The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - June 23, 2025


FREEMIUM： Realpolitk #1 ｜ Defining Geopolitics


Episode Stats

Length

32 minutes

Words per Minute

135.88199

Word Count

4,437

Sentence Count

236

Hate Speech Sentences

32


Summary

In this episode, Firas Badad gives a brief summary of where we are in the world today, what's happening around us, and why the world is the way it is today. He talks about the rise of China and Russia, the de facto alliance between them and Iran, and the economic and military advantage that the Chinese have over the West.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to RealPolitik. I am your host, Firas Badad. This is the first episode of a new
00:00:06.060 show dealing with global geopolitical developments and political change. I thought I'd start us off
00:00:12.000 with a summary of where we are today and what is going on in the world around us. I wanted to give
00:00:17.360 an evaluation of what's happening, what's the West situation, and where do we see things going
00:00:23.060 forward, and more importantly, why is the world the way it is today? The unipolar moment that
00:00:28.460 happened after the end of the Cold War is pretty much over. The Americans are no longer the only
00:00:35.260 major geopolitical player in the world. The Russians have risen, the Chinese have risen, and a bunch of
00:00:41.180 other countries like Turkey and Pakistan and India are able to assert their autonomy and pursue their
00:00:47.640 interests regardless of what the Americans think. More importantly, we are now in a situation where
00:00:54.300 there's a de facto alliance between China, Russia, and Iran. This is particularly important. If you
00:01:01.500 look at the history of World War I and World War II, the strategic impetus, aside from any moral
00:01:09.180 questions, for the intervention of the United Kingdom and the United States in those wars was to ensure
00:01:17.100 that Russia and Germany didn't form a single combine whereby Russian natural resources would
00:01:25.580 be feeding the German industrial machine and that combine would then be able to dominate the Eurasian
00:01:32.620 landmass and become a major challenger to a naval power like Britain or the United States. Well, thanks to
00:01:41.580 sanctions on China, pressure on Russia, pressure on Iran, now a much bigger industrial machine, the Chinese
00:01:50.540 industrial machine, can rely on the resources of not just Russia but also those of Iran as well. And if you
00:01:58.300 just look at a map and accept that, you know, the Chinese have an alliance with Pakistan, you can see
00:02:05.100 that between Russia, China and Iran and Pakistan, the Eurasian landmass is locked and all of the resources
00:02:15.660 of Asia and of Russia are going to be feeding an industrial machine that is much more capable than
00:02:22.780 that of the West. If you look at technology today, China is the technological leader in a huge range of
00:02:29.100 industries, including material science, including electronics, including optics. The Chinese are now
00:02:37.100 in a position where they have a military machine that is really incomparable in in the size of the
00:02:45.100 industrial base that it can tap. And what matters in a shooting war isn't how advanced your weaponry is
00:02:53.660 today. What actually matters is how sophisticated is your industry, and how big is your industrial base,
00:03:01.980 and how quickly can you replace equipment and personnel who are lost in combat. That's what matters in
00:03:09.660 modern warfare. Not how good the equipment that you have today is, in which the Americans are still
00:03:15.500 excellent. What really matters is how quickly can you replace weapons, ships, aircraft, drones, missiles,
00:03:25.340 ammunition that is depleted during actual combat. And that's where the Chinese advantage is. They have
00:03:34.060 a far bigger, far deeper industrial base than the Americans. The Europeans are not really a geopolitical
00:03:41.820 player anymore. Europe can be best thought of as a theater in which geopolitical competitions take place,
00:03:49.180 rather than an actual geopolitical player. Worse than that, the Europeans are deeply wedded to the ideology of
00:03:56.940 net zero, endless immigration, that is just simply destroying European industry, but also European societies.
00:04:08.620 What's happening with Europe is that their reliance on cheap migrant labor is holding back automation.
00:04:15.820 And if you're going to compete in modern industrial warfare, you need a very high amount of automation
00:04:22.860 in order to do so. So the Chinese have an advantage there. More than that, for European countries, if they
00:04:29.900 were to try to fight a war, most of the people who would want to volunteer to join a European military
