: The speaker discusses the polarization and hate-filled nature of social media during the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, highlighting the need for regulation of social media companies.
40:36: Social media promotes a narrative that exaggerates atrocities and polarizes opinions. 41:18: There is an increase in hatred and willingness to promote extreme opinions on social media.
41:48: The speaker has received death threats from both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine individuals.
43:54: Social media companies should be regulated and held responsible for the content on their platforms.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQmBsbt9blg&t=2374s

The Israel-Hamas War — and What It Means for the World | Ian Bremmer | TED

1:11: Hamas attacked Israel, overran military bases, killed hundreds of Israeli citizens, and took hostages, causing shockwaves of fear and panic in the region and the world.
1:11: Gaza has a population of over 2 million Palestinians and is run by Hamas, which does not recognize Israel's right to exist.
2:34: The two-state solution for Israeli-Palestinian conflict has lost traction, as some Middle Eastern countries have established diplomatic relations with Israel without resolving the Palestinian question.
4:14: Israel is in a strong geopolitical position, surrounded by countries willing to do business with them, while the Palestinians are not benefiting economically from these developments.
5:23: Israel has been making news due to its domestic constitutional crisis and judicial reform, rather than the Palestinian issue.
8:04: The recent attacks in Israel have caused a major shift in the country's priorities and united its people in responding to the crisis.
8:04: The Israeli government's failure in intelligence and defense systems has deeply impacted the Israeli consciousness.
10:09: Direct American support may be sought in the rescue mission.
10:09: The priority for Israel now is to rescue the hostages held in Gaza.
11:04: Israel may consider a military action to remove the Gaza leadership and disarm the militias.
11:51: The recent attacks by Hamas on Israel have led to a national emergency and a collective effort to ensure the security of the Israeli people.
11:51: The Israeli people are standing together and there is talk of a government of National Emergency to fight this war.
12:42: There are likely Hamas operatives inside Israel that need to be found and neutralized. 13:32: The level of concern and focus on national security is higher than anything else on the political agenda.
14:27: The speaker compares the support for Israel after the recent attacks to the support the United States received after 9/11.
14:59: The speaker acknowledges that there were mistakes made by the United States after 9/11 and hopes Israel can avoid making similar mistakes.
17:48: The speaker discusses the mistakes made in the US response to 9/11 and warns about the potential dangers of Israel's response to Hamas.
17:48: The American response to 9/11 with the war on terror was not successful.
19:46: A unity government in Israel may prevent overreactions.
20:22: The speaker expresses concern about the Israeli defense minister's language and actions towards Gaza.
21:06: The Palestinian people will suffer from the ongoing conflict.
23:00: Hamas leaders knew the consequences of their actions, but felt increasingly untenable. 23:10: Hamas' actions may be a result of losing support in the region and lack of leverage against Israel.
23:51: The speaker discusses the motivations behind Hamas' actions and the potential involvement of Iran in the recent attacks.
23:51: People in desperate situations often make irrational choices, which may have influenced Hamas' decision to take action.
25:08: Hamas aims to radicalize the Israeli population, undermine the Palestinian Authority, and mobilize support from the Arab Street.
28:11: The Wall Street Journal article suggesting Iranian involvement in the attacks was lightly sourced and not confirmed by the US.
29:03: Iran has a history of supporting and providing military support to Hamas.
29:41: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has escalated with Hamas launching rocket attacks on Israel and Israel retaliating with airstrikes, causing a high number of casualties.
29:41: Hamas, a Palestinian militant group, has launched missile and rocket strikes against Israeli military outposts.
30:01: Israel has responded with airstrikes against Hamas.
30:11: Iran denies involvement in the conflict and has been making diplomatic progress with the US and other countries.
32:15: The US has shown support for Israel and warned against expanding the conflict to Iran coz the consequences are $150 crude minimium.
33:15: The suffering and casualties are disproportionately affecting the Palestinians, who lack resources and proper defense capabilities.
33:54: Hamas's actions have led to a perception that all Palestinians are equivalent to Hamas, which worsens the situation for the powerless Palestinians.
34:43: The Palestinians have historically suffered more deaths and casualties in the conflict. 35:05: The Palestinians are likely to suffer the most going forward.
35:27: The speaker discusses the impact of the conflict between Israel and Hamas on the Palestinian people and the potential for a two-state solution.
35:27: The speaker believes that the biggest damage caused by the conflict will be to the Palestinian people, who will face deprivation.
35:45: There may be a movement within Palestine to push for international engagement and a two-state solution if Hamas is removed.
38:04: The Israelis are currently focused on immediate short-term decisions to defend the country and secure their borders.
38:14: Long-term decisions, such as annexing Gaza, are not being made at this time.
39:34: Multilateral diplomacy and influence from other countries will play a role in Israel's decision-making process.
45:06: The speaker warns about the potential escalation of the situation in Lebanon involving Hezbollah.
45:48: Hezbollah operatives could contribute to further escalation in the conflict.
45:56: ! The key points to watch in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are the potential escalation of violence, the fate of the hostages, and the nature of the Israeli government.
45:56: The conflict could escalate further and involve Lebanon, Hezbollah, and Iran.
46:25: The fate of the hostages is uncertain, as Hamas has control over their release.
47:11: The Israeli government's ability to form a unified National Emergency government will determine stability and decision-making.
47:18: Longer-term engagement with Palestinians in the West Bank may be considered if a stable government is formed.

