Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century

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DSJ: I’m intrigued by your claim that the humanitarian tragedy in Syria was even more disruptive than the Iraq War. Can you explain your reasoning here, especially as it relates to new interstate rivalries and the challenges facing NATO? The past few decades have not been kind to the democracies of the North Atlantic. Deindustrialization, financial crises, mass unemployment, chaos in the Middle East, and rising inequality have shortened life expectancies, undermined social stability, and opened the door to demagogues and authoritarians. And that was before the pandemic killed tens of millions of people and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine displaced millions more and upended global commodity markets.

Disorder : Hard Times in the 21st Century PDF - Hive Disorder : Hard Times in the 21st Century PDF - Hive

Thompson’s explanation for the 2016 Brexit referendum suffers from similar flaws. That referendum, it must be remembered, was decided in a close vote that was only held because the Tories won an unexpected parliamentary majority the year before. And that election, it should also be recalled, was one in which European issues played almost no part. Instead, the supposed threat of Scottish independence was the decisive issue in key English constituencies. Moreover, according to the 2016 British Social Attitudes survey, only 22 percent of U.K. citizens wanted to leave the EU in 2015. But instead of treating the outcome as a fluke that needs to be explained by contingent circumstances, Thompson believes that it was a fundamental consequence of the United Kingdom’s place outside the euro.Book Genre: Business, Climate Change, Economics, Environment, Finance, History, International Relations, Nonfiction, Political Science, Politics, Sociology I know Helen Thompson from one of my favourite podcasts, Talking Politics (which sadly has ended recently). She’s an extremely knowledgeable scholar so it was no question I would read her book as soon as it comes out. Thompson's core contention as noted in her introduction is that 'energy has largely gone unrecognized as an important cause of (recent) geopolitical and economic fault lines.' This is not unexpected. The primacy given to ideological and cultural factors in modern histories seems reasonable. The second reason is more powerful still. While on the surface it may seem that lower oil demand will ease competition over resources, new energy technologies require their own specific metal and minerals resources. Though there are overlaps, these are generally distributed differently to oil resources, adding further dynamics to energy geopolitics – China, a large energy importer in recent decades, has many of the minerals of the clean energy transition. “Geopolitically, an energy change will necessarily result in upheaval. If Britain was the power that climbed to dominance during the age of coal and the United States the power that ascended during the age of oil and coal, the spectre haunting Washington is that without a decisive American strategic turn to renewables and electrification, the new energy age that depends on metals and minerals will belong to China. For the EU, there is the hope that green energy will prove an escape from the world of oil and gas that through the twentieth century did so much to weaken the European powers.” Three threads - Geo Politics around the world; Energy; Power of the Central Banks (U.S. Federal Reserve in particular) - are discussed in great detail with extraordinary insight. The biggest 'take-away' is that we've traditionally looked at each of these three threads - as separate 'silos' to be studied. Thompson makes the point that these three threads are interrelated - and should be thought of as impacting one another.

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A thought provoking book that does an admirable job of connecting the dots between energy and financial markets, and the political and geopolitical challenges the world has been facing. economic recessions in the 2000s generated by uncontrolled deployment of the very laThe economic story begins in the 1970s and explains how the rise of the Eurodollar system and the decade's energy crises remade the monetary world and the European Union, and how the Federal Reserve and China's response to the 2007-8 crash in preventing an economic collapse let lose a succession of economic and energy problems that cannot now be resolved. This book appraises rising instability and fragility in domestic settings in the West and in the global political economy. It offers histories in three overlapping spheres – geopolitical (focused largely on fossil fuels); economic, with global finance in the foreground; and representative democratic politics, whose decay is hastened by forces at play in the first two spheres. Similarly, the emergence of China as a major manufacturing power was so traumatic to the workers of the industrialized world only because the party state ensured that Chinese consumers were unable to spend the money they should have been paid on the goods and services they wanted. China did not practice “export-led growth” but rather wage suppression and financial repression that held down imports. That choice was bad for people in China, but it was also costly for everyone outside China who lost income because they couldn’t sell enough to Chinese customers. There were some commendable parts, don't get me wrong. The deep dives into specific global events and their intertwined complexities showcased Thompson's in-depth research and understanding. I just wish these insights weren’t buried under layers of heavy language and disjointed narratives. Russia and China's recent renewed efforts to form alliances with oil-rich countries in the Middle East;

Disorder: hard times in the 21st century | International

Most egregiously, the slowdown in China’s growth rate that began in 2011 had nothing to do with “the ongoing risks around dollar shortage problems in Eurodollar markets.” Instead, it was a deliberate policy choice by Chinese officials who wanted to curtail the unnecessary and environmentally destructive construction projects that were launched in response to the global financial crisis. Thompson writes Chinese leaders were worried “that China’s dollar debt vulnerability had trapped the country in a lower growth paradigm.” Yet she cites a People’s Daily article from 2016 that warned against another yuan-denominated borrowing surge and welcomed slower growth because “China has to make a choice between quantity and quality.” You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. The next two sections are also interesting, however they do feel a little less novel than the first, where Thompson is so obviously in her element as one of the pre-eminent experts on the politics of oil. Her retelling of the story of the rise of global finance in section two, and particularly the emergence of Eurodollar markets, let’s her to really do a great job in explaining the current issues of the Eurozone in particular. Likewise if and when there is another Energy transition - to renewables - the U.S. and China will contest for dominance in that age - Geo politics/alliances will change as appropriate.HT: In the way the distinction between optimism and pessimism is usually applied to politics, I am on the pessimistic side. I don’t think we, as humanity, or as the citizens of individual states or the EU, can collectively choose whatever future we wish. I think whatever the big political and indeed ethical problems that the whole structure of international finance creates, it would be impossible to dismantle it without a collapse. That does not mean everything around it is a given—but outside that collapse scenario, I don’t believe it can be radically transformed. We live in the world of quantitative easing now, and for the monetary and financial system to function, central banks have to maintain the confidence of international financial markets. I first discovered Helen Thompson in the now defunct podcast 'Talking Politics' hosted by David Runciman. Runciman and Thompson conversed at an exceptionally high intellectual level, I found. HT: I am not sure whether it is primary or not. There is a lot already in play, especially given the rise of China’s navy and high-tech manufacturing competition in defense areas. I also think fossil fuel energy questions have long caused tensions in the US-China relationship, especially on the Chinese side. This is a vastly abbreviated summary of the highly complicated history of oil and geopolitics presented in the book. Missing here are the Syrian civil war, NATO actions in Libya in the 2010s, China’s rising demand for energy and the effects on international finance, the US shale revolution, Turkey’s increasingly militaristic claiming of oil and gas resources in the Eastern Mediterranean, amongst other things, but being more recent these might be more familiar to the reader.