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Premium Edition Teaser: 51st State of Mind, You Bloody Bastard, Wanging On

2025/5/1
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Multipolarity

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Philip Pilkington
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专注于电动车和能源领域的播客主持人和内容创作者。
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主持人: 加拿大联邦大选结果与之前的民调预测大相径庭,保守党领袖Pierre Poilievre的失利令人意外。这引发了人们对加拿大政治走向的诸多猜测,例如加拿大是否受到了特朗普总统任期内巨大贸易引力的影响,以及加拿大人为何认为选择一位温和的前央行行长就能避免美国对其国家的影响。此外,印巴冲突的加剧也显示出该地区日益重要的地位以及其成为大国博弈棋子的现实。 Philip Pilkington: 我认为加拿大这次大选并非正常选举,其背后存在一些长期性的因素。自由党在选举中的转变,从“觉醒”转向某种形式的加拿大民族主义,实质上是参与美国的文化战争。加拿大历史上的两种主要文化认同(魁北克法裔和英裔)都经历了美国化的过程,如今加拿大试图在与美国的对抗中重建民族认同,但这实际上是通过反映美国自由主义文化政治来实现的。美国不会容忍加拿大或墨西哥变得比现在强大得多,或不听从美国的命令。美国强大的海军实力是其维持北美地区影响力的基础,其经济实力和地理位置也对此起到了关键作用。即使加拿大构建了一种虚假的加拿大认同,最终仍将与美国对抗。马克·卡尼当选加拿大总理具有讽刺意味,因为他曾反对脱欧,是全球主义者的代表,如今却成为加拿大民族主义的象征。

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We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a new world order. This is Multipolarity, charting the rise of the new multipolar world order.

Coming up this week... Three months ago, Pierre Poivre was going to take 50% of the total vote, an historic generational landslide. Now, here's a pub trivia question. What happened in Canada? Did it warp beneath the enormous trade gravity of the Trump presidency?

And why did Canadians think that turning to a milquetoast former central banker would turn off the US electromagnet dismantling their country one bolt at a time?

India and Pakistan are at it again. Earlier in the week, reports were of World War III, Vishnu and Allah duking it out with nukes at the gates of hell. So far, it's all sparks and no light. But this week's rift shows how the region is both increasingly important and ever more the pawn of bigger powers. Finally, on Saturday, foreign ministers from five Central Asian countries met with China's Wang Yi to talk over deepening trade ties.

It may seem like just a bunch of guys drawing over the agree-to-agree communique, but this is the dawning of the middle corridor. But first, 51st State of Mind. Exciting news from across the pond this week. Political extravaganza in Canada, which held a federal general election. It was won by the Liberal Party, led by Davos pin-up boy Mark Carney.

was the former central banker, the former head of the central bank in Canada, and also the governor of the Bank of England in the past, and is now going to become the Prime Minister of Canada, leading the Liberal Party, which was also the party of previous Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. They won 167 seats, which was actually a gain of two seats from 2021.

The Conservative Party, which until very recently had been in the lead and is led by Pierre Poilievre, won 145 seats, actually a loss of two seats.

And actually, the leader, Poilevra, lost his own riding. Of course, the big story about this is the turnaround that's happened since Donald Trump was elected. In fact, the Conservative Party were comfortably in the lead for a long, long time. And they were heading, in fact, for a landslide victory if the polls were to be believed. And then two things happened. First of all, Justin Trudeau, who was tremendously unpopular,

resigned and secondly Donald Trump started talking about annexing Canada to the United States

a voluntary annexation, of course, where Canada would become 51st state. He started referring to Justin Trudeau as the governor of Canada, as if Canada was a state. This seemed to create an opportunity, really, for nationalist fervor on the liberal side of things, rather than the more populist, aligned Pierre Poilev and the Conservative Party.

It just led to a staggering turnaround in fortunes and now we pretty much have the status quo ante again.

But this is well known in the press. This is well covered elsewhere. And Multipolarity, of course, likes to offer things at a different angle. And Philip Pilkington, you indeed have a different angle to offer. You posted a really interesting Twitter thread about Canadian politics just today. And I think our listeners ought to hear it because it's an original and fascinating and I suspect correct take.

Yeah, I think maybe the reason I'm sensitive to what's actually going on in Canada is because I come from a former Commonwealth country myself. Ireland was originally part of the United Kingdom only until a few generations ago.

And it actually has many of the same political dynamics as Canada, which is still part of the Commonwealth, of course. What's really stood out in the past few weeks about the election cycle in Canada? Well, first of all, it's not a normal election cycle. And I think people have a lingering sense that that's the case.

You just alluded to it there. The liberals who until very recently were associated with Justin Trudeau, who put on funny outfits and was kind of the global embodiment of woke.

are now some sort of Canadian nationalist, which is the most strangest turnaround. But when you kind of scratch the surface, you begin to understand what this is. Canada historically was not really Americanized. That's what a lot of people outside of Canada don't understand today because they meet Canadians today and you can barely tell a Canadian apart from an American. Sorry to my Canadian listeners, but that's how it is internationally. I can actually tell Canadians apart because I'm so culturally empathetic.

pathetic, but most people in Europe can't and most people in the Anglo world outside of America can't, including British people.