[Davexl]

Some truly excellent contributions there Moka - Thank You. Subscribed!

Been a big fan of Yanis Varoufakis, since following the Greek Financial Crisis in 2015, Ian Bremmer is amazing also. Thanks again!

[moka]

After the crisis of the 1970s capital reengineered the economic system to run on a bubble of debt.
In the 1970s capital went on strike and stopped investing. It saw few growth opportunities that offered a reasonable return and reasonable profit. So we had stagflation in the 1970s, a combination of slow growth and rapidly rising prices. There was plenty of capital looking for a home, so debt was encouraged.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/socialism-or-barbarism-a-review-of-stolen-by-grace-blakeley/

Stolen’s history of class struggle begins in the aftermath of World War II. The labor movement emerged from the early 20th century with sufficient power to bend capital, but not enough to break it. The great class compromise of modern social democracy was born. For a time, the arrangement succeeded, but in the 1970’s crisis hit, laying bare the conflicting class interests that had remained beneath the surface.

In the resulting moment of political plasticity, it was the capitalist class that emerged victorious, overhauling the economy to its own benefit and birthing what we would now call neoliberalism. The new system – though always ruinous for the masses – was stable in the short-term. But another crisis was inevitable, and it came in 2008. Once again, the power of capital was stronger. Rather than enacting systemic change, the problems were band-aided over. Today, wages stagnate, inequality deepens, and climate collapse looms. Liberals have no answer to the questions of the moment. The right-wing reaction defends the existing distribution of power by scapegoating the “other.”

Financialisation, Blakeley convincingly argues, is the unique way in which capital responded to the crisis of the 1970’s, and the order on which its power has been built ever since. By increasing the “role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors and financial institutions,” capital reengineered the economic system to run on a bubble of debt. Restraints on banking, lending, and capital mobility were lifted. Corporate structures were reoriented from production to the service of shareholders. And middle-class consumers were transformed into mini-capitalists through such Thatcherite reforms as the privatization of pensions and the incentivization of home ownership.

Under the new finance-led order, the capitalist class squeezed out ever-increasing profits without an equivalent increase in productivity. It managed to do so without fomenting revolution because debt-fuelled growth in asset prices appeased the mini-capitalists, and the true costs of the system were postponed. Until 2008.

Overlapping with the global class struggle between capital and labor is an imperial struggle between North and South. It is the North’s exploitation of the South – and the share of extracted value that has made its way to the Northern working class through labor concessions, a tempered welfare state, and low consumer prices – that keeps Northern labor quiescent. To the extent that this is the case, Blakeley’s position that capital is out of room to maneuver and an open confrontation is imminent may require reassessment; capital may instead restabilize its relationship with Northern labor by deepening its exploitation of Southern.

