The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - PREVIEW： Realpolitik #6 ｜ The Acceleration AND Surviving Europe turning into the next Middle East

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to a new episode of RealPolitik. I am your host, Firas Maudad.

00:00:05.580 In this episode, we are trying a little bit of a new format. We're going to break it up into two different segments.

00:00:11.340 The first segment is about the acceleration that we are living in and how we are quickly shifting from the perma crisis to the great emergency.

00:00:21.880 And I'll explain what I mean by that in a moment.

00:00:23.980 And the second one is I wanted to share a few of the lessons that I've learned over my years as an analyst.

00:00:30.800 And I wanted to discuss those with you and get some of your feedback and your inputs.

00:00:36.000 As usual, I invite you to comment. I invite you to tell me what you think I should cover.

00:00:41.420 Ask any questions. And I will be looking at those and coming back to you with things that you actually enjoy.

00:00:47.980 The state of the world for the last few years has been really something of a bit of a perma crisis.

00:00:54.420 Wars in the Middle East, a war in Europe between Russia and Ukraine, the threat of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, instability in Libya,

00:01:04.180 the expansion of jihadi movements in the rest of Africa, and then the attempt by Russia and Turkey to kick out France and to stabilize the situation in Africa.

00:01:15.200 And this has become a bit of a normal setting for us in the world where we expect that there is some kind of crisis going on somewhere.

00:01:27.800 But really, it doesn't end up impacting in Europe and in America.

00:01:33.220 It doesn't end up impacting people's day-to-day lives.

00:01:37.360 You can go to the grocery store. Prices are more expensive. Your wages are worth less.

00:01:43.140 Things aren't doing particularly very well for you, but life continues to hum along with no actual major disruptions,

00:01:53.060 not at the scale that you would be experiencing if you were living in Lebanon, if you were living in Libya, if you were living in Iran.

00:02:01.840 Your life kind of continues at a normal pace.

00:02:05.600 I think we're beginning to see this change, and we're moving from this distant perma-crisis that is affecting the world to something that is more impactful on people's daily lives in the West.

00:02:21.560 And I'll want to take a step back and explain a little bit how we got here and what it means going forward.

00:02:29.280 How did we get here, first of all?

00:02:33.100 Well, the West was living in an amazing level of comfort after the end of the Cold War.

00:02:40.060 There were no serious military threats.

00:02:42.660 There was nothing to worry about except GDP, economic growth, tinkering a little bit with tax policies, adjusting welfare here and there.

00:02:52.820 There were some terrorist attacks, very substantial terrorist attacks, but these get quickly brushed under the carpet in the spirit of don't look back in anger.

00:03:04.820 Multiculturalism will work one day. 0.99

00:03:07.020 You just have to accept it.

00:03:08.660 How does this affect you personally, mate?

00:03:10.580 That kind of attitude of disregard towards the changes that are happening based on the idea that it isn't affecting you on a daily basis.

00:03:22.980 During that period, the West went to war against Russia in the Balkans and in Chechnya and now in Ukraine.

00:03:32.840 In the Balkans, the country of Yugoslavia was destroyed partly due to the errors of its own leaders, but partly because NATO saw an opportunity to destroy the bastion of Russian influence in the Balkans with the aim being to weaken Russia and integrate the Balkans fully into the Western sphere of influence.

00:03:59.220 So we saw that crisis that ticked over in Bosnia, and during that time, you have to remember, Al-Qaeda, Saudi Arabia, Hezbollah were all working together against the Russians.

00:04:13.040 We had the war in Chechnya, which was supported to some extent by the West and by Saudi Arabia, where jihadis based in Russia's Caucasus region went on a campaign aimed at carving,

00:04:29.220 carving out some kind of ethnic Muslim republics on the border between the Turkish sphere of influence and the Russian sphere of influence.

00:04:42.220 And the idea being that this makes Russia a lot weaker, it threatens it with repeated invasions from the Caucasus, more instability, and could lead to its breakup.

00:04:54.220 And in Ukraine, obviously, in 2014, I'm going to explore that in future episodes of RealPolitik, the West supported the overthrow of the pro-Russian government in Kiev through street protests.

00:05:10.440 This triggered unrest in the Russian-majority regions of Ukraine.

00:05:14.900 This led to a mini-civil war that was then frozen and was reactivated with a full-scale Russian invasion.

