Here at Multipolarity Towers, we’re in the process of building a Substack-first package that will allow subscribers complete access to our archive of paid episodes — in addition to any gated content on the Stack.

We’re going to be putting up two episodes a week. We hope this pace will also allow the interested to imbibe at leisure, rather than being confronted with a random pile in a single post.

This week -ah yes the UK General Election. How’s Starmer doing? Oh.

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We might soon miss the days when heated online arguments over the exact ranges of various missiles was the purview of military nerds. With the recent Ukrainian strike on an Iranian ship in the Caspian Sea, these debates could come to have real meaning in the very near future. Increasingly, it looks like Ukraine’s strike on the Iranian ship was a desperate gambit to try to tie the Ukraine and the Iran conflicts together in the hope that it would increase American support for Ukraine as the frontline in Eastern Ukraine starts to buckle.

I appeared on Mario Nawfal’s show recently and explained that there is good reason to think that there is now an extensive, multifaceted campaign by Ukraine’s supporters to fuse the two wars together. You can watch that here if you want a fuller explanation.

The key question, however, is that if the wars do become fused, then what happens in the Middle Eastern theatre would affect the European theatre and vice versa. The problem with this is that there is good reason to assume that, the balance of forces being what they are, such a development would not be meaningful for any of the war’s participants except one: Europe.

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The world is shifting in unpredictable ways. The old order dies of smoke inhalation in a dumpster fire. The new one has yet to be lifted out by C-Section.

Iran, it is now clear, represents the smouldering conflagration that will consume US power. As its strength is sapped, this lumbering giant will make ever-poorer decisions. Bad money will be poured after good. The Falcon F-16 cannot hear the falconer. Which way is up will become ever harder to discern. In the face of this spinning compass, our sense-making apparatus is as useless as a cavalry charge in the Ardennes.

But there is one doomsday weapon that could yet unscramble our circuits. One that has only recently become known to science.

The Pod to End All Pods is a three episode collaboration between Multipolarity, and our two most requested guests – Malcolm ‘Juche Respecter’ Kyeyune - and Amerikanets, the anonymous Substacker who uncovered the implausibility of Trump’s Venezuela Raid.

We’ve assembled this little RAND Corporation, and told them to solve for the next twelve months — and the next ten years.

The results were incendiary and interminable. They spoke for three hours — which we’ve decided to carve into three separate podcasts.

In the first episode, this week, we’re going to talk about the Air War — the debaseification thesis, as laid out by Amerikanets. The Iranians are systematically denying the US its regional airbases by killing personnel and hitting assets on the tarmac. The Reaper drones that put the fear of god into America’s enemies in the 2010s are now undergoing their own holocaust in the skies over Iran. Meanwhile, American generals are struggling to understand what the target even is — in a KPI culture, they’re running out of targets, and pushing towards more and more abstruse success metrics. This is a war being run without a purpose.

Then, In part two, we get round to The Systemic-War Thesis. Like World War I, like the Thirty Years War, or the Napoleonic Wars, this has become a conflict that pulls in every actor within a closed system — and only stops at mutual physical exhaustion. A point only underlined by the Saudis’ decision to hit Iranian targets this week.

Finally, in part three, we take on Europe, America and the political fallout. Is the old world about to be dragged into this, much against their will? Given the spate of fires at EU refineries and munitions plants, are we on explosion watch?

All this and more, as the July Crisis takes shape.

They said it would be over by Christmas — and this show just about will be.

This is the Pod To End All Pods.

Seriously? On Saturday, the US… stopped. With no announcement, after two weeks of a return to something like the intensity of fighting between February and April, the guns fell silent. But there was no ceasefire agreement. Iran offered no sign it was open to discussing another ceasefire. Hormuz remained shut. Worse, the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, between Yemen and Djibouti, connecting the Red Sea (and Suez and the Mediterranean beyond) with the Gulf of Aden and thence the Indian Ocean, was also shut (more on which later). Where oil would ordinarily be flowing by the millions of barrels a day, it still was not. The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve is still verging on empty; its ability to help balance the global market dripping every closer to its end. China was still nearing the point at which it would re-enter the market, after having cut its imports by 25% for months. In other words, the strategic landscape that had pushed oil back above a hundred late on Thursday remained firmly in place. So, of course, when the oil markets opened on Monday, the oil price dropped like a stone — all the way to $85 a barrel by Tuesday.

Brent crude futures, the global benchmark for crude oil, falling from Friday evening until Tuesday morning, despite no change in the oil squeeze.

So we ask again, “Seriously?!” How is it that the strategic and energy supply backdrop can remain unchanged, and thus the world continue inching toward an energy crisis for lack of oil, and yet oil prices decline? Crack spreads offer a clue. These are price signals that have been increasingly discussed and shared by energy and geopolitical analysts — as well as our fellow monitoring-the-situation bros — on X (formerly Twitter). But what are crack spreads, and what do they tell us?

Let’s start at the beginning. When we talk about ‘the price of oil’, this is usually the price at which futures contracts for certain blends of crude oil are trading. The two most commonly referred to benchmark blends are WTI (West Texas Intermediate, mostly for the US) and Brent (for the rest of the world). In very basic terms, the crack spread is the spread between what a refinery that makes, say, diesel, jet fuel or petrol (gasoline), sells that refined product for, and the price of a given crude oil benchmark. So, let’s imagine that WTI is trading at $80 a barrel, and a refinery in Texas is selling diesel at $90 a barrel: the diesel crack spread would be $10.

But here’s the rub: the benchmark crude price from which the crack spread is calculated is not the same as the price that the refinery actually pays for oil. Their price is whatever deal they negotiate with a provider for delivery of actual physical oil. For curious minds, this at least raises the question: are oil futures prices real? Or are they being manipulated? Is the benchmark indicated price really so far out of whack with the price refineries are paying for physical oil?

The diesel crack spread: about the same as the price of WTI. Highly unusual.

It is true that in times like this, oil refiners often charge more for their product. There are two reasons for this: one decent and one more a case of ruthless capitalism. The reasonable imperative is that in times of great oil price volatility, the refiners need to protect themselves against further gyrations that could leave them significantly out of pocket. The more ruthless reason is that, well, they can. Presently, diesel, for instance, is in short supply. China is exporting less. Attacks on Russian refineries have prompted Russia (a net exporter of diesel) to impose an export ban. The Middle East didn’t just ship crude oil through Hormuz, but refined products too. So the market is tight, and refiners can therefore charge more. If you could charge more for your labour because it was suddenly in short supply, you probably would. I would. And recent financial statements indeed suggest that refineries are making fat profits.

But really? That much? On several occasions since the war started, the diesel crack has been bigger than the actual benchmark price of crude. This is unprecedented. Even when Hurricane Katrina physically damaged or shut lots of refineries on the American Gulf Coast, crack spreads were still nothing like this, despite the shortage of diesel this caused. Given there are numerous reports of Asian customers paying well in excess of $110 a barrel for prompt physical crude delivery (as much as 50% above the benchmark), and given oil is transportable and thus fungible, it at least suggests that something has gone badly wrong with the benchmark futures markets.

Stories of Asian buyers paying well over $110 a barrel for crude are commonplace. But stories of buyers willing to fork out in excess of $250 are not unheard of. Why is physical oil delivery so much more expensive than the benchmark price? And what does that suggest about the crack spread conundrum?

Multipolarity Podcast co-host Philip Pilkington was one of the first analysts to pick up on this, weeks ago. He suggests that the US Presidential Administration is manipulating the futures markets to hold inflation in check, ameliorate jittery investors and keep the economic show on the road. He starts by pointing out that much trading these days is conducted by complex algorithms. One of their inputs is headlines. So, if you can plant enough headlines (“Peace Deal Close”… “Ceasefire on the table — Trump”… “Hormuz likely to open next week”), then you can spoof the algos.

If you then also dump onto the market lots of short contracts (bets that the benchmark crude oil price will decline), you force investors who are long the market (betting that the price will rise) to hedge or outright sell. This further sends a price signal to the algos. The best time to do this, Mr Pilkington contended in an podcast with internet broadcast megastar Mario Nawfal last week, is a Friday afternoon, when trading is often thinner just before the market closes for the weekend, and thus bigger price movements can be attained for the same cash deployed. The other time to do it would be on Monday morning, to set the tone for the week, something else the algos pick up on. This makes going long oil a risky proposition, itself keeping prices down by lowering the number of people willing to bet on them rising.

Thus, claims Mr Pilkington, it is possible to suppress the benchmark price of oil. The fact crack spreads are so much higher than previous record cracks suggests that the price of physical delivery is indeed higher than the benchmark, and thus the latter has gone out of kilter, he argues.

If this theory is true, then the US government is playing a dangerous game indeed. The benchmark price is an important signal to economic actors. It tells them whether the marginal value of a certain activity that uses oil is actually worth it. A lower price encourages economic actors to drive more, transport more stuff, fly more, build more and so on. This helps the economy in the short run, but only by using oil, and driving up the marginal demand, into an already tight physical market. This could make oil shortages worse in future. In other words, if we are to face an almighty squeeze once the US SPR runs out, and commercial reserves dry up, and China ends its 25% reduction of normal purchases, then artificially suppressing the price of oil for reasons of economic and political expediency would make the crash worse when it happens.

It also risks the loss of trust in price discovery. While this sounds banal, transparent and easy price discovery (the ability to quickly and regularly understand and monitor the true price of commodities, currencies, or securities) is a crucial signifier of a developed economy. This is because it allows for long-term financial and economic planning, as well as effective hedging that brings predictability to future cash flows. Lose that, and your economy could rapidly descend into the sort of thirdworldist high time-preference business activity endemic in many emerging markets and economies.

Nobody is suggesting it will get that bad, but if markets are being outright manipulated, they are playing with fire.

Base Case Scenario

So why did the US stop shooting anyway? Gigabrain, hedge fund principal and friend of Multipolarity, Anusar Farooqui, AKA Policy Tensor, contends that Iran had credibly threatened to move to a counter-personnel campaign. He points out that Iran’s strikes on US bases in Jordan led to significant personnel losses, and that Tehran had said that from now, when Iranian citizens were killed, US service personnel would be targeted. US loss aversion thus forced the decision to relent.

Source: The War Horse. The US suffered more than 400 casualties in the first phase of the war, before Iran has started targeting US service personnel, which it has now threatened to do. Was aversion to losses a reason the US decided to unilaterally cease fire?

Another friend of Multipolarity, Amerikanets, the provocateur and excellent independent analyst of the war, has argued in a viral Substack article that Iran has been waging a highly effective campaign of ‘debasification’. The Iranians first targeted US bases on the Gulf Coast, in countries like Bahrain, Kuwait and the UAE, forcing their evacuation. Then came bases in Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Now, Jordan seems increasingly on the menu. This is forcing US assets — such as AWACS planes, refuelling tankers, and fighter-bombers — farther and farther away from Iran. This in turn makes air attack sorties significantly more difficult because the greater distance involved reduces time over target and manoeuvring capacity. It also makes them more vulnerable, as an ever greater proportion of the US assets and personnel in theatre are cooped up Israel, a tiny patch of land on the Eastern Med.

Souce: Amerikanets Substack. A map of US bases hit during the Iran War so far.