[moka]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h1XD7fQSfg

Conversation with Fareed Zakaria — The Conflict in Israel and the State of Foreign Affairs. The Prof G Show

1:07 In a historical backdrop really the most important thing that has happened over the last two decades in the Middle East is the withdrawal of American power. In a fairly dramatic sense the United States had been the dominating outside force in the Middle East for decades. It used to be the Soviet Union and the United States. Both had their client states then in an amazing move of diplomatic jiu-jitsu after the 1973 war Kissinger gets Egypt to flip. It goes from being pro-Soviet to pro-American and that begins the end of the Soviet era and or the bipolar era and it becomes a period of American domination. So the United States had better relations if you think about it in 1975 with every country in the Middle East than they had with each other.

2:06 So United States had better relations with the Shah of Iran, with Egypt, with Syria, and of course it had very close relations with Israel. Then that starts to change but the fundamental thing that happens after the war in Iraq is that the United States realizes it is over invested in the Middle East, it just does not have the capacity.

It's a very turbulent unstable region and the only way seemingly to stabilize it is military power, military force and Obama begins this - it was called a pivot to Asia, but really was a pivot away from the Middle East and he was continuing in a way something that Bush had begun in the second term chastened by the Iraq adventure. Bush had been cutting back and so in that context what's been happening is you've been creating a kind of post American Middle East.

And in that Middle East everyone is jockeying for advantage and everyone is trying to figure out how do I protect my equities, so the Turks have become much more active, the Saudis and the Iranians - that's the principal dynamic. Each one is trying to become the top dog, Israel has quietly become the essentially economic superpower, technological superpower of the region, but increasingly military. And the Israelis have been trying to do this extraordinary move which is to completely marginalize the Palestinians by making peace with the Arabs who want to make peace with Israel because they fear a common enemy Iran.

So that's the backdrop of what's happening. Two important things in the shorter term - one is Netanyahu really pushing forward to try to make a deal with Saudi Arabia which would really marginalize the Palestinians because Saudi Arabia is the most important Islamic State, it's the richest, it's the one with the two great mosques, the King of Saudi Arabia is called the custodian of the two great mosques.

And the second piece is that he has a very extreme right-wing Coalition. He has people in his Coalition who basically don't believe there should ever be any kind of Palestinian State at all. They want a greater Israel, as they call it from the Jordan River to the sea and that means no West Bank, no Gaza. I don't know what they plan to do with the 5 million Palestinians on those lands but the Netanyahu government has been very, very hardline mostly in the West Bank - shootings, arrests, killings, the thousands of Palestinian prisoners.

4:46 So you had gotten to the point where Israeli Palestinian relations were terrible. The Palestinians are looking and seeing they're being marginalized, they're going to be bypassed. This big deal and all that comes together, and the Hamas must have decided we are going to burn the house down. And in doing this what are they hoping they'll trigger a massive Israeli reaction which is ongoing. That reaction will then make the Arab world sympathize with the Palestinians who are getting pummeled. In that context it'll be very hard for Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel and that serves their objectives of a highlighting the Palestinian cause, putting Israel on the defensive, getting rid of the Saudi normalization.

6:28 I think that the government in Israel had focused almost single-mindedly on three issues, overturning judicial independence or undermining judicial independence - that was a big constitutional push, normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia and essentially creating de facto annexations on the ground in the West Bank to make a Palestinian state there more and more unviable. They might have not been paying a lot of attention to Gaza. In fact we have some interesting Israeli reporting that says that there were army people who were telling the Netanyahu government look at what's going on in Gaza because some of what the Hamas was doing is they were openly practicing manoeuvres and the Netanyahu government thought that they were trying to fool them and they didn't take it very seriously.

[moka]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h1XD7fQSfg

Conversation with Fareed Zakaria — The Conflict in Israel and the State of Foreign Affairs. The Prof G Show

8:38 A few weeks ago a Saudi official explained the situation to me and it was all off the record but I think this is the way the Saudis are thinking about this. Look we are willing to do this and we want to do this because it serves both our interests, but we have to be careful with our domestic population particularly because the Crown Prince has been doing a lot of stuff that has been enraging the religious fundamentalists in his country. He's shut down the religious police, he's allowed movie theaters, restaurants, desegregated every facility where women can be, women can now drive, women can leave the country without checking with their male guardians. All that stuff has pissed off the mullahs. He said we can't also piss them off by completely abandoning the Palestinians, so we do need some real concessions on the Palestinian front.