Well, that wasn't always the case. Historically, Canada had two main cultural identities. One was the Quebecois French identity, which was very, very Roman Catholic until a generation or two ago. And of course, they still speak French to this day. So the language is still there, but they've become very Americanized. They've become a strange Americanized sort of French identity. It's interesting in and of itself. Basically, via the Quebecois now are very woke, as we'd say. So they've absorbed...

American liberal left cultural identity. And of course, the previously British Canadians have as well. They used to be very much so of the Commonwealth. You might think of kind of more upper, you know, the elite there would have been the same in terms of kind of an upper class quasi-

British as you'd have found in Ireland. Also, you'd probably have found in Australia and so on. But they haven't been like that for a long time. The Canadians have become Americanized to the extent that, as I said, most people internationally, including English, native English speakers, can have a very hard time telling a Canadian apart from an American.

And so Canada's in this very strange spot where it thinks it's falling back on some sort of national identity, which they're setting up in reaction to the United States. But actually, they're not doing that. They're taking part in what is in effect an American culture war. They're looking at Trump and they're seeing what every American liberal sees.

the orange overlord, as I called it in my tweet, the big scary orange man, the embodiment of, you know, whatever you want to call it, fascism, nationalism. Well, you can't use that term anymore because you're Canadian nationalists now. But you get my point. They're seeing through the lens of an American liberal. And so they're remaking their own identity in opposition to Trump by voting for a kind of this quasi-nationalist in the form of Carney. But they're just fighting the American culture war.

We're seeing something very similar in Ireland right now as well, and in Britain to a certain extent, although it comes with shades of its own. But I'm just saying it's very familiar to me, so it wasn't particularly hard to understand. At a more meta level, as the global Western, I called it Anglo-liberal system unfolds,

Twitter, and I think that's probably the correct term here, because we're not dealing with Europe, we're dealing with the Anglo-liberal system, which is America, Britain, Canada, Ireland, the antipodes, etc, etc. As these go through the kind of collapse of the world order, what's actually emerging, and we should call a spade a spade, are ethnic tensions.

old ethnic tensions that have been there for a very long time. This is a very similar process that we'd see in the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia and so on. Now, look, we're not at the point where, you know, there's a civil war or anything, and I don't think we'll get to that point. I'm not predicting that. But we are seeing the reemergence of old ethnic identity.

And Canada at the moment is in this confused time where they're trying to form an oppositional ethnic identity to the United States. Right now, they're still trapped in the looking glass because they're just reflecting back American liberal cultural politics.

I don't think this is going to go in a different direction. Even if the Canadians build a kind of a fake Canadian identity, as it were, out of American liberal left politics, that's fine. They can do that and they can keep that and they can call it Canadian identity. And, you know, for all intents and purposes, it is as it exists today. But if they do that, they're setting themselves up in opposition to the United States.

And that is where it gets interesting because that is only going to go in one direction. And maybe we can talk about that now because we were talking about it before the show. Yeah, I think people don't realize that, or people perhaps realize it, but it hasn't crystallized as a thought in their minds that the United States will not tolerate Canada or Mexico being either considerably more powerful than they are today,

or not towing the US line when push comes to shove. Like Washington simply will not tolerate that. At a very basic level,

The US at the moment has an awesomely powerful navy and very powerful navies are much more expensive than powerful land armies. It's not cheap to build an aircraft carrier strike group, even a single one, and properly equip it as Britain's desperate attempts to put one strike group into the ocean have shown. It's not cheap. And it was ever thus. It's always been expensive to build navies. Even back in the days when

you know, they were built out of wood and had sails. The reason that the US can afford that and afford this like really powerful expeditionary capacity where it can sail anywhere in the world and put pretty powerful land and air forces pretty much anywhere that it wants to in the world. The reason that it could do that isn't just because it has a big enough economy to do it. Like that, that of course is one essential component. You've got to be rich enough to do that.

But there are probably a few other countries in the world who are rich enough to do that, and yet they don't, they haven't. And the reason is that the U.S. has such quiescent borders. You know, like the U.S. is bordered by Canada and Mexico. It's not like Germany, which is surrounded by, you know, France and Russia, or Russia, which is surrounded by Germany and Turkey and China, right? Just because the U.S. has changed its policy

Just because we've gone from this kind of liberal globalist abroad and liberal progressive at home consensus among the Washington elites to something different, a kind of inchoate and nascent Trumpism, shall we call it, that doesn't mean that China and Mexico are going to have to toe the line any less than

than they do now. They might not like it, but they're going to ultimately have to do it because the US simply will not tolerate them refusing to do that when push comes to shove. They get some latitude to maneuver. They can set policies to a certain degree in the same way that a member of the European Union can set fiscal policy to a certain level. But if it gets out of whack, then the big clunking fist of Brussels is going to come in

and tell you to get in line or it's going to use the ECB to remove your government, right? Like this is how it works. And it's also how it works in North America ultimately. It's just done under the surface. Ultimately, the US is going to force...

Canada to toe its line. I mean, it's one of life's ultimate, ultimate political ironies that Mark Carney, of all people, the man who opposed Brexit, the globalist's globalist, the pin-up boy of Davos Man and central bankers, it's such an irony that he should hold a baton for Canadian nationalism. But of course he's not holding that baton.

Hello there, Andy Collingwood here, interjecting, just to let you know that this is a premium episode of Multipolarity the podcast. So if you want to listen to the rest of this, if you want to hear about how China is turning Central Asia into a crucial logistics hub to connect the manufacturing prowess of China's eastern seaboard with the wealth of Western Europe...

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