The Best of Bloomberg Opinion

Published Dec 28, 2022, 5:58 PM

Join us as we wrap the top stories we covered this year. Philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko breaks down Ukrainian and Russian identities and post-war questions. Clara Ferreira Marques remembers Mikhail Gorbachev. David Fickling examines the world's bread baskets, and Cambridge professor Helen Thompson discusses the new world order.

This is the best of Bloomberg opinion. I'm Vonnie Quinn. The divining event of two was undoubtedly Russia invading Ukraine February. The war force continues latest tally's estimate, more than forty one thou people dead, more than fifteen thousand missing, and about fourteen million displaced. The invasion that chocked the world saw Russian troops entering Ukraine from the northeast and south. Two months following that, I spoke with Ukrainian philosopher Vladimir your Malenko in an effort to grasp the enormity of what had happened. How do Ukrainians understand Vladimir Putin? If he were to be removed by his own people or an outside force, would Russia look different. I'm not sure. I'm not sure it will look different. Obviously, the problem is not only putting it himself, and if there is a replacement for somebody else, most probably will have the same personality or even the worse personality, although it's difficult to imagine worse. So Ukrainians do not have any illusion with regard to this. We understand that Russia in its current form is seeing itself as a wounded empire which tries to, you know, regain what it understands this past glory and conquering Ukraine or even annihilating Ukraine. Ukrainians independence and Ukrainian self consciousness is one of the key elements for restoring this empire. So for us, it's a real existential fight. We understand that Russians want to conquer these territories and have the Ukraine without Ukrainians. You wrote a threat attempting to put into words why Russians hate and humanize Ukrainians so much. It's producing a lot of cognitive dissonance that Russia wants Ukraine to sort of come back into the cradle. And at the same time there's so much hatred directed at Ukrainians, which Vladimir Putin maintains come from the same Soviets nest as you like. I think we have to understand that Russia is not a nation, it's an empire. So an illusion that sometimes you see it in America in Europe is to consider Russian generation as a kind of a nation state, where for example, there are Russians living with certain homogeneity ethnic, cultural, linguisticy, etcetera. It's not the case, especially actually a continental empire, which conquered so many different technicities, which has its colonies inside its body. So it also considered Ukrainians and Belarusians as part of this kind of imperial body. And when it, for example, sees Ukrainians saying that no, look, we are not Russians. We are a different nations with different organization of society, culture, language, etcetera, this produces very difficult feeling in Russia because it believes that Ukrainians and Delusians and Russians is the same construct, the same nation, and every deviation from this Russian nation, as they say, is an example of Nazism, you know. So I think that they are legging behind in developing their own national identity. Their concept of empire means that empire doesn't have borders, Empire is always expanding. Ukrainians developed this idea that well, this is our land. We have certain borders. We don't want to go any further these borders. But here inside our borders, we organize our society in the way we like, and we don't want to expand anywhere. And so a lot of where when people talk about a Soviet identity as a Ukrainian, what does that make you think is that relevant to the current train. Well, in Ukraine, obviously there are people who have some kind of nostalgia about Soviet Union, but much less than in Russia. Russia really developed a political project of coming back to this glorious Soviet past. Ukrainian political imagination is not centered on the past. It's centered on the future. For Ukrainians, the past is a very traumatic thing. So basically Russian slogan was we can do it again, meaning the victory in the Second World War. Our major slogan is never again, which is kind of a slogan also common with Europeans. Why Russians are developing this idea of ruleski mere Russian world, it's also an artificial construct to replace this idea of Soviet people. There is a kind of artificial invention in which every particular group will be just assimilated into some kind of utopian Soviet people, which is very artificial. Let's talk about NATO for a second. Do Ukrainians accept that Ukraine cannot be at least as the world is now part of NATO. Well, public opinion polls show support of NATO membership is very high. It has never been as high as now over seventy. But at the same time, what is NATO. Nature is a security guarantee, and Ukrainians do need this because they're living with such a monster neighbor. We understand that nature is composed of many different countries, and you need consensus to get Ukraine into nature. Maybe it's better to have bilateral security