00:04:36.620 would be considered far right by the European establishment and would be therefore considered
00:04:41.100 unwelcome. So there isn't the right technical capability and there isn't the right spirit to
00:04:48.460 animate a population to rise to the challenges of war. These are the problems that Europe faces.
00:04:55.500 The United States is in a somewhat better position, but not by very much. It equally has an immigration
00:05:01.980 problem. It equally has deep internal divisions over race and ethnicity and religion. And it has
00:05:10.860 outsourced way too much of its manufacturing to China and to Asia. When you understand this context,
00:05:18.060 you understand why there is a trade war that's happening between China and the United States. You
00:05:23.900 have to also consider that for decades, the Chinese have been able to essentially take any IP that they
00:05:30.380 want to take, any intellectual property that they want to take, use it, and they're now in a position
00:05:36.060 to develop it and advance it further. In most industries that matter militarily, the Chinese are today ahead.
00:05:42.940 And with the sheer scale of manufacturing and industry that they have in their country,
00:05:52.220 in an actual conflict, they can scale this up and transform that industrial capacity
00:05:57.500 into military industries. So this is where we are and it's important to understand that.
00:06:03.260 Another point to consider when we're thinking about where is the world today in terms of geopolitics
00:06:08.220 is the fact that the Muslim world is slowly aligning with China. Forget about the Gulf states,
00:06:14.220 who are completely dependent on the United States. I'm thinking about major population centers like
00:06:20.860 Pakistan, which has just proven itself against India using Chinese weapons and was able to humiliate
00:06:26.780 India in aerial combat, where Chinese weapons demonstrated that they are better than French weapons,
00:06:33.100 at least. You have Turkey, which is building an industrial base all of its own, which is a player in Ukraine,
00:06:40.780 a player in the Caucasus, a player in the Gulf and in Africa, a major player in Africa. You have countries
00:06:46.940 like Indonesia and Malaysia that are dependent on trade with China and who will pick China rather than the
00:06:56.700 West in any conflict. And you see that there is a massive problem. The bulk of the world's population
00:07:05.900 is aligning against the West and against the United States. And this alliance that has been forced
00:07:14.700 through Western policy that brought together Russia, Iran, and China has the ability to expand and to
00:07:23.340 include countries like Pakistan, Turkey, Malaysia, Indonesia, and a big chunk of Southeast Asia. This is a
00:07:32.060 winning combination in terms of the scale of the natural resources that are available and the size of the
00:07:39.020 population. And from a Western perspective, this is a much worse outcome than the Germans succeeding
00:07:47.580 against the Russians and getting Russian natural resources to feed the German industrial machine.
00:07:53.660 So the world today is in a position where the West is really on the back foot and has been severely
00:08:00.940 weakened, and it's been severely weakened by its own hands and its own policies. Now the question that I
00:08:07.660 want to address is why are we in this mess? The short answer is liberal assumptions about humanity that go
00:08:16.700 against any decent realistic understanding of human nature. In this show, audience, we want to emphasize
00:08:26.540 that human nature is flawed and that conflict is a permanent feature of life. However, after the triumph of
00:08:35.900 liberalism against the Soviet Union, the leadership of the West seems to have forgotten this lesson.
00:08:43.260 Instead, the leadership of the West assumed that if it traded with China and if it brought China into
00:08:51.020 the international system, then a Chinese middle class would emerge. And that Chinese middle class would
00:08:57.900 naturally seek liberal democracy because liberal democracy is the end of history. Not just the end as in
00:09:04.940 the termination of history, but even the spiritual purpose of history. This was the assumption that the
00:09:12.220 liberals adopted. They thought that so long as most of the world was included in a free trade framework,
00:09:20.380 everybody was just going to magically get along and we are going to forget all of our differences.
00:09:25.020 That proved to be highly unrealistic. Rather, the Chinese wanted to pay the West back for the
00:09:32.620 century of humiliation, for the opium wars, for the sense that China was inferior. And the Chinese wanted
00:09:40.460 their country to rise as a global superpower. And so they took the investment in manufacturing that was
