Energy & Trade Wars Are Rewriting the World Order | Helen Thompson
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The thing that's that's radically different about the Trump approach is he's willing to use trade as a geopolitical weapon. On the fossil fuel energy side, then it's all advantaged to The United States, and China has some, like, very clear vulnerabilities as the world's largest oil importer. In a world in which the Western Hemisphere is becoming more important in energy terms, does China actually want dependency upon the Western Hemisphere? That is incredibly disruptive of its relations both with Russia Arabia, and it pushes Russia and Saudi Arabia into a new cartel. In the geopolitical sense,
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It's great pleasure to be back, Felix.
Yeah. There's certainly been quite a bit of developments in the geopolitical landscape since you're on just over a year ago. Suddenly, we're talking about tariffs. We're talking about rare earths. We're talking about geopolitical instability. Lots going on. I would love to just start by just getting a level set of how do you characterize your your framework of the geopolitical landscape in the world right now?
I spent a lot of time this year in a way thinking about just that question, because I think that Trump represents or Trump's second presidency, perhaps more accurately, represents quite a challenge to geopolitical thinking in the sense that have your, or any of us who try to analyze geopolitics have our frameworks and we privilege analytically certain things over others. I always trying to test that. So I tend to work through like competing hypotheses in my head about what's going on. But the problem with Trump running into the second Trump presidency is, at least it seemed to me, that it is p
Yeah, let's unpack that idea of parallels in history. What dynamics do you see today are relevant to some historical context and what are those ones that are unique to this day and age? Or is it just the aggregation of them all at once that is unique? How do you see that?
Yeah. I mean, I I think that you can draw parallels that are reasonably obvious with the nineteen seventies. You you can see a conjunction of energy problems, an unstable monetary and financial environment generated by the end of bread and woods. You can see particularly in like Western European countries, but to some extent, I'd say The United States as well in the 70s, increased political polarization, in some sense, actually political instability of a certain kind, certainly in terms of party fragmentation. But then I think you you you run quite quickly into the ways in which this is, like,
I think it's safe to assume that one of the key unique circumstances we're in now is this theme of globalism that we've had for the past few decades. We've never seen anything like it. And now it feels like we're reaching a phase shift in how we think about globalism. You could argue it was triggered by COVID or maybe it's just triggered by Trump and these more tariff policies. But yeah, how you think about some of the goals there in terms of tariffs specifically? Do you s
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