ITK Daily | November 19

Happy Saturday.

Here’s today’s ITK Daily.

To be ITK, know this:

Are we really prisoners of geography? A wave of bestselling authors claim that global affairs are still ultimately governed by the immutable facts of geography – mountains, oceans, rivers, resources. But the world has changed more than they realize. Daniel Immerwahr

+ Ideas, laws, and culture are interesting, geopoliticians argue, but to truly understand politics, you must look hard at maps.

+ "Geopolitics are back, and back with a vengeance, after this holiday from history we took in the so-called post-cold war period," US national security adviser HR McMaster warned in 2017.

+ Like geopolitical theorists, geographers believe in the power of place, but they have long insisted that places are historically shaped. Law, culture, and economics produce landscapes as much as tectonic plates do. And those landscapes change with time.

+ Geopoliticians’ reluctance to reckon with the climate crisis comes from their sense that there are only two options: transcend the landscape or live with it.

+ Geography isn’t “unchanging,” as Kaplan writes, but volatile. And where we’re going, the old maps won’t help.

Bloomberg: Kamala Harris announces San Francisco as 2023 APEC host city

+ California native unveils home state as leaders summit site

+ Location highlights American tech strength amid China rivalry

+ Kamala Harris and China’s Xi Jinping met briefly on the sidelines of APEC 202

Xi met with more than 20 world leaders during his time at the Asian summits this week, signaling intentions to mend relations with close US allies such as Japan and Australia.

USA’s military empire: A visual database.

US military space plane lands, ending record-breaking mission: UPI reports on November 12 the US military's X-37B space plane finally came back to Earth after spending 908 days in orbit.

Bloomberg: China has put longer-range ICBMs on its nuclear subs, US says

+ JL-3 would let China hit the US from closer to its own shore

+ JL-3 Sub ICBMs are "built to threaten the US," Admiral Sam Paparo, the head of the US Pacific Fleet, says

+ "They’re now capable of continuous at sea determined patrols with their Jin-class submarines” and “more are coming. They have a true nuclear command and control system." -- US Strategic Command Commander Admiral Charles Richard

Canadian Armed Forces to enhance engagement with Indo-Pacific, Trudeau says: CBC reports the Liberal government's long-promised Indo-Pacific strategy will include new investments to strengthen the role the Canadian Armed Forces plays in the region, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Friday in Thailand.

+ "This will support our allies, Japan and South Korea, and all of us in the Pacific"

Sunak’s China pivot will need careful steering: Britain’s prime minister follows the leaders in seeking to bolster ties with Beijing. Matthew Brooker

+ The world has changed. There is a war in Europe, tacitly supported by Beijing. China can no longer be considered a giant business opportunity with no downsides to engagement.

+ It appears the Western world is edging toward a fresh accommodation with China, one that recognizes the increasing antipathy that Beijing displays to liberal democratic values outside its own borders and doesn’t shrink from criticism of the country’s human-rights abuses or threats to peace and stability, yet which aims to maintain the economic relationship and preserve cooperation in as many areas of mutual interest as possible.

Dutch minister says US can’t dictate approach to China exports: Bloomberg reports the US shouldn’t expect the Netherlands to unquestionably adopt its approach to China export restrictions, a senior Dutch official warned, signaling a potential obstacle to the Biden administration’s trade fight

+ “The Netherlands will not copy the American measures one-to-one,” Dutch Foreign Trade Minister Liesje Schreinemacher said in an interview with newspaper NRC.

Middle Powers are reshaping geopolitics: Regionally strong countries such as Turkey share a determination to be at the table rather than on the menu. Ivan Krastev

+ Simply put, the insecurities and ambitions of what we might call the Middle Powers, rather than any grand strategy of the Middle Kingdom, are shaping the emerging geopolitical landscape.

+ The war in Ukraine has shone a spotlight on the activism of the Middle Powers as the major driving force of the reshaping of the international environment. They are a cast of odd bedfellows. South Africa, India, South Korea, Germany, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel, to name but a few, don’t have much in common.

+ [Middle Powers] all share one fundamental feature: they are determined to be at the table and not on the menu, since they all have the power and ambition to shape their regions.

+ One thing is certain: there will be no Bandung conference of 1955; no resurrection of the cold war’s non-aligned movement. There is no common ideology among the Middle Powers. Indeed, they often have divergent or competing interests. And the movement is not even a movement.

Shipments to the ports of LA and Long Beach plummeted 26% compared to the same month last year, the lowest volume since May 2020. The port’s executive director said protracted labor negotiations are forcing importers to move their goods to the East and Gulf coasts.

In the bunker: Boris Johnson’s last stand: A blow-by-blow account of the plotting that consumed the prime minister’s last day in power — climaxing with the showdown with his old rival Michael Gove. FT

+ "Boss, I’m really sorry to say this but I think you should announce you’re standing down today"

+ Johnson sarcastically thanked Gove: "You’ve delivered the bullet in a polite way"

+ "They’re going to have to prise me out of here"

+ "Isn’t this the first recorded case of the sinking ships fleeing the rat?"

+ Sebastian Payne is the FT’s Whitehall editor. 'The Fall of Boris Johnson,' his second book, drops November 24.

The petulant King: Charles III can’t keep the myth of monarchy alive. Caitlin Flanagan

+ [Queen Elizabeth] didn’t really serve at the pleasure of God and the House of Windsor; she served at the pleasure of the exterminators and the takeaway-shop owners and the Daily Mail.

+ Elizabeth never “celebrated” multiculturalism in the smarmy, meaningless way of college presidents or HR functionaries. But she often acknowledged how Britain was changing, never once disparaged it, and found within it a plausible case for continuity.

+ Charles has been handed an England in which a growing percentage of the population has no inclination to continue making nice with the Crown.

