Has the Balance of Global Power Just Shifted to Israel?

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1:51how you doing there it is time for the podcast and what a week to be podcasting about the global economy global politics geopolitics the price of oil the shift in power in the middle east what's going to happen to nato what's going to happen to europe are we going to spend five percent of our budget gdp on military and if so what gives and john of course is down in the south of France. Yes, I turn my back for two minutes and look what happens. I know, there you are, exactly, you were driving, the last time you were driving down France, I will let the listeners remember, you had nightmares of Prigozian driving your car.

2:27That's right, yes I did, yes I did, but wait till I tell you, so we got the boat from Roslare to Cherbourg and it's an overnight boat, so we had a cabin, which is great. Anyway, I got up in the morning, I went up to the deck to have my morning coffee and the young fella who was playing dj and this is eight in the morning or something was blasting out top volume in the middle of the ocean war what is it good for absolutely nothing say it again and i was looking i'm going that's an odd choice and sheena turns around to me and says have you not read the news yet this morning i went no and i opened the phone and went oh no Oh, what now?

3:11What is happening? And it was the quickest war of all. The war that's over. And it's a beautiful piece. It's a beautiful ceasefire. It's a beautiful thing. But we were going to talk about that now. So tell me, you were going down the spine of France then, were you? Down through the middle. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because, you know, we're heading towards the kind of Carcassonne, Perpignan area, Aix-Ate. Lovely, lovely, gorgeous. Stopped off a tour. Beautiful place. Beautiful place, actually. Tour, the original home of the French kings, I think, that neck of the woods. Yeah, Charlemagne's wife was buried there.

3:44Do you know that Tour is where the French language comes from? Ah, what do you mean? The French language is a relatively new construct in the sense that the vast majority of France

3:54David McWilliams: spoke various different dialects for many, many centuries. And the French court decided that the French court originally comes from Tour before they moved to Paris. Yeah. And they decided that Latin, if they continued to speak Latin, that would only cede power to the Vatican. Because the Vatican was the massive, big power that was always against the kings. So there was the church power and king power. So the French kings decided around the 13th century or something to impose the dialect of Tours on France. and gradually and very progressively, they continued to expand. Somebody once said that, you know, a language is a dialect with an army, which I thought was quite good, right?

4:42Yes. So basically you have a dialect with a proper army and they impose their power on other people. And so, so much so that, for example, even Napoleon, fan of the show, I know, fan of the show, didn't speak French properly. He spoke Corsican. Ah, of course he did, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's interesting. So Tour, where you were, John, is the epicentre of the French language. So it was the dialect of that part of La Loire, you know, the valleys, all those massive big... Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, those huge castles they have and this kind of... It's where Disney's... The Americans got the Disneyland idea from.

5:19Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah, because it's gorgeous. And it'd be easy to imagine being in like a Disney-type fable or something like that, you know, because, you know, the parts of the town that weren't bombed in the Second World War. You know, they're beautifully preserved medieval buildings with cobbled streets and stuff. But anyway, so are you saying then that when you say a language is a dialect with an army, that what I suppose is already happening, we're already speaking American English in so many ways, like through soft power. Absolutely, and hard power. Even if we'd be speaking Hebrew. Well, I tell you now, somebody's going to be speaking Hebrew, and we're going to talk about that, which is the power of Israel, which a lot of people listening to podcasts might not necessarily have the palate to hear, but I want to talk about how the Israelis have reframed the Middle East.

6:05But if you think about the Irish language, you know, for example, the Irish language was basically bullied out of Irish people. So language is always about power, you know? And I was thinking this when I was in South Africa a couple of, was it weeks ago, a couple of months ago now, a couple of weeks ago now. You're so waddled with all the travel. Oh no, I know, just tell me about it.

6:23David McWilliams: But you know, when you go to South Africa, what happens is you talk to somebody and you're talking to a guy and he speaks five languages. This is quite normal in Africa. Wow. They speak lots of different languages. And for us kind of, let's say white Europeans, somebody being multilingual, the ability to speak four or five languages, you think that's the height of sophistication. They must be highly, highly educated. They must be very, very civilized. They must be very well read. So we equate speaking many, many languages with deep levels of education, usually upper middle class people, etc. What you realize is that in the poor world, John, the more languages you speak, the poorer you are.