The Multipolarity Brief would like to offer another theory: it wasn’t working. As we have discussed many times in past editions of these Briefs, the US had a well-defined set of war aims — the physical dismantling of Iran’s nuclear programme; imposing restrictions on the scale and range of Iran’s missile and drone arsenal; an end to funding of Iran’s proxies in the region, such as Hezbollah, the Houthis and the Iraqi militias; and, of course, regime change. It failed to achieve any of these, or gain a single operational victory that might have taken it part of the way there. Round two, more recently, was to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. It was failing to achieve that, too. And all the while, the arsenal was being drained. So what was the point? At some stage, they were going to have to draw a line under it, and better to do it while they still had at least a few JASSMs and THAAD missiles in the magazine.

Source: The Centre for Strategic and International Studies. The magazines are starting to look dangerously low. Without air defence interceptors, bases cannot be defended, troops cannot be defended, logistics cannot be defended — and neither can cities.

The problem is that Iran isn’t done. Or, more to the point it is done with ceasefires and interim agreements. It agreed to discuss a peace agreement with its ten points as the basis of negotiations. Low-simmering tit-for-tat, cat-and-mouse strikes continued until eventually the US was forced to sign the Islamabad MOU based on, yes, pretty much those ten points. But this wasn’t a final peace treaty, and the games continued, eventually escalating into the most recent reeruption of the war. Now, Iran has said that the MOU is dead. It wants something, in its words, “comprehensive” (which we take to mean a full and binding peace treaty that puts US-Iranian relations on a course acceptable to Tehran). Worse, it has struck Jordan again. Washington has stopped firing, but Iran hasn’t. This is exactly the scenario the Multipolarity Brief said, way back in March, would happen if the US unilaterally ceased hostilities: Iran would be able to continue and thus to coerce its western neighbours to accept its terms.

President Trump is not having it. “We are going to beat the effing s*** out of them,” Fox News reports him as having said. “We will be hitting them hard — they’re going to get a beating.” Just like the first time? And the second time? If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again until the gun runs out of ammo and you have to use the butt for a club? Until more US servicemen die in a losing cause?

The problem for Iran is that, while it is the prohibitive favourite to survive another US Air Force fusillade, getting an actual deal from the US looks likely to be extremely difficult. President Trump has shown that he cannot be relied upon to adhere to the things he agreed with Iran in writing. So how exactly is Iran going to get a treaty ratified by the US Congress? And what value that treaty, given the US unilaterally withdrew from the JCPOA, a decision that pushed us down the slipway to finally splash into our current pretty pass?

The aforementioned Anusar Farooqui believes that the Iranian calculus is that once Trump in particular and the US in general have been suitably chastened and discouraged, the costs of restarting a conflict with Iran would rise massively. Furthermore, if Tehran can secure US recognition of Iranian sovereignty over, and thus right to manage, the Strait of Hormuz, it can use that weapon to coerce other countries and guarantee its security.

This starts to approach the longstanding Multipolarity Brief view that, absent a credible US agreement, Iran would simply look to enforce its will with other nations. First, it would seek to remove the US Navy’s blockade (an act of war in itself) through coercion. Second, it would seek to gain control over Hormuz — de facto, with desperate buyers and sellers acquiescing to Iranian control and management without actually saying so. Thirdly, it would use that to impose, after the US has been forced to retreat from its regional bases (sans the garrison state of Israel and the NATO state of Turkey), terms on the Gulf nations that would put a physical barrier between it and vectors of US air attack. Meanwhile, the Hormuz weapon could be used to force those who need to sell oil to keep their economies afloat, or buy it for the same reason, to relent on sanctions and/or pay Iran ‘management fees’. This is the scenario we first proffered in April, and the chances of this outcome, while still not the most likely, are increasing.

Already we are seeing signs of cracks in Jordan. The King has not returned from his trip to Europe. And Jordanians are starting to say that US bases, far from being a guarantor of security, are a liability. Jordan has struggled with internal strife before (not least on the Palestine matter), but managed to survive, which it has great incentive to do given it relies so heavily on US aid. But this may be the first hint of things to come.

Flight tracker showing the King of Jordan, who has apparently made an unscheduled stop in Croatia and Montenegro on the way back to his homeland.

A Ukraine in the Backside

The problem is that the war is starting to show signs of serious escalation. On Saturday, Ukrainian forces struck an Iranian cargo vessel in the Caspian Sea. President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed the attack that day, stating the ship was involved in transporting military cargo between Iran and Russia. Iran said that it was a civilian vessel and that the strike caused an explosion, killed one sailor, and injured another. The next day, Iraq’s National Security Adviser, Qasim al-Aboudi, said that Iraqi forces had arrested individuals who confessed to carrying out bombings against Iraqi government facilities on behalf of Ukrainian intelligence, allegedly to frame Iran-backed militias. Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry rejected the claims.

It seems likely that Ukraine is attempting to link the two wars. It hopes that either Iran swallows the hit and Ukraine can thus disrupt Russia’s Caspian Sea trade with impunity (unlikely), or far more probably, Iran retaliates and Ukraine becomes a co-belligerent in the Iran War, which would effectively make Iran a co-belligerent in the Ukraine War, which might help bring the US and Israel into that theatre as full participants, or at least garner much greater aid from the former. The Iraqi accusation, if true, would lend credence to this theory, as would the timing, just before President Zelensky’s visit to Washington, which included a meeting with Donald Trump and an impromptu one with Benjamin Netanyahu.

The problem with this line of thinking, from Ukraine’s perspective, is that if it argues, as it does, that Iran is effectively a co-belligerent for supplying Russia with weapons (although this doesn’t seem to have happened much since Russia bought the licence to produce Shahed drones), and therefore fair game for Ukrainian attacks, then doesn’t that also make Europe a co-belligerent in Ukraine’s war against Russia and (prospectively) Iran, and thus fair game for Russian and Iranian attacks? Perhaps Europe’s lack of overt support for Ukraine’s strike on the Iranian ship in the Caspian suggests that they certainly see this risk.

The conflict also appears to be teetering on the brink of expanding into a wider regional war. First, the Houthis responded to a Saudi attack on an airfield controlled by the Houthis by shutting the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait to Saudi tankers. Saudi Arabia had been relying on it to transport oil sent to the Red Sea via a bypass pipeline. Now, the Saudis and the US are retaliating against Iraqi Shia militias for their attack on the facilities of Aramco, the Saudi Arabian state-owned oil monopoly.

Here, we return to the point we made above: Iran is refusing the offer of another ceasefire implied by the US decision on Saturday to stop its air attacks on Iran. It is, directly and through its proxies, pressing its case with increased confidence. It appears to believe it has the upper hand, and thus a rare chance to break out of the cage in which US economic, diplomatic, covert and military pressure have placed it for 40 years. Washington can either make enough concessions for Tehran to stop, or continue its failed efforts to pressure Iran from the air, while retaliating against Iranian proxies, all while now risking a far greater conflagration that could consume the whole region — and could even put Europe in the line of fire.

Pick your poison, Mr Trump.

Until the clouds roll in a little

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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?

The story begins in mid-May, when Ukraine had the body of one Andriy Melnyk exhumed from his Luxembourg grave, returned to Ukraine, and buried with full state honours in a ceremony attended by President Volodymyr Zelensky. In early 1929, Mr Melnyk co-founded the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), a far-right, fascist-adjacent movement with the explicit aim of creating an ethnically pure Ukraine. Later, after the onset of the Second World War, this group — including the faction Mr Melnyk himself commanded, the OUN-M — collaborated with the invading Nazi forces. Elements of the group directly participated in the Holocaust, and most were involved in ethnic cleansing and the genocide of Poles living in what is now western Ukraine. In the Volhynia Genocide, they killed over 100,000 Poles, the overwhelming majority of them civilians, often targeting the elderly, women and children, sometimes torturing them before death.

Andriy Melnyk, right, photographed with Yevhen Konovalets, who with Mr Melnyk co-founded the OUN.

Modern Ukrainian nationalists argue that the story of Mr Melnyk and the OUN is more complicated: that they were primarily Ukrainian nationalists and anti-Bolsheviks who simply wanted independence from Moscow’s yoke. They note that by the end of the war, elements of the OUN were fighting a guerrilla campaign against the Red Army and the Nazis. Ukrainian nationalists further highlight that many historical national heroes have chequered pasts (the Multipolarity Brief has seen Winston Churchill suggested as an example of this — a comparison bound to win friends in Britain). Nevertheless, the Polish government and much of Polish society was understandably touchy about Mr Melnyk and his wife receiving a state burial as national heroes of modern Ukraine.

Just days after the ceremony, the situation worsened when President Zelensky signed a decree awarding the honorary title “Heroes of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army” to a Ukrainian special forces unit. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) was the armed wing of the OUN-B faction led by Stepan Bandera. Like Mr Melnyk, Mr Bandera was a far right Ukrainian nationalist leader who collaborated with the Nazis and was involved in genocide and ethnic cleansing, yet is now held up as a hero.

The spat between Kiev and Warsaw rapidly spiralled into something far more serious. Polish President Karol Nawrocki revoked Poland’s highest civilian honour, the Order of the White Eagle, from President Zelensky. Ukrainian leaders returned honours Poland had previously awarded them, while Zelensky approved legislation creating a “national pantheon” expected to enshrine Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych — the chief architects of the Volhynia Genocide.

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky, left, receives the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest honor, from then-President of Poland Andrzej Duda on 5 April 2023.

The Multipolarity Brief does not wish to pass judgement on this matter, and a full historical reckoning lies beyond the scope of this article. For those interested in learning more, we recommend the Substack of Andrew Korybko, an American-Polish geopolitical analyst. His work detailing the unfolding diplomatic imbroglio between two of Europe’s most nationalist states has been highly valuable. Crucially, Mr Korybko points out that the episode is acting as a catalyst for existing, slow-burning resentment toward Ukraine and Ukrainians in Polish society. Even before the war, millions of Ukrainian migrants and guest workers lived in Poland. Since the war began, millions more refugees have joined them.

Mr Korybko has also reported that many Poles have begun to resent what they see as Ukraine’s transformation into an anti-Polish state, despite Warsaw’s support for the post-Euromaidan formation of a Ukrainian national identity and the tremendous aid they have provided to Ukraine (nearly 5% of GDP, including much of Poland’s military stockpile and shelter and financial support for Ukrainian refugees).

But it goes further than popular feeling. Senior Polish officials have gone so far to describe Ukraine’s recent actions related to the OUN as proof of civilisational incompatibility, likening the cult of these Nazi collaborators to Russia’s veneration of Stalin in Polish historical memory. The former President of Poland and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Lech Walesa, has removed the Ukrainian flag he was wearing on his chest, announcing that “by honoring the UPA bandits, the President of Ukraine has insulted me and all of our compatriots who were murdered.” Even the pro-EU, more globalist-liberal government has been forced to take a stand, given how the conservative-nationalist opposition has been able to gain so much political capital out of the issue.

Lech Walesa, who led the Solidarity movement against Poland's communist regime, greatly precipitating the end of the hard Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. From 1990 until 1995, he was President of Poland.