00:05:21.420 The effect of this series of crises on Russia was really to harden its position to awaken a much stronger form of Russian nationalism,

00:05:33.700 to get Putin to focus on more competent government.

00:05:39.060 And the result of that was that Russia could challenge the entirety of the West as they armed Ukraine to the teeth. 0.93

00:05:47.320 And Russia is now in a position where it's fighting the war in Ukraine, and it's slowly winning.

00:05:54.700 You never know how wars end.

00:05:56.720 This is a lesson that we learned from history.

00:05:59.320 Advances in the early stage of the war don't mean victory.

00:06:03.160 And casualties aren't as important that people assume.

00:06:06.680 Often the winning side takes more casualties than the losing side.

00:06:10.520 So there's still a lot of gray there.

00:06:13.640 But the result has been the awakening of Russia.

00:06:16.740 In the Muslim world, what we are seeing is something similar.

00:06:21.620 We spoke about the creation of the State of Israel.

00:06:24.640 We spoke about how this fundamentally destabilized the Muslim world. 1.00

00:06:29.760 We spoke about how these states in the Middle East were carved out.

00:06:35.040 Countries like Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, that hadn't really existed in any form as nation-states prior to the arrival of the Europeans.

00:06:46.380 The brief 20-year period in which Europe was dominant in the Middle East really led to fundamentally different borders in the region.

00:06:54.040 This sense of humiliation, especially at the hands of Israel, given the repeated Arab defeats against Israel,

00:07:04.080 ended up leading to what I'm beginning to refer to as the Great Islamic Awakening,

00:07:09.380 where now you see that the Muslim world is no longer this broken shell that is looking to Europe to see how it advances.

00:07:19.140 Rather, you're seeing countries like Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan asserting an independent line against the West

00:07:30.240 and saying that they are geopolitical players in their own right

00:07:34.340 and that they are no longer concerned with what the West wants or with what the West thinks.

00:07:40.020 Some of them, like Turkey and Pakistan, are working very hard to reduce their dependence on the West.

00:07:51.400 In Pakistan's case, this is coming with more dependence on China.

00:07:55.020 In Turkey's case, this is coming with a lot more autonomy.

00:07:58.900 And we're seeing Turkey and Pakistan cooperating with each other militarily.

00:08:03.660 We see them working together to support Azerbaijan against Armenia. 0.91

00:08:10.860 We see the Turks sending some of their ships to Pakistan to help Pakistan with any potential naval warfare against India.

00:08:24.260 And we see a deepening level of technological cooperation that's intended to contain Iran. 0.89

00:08:30.400 Iran has become an example for other Muslim countries in that it was the first one to have a level of autonomy in its military manufacturing.

00:08:40.240 And it was the first one that showed that it could challenge the West. 0.83

00:08:45.020 In the end, it wasn't successful in its attempt to export the revolution,

00:08:49.520 but it did succeed in setting an example that said to the Muslim world,

00:08:54.700 you can stand on your own two feet.

00:08:57.340 You don't need to worry about what the West thinks.

00:09:01.200 You can pursue autonomous strategy.

00:09:04.720 And this is quite important.

00:09:07.160 We see Muslim countries becoming a lot more assertive,

00:09:10.880 Turkey making expansionist maritime claims,

00:09:13.620 and stating clearly that nothing in its near abroad,

00:09:18.980 including in the Black Sea, in the Balkans, in the Middle East, in North Africa,

00:09:23.800 and indeed even in other parts of sub-Saharan Africa,

00:09:28.660 can be decided without Turkish inputs.

00:09:32.560 Turkey is making itself a great power and is making itself a necessary power.

00:09:37.880 China, obviously, is in the midst of a very dramatic rise.

00:09:42.180 Because the United States outspends the next nine or ten countries in military terms,

00:09:50.220 China outproduces the next ten countries in manufacturing terms.

00:09:57.740 So China's production, China's industrial output,

00:10:02.040 is equal or greater than the industrial output of the next ten manufacturing powers put together.

00:10:12.180 And that includes Germany, that includes the United States,

00:10:17.480 Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and other industrial powerhouses.

00:10:23.640 China is now the world's greatest manufacturing power.

00:10:27.080 It's clearly very assertive.

00:10:29.640 And this came in response, in part, to Western challenge.

00:10:34.180 From the Chinese perspective, they were humiliated at the hands of Westerners for a century.

00:10:40.600 There were the opium wars, bits and pieces of China like Hong Kong and Macau,

00:10:45.520 and the last one being Taiwan,

00:10:47.900 were cleaved out of China with Western support.

