Geo Political Risk

[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

27:40 MBS has a poor track record on human rights, the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. And the thesis is that MBS is actually an enormous asset or an enormous positive for the West, that the pivot from a hot war in Yemen and a cold war in Iran, sort of the pivot loosely speaking from terrorism to capitalism, that we could have not written a better script for pro West interests.

28:53 MBS has been the principal modernizing force in the Gulf on a scale we have never seen before. Saudi Arabia has modernized more in the last two to three years than it did in previous 50, even if you think about human rights. He's allowed women to drive, he's allowed them most importantly to be in unsegregated areas in education, in workplace that means Saudi female participation in Saudi Arabia has been going up steadily much, much faster than people realize. You getting to the point where those distinctions are becoming much less important. He's opened up the economy to outside forces. He's opened it up to entertainment, he's opened it up to tourism, all those are freedoms, people have the freedom now to do lots of different things that they were not able to.

They don't have political freedom yet. You can't pretend they do, but point two as you say he could be a huge Western asset because look at how he's modernizing his country. Is it along Chinese lines no, it's along Western lines. The deal that the Biden people have been trying to do with the Saudis, with Israel is good for Saudi Arabia, good for America, good for Israel and understand the parts America gets - Saudis would agree to consult with America on the price of oil, Saudis would agree no Chinese military facilities in their country, and basically no Chinese high-end technology - no Huawei, they've agreed that they would continue to price oil in dollars, no question of pricing it in Yuan.

Those are real important elements of American power. Saudi Arabia is still the swing state for the most important energy resource in the world and will be the most important energy resource in the world for the next 20 years.

People don't focus on enough right now which is the most powerful man in the world is going to be elected by probably 100,000 people in four states, in Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. It's not even going to be in those States because the cities are going to go blue, the rural areas are going to go red and it's going to be those exurban counties and you're talking maybe 50,000 people are going to determine the fate of the way the war in Ukraine goes, the future of the International System.

32:18 The part that worries me the most is the Republican party is returning to its isolationist roots. This is something people don't realize. This is a big deal for ever since World War II the Republican Party had been taken out of that. They opposed US entry into World War II, they opposed US support for Britain and France all that stuff. It was the most bitter debate in some ways of the 20th century in American politics. They are going back to that, listen to Josh Hawley, listen to Vivek Ramaswamy, listen to Trump and you see the Republican party is basically is saying pox on everybody's house, we get out of the world.

If you want to see serious disorder that's where I think it begins, if we really see a total withdrawal of America from the world.

What's stunning about where we are is the mismatch between economics and politics. So if you look at where we are economically, if you were to ask yourself at any previous point in history who dominates the world of technology and the industries of the future. In the 1970s you'd be looking at a lot of German companies, Japanese companies, Dutch companies like Phillips, the hot technologies like NEC, Toyota, computer, consumer electronics all that.

Today it's America, America, America, you know it's just crazy how dominant we are, our banks are absolutely dominant. There's no global banks left and they're just American Banks, the Europeans are in tatters, the Chinese can't open up their system, the Japanese banks have been declining for 25 years. You look at demographics. We're the only rich country that is going to be demographically vibrant because we take in a million legal immigrants a year. That's more than the entire industrialized world put together. We're energy sufficient, independent. We are the now the largest producer of liquid hydrocarbons in the world. People don't think about that because we consume most of it but we produce more liquid hydrocarbons than Saudi Arabia or Russia.

How do we have this totally screwed up politics? We can't pass a budget, you can't have a speaker, you can't get any kind of rational immigration reform which is the single thing that could boost the American economy right now.

If Biden decides he's going to run it's difficult to dislodge him. He's been a successful president. He's done more in terms of legislation than any president, any Democrat since Lyndon Johnson. He's got good judgment on Ukraine, on things like the Saudi deal, his foreign policy has been smart, and yet the problem I think we all have at the back of our mind is he is going to be 82 years old when he starts his second term.

