The Day the "Rules-Based Order" Died: Canada's Revolt & the End of US Hegemony | Silk and Steel

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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Silk and Steel podcast.

I'm your host, Carl Tsa.

Today, I have back on the show our favorite guest, Iron Art Kengen from Beijing.

Welcome back to the show, Iron Art.

Carl, it's always a pleasure.

You said that some are one of your fans like me.

No counting for taste, but it is always a pleasure to be back with you.

Always real fun.

I heard about your surfboard.

I'm very sorry to hear that.

I blame the dogs.

That's what I always say, blame the dogs.

You know, we're living in dog years.

You know that.

Every year of Trump is seven years for the rest of us.

So, I mean, you know, the good news is in three more years will be, you know, it's like 21 more years.

I mean, this is like, you know, longevity medicine.

Oh, wow.

Well, Trump makes everything interesting because like I was telling you, I never expected, you know,

major news coming out of the Davos because normally it's a place for people to sprout.

Platitude and boiler template speeches, but this year is different.

You know, first, we heard from the Canadian Prime Minister Scott Carney.

Again, I never expected a speech like that from a Canadian Prime Minister.

And now, now, the Cardi is on, you know, Cardi, I know Cardi is a Prime Minister,

but he's on his way to sound very presidential at least when he's giving that speech at Davos.

I can, you know, in parlance of the day, he will be called based.

And then there's a Macron, Macron also made something very similar.

So both the, the, the just of both their speech is that the, the rule based international order is over.

Oh, in fact, Carney straight out said that the rule based international order was a lie.

It was just that the lie that benefited people like himself.

You know, it benefited Canada, Europe for a long time.

So nobody wanted to say the Emperor has no clothes.

But now the rule based international order has decidedly broken down.

And it's not just not working for United States, but it's also a little longer working for Europe and Canada.

So now he's talking about this as a rupture, not a transition.

And then Macron also went down to say that we need more Chinese investment in Europe.

So there's a lot to unpack on top of that.

You've got the trash, you got the commerce secretary lot Nick going on to say, you know, why would the Europe try to subset.

Why would Europe go to a green transition when all it does is just benefit Chinese manufacturer of solar and wind power equipment.

Good.

No, but I mean, he has a point because there are no windmills in China.

I mean, Donald Trump said this. He's never seen any.

Therefore, there aren't any, you know, he's seen some off the coast of his golf courses.

So they must all be in Britain.

You've seen them in the US. So the rest of them must be in the US.

Can't quite understand that you can go to the satellite pictures of China in Gansu.

They have the largest wind farm in the world.

And coincidentally, China is the largest installer of wind power in the world and the United States is second fairly distant second, but still second.

It's just this denial of reality, which is quite interesting.

It's not new. We expect that.

What can you say?

I feel sorry for his grade school teacher. I don't think he passed many grades.

I don't say this lightly. I mean, within the cabinet, it said that he is by far the stupidest one and you're not looking exactly at a brain trust out there.

He's the guy who he went sitting and answering some questions about, you know, Gaza said, yeah, we've been preparing this plan for years.

Jared Kushner is literally all your part. His face is going through condorsions.

Well, what did I say?

Let me definitely prove that you don't have to be extra smart to be a billionaire in the United States.

And this guy I call him nut lick because he does. He just sucking up to Trump's balls all the time.

Well, look, if you're not smart, you got to be a sequence, right?

I mean, this is like going back to the, you know, the Arab kings and queens when they had a, you know, they had a guy of fool who would, you know, make them laugh.

You know, they could be deliberately or just they were a natural in his case to give it to him.

I think he's a natural fool. I don't think I don't think this is being put on. I think he is, he's the real thing.

Yeah. So what's your take on, you know, the Scott, a carny speech. I mean, like, I did not expect that out of all countries, Canada.

And for a Canadian prime minister to say something like that, which is definitely in response to Trump's land graph over Greenland and his threat to annex Canada.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, this, this is one of the things that I often point is the one of the most powerful emotions there are is the sense of betrayal.

And, you know, it can take a relationship that was about love. And if there's a sense of betrayal, they can quickly turn to hate.

And I don't saying that Canada hates the US, but they do feel betrayed by it.

You know, Donald Trump, I mean, you know, Canadians are very nice people.

They're very polite as a fool. I mean, sure, they're exceptions.

But, you know, they put up with the United States. They put up with our jokes, you know, like it's there. Where is Canada? I don't know up there or somewhere, you know.

But, you know, what Donald Trump has done to attack them in their homes, literally economically.

They've taken away their livelihood, making it clear that he is going to try to death strangle them unless they acquiesce.

This has stirred a hornet's nest. People who used to be fairly friendly to Donald Trump in Canada now completely repudiate him.

You have Canadians saying don't buy American. These are things that are unheard of.

You know, Canada is stood by us, basically, you know, unfortunately Washington always treated, took them for granted and just assumed that they would follow where we go.

So, a powerful speech by somebody who is just said, look, we're at our wits end. He tried to go and talk to Donald Trump and say, look, you know, what do we need to do here?

Remember, he was elected on his, on the voters perception that somebody who was very serious has been on a number of central banks and things like that would be able better to handle Donald Trump.

So, he tried one way, didn't work. In fact, the more he tried to appease Trump, the worse it got.

So, I think at Davos, he finally said enough, our country is not going to be continued to be humiliated by this false self-appointed God and we are going to just lay it out.