agreements with the United States, with United Kingdom, with Poland. The second thing is that Ukrainian army can be very efficient and in a way Ukraine can turn into kind of a security provider, not only security recipient, for other countries. So I imagine, for example, Ukraine in the future to be a kind of a country which will share its military and security experience with other countries of the world, maybe with NATO members. Do Ukrainians understand why Vladimir Putin might feel threatened by NATO. No, Ukrainians don't understand it. So we just look at the map of Russia and we can't understand how Russia can be encircled as they say, or fear the attack of NATO or whatever. But the problem of Putin is that he creates a reality which he constructs in his imagination. So his propaganda was saying that Russia is not waging war with Ukraine on Ukrainian territory, but with the United States and nature. This was his propaganda for the past eight ten years. So basically Putting created a reality which he first invented in his head. And now this is the reality that Ukrainians do have military support from the West a lot of it. Has the West lived up to its expectations in the eyes of Ukrainians. I mean, there obviously have been attempts from the very beginning to punish Russia and to help Ukraine, But has it been enough, particularly since Ukraine has always looked West, has looked for leadership and guidance and inclusion. Look, Ukraine was not taking seriously all all those years. Our warnings were not hurt. So when we were telling the West that after Russian invasion of Georgia, Ukraine will be next. After Ukraine, nature countries will be next. When Ukrainians were warning Europe that dependency on Russian gas and oil exports is very bad, we were warning Europe at least since two thousand and six, We were not very much hurt attentively, and I think that Ukrainian self description as a kind of both the land of the Western civilization and which is fighting against something barbarian, undemocratic and the enemy of the civilized democratic war. This self description is now more and more accurate, and therefore the West should stop looking for compromises. Once it's over. Will Ukraine still want to be part of the likes of the European Union and other Western institutions, Yes? Why not? Why why shouldn't it strive to these institutions. So of course it wants to be part of nature, part of the EU. But at the same time Ukrainians understand that European Union has been made possible because security was guaranteed basically by nature by United States since the end of the Second World War, and Europe concentrated its efforts on welfare, economy, equality, human rights, etcetera. Unfortunately, Ukrainian situation is different. We will be for decades with the country neighboring Ukraine a nuclear power which WANs to destroy us. Therefore, we should think primarily about our security, whether we are in nature, whether we are in the EU. So I think that after our victory, Ukraine will be a kind of a country with very strong state presence in the security sector and quite liberal economy, Vladimir, do you understand how Russia might continue to be part of institutions, So, for example, the U N. Security Council. I mean, it's out of the Human Rights Council, but it's still very much part of the United Nations. And in a far flung future, maybe not even that far away, you might have to work with Russia. I mean your own president has said that. No, I don't understand it. Frankly, I don't understand how U N. Security Council as an institution can function after these events. It's unacceptable that any country of the world has a veto power. If it's not able to reform itself. United Nations will be over as organizations. But you do accept that Russia, and it's one forty four million people, is not going away, and at some point when this is resolved somehow, it's still going to be a major player on the world stage. Look, we don't know, because if my interpretation is correct, and Russia is not a nation state but an empire, Russia is the only empire that survived the twentieth century, or the only European empire that survived the twentieth century. But it doesn't mean that it will survive the twenty first century. If you look at Russian interpretation of what's going on, they basically admit that if they do not expand, they will collapse, as it collapsed when the Soviet Union dismountled, and therefore the war in Ukraine is so existentially important for them. Ukrainian philosopher Volatimer yo Malenko in April, this is the best of Bloomberg opinion. You're listening to the best of Bloomberg opinion. I'm Vonnie Quinn. Just more than six months after the start of Russia's war on Ukraine, the man who presided over the end of the Soviet Union died, the President Reagan and I of the Treaty on the Elimination of Intermediate and Short Arrange Muscles. Nikail Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize in for quote the leading role he played in the radical changes in East West relations in the scheme of history. However, his was a complicated role. I spoke with Bloomberg Opinions Clara Ferra Marquez about the