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What Is A ‘Multipolar’ World?

It is now widely acknowledged that the world is multipolar. This is so uncontroversial that the Munich Security Conference chose the title “Multipolarization” for its 2025 annual report. However, there is not a common definition of “multipolarity”. The Munich Security Report noted that, while “the world’s ‘multipolarization’ is a fact”, the “international system shows elements of unipolarity, bipolarity, multipolarity, and nonpolarity”, in which “multiple order models co-exist, compete, or clash”. Governments have radically different understandings of the meaning of multipolarity.

US Seizing Panama And Greenland Aimed At China

While a recent interview with the newly confirmed US Secretary of State Marco Rubio began with promising slogans, it quickly unraveled into threats of overt aggression, including outright calls to seize the Panama Canal and annex Greenland from Denmark under an implicit threat of military force. While the change in presidential administration is purely superficial, the intense urgency it pursues continuity of agenda with is not. It reflects the rapid rise of China, Russian resilience in the face of US proxy war in Ukraine, and an expanding multipolar world overwriting the US-led unipolar world order at ever-increasing speeds.

US Sectors Hit By New Chinese Tariffs And Restrictions

Earlier this week, China’s tariffs on some US products came into effect, in response to the 10% increase in tariffs that the Trump administration imposed on all Chinese products, starting on February 1st. China created a 15% tariff on coal and Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) and a 10% tariff on crude oil, agricultural machinery, cars with large engines and pickup trucks. On February 4, Xi Jinping’s government filed a lawsuit against the US government’s tariff imposition with the World Trade Organization’s dispute settlement mechanism. China has also implemented export controls on five metals: tungsten, tellurium, bismuth, molybdenum, and indium.

Trump’s Threats Expose Canada’s Utter Dependency On The US

United States President Donald Trump’s tariffs against Canada are understandably causing much consternation and debate. Some business leaders are forecasting dire warnings, union officials are calling for retaliation and relief while also sidling up with their corporate counterparts to present a united front. But these developments are about much more than tariffs. Trump’s tariff plan exposes the perils of Canada’s dependency on the US and the price of integration within the American Empire. To discuss these issues, last week I sat down with Sam Gindin. For more than 25 years, Sam was research director of the Canadian Auto Workers union.

Clean Waters And Green Mountains As Valuable As Gold And Silver Mountains

Lost in a colonial fog of inferiority, writers across Asia imagined a world that was beyond the reach of colonialism’s devastation. In 1835, Kylas Chunder Dutt (1817–1859) wrote a remarkable story called ‘A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945’; the story, published in The Calcutta Literary Gazette, came out when the great French science fiction novelist Jules Verne (1828–1905) was only seven years old. Dutt’s account is not strictly science fiction, but largely futuristic. The eighteen-year-old opened his story with this line: ‘The people of India and particularly those of the metropolis had been subject for the last fifty years to every species of subaltern oppression. … With the rapidity of lightning the spirit of Rebellion spread through this once pacific people’.

‘Quantitative Easing With Chinese Characteristics’

China went from one of the poorest countries in the world to global economic powerhouse in a mere four decades. Currently featured in the news is DeepSeek, the free, open source A.I. built by innovative Chinese entrepreneurs which just pricked the massive U.S. A.I. bubble. Even more impressive, however, is the infrastructure China has built, including 26,000 miles of high speed rail, the world’s largest hydroelectric power station, the longest sea-crossing bridge in the world, 100,000 miles of expressway, the world’s first commercial magnetic levitation train, the world’s largest urban metro network, seven of the world’s 10 busiest ports, and solar and wind power generation accounting for over 35% of global renewable energy capacity.

Trump’s Trade Wars Push US Allies Into Open Rebellion

In an increasingly multipolar world, Donald Trump’s plans to impose tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and the European Union threaten to erode the United States’ global standing. The move has even provoked a backlash from Canada, a historically close ally, where citizens have responded by launching a significant boycott movement. With the notable exception of Israel, Trump has strained relations with nearly all of Washington’s traditional allies. Among the most unexpected targets of his rhetoric has been Canada, a country he has suggested should “become our cherished 51st state.”

