In this short segment, Demetri Kofinas shares some thoughts to end the summer and looks ahead at what listeners can expect to hear in the next few months.
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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
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Episode Recorded on 08/29/2020
In Episode 152 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Soner Çağaptay, the Beyer Family fellow and director of the Turkish Research Program at The Washington Institute. Soner has written extensively on U.S.-Turkish relations, Turkish domestic politics, and Turkish nationalism and is the author of several books on Turkey including his latest “Erdoğan's Empire: Turkey and the Politics of the Middle East.”
Turkey’s neighborhood is arguably ground zero for anyone interested in studying the effects of the breakdown of the American-led international order. America and its Western allies have more or less kept the peace in the greater Middle East and Europe for the better half of the 20th century, but the misadventures in Iraq and Libya, along with the Obama administration’s decision not to intervene in Syria, coupled with Trump’s latest maneuvering of troops out of Rojava have reinforced the view that the United States is no longer committed to providing a security guarantee to the region’s most insecure countries.
And to this point, Turkey has a lot to feel insecure about. To its south, it borders Iraq and Syria, two countries that remain highly politically fractious with large Kurdish populations. To the east, it borders its strategic, regional competitor Iran. To the north, across the black sea sits Turkey’s historical nemesis Russia and to the west lie the Mediterranean and Europe. Turkey is therefore both strategically insecure and simultaneously capable of projecting influence across a wide territory, which is why it has been such an important part of NATO going back to the earliest days of the Cold War.
This makes the latest crisis that has broken out in the eastern Mediterranean between Turkey and an alliance of regional actors including fellow NATO member states Greece and France very concerning. Not only is there a real risk of military conflict, but the fractures that started in the Middle East with Iraq, Egypt, Libya, and Syria are now extending into Europe. This poses huge security challenges for the EU, while simultaneously creating opportunities for Russia and perhaps Turkey, the latter of which stands to benefit from a reconfiguration of its western territories that would allow it to capitalize on untapped natural gas reserves in the Aegean.
Anyone interested in accessing the overtime, as well as the transcript and rundown to this episode can do so through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers gain access to our overtime feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application. If you have trouble connecting the RSS feed, please send us a direct message through Patreon and we will help you out.
If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following:
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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
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Episode Recorded on 08/19/2020
In Episode 151 of Hidden Forces, In Episode 151 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with journalist, author, and documentary filmmaker Margaret Heffernan, whose best-selling book Willful Blindness, was named one of the most important business books of the decade by the Financial Times. Her latest book, “Uncharted,” addresses many of the core themes and subjects that have captivated our attention on this podcast for years.
In today’s conversation, Margaret and Demetri explore many of the various phenomena that arise from our unhealthy relationship with the future.
Whether it’s the on-air financial host pumping & dumping stocks to his viewers, the policymaker forecasting unemployment figures and growth rates, or the Silicon Valley executive predicting autonomous fleets of vehicles, telepathy, and jobs on mars, all within a decade, it is our discomfort with uncertainty and simultaneous craving for reassurance that fuels so many of the commercial and political operations of daily life.
And yet, history is an incomplete data set. We know this because the future is full of things that have never been here before. So, if we want to successfully confront the unknown challenges to come, we need to begin by acknowledging that we cannot plan for them. The best we can hope to do is prepare, and fortunately for us, Margaret Heffernan is just the person to help us do it.
For those who want access to the episode overtime, as well as to the transcript and rundown to this week’s episode, you can find all of that on the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers gain access to our overtime feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application.
If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following:
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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
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Episode Recorded on 07/27/2020
In Episode 150 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Rick Rule, President & CEO of Sprott US Holdings and Senior Managing Director of Sprott Inc. a global, alternative asset manager focused on precious metals and real assets with approximately 12 billion dollars in assets under management.
After spending most of the last decade in a period of prolonged underperformance, gold has spent the last two years on a tear, up 67% since September 2018. This episode is meant to introduce Hidden Forces listeners to gold, precious metals, and the larger natural resource industry. We discuss gold’s physical qualities as a commodity that needs to be prospected, mined, extracted, refined, and stored, as well as its investment profile in the form of bullion, equities, and derivative products like futures, options, and ETFs.
We also spend time in the regular episode discussing gold in philosophical terms. What is gold? What is it that gives gold its value? Is gold a hedge against inflation? Is it insurance, and if so, insurance against what? Finally, is it possible to even talk about gold without discussing the macroeconomy, credit markets, and ultimately people’s faith in the institution of paper money?
Other topics include the supply and demand-side drivers of the gold price, what Rick Rule sees in terms of institutional demand for gold, how the mining industry has changed over the last few decades, the relationship of gold to silver and where the silver market is trending, the use of public ledgers and blockchain-related technologies in the precious metals industry, and much, much more.
You can access the episode overtime, as well as the transcript and rundown to this week’s episode through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers gain access to our overtime feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application.
If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following:
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | YouTube | CastBox | RSS Feed
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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
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Episode Recorded on 08/03/2020
In Episode 149 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Orville Schell, Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society about the implications of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's monumental speech at the Nixon Library, the history of engagement with China’s Communist Party, and what a New Cold War with China will mean for the future of peace and security.
Dr. Schell’s career as a China scholar spans the entire arch of US-Sino relations since Nixon’s fateful trip to the Middle Kingdom in 1972 and the opening up of China to the world.
The same year (1967) that Dr. Schell earned his master's degree in Chinese studies an astounding 70 percent of Americans agreed on one thing: the greatest threat to U.S. security was the People’s Republic of China. After fifty years of engagement where relations between the two nations would improve dramatically, Americans are now back to viewing China as an enemy.
A Pew Research Center poll conducted in March 2020 shows that roughly two-thirds of Americans now say they have an unfavorable view of China, the most negative rating for the country since the Center began asking the question in 2005, and up nearly 20 percentage points since the start of the Trump administration. Positive views of China’s leader, President Xi Jinping, are also at historically low levels.
In a recent speech delivered at the Nixon Presidential Library, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared the failure of 50 years of engagement with China and called for the free world to stand up against this “new tyranny” in what felt very much like the beginning of a new cold war.
“It’s true, there are differences,” remarked Pompeo, when contrasting China to the USSR. “Unlike the Soviet Union, China is deeply integrated into the global economy. But Beijing is more dependent on us than we are on them.” “I reject the notion,” he continued, “that we’re living in an age of inevitability, that some trap is pre-ordained, that CCP supremacy is the future. . . . If we bend the knee now, our children’s children may be at the mercy of the Chinese Communist Party, whose actions are the primary challenge today in the free world. General Secretary Xi is not destined to tyrannize inside and outside of China forever unless we allow it.”
In their conversation, Orville Schell and Demetri Kofinas discuss the speech, what it means for US-Sino relations, and the implications of disengagement for the US, China, and the world.
You can access the episode overtime, as well as the transcript and rundown to this week’s episode through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers gain access to our overtime feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application.
If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following:
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | YouTube | CastBox | RSS Feed
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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
Subscribe & Support the Podcast at http://patreon.com/hiddenforces
Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod
Episode Recorded on 07/29/2020