So he was telling me that there's a feeling particularly in America, in Washington that the Saudis are completely unconcerned, they're happy to sell the Palestinians down the river, they just want to make a deal with Israel. Now I think there's some truth to that, that is that they are as frustrated with the Palestinian leadership as anyone who has ever dealt with the Palestinian leadership would be, they're feckless, corrupt, incompetent but they know that they've got this issue.

They're fairly careful about how much they push forward, for example they've been opening up all this tourism, and they’re building all these hotels, they still don't allow you to drink alcohol and the point is it's going to happen, but you push one of these things every six months, you don't push them all together and you try to work with those people.
The Saudis are going to be very careful but I think their national interests are driving them together. So as long as this doesn't completely explode and it might, you could you could see this getting back on track maybe in a year.

10:46 So if this is a war of perception, as Lincoln said you can't win a war without public support. I believe that empathy towards the Palestinian cause across America and the West had somewhat increased steadily over the last 20 years and that the perception was negative or increasingly less positive towards Israel. And I feel like the actions of the last three or four days have totally reversed that.

In the Arab world there was some initial shock at just the brutality. But now what is happening is there is the focus on every building that's being bombed in Gaza, every family that's being dispossessed, the women and children in the rubble and my guess is you're going to end up with a very disproportionate body count at the end of all this because right now you have 900 Israelis killed and several hundred Palestinians but by the time the Israelis are done with this just because of this massive superior firepower of the Israelis you're going to see that Gaza will be devastated and that will probably evoke a certain amount of sympathy.

13:39 It partly depends on what the Israelis do. I hope the Israelis think about that issue because they've bombed Gaza a lot over the last 20 years. It's not clear to me that that strategy works. I would think more about creating a buffer zone, essentially annexing a kilometer or so of land so that you make the border impregnable. But there is this desire for understandable for revenge almost and I would hope that that is kept in check and there's a more strategic idea of what is the purpose of this operation.

14:20 We’ve spent a lot of time talking about young men on the show and we've said consistently that the most dangerous person in the world is a young, broke and alone man and I see this imagery. And there's too many of these young men that have quite frankly nothing to lose.

I don't care if it's migrants flooding the US border, it all seems to reverse engineer to an absence of opportunity across young people which and I need to say this in no way excuses what has happened.

There's 5 million people we got to deal with. There are 2.2 million people in Gaza. It's the most densely populate part of the world, 50% of those are children, youth unemployment in Gaza is over 60% by some accounts 70%, 75% of the people in Gaza lack access to drinking water, 60% live below the poverty line so it's a pretty miserable place. The Secretary General of the UN visited it and he described it last year as hell on earth.

How much worse can you make Gaza and again it's important now I'm talking about the people of Gaza, that Hamas is a terrible tyrannical terrorist organization so it's even worse for them to the extent they have any governance, it's governance through this very tyrannical radical and corrupt organization Hamas.

[moka]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h1XD7fQSfg
Conversation with Fareed Zakaria — The Conflict in Israel and the State of Foreign Affairs. The Prof G Show

16:45 What these people want more than anything else as far as I can tell is political rights and dignity and the Israelis have been very willing to give them a lot of other stuff, economic rights, development aid. The world has been willing to give them that, but it's almost as we're trying to get around the central problem which is what they want is a state. And the Israelis to be fair have tried to go down that path as well, not so much this government but Ehud Barack you remember 2000 Bill Clinton came all tantalizingly close to a Palestinian state. They had agreed on all the parameters both sides and then Yasser Arafat pulls out the last minute. Another Israeli Prime Minister offered a version of that deal again to Abbas the current Palestinian Authority leader. He turned it down. I have a lot of sympathy for the Palestinians. I do not have a lot of sympathy for the Palestinian leadership.