CNN is going through a kind of classic innovators dilemma problem, which is that it had an amazing business model. Most people don't understand how profitable the cable carriage business was and CNN's margins on the cable carriage fees were close to 50% and was getting I'm guessing 1.5 billion dollar of cable carriage. So it made sense for them to be milking that for as much as they can. But that world is going away. The revenue of the future is going to be in some form in streaming and digital and can they make that transition.

[kiora]

"The New Economic Security State
How De-risking Will Remake Geopolitics"
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/unite...mail-prospects

[moka]

Bertrand Russell’s Last Message: Israel-Palestine War.

Bertrand Russell was a British mathematician, philosopher, logician, and public intellectual. He was also an advocate for reason and humanism and a dedicated defender of freedom of speech and freedom of thought.

https://abdelmoumenchouichi.medium.com/bertrand-russells-last-message-israel-palestine-war-694eb7a7a99e

This statement on the Middle East was dated 31st January 1970, and was read on 3rd February, the day after Bertrand Russell’s death, to an International Conference of Parliamentarians meeting in Cairo.

The latest phase of the undeclared war in the Middle East is based upon a profound miscalculation. The bombing raids deep into Egyptian territory will not persuade the civilian population to surrender but will stiffen their resolve to resist. This is the lesson of all aerial bombardment. The Vietnamese who have endured years of American heavy bombing have responded not by capitulation but by shooting down more enemy aircraft. In 1940 my own fellow countrymen resisted Hitler’s bombing raids with unprecedented unity and determination. For this reason, the present Israeli attacks will fail in their essential purpose, but at the same time they must be condemned vigorously throughout the world. The development of the crisis in the Middle East is both dangerous and instructive. For over 20 years Israel has expanded by force of arms.

After every stage in this expansion Israel has appealed to “reason” and has suggested “negotiations”. This is the traditional role of the imperial power because it wishes to consolidate with the least difficulty what it has already taken by violence. Every new conquest becomes the new basis of the proposed negotiation from strength, which ignores the injustice of the previous aggression.

The aggression committed by Israel must be condemned, not only because no state has the right to annexe foreign territory, but because every expansion is an experiment to discover how much more aggression the world will tolerate. The refugees who surround Palestine in their hundreds of thousands were described recently by the Washington journalist I.F. Stone as “the moral millstone around the neck of world Jewry.” Many of the refugees are now well into the third decade of their precarious existence in temporary settlements.

The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country was “given” by a foreign Power to another people for the creation of a new State. The result was that many hundreds of thousands of innocent people were made permanently homeless. With every new conflict their number have increased. How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty? It is abundantly clear that the refugees have every right to the homeland from which they were driven, and the denial of this right is at the heart of the continuing conflict. No people anywhere in the world would accept being expelled in masse from their own country; how can anyone require the people of Palestine to accept a punishment which nobody else would tolerate? A permanent just settlement of the refugees in their homeland is an essential ingredient of any genuine settlement in the Middle East.

We are frequently told that we must sympathize with Israel because of the suffering of the Jews in Europe at the hands of the Nazis. I see in this suggestion no reason to perpetuate any suffering. What Israel is doing today cannot be condoned, and to invoke the horrors of the past to justify those of the present is gross hypocrisy. Not only does Israel condemn a vast number of refugees to misery, not only are many Arabs under occupation condemned to military rule; but also Israel condemns the Arab nations only recently emerging from colonial status, to continued impoverishment as military demands take precedence over national development.

All who want to see an end to bloodshed in the Middle East must ensure that any settlement does not contain the seeds of future conflict. Justice requires that the first step towards a settlement must be an Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied in June 1967. A new world campaign is needed to help bring justice to the long–suffering people of the Middle East.

I invite you all to read the letter with thoughtful consideration.

[Davexl]

Kissinger - the good & the bad...

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/hen...AQS65ADKLX5MU/

Celebrated and reviled: The complicated legacy of Henry Kissinger

[warthog]

Bertrand Russell’s Last Message: Israel-Palestine War.