7:07David McWilliams: And this is a fascinating idea. Oh, explain that one. It's really interesting. So poor people need to learn the language of the dominant race or tribe in their area. Right, sure. Okay, so in order, for example, let's say you speak some very small languages, spoken in a little region in order for you to get on you need to learn the language of the bigger region okay so you move from the village yeah you move the village to the town right you need to learn the language of the town why because you're actually selling usually usually you're a woman selling primary products agricultural products in the market of the bigger town therefore you have to adopt the language and consequently then as you go to the city you have to adopt the language of the city, et cetera, et cetera.

7:53Then you might have to adopt the language of the white man. So it could be Afrikaner or English or French, for example, in certain areas. So what you find is

8:01David McWilliams: that the people who speak most languages in poor areas are the very poor. And the people who speak most languages in rich areas are the very rich. And the reason is the people who speak most languages in rich areas of the world learn the language out of choice to deepen their appreciation of culture, travel, sophistication, trade, etc. Whereas the people in the poor part of the world who speak all various or four or five languages do it out of necessity. And that's a way of looking at what happened to the Irish language, which is very few English speakers ever spoke Irish, but every single Irish speaker had to learn English in the 16th, 15th, 17th century, etc.

8:45And that's just kind of a fascinating sort of backdrop to what happened in France, which was the dominant language, which was the language of the prince and the king. And then gradually they enforced that, not through a willingness of the rest of them to say, oh, that language is lovely. Let's learn that. It was actually, you don't learn this language, you don't eat. But it was a version of French. And it was just, this was the dominant dialect. Is that right? Yeah. So there would have been, there would have been, so Lang-Doc. So think about Lang-Doc. Lang-Doc means long, lang. Yeah.

9:17David McWilliams: The language Doc, d 'Occitantale, from the West. So Lang Doc is an area that was defined by a language that was spoken there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Acutane was defined by a language that was spoken there. You know, and you've all these various different languages within the umbrella of what we call now French, which are actually very distinct from each other. And now they've all disappeared or gradually disappeared or they're simply there in kind of heavy accents and one or two odd words. but it is the study of language John is one of the fascinating things but we have been sidetracked earlier than normal on the podcast John yes normally normally we get sidetracked about halfway in but not this time anyway from the get go now tell me war oil Middle East let's go there yes so this bombing and this new conflict has kicked off a whole plethora of stuff and I've got a bunch of questions for you shoot But one of the key ones is, you know, in most conflicts in the Middle East, it's the oil price that it is reflected in first.

10:26Yeah, absolutely. But in this particular conflict, the oil price has fluctuated up and down a little bit, but it hasn't gone wild. Why is that? This is a fascinating, fascinating thing. So you're absolutely right. So if you go back, 1973, 1979, the First Gulf War in 2001, Second Gulf War 2003, 2004,

10:50David McWilliams: all of these were characterized by a transmission mechanism, John, from Middle East to us via the oil price. So what would happen is tensions would rise, bombings would start, oil price would rise dramatically because everybody imagined there was going to be a shortage of oil. As the oil price increased dramatically, what you had was a direct kick into the cost of energy. After wages, the cost of energy is the biggest cost in the West for any production. Therefore, you get inflation, producer price inflation in the West. That leads to consumer price inflation in the West. You get inflation. Inflation spikes upwards.

11:30David McWilliams: Because inflation spikes upwards, demand slows down because people's take-home wage is less. and you get this combination of stagflation, which is inflation and a recession, and or you get a recession. You're absolutely right. So typically the transmission mechanism is after a number of months, the West suffers profoundly as a result of the Middle East, which is precisely why, John, which is precisely why the Americans are there in the first place. I mean, if the Middle East produced turnips, nobody would give a shite about it, right? Fair enough. Right, but they produce oil. So that's the first thing, right?

12:08So explain the difference and explain why that's not happening now.