00:09:48.780 given to them. They took the jobs that were outsourced from the West. They took the technical know-how and
00:09:56.140 the knowledge that these jobs entail. They took the intellectual property and are now developing it to
00:10:03.820 their own ends. The situation has gotten so severe that now China outproduces the whole rest of the world
00:10:12.460 in just ships. And if you consider that America claims that it is a naval empire, being eclipsed
00:10:21.980 by China and ship production is a major problem. Not just that. The second and third largest producers
00:10:29.100 of ships are South Korea and Japan. Countries that are extremely vulnerable to Chinese influence and to
00:10:35.900 China militarily. If you were to just look at a map, frankly, you would see the proximity between Japan
00:10:44.780 and China and you would instantly, by the way, understand the importance of Taiwan. And let's dive into that
00:10:51.020 for a moment. The island of Taiwan polices the shipping that goes from the rest of the world
00:11:03.820 through the Strait of Malacca, next to Singapore, through the South China Sea, and up to South Korea
00:11:11.100 and Japan. It also polices access to China's most important ports, which are concentrated in the north of
00:11:19.980 the country. So if the Americans had Taiwan, they could conceivably blockade China. On the other
00:11:28.060 hand, if the Chinese were in control of Taiwan, they could quite easily blockade shipping to Japan and to
00:11:34.220 South Korea and go further afield from Taiwan and make sure that anything that passes in the Philippine
00:11:39.820 Sea was vulnerable to the Chinese Navy. I wanted to mention that because this is part of what the fight
00:11:46.540 over Taiwan is all about. And the West, instead of realizing that this is a pretty dire geopolitical
00:11:54.620 situation, is mostly focused on stopping Russia in Ukraine. Now, this is extremely reckless because
00:12:05.980 from the perspective of the West, it's really not that important whether the border between Russia and
00:12:12.620 Ukraine sits here or somewhere closer to the Dnieper River. It's really not that big of a deal where
00:12:22.620 the borders of Ukraine actually end up being, because the challenge isn't going to emanate from this
00:12:32.140 relatively small, in the grand scheme of things, piece of territory, rich as it might be in natural
00:12:37.980 resources. The challenge is emerging from the fact that the world's natural resource superpower has been
00:12:46.620 forced into an alliance with the world's manufacturing superpower, and that between them they can pretty
00:12:53.900 much dominate the entire Eurasian landmass, as I keep saying, and feed the resources of Asia into the
00:13:01.580 Chinese manufacturing machine. Instead of seeing the size of this problem, the focus of the West is where does this
00:13:10.140 line between Russia and Ukraine actually lie, and who controls the eastern side of Ukraine?
00:13:18.860 It's like picking up pennies in front of a train. They're focused on something that's absolutely
00:13:23.340 insignificant, on something that's really of no material importance, but they insist that this is what they
00:13:30.300 want to focus on. Well, why? Largely because they're ideologues in a wide number of ways. First, they believe
00:13:40.300 that the order that was constructed after the Second World War, and more importantly after the end of the Cold War,
00:13:48.140 can last forever. When we know, being men of faith, that nothing lasts forever. They believe that
00:13:55.980 borders are inviolable except to them. So, if the leadership of the United States wants to destroy
00:14:07.900 Libya, or invade Iraq, or send jihadis to Syria, or to Afghanistan, or to Chechnya, this is absolutely
00:14:15.660 fine. They can do that. Borders are now viable again. If they were told, you've got to police your own borders,
00:14:24.460 and there's always going to be conquest and gains by conquest, they will say, absolutely not. Only we get
00:14:32.140 to do this. It's pride that's primarily animating them, and it's an inability to understand how the
00:14:39.100 world really works. And it's really tragic to be led by people who don't understand the world. Now,
00:14:48.380 not only were they reckless enough to push Russia, China, and Iran together,
00:14:58.300 they also decided that they're going to spend their resources trying to build democracy in Iraq and
00:15:05.100 Afghanistan. They simply assumed that there is no difference between different cultures.
00:15:14.060 They didn't understand that for the West itself, for Europe, the imposition of democracy required
00:15:21.500 two American invasions during World War I and World War II. Justified, as you may think these
00:15:27.900 invasions were, it was only through the force of American arms that Europe became democratic,