complex legacy of the man who ended the Cold War. Clara, what for you is the lasting legacy of Michael Gorbachev? I think it's a really interesting and a far more difficult question. And I think a lot of people realize, and particularly in the West, where we have a very particular view of Gorbachev and what he did and what he represents for many of us at the end of the Evil Empire, it's in reality a lot more complicated. So he was clearly a man of the system, a man who wanted to work within the system. Obviously, he did not start out to collapse the Soviet Union. That was unintended consequence largely of economic and this school reforms. He changed the world. He was able to end the Soviet Union largely peacefully, and that is remarkable. But also you know that a lot of the ill conceived economic reforms that he brought in, the chaos that he left in his wake, allowed kleptocracy to take roots, and in many ways he is responsible for where Russia is today. Russians too, of course, putain many of us in the West who supported the system, but the economic plundering that was possible was to a degree because of right, there's a little bit more of a complicated legacy than just he presided over the end of the ussr absolutely think about him as a bit of a political rule shact test. You know, to us in the West, he's the man that Margaret Thatcher said she could do business with the Many and the former Soviet States, he's the man that brought down the wall. But for Russians, and I think in particular what matters for us as we look at this today is really what he means for the Britain regime and for them, he is the man who lost an empire, the man who brought national humiliation to a great nation. And I think that's really very very important in undis ending where we are today. So just to go back to Paristoica and Glass nows those reforms were life changing events, countries, state changing events. Were there any remnants of what Gorbach had introduced, Well, now that's a difficult one. I'd say almost no. So if you think about the three things that he really wanted to bring, he really wanted a thriving economy, he wanted openness, and he wanted democracy, and under putin, all three have been undone. But the concept of Parasto and the concept of glass and stars slightly different, and they are self reinforcing. Glass means transparency, clarity, It was about openness, and really that began very strongly after ch a novel which was a failure of the system that kept so many secrets. And Peristoia was the reconstruction. So that's what Pedistroian means, to reconstruct. And what happened, in fact is so relevant to today because when he started to unpicket, he found that the Soviet Empire was also on nothing. It was built on violence, it was built on lies. And really that's what we will find with the Putin regime. Archie Brown and The Guardian said, Gorbachev was asked a couple of years ago what has epitaph should be, and he replied, we tried. He was devastated, apparently by the war, and at the same time, Clara, he must have seen this coming in some ways. I don't want to compare it to other rises and falls of other regimes and so on, but in some ways these things are visible in advance, right and certainly in the case of Russia, this was potentially extraordinarily visible, especially to a statesman like Gorbachov, who then handed off to Yelson, who then handed off to Putin. I think, in terms of thinking about the collapse of the Soviet system. Two things are important. One is that they themselves think about this. Beijing thinks about this, So Beijing spends an awful lot of time studying paristoric again because going back to the Rulesha Act test, it really says everything about fishing and not much about Mihil Gorbachev. The second thing is just in terms of the visibility. So when we look at the Soviet collapse, the most important thing is really to think that what was obvious was that it would come to an end. It wasn't at all obvious how it would come to an end or when. And I think the same as through today. We have an extremely brittle system and a system that is hollowing itself out, stagnant economy and impossible plundering of resources at the top of predicting when that can end, I mean that is almost impossible. You mentioned that Beijing studied Paristroiker. What lessons did Beijing learn from this study? What so called errors of Paristroika would Beijing seek to try and avoid. I mean, interestingly, I would argue they take all the wrong lessons from this. They look at gorbashof I mean, obviously there were violent incidents, but by and largely was averse to violence, and Beijing sees certain I think you think they once made a comment about, you know that the iron grip that gorbashof did not have. They really see this assay of demonstration that forces required. If somebody wants to pull out of your empire, you pulled them back in by force, and obviously that's what's happened, for example with Hong Kong. The other thing they think about it as economic and political reform, which comes first, and they really see as a problem that what happened in Russia was that political reform was done first, so