12:12David McWilliams: Now, I'll give you the figures, which are amazing. As we go to press, John, the price of a barrel of oil started last week at$78 a barrel. It is now$68 a barrel and falling. Wow. So why is that? Yeah. The key question is, the only thing that matters in the area is whether or not the Iranians were going to cut off what they call the Straits of Hormuz. And the Straits of Hormuz are a 30-kilometer bottleneck, in effect. I think if you've ever been to Dubai, that part of the world, it's just around there, just, I think, west of Dubai. It's a little sort of bit of the Arabian Peninsula that juts out between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula.

12:58So all the oil from the likes of Iraq and Kuwait, they have to go... Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, all the gas, Bahrain, all the oil, Iraq, Kuwait, and of course Iran itself. Iran produces about 4 % of the world's oil,

13:13David McWilliams: which is a huge amount, right? Yeah. So all of that comes through there. Now, if the Iranians decided to, or if the expectation was that they were definitely going to attack the Straits of Hormuz and do what the Houthis did in the Red Sea, which is close international traffic, what you would get is an immediate shortage of oil worldwide, an immediate increase in the price of oil. And then that transmission mechanism we talked about would kick in. Now, of course, what happened was the Iranians showed no indication that they wanted to cut off the oil for the Straits of Hormuz are no ability? This is the question, right?

13:54David McWilliams: Yeah. So when they sent those missiles on Monday, so we're now talking, John, on Thursday, when they sent the missiles on Monday into their American base in Kuwait, they actually called the Americans in advance and said, we're going to do this, which Trump actually thanked them for on Tuesday, right? And that meant that it was entirely symbolic. that they were just going to shoot off a couple of missiles to say, we're still in the game, we're still here. But it wasn't an aggressive act. And also, the Americans had been given time to move their planes that were on the ground in Kuwait to actually fly them out of Kuwait.

14:35It's so bizarre, these war games. It's all war games. Because that's what it is.

14:39David McWilliams: That's what it is. So basically, that said, the Iranians are in no mood for a scrap. Now, why is this? It is because they were comprehensively humiliated by the Israelis and the Americans in the last 12 days. Thus the 12-day war that Trump has now defined this. And I think this is what you focus on, is that the oil price is an indicator of risk. And it's very clear that financial markets think that the risk in the Middle East is falling, not rising. Now that is an interesting thing. And that means that the financial markets have decided, okay, there is a new sheriff in town. There is a new dispensation.

15:24David McWilliams: That the risk of an ongoing war or even low-level conflagration is diminishing. That's the first thing. Second thing is there's a hell of a lot of oil around the world, John, right? So OPEC plus, which is OPEC plus Venezuela, Russia, Nigeria, these places, these countries have dramatically increased their production of oil over the last while and as a result of that there's loads of oil around the american shale oil is another huge source of oil and again the americans are pumping out that as fast as they possibly can which means that there is actually loads and loads of oil around the place that's the first thing right And the second thing is that the Iranians are kind of cornered now.

16:12David McWilliams: They don't have any ability to actually disrupt oil prices. Why? Because if they cut off the Straits of Hormuz, the first people who will suffer, they themselves, they need oil for their own domestic economy. And the second people who will suffer are the country, the only country that stayed with them, or at least even tacitly stayed with them over the last two weeks, which have been the Chinese, because Iran supplies China with oil and China supplies Iran with technology. Yeah. Okay, and with consumer goods. Yeah. So they're kind of backed into a corner. And of course, the third thing is, John, the Iranians are now, having been humiliated by the Israelis, are now probably in self-preservation mode, John.

17:02David McWilliams: they don't have an ability to fight anybody else what they're trying to do the fellows with the beards is they're trying to stay in power so they're kind of regrouping because i think the the israeli attack the amount of informants they seem to have the amount of massage agents they seem to have in iran the ability of the israelis to strike at the heads of the nuclear to assassinate nuclear scientists, generals, all that sort of stuff. That will have completely terrified the Iranian regime. As a result, nobody feels safe there. And then finally, John, you have this extraordinary image of Israeli planes flying sorties into Iran, deep into Iran, with no air cover, with no anti-aircraft.