The Multipolarity Brief does not believe this will lead to an outright rupture between Poland and Ukraine. However, it does offer a glimpse of what the post-Ukraine War geopolitical environment might look like on Europe’s Eastern Approaches. To tell that story, we must set the matter against Poland’s perennial geopolitical predicament.

The North European Plain. A flat geographical feature that stretches from the Atlantic to the Urals. It offers little in the way of defensible features after the River Rhein, and widens massively toward its eastern end.

Poland sits near the wide and open eastern end of the North European Plain, a broad, largely featureless corridor between the Carpathians and the Baltic that has historically offered invading armies few natural obstacles. Sandwiched between Central and Eastern Europe’s two historically dominant powers — Germany to the west and Russia to the east — Poland has repeatedly found itself as an arena in which larger forces contest supremacy. Its history of forced partitions, beginning in 1772, its temporary erasure from the map, and its postwar reconstitution as a westward-shifted Soviet satellite state designed to serve as Moscow’s forward buffer, left deep scars on the national psyche. These experiences produced a national security mentality acutely attuned to the raw mechanics of power in a way that is often beyond the comprehension of more geographically insulated states such as Britain and the United States.

Poland’s dramatically shifting borders through history.

After the Soviet collapse (1989–91), Poland pursued two parallel tracks to escape its historical vulnerability. NATO membership in 1999 brought it under the American nuclear umbrella and facilitated the modernisation of its armed forces at a moment when the former Soviet states lagged in technology and modern warfighting practice. Meanwhile, European Union accession in 2004 integrated its economy into German-led supply chains and delivered substantial investment and structural funds, paving the way for strong economic growth. By these means, Poland negotiated the 1990s and 2000s far more comfortably than Russia or many other post-Soviet states, and has come to be seen as one of Europe’s star pupils. Barely a week passes without the UK financial press noting that, on current trends, Poland will soon overtake Britain in GDP per capita.

Source: The FT, the IMF. Poland, on current trends, will overtake the UK on GDP per capita at some point in the 2030s.

Yet Warsaw never forgot its history — or its geopolitical realities. While Poland has used Germany and the United States as a shield against Russia, and remained implacably opposed to the latter, it has resisted full integration with Germany (via the EU) in a way the Netherlands, Czechia or the Baltic states have not. For example, Poland has retained its own currency, the zloty, rather than adopting the euro. It has also helped to build the Visegrad Group (comprising Czechia, Hungary and Slovakia in addition to Poland) to amplify the voice of Central European states against Franco-German dominance in Brussels.

Warsaw also led opposition to the Nord Stream pipelines, correctly identifying them as vehicles for deeper Russo-German economic interdependence — the eternal nightmare of Polish strategic planners. Under the conservative Law and Justice government (2015–23), the country sought to reassert sovereignty over its judiciary, a key tool through which Brussels (and by extension Germany) has influenced EU member states. Taken together, these choices suggested that, once protected against Russian revanchism, Poland preferred balancing rather than full bandwagoning.

Mateusz Morawiecki, Prime Minister of Poland, 2017-23, for the Law and Justice Party.

As the world order shifted from unipolarity to multipolarity, Poland refined this strategy further. The Ukraine conflict was leveraged to cleave more closely to Washington — the only external power capable of guaranteeing Polish sovereignty against either or both of its great-power neighbours. Exports to the United States surged, and Polish diplomacy has positioned the country as Washington’s most reliable partner on the eastern flank.

At the same time, Warsaw revived elements of the interwar Intermarium concept. Conceived by Józef Piłsudski, the Intermarium was an effort to use the collapse of the German and Russian empires after the First World War to reconstruct something like the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth — a multinational federation with the economic (and thus military) power to secure independence from the inevitable recovery of the two 800-pound gorillas that bookend Central and Eastern Europe. The original plan failed, but the modern version may stand a better chance by focusing first on economic integration.

The Intermarium concept, to create a federal union of nine states in 1930.

The Three Seas Initiative is a North-South infrastructure project involving the expansion and upgrading of motorways, gas interconnectors and rail links. It aims to reduce East-West logistical dependence and create a more cohesive economic space stretching from the Baltic to the Adriatic and Black Seas. American investment, including recent commitments to energy infrastructure, has reinforced the initiative’s strategic character. It is very much an Intermarium for the 21st century.

The geographical likeness of the Three Seas Initiative and the Intermarium are even more apparent if much of Western Ukraine was included.

Poland’s military posture has undergone the most visible transformation of any nation in Europe. Plans unveiled before the full-scale war — and accelerated by it — call for a dramatic expansion of land forces, with major acquisitions from the United States and South Korea rather than traditional German suppliers. If realised, these programmes would make Poland the second-most powerful land army in NATO after the United States and potentially the strongest on the European continent.

Then-Defense Minister of Poland Mariusz Blaszczak at a ceremony to mark Poland signing a deal to purchase of hundreds of HIMARs multiple-launch rocket systems from the United States, 11 September 2023.

Since the Civic Coalition, led by former EU commissioner Donald Tusk, defeated Law and Justice in the 2023 elections, Poland’s stance has shifted somewhat. Like their fellow liberal, pro-EU ‘establishment’ parties across Europe, Civic Coalition prefers to cleave more closely to Brussels both as a source of security and of greater economic strength. While this often entails some loss of sovereignty, such thinkers view it as a price worth paying for deeper economic integration, security in numbers, and the enhanced influence the EU’s scale provides when dealing with partners and rivals.

Donald Tusk wins election as Prime Minister in 2023.

Yet Poland’s view of Russia has remained unchanged. Its efforts to achieve energy independence (through shale exploration and pipeline connections to Norway) continue. Its rearmament programme remains largely intact. Its closer relations with the United States compared with most EU nations persist. In other words, Poland’s geostrategic realities remain constant, and political ideology cannot wish them away.

It increasingly appears that the United States will seek to draw down from the European peninsula. Military units are already leaving, and diplomatic and economic focus will likely follow. Contrary to popular belief, this is not a policy novelty introduced by US President Donald Trump. Powerful strategic forces are pulling Washington away: China is now so formidable that the struggle for mastery of the Western Pacific will consume the bulk of America’s economic and military power. The United States can no longer afford to act as first responder to every European security issue or maintain forces on the continent sufficient to act as a credible deterrent on its own.

When and if it does leave, however, Washington will not forswear all strategic interests in the Old World. It will still want to maintain influence on the continent and, above all, to ensure that Europe’s vast wealth, consumer markets and engineering and technological expertise do not link up with Russia’s natural resources — and thence with China. Such an outcome would represent Washington’s worst geopolitical nightmare. It would seem to make sense for the United States to therefore attempt to leave behind ‘blocking forces’ as it withdraws. These would take the form of a select few countries capable of physically and diplomatically preventing future Russo-German (and thus EU-Eurasian) integration, while also providing the US with a potential land bridge onto the continent if needed.

Poland would appear to fit this bill — and Warsaw certainly shares strategic synergies with Washington on the matter. Its geographical position on flat, open land between Russia and Germany makes outside support a strategic imperative rather than a luxury. Its rearmament programme is expensive, and the country is already running a hot economy with a budget deficit near 7 percent of GDP. Poland may therefore come to rely on inward investment to cover the gap. In this sense, it could end up importing capital and arms while exporting geopolitical utility.

Source: Notes from Poland, Finance Ministry of Poland. Since Donald Tusk and Civil Coalition have regained power, the Polish budget deficit has blown up.

But what if Poland turns out not to be the most geopolitically useful state in Eastern Europe? There is, after all, another geographically expansive nation nearby that has a huge and battle-hardened army, a willingness to accept tremendous sacrifices to weaken Russia, a political class that is tightly connected with (and reliant upon) its American and Western European counterparts, and whose geopolitics align closely with those in Washington who seek to contain Russia independently of potential interference from Berlin or Brussels.

In this light, recent announcements that Ukraine has secured mutual arms-manufacturing agreements with the Baltic states, Finland and Germany — as well as a Patriot system manufacturing licence from President Trump — should be seen not merely as a means to produce more weapons for the current fight against Russia, but as a way to shape the post-bellum geopolitical reality. A reality in which Ukraine, rather than Poland, becomes Western Europe’s and Washington’s premier tool for containing Russia.

Andrew Korybko has reported that Polish strategic thinkers are waking up to this possibility. After the war, Warsaw would wish to play a large role in rebuilding a weakened Ukraine, and by this means push its sphere of influence deep into its former Galician territories and ideally as far as the Black Sea. Instead, Warsaw faces the possibility that old ethnic enmities between Poles and western Ukrainians begin to re-emerge, destabilising relations between the two countries, even as Ukraine attempts to usurp the geostrategic role Poland had hoped to carve out for itself vis-à-vis the great and regional powers to its west.

In the OUN-Melnyk affair, and the deterioration of Ukraino-Polish relations it has precipitated, we are not witnessing a fissure that might crack the European alliance against Russia. (Indeed, while the war continues, a lid will almost certainly be kept tightly on intra-Eastern European relations.) Rather, we are seeing a glimpse of the strategic contours of Europe’s Eastern Approaches ten years hence. It is a future in which Poland seeks to keep Ukraine close to expand its sphere of influence — or at least as a useful buffer between it and Russia — even as it competes with Ukraine for geopolitical influence and has to manage historical enmities which will have more freedom to burn absent the unifying war against Russia.

Until the clouds roll in a little

Be honest, how much analysis of this depth and perception do you read elsewhere? Try to answer. Perhaps it’s time to show your love and get a paid sub to support our efforts. It only costs the equivalent of a couple of pints in a pub. And, as a bonus, paying subscribers get access to the secret club that are our premium podcast episodes, and the entire back catalogue of premium podcasts. That’s worth eight bucks a month by itself. A belter of a deal, everybody agrees.

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The Multipolarity Brief will return next week. Meanwhile, more content will appear here. Until then, farewell and good luck.

Polymarket, everyone’s favourite online political betting shop, is, in fact, an American quasi-intelligence cut-out designed to control the world through mass information gathering. Or at least that is the contention of controversial journalists Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin, who, through an in-depth, two-part series, The Secret History of Polymarket, tell the fascinating history of the online gambling market and its connections to other quasi-intelligence cut-outs.

If readers wish to assess these claims for themselves, I suggest reading the original series. I have very little to add. I would merely observe that senior Polymarket ‘enthusiasts’ on X.com (formerly Twitter) are not denying the report – but rather are raging against the journalists for not reaching out to the company for interviews. Here, I will instead tell the story of an overarching vision of intelligence gathering and governance that emerged in the 1990s and 2000s, why this vision has proved largely false (at least in its more ambitious forms), and how Polymarket fits into the story.

Deep in the Bowels of DARPA

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Donald Trump has become an unreadable politician. His credibility has burst through various levels of ‘madman theory’ negotiating prowess, into a place where it may not even be clear to his most intimate subordinates where his true intent begins and ends. The result is that US policy is now a broken sail, flapping in the wind.

Originally, America had four aims: dismantle Iran’s nuclear programme, cap its missiles and drones, cut off its proxies, and change the regime. With nil-for-four, the window to credibly settle this beef is getting farther away – not closer.