that there was openness, there was an ability to discuss the errors, and everything was out in the open, and they see that's as fundamental, but it is. It's a really interesting study because it has chain and show over time. So Clara, you would have seen this happening when you were a youngster in school and so on, but you did arrive in Russia not that long after some of these changes were enacted. What was it like. Was it a free and open society where there was a view towards market economics and so on, or was the Yellson era already showing signs of Strain. I think what the Alton era really showed was that we were heading towards the sort of personalist, kleptocratic system, and at the time it perhaps wasn't so obvious. We saw a different direction of travel. So I arrived in Russia in August nine seven, so just before the financial crisis the year after, and it was a time that was extremely chaotic, extremely painful economically and also quite violent. To be clear, this was not an easy time at all, but it was a hopeful time in the sense that people did see something better down the line. They were sort of living through this period, even during the crisis, which is absolutely catastrophic. I'd say a lot of that has been reversed, the hope in particular, but also this idea that we could escape stagnation. Take the auto industry or take the aviation industry for example. Clara Putin, How would Vladimir Putin have been shaped by the events that Mikhail Gorbachev oversaw. I think there are two very important events I think important to understand where Puttin is today and the plistical man that he is one is effectively nine eight nine, he was the young KGB officer in Dresden, in Germany, and there's an episode that he's written about. He was at the KCB headquarters and there was a mob approaching, and he was desperate to preserve what was inside, and he called the Red Army and he asked for reinforcements and they said we we haven't got to orders from Moscow, so you can't do anything. And then they said something that stayed with him, which is they said Moscow is silent. And this particular phrase for him was really a sort of demonstration of powerlessness. It was a humiliation. He felt the country no longer existed, and he wanted to reverse this destruction of an emph He said later that the thousand years of our work was Undone the second important moments is that he did consider the role that a collapsing economy place. So for him, macroeconomic stability was and remains absolutely crucial, and he very often positions himself in contrast with the chaos of the nine nineties. Obviously, that's very ironic given where we are today with the Russian economy, where he himself has pushed the economy back to pretty much that period. How is Gorbachev seen by the majority of Russians? If there is a majority opinion one. Well, Russian's opinions on quite complicated and it depends to some extent what age you are. But I think for a long time he was actually completely ignored. He was a fringe figure. He complained about the Prutain regime. Though I would say that he saw Ukraine in Russia's orbit the way that prusin. I mean that doesn't mean he advocated an invasion. In fact, he clearly spoke up against it, but he didn't have a radically different view. I think it's important to understand the role that political deaths play in the regime like this, the political death funeral, the eulogy, the whole pageantry around it is not about the person whose diet's about those stuff behind. The tributes have been exactly as you would expect. So Frutin criticizing the failures that he is now undoing, so the loss of empire, but really glossing over some of the failures that tell you a lot about the region today. So for example, excessive military spending, for example, the misadventures in Afghanistan, or the stagnating economy, all of that he will not talk about, so he will use it in that sense and really succeed the sort of Soviet tinged nostalgia. That is the only thing that the current regime has to replace ideology, and they cannot pull the country together on the basis of ideology, so they've gone back to a lot of the old Soviet imagery, the old Soviet narrative. Bloomberg Opinions that Clara Ferreira Marquez, this is the best of Bloomberg opinion. You're listening to the best of Bloomberg opinion. I'm Vannie Quinn. The war on Ukraine is having devastating effects. Beyond the crucible of the war itself. The impact on global food supplies was immediate and vast, thanks to port blockades, sharp increases and prices, and countries implementing measures to protect domestic supplies. Food security, particularly in North Africa and the Asia Pacific regions particularly impacted early in the food crisis. I spoke with Boomberg Opinions David Fickling for an assessment of the potential damage. I think we're approaching a quite unusual turn in the sort of history of global food security. To be honest, if you look back at the long history of this, you know one of the crucial things that helped keep the world fed over the past fifty years while the world population has doubled, is actually trade. People talk a lot about the