17:51The Iranians didn't even put up planes against them. That would be terrifying for a country. Do you know what I mean? Absolutely. And then finally, of course, is once the Israelis have done that preliminary work

18:03David McWilliams: for the Americans, the Americans come in and bond them. So if you're sitting in Tehran, you're thinking, keep the oil flowing, send a few symbolic missiles over towards Kuwait and Israel, but we're in no mood for a fight, which means then that the risk in the Middle East has diminished because the new boss is Israel. And the risk for, I mean, that doesn't mean the risk to people has diminished, on the contrary. Yeah. But the risk to, and this is the weird thing about economics, John, is the risk to people, particularly people in Gaza, has increased dramatically. Oh, absolutely. But the risk to financial markets has actually diminished profoundly.

18:46And before we get on to the impact on Gaza and the rest of the Middle East, I was curious about at one stage there was talk of China and Russia coming in and backing Iran, but then they have pulled back going, it's not worth it.

19:02David McWilliams: So did you see what Putin said, which is very interesting? Putin said when he was asked, will you side with Iran against Israel? He mentioned something that no Russian president has ever done in the sense that, well, actual fact, it was only himself and Yeltsin have been in power since then. But he said that Russian is the second language of Israel. Israel is a Russified country. There are two million citizens of the Soviet Union and Russia living in Israel. And he said, we will not go against them. That was a massive shift. That's a massive change. Wow. He's basically saying our citizens are Israeli citizens and we don't have a scrap of them.

19:40David McWilliams: And that, of course, is very chilling for the Iranians. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But you see on the flip side of it. Russia would have benefited hugely from a spike in oil prices because it would have just loaded up their war chest and they could have then used that against Ukraine. Yeah, but the Russians seem to be kind of happy with the way things are going in Ukraine. It's a stalemate that they have the upper hand in and they're just going to wait and see what happens in NATO today or tomorrow or this weekend. But what is interesting, John, is the way in which the Middle East has been reframed in the last two years.

20:23David McWilliams: And I think that's worthy of comment, you know. Yeah, it's incredible to think that since Trump has come in since January, you know, that the complexion of the world, and particularly the Middle East, has completely changed. Maybe he will get his Nobel Peace Prize, you know. He'll buy it. He'll buy it. But the next thing on this, then the next question for us is like regime change. Will there be a regime change? Could there be a regime change? And what will that look like? But here's something I was thinking about on the way down, because we're kind of listening to the radio and reading newspapers and stuff.

21:03And I was actually quite upset and pissed off when I heard about the bombing. Because the one thing that having spoken to loads of French people, this is not our war. This is not a people war. This is a war of government against government. It's not people against people. And I don't think the people want that. Like there are many regimes around the world that we have an issue with, including Israel and Iran, but also the likes of Saudi Arabia, Myanmar. It goes on and on. You have an issue with everyone, John. You have an issue with the podcast regime. But you know what I mean? It's not a war of people.

21:41It's a war of governments. Well, I think, you know, let's explore after the break what it all means, who's doing the fighting, who isn't doing the fighting, what it means for the world if this 12-day war is over, if this ceasefire happens and it holds, what

21:59David McWilliams: it actually means for status quo. because as I said, the status quo has shifted profoundly in the Middle East. A lot of people might not like it, but it's a status quo out of which Israel is now emerging as the regional hegemon, the boss power. Yeah. And I think we should discuss that afterwards. Absolutely.

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24:31So, Mark, we're talking about the Middle East and the change in complexion of the Middle East. and, you know, who's the top dog now? And that's very much Israel. So what is that going to look like now? How are things going to change in the Middle East?

24:46David McWilliams: So maybe the reason that Trump has described this as the 12-day war is he has in his head the notion of the Six-Day War, which was the war in 1967 between Israel and the rest of the Arab world. So Six-Day War, but better. But better, yeah, longer. Yeah, exactly. And his guys won. So after the Six-Day War, the Israelis occupied the West Bank. They occupied Gaza. They occupied the Golan Heights. And that shifted for a generation, for a generation, or even two, this sort of facts on the ground as military people talk about, the strategic people, right? Now, the question is whether this 12-Day War will have a similar effect on the Middle East.