00:15:35.260 that Japan and South Korea became democratic. They thought that they could do the same to Iraq and
00:15:41.340 Afghanistan, refusing to respect the differences in culture between those countries in the West.
00:15:49.020 The Muslim world has no tradition of democracy. None. It doesn't have any of the intellectual or
00:15:57.100 cultural underpinnings that are required for it. In the most westernized Middle Eastern country,
00:16:03.420 Tunisia, they got democracy on their own in 2011, and then 10 years later they decided,
00:16:12.060 right, this experiment failed, we want nothing to do with it, let's have a president who can rule as a
00:16:18.140 full-on authoritarian and trust him with power. This is the Middle East organic experiment with democracy.
00:16:25.340 It was one where the public actually rejected it and preferred an authoritarian autocrat to
00:16:33.660 multi-party democracy. But the West didn't want to accept that this was possible. They insisted,
00:16:41.420 or at least I should say the Western leadership, insisted that Iraq and Afghanistan should become
00:16:47.180 democracies. And to that end, they spent seven billion dollars. Seven trillion dollars, I should
00:16:53.340 say. If it was seven billion, it would have been acceptable. We've ended up in a position where the
00:16:59.980 West refused to learn the lessons from the story of the Tower of Babel in the Old Testament. To remind you,
00:17:07.900 in that story, Nimrod and his people decide that they were going to equal God, and that they were going to
00:17:14.860 build a tower that reaches all the way to heaven. And God looks at this and says, I'm not going to allow
00:17:22.540 it. I'm not going to reward these people's pride. I'm going to give them 999 languages so that the
00:17:30.940 thousand builders who were involved in this project could not understand each other. There is a deeper
00:17:37.260 meaning behind that story, which is that whatever you build must remain at a human scale. You can't
00:17:46.300 recreate the world into your image. You can't reach heaven through your own hands, through your own
00:17:53.020 effort. This is the message behind it. Meaning that, as far as it applies to geopolitics,
00:18:00.540 that what works in America and Britain, which is parliamentary democracy, will not work in the
00:18:08.620 rest of the world. It was imposed on Europe through force of arms, but it can't be imposed on the rest of
00:18:17.500 the world. And for those of you who say, well, what about Japan? My answer is simple. Wait and see what
00:18:25.500 happens after the American military withdraws from Japan. If it remains as a nominally liberal democracy,
00:18:33.820 but in effect a one-party state, we'll see. I will bet money that it wouldn't, and that democracy would
00:18:42.300 end in Japan the minute that the last American soldier leaves Japan. Same for South Korea. However,
00:18:49.340 the people that govern today refuse to understand the world in this way. They refuse to understand
00:18:55.580 that there are limits to their power and limits to their ideology. In a sense, they've also forgotten
00:19:02.460 the story of Cain and Abel. In the story of Cain and Abel, we have, in essence, the first two men,
00:19:09.500 the first children of Adam and Eve, ending up in a position where one of them murders the other.
00:19:16.220 The story doesn't explain why. It isn't clear if it's because one was a husband's man and the other
00:19:25.100 was a farmer. It isn't clear if it's jealousy or wrath or pride. It was most probably all of the above.
00:19:35.100 Nobody explains why this happened. But the message of the story is even worse.
00:19:40.460 It is that no matter what their reason is, humans are naturally in conflict. If they try to build too
00:19:49.900 high, it will be another Tower of Babel, or it will be another Cain and Abel. And it doesn't matter
00:19:56.780 which route you take to reach that conclusion. If you start with evolution and assume that we are just
00:20:03.020 the cousins of the chimpanzees, that leaves you in pretty much the same place. Chimpanzees naturally
00:20:09.740 organize military patrols and go around their territory in silence, looking for males from rival
00:20:17.260 clans to murder them. And when their own clan becomes too big, it just breaks up. That's human nature.
00:20:25.100 We can't have a global system because we're human. And there is never going to be a single global
00:20:33.420 system that reigns peacefully unchallenged. That never works. The fate of every empire is to decay and
00:20:41.980 fall. And what we're seeing with the United States, frankly, is that this decay is set in. And it's set in
00:20:48.780 quite considerably. And that's one of the themes that this show is going to be dealing with time and time