growth of sort of chemical fertilizers and farm machinery, which have both been very important in the twentieth century in keeping the world fed, but trade is a really important part of that because, of course, if you have drought and crop failures in your region, then there's no amount of fertilizer or farm machinery that will solve the fact that your crop just won't grow. So a really important thing that I think is underappreciated is that the cost of ocean freight in the nineteenth century dropped by about and so you suddenly have this global trade in grains and about a quarter of all the calories we consume it and now traded across borders. So it's very important that this is a global trade. But I think something's undappreciated is that it's quite a concentrated trade. The world's bread baskets are rather few. There's probably about six of them the US Midwest, the South America, sort of Argentina, Brazil, that area, areas of western Europe, and the Ukraine and the former Soviet Union and Russia, and I think most importantly the playing between the Indus and the Ganges in northern India and Pakistan and eastern China, between the Yank Sea and the Yellow Rivers. Those six read baskets are absolutely crucial to the world's growth. Of these relatively few number of crops that we depend on, wheat, rice, corn, soybeans. More than half of wheat and rice and corn are grown if you put those those areas together, soybeans disclosed. Now for most of the time, that's not too much of a problem because although there's just half a dozen of these bread baskets, if you get a draft in one region, it tends to pair with good rainfall and another region that leads to higher crop yields, because essentially the rainfall has to go somewhere. It evaporates on one side of the ocean, it tends to drop on the other side of the ocean, And when we talk about things like El Nino and Landinia, that's essentially about rainfall ending up in different places. However, as the climate is changing, a lot of that is getting a lot less secure than it has been in the past. The weather has a lot to do with the fact that there's going to be a shortage. It is not just Russia's war in Ukraine. Absolutely one of the world's top three wheat producers. May be slightly surprising in fact, is India. You don't think of India as a big wheat producer because there's not a big wheat exporter normally, because it's almost all consumed at home. What we've seen in India over the past a couple of months, we've seen this very extreme heat wave and that has caused India to embargo exports of wheat. Places like the Middle East. They were very dependent on wheat from Ukraine. That's obviously been damaged by the war in Ukraine. The places they were hoping to get their wheat supplies from with India, but now injury is not supplying that either. Obviously you see these high prices in the US as well, So you really see how some relatively small changes, and especially if you throw gear politics in the mix, as with the war in Ukraine, suddenly what looked like a decent spread of food baskets can very quickly that are rather short. You also point out on a recent piece food dependent nations can import nutrition, but they must have the foreign exchange to pay for it, and we know that because of the dollar strength, that's in short supply in many of these countries. Yeah. Absolutely, and of course a weak currency becomes a problem for especially the poorest in the country, even if there is the availability of imported nutrition. I mean, another interesting example you look at Brazil. Brazil recently not a country that you really associate with a sort of open trade policy, but they've been drastically cutting the tariff rates essentially to zero for all food imports. The eye of values, of course, that the inflation is very high in Brazil, and it is a problem for people in Brazil that they can afford to eat. Well. That is a decent policy approach, but the problem is it's not nearly sufficient, because if you look at the way the real the currency has fallen in recent years, Brazili the big food producer anyway, and it's probably not going to lead to any increase in food imports because Brazilians simply can't afford the market global price of food. Now, David, how bad does this get in terms of people actually starving people in places you might even associate balmon and food and securityers. The past few decades mostly have been an extremely successful period of bringing down rates of under nutrition under nourishment. That progress continued to slow down through but then just in and then particularly twenties, since of course the covide pandemic, we've really started to lose ground on that. Now part of that is essentially driven by the pandemic and driven by incomes. People don't have the money to spend on food that they used to have, but it's not just because of that, and I think particularly at the moment, we see all sorts of factors a eading to a much more insecure environment for food. Clearly, you have the crop failures that we're seeing. We're in the third year of a Landinia event, which causes all sorts of disruption to the food system in that