Helen Thompson/Disorder

TALKING POLITICS

Catherine Carr

News, News & Politics

4.7 • 2.5K Ratings

🗓️ 24 February 2022

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For our penultimate episode, David talks to Helen about her new book Disorder: Hard Times in the Twenty-First Century. It’s a conversation about many of the themes Helen has explored on Talking Politics over the years, from the energy transition to the perils of QE, from the travails of the Eurozone to the crisis of democracy, from China to America, from the past to the present to the future. In this book, she brings all these themes together to help make sense of the world we’re in.

Talking Points:

Suez is often seen as a crisis of British imperial hubris. But it’s also about energy.

The US wanted Western European countries to import oil from the Middle East.
But the US at the time was not a military power in the region.
So the US essentially became a guarantor of Western European energy security, but implementation was dependent on British imperial power in the region.
When Eisenhower pulled the plug on Suez, Europe panicked.

The aftermath was hugely consequential.

France turned to Algeria, but that went badly.
Europe also embraced nuclear power to pursue energy self-sufficiency.
And finally, this precipitated a turn to Soviet oil and gas and the construction of pipelines between Soviet territories and Western Europe.

The shale boom was a double-edged sword: it also destabilized the alliance with Saudi Arabia and increased competition between the US and Russia.

Meanwhile, Chinese demand has been increasing.
The US today imports much less oil from the Persian Gulf, but the US Navy still provides energy security in the region, even though most of that oil goes to China and Japan.

QE created a wholly new situation in the Eurozone.

Everyone in the Eurozone game essentially understands that if QE is going to continue, there will be constraints around what can happen in Italian domestic politics.
The current prime minister of Italy is the former president of the ECB.

One of the risks of democracy is democratic excess. But democracies can also experience aristocratic excess.

In US elections, people need a lot of money to compete. This means that there is not really an outlet for genuine democratic demands.

Mentioned in this Episode:

Further Learning:

And as ever, recommended reading curated by our friends at the LRB can be found here: lrb.co.uk/talking

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, my name's David Rundsenman and this is Talking Politics, and this is our penultimate episode,
0:14.5	and it seems very appropriate that I'm going to be talking to Helen Thompson about her fantastic new book, Disorder.
0:23.5	Talking politics has been brought to you for the last five years in partnership with the London Review of Books,
0:28.9	who are mourning the end of the podcast the only way they know how, with one last unbeatable subscription offer for Talking Politics listeners.
0:36.9	Get six issues.
0:38.4	That's three months of the LRB,
0:40.0	where I'll be continuing to write about politics and more,
0:42.5	for just £6 by using the URL,
0:46.3	lrb.me slash talk6.
0:49.6	That's lrb.me slash talk six.
0:53.2	Thank you. That's LRB.me slash talk six.
1:06.5	Alan, I'm sure I'm not the only person who's interviewing you who's going to say this.
1:10.0	There's so much in this book, we're not going to be able to cover all of it.
1:28.2	And also there's a lot in this book that you and I and other people have talked about on talking politics over the last five and a half, six years, geopolitics, oil, energy, the fate of democracy, climate change, China, it's all in here. And you tell a series of interlocking stories. So I'm going to start, because we have to start somewhere in the middle of one of these stories, and then we'll see on how many of the others we can get to. And then I want to come to climate change at the end, because I think it does, and you do it in the book. It pulls a lot of this together. I'm just going to read one sentence from the book, which kind of opens up a whole set of questions that you then interrogate in lots of different ways. But we're going to go back to 1956. So you write, the year of sewers. In 1956, the inherent tensions of the United States
1:50.0	acting as an oil guarantor for its allies via a supply coming from a part of the world where it lacked
1:55.9	military power, produced a profound geopolitical crisis whose monumental consequences still reverberate, and I think
2:02.7	we could say still reverberate today. What's in that sentence is one of the themes of your book,
2:07.7	which is the tension between the United States geopolitical role, including as an energy guarantor,
2:13.9	and the many other states who are energy dependent and what that does to America's sense
2:19.3	of what it can do in the world. Let's take it back to Suiz and then sort of unpick it from there.
2:24.7	So what was going on in 1956 that brought out this kind of fault line in America's place in the world?
2:29.8	The fundamental thing about Suez, and I think that Suiz is often misunderstood as a crisis
	...

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