00:10:51.640 And the Chinese felt this massive sense of humiliation.

00:10:56.820 And this led them to invest in themselves for pretty much a century

00:11:02.860 in order to develop an authentic Chinese solution that allows them to stand up against the West.

00:11:10.900 And the theme that I'm repeating here, the theme that I'm trying to get to here,

00:11:15.700 is that these parts of the world, Russia and its sphere of influence,

00:11:21.820 the Islamic world, and China,

00:11:24.200 faced enormous challenges from the West.

00:11:27.920 And they responded to these challenges

00:11:30.140 by waking up to their own identity,

00:11:36.140 by borrowing, stealing technology from the West,

00:11:41.240 by, in China's case especially,

00:11:44.120 benefiting massively from the West's economic greed

00:11:47.780 and from the greed of Western oligarchs

00:11:50.840 who pushed for the inclusion of China in the World Trade Organization

00:11:54.840 and who pushed the United States to give China

00:11:58.660 the most favoured nation status,

00:12:01.880 which allowed China to trade with the US

00:12:04.360 as any country would within the WTO rules.

00:12:07.240 They used their humiliation in order to wake up,

00:12:13.120 in order to rise to the challenge that they faced.

00:12:17.700 It took different countries different timeframes.

00:12:20.420 So China, you know, the awakening began arguably

00:12:25.200 with the war between the nationalists and the communists,

00:12:28.640 which began in the 20s,

00:12:30.800 continued through to 1949 through the Japanese invasion

00:12:34.720 and the horrors of the Japanese invasion.

00:12:37.700 After Mao's various revolutions,

00:12:40.960 there came the great economic reform

00:12:43.840 under Deng Xiaobeng in 1979.

00:12:47.220 And over the course of two generations,

00:12:51.080 China went from a backwards country

00:12:53.040 to an advanced manufacturing country.

00:12:55.440 In the Middle East,

00:12:57.280 it took more than a century,

00:12:59.720 perhaps several centuries, two centuries.

00:13:02.380 The humiliation of the Ottomans 0.95

00:13:04.200 really began in the 1800s.

00:13:06.560 It continued with the defeat of the Ottoman Empire 0.84

00:13:11.300 after the First World War.

00:13:13.720 They tried nationalism.

00:13:15.540 They tried to find a way to westernize

00:13:19.480 as much as they could.

00:13:21.200 This ended with Islamists staking power in Turkey 0.98

00:13:24.600 and focusing on developing

00:13:27.480 autonomous Turkish capabilities

00:13:29.840 and autonomous Turkish military industries

00:13:32.580 in order to be able to confront the West 0.58

00:13:35.720 and to force the West to treat them as an equal.

00:13:38.100 Russia, we had the Bolshevik Revolution.

00:13:41.100 We had the Soviet Union modernize 0.95

00:13:44.140 at breakneck speed,

00:13:46.160 at least in terms of industry and manufacturing.

00:13:49.120 The Second World War

00:13:50.480 saw the Soviets in control of Eastern Europe

00:13:54.800 and a chunk of the Balkans

00:13:57.540 and the Baltic states.

00:13:59.640 And Russia became a great superpower.

00:14:03.200 This ended in 1990.

00:14:05.160 And then Putin came back 10 years later

00:14:08.680 and has been working on rebuilding Russia since then.

00:14:11.640 So you see a very, very different timeframes

00:14:15.140 over which these countries, nations, empires,

00:14:20.040 call them whatever you want,

00:14:21.700 managed to find a way to stand on their own two feet,

00:14:26.000 largely independently of the West.

00:14:28.160 What's happening in the West is sort of the inverse.

00:14:31.380 The crises that the West has,

00:14:35.080 to some extent, benefited from,

00:14:37.640 to some extent, exported,

00:14:39.860 to some extent, contributed to,

00:14:42.780 without taking away the agency of bad actors

00:14:45.980 in any of these parts of the world,

00:14:48.260 these crises are now beginning to affect the West.

00:14:51.280 And we are heading towards moving

00:14:53.680 from a state of perma crisis

00:14:56.320 where the West is threatened by issues at its borders

00:14:59.520 and by attacks on its own territories

00:15:02.640 that the states of the West

00:15:04.720 refuse to recognize as attacks,

00:15:07.700 to the conflict shifting into the West itself.