Meanwhile, chez Pilkington:

The US now believes it can ‘print oil’. That the present attempt to jigger the markets by making use of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and various ‘Whale of Hormuz’ attempts to rig the options market are long-term sustainable. They are not, as Phil points out. What goes up must come down, and the slip-slide will not be pretty. Rather than a war of attrition, Pilko suggests, the oil price war has become the totality of conflict – a Baudrillardian quarrel over supremacy of a number – only secondarily underpinned by the drones and bombs of the Arabian Gulf.

Yes, it’s time to up the escitalopram – enter code HAPPYPILLS26 at checkout to redeem this offer.

Four weeks ago, US President Donald Trump was asked why he had signed the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding, which appeared to be extremely one-sided in Iran’s favour. He replied that he had had to sign it, because the American strategic petroleum reserves only had four weeks left before they ran out. After that, prices would skyrocket and shortages would be a real possibility.

Since then, the SPR has not been refilled. In fact, it is still being drawn down. Yet back to war America’s gone. Who are we meant to believe? The Donald Trump of four weeks ago, who suggested he was forced to end the war because of the parlous US energy situation? Or the Donald Trump today, for whom war and a blockade of the Persian Gulf is a necessary means of dealing with the “liars,” “cheats,” and “sick people” in the Iranian government?

There is a definite answer to this, but the Multipolarity Brief has never liked spoon-feeding opinions and prognoses. Instead, we have always wanted to provide our readers with a framework that makes sense of the situation and allows them to draw their own conclusions. To show our working, so to speak. Multipolarity Brief likes to think it’s the go-to geopolitics digest of the Monitoring-the-Situation bros.

Let us therefore begin by reminding ourselves of the strategic landscape during the hot phase of the war, between late February and mid-April. The Trump Administration was extremely clear about its reasons for starting the war. Or, to put it another way, it had a tightly defined set of war aims. This is something seldom mentioned. Many seem to proceed on the basis that President Trump went to war for somewhat nebulous reasons related to regime change. In fact, both his negotiators and the president himself were crystal clear about the goals of the war.

First, to completely dismantle Iran’s nuclear programme. This involved the US taking into custody Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile and the physical dismantling of nuclear facilities like Natanz, Fordow and Isfahan.

Source: CNN. A satellite image of Iran’s Fordow nuclear enrichment facility.

Second, hard limits on the scale and range of Iran’s missile and drone arsenal: Iran could have missiles and drones, but only a certain number, and those it did have would be limited to a certain range (one imagines less than the distance to Tel Aviv).

Thirdly, to end Iranian funding of its proxy forces, like Hezbollah, Ansar Allah (better known as the Houthis) and the Shia militias in Iraq. These first three of the four war aims were articulated by both Trump’s negotiators (as an ultimatum) a day or two before the war and by Trump himself during his television address to announce the commencement of the war.

Since the last two of those ultimatums would represent an unconditional surrender that no sovereign government would accept, during his TV address to the nation, Trump added one more war aim: regime change.

The US failed to achieve a single one of these aims. In fact, it failed to secure even a single operational victory that might have brought any of them close. In the final analysis, this failure was a result of Iran’s missile and drone capacity. The US military failed to suppress Iran’s ability to fire these weapons. In turn, this allowed Tehran to wage a countervalue war to inflict economic damage on US allies in the region and, most of all, to shut the Strait of Hormuz, which effectively sanctioned Planet Earth, raising the possibility that an energy crisis would eventually manifest and trigger a global economic catastrophe.

Iran was also able to hit US military assets in the region, damaging its bases and destroying virtually irreplaceable and hugely expensive radars and an AWACS plane. In turn, this made its countervalue strikes even more effective.

A map showing the locations of US-Israeli strikes on Iran (blue) and the Iranian responses (red). Hat tip: Policy Tensor

Thus, Washington was forced to relent and agree to a ceasefire during which negotiations toward a peace deal would take place. Crucially, President Trump’s official communiqué on the matter said that the US had “received a 10-point proposal from Iran, and believe it is a workable basis on which to negotiate.”

What were those 10 points that would form the basis of negotiations? Versions differed (perhaps because of the translation issues), but most settled upon the list below, taken from the Wall Street Journal.

Clearly, this was a list hugely in Iran’s favour, but the US agreed to make it the basis of negotiations. Almost immediately after, President Trump appeared in social media comments to renege on this promise, while Israel continued its war in Lebanon, even expanding it to include strikes on Beirut. Both sides exchanged fire for several weeks, albeit with far lower intensity.

Eventually, we reached the beginning of our retelling of the story: the US signing the Islamabad MOU, which was hugely favourable to Iran, preserving almost all of the above 10 points, and which President Trump admitted he had done because of the risk of a serious energy crisis.

Dire Strait

Yet after the MOU was signed, exactly the same thing happened. Almost straight away President Trump appeared to be seeking to attain his original war aims over the negotiating table, even as he had failed to do so over the battlefield, and after having (for a second time, and this time in writing) conceded Iran’s position as the basis of negotiations.

Crucial to the US tactics was an attempt to unravel Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz. If this could be achieved, then Iran would lose by far its greatest point of leverage in negotiations. Washington would have been able to negotiate at leisure, slowly crushing the Iranian economy with sanctions and, potentially, further air attacks.

Therefore, it attempted a range of schemes, both between the ceasefire agreement and the signing of the MOU, and after the MOU was signed. The most prominent of these was the naval blockade of the entire Persian Gulf. The most recent was the attempt to manage shipping by the so-called Oman Route (i.e., away from the Iranian-designated route that travelled close to the Iranian shore next to the Island of Hormuz) with US Navy and Air Force cover.

If the Multipolarity Brief could see what was happening, you can bet your bottom rial that Tehran understood exactly what was going on. Eventually, it decided to enforce the red line, attacking ships using the Oman Route. The US responded, and here we are. This is what the current leg of the war is about. Much as it is funny to think that the US is attempting the same failed strategy of war to force open a Strait that was open before the US failed using the same strategy first time around, it is a serious matter. This is a zero-sum game. Either Iran will secure control of the Strait or it won’t. There is no half-pregnant woman in this final battle. As Anusar Farooqui, hedge fund CEO, geostrategy analyst under the Policy Tensor moniker, and friend of Multipolarity, has succinctly put it: “Iran has put down all the chips. Everything is now on the line.”

This, then, is the framework through which we must view the ongoing conflict. But what about the prognosis? Who is likely to come out on top?

The strategic calculus, both military and economic, remains unchanged. The US has not brought any wunderwaffen into the theatre in the last four weeks. It has not devised a new winning strategy. All it has is the same means of attacking as last time around, only this time without the discombobulating effects of being able to fire the first shots. It is therefore difficult to imagine a scenario in which the USAF will be able to suppress Iran’s missiles and drones. And, given the increasingly obvious shortage of air defence interceptors, they cannot be reliably intercepted once fired.

Furthermore, pace Professor Robert Pape, who has suggested that the most recent US attacks look exactly like the attacks one would expect as the prelude to an American ground assault, the US does not have the manpower or materiel for such a campaign. Even ignoring the difficulties of staging and supplying such a force in a contested area, the US simply does not have the chops to achieve a strategic victory on the ground. In April, the Multipolarity Brief crunched the numbers.

And what would a more limited incursion achieve? It would surely do yet more damage to Iranian infrastructure and its economy. But would occupying a small chunk of the Iranian coastline stop Iran from firing drones and cruise missiles at ships? No. Would it end the bombardment of US bases and allies in the region? No.

Professor Pape is a serious academic who has shown some predictive capacity during this war so far. As well he might: he literally wrote the book on strategic bombing as a tool of regime change. Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine him being correct that the most recent air attacks are shaping the battlefield for a land campaign, if only because it could hope to achieve so little (beyond significant US casualties).

The lay of the land for a US invasion. Challenging.

Furthermore, the balance of resolve still strongly favours Iran. The stated US aim is regime change, and it is possible that Israel would rather like full state dissolution (doing so much damage and sowing so much chaos that the Iranian state breaks up into warring political and ethnic factions, per the Yinon Plan). Therefore, Iran has the balance of resolve in its favour. It is difficult to imagine any pain it would not suffer in order to survive. This in turn means that Tehran has escalation dominance. In many ways, we should be grateful that Iran can shut down the Strait. This way, it can inflict economic pain without having to destroy the energy infrastructure of the Gulf itself. The Strait can be swiftly reopened; destroyed wells and terminals take much longer to bring back online. Yet make no mistake: these options, as well as targeting the region’s electricity generation and desalination plants, remain very much on the table as Iranian escalatory options.

In summary: the US cannot realistically hope to prevent the missiles and drones from being fired, and cannot intercept them in sufficient numbers once they are, and therefore cannot stop Iran from damaging Washington’s Gulf allies or shutting the Strait. It cannot coerce Iran to its point of view today any more than it has been able to in the last five months. If the US has successes, Iran has a lot more room to escalate in hugely damaging ways.

So do you think Trump has a chance of succeeding in this round? Me neither.

It’s Oil I Ever Wanted

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking. The inflection point into an energy crisis has not yet been reached. However, the three reasons for this are unlikely to be sustainable.

First, China has been able to reduce its imports by some 25%. As the Multipolarity Brief was early to predict, China, far from being uniquely vulnerable, had a unique ability to significantly cut oil imports. This has helped balance the global market.

China has dramatically reduced its oil imports (left) allowing the rest of Asia to bring its own imports back to normal levels. But for how long?

Secondly, the US has managed a herculean drawdown of its Strategic Petroleum Reserve, while running record oil exports. This means that the US has been, in effect, exporting its strategic reserves to balance the market.

Remember that the US Strategic Petroleum Reserves (bottom left) cannot go to zero: the salt caves in which they are stored need a certain level of crude to maintain structural integrity.

Yet China will eventually have to return to purchases. The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve will sooner rather than later run out. And at that point, the US Treasury can engage in all the futures market manipulation it wants: the prices will skyrocket, or shortages will manifest, and probably both.

Worse, in response to the latest US attacks, it looks increasingly as though Ansar Allah will close the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, which has been a key Strait of Hormuz route for Saudi oil. Multipolarity Podcast co-host Philip Pilkington estimates that this would account for some 60% of remaining Gulf crude flows. It would also mean the Suez Canal was effectively shut, affecting a broader range of traded goods.

The Multipolarity Brief has argued since mid-March that eventually the US would be forced to the table on Iran’s terms. We wrote that those terms would be so politically unpalatable in Washington that it would take significant economic pain for President Trump to swallow them. When the US signed the MOU, the Brief was unsurprised by the terms, but surprised they had been signed before the Trump Administration saw the whites of an oil crisis’s eyes. There is still time.

There is another alternative: that the Iranian terms remain unpalatable in Washington, which decides it would prefer to quietly call it a day while maintaining sanctions on Iran. At that point, it becomes possible that an alternative ending that the Multipolarity Brief has long highlighted as a possibility comes to pass: Iran makes bilateral deals with desperate sellers and desperate buyers of oil. This would likely involve a removal of US bases and forces from the region while even American allies buying Iranian oil through various means that avoid secondary sanctions.