way, that's why you see a lot of these low yields on crops from Latin America. That tends to be the case with it with a landing near event. On top of that, of course, energy prices are very high and that pushes up the cost of fertilizer, so that's another thing that decreases yield. And then you throw into the mix the war in Ukraine is a factor. Ukraine and Russia are both big food exporters. Then you can add some of these export embargoes. Obviously, you know, an interesting one was India's wheat embargo follows very rapidly on the heels of an export embargo in Indonesia for palm oil, which has actually now been revoked, but went on for a while. Injury is one of the biggest importers of palm oil. India needs palm oil for basic nutrition for Indians. They lose that nutrition from Indonesia. They embargo their wheat exports elsewhere, and you see these knock on effects everywhere. Malaysia embargoing exports of chicken, but of course you've got an ava influenza atbreak around the world at the moment, and the price of corn, which is essentially the price of raising chickens, is also very high. So there are all sorts of impacts like this. Can the World Food Program, for example, do much about this? Well, traditionally that's exactly what the World Food Program is for. And in fact, it's its origins essentially are as a US export program. It's deep origins are in World War One when Herbert Hoover was seeing sort of famine in Belgium and decided to use some of the US's significant agricultural surpluses to solve that problem. So that is what the World Food Program does. It uses the agricultural surplaces from from the US and to a lesser extent, Europe as a way of applying supplementary nutrition around the world. That works as long as you don't have these simultaneous bread basket failures and as long as they don't come repeatedly. But that's the risk with climate change. And you know, I think a key instance here in twenty you had very dramatic heat waves and drought in Russia that caused a real collapse in agricultural production there, and they were head with flooding in Pakistan. Normally, of course, the rainfall it was the same climate system. Normally, you would say, you know, there's a drought one place, there's rainfall elsewhere. But the flood in Pakistan was so severe that Pakistan also suffered a collapse in production. So two of the world's big wheat belts collapsed at the same time, which is not something that we've seen before, but it is something that as global warming increases the risk of that. And remember there's only fix or some of these red baskets around the world. The risk of that goes up quite substantially. Is Eastern in China at least a functioning bread basket for the world at moment. China is an interesting case, but it also an interesting case around geopolitics. You see occasional reports out of China saying that, you know, they're the agricultural yields are not as good as expected, and there are you know, there are sort of food problems. But I would say China is pretty well supplied with food at the moment, and actually over a police applied. If you look at the stockpiles that they have of key grains, they are extremely high. They've got enough stockpiles to last, you know, in most cases well beyond a year, when a lot of other parts of the world are very short. Now. I think in part that is actually a product of geopolitics. You know, China is less sure of its trading relationships than it was a few years ago, and there's a bit of a sort of fortress China approach to that. So we did stop piling this stuff at home, and it is not available for its its trading partners, and other nations to feed their own shortages. If there was to be a letter up on Russia's war in Ukraine, how much would that alleviate the situation. It wouldn't happen immediately because actually, to some extent, the larger problem with Ukraine at the moment is of course that we've we've missed the planting season largely for a lot of the crops for this year, and that's pretty significant. And if you look at some of the US Power of Agricultures projections, the bigger supply crunch for wheats is actually for the coming marketing year. For the coming marketing year, they lose about a third of their output, So that's going to be the more significant one. Of course, a big factor behind this is what happens with the global climate. We are three years into a Landinia event and the climate shifts that that causes. It's likely that we're going to see a shift into an Alnnio event, which favors different bread baskets. But when we move into that, we have the real core of the high prices that we're seeing for agricultural produce is that stocks are low and stocks have been running down essentially over this three year learning near event, So we need to rebuild those stocks, and that's not going to come overnight. That would be the product of a number of years. I suspect climate change. Notwithstanding that, we will again see very cheap prices for food over the next decade, but it will be a number of years before things really get back on track. Bloomberg Opinions, David Fickling. In March, Helen Thompson's book