The way I would put it is fundamentally there was a struggle here. The Israelis have won. They have all the territory. They're a rich powerful strong country.
When you're in a war that you're losing the longer you wait the worse the deal you get.
The deal they were offered in 1948, the partition was half of that British mandated land, they said no.
Then the 67 war happens Israeli take more. Now the settlement activity is taking place. The deal that that Clinton offered is way better than anything they could dream of getting today because in a war when you're losing the longer you wait the worse the deal gets and the leadership doesn't want to own up to its people. Leadership has a lot to put to answer for in my view.

19:41 So I think in the region what you see is this the reality of a post American Middle East. It's very messy, everyone is trying to jockey for advantage. You're going to see more violence, you're going to see more groups that try to take advantage of the fact that there is this level of instability. I think with the Iranians the interesting question is how much do they want, that's the crucial question here because the other ones the Turks are trying to establish themselves a bit in Syria. The Israelis of course have largely been trying to do it through technology and that kind of thing and build up a big deterrent force. The Saudis are trying to do it with money. The Iranians have tended to try to extend their influence politically and militarily through militias in Lebanon, in Yemen, in Syria, in Iraq and so will the Iranians really try to play a game here.
The Iranians are a malicious force don't get me wrong but they seem to be searching for a way out partly because they have these crippling sanctions on them.

What's the evidence of this? The biggest evidence of this is the Saudi - Iranian normalization, that was a big big deal. It happened last year, the Chinese brokered it. It seems to me they would jeopardize all that if they were to really take advantage of this, but that's the part I worry the most about.

And then there's the broader issue which is the central challenge in international relations we face. Iit is a version of what's going on in the Middle East, which is can we maintain a rules-based international order that encourages open trade, open commerce, open communication, open information platforms, without the great liberal hegemony superpower that sustained built and paid for the international system as it exists today - the United States. Because the US is not going to be able to play that role that it's played in the past, partly because it has grown weary, partly because others have risen and will not accept US hegemony, and states like Russia, Iran, groups like Hamas, Hezbollah are basically trying in various ways undermine the rules based order, undermine the international system, burn the house down.

Will they win or will the United States and Europe and Japan and Singapore and Saudi Arabia, all these countries that want order and stability and openness will they prevail that's the big dynamic? And that's why what happens in the Middle East does have a larger global significance.

22:37 The biggest problem in Ukraine is the West is getting fatigued. They won't admit it but they are getting fatigued. You're seeing signs of it in the Republican Party very strongly, you're seeing some signs in Europe as well, the Slovakia election. They elected basically a pro Russian leader, the Poles these populist nationalists, they're pretty good on Ukraine but they've been quarreling with Ukraine for the last two or three months about Ukrainian aid as these refugees -remember there's six - seven million Ukrainian refugees living in Europe. I think that's the critical thing to look at. The Ukrainians are not going to give up. This is their land. This is existential for them. The question is will they run out of money and weapons and that's all on the West.

The Russian strategy right now is pretty clear. They're waiting for the 2024 election. They think there's a 50% chance Donald Trump will win. Trump will sell the Ukrainians down the river, may cut a deal with Putin.

25:02 As we pull back the lens on the Middle East I increasingly believe that the catastrophic geopolitical decision of the last 50 years will be seen as our invasion of Iraq. Our weariness, the resources expended. We're like someone who's gotten their eyebrows burnt and we just don't want to get near any hot surface any longer in the Middle East. Going into Afghanistan absolutely justification, but going into Iraq will be seen as probably the greatest geopolitical mistake in US history of the last 50 years.
It is bigger than Vietnam but it certainly was a massive mistake and it represents two things one was this was the kind of peak American hubris. This was an American dominated world, this was the post cold war world. We destroyed the world like a colossus and then 9/11 happens and we are like a wounded giant, and we start lashing out and we lash out and we totally militarize the conflict.

I wrote a piece for Newsweek two weeks after 9/11 called why they hate us and was trying to explain the root of this Islamic rage. And the main point I was trying to get across is the main thing we have to understand is this is a kind of ideological civilizational political struggle, don't turn it into a military struggle because that's what they want.

27:05 I think we massively misread how we should we should handle it (Afghanistan.) We should have gone in there got rid of the Taliban and then left. When you try to bring order in a country what we always forget is we are the foreigners and you can have all the best intentions in the world but it's the easiest thing in the world to arouse nationalist opposition against an occupying foreigner.