Hello and welcome to another episode of Real Politics. I am your host, Firasmodad.

Today we're going to be talking about the new age of empires, which is now upon us. As you

probably have assumed, this has been our view consistently, the world order as we know it is

completely dead. It's buried, doesn't exist anymore. As Mike Carney ended up admitting in Davos,

it was always a fiction. But now the death of it is official. And we're seeing the United States

behaving in a much more openly imperialistic way. And I thought we

should discuss this new age of empires and what it actually mean, not vampires, empires,

and what it actually means and how the different empires are positioned to be able to compete with

one another. To be able to compete with one another.

To be able to be sovereign, which is the first step towards being an empire,

you need four things.

You need an independent currency and therefore the ability to trade with the world freely

on your own terms when you want to.

Indeed, this is the whole point of BRICS.

BRICS is there mainly to make sure that countries like Brazil or India or South Africa

can trade with Russia or China or Iran on their own terms without the intervention of the Americans or the Europeans.

So it's mainly a sovereignty play.

And that sovereignty play is absolutely necessary for you to be in any way recognized as a real power

because that defines whether or not you can trade,

and that's a fundamentally sovereign decision. The second thing that you need is energy independence.

If you're going to play it being an imperial power, you need to have sufficient reserves of energy that you can access

when you want to. Otherwise, you can't really be independent because any military rival can cut

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