Get on the bus. Or get on the Trump train. 

At this week’s Chinese trade talks, Europe has found itself piggy in the middle in the great global realignment. 

After Team Ursula were shunted off an airport bus by their Chinese hosts, – and given no official welcome, it’s clear which side is now entering their Hundred Years of Humiliation.  

We’ll be clipping the tickets of both delegations, and trying to piece together where the Great Tariff Wars of 2025 are up to.  

But as this is a pay week, we’re also going to have to impose a 75% tariff of our own, until you come to heel. 

For those inside the customs union - Multipolarity’s Patreons - this episode is entirely free throughout. For the rest of you – you’ll get the first quarter and no more. 

But all is not lost. Join us, in an ever-closer union, by going to patreon.com/multipolarity, and paying five Euros, Pounds, or Dollars a month. 

Steve Hsu is a physicist, a tech founder, the hub of a network of cutting edge thinkers, and the host of the excellent Manifold Podcast.  After a record-breaking first appearance, this week, he returns to Multipolarity for his second turn. 

This time, we want to ask him about the big picture on China’s tech frontiers. Six months on from the Deep Seek shock, it’s clear that China is making leaps not just in AI, but a range of high-end technologies, from materials science to robotics, semiconductors and telecoms. 

Far from the old paradigm of ‘China doesn’t innovate; it copies’, we’re seeing genuinely novel applications: from beetle-inspired heat censors, to synthetic biology, to silicon wafer replacement.

Beyond the immediate economic implications, how does their coming prowess relate to the strategic balance of power? 

We talk military hardware: the debate about tech missiles versus jets, China’s 6th generation fighters, drones, and the battlefield of the future.

And given all this – what can the US do to claw back the high ground? Can Washington accept their diminished status? Or will they end up both more insular and more aggressive on the world stage? 

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Philip Pilkington is away in Belgrade on a foreign assignment, which means we’re serving up a Sleepless In Seattle-style double header, on tariffs. 

First off: what is the end game for trade and the dollar? With Liberation Day now a distant memory and the passing of The Big Beautiful Bill, Philip has crunched the numbers, and figured out that all is not what it seems. 

Meanwhile, Andrew, casts his eyes eastwards. How are tariffs affecting the geopolitical balance of power in south-east Asia? Are the Japanese slicing up some lessons in Cakeism for Trump?

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In a viral video clip, tantric sex expert Javier Milei once said that he only makes love once every three months. Let’s see if he goes to the IMF any more regularly. In the wake of an enormous bailout, we’ll be busting some myths on the grand schemes of Captain Ancap. 

Meanwhile, in Britain, the finance minister is crying in Parliament, and the Prime Minister is too socially awkward to comfort her. At least Milei made the cuts first; and then went to the lender of last resort after. What happens when a dying G7 economy is too proud to cut anything, and too paralysed to do anything? Looks like they’re also ready for a visit from a certain monetary fund. 

Finally, the Stablecoin revolution is here. That’s right: you can now buy one dollar you don’t physically hold, for the price of one dollar you do hold. Sounds a bit silly? Welcome to crypto, bro. We’re asking: Is the GENIUS Act actually the DURR BRAIN Bill?

You can get special paywalled premium episodes of Multipolarity every month on Patreon: https://patreon.com/multipolarity

Nothing Ever Happens. Or does it? A week on from a one act play of a war, we pick through the charred remains of the Fordow Nuclear Site. We’re looking for clues. A smouldering nothingburger here; or a flambéd Middle Eastern order there?  

Meanwhile, Daddy got his five percent — NATO members have signed up to splash the cash on the next generation of weaponry. But is this wise defensive spending, or just a fully-armoured hypersonic pork barrel? 

Finally, the S&P has rallied this week - just as the dollar has dipped enough to offset the wins. Now, with bond yields also on the up, we’re into an era of two snakes for every ladder. Is this a weird blip - or the first horseman of dedollarisation? 

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Was it real?

As we record this on the morning of the 23 June, we are a little over 24 hours removed from Operation Midnight Hammer, in which USAF assets, including B2 Spirit stealth heavy bombers, attacked the Iranian nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan. 

US President Donald Trump says that Iran's nuclear programme has been destroyed for good. Open Source satellite pictures of the Fordow site show six ominous black holes in two, tightly clustered groups of three, into which deep-penetration bunker buster bombs were dropped. The entire strike package got in and out entirely unmolested.

But was Iran's nuclear programme really destroyed? There are suggestions that Iran moved its highly enriched uranium from the Fordow site some days before the US attack. If it was such a devastating blow, why has Iran not responded? US Bases and Gulf energy infrastructure is far closer, and far easier to strike than Israel, which Iran is still pounding.

And was Iran a paper tiger? So beset by corruption and ill discipline that Israel could establish air supremacy in a single night, and US air assets can roam the skies with impunity? So that it could have its entire nuclear programme destroyed in a week? That it would be too afraid to strike back, lest the US escalate further. 

What was real at all? And what's next… 

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Malcom Kyeyune is one of the oldest friends of Multipolarity.

In his first 2025 appearance, he catches up with Andrew about the state of the world. Trump’s ‘military parade’. The breakup of the MAGA coalition. Violence on America’s streets. The advent of hypersonic missiles above the skies of Tel Aviv.

This is a wide-ranging, theory-of-everything overview of the geopolitical moment.

You can get special paywalled premium episodes of Multipolarity every month on Patreon: https://patreon.com/multipolarity

The Big Divorce has finally hit. Like a country rock record written by the WWE, the Trump Musk split has been its own kind of kino. But beyond two hotheaded men who secretly still love each other very much, could it be that this marks the schism between tech and MAGA?

Meanwhile… that escalated quickly. As LA smouldered over the weekend, Trump punched the nuclear button, demanding to send in squadrons of marines. Whether they storm the beaches of the I-110 is perhaps secondary to the constitutional question: who holds the keys to law and order in a divided America?

Finally, right now China is squeezing its rare earth metals. Always wear gloves if you do that at home, but if you do it at a geopolitical level, just get ready for some serious blowback.

You can get special paywalled premium episodes of Multipolarity every month on Patreon: https://patreon.com/multipolarity

This week, we’re going as big picture as imaginable. Philip Pilkington has a thesis about liberalism itself:

1. That it is bad.

2. That it is ending. 

That’s the nub of his new book, released this week.

He argues that the modern world order is based on a doctrinaire and unrealistic form of liberalism and has given rise to hollowed-out financialised economies and disintegrating societies that can barely even reproduce their population or meet their energy needs. 

Only by abandoning our liberal delusions and adopting hard-headed post-liberalism can the West survive.

In this special edition, Andrew Collingwood interviewed him in front of an online audience on a live Twitter Spaces. 

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China is planning a new version of its Made In China 2025 industrial strategy. Just as America is punching holes in its own science funding budget, we'll be reporting from the output gap. 

Meanwhile, the new US ambassador to Ankara has declared that he's against carving up Syria in a modern Sykes-Picot, the treaty that drew up the Middle East modern borders. Is this an important anti-colonial action or just a license for Erdogan to gobble up his own Ottoman empire?

Finally, Harvard continues to come under shelling by the US government. Not content with disbarring international students, Trump said on Monday that he is considering taking $3 billion of previously awarded grant money and giving it to trade schools. Is this a case of frightening them to with an inch of their lives or is Trump genuinely guillotining the credentialed aristocracy that runs the United States? 

To hear the full episode (and the whole back catalogue of our special paywalled premium episodes of Multipolarity) go to Patreon: https://patreon.com/multipolarity