Until the clouds roll in a little

After so many of our calls have been proved right in recent weeks, perhaps it’s time to get a paid sub to support our efforts. It only costs the equivalent of a couple of pints in a pub. And, as a bonus, paying subscribers get access to the secret club that are our premium podcast episodes, AND the entire back catalogue of premium podcasts. That’s worth eight bucks a month by itself. A belter of a deal, everybody agrees.

If you really can’t spare the price of two pints for a whole month’s content, then could do us a favour? Share this with somebody who would benefit from reading it. Or announce on social media how much you enjoyed it. Thank you in advance.

The Multipolarity Brief will return next week. In the meanwhile, more content will appear here. Until then, farewell and good luck.

Here at Multipolarity Towers, we’re in the process of building a Substack-first package that will allow subscribers complete access to our archive of paid episodes — in addition to any gated content on the Stack.

We’re going to be putting up two episodes a week. We hope this pace will also allow the interested to imbibe at leisure, rather than being conf…

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Then in the second half of a two-parter, we’re digging into the brewing Ukranian-Polish conflict. At the earliest days of the Ukraine War, around 2014, their Parliament passed a series of laws which granted official veteran status to a couple of Second World War military groups who had, shall we say, colourful pasts.

Recently, the Polish President withdrew the Polish White Eagle decoration from President Zelenskyy after Ukraine named an elite special unit after one such.

Hundreds of hatchets were buried after Communism, but now, despite the shock of the war, old animosities are bubbling to the surface. And with them, the facade of a united Europe begins to crack.

Here at Multipolarity Towers, we’re in the process of building a Substack-first package that will allow subscribers complete access to our archive of paid episodes — in addition to any gated content on the Stack.

We’re going to be putting up two episodes a week. We hope this pace will also allow the interested to imbibe at leisure, rather than being conf…

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In Buenos Aires in 1996, the mysterious American chess legend Bobby Fischer suddenly reappeared. Still brilliant, but an increasingly reclusive figure and now a fugitive from American law, Fischer had been out of the public eye for nearly half a decade, probably maintaining a relationship with a beautiful young Hungarian chess master, Zita Rajcsányi, in Budapest. But now he was returning — returning, he said, to save chess.

During his exile, Fischer had become ever more dispirited with the game. He believed that it was being destroyed by the way in which players, with the aid of modern computers, were able to learn perfect opening theory, and then simply memorise sequences of 20 or more opening moves. Instead of being the great contests of creativity, mental dexterity and intuition that Fischer believed chess should be, matches often started with players blitzing out memorised moves in response to memorised moves, 10, 15 or even 25 moves deep into the known ‘opening book’. Even novelties emerged from computer study and were then memorised, rather than being discovered — and disproved — over the board.

Bobby Fischer believed that he had a solution to this sterility. And now, in Buenos Aires, he was returning to public life to share it. Fischer explained a version of chess in which the pawns would be placed as they are in the standard rules, but the other pieces would take completely different, randomised positions on the back rank of the board for every game. There were three restrictions on the randomisation. First, the bishops had to be on opposite-coloured squares. Second, the king had to be between the two rooks. Third, the positions of white and black had to mirror each other.

One of the 960 potential starting positions in Fischer Random Chess.

This ‘constrained randomisation’ maintained the dynamics of chess, but multiplied the possible opening sequences to such an extent that learning them all was next to impossible. Thus, Fischer claimed, it would save the game from exhaustive rote memorisation, and instead force players to engage in the creative thinking that hethought made for the best chess games. This form of chess has since been called “Fischer Random Chess” (or, sometimes, “Chess960” because the randomisation allows for 960 novel starting positions). Fischer Random is not widely played among the public, but is extremely popular with elite players.

Interestingly, when Fischer Random was first introduced, some thought that it might even give human players an edge over computers. In 1967 a computer program called Mac Hack IV had already managed to beat a rated human player in a tournament setting. But it took until 1996-97 for a computer to beat a World Chess Champion, when IBM’s Deep Blue famously defeated Garry Kasparov — who was equally famously angered and shaken by the experience. Since that point, chess has lost a lot of its mystique: today a smartphone can crush even the best human players. In 1996, however, some thought that the random element introduced by Fischer might allow man to once more dominate the machine.

The exact opposite happened. It turned out that randomising the board at the beginning of the game actually gave an even greater advantage to the computer. It seems that being able to memorise perfect opening play at least allows humans to match computers for a certain number of moves, and Fischer Random Chess removed that advantage. Furthermore, while humans are better than computers at pattern recognition, allowing great players to navigate certain positions intuitively, the randomisation took that edge away, too. This increased emphasis on creativity, which Fischer had designed Chess960 to re-inject into the game, instead gave computer programs — especially neural network evaluation — a massive advantage because the rate at which they could examine, and discard or select, novelties on the fly was almost infinitely faster than the best human performance.

The Materialist Dialectics of War

As a human endeavour, war seems to go through a periodic cycle of order and chaos — or perhaps we would better say periods when macro-war dominates and periods where micro-war dominates. Consider the Roman legions as the most obvious example of macro-war. The legions often found themselves up against ferocious warriors with renowned fighting ability. The legionnaires were, on the other hand, simple Roman citizens who were called up in times of war. The Roman legions were able to beat the fierce, often battle-hardened opponents because of their excellent, standardised equipment, their strict discipline, and their orderly battlefield tactics. This is macro-war at its best. The barbarians can be thought of as great entrepreneurs of the battlefield who would win easily in one-on-one fights against single legionnaires. But with exemplary organisation, the legionnaires became the legion — which is greater than the sum of its parts — and the large macro-formation can roll over the battlefield and crush any opponent.

The Roman Legion’s discipline, tactical and logistical superiority, and cohesion allowed it to defeat armies whose soldiers were man for man more skilled or otherwise better warriors. An example of macro-war.

Many of you will have heard the quote, “Quantity has a quality all of its own”. Everybody thinks that Stalin said this, but in fact the quote can be traced to a 1979 newsletter by the American defence analyst Thomas A. Callaghan. The reason for the misattribution can be explained by the source: it comes directly from Friedrich Engels’ early attempt to produce a scientific account of Marxist dialectical materialism: *Anti-Dühring*. Here is the full quote:

As we can see, Engels’ source for his “law of the transformation of quantity into quality” is none other than Napoleon Bonaparte, the general who arguably reintroduced a new form of macro-war into Europe in the early 19th century. The Frenchmen that Napoleon and Engels refer to were not more skilled than the fearsome Mamelukes, but they were more organised. The Mamelukes were well-suited to fighting other somewhat disorganised militaries, but once they came up against Napoleon’s Grande Armée they were crushed by sheer quantity and organisational power.

Napoleon’s tactical genius and the Grande Armee’s sheer scale was the ultimate expression of macro war. Painting: Battle of Austerlitz, 2 December 1805, François Gérard, c. 1810

The Grande Armée provided the template for the great industrial-scale wars of the 19th and, especially, the 20th century. First, the American Civil War was ultimately determined by the greater economic and organisational power of the Union forces—although, at this point there was still a large part to be played for the Confederate entrepreneur. Then, the First World War, outside of the aces of the skies, seemed to remove human agency almost completely. And then the Second World War was also a war ultimately won on logistics, especially the logistics of the great Soviet Army (while not as grinding as the First World War, most of the stories of heroics that won the day are probably exaggerated in their importance).

Fischer Random War

Micro-war has never disappeared. Rather it has been contained to various types of war. Guerrilla wars of the sort fought by the Cuban Revolutionaries under Fidel Castro or the Irish Republican Army are forms of micro-war. They take place in specific environments that make macro-war irrelevant. The same is true of many of the policing-style operations that the United States has undertaken in recent years. The Vietnam War was an attempt on the part of the Americans to apply a hybrid doctrine of macro-war to a set of circumstances that was better suited to micro-war. What all these wars have taught us is that, in the era where technology allows for advanced forms of micro-war, it is very difficult to occupy territory in an area where the inhabitants would prefer that you leave.

Micro-war has not been rendered irrelevant by the rise of the industrial economy. But it has been rendered subordinate. At the end of the day, if great powers go to war and open the battlefield up to no-holds-barred destruction then we assume that the rules of macro-war will win the day.

An FPV drone operator, somewhere in Ukraine.

Yet the recent rise of drone warfare, especially in Ukraine, has raised the prospect that macro-war might be winnable by applying the principles of micro-war. Throughout the Ukraine war the Western-backed Ukrainians have tried to engage in heroic operations that might turn the tide of the war. The latest attempt to win the war through micro-war tactics is the Ukrainian drone campaign against Russia. Drones seem to lend themselves to micro-war strategy—it seems on its face that a skilled entrepreneur or team can use this weaponry to defeat much larger opponents.

Yet this has not proved to be the case. The Russian war machine rolls on and on. The Ukraine war is definitively a war of supplies and logistics. Why? Here we return to Fischer Random Chess. Recall that by randomising the board the play of the game becomes much more intuitive and creative. When we watch videos of the Ukrainian battlefield, we see much the same thing: as the average soldier experiences it, the new technologies have made the battlefield much more intuitive and open to creative solutions. Soldiers repurpose shotguns filled with birdshot to take down drones, for example; so-called “cope cages” of ever-increasing sophistication are built on top of vehicles. What these new technologies have done is introduce a level of randomness into the battlefield that allows for a lot of creativity. We might call it a form of Fischer Random War.

A Russian tank shows the rapid process of creative innovation and evolution in response to a revolutionary warfighting technology — in this case, the drone. This ridiculous looking covering is an evolution of the original cope cage, with the porcupine spikes expected to offer better protection against anti-armour drones.

But now consider what we discovered when we examined Fischer Random Chess when confronted by computer programs: the additional creativity ultimately gave the computer the advantage. Consider what this means for the human player. The player will experience a game of Fischer Random Chess against a computer as a much more creative and random process. He will be left to rely on his wits. Meanwhile, however, the computer is just grinding away, exploring possible moves, calculating countermoves, mapping out strategies. The player may feel empowered, but this feeling is an illusion: it simply shows that he is less prepared against the big, organised machine that sits in front of him.

It seems that the same is true for Fischer Random War. To the average soldier the battlefield may feel like a reversion to micro-war, where rapid decision-making and individual entrepreneurship are rewarded. No doubt this is true in terms of the individual soldiers’ survival. But zooming out reveals that the innovation merely tilts the probabilities of advantage in the most minute of ways — and that these probabilities tilt back when the other side introduces a counter-innovation.

Meanwhile, the macro-war grinds on, determined simply by logistics, supply lines, organisation and, probably to an extent that is far less than people think, strategy. Creativity will not save man from the grinding persistence of the machine — and perhaps it is in this that we see the tragedy of modern warfare most clearly.

Agree? Disagree? Share your views in the comments section. Don’t be shy.

If you would like to support the effort we put in to produce all this content, feel free to get a paid sub. It only costs the equivalent of a couple of pints in a pub. And, as a bonus, paying subscribers get access to the secret club that are our premium podcast episodes, AND the entire back catalogue of premium podcasts. Elsewhere, we charge eight bucks alone for that. So a Substack paid sub is a belter of a deal.

If you really can’t spare the price of two pints for a whole month’s content, then could do us a favour? Share this with somebody who would benefit from reading it. Or announce on social media how much you enjoyed it. Thank you in advance.