00:15:11.480 This is the big transformation that we're seeing now.

00:15:14.940 And I want to sort of go over

00:15:17.220 a couple of the ways that we see this.

00:15:20.960 The West is afflicted

00:15:22.360 with completely incoherent ideology.

00:15:24.520 Instead of ideologies like communism

00:15:28.220 that affected Russia and China,

00:15:30.800 or secularism and Islamism

00:15:33.320 that affected the Middle East,

00:15:35.800 including the holistic forms of Islamism

00:15:37.960 like the Jihadis, 0.88

00:15:39.020 like the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia, 1.00

00:15:42.340 we have in the West

00:15:43.740 this very extreme form of liberalism

00:15:46.360 that sees British government websites

00:15:50.160 place Western culture in scare quotes,

00:15:55.240 implying that there is no such thing

00:15:57.000 as Western culture.

00:15:58.700 We see this idea that anybody from anywhere

00:16:01.500 can instantly become European,

00:16:04.840 American, British, whatever it is.

00:16:07.860 No value given at all

00:16:10.360 to the reality that different people

00:16:13.040 are genuinely different.

00:16:14.500 We see this loss of any sense of identity.

00:16:17.920 In Turkey, we saw it with Atatürk

00:16:20.800 trying to erase Turkey's Islamic identity 1.00

00:16:24.520 and replace it with a Western identity.

00:16:26.900 In the Arab-speaking parts of the Middle East,

00:16:31.580 we saw it with the attempt to impose secularism

00:16:34.740 and distance these societies from Islam. 0.84

00:16:38.040 We saw the rise of Arab nationalism

00:16:40.060 as a substitute for pan-Islamism 0.55

00:16:43.860 and the disasters that this led to.

00:16:47.800 In the West, it's sort of similar.

00:16:49.540 There is no...

00:16:50.800 Nobody in government in the West

00:16:52.600 really has a sense of what

00:16:55.540 Western identity is.

00:16:58.460 You have Angela Merkel

00:16:59.900 removing German flags

00:17:02.080 from the hands of her supporters

00:17:04.460 to make sure that

00:17:06.160 nobody does something patriotic.

00:17:08.200 You have the insistence

00:17:10.260 in all of Europe

00:17:12.460 that recently arrived

00:17:14.540 Middle Easterners

00:17:15.600 or North Africans 0.92

00:17:16.600 or Africans 0.94

00:17:17.800 are just as Spanish

00:17:19.980 or French

00:17:21.060 or whatever

00:17:21.720 as somebody who's been in that country

00:17:23.940 for tens and hundreds of generations.

00:17:26.900 In America, it's the same thing.

00:17:29.000 The revolutionary idea of America

00:17:31.520 that it's the place

00:17:32.700 where all Europeans can go and integrate

00:17:35.040 is being expanded

00:17:37.380 in an unrecognizable fashion

00:17:40.200 to say that, again,

00:17:42.500 anybody from anywhere

00:17:43.700 is now an American.

00:17:45.720 It doesn't matter

00:17:46.520 if they have statues

00:17:48.380 to Hanuman 0.76

00:17:49.100 or an Indian monkey god.

00:17:52.360 They're just as American

00:17:53.700 as the Founding Fathers.

00:17:55.360 So there is this crisis

00:17:56.720 of identity in the West

00:17:59.280 that is very similar

00:18:01.160 to the crises of identity

00:18:03.060 that were felt

00:18:04.860 in the Muslim world

00:18:06.160 that were felt

00:18:07.040 in China

00:18:07.860 or in Russia

00:18:08.800 as these nations

00:18:11.320 attempted to transform

00:18:13.340 their societies

00:18:14.160 to compete with the West.

00:18:16.480 Things have gone

00:18:17.340 full circle.

00:18:19.320 It was the Westerners 1.00

00:18:20.700 who were the confident

00:18:22.540 civilizing influence

00:18:23.940 who could go

00:18:26.020 and conquer the world

00:18:27.280 and now it's them

00:18:29.340 who are being conquered.

00:18:31.140 Now, the West isn't

00:18:32.240 to understand

00:18:33.080 what the West is

00:18:33.940 in a geopolitical sense.

00:18:35.460 It is the American Empire

00:18:37.300 and her satellites.

00:18:39.300 That's what the West 0.92

00:18:40.220 is right now.