25:32David McWilliams: I mean, what is incontrovertible at this stage is that Israel is now the dominant military, political and strategic power in the Middle East. Absolutely, yeah. And probably the most explicit example of that was their ability to fly their air force unimpinged across Iranian airspace. But if you look since the 7th of October attack, take that day as the beginning of something new. The Israelis have destroyed Hezbollah on their northern flank. So the Iranians were their big enemy. They still are. The Iranians had this, what they call the axis of resistance, which was Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria, and Shia in Syria, and the Houthis.

26:21David McWilliams: And this was their idea of they will surround the Israelis with proxy Iranian forces that will continue to attack, undermine, and threaten the Israelis, right? So the Israelis, if you see from the Israeli perspective, what has happened? Hezbollah has been comprehensively humiliated by Mossad, in effect. Yeah. Because Mossad, with those pager bombers and all that sort of stuff. So they've been waiting in the long grass for this for a long time, the Israelis, and planning this. That's the first thing. Second thing is Hamas has been destroyed, as has Gaza been destroyed. Absolutely. But from the Israeli mind, if you just think of the Israeli mind, because again, it's important to get into the headspace of the people that you might not want to get in the headspace of.

27:10David McWilliams: From the Israeli mind, Hamas is gone as a threat out of Gaza. Think about Syria. Syria has had regime change again. Assad is gone. Assad was a protectorate of Iran because it was used, the weakened Assad government was used as the, almost the roadmap from Iran to South Lebanon. That's gone. Iran has been completely humiliated and is now ringing up the Americans to say we might rob a bomb at you. Right? Yeah, please, can we? Yeah, can we rob a bomb? Right. So that's how defanged Iran has become in the Israeli mind. I'm just looking at the Israeli perspective. Yes, sure, sure, sure. All the Arab states sat in their hands.

27:57Not one of them did a thing to help the Palestinians. Not one of them did a thing for solidarity with their Islamic brethren. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. What does that say about them?

28:07David McWilliams: It says that they're shit scared of Israel. That's what it says. Yeah. If the Israelis can fly over Iran, the great enemy, a 92 million strong country, without any incoming fire against them, they can fly over Saudi Arabia and do the same thing. so what I'm just saying is that if you look at from the Israeli perspective which most Irish people don't ever look at I understand, they are now probably sitting back now and thinking okay job done new dispensation, we are the top dogs but the problem is John when you're the top dog the only place to go has been the second top dog, you know what I mean, when you're the top Yeah, well, that's exactly what I was going to say.

28:56You talked about Mossad hiding in the long grass, waiting for their moment. As with the Nakbar, it's a brooding, deep, deep resentment that is building all the time and then manifests itself in the likes of Hamas and Hezbollah and all the rest. so while they've been beaten now are they going to be brooding and is iran going to be one of these brooding states that it's going to at some stage in the future because it's never truly done

29:28David McWilliams: it all depends on how you view the world i'm completely with you right is that every single palestinian child that is murdered in gaza and they're not killed they're murdered right yeah They're murdered intentionally. That is a recruitment agent for the next Palestinian child. Exactly. We know that. But there probably comes a time where the Palestinians may well take the view, if they are allowed to by the Israelis, that the Jordanians took. I think the Jordanians took a view after being beaten by the Israelis a few times. They said, look, there's no point in fighting these people anymore. Yeah.

30:03David McWilliams: They're actually too strong. This is an enemy we cannot defeat. and the Jordanians have this kind of unsteady peace with Israel, have had it for a long, long time. But they didn't lose that much though, did they? And life goes on in Jordan as a result. But of course what the Jordanians did is said we don't want the Palestinians in Jordan anymore. So the Palestinians are the ones who are caught between the pragmatism and the selfishness of the Arab states and the brutality of the Israeli state, if you think about it. with respect to regime change in Iran, you know, who knows what's going to happen.