More content will appear here. Until then, farewell and good luck.

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Europe is back. Or so it seems. Several news items emerged (or, in one case, erupted) in recent weeks that suggest a greater assertiveness and confidence among European leaders. Individually, they do not appear to amount to much. Yet together, they suggest something more: Europe thinks it’s winning.

What’s happened? Let’s look at the facts, one at a time.

First, the EU is preparing to impose a range of trade restrictions against China. The messaging is classic Eurocratese. Talk of strengthening the EU’s trade defense “toolbox” (‘anti-dumping’, ‘anti-subsidy measures’, ‘safeguards’). Of the EU giving itself a “diversification” and “resilience” tool to reduce excessive dependence on single suppliers (AKA China) in strategic sectors. Of a new “overcapacity instrument” to tackle ‘systemic distortions’ (inspired by tools like the US Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act, which gives the US President the power to investigate and impose retaliatory tariffs or trade restrictions on foreign countries engaging in "unjustifiable, unreasonable, or discriminatory" trade practices that burden U.S. commerce).

There is also the Industrial Accelerator Act in the works, which might include “Buy European” preferences in public procurement. The EU is also looking to tighten rules on what it sees as ‘high-risk suppliers’, one of those nebulous terms that can capture anybody that ‘we don’t like’.

What all this boils down to in plain English is putting up trade barriers against China. Such barriers would likely involve sector-wide quotas or tariffs on imports in affected sectors like chemicals or cars, rather than slow product-by-product cases. Given that China could be expected to retaliate against such measures, and given that it beat the US in a trade war just last year, this is a bold move.

Then, at the beginning of the month, there was the meeting of the E3 nations (the UK, France and Germany) with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. This meeting produced a new peace proposal that was… no different from any of the others. A ceasefire before negotiations. A demand that Ukraine join NATO (“[Ukraine has] a sovereign right to choose its own security arrangements.”) The deployment of a multinational (read: NATO) military force in Ukraine after the war. Reparations to be paid by Russia.

Moscow has rejected all of these demands on multiple occasions in the past. It was almost as though it was designed to be rejected.

The leaders of the E3 plus Ukraine. Sir Keir Starmer, host, no longer lives at the house pictured.

Then, there was the unseemly blowup between those two most unseemly of politicians, Donald Trump and Giorgia Meloni, over a photo op. For days afterwards, accusations about who said what to whom, and who wanted what from whom, spat back and forth across social media like excrement between quarrelling chimpanzees at the zoo. It was too shameful to justify going into more detail, but as of today, Ms. Meloni is still raising the issue in interviews. Not that long ago, the Europeans, including the present Italian prime minister, were pussyfooting around President Trump and calling him ‘Daddy’. Now they’re sassing him and picking fights on social media.

On 17 June, France said that it was prepared to use its veto at the UN Security Council to present sanctions against Iran being lifted (a promise to do so is part of the MOU, which this Brief covered in detail in previous issues) if the final peace deal did not satisfy the EU. One might wonder what the EU or France has to do with this, given the absence of serious leverage they have over the situation. But there are indeed the French, injecting themselves into the high-stakes, cross-Hormuz diplomacy currently underway.

Finally, President Zelensky threatened to take action against Belarus unless it dismantled telecommunications systems on the country’s border with Ukraine, which he claimed were being used to zero in on targets for Russian drones. He also demanded that Belarus stop sending refined oil products (diesel, gasoline/petrol, etc.) to Russia (something that would be illegal under Belarusian law, given the free trade agreements it has signed with Russia). Whatever one thinks of the validity of these complaints, the fact is that President Zelensky is unlikely to have threatened to open up a new front in the war without approval from somewhere in the West, almost certainly from one or more of the aforementioned E3.

The EUnbearable Lightness of Being

What on earth is going on? How to make sense of these events? And in understanding them, can we create a framework that would allow us to understand what’s likely to happen from here?

In short: Europe thinks it’s winning. From the vantage point of the Euro Elite Blob, all they can see, in whichever direction they look, is win after win from foreground to horizon.

Viktor Orban lost the Hungarian election, a major victory in the EU’s war against conservative populism. Even better, his successor, while branded as a conservative populist himself, is governing as a standard, neoliberal, socially progressive EU Mark I leader. He has caved on every single EU demand in his negotiations to free up funding that Brussels had frozen during the Orban Administration. Pride flags fly in Budapest. The Orban-era pro-family and Hungary First industrial policy is being dismantled in double-quick time. Happy days.

Pride Flags hang from buildings in Budapest. A marked change from last year, when such displays were banned.

Meanwhile, the newspapers are filled with stories about how Ukrainian drone attacks on Moscow and elsewhere in Russia are causing economic and political havoc for the Kremlin. Whatever the truth of this, the narrative is that the tide has turned.

The US has signed an MOU with Iran to end hostilities, bringing two benefits for the EU. First, a reopening of Hormuz forestalls any energy crisis (which President Trump himself conceded would have arrived had the Strait remained shut). Secondly, a much diminished Trump Administration in foreign affairs.

Coupled with the approaching midterm elections, in which the Democrats are broadly expected to regain control of at least one of the houses in the US Congress, it seems that President Trump will have far less room to break with old Atlanticist norms from now on.

Polymarket gives Democrats an 84% chance of retaking the House of Representatives

It is important to understand the mindset — or perhaps it would be better to say the preferred medium-term future — of the Atlanticists who control the commanding heights of the EU bureaucracy at both the national and supranational levels. They believe that Europe is best served with heavy US involvement; in an arrangement whereby Washington guarantees European security and deters potential enemies and rivals in return for Europe subordinating its own strategic interests to America’s.

What these Euro-Atlanticists want, therefore, is for Washington to double down on a full-court press against Russia — fresh sanctions, new weapons, the whole nine yards — in an effort to finally (this time, comrades!) bring Moscow to its knees. And in return, Europe will accept the economic damage that will come its way for taking the US side on containing China.

And this, they now believe, is in the offing.

In their victory in the Hungarian election they have removed not only a major impediment to the policy of maximalist pressure and negotiating position vis-à-vis Russia. They have also removed a blockage to engaging in what is likely to become a tit-for-tat trade war against China. Viktor Orban, among other things, believed that Europe could benefit from economic engagement with China, and had worked hard to position Hungary as a Chinese gateway into Europe. BYD, the Chinese EV maker, chose Hungary as the location for its first passenger vehicle factory in Europe.

In the US defeat to Iran, and after the forthcoming midterm elections, the EU sees that the Trump Administration is likely to have far less room for manoeuvre. Indeed, perhaps the EU could coordinate, directly or by coincidental alignment, with the Democrats to scupper Trump’s foreign policy aims, make life more difficult for him, gain leverage over him, and perhaps help get a Democrat or at least an establishment Republican into the White House next time.

At the very least, a much weakened Trump vulnerable to such games would surely be more likely to swing behind the EU on Russia. Especially if he is flooded with press reports of Moscow burning and about how Ukraine is now winning. And doubly so if Brussels makes moves likely to please Washington, such as lifting trade barriers against Beijing.

The Euro-elites suddenly see the route opening up before them: a pathway that leads away from the dark times — of war, and energy blockades; transatlantic fissures and geopolitical instability — toward the sunlit uplands of total victory over Russia and containment of China; a return of the days when the Atlanticist duopoly could run the world, hectoring less civilised peoples about gay rights, democracy and economic correctness; the EU regulating and the US knocking heads together. They can smell it. And it sure is sweet.

This is why they feel confident enough to throw shade at Trump on social media. To reaffirm already rejected Ukraine War demands. To threaten to scupper Trump’s Iran peace deal at the UNSC. To start a trade war with China. To support threats to open a new front in the Ukraine War.

Europocalypse Now!?

Now remind me: what comes after hubris again?

First, when it comes to dealing with China on matters of trade, can the EU not remember as far back as last year? That was when China handily forced the US to back down in a trade war. It was also when China rapidly brought the EU itself to heel over the Netherlands’ decision to expropriate Nexperia, a chipmaker, from its Chinese owners due to ‘security concerns’ (in fact, at the behest of the US on pain of secondary sanctions). In response, China restricted EU access to semiconductors that various European industries — including their automakers — needed to survive. The EU backed down at the double.

The EU’s assumption is likely to be that the Chinese will see the rightness of the European cause, or at least respond in a measured and tolerable way so as not to lose the EU market altogether. Well, maybe. Or maybe not. Because of its history, and what it sees as the Century of Humiliation, it does not take kindly to European powers or the US applying trade pressure. It is more likely to act aggressively in the face of such actions than in other areas of diplomacy or conflict.

China being forced to sign the first of many unequal trade treaty during the Century of Humiliation, on HMS Cornwallis moored in Nanjing Harbour.

Secondly, the Iran crisis is far from over. Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is nowhere near peacetime levels. Petroleum reserves are at razor-thin margins, and, importantly, are still being drained. China is yet to return as an oil buyer, after helping to balance the global market by cutting its imports by 25% (as the Multipolarity Brief said it would be able to do). And importantly, a final peace deal has not been inked. Within the last week, Iran and the US have exchanged fire; only today, J.D. Vance seemed to suggest in an interview that the MOU was a ruse to give the oil market some respite.

Where’s my oil glut, dude? Outbound Hormuz traffic is not exactly back to its pre-war levels.

Thirdly, while it is true that Ukraine is scoring both tactical and operational victories in its long-range and medium-range drone strikes (against infrastructure in Moscow, Crimea and other Russian cities, and against supply lines in Zaporozhia and the Donbass, respectively), Russian forces have still almost completed the capture of Konstantinovka and Lyman, two important cities in the battle for the Donbass, this summer. Optically, it has achieved this far more rapidly than it did, say, the capture of Pokrovsk a year or so ago. And in the meantime, the war of attrition continues grinding — and not in Ukraine’s favour.

But there is a worse scenario here. How long before the Russians refuse to play the “we can hit your infrastructure, but you can’t hit ours because Article 5” game? Multipolarity does not as a rule venture into Kremlinology, but it can certainly wonder about the response of the UK press, people and political class if a third country was providing a military with which Britain was at war the weapons, intelligence, technicians and training it needed to hit homes, energy infrastructure and train stations in mainland Britain. It would not be pretty.

Furthermore, the fractious relations between the US and the EU — and especially President Trump’s apparent personal resentment that the Europeans did not sufficiently help him in the Iran War, and scuppered his efforts to reach a deal with Russia — open the possibility that the US might not rush to defend Europe in the event of a Russian attack. Is it really beyond Donald Trump to say “You didn’t help us in Iran, and we tried to make peace in Ukraine, but you stopped it. This is your problem now”? The fact that this is not beyond the realms of possibility opens the greatest of all prizes for Moscow: the de facto end of NATO in the face of a Russian attack.

The fact the Kremlin has restrained from hitting drone and missile factories in the EU and Britain so far is most likely a sign of the potential for escalation into the nuclear theatre. But this should be a deeply sobering truth for EU policymakers, not a licence to act with abandon. As Matthew Blackburn wrote for Responsible Statecraft this week, “If Moscow concludes that its restraint… is being weaponized by Kyiv to inflict deep, humiliating costs on the Russian heartland, its calculus will shift. Instead of going for Ukrainian infrastructure, Moscow may seek to redress the asymmetry in deep strikes and restore deterrence by targeting the true source of Ukraine’s new capacities: European logistical hubs and the manufacturing facilities.”