00:20:53.500 again. A couple of more comments on human nature, if you will be so kind as to tolerate me.
00:21:00.700 If you ask yourself, well, will this ever be solved? Will we ever all get along?
00:21:09.820 The answer is always going to be no, we won't. Human beings naturally divide by blood and by faith.
00:21:18.860 And you need shared blood and shared faith to have peace. Take the example of Iraq. It's divided by
00:21:28.940 ethnicity between the Kurds and the Arabs. And the Arabs will generally side together against the Kurds.
00:21:38.060 And the Kurds will generally rally to one another and support each other. The ethnic divide is always
00:21:45.980 going to be there. But if you look deeper, there are many, many tribal divides that are also always
00:21:53.020 going to be there. If you look at Lebanon or Syria, these are countries with pretty much the same ethnicity.
00:21:59.260 All of the people there, for the most part, aside from the Kurds, have the same ethnicity.
00:22:03.340 However, the divides between Christians, Druze, Muslims, and others is simply irreparable. It's not
00:22:14.940 enough that they share ethnicity. Same stories in the Balkans. There's no ethnic difference between
00:22:20.060 the Bosnians and the Koroats and the Serbs, but their religious division is so overwhelming that that
00:22:27.180 conflict will always be there. If you look at the United States, for the most part, the black community
00:22:33.180 is Christian. For the most part, the white community is Christian. The divide between them is always
00:22:38.540 going to be there, because they're divided by ethnicity. It is in our nature to divide ourselves
00:22:46.940 by ethnicity, by tribe, by race, by religion. And even then, there are always going to be some divides
00:22:57.740 between the same community that does share the same ethnicity and that does share the same religion.
00:23:04.940 We see it from the civil wars of Europe that happened over centuries. We know about them because
00:23:10.940 they're well-documented, but in fact, civil wars are part and parcel of everybody's history.
00:23:17.660 So this is what I wanted to sort of get across, that conflict is natural, and that's what animates
00:23:24.620 politics. What's geopolitics then? Geopolitics deals with how geography affects the manner in which
00:23:32.940 societies are organized, and it deals with how geography affects human divisions. That's what
00:23:43.020 geopolitics means. So I want to take the example of a country like, say, Iran. Iran is a highly fractured
00:23:53.020 country with dozens of different ethnicities. These different ethnicities
00:24:02.060 must be controlled through a strong central state. The biggest vulnerability of Iran isn't external
00:24:10.220 invasion. The country is too mountainous for external invasion to really be a huge threat.
00:24:18.860 It's fragmentation that comes from the ethnic divisions within Iran. And it's the fact that
00:24:25.740 the different ethnicities will pull the country in different directions. And so a wise ruler of Iran
00:24:33.100 will try to use a combination of repression and religion in order to keep the country together.
00:24:42.540 And if you look at how the Shah of Iran behaved back when he was in power before 1979,
00:24:49.020 and how the modern Islamic Republic of Iran operates, it's pretty much the same thing.
00:24:53.500 They both had very strong and effective secret police. That secret police was used to subdue the vast
00:25:01.500 bulk of the population and to keep them under control. And the reason that they had to do it by coercion
00:25:08.380 is because different communities in the mountains could easily fortify some mountain passes
00:25:14.540 forces and deny access to the state's forces and therefore try to secede or become independent.
00:25:23.500 So it becomes necessary to preempt that through suppression.
00:25:29.340 Another country to think about in terms of the geo in geopolitics is Russia.
00:25:35.340 Russia. If you take a Russian perspective on the world, everything around Russia looks like a threat.
00:25:45.020 So I wanted to show you this map of Moscow's perspective on the world.
00:25:50.140 If you look at the world from Moscow, you see something slightly different.
00:25:54.620 You see to the Far East, Mongolia and China, and the risk of invasion from Mongolia and or China of Russia's Far Eastern provinces.
00:26:10.220 You see from the Caucasus, the risk of the Turks or the Persians crossing the mountains of the Caucasus
00:26:20.060 and invading the flatlands of Russia and going up the Volga and threatening to take away pieces of Russian territory.
00:26:29.340 You see from the West, the great powers or the great potential powers like Germany and maybe Poland,
00:26:39.500 that can at some point decide that they're going to try to take their share of Russian territory.