30:39David McWilliams: Typically what happens is when you lose so publicly, the regime itself is undermined dramatically. And as we heard with Christopher de Beleng last week, there is no majority support in Iran for this regime. Iranians do not want to live under an Islamic law. Absolutely. Nobody does. Nobody does. It's horseshit. It's a theocracy. You know, I mean, call it for what it is. It's bullshit, you know, in the 21st century. But you know why you used to work with the Iranians in the Persian section of BBC World Service? And absolutely, they had no interest in living under a regime like that. And actually, a lot of the BBC guys were exiled from Iran.

31:27So you mean Iran, Iman? The Iranian regime could be toppled in the next while.

31:31David McWilliams: Yeah. And that would be a victory for the Israelis total. And Americans. Yeah, but I'm putting the Americans and the Israelis in the same bracket. Sure, sure, sure. I mean, but at the moment, the Israeli Americans have kind of almost won, but they haven't quite won. Yeah. So, because their idea would be regime change in Iran, and that would bring in a kind of a Shah type regime. The Iranians would make peace with everybody. They'd be back in the fold, right? But that hasn't happened. So what you have is an unsteady peace, John, a fragile peace, a fragile ceasefire, where the Iranians are playing second fiddle to the Israelis.

32:11The Israelis are the top.

32:13David McWilliams: But you know, a country of, you know, 7 million Jews, surrounded by several hundred million enemies, can't remain top dog for long. and then it depends on your worldview. And this, I suppose, is where you get to the worldview of the likes of Netanyahu and stuff I picked up in Israel years ago, which was a lot of Israelis see the world through a prism of the permanent struggle of the Jewish people for survival, going back thousands of years. So they don't see the world like we see it, which is that you can have a peace, the peace can be negotiated, that peace and negotiations is respected by all, and you move on in a peaceful world.

32:57David McWilliams: What they see, or many of them see, not they, many of them see the world as a perennial existential struggle, that you always have to be fighting with somebody. And the minute you lose, you lose not just face, you lose territory, you lose population. And once you kind of get into that mindset, or not get into it, but at least appreciate it, what you realize then is someone like Netanyahu who just sees the world as a permanent struggle. And then it also helps him that this permanent struggle will allow him to stay in power and stay out of jail, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. On a very personal level.

33:34Yes, yeah.

33:35David McWilliams: But I do think there's something deeper there. I remember having a mentor, an Israeli mentor years ago called Amos Rubin, who sadly passed away. And I remember sitting and talking to him over many cups of tea, because they're not big boozers, right? Cups of teas and coffees late at night. And, you know, he talked about this permanent struggle. And I thought, wow, that's a different way of looking at the world, you know. And so maybe, as you said, this is a half victory. Yeah. But it's only a half victory in a world of permanent struggle. So it can never be what they would describe as a victory that's comprehensive.

34:11It's just the next chapter. And if you look at history, John. So there never will be a complete victory. No, you'll never. And if you look at history, right, In 1967, the Israelis declared victory. What happened by 1973? They were scrapping again, right? In 1973, they declared a victory. What happened again? 1982, they were in Lebanon, scrapping again, right? In 1982 in Lebanon, they declared a complete victory. What happened? In 1991, we got the Gulf War. Then we got the, you remember that podcast we did two years ago on the, so it never ends. That's the problem. And if you even think about it now, do you remember after the Gulf War won in 1991, the Americans declared a comprehensive victory, but they didn't depose Saddam.

34:56They left him in power. Yes. Yeah. And 2002, they're back scrapping again. Absolutely. Yeah. And so that's what's going to happen. If they don't get regime change in Iran now, which they might not get, our friends, the Ayatollahs and the Mullahs will lick their wounds, regroup, stay in power. and in a couple of years' time, you're back all over again.

35:16David McWilliams: And that, I suppose, is the MAGA movement's understanding of the world. The MAGA movement understands you can't win these wars. These forever wars are constant and the Americans need to pull out and leave them scrap amongst themselves. Well, that was the last point I was going to make, that because of what you say about the MAGA movement, that is one part of the MAGA movement's view of the world, that they never want to have American boots on the ground anywhere in the world again. But that in itself could split MAGA and could be the downfall of Trump, the big, beautiful downfall. Well, the big, beautiful downfall.

35:54David McWilliams: And if it comes, there'll be no putting together Humpty Dumpty again. I will talk to you Tuesday.

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