Fourthly, Trump may be weakened, but he still has significant leverage. The EU is even more reliant on the US for its security now than it was in 2022. That might seem difficult to believe, given it has spent those four and a half years talking up the need to rearm in the face of the Terrifying Russia Threat. Yet, it is true: it has sent so much materiel to Ukraine that its magazines for certain crucial armaments are almost empty. Furthermore, the EU is now massively reliant on the US for energy (chart below). Controlling Europe’s energy and security gives Trump plenty of leverage. It is likely that the EU is gambling that the political and strategic costs of using this leverage would be far too great; however, sensible leaders take into account the existence of such realities when deciding whether or not to sass another leader over a selfie.

Does Europe’s economy seem well positioned to cope with the sort of exogenous shock that a trade war with China would create? Or an energy crisis because Hormuz doesn’t open as quickly as futures markets seem to be expecting? Do Europe’s politicians and political systems seem like they’d cope well with a nuclear crisis with Russia? As the aforementioned Responsible Statecraft article noted: “Even a limited Russian reprisal strike on European soil would severely test its collective political will… Instead of a weak Russia making hollow threats, Europe would be gripped by panic as its leaders scrambled to respond without crossing the nuclear threshold.” What confidence do we have in Kaja Kallas, Friedrich Merz, Ursula von der Leyen, Andy Burnham and Emmanuel Macron to manage such a crisis? And what if they push Trump too hard, frustrate him too much, and he decides to cut off the gas, or withdraw American military security for good? What then? Or, more likely, what if it turns out that the Democrats just aren’t as into Europe as they used to be? What if they use nicer words than that frightful hillbilly Vice President, but don’t really do much, because they’re all focussed on containing China now?

What if all these things happen?

The governments of France, Germany and the United Kingdom are all historically unpopular, lest we forget.

As the Greek wrote: “Hubris, when it blooms, bears a grain-head of ruinous folly, from which it reaps an all-weeping harvest.”

Until the clouds roll in a little

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But after the occupation of the Ruhr and the abdication of the Kaiser, what else could the Mullahs possibly put on their shopping list?

We’ll be picking through the carcrash, looking for signs of life in DC.

Meanwhile, to cement his lousy week Donald got into a love tiff with Georgia Meloni at the G7. Was this a passing fugue of Italian passion? The flamethrower of a woman scorned? Or was it the beginning of the end of what we’ve dubbed the ‘Euroslopulists’ – fake populists kept on a long-short leash by Brussels and the European Central Bank?

Finally, Donald Trump – remember him – managed to scoop the world’s press to the news that Keir Starmer would resign as British Prime Minister, being sure to spell his name wrong as a final boot in the teeth.

Sir Keir has evoked the kind of visceral loathing among Brits normally reserved for child killers and queue jumpers. But who will they have left to blame when his affable dimwit successor blows up in half the time?

Three’s a Crowd

There’s this famous meme in which a good-looking man and woman, seemingly enamoured with each other, are both saying “I consent.” The problem is that there’s a third person in the equation: a sour-faced, morbidly obese, blue-haired woman. And she’s saying “I don’t!” Of course, it’s really nothing to do with her, but I think most of us chaps have been in enough similar situations to know that it somehow always ends up having something to do with her.

This is exactly the position in which the US finds itself now. Washington wants a deal — after all, US President Donald Trump admitted that the Strategic Petroleum Reserve was down to just four weeks, after which all hell would break loose — and, given the goodies Uncle Donny is willing to offer, Iran wants a deal too. But there’s somebody else who must consent.

Within less than 48 hours of the Islamabad Memorandum being signed, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) declared the Strait of Hormuz shut again. Why? Because Israel and Lebanon had been included in the ceasefire agreement — in Clause 1 no less — and yet Israel had shown no signs of easing off on their campaign in Lebanon. Beirut was clobbered again, and the IRGC angrily pulled up the drawbridge.

Israel clearly hates the MOU and wouldn’t mind fouling up the whole thing. Why? Even if Iran verifiably gives up its nuclear weapons programme, an Iran that maintains its ties with its proxies, that is de facto given control of the Hormuz weapon, that gains through its frozen sovereign assets, sanctions relief and the $300 billion Development and Reconstruction fund the means to grow GDP at double-digit rates in the foreseeable future, and has something approaching hegemony over its western neighbours, obviously poses a threat to Israel.

But what can be done? The accounts that have been made available so far show that the Israelis pushed for this war more than any other party. They bet on red, but when the wheel stopped spinning, the ball was sitting on double zero. Israel would like the US to carry on regardless. Even though there is no military solution to Iran’s missile threat, and even though the world is nearing economic catastrophe as long as the Strait is closed, Israel wants the US to keep going. Because every bit of damage done on Iran is positive. And if enough damage is done, then maybe, just maybe, Iran will turn into a kind of large version of Syria or Libya — a pit of crushing human misery so wracked with strife, chaos, dysfunction, violence, civil war and poverty that it is unable to pose any risk to anybody. This is Israel’s Plan B.

US Vice President JD Vance admitted as much in an interview last week. He said that there were “people in Israeli society who would like to see Iran turn into… basically a failed state with 90 million people.” That’s easy when you’re playing with the house’s money — when it’s the US draining its magazine and leaving itself vulnerable to other threats, and when it’s other countries that must deal with the refugees, the regional instability, and additional terror risk, not to mention the economic catastrophe.

But given it seems that the US is well aware of the military and strategic realities on the ground, Bibi Netanyahu is unlikely to get the US to go along with this — or at least not until the US has the dubious pleasure of a President Lindsey Graham.

Of course, it could all be an effort to give Netanyahu an excuse for calling a halt to the war in Lebanon: “The Americans made me do it.” Yet it still shows how fragile the agreement is. Israel does not like it and knows it has a means of disrupting it: the ongoing invasion of Lebanon. It all depends on the extent to which the Trump Administration is willing to bring the Israelis to heel. And on that question, prospects do not seem hopeful. Recall that in August last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Trump appeared to have reached at least a modus vivendi at their meeting in Anchorage, Alaska (and, the Russians claim, an agreement on how to move forward to a peace deal). Yet Trump could not control the Ukrainians or Europeans, who managed to scupper the prospects of any deal, and here we are, almost a year later, still nowhere near a peace. It would seem that Israel has more agency in this matter than Ukraine.

Persian Slights

Trump, of course, does not help himself. First, there was the claim that Iran would have to cut ties with Hezbollah as part of any deal. That is highly unlikely to happen. Iran’s network of proxy forces in the Middle East have acted as the main way by which it projects military power across the region. However, they have also acted as a kind of forward deterrent: an attack on Iranian interests could lead to responses by Iraqi militias, Hezbollah, the Houthis or some other group. This allowed Iran to protect its interests without direct armed conflict. Hezbollah has always been the primo asset among this network. The idea that Iran would give this up for relief on sanctions that could always be reimposed on some trumped-up charges is for the birds.

Then there was the claim that Iran had agreed to allow International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors back into the country: untrue, said Iran. Or that the release of Iran’s frozen sovereign funds would be specifically and exclusively used to buy food from the US. The Iranian foreign ministry also rejected this, but with an acid little statement that is worth sharing just for what it shows about the Iranian attitude at present. “We find it interesting that the goal of the war, which was announced as the destruction of Iranian civilisation, has been reduced to enriching American farmers. Iran’s frozen funds are accessible so that Iran can freely use them as needed.”

Finally, there has been Trump’s claim that tolls would not be imposed on the Strait of Hormuz, despite the MOU explicitly giving Iran the right to do just that. Iran released a joint statement with Oman saying that the two foreign ministries would continue their dialogue to reach an agreement on the future administration of the Strait and the “services that will be provided in this regard and the costs associated with them.”

Perhaps Iran would do well to humour Mr Trump just a little. It is vitally important to Iran that he can sell what amount to surrender terms at home. The problem is that the neoconservatives in the US seem to have an extremely bad — and in this case dangerous — case of cognitive dissonance. Their entire worldview was based on the irresistibility of American power; the idea that if America willed it enough, the military could make it happen. They could swallow defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan, which were a matter of being outlasted. The initial war was a success, but the US simply didn’t have the stomach for a long-term occupation.

Iran is something different. It is an outright defeat in a war. It is not sandal-wearing goat herders who, through their willingness to tolerate 100-to-1 loss ratios over decades, were able to wait for public opinion in America to force its troops home. This time, the US military went toe to toe with an adversary and — there’s no way to dress this up — lost. It created many explosions in Iran and killed lots of Iranian leaders, but it did not break the government’s command and control of the military, or suppress, let alone destroy, that military’s capacity to fire drones and missiles. This allowed Iran to do significant damage to US bases and allies in the region, and, most importantly, sanction planet Earth by shutting the Strait of Hormuz. The risk of global economic catastrophe and the fact the US had no military solution to the missile and drone issue forced it to sign an MOU on Iran’s terms in order to secure an end to the war.

The problem with the neocons isn’t just that this is a national humiliation, as losing a war is. The problem is that it at the same time destroys their entire worldview. There’s visible anger, disbelief and confusion. Such emotions are unlikely to allow for calm, cold-eyed conflict resolution. An excellent example (as ever) was the mad ravings of Lindsey Graham, who suggested that the US might just have to take the Strait by force if Iran doesn’t do exactly that Lindsay Graham wants. This is dangerous for both negotiations and the long-term resilience of whatever deal might be agreed.

Yet, as explained above, Tehran is plainly rebuffing every claim of positivity that President Trump and JD Vance make. It has even gone so far as to say on the record that the deal to end the war is “a declaration of US defeat.” This prompted Murtaza Hussain to tell Drop Site News that for decades after the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese still treated the US as the “lesser party” in private interactions, and Iran now treats threats from the US with similar derision.

Crude Awakening

The problem for the US is that there is little way out of this. Restarting the war would rapidly see the same military-strategic realities impose themselves. Unilaterally leaving the theatre would be worse than no deal: Iran would be free to impose its will on its neighbours and would likely end up doing bilateral deals with desperate oil buyers. While oil prices are plunging — now priced in the 70s per barrel for the first time since the beginning of the war — there is no real physical basis for this yet. See the chart below to get an idea of the scale of the great increase in Strait traffic. Not as impressive as the Narrative suggests. More a case of the traffic jam slowly clearing than a return to business as usual. With reserves at wafer-thin levels and Chinese buyers still to return to the market, it seems possible that if negotiations don’t go perfectly, and both sides don’t fulfil their ends of the bargain at the right time, the crude market could still find itself short. And at that stage, we might see the short squeeze to end all short squeezes on the oil futures market.

Ultimately, Washington would be well advised to see the deal in a positive light. Although Iran is right in that it is a declaration of US defeat, it can still lead to a positive outcome for the US. An Iran that is growing economically and is able to trade internationally is an Iran with a stake in the system. It is a country less likely to be a source of regional instability or global friction. It is a country which the US could ultimately do business with, as Vietnam was in time.