Bertrand Russell was a British mathematician, philosopher, logician, and public intellectual. He was also an advocate for reason and humanism and a dedicated defender of freedom of speech and freedom of thought.

https://abdelmoumenchouichi.medium.com/bertrand-russells-last-message-israel-palestine-war-694eb7a7a99e

This statement on the Middle East was dated 31st January 1970, and was read on 3rd February, the day after Bertrand Russell’s death, to an International Conference of Parliamentarians meeting in Cairo.

The latest phase of the undeclared war in the Middle East is based upon a profound miscalculation. The bombing raids deep into Egyptian territory will not persuade the civilian population to surrender but will stiffen their resolve to resist. This is the lesson of all aerial bombardment. The Vietnamese who have endured years of American heavy bombing have responded not by capitulation but by shooting down more enemy aircraft. In 1940 my own fellow countrymen resisted Hitler’s bombing raids with unprecedented unity and determination. For this reason, the present Israeli attacks will fail in their essential purpose, but at the same time they must be condemned vigorously throughout the world. The development of the crisis in the Middle East is both dangerous and instructive. For over 20 years Israel has expanded by force of arms.

After every stage in this expansion Israel has appealed to “reason” and has suggested “negotiations”. This is the traditional role of the imperial power because it wishes to consolidate with the least difficulty what it has already taken by violence. Every new conquest becomes the new basis of the proposed negotiation from strength, which ignores the injustice of the previous aggression.

The aggression committed by Israel must be condemned, not only because no state has the right to annexe foreign territory, but because every expansion is an experiment to discover how much more aggression the world will tolerate. The refugees who surround Palestine in their hundreds of thousands were described recently by the Washington journalist I.F. Stone as “the moral millstone around the neck of world Jewry.” Many of the refugees are now well into the third decade of their precarious existence in temporary settlements.

The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country was “given” by a foreign Power to another people for the creation of a new State. The result was that many hundreds of thousands of innocent people were made permanently homeless. With every new conflict their number have increased. How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty? It is abundantly clear that the refugees have every right to the homeland from which they were driven, and the denial of this right is at the heart of the continuing conflict. No people anywhere in the world would accept being expelled in masse from their own country; how can anyone require the people of Palestine to accept a punishment which nobody else would tolerate? A permanent just settlement of the refugees in their homeland is an essential ingredient of any genuine settlement in the Middle East.

We are frequently told that we must sympathize with Israel because of the suffering of the Jews in Europe at the hands of the Nazis. I see in this suggestion no reason to perpetuate any suffering. What Israel is doing today cannot be condoned, and to invoke the horrors of the past to justify those of the present is gross hypocrisy. Not only does Israel condemn a vast number of refugees to misery, not only are many Arabs under occupation condemned to military rule; but also Israel condemns the Arab nations only recently emerging from colonial status, to continued impoverishment as military demands take precedence over national development.

All who want to see an end to bloodshed in the Middle East must ensure that any settlement does not contain the seeds of future conflict. Justice requires that the first step towards a settlement must be an Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied in June 1967. A new world campaign is needed to help bring justice to the long–suffering people of the Middle East.

I invite you all to read the letter with thoughtful consideration.

Russell, as many like him, was a deeply principled and moral gentleman. Rare qualities. Thanks for posting.

[warthog]

Kissinger - the good & the bad...

Celebrated and reviled: The complicated legacy of Henry Kissinger

Celebrated by warmongers and the misinformed, reviled by anyone with their eyes open.

[Davexl]

Thought this might be interesting. Note the urgency.

Australia will start making long-range missiles from next year

https://thewest.com.au/politics/fede...ear-c-13237224

[Valuegrowth]

Investors have not paid attention to geo political risks. It's highly risky to invest in foreign markets. Time to invest in basic things.

[Valuegrowth]

[Davexl]

Demonstrating just how twisted the Middle East situ is with Iran (in Iraq's influence) for Biden...
Iraq and Iran were complicit in the Tower 22 attack


https://asiatimes.com/2024/02/iraq-a...wer-22-attack/