Washington’s Fantasy Of A War Against China

The fragility of US power was clear when a small Chinese startup released the DeepSeek machine learning program. The US stock market Nasdaq shuddered, with technology stocks collapsing. This collapse is not a minor matter for the US economy. During the post-COVID-19 inflation (2021), foreign investors began to slow down their purchase of US debt. Then, after the US seized USD 600 billion in Russia’s foreign exchange assets (2022), many central banks moved their own holdings away from the long-arm jurisdiction of the United States. US Treasury bills languished.

Trump’s Tariffs Could Cause Huge Global Crisis

The US designed the global financial system in a way in which the US dollar is at the center, and other countries need to get access to dollars to pay off their dollar-denominated debt, and to pay for imports. Yet, in order for this system to work, the US has to run a deficit with the rest of the world, a current account deficit, so other countries can get those dollars. But Trump wants to disrupt this. He says he wants to tariff other countries to reduce the US trade deficit, which means that other countries won’t be able to get the dollars they need to pay off their debt and to pay for imports.

Panama Tries Compromise; US Says It’s Not Enough

After intense pressure by the U.S. on Panama to return possession of its canal to Washington because the Trump administration thinks China is threatening it, the Central American nation on Sunday sought a compromise by announcing it would study whether or not to renew contracts with a Chinese company managing two ports on the waterway and would withdraw from China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The announcement was made by Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino after meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Panama City.

US Tech CEOs Admit They Want AI Monopoly And ‘Unipolar World’

The CEO of Anthropic, a US AI company backed by Amazon and Google, argued that the government must impose heavy restrictions on China in order to maintain a monopoly on artificial intelligence technology. If the US government can block China from getting advanced semiconductors, we will “live in a unipolar world, where only the US and its allies have these models”, wrote Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Calling for more aggressive sanctions on China, Amodei warned, “Well-enforced export controls are the only thing that can prevent China from getting millions of chips, and are therefore the most important determinant of whether we end up in a unipolar or bipolar world”.

Mexico And Canada Hit Back, China Pulls Punches On Trump’s Tariffs

Within hours of United States President Donald Trump announcing tariffs on China, Canada and Mexico over the weekend, his Canadian and Mexican counterparts hit back with their own levies on US goods. The response from China, Washington’s biggest strategic rival, was notably more restrained. China’s Ministry of Commerce did not announce specific tariffs in its response on Sunday, stating only that it would take “corresponding countermeasures to firmly safeguard its rights and interests”. The ministry also said it would challenge the tariffs at the World Trade Organization, a largely symbolic measure since its appellate body has been non-functioning since late 2019 due to Washington’s refusal to support the appointment of new judges.

China’s Shocking DeepSeek AI Pops US Big Tech Monopoly Bubble

China is making enormous progress in the development of artificial intelligence technology, and it has set off a political and economic earthquake in the West. The stocks of US Big Tech corporations crashed on January 27, losing hundreds of billions of dollars in market capitalization over the span of just a few hours, on the news that a small Chinese company called DeepSeek had created a new cutting-edge AI model, which was released for free to the public. The UK’s leading newspaper The Guardian described DeepSeek as “the biggest threat to Silicon Valley’s hegemony”.

Doomsday Clock Set At 89 Seconds To Midnight

The Doomsday Clock was set at 89 seconds to midnight, the closest the Clock has ever been to midnight in its 78-year history. The 2025 Clock time signals that the world is on a course of unprecedented risk, and that continuing on the current path is a form of madness. The United States, China, and Russia have the prime responsibility to pull the world back from the brink. The world depends on immediate action. The Doomsday Clock’s time is set by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board (SASB) in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which includes nine Nobel Laureates.

How The Chinese Beat Trump And OpenAI

The hype around Artificial Intelligence, the now failed U.S. attempt to monopolize it, and the recent counter from China are a lesson in how to innovate. They also show that the U.S. is losing the capability to do so. In mid 2023, when the Artificial Intelligence hype gained headlines, I wrote: 'Artificial Intelligence' Is (Mostly) Glorified Pattern Recognition Currently there is some hype about a family of large language models like ChatGPT. The program reads natural language input and processes it into some related natural language content output. That is not new. The first Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity (Alice) was developed by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT in the early 1960s. I had funny chats with ELIZA in the 1980s on a mainframe terminal. ChatGPT is a bit niftier and its iterative results, i.e. the 'conversations' it creates, may well astonish some people. But the hype around it is unwarranted.
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