Until the clouds roll in a little

Guys, seriously, I think we’ve done a good job covering the Iran War. We’ve been almost completely right, and for the right reasons. That’s because we, unlike the mainstream media — who are really the ones who should be doing this — make great efforts to do proper research and analysis. Could we therefore ask you to make a small effort to subscribe for free right now. This helps us a lot, and even though it only takes you ten seconds, we very much appreciate it.

But realistically, after so many of our calls have been proved right, perhaps it’s time to get a paid sub to support our efforts. It only costs the equivalent of a couple of pints in a pub. And, as a bonus, paying subscribers get access to the secret club that are our premium podcast episodes, AND the entire back catalogue of premium podcasts. That’s worth eight bucks a month by itself. A belter of a deal, everybody agrees.

If you really can’t spare the price of two pints for a whole month’s content, then could do us a favour? Share this with somebody who would benefit from reading it. Or announce on social media how much you enjoyed it. Thank you in advance.

The Multipolarity Brief will return for Part 2 on Friday, and then again next week. But between now and then, more content will appear hear. Until then, farewell and good luck.

Last week on these pages, T.P. Huang wrote a masterful tour d’horizon of the Chinese tech industry: the major players; the differences between China and the US in terms of the way they see tech, and their goals for it; the dynamics of the tech war between the two sides. This week, he drills deeper, and looks toward the future: who will win the tech race; what are the main battlefields; why things in most segments of the tech industry are so much easier in China than the US; and what are the key Chinese developments in the sphere. Most importantly, This week’s story is about the world that an ill-considered Biden-era policy created. More essential reading.

In recent weeks, Huawei made an announcement that sent shockwaves through the tech world. It wasn’t a new smartphone, or laptop, or electric car. It was far more important than that. Huawei shared with the world its early work on a project that promises to revolutionise chip manufacture entirely – and in the process maintain gains even as other ways of making chips run into problems with quantum tunnelling. Huawei calls the process used in its new technology ‘Tau Scaling’.

Historically, chip makers have tried to make transistors smaller. Tau Scaling looks at the problem from the other end: achieving more compute using the same power draw. This is a must-have in the age of electricity-thirsty AI. Traditionally, more efficient and lower-cost chips are achieved through smaller transistors. Of course, manufacturers have long sought to achieve greater efficiency through other innovations like advanced 3D packaging of chips so that they are closer together and require less power. But Huawei is trying to revolutionise the very thinking of the semiconductor industry itself, moving it from the traditional metric of “Moore’s Law” (capacity doubles every year) to “Tau Scaling” (chips use less energy along a similarly exponential scale).

Recall that the ultimate goal of chip designers is to achieve the same performance at lower energy and financial cost. Bigger chips only matter in certain contexts. Take a look at the diagram below, from a Huawei presentation. The company thinks it can achieve a 1.4 nanometer level of chip efficiency (very good) without having to use a 1.4nm node process (very hard), by 2031.

It also believes it can achieve a 125x gain in AI supercomputer power over four years, through hard engineering work and efficiency gains at each step in the system construction.

This is not an eccentric goal. Today, the industry is all about total compute. Presentations from other AI system producers like Nvidia, Google and Alibaba all preach the same end goal: producing an ever-larger AI supercomputer that can train and/or run inference on AI models with the greatest efficiency. It all boils down to cycles per second and the electricity burned to produce them.

Modern AI models are too large to run on a single chip (for example, some require something like 3.4 terabytes). Performance improvements are therefore typically sought by linking chips together to achieve greater memory bandwidth and faster connections between the chips and memory. Most of the performance gains recently have come from faster chip-to-chip interconnections, plus linking more of them together into a kind of supercomputer (also known as Super Nodes). These are in turn linked together into an even bigger unit known as Super Clusters.

In Nvidia’s world, chips in their flagship Blackwell range are linked 72 at a time to create the industry standard ‘Blackwell NVL72’ rack. It costs $4 million to buy one of these racks. AI hyperscalers must link thousands of these racks together if they want to have a super data centre of the sort that could compete with the best in the world.But nine months ago, the hyperscalers started running into trouble — bigger trouble than is often understood. Electricity supply and supply chain problems have turned into major bottlenecks for the construction of data centres. Aside from AI chips, hyperscalers also need CPUs, memory chips, analog chips, printed circuit boards, optical fibres, optical transceivers, racks, cooling solutions, power chips, diesel generators, transformers and various other components. In short, a lot of complex and high-tech moving parts that all need to be in place.

The result, in the present component-scarce market, is that most builds are massively delayed.

China is not having the same issue with its AI data centre build-out. Why? It controls a large portion of the supply chain. It might not be fully self-sufficient in AI chips, CPUs or DRAMs, but it controls many of the industries that flow downstream of those components. The crisis in materials was so intense — rare earths in particular — that Jim Anderson, the CEO of Coherent, travelled to China with US President Donald Trump to try to secure access to indium and other rare earths that the company needed to build optical transceivers, which are vital for pulling together an AI system. Furthermore, China now generates more kWh of electricity per capita than most of the Western world, so that is not an issue for its capacity to build out data centres.

That’s the supply side question. But then there is the demand side. What do people want from AI? Where does it add value once it’s built?

If we line up all the top AI models on a benchmarking spectrum (see the chart above), we see that America undoubtedly leads at the high end. But China also has many models in the middle of the field. China’s most popular model, for instance, is Doubao, by ByteDance/TikTok. It has never been ranked on these lists, but you can see Qwen (by Alibaba), Kimi (by Moonshot), Mimi (by Xiaomi), DeepSeek, GLM (by Zai) and Minimax all in the top half of the above benchmark ranking. America is in command, but given the speed of progress, the best Chinese models are probably only six months behind.

Then there’s the question of revenue. In this context, the Chinese AI companies are much farther behind, because corporate China is much less willing to pay for AI. As a result, there is a large valuation difference between US and Chinese AI companies. Of course, US AI companies are also far more supported by Gulf nation sovereign wealth fund (SWF) money.

Personally, I don’t quite understand the significance of artificial general intelligence. The Silicon Valley obsession with a ‘thinking machine’ seems to get the real-world effects of this technology the wrong way round. The Chinese are not interested in reincarnating Buddha. They want to ship systems that have a practical use. In that context, it seems difficult to make the argument that being six months ahead in LLMs is something worth losing the semiconductor industry for.

In truth, LLMs are just one part — even if a huge part — of the overall AI strategy China is pursuing. While the world is fixated on AI, for China it is one part of a broader industrial strategy. China cannot spend as much capital on AI as American tech firms. This is because it also seeks to displace the US in energy, auto, chemicals, metallurgy, precision machine tools and the semiconductor industry. How could China possibly allow all of its investment to pour into the stock market and into soft tech companies, when the building blocks of a hard-power economy still rely on traditional hard science and engineering industries?Put a different way: how could America supply the energy needed to refine aluminium, copper and tungsten when AI is thirstily drinking every last drop of spare energy right now, effectively crowding out these industries at the margin?

Even within AI, there are category distinctions in which these two differing strategies show themselves. China is much more evolved in the categories of embodied AI and video generation.In fact, since the release of Seedance 2.0, ByteDance has vaulted to the top of the video generation leaderboard. The recent video model ranking boards show Chinese models are the leaders. This has allowed China to achieve huge growth in AI-generated short dramas and videos. At the same time, OpenAI gave up on Sora. The only leading American video model is now Google’s Veo.

What is the importance of a video generation model aside from producing videos and ads? The world is moving toward multi-modal communication. Popular AI apps in the future will have more than just text chat. They need to be able to create photos, videos and audio clips, as well as receiving them as inputs. Thus, a different internet is already taking shape. ByteDance’s app Doubao is far and away the most popular AI app in China. It is now expanding globally with its overseas app Cici/Dola. Alongside Google, ByteDance might own the deepest AI ecosystem, in terms of different types of models, AI infrastructure, apps and researchers.

Then there’s embodied AI. What really gets to Silicon Valley executives these days is the sight of Chinese humanoid robots. Silicon Valley now often talks about the need to win the robot race. The reality is that this is no longer plausible. While America is focused on a few robot projects from Tesla and Figure.ai, China has built full embodied AI supply chains around tech hubs in Shenzhen, Hangzhou and Beijing. These hubs have given birth to many AI and robotic startups producing embodied AI products — from smartwatches, through AI-powered toys and robot dogs, all the way to full-sized humanoid robots.

Not only that, China has developed a full supply chain around it. Given this clustering effect and the depth of Chinese manufacturing, it will be hard to replicate China’s process, engineering and supply chain knowledge anywhere else.I had the pleasure of working on an embodied AI project in the US and experienced the frustrations of a long turnaround cycle for teams trying to create new things in America.

Even for basic components, like the AI chip used in an embodied AI robot, it rapidly becomes clear that it won’t be sourced from America. Nvidia and Qualcomm chips are still far too expensive to be used in small consumer electronic products. Beyond that, where can the manufacturing, the memory chips, the board, the housing, the batteries and the cooling for a product be sourced? Outside of the specialised firms that have spent years working on these products, how can new startups get in on the action?

To give a better idea of what this this supply chain gap looks like in practice: China has platforms like Tuya AI – a website that helps AI startups find a suitable model, select the right hardware modules, and match with an original design manufacturer. That means a prototype can be built in as little as a month. In America, that’s how long it would take to buy boards from China and get them shipped. For anybody living in Shenzhen, the process is even easier. It is possible to talk to the right people and get super-rapid turnaround time for hardware and manufacture. The process is end-to-end: a company only needs to design and add the software to bring it to market. This is probably why China’s AI toy market has already grown so much.

The people who drive media narratives in America most likely have never done real manufacturing. They do not understand China’s advantage in embodied AI. It is the same advantage that has allowed China to dominate the manufacturing of consumer electronics, drones and EVs. There are many things that LLMs simply cannot replace humans for yet. This would be a hard lesson to learn for people who spend their entire lives doing software development. No matter how good they are, tools like Claude Code and GPT Codex cannot solve all the problems in the world.

And now, as we end our exploration of China’s tech industry, we return to the beginning and know it for the first time. It was the Biden Administration’s decision to start a tech war against China that boosted this sector by lighting rocket underneath its growth. The short-sightedness is, looking back, staggering. Chinese breakthroughs in the semiconductor and other high-tech sectors would probably never have happened without the shove the Biden administration gave them. Many of the people who supported and lobbied for this move became convinced that China would not retaliate, because China did not do so very much over the first two years. They failed to see that China needed time to develop the institutional and bureaucratic muscle, as we explained in the first part of this series. In September 2025, when the Trump administration had to deal with the reality of losing access to the critical mineral supply chain, they — to borrow from the social media vernacular — found out.

What are your views on the issues raised in this report? Let us know what you think of this in the comments below. Maybe TP himself will respond.

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Multipolarity wishes to thank TP Huang for this work. TP is very much worth following on X (formerly Twitter), here. We also encourage all our followers to subscribe to TP’s Substack here. TP is linked to the Chinese Research Collective, which seeks to provide analysis on Chinese tech, society and history, much of which, it seems to me, would ordinarily not be available in the English language. It is a goldmine. Finally, TP was guest of honour on last week’s Multipolarity Podcast, on which he discusses these matters. Busy lad.

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