00:18:41.700 And so any crisis

00:18:42.820 that affects America

00:18:44.180 naturally ends up

00:18:46.640 affecting the rest

00:18:47.880 of the world.

00:18:48.640 This is how it works.

00:18:50.880 In the same way

00:18:52.000 that the defeat

00:18:54.100 of the Soviet Union

00:18:55.320 means that

00:18:56.880 the Russians' allies

00:18:58.760 in the Balkans

00:19:00.440 are going to get smashed

00:19:01.740 by Russia's rivals,

00:19:04.580 that's exactly what it is.

00:19:06.260 If America is weakened,

00:19:08.100 then all of the West

00:19:09.120 is weakened

00:19:09.660 because of the degree

00:19:11.340 of economic defense

00:19:13.080 and financial interdependency

00:19:14.940 and because at the end

00:19:16.640 of the day

00:19:17.000 this is one culture.

00:19:18.440 If America

00:19:19.400 had been colonized

00:19:20.560 by Indians

00:19:21.420 or Japanese,

00:19:22.500 it would be

00:19:23.960 in no way recognizable

00:19:25.340 and all of Europe

00:19:26.840 would see her

00:19:27.440 as an enemy.

00:19:28.020 So what's happening

00:19:29.140 in America

00:19:29.720 affects everybody

00:19:31.280 but the acceleration

00:19:34.120 towards crisis,

00:19:35.680 towards a great emergency

00:19:36.980 is really happening

00:19:39.320 across the West.

00:19:41.060 Now what's the great emergency?

00:19:42.680 What is an emergency

00:19:44.420 or a big emergency?

00:19:45.780 You end up in situations

00:19:47.200 where a society

00:19:48.660 becomes so ungovernable

00:19:50.240 that the previous rules

00:19:52.620 of the game

00:19:53.340 are no longer adequate

00:19:54.640 and therefore

00:19:56.420 somebody must take charge

00:19:58.800 of executive power

00:20:00.120 and impose his will

00:20:02.360 and remake

00:20:04.060 the Constitution,

00:20:06.100 the customs,

00:20:07.200 the laws,

00:20:08.620 the unseen things,

00:20:11.220 the immaterial things

00:20:12.860 that keep society functioning

00:20:14.500 and the material things

00:20:16.660 because it includes

00:20:17.500 the military

00:20:18.000 and it includes

00:20:19.100 the bureaucracy

00:20:19.680 of course.

00:20:21.080 But this is

00:20:21.920 what the West

00:20:23.080 is heading towards.

00:20:24.020 So if you look

00:20:24.960 around you,

00:20:26.120 you will see

00:20:26.980 as of the time

00:20:28.480 of the recording

00:20:29.640 of this video,

00:20:30.960 there are riots

00:20:31.800 in Northern Ireland

00:20:32.940 over the attempted rape 0.88

00:20:35.800 of a young girl 0.95

00:20:36.720 by Romanian migrants.

00:20:38.860 There are riots

00:20:40.180 in France

00:20:40.880 over a football match

00:20:43.020 but also over

00:20:44.680 Gaza,

00:20:46.140 Palestine,

00:20:47.180 the role of Islam

00:20:48.140 with the left

00:20:49.480 doing everything

00:20:50.340 that it can

00:20:51.180 to side

00:20:52.340 with the enemies

00:20:53.240 of the West

00:20:53.920 and the enemies

00:20:54.540 of Western civilization

00:20:55.740 in order to undermine it.

00:20:58.360 You see,

00:20:59.620 as I was recording

00:21:00.620 this video,

00:21:01.500 we learned

00:21:02.000 that in Austria

00:21:02.680 there has been

00:21:03.200 a mass shooting.

00:21:04.600 We don't know

00:21:05.180 who the perpetrator is

00:21:06.260 and I won't speculate.

00:21:07.800 But you've seen

00:21:08.580 this pattern

00:21:09.240 of steady terrorist attacks

00:21:10.820 and the rising risk

00:21:13.080 that this is going

00:21:14.640 to trigger

00:21:15.260 some kind of reaction

00:21:16.700 similar to what we saw

00:21:17.960 in Northern Ireland.

00:21:18.980 If you enjoyed

00:21:19.620 this piece of premium content

00:21:20.980 from the Lotus Eaters,

00:21:22.340 head to our website

00:21:23.240 where you can find more.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - July 28, 2025

PREVIEW： Realpolitik #6 ｜ The Acceleration AND Surviving Europe turning into the next Middle East

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