Disorder, Hard Times in the twenty one century. It was published the University of Cambridge professor of Political Economy, makes the case that political turbulence around the world is founded in the tussles for fossil fuel energies, specifically oil. She says they have fundamentally reshaped the global political order and will continue to while energy transitions play out. Here's a small part of our conversation. So, Helen, are we at a pivotal point now in how the global economy oper rates? Yeah, I think that we are. I think we're actually at a pivotal point before the war. I think that what we could see during the latter part of last year and the months autumn before Omgon hit was that the world economy is facing some pretty serious energy constraints. At any point when there's any significant growth. The world economy is now running into high energy prices, and we're not just talking about high oil prices. We're talking about high natural gas prices and high coal prices too, And I think high core prices has really taken a lot of people, including myself. We try to follow the energy situation quite by surprise, and I think that that goes to show the depth of the issues that we're now facing, particularly when we bear in mind that we would like the world economy to be moving away from coal as rapidly as possible given the need to address climate change. One of your main visas is that the US failed to secure the stability of its relationships in the Middle East, and that created an instability around energy, which reverberates. So in a sense, this shouldn't have taken any of us, and by surprise by that piece, that's right. I think that what we can see during the two thousands and tens is that the United States, in terms of its own energy needs, is in a much stronger position than it had been since the nineteen seventies. Because the shale oil and gas boom allowed the United States a higher level of energy independence much reduced energy dependence. What was revealing, though, was the way in which as the United States achieved that it's very success had so many disruptive consequences in the Middle East, in particular because it was very problematic from the Saudi point of view to now find that American shell producers were big rivals, and as that came at a time when the United States and the Obama was also trying to improve relations with Iran, and then things didn't work out very well in Syria. Despite the fact that Saudies and States have started on the same side, what we see through the two thousands and the end as the shell boom goes on is a complete deterioration of US Saudi relations and although to some extent they're repaired during the Trump presidency, is that Trump tries to hug the hat is hard, he still isn't really able to influence the Saudis when it comes to the price of oil, and as the US shale boom foltered during the pandemic, another American president was left trying to persuade our oil producers to produce more oil. The problem now is the exception probably of Saudi Arabia and United Arab em Ence, it's not quite clear how many of them really can produce more oil, particularly I think there are difficulties with Kuwait. So there's a great global energy rivalry now between the US, Russia, and China. Are we doomed to see nuclear powers face off until this energy revolution is somehow enacted? Yeah, I mean in a way. The way to think about what's happened over the last decade in particular, is that two competitions ensued. The first actually was in Europe and in some sense as being the most geo politically lethal, and that was a competition between the United States and Russia to sell natural gas in Europe, and the Russian point of view, that was a really different situation and than the one that they've enjoyed in the two thousand's when they could take really the European gas market for granted. I think the big change that's happened in the United States, ironically in good part as a consequence of the U S SHL boom, is that Saudi Arabia now has to think much more carefully about who it's selling its oil too, and that means that there's also a competition, I think between Saudi Arabia and Russia to sell oil to the Chinese. The Chinese leadership have a very strong awareness of China's strategic vulnerabilities around energy. China is also trying to influence the price by stockpiling. So we've got complicated dynamics because it's not just actually a competition between the producers, We've got this very large consumer in China not really prepared to accept a passive position in all this. Cambridge University professor Helen Thompson, author of Disorder, Hard Times in the twenty one century. That's it for our special best of Bloomberg Opinion. Please do reach out though with thoughts and opinions of your own. Email me at v Quinn at Bloomberg dot net and don't forget where available as a podcast on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform. Were produced by Eric mollow till next year on Bloomberg Opinion

Bloomberg Opinion

Deeper conversations on the week's most significant developments. Tune in and join in!
Social links
Follow podcast
Recent clips
Browse 102 clip(s)