And this is the sure signal that I've seen that the new multi-polar era is, it's been here for a while, but this is now extended to what we're previously American allies.

Interestingly enough, Mexico kind of went the other way. They, it's millions of jobs at stake and things like that. They don't feel that they can take it, but she's not being a sequence, but she is deferring.

For instance, she went along with this idea of putting 50% tariffs on certain Chinese goods and things like that.

This would have a very, very serious effect on the Mexican economy because many of the inputs that come in, if you just go back and you start looking at the rise because Mexico has increased its trade with the United States in proportion to the decrease of trade with China.

And a lot of, and you can see in parallel an increase of Chinese goods coming to Mexico.

So that tells you that Mexican companies are buying Chinese intermediate goods, parts, et cetera, and then they're being assembled or added, values being added in Mexico and then they're flowing into the United States.

Canada, on the other hand, they don't have as large a trade like that as Mexico does.

And they said, you know, there's, there's at this point we have nothing to lose except our own sense of ourselves.

So national pride has entered in here and Donald Trump has triggered it.

So as I said, sure a sign ever that the multiple world is here when the closest traditional ally of the United States said it's all been a lie.

We went along with it because it was seen in our interest and we didn't think we could do anything else, but now we've been pushed to the end of our rope.

And we've just said what it is. So, and as you saw predictably he's not going to get a Christmas card from Donald Trump.

No, no nice pictures, you know, like he sent to Epstein for his birthday.

I think he'll, he'll just get it and shortly after that he got disinvited.

Now, if you look at the little missive he sent, it's quite, you know, it's quite charming and elegant.

Oh, wait a second. No, it wasn't.

But he signed it and he forgot one key ingredient, but president of the United States, but he also forgot to put and Venezuela.

This is now put that into Wikipedia that he is the acting president of Venezuela.

Thanks. So why don't you ask me why I think he's doing this.

Yeah. Why is he doing this? I know.

Well, let's see here ever since he invaded Venezuela and took the president and first lady away and then started on this.

I'm going to take Greenland type of thing. There hasn't been much of any mention of a certain Jeffrey Epstein and his files.

And literally the moment he talked out in Europe, you know, as finally enough countries in Europe found a spine to say no, you know, that's it.

You know, you can, you can do so much to us, but you can't take land from us.

We're the ones who are supposed to colonize others, not them colonize us.

And you know, the US, that's even weirder.

I thought we were in this together, colonize other groups, destroy other countries.

This isn't fair. You know, you didn't read the script we sent you.

So you know, he, he tacos on that and says, oh, we have a great framework.

The usual thing kind of like in China. After he visited, he says, yeah, China's agreed to give us all the rare earth.

We want everything's fixed. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. Nothing could be further from the truth.

So I mean, he has to every time he tacos, he has to, you know, declare victory and make it seem like a massive loss was a massive win.

But no sooner as he done that, then guess what? All of a sudden it's about Iran.

I have a huge flutilla flying towards Iran. Who knows what's going to happen.

I mean, this is the kind of stuff that you remember when we were young on television.

They'd say next week, oh, you know, the protagonist is in a difficult situation.

What was that?

There was a Canadian cartoon, Dudley Do Right. And at the end of every thing, you know, the villain had a nail tied up on the railway track.

And we were supposed to wonder, what happens next?

And this is Donald Trump. He keeps inserting these things to go in.

But interesting enough, I don't know if it's going to work real well.

So suddenly you're starting to see a resurgence of, I don't know, it's a very minor thing, but about two and a half million pages of documents related to the Epsilon files, two million of which they just, you know, they found.

How do you find two million pages of documents in one of the most visible political and legal cases in the United States recent history?

We don't, I thought we had three or four hundred thousand. Oh, turns out we have 3.5 million.

What's a couple of million between friends? I mean, I worked in the prosecutor's office as an intern when I was younger and I was also in criminal law.

I assure you, I don't know how you miss out on two million pages.

But I think it sent off alarm bells for Donald Trump. He doesn't, he hasn't had time to look over what's in there, devise some sort of strategy.

I don't know, that, that film of me doing that, it was a, it was a, it was a plot by the Democrats to ensnare me.

They deliberately didn't release these documents because they knew I would try to get to the truth and they planted all of these false videos and pages of things just to get me.

Come on, I mean, I, I know guys with tinfoil hats who do better than this. I mean, who can't do is weird as this.

So I, I do think a lot of this has to do with his domestic hills. First, Epstein, second, fracturing within his base.

Every time he does something overseas, people at home said, I don't understand. I voted for you not because I liked you, because I thought you do a better job with the economy.

You're supposed to be a business guy. And instead, you seem to be often these foreign adventures that you ridiculed other precedents for being involved in.

So they're running shorter patients there. They like the ice things. I know some of them do others are starting to wonder if attacking Americans on the street is really an American type of thing.

But some of them say, well, you know, we have to do it and things like that. But there is a fracture in the base.

And notably, a lot of it's coming from his previous group of, you know, supplicants, people who used to support him on air personalities who now is distancing themselves from Donald Trump.

And this has to worry him. And then the last part is, you know, this issue about, you know, over 50% of Americans are one crisis of way from being homeless.

And it sounds like, oh, this is real. But this is a report that was done by the Fed.

And not by the US government itself. And they just said, look, so many people here who don't have $400.

If they, for some reason they have to take an ambulance, that could be a $3,000 bill. Never mind what the medical cost would be.

If they, you know, somebody in the family loses a job and it's dependent on multiple jobs, that could be an issue. So, you know, death in the family and a funeral bill comes up.

And these are things that do happen. And over 50% Americans are now exposed to a situation where they cannot respond effectively with any kind of savings to a crisis like this.

And this is really serious. Donald Trump isn't about to do anything to that. In fact, he's exacerbating it.

He's not paying attention to inflation, which is being driven in large part right now by the tariffs that he's put in.

The latest study has shown that the tariffs 96% are passed on to US consumers. Only 4% is absorbed by the traders who are bringing them in the middle.

So, and the prices are not dropping from China. They don't have that kind of margin or anything like that. And they're not dropping from other countries.

It's not like they were sitting on these huge profits. It's a very, very competitive market. So there's no room. So this is pushing up prices for American consumers.

In theory, if you look at the economic stats that are coming out, Americans spend more this holiday season than they did last season.

So this would seem to be some, you know, a ray of hope. Maybe there's an underlying strength within the US economy. Maybe we can spend ourselves out of it.

If we spend more, there are perhaps more jobs created, but those jobs, those monies are going into US government coffers. They're not going into real business and things like this.

So they're, it's a real quandary. I don't think that we've seen the last of it. And obviously when we get to the midterms people in the United States, I told you, after years of being involved in elections and running them, people vote with their pocketbooks.

And I don't blame them. And, you know, you start looking at the statistics, Donald Trump got 48% of the Hispanic vote.

Ironically, a lot of Hispanics, or lions, they should say Latin Americans, they do not really care for more immigrants because they see them as a possible source of competition.

So that's okay. But now they're, you know, when they see people who look like them being brutalized, when they see American citizens who have, you know, Latin American accents, being half by the police, then they start to think, oh, this isn't so good.

And then, you know, they said, well, we elected this guy to bring down grocery prices and that isn't happening. So you're starting to see them fade away.

And splits in his base, the independence have already walked away. They're there.

The stuff that's going on with the ice has completely non-pluss them. He hasn't answered the economic stuff. So things are really adding up to a landslide against Donald Trump.

The question is, and everyone's mind, and I think we talked about last time is, does he do something about it? Does he, he's already floated the idea that there should not be an election?

He's doing so great that the Democrats should say, no, we don't need an election. We need to keep Donald Trump in power.

It sounds a little bit weird, but so does everything else. He's saying these days. So, you know, people are wondering given his, what he did when he lost the presidential election and trying to incite a riot to prevent early transition.

We do that again now that he seemingly has all the pieces. He's been firing generals, being, you know, Pete Hegsethis, you need to swear a loyalty to, you know, Donald Trump.

You know, when you have some pushback, of course, people are saying, you do not, you are instructed the first day you're in there is that you do not obey an illegal order.

Donald Trump is trying to prosecute criminally anybody who says that, but it still is, it's not going to go anywhere. But, you know, you start looking all of this car.

I mean, it's, it's really serious. When your best friend deserts you and says you're a criminal, when your own household is being threatened with economic deprivation, when the entire world has turned against you.

It's not, it's not something where the string is going to go on and it's going to be a nice outcome for Donald Trump.

Well, what about Trump's claim that tear is actually being used to pay for pay down the US national debt, you know, all 36 trillion of it.

Okay, well, the entire amount of his, of what he has brought in, which has been in the hundreds of billions, unfortunately, is a drop in the pocket.

He doesn't even cover the amounts that he's increased the deficit by and nor does it even attempt to address the fact that he wants to go from almost one trillion to 1.5 trillion next year for the defense budget.

He has no plan, and he doesn't really care. I mean, he had to understand a real estate developer, all he want is other people's money, right.

And they go to the bank and say, lend me money. They go to the market, say, you know, I'll put up bonds. I'll do anything.

And they figure that they can take this money and they can make money on it. And this is kind of Donald Trump. He doesn't care about debt.

All he cares about is cash flow. So when he sees, you know, tens and hundreds of billions of dollars coming into treasure ease, like, okay, good.

I have my honey pot. Anybody, you know, don't have to take care of toss him a few bucks, you know, they'll be happy.

And he did that last time. Remember with the soybean farmers during Trump won. He, you know, he made his deal, didn't work out, you know, because he made sure it didn't work out.

And then he tossed them, you know, some money, but nowhere near their losses. And guess what? I know you're going to be shocked.

About over 90% of 90, anything is 96% somewhere in that 94 to 96% of all the money that the federal government paid out.

Yes, it went to not to mon pop farmers. It went to big corporate ag, you know, these poor people who drive around in limousines, they, they were feeling the pinch.

They might have had to fire at least one of their 16 chauffeurs. So Donald Trump to the rescue.

So it's not helping him and a lot of farmers.

You know, you saw them rats now. China is putting some soybean orders in, but it's nowhere near what they're doing before.

And that means that there's a huge gap. And right now, competition in Brazil is getting intense. They can do it at a lower price.

Ironically, it's not all bad news for America in that a lot of farmers from America went down to Brazil.

They bought up huge tracks of land and they've been growing things down there simply because they, they needed to be competitive.

And they said, well, can't be competitive in the US. We will be competitive down in, in Brazil.

So I, you know, money has its own logic and politics and money aren't that far apart.

But right now, the politics and the money are far apart. And unfortunately, if you look out through history, money and power aren't in the same, you know, time zone.

You're risking real, real catastrophe, a civil unrest, that type of thing.

And unfortunately, I'd have to say that, you know, despite Donald Trump's pronouncements, everything's going great.

It isn't. And I think if you talk to the vast majority of Americans, that's what they will tell you.

But, you know, you mentioned that Donald Trump is doing all this as a distraction from his domestic issues, from Epstein files.

But couldn't he conceivably to keep the distraction on forever? You know, he can pivot from one crisis to the next, like he did from Venezuela to Greenland to Iran.

I mean, he can just like keep juggling, right? I mean, what's what's one more crisis for Donald Trump?

Well, I think he does. I mean, you know, I alluded to this before in his biographies, he always says, I get up in the morning and I try to maximize the day.

So I think the first thought he has when he gets up is how do I keep the Epstein files off the, you know, off the front page, at least until I figured out what I, you know, how I'm going to respond to this.

I have to know what's in there and things like that. So he's definitely playing for time.

The speed and the volume of these, you know, self-created crisis that he is, you know, pushing out onto the front page and quite frankly, the press is following should be an indication.

I mean, many of these things, it's not on Donald Trump is the king of let's throw a dead cat onto the table, walk into the, into the press room, throw a dead cat on there.

Oh, my God, it's a dead cat. Oh, front page news.

And then he pulls, pulls about six little white bunnies out and throws them into the crowd and people are, oh, there's a white bunny.

Oh, follow the white bunny. He's the king of that. But I mean, right now he's throwing out six dead cats a day and released in 50 bunnies and he's trying to trying a little bit too hard to distract the American people.

And you, at some point you run out of string something happens.

You know, now we have the prosecutor, Jack Smith, getting up matter of factly describing the fact that Donald Trump is a criminal and that he sought to undermine the process.

That is not something that he can keep off the front pages, the Democrats are hammering on this, you start looking at his, his testimony, its matter of fact, it is absolutely believable as opposed to the orange monster who does not seem very beautiful.

And then you have Giselein Maxwell, what happened? She had a private conversation with Donald's previous private attorney who's now in the government who breaks protocol and has an interview with her without anybody else present.

And the next day, magically she goes from, you know, Jen pop max security prison for the kind of felonies that she's accused of, which is child trafficking trafficking down to a country club hotel jail where she has access to phones, she can get her nails done, you know, and life's pretty good.

I don't think that Giselein is satisfied because she's just agreed to testify to Congress without the immunity that she has been demanding.

He said, yeah, sure, I'll come, but I'll plead the fifth forever unless you give me immunity to give me immunity. Okay, she's probably also going to want to deal.

It kind of tells me that she has some sort of leverage or it seems to indicate this, I'm just speculating here, but you know, why is she moved to a country club prison, you know, a day and a half after she chats to Trump's private attorney, and why is she inserting herself here?

I think she wants the Epstein files to come from the center.

If I was her attorney and I suspected my client had the goods on the press in my states, I might say, hey, it's time to give me a pardon.

Let me go. I mean, you can say whatever you want, you figure it out. That doesn't matter to me, but you get me out. I'm not satisfied with the country club prison.

I don't want to stay here for the next rest of my life. I want to get out. You need to figure it out.

So, you know, the story itself has so many protagonists. You have, you know, 26, 27 women who have said that, you know, he molested them, which kind of backs up the story of all statements he said about looking at young girls, because he had team Ms.

teen USA pageant as well as the North American, Miss America pageant, and he used to go in the back room and look at them naked and says, they should do that.

We have his statements about what he likes to do to women, how he can grab them in certain places.

And all of a sudden, you know, what you have here is a mass, if this was all true, America elected sexual deviant predator, you know, why is he so around the neck with a known pedophile.

I mean, you know, this isn't somebody who was hiding it. His name of his jet was the Lolita express Lolita is a story about a pedophile, Humbert Humbert, who, you know, kidnaps a young girl and, you know, converts them into her into his love toy.

I mean, what, what more can you say about somebody like this.

And, you know, at some point, all the pieces start to add up.

I mean, he's, you know, he's on tape saying, oh, yes, you know, you know, making little inside jokes.

And of course, you have the birthday card and things like that.

So, tremendous amount of stuff to hide. It's starting to pile up.

I don't know that he can, you know, the little boy with his finger in the dike.

I don't think that's going to do it. The pressure is building.

And at some point, it'll be over, it'll overwhelm him.

It's not that he won't run out of manufactured crisis. You can do that.

Say, I'm going nuclear with Russia.

Yeah, I think the press would follow that. He can say that I'm going to put a contract out on Xi Jinping.

My point being that he has to raise the level of his antics.

You know, every day it has to be higher and higher.

And I don't know how long he can continue that without making some sort of a mistake that leads to an incident that leads to escalation, et cetera.

I mean, he has says, I have an amarta, amada, huge fleet, you know, steaming towards Iran.

You know, stay tuned, you know, war could be coming.

I'm not going to say one way or the other, you know, I'll keep you guessing, you know, tune in tomorrow for the next episode of Trump and toilet.

It's just not really, you know, it's, I don't know, I don't, it's not the same.

Well, let's talk about the international consequences of Trump's actions because we have already felt this a Davos.

But do you think the split, the trans-Atlantic split is permanent?

Or do you think they have now kiss and made up, you know, with the new deal on Greenland where the Europeans agree to give him small portion of what he asked for?

I mean, I guess Trump can even claim victory on that because Trump's negotiation tactic has always been asking way more than he wanted and then force the other to accept his position, right?

He can claim that the Greenland deal was actually a victory because all he wanted really is just, you know, American basing rights and impermanent, you know, American sovereignty over American bases and et cetera, et cetera.

All the other antics about annexing Greenland, that was just his negotiation tactic.

Yeah, well, it's not going very down very well.

Poll after poll reveals that, you know, 9 out of 10, 10 out of 10 people oppose the U.S. going in and taking Greenland or Canada by force.

They're not happy with what happened in Venezuela.

So he can say it's tactics, but he's drawing attention to the fact that he's doing all these things overseas that he said he wouldn't do.

If you asked somebody who's facing a big grocery bill that they can't pay and they're thinking themselves, I'm going to skip a meal so I can feed, you know, Cheerios to my kids.

I don't really think they care about Greenland.

They don't understand it. Why do you want a big, you keep saying it's a big chunk of ice, you keep calling it Iceland and then Greenland and, you know, he doesn't look very presidential.

He doesn't look like he's in control of his own narrative and cognitively, he looks very, very weak.

So he can make any claims that he wants that a victory.

It's like he had a huge victory in China, right? As we discussed, I got everything he wanted, you know, China is eating out of my hand.

You know, I wrote the playbook there following it. It's not true.

And it doesn't work on his supposed declaration of victory is that he got exactly what he had before, plus maybe some mineral rights to exploit, but he doesn't own them.

Greenland is still going to have to get some sort of benefit so he couldn't negotiate it at separately.

So let's just clear the air on a few things.

The United States used to have 115,000 troops and six bases in Greenland.

Then they drew it down to 150.

That's the US pulling out of Greenland, right?

There's nothing that prevents the US from setting up more bases, setting up more equipment, more defensive means Greenland hasn't said no.

In fact, I said, sure, you know, that that's okay.

You know, we want to be defended. We, you know, we don't we don't want to invite a missile attack, but if it's necessary to fence of, you know, our, the United States, which is our umbrella organization, because guess what Greenland is in NATO.

There's no argument here that, you know, the US shouldn't be doing something protect NATO. They're part of NATO.

So they have the right to do it.

You know, Greenland and Denmark are saying, fine, that's wonderful to us, but he tried to push it further and say, no, I need to own it.

You heard him in his speech, or if he didn't, what he said is, well, I wouldn't feel so good about, you know, defending least land.

I need to own it in order to defend it.

Well, that's not exactly, you know, confidence material to Europe, unless you think you own Europe as well, because you don't own Europe.

And so therefore what you're not going to defend it.

I mean, he doesn't realize the things he says are undermining the positions of the United States and makes us look less and less trustworthy to our, you know, not to our enemies.

To our friends, our allies, our traditional people who, who, who used to say that they shared values with us.

But in terms of your first question, is this permanent?

Part of it is the United States is no longer seen as reliable.

The fact that Trump was elected, then, you know, he lost the second election, but was perturbed to office.

He was telling most of the world, they said, look, the book ends of the United States and its politics have shifted and don't expect anything to radical to replace it.

Remember, despite all the protestations, you know, President Biden did not really change much.

He changed the tone, but he didn't change the tariffs.

He didn't change the positions that Donald Trump was pushing.

And as a result, you know, if you're looking at three terms of U.S. presidents, you got to say, okay, there's a common thread here.

And it's not a good thread for us because you don't want this seesaw where the next guy who comes in or a lady is going to definitely undo a lot of what Donald Trump has done.

But then what happens after him or her leaves office in four or eight years?

Do you have another populist, somebody like, as I like to call him, Darth Bantz, move into the White House and re-enact another Star Wars plot where the Empire strikes back.

And I mean, no, I mean, come on.

Does anybody kind of sit back and wonder, said, didn't we see this movie before?

I mean, you have these people be, you know, it's just literally straight out of a Star Wars things.

You have these groups who don't, you know, Darth Bantz is associated with a group, Palantir and Peter Thiel, they don't believe in a democracy.

They believe that they should be in control of the United States and that they can manipulate people into a sense of complacency and obedience using a high-tech and things like this.

And tell me this is somehow different from the Emperor, whatever his name was, saying, I'll bring order to the world.

Don't worry about the cost and things like that.

Yeah, Mark Andreessen was on record of saying oligarchy has been the natural state of things for much of the human history, you know, not democracy, but oligarchy.

You know, of course, he considered himself part of the ruling oligarchs, you know, just like the other, other capital of, you know, White House Africans, like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, you know.

I don't think he's a coincidence, all these things.

You're drawing a connection between South Africa and this kind of a part-time idea.

Yeah, you know, I, but I mean, this is, this is one of the things, you know, we get wrapped up with these headlines and we don't sit back and say, oh my god, this is just a bad movie.

You know, Donald Trump isn't the kind of character, you know, he seems, you know, paint himself orange, he says ridiculous things.

At least in Star Wars, you know, the evil guys are, you know, they're in control of things. They might have maniacal intent and things like that.

They, they might have overextended egos, but there, there's some sort of plot in their mind to take control of the, of the universe.

Donald Trump, I mean, he seems like a, a pale clown, orange clown in comparison.

So yeah, I, I do think America is now America alone because when you're, you're closest allies and neighbors, basically draw the line and say, you know, we, we don't believe you anymore.

We're, you know, we see ourselves as different and we're going to make moves to do so. Just imagine the, you know, 85% of the rest of the world sitting there going, yeah, no, they don't trust you.

Why would we, especially after you go after a country like Venezuela? Yeah, a lot of countries in South America don't like Venezuela.

They didn't like them to do a regime, but other than, you know, a few countries who feel that they have to pay lip service to Donald Trump, all of them said, look, you know, our problems are our problems.

They're not yours to solve and you're not here to solve them. You're here to take the gold. It's another colonial move.

And, you know, you, you have the Europeans who did physical colonialism. They would go into your country, claim it, plant the flag, and then take it over and start shipping out the, the wealth.

In America, we said, no, that's too cumbersome. You know, it doesn't work. We're going to do financial colonialism.

We'll have the trade dollar and we, you know, basically control everything through our currency and through our, our banks, et cetera.

I am a world bank and then in addition, our private banks themselves, JP Morgan, all these investment banks and regular banks.

But now, all of a sudden, we're back to physical colonialism. So I don't really see that as working.

How long can you put a lid before the pressure blows it off? That's why you have the, you know, the oil major oil companies, you know, they're not jumping for joy to run down there. They're saying, well, sure, we'll go, you guarantee everything.

Yeah, sure. No problem. You guarantee us a profit. We'll go. Who wouldn't go in that kind of situation. But they've, you know, Exxon came out and said, it's uninvestable.

You know, we're not going to put a hundred billion dollars. That would be the collective amount that would have to be put in to bring up Venezuela's oil capacity up to, you know, a high standard.

You wear it used to be. They're not going to put that in because the only thing they know is their Trump will probably be around for the next three years.

And be a forcing, I don't know what he'll do with Congress who doesn't approve of what he does.

My guess is he'll just continue to do it and build up lawsuits and just say, well, you can't prosecute me because it was all official acts. And he can walk off in the sunset with his additional, I think he's up to about 1.5 billion in additional personal wealth that he's accumulated in the last year.

There were numbers that were just recently released. But then that's not counting his family. When I was in Davos, not Davos, when I was in Doha, his son was at the same hotel, interestingly enough.

So was Hillary Clinton. And so was Tucker Carlson. I literally would spend my free time in the place where we were assigned to eat thinking, oh, maybe they all come in.

Oh, that would be interesting. Will they get into a food fight? Will there be a mock battle between their different bodyguards? Or will they just stare at each other?

I was hoping for my own drama. Unfortunately, all I saw there was Tucker Carlson. Not that it was unfortunate. It's just not not the kind of drama I was looking for. But I can always switch on the TV and watch Donald Trump for that. So there goes, but yeah, there's no question.

Donald Trump has permanently changed the perception of the United States. The United States is now and out and out, bully. We just take what we want under Donald Trump. The next guy who comes in doesn't matter.

High probability that we'll return to somebody like Donald Trump because America is hurting.

I read a interpretation. You know, there's some some interprets Scott Carmen speech at doubles as aiming to our Europeans. And he's really saying to the Europeans, hey, us midpowers, we need to cuddle together now. Now we can no longer count on us under Donald Trump administration.

We need to form our own grouping so we can stand united. But at the same time, both Canadians and the European elites, if given the chance, if there was a regime changing America, whether by election or otherwise, you know, if the Donald Trump is replaced, they would probably jump back in into bed with a new administration.

That's not Trump. I mean, like that's that was the EU strategy, basically leading up to this moment to have been bending backwards for Trump by hoping that there will survive the Trump administration until the next one, and they will have someone maybe like a Biden who, you know, I'm not talking about real Biden, but like another.

Another Biden that would talk to the guy at wheel.

That would talk, you know, about partnership transatlantic partnership before their alliance, you know, that then everything will return to normal. Do you think they, you know, the European elite as well as the Canadian elite establishment have realized that the overcome window has shifted permanently in US.

Yeah, obviously not all of them have the realization, but I think that there's enough out there that they say, well, even if we think that we still have to prepare for the other, so it's plan A, plan B, and there's really nothing else that they can do.

They cannot count on the US as a reliable partner, so they have to make other things. You know, you said it earlier, everything is about oligopoly, you know, these groups who just come together for power.

And what is the US done very successfully? It's always about elite capture.

You go into countries and you make deals with the top people. What are they doing in Venezuela right now?

They're trying to accomplish this idea of elite capture, you know, won't let you stay in power.

Well, you know, although we said you were all you were all evil and horrible and part of a administration that we needed to bring down now that, you know, we've taken your president and threatened you.

You're okay. You can be our henchman.

We've done this many times before.

We go back to Noriega and, you know, Saddam Hussein, you got come any in Iran, et cetera.

We always like to have people on our payroll who we think we're going to be able and client henchman, but it never kind of works out the way we think.

We create monsters and then we have to end up fighting with them.

So I don't see the situation, for instance, in Venezuela is as stable. He can do elite capture.

He wants, but at a certain point, the people say, we have nothing to lose.

We're going to go against this in Europe right now. The hard right is growing.

You know, every time the EU puts more money into defense and overseas things and placating Trump.

You know, people on the street are saying, hey, wait a second.

Government is supposed to be about me, not about Donald Trump, not about other areas. It's about me I'm hurting. I lost my job.

Volkswagen for the first time in their history has closed a plant in Germany. All those people are going to be out of jobs.

And the expectation that they had that their children would take over after they left employment is now repagoned.

And, you know, people are going through a re-adjustment in terms of the thinking.

You know, as soon as the elites get too far away from the people, we've seen what happens.

That's why we have those revolutions and things like that. You know, we're in the midst of one of the very, very sensitive time.

One, because you have a shift in terms of great powers, how they're approaching the world.

But second, we're in the middle of a digital revolution that is probably a kin in terms of impact to the industrial revolution.

We're literally going to start replacing people with robots in China.

You know, I talk to a lot of ambassadors and they're always in there. They're going, ooh, why?

Because they go down to factories throughout China and there are no lights on in the factories because there are no people working there.

It is completely automated.

The only people who go in there are technicians who are checking the machines that are doing the work.

And, you know, they say, well, you know, where is that lead? And people think about that. Well, yes, we are on the cusp of a new kind of economic structure.

And it's a little scary, you know, for instance, if I'm a delivery driver, you know, doing, sending food to people's homes and things like this.

At some point, I, you know, I know everyone else knows that it's going to be done by robots. It's more efficient.

They can do 24 seven. They never ask for pay raise. China produces electricity at one quarter of the cost of the United States.

So a running one is going to be pretty, pretty efficient.

And then the question is, what do you do with these people? Where do they work? How do they make money to live?

And those are the questions that should be answered. You know, we should be looking at collectively.

Not just China and the US and Europe and things like that, but, you know, how does affect the entire world? We got 8 billion people.

What are we going to do to, you know, kind of absorb this? What kind of new economic drivers should we be developing?

But instead of that, we have these kind of manic antics of people like Donald Trump, you know, lighting their hair on fire and running around the room.

Just so people will look at them as opposed to the reality of the situation. So very dangerous.

We're increasingly disconnected from the economic and political realities.

The elites are easily swayed as you pointed out. They would love to think that they can do a rota.

Daddy, daddy, you know, you, you know, you were mean, but now you're nice daddy, right?

Oh, come on. The United States is not anybody's daddy.

What's that face? Who's your daddy?

I'm waiting for Trump to say that. Who's your daddy now?

Speaking of which, so what do you think about the pivot to China?

Canada has made some concrete steps by removing the 100% EV and now they're in reciprocal China,

and we've removed air from Canadian canola oil and other commodities.

So Canada is in essence returning to a pre-2015 era relationship with China, you know,

back when conservative government under Harper in Canada had a, you know, a warming of pies with China again in response to shenanigans from the United States.

And UK is a UK just approved the new big embassy upgrade of Chinese embassy UK.

And Macron is also on record saying at Davos that you need more Chinese investment.

But but in case of Macron though, I don't know because Macron has always been saying the right things to the right people and then end up doing nothing.

And he was, he was warmly received on his visit to China twice.

And then he always say the good, good, good right things about how Europe need to assert its strategic economy.

And then in the end, he really don't do anything about it.

So what do you think the prospect for, for a European pivot to China to lessen their dependence on United States?

Well, it's happening the same as with Carney and Canada.

Here's the problem though. Canada has been so captured by the United States in order to get to what they want is, they only want 50% exposure to the United States.

It's like saying I only have to pay off half the money I owe to a mob boss.

And then that's unfortunately the way I would term it with 50% of your economy, depending on one nation, they have a tremendous amount of leverage.

But this is as far as the imagination can go at the moment in Canada is how do we get away from being 80 to 90% dependent on our other neighbor who has turned on us.

It's going to take quite a bit. They need the infrastructure to get their oil out.

Their oil is obviously more expensive.

You can extract the heavy tar oil, what they call heavy sulfur, they call it sour oil, because it has a high sulfur content.

It's good for certain types of things like when they put this fresh coats of tarmac on, that is that heavy oil.

Also you need it to make diesel. Interestingly, diesel, this is just a side note.

Diesel is about to go away, not completely, but for a lot of reasons.

Right now China is developing these things called micro grids.

So for instance, one quarter of the GDP of the Oceana nations is devoted to buying energy, most of that importing energy, most of it diesel.

They run diesel generators to power everything in terms of their grids on these little islands and things like that, they didn't have a choice.

It's dirty, it's inexpensive and unreliable.

Now China is putting in these micro grids.

So all they do is they ship a battery and solar array.

And now on that same island, you can run your agricultural pumps.

If you're doing any kind of agriculture, you can power your boats, you can power your cars, you can power your bikes,

you can power your phone, you can power your homes.

And even your communications, because communications need electricity and you can have various means of connecting either through satellite lengths or through other things.

And all of a sudden, you're not expanding a quarter of your gross domestic product on diesel.

So diesel may not be the factor that Donald Trump thinks it is.

Remember 60% of America's refining capacity is all around heavy oil.

There's this place called Cancer Alley in Louisiana.

You can forecast death rates by cancer, the highest in the United States, 50 times average in certain parishes going along there.

Why? Well, heavy concentration of these plants.

They do provide jobs, unfortunately, not necessarily to the locals.

But the locals have to breathe the air and deal with it.

They say, well, we used to eat stuff from our garden. Now nothing grows in our garden.

We can smell the chemical exhausts coming out.

And Donald Trump has basically dismantled all the EPA guidelines, which still weren't working.

He's dismantled them and these people are suffering.

You have these situations where, you know, it's not going in the right direction.

Europe does believe to a large extent in the environmental stops.

So this is another divide. So going forward, yes, they're going to try to pivot.

But, you know, how far does elite capture go if Donald Trump or some future administration dangles a few carrots in front of them when they jump?

Yes, the only thing stopping them, of course, is, you know, this kind of populist.

Not regression, but just discussed with the fact that you have a few wealthy people who are determined to earn more wealth by simply selling out their own people.

Wow. Well, that was, that was not very optimistic outlook for Europe.

Well, but, you know, Europe earned this.

We can't overlook the fact that this, this is a group of nations who took wealth from the rest of the world and have been sitting on that wealth for a long period of time.

I don't, I don't at all enjoy seeing anybody suffer.

But, you know, there's a certain point where you have to say there's, there's karma in both.

You know, it wasn't this generation that did all these things, but they're enjoying the fruits of their great, great grandfather's and going forward of how, you know, how they collected their money.

Look at the silos. You know, we have five former French colonies who went independent and now said, get your leave.

Don't, you know, don't let the door hitch in the ass on the way out.

And these are French speaking, French, you know, they identify with a lot of French concepts.

They've been tooled in French textbooks and things like this.

And they said, well, we just woke up one day and realized we were being cheated.

And, you know, then you had, of course, some old general saying time to go back in there.

So those silly natives hooves in charge, you know, these are our things, you know, France is entitled to them.

It's the sounds exactly like Donald Trump, right? I'm entitled to take back Panama because there was a US company that built part of it after the French failed.

So therefore we have a forever claim on the lands of another country simply because we did investment there.

And that's what he's pushing the same thing in Venezuela.

So, yeah, the global south right now, I mean, we talk about Europe, the United States, that's 15% of the world.

You could see a dramatic change.

And I think we talked about this before, which is if countries who have are now traditionally subject to this resource curse, suddenly decide to get together, create their own pricing mechanisms like opact for these strategic minerals and you name it because they have it all.

If they suddenly said, look, we're going to, we're going to be determining the price, not you.

That would reverse the flow.

So I tell people, stop looking the way we have in the past at Europe and the United States about the G7 and start looking about at the 85%.

But remember, developing countries and emerging countries are growing at more than double the rate of the developed countries, the G7 etc.

So why would you look to a bunch of laggards who don't seem to have an economic plan for your future? Why would you concentrate on them as markets?

Look at the rest of the markets. China has just done amazing amounts of increased business.

They actually, in the midst of all of these Trump attacks and things like that, they increased their export to the extent that they're actually saying, well, we need to even that out.

Our aim was never to have a $1.2 trillion surplus.

Our aim is to have something that's more fair. We want to return that surplus out there so that people have money so that we have a working circular flow of virtuous cycle where countries have jobs, have income, help them develop their assets, also technology, share technology.

And based on that, have a much more stable world. But the outgrowth of what is happening now, we see it playing out in the Middle East, Washington pulling out, and you're having regional rivalries.

We saw that quite clearly with Saudi Arabia, UAE, but you also pay attention.

We're looking at Trump, but the rest of the world is changing. You have Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, perhaps in alliance with Pakistan, which is nuclear armed.

And then you have Iran, ironically, you could have a combination of Iran and Israel and other countries basically opposing that, and that's not good.

We need systems that allow regions to settle their differences amongst themselves without outside interference.

Because what's driving this, and one feels that the US is reliable, so therefore they're looking for other sources of protection, security, and that's driving a whole new set of variables, which is actually causing more risk, a higher risk of confrontations rather than a lessening them.

So there are so many things that have been said in motion, and we tend to look at a very narrow area, when in fact we should be looking at the rest of the world, the majority of the world, where the assets are, where the markets are, where the people are, and where the growth is.

I'd love to end such optimistic note, but thank you, INR, for making your time to speak to us. What if people want to follow you, where would they go?

Well, they can go and do an internet search, look under my name, Einer Tangon. I also have a sub-stack that I do.

It's maybe once or twice a week, if you have nothing to do and you like what you heard, you'll probably hear more of the same from there, try to mix it up a little bit.

But really, it's what I'd ask is it's not about paying attention to me, it's paying attention to people like yourself and others who are trying to bring to the world the renewed sense of balance in their perspective, as I was saying.

I mean, if you just keep looking at the old ways, you're never going to discover what the new ways are.

I really love the fact that you're out there on a daily basis, making sure that people have a different sense of this.

You do it with a sense of humor, which I think is really important. If you're not laughing these days, you're going to be crying.

And this is really the good fight. If you're not continuing to understand and question these things, you're never going to have a plan to go forward.

And right now, we all need to be planning and a lot of that has to be in how we can work together as opposed to work apart.

Thank you. Thank you for that, I know.

Ladies and gentlemen, I know Tang and everybody, hailing from from Beijing, always a fond of wisdom and always a pleasure, a pleasure to listen to you.

You, you, you make my job so much easier, I know, you know, I have to do just sit here and listen.

I'm a glad about what you're saying.

Can't shut the guy up. I mean, he just talks forever.

Well, you make great TV.

Find Diana up and then watch him go around the room.

Well, again, all the best and I'll best to you and your viewers and let's hope that we get to a point where there's a little less drama, a little more help for people who need it.

Thanks, everybody, for tuning in until next time. Bye bye.