# Multipolar Realpolitik (Omnibus draft) (part 2 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [243], part 2 of 2. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: document (Text), 2024-05-06 (from the career record), https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AelylfOU517y0BI184sW7p8TnQl_oH8t4ajH6Fe4vH0/edit. Text: document text
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the great powers step (Multipolar Realpolitik, 2024), the latest step.
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Top of the spine: the international truce and frictionless-trade conditions a zero-tariff refugee export zone would depend on.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Multipolar Realpolitik (2024): Essays arguing that a global truce among a few great powers, with treaties checked by AI, blockchains and...
  - Through the Looking Glass (2010): Talk for FEASTA in Ireland on systemic risk: government is the wrong place to manage big risks, so... (suggested by machine)
  - Sharing our fear can make peace: envisaging military cooperation to avoid Mutually Assured Starvation (2012): One-page paper: the rational elites who kept nuclear deterrence stable could cooperate the same way to... (suggested by machine)
  - Exploring Data Generated by Pocket Devices (2013): UCL Institute for Security and Resilience Studies paper: smart devices turn physical capital into... (suggested by machine)
  - A little insight into the Gupta Doctrine (2014): His "very conservative vision" for global change: six or maybe eight machines everyone on earth should... (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - CheapID to Mattereum: One identity pattern, from a person's ID card in 2006 to warranties on physical goods in 2017.
  - cyber and defense: Security work for defense clients, built on one idea: set rivals to check each other. Resilience and Opportunity in...
  - nuclear / panflu: Pandemic, evacuation and rehousing plans.
  - rich data capitalism: Cheap information changes what a market can carry: price signals hold only a few bits (2013), blockchains cut...
  - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Ideas whose earliest source in this archive is this one: Multipolar truce (Multipolar Realpolitik)
- Topics: Multipolar Realpolitik — strategic international systems (100%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: complex value networks (15 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2016); value networks (15 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); human security (7 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2007); geoengineering (9 here; 13 sources in all, earliest dated 2010, 2 undated); Multipolar Realpolitik (7 here; 8 sources in all, earliest dated 2024, 2 undated); realpolitik (8 here; 11 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 2 undated); global governance (8 here; 18 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); great power (3 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); global trade (7 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); ledgers (4 here; 15 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 1 undated)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): Multipolar Realpolitik
- Importance: core-text score 0.95 (1.00 is the top), number 2 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [826] [Index of /in_a_page (2010)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/826.md): Vinay: Multipolar Realpolitik is the AI / truce core text; see also The Democratic Empire
  - [410] [AI and Speed of Change (2026)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/410.md): shorter AI clip under the core text
  - [521] [The Next Industrial Revolution of AI & Blockchain (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/521.md): shorter AI clip under the core text
  - [525] [The Future of Finance Markets in the Blockchain and AI Era (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/525.md): shorter AI clip under the core text
  - [319] [A sleepless night trying to find words (2013)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/319.md): same career work: Multipolar Realpolitik
- On the same works, just before: [724] [Roundtable Discussion with Vinay Gupta and Bryan... (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/724.md); [663] [Ownership Fractionalization: Kickstart Innovation