+ Will Charles—Boomer Zero—be able to keep hold not merely of the things but of the idea of England that his mother helped create? Doubtful.

FTX was an empty black box all along: Sam Bankman-Fried made crypto charming—and only now is the frightening scope of this fiasco becoming clear for everyday investors. Bloomberg

+ Why were people so ready to give money to Bankman-Fried? It helped that he was a character. Just 30 years old, he was famous for his unkempt, curly mane and his uniform of T-shirts and shorts, which he even wore onstage with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair at an FTX-sponsored conference in the Bahamas in April.

+ He gave people what they needed. With journalists, he was quick to respond to emails and messages and provided clear explanations of what was happening in the crypto world. He could be disarmingly frank: In an interview on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast in April, he seemed to concede that many digital tokens were essentially Ponzi schemes.

+ To politicians, he not only offered campaign cash but a blueprint for how they could flex their legislative muscles. Instead of the usual libertarian calls to keep the government out of crypto, he pushed legislation giving the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission more oversight

+ Outside of politics, Bankman-Fried promised to give almost all of his wealth away. The son of Stanford law professors, he was a backer of “effective altruism”—a movement, rooted in utilitarian philosophy, that says people should rigorously measure how they can do the most good.

+ His fall is a reminder that a market that draws people looking for fast, potentially life-changing gains also has a way of attracting predators. Whether it was a fraud or a fiasco, behind FTX’s sleek trading tools was another gambler willing to be reckless with other people’s money.

The North American battery boom: Perhaps $91 billion will be sunk into batteries in the next decade.

Detroit will soon get 2 roads that can charge your EV as you drive: Michigan is one of several states that plans to test inductive charging. It could be a game-changer, especially for freight trucks. Fast Company

+ Over the next two years, transportation officials plan to embed technology in the pavement that can charge electric vehicles while they’re being driven. The wireless system will be the first US test of so-called inductive charging on public roadways, according to the Michigan Department of Transportation.

+ “We’re the auto capital. We continue to push technology advancements,” said Michele Mueller, a senior project manager at the agency.

+ Drivers would use a phone app or vehicle control to choose whether to accept a charge from a road’s coils. Users would pay for kilowatts the same way they do at an EV charging station, though the system would be free to drivers during pilot testing.

+ The biggest challenge in getting to zero emissions nationally is figuring out how to move the 70% of freight that is now transported by truck.

Replay: What will next generation car designers create? A Brigadoon Monthly Call with Paul Snyder . Access the conversation here.

+ Paul Snyder, the Paul & Helen Farago Chair of Transportation Design @ Detroit's College for Creative Studies.

QOTD: If Twitter is still here, am I still here?

Look for my 18 session Mastodon how-to strategy workshop coming soon.

TikTok builds itself into an ads juggernaut: The Chinese-owned video app’s ad business is thriving, even as a digital advertising slump hurts Meta , Snap, and other rivals. NYT

TikTok is a handheld QVC.

+ TikTok is on track to make nearly $10 billion in ad revenue, more than double what it generated last year, according to estimates from the research company Insider Intelligence.

+ TikTok’s ad revenue this year is expected to eclipse that of rivals like Twitter and Snap, although its business remains small compared with Google and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.

+ TikTok’s users spend an average of 96 minutes a day on the app — nearly five times what they spend on Snapchat, triple their time on Twitter, and almost twice as much as their time on Facebook and Instagram, according to the data analytics company Sensor Tower.

Ticketmaster Swift snafu Bob Lefsetz

+ "I wish everybody would STFU! There is no villain here. Just an incredibly successful pop star and a company that was caught off guard by demand." -- Bob Lefsetz

Two strategy + comms briefings to consider:

December 2 - Dr. Leigh George on fandoms: Fandoms can be a powerful space for people to build friendships with others who share their passions, create memes and other cultural artifacts, and feel less alone. More here.

December 7 - Scott Galloy's predictions for 2023: Annual predictions event, where he’ll share his unfiltered predictions for business, tech, and more in 2023–and recap what he got right (and wrong) the last time around. More here.

Virginia coach Tony Elliott is uniquely, and tragically, prepared to handle this moment The Athletic

UCLA to Big Ten Conference : The University of California Board of Regents punted a decision to block UCLA’s PAC-12 defection to December 14.

FIFA chief accuses Qatar’s western critics of ‘hypocrisy’: FT reports Gianni Infantino lashes out at Europe for double standards on migrant worker rights.

The World Cup that changed everything: The decision to take the World Cup to Qatar has upturned a small nation, battered the reputation of global soccer’s governing body, and altered the fabric of the sport. NYT

+ For much of the 20th century, Qatar was a barren Persian Gulf backwater better known for pearl diving than power politics. Its people were poor, lagging far behind their Saudi neighbors. Then Qatar struck gas.

+ In many ways, though, Europe’s unwanted hiatus is the least of the consequences of FIFA’s decision to hand Qatar the World Cup. A brief interruption to a single season, after all, is far less significant than a yearslong shift in the game’s landscape.

+ As the tournament that the host country was willing to pay almost any price to obtain gets underway, though, and as the eyes of the world turn to a tiny corner of the Gulf, it is hard not to feel it is the other way around: Soccer may or may not change Qatar, but Qatar has changed soccer forever.

FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 kicks off tomorrow: Qatar plays Ecuador @ 11:00 am ET.

Enjoy the ride + plan accordingly.

-Marc

Caracal produces ITK Daily.

Caracal is a geopolitical business communications firm specializing in global business issues at the intersection of globalization, disruption, and politics.

Caracal believes that to be a world-class geopolitical business communicator, you need global street smarts coupled with holistic, high-frequency, and high-low communications.

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