00:26:45.260 And you see the Scandinavians who might at any point decide that they want to threaten St. Petersburg
00:26:53.900 and try to challenge the Russians there.
00:26:56.700 So the Russian perspective on the world is that everybody looks like a threat.
00:27:01.340 Not only that, it's surrounded by either middling or great powers,
00:27:07.660 and it can be invaded from any direction because most of the country is flat.
00:27:14.300 Add to it that for the most part, Russia has very few navigable rivers relative to its size.
00:27:20.140 Therefore, the construction of roads, which is absolutely necessary to be able to defend yourself militarily,
00:27:27.500 is almost entirely dependent on the Russian state.
00:27:30.700 This means that the state must have a massive role in the economy no matter what.
00:27:38.380 And that automatically leads to statism and authoritarianism.
00:27:42.380 So geopolitics is the claim that the way Russia is set up geographically and culturally
00:27:50.860 means that it must always have an authoritarian state.
00:27:54.060 The way that Iran is set up geographically and culturally means that because of the mountains,
00:28:00.300 there is always going to be different ethnic communities that go up the mountain and try to defend themselves.
00:28:06.220 And that the only way to police them and control them is to be able to use repression.
00:28:14.300 And that's a fundamental story from, say, Britain, which has a huge number of navigable rivers,
00:28:22.860 as well as the ability to impose a strong central state, especially in England.
00:28:28.940 And that's fundamentally different from America, which is isolated from the rest of the world by a bunch of oceans,
00:28:38.220 by two oceans, and which has, through the Mississippi River Basin,
00:28:44.540 the largest network of navigable rivers in the world, as well as the largest chunk of irrigable land in the world.
00:28:55.420 Meaning that America is always going to be a superpower in food and in natural resources.
00:29:00.940 Meaning that America is always going to be a great power, even if it falls behind sometimes.
00:29:06.620 Unless, of course, it somehow gets partitioned.
00:29:09.260 So geopolitics really deals with these kinds of questions.
00:29:12.620 It deals with the intersection of geography and politics.
00:29:15.980 But it also has a bit of a missing component in that it must also account for culture and human nature.
00:29:25.020 It's not enough to think just in terms of geography.
00:29:30.620 It's not enough to think just in terms of material lessons.
00:29:35.740 One of the big things that I learned in my career as an analyst is that the material explanation isn't enough,
00:29:46.700 but is necessary to consider.
00:29:49.660 We must think about material conditions, but it isn't enough.
00:29:54.380 So the way to think about the United States today, and why it's in decline,
00:29:58.300 even though it has this massive wealth of resources, is that because human nature, when it gets too comfortable, gets rotten.
00:30:07.820 When things go very well for us, and we're not sufficiently challenged,
00:30:12.140 we no longer have the energy or the impetus to rise to the occasion.
00:30:20.940 Rather, we become a little bit lazy, and a little bit complacent.
00:30:25.580 And we assume that the good times that we have, or that we had, will always last.
00:30:32.300 And that seems to have affected a lot of the West.
00:30:34.460 This confidence that the things that happen everywhere else in the world, civil wars, ethnic conflict, won't happen here.
00:30:46.300 And this assumption has proven to be extremely destructive, I would argue.
00:30:51.100 And one of the things that I want to do in this show is introduce this idea.
00:30:54.340 Is to sort of give a bit of a spiritual accounting of politics, and try to be realistic by admitting that we are, in fact, spiritual beings, as well as flesh and blood.
00:31:11.200 And that the way we think, and that the ideologies that animate us, have a material impact, rather than remaining merely in the realm of ideas.
00:31:21.580 So my hope with this show is to be able to bring a sense of reality and realism to the discussions of geopolitics.
00:31:31.540 It's my hope that we can account for the spiritual as well as the material.
00:31:37.960 It's my hope that we can think in multiple layers, rather than just, you know, who has the best military technology, or who has the biggest economy, or whatever.
00:31:47.680 And to be able to have a perspective that respects human nature as it is, that accepts how we operate in the world, rather than tries to impose theories, be they material or spiritual, on the world.
00:32:06.160 Thank you so very much for watching, and I really hope you enjoy the show.
00:32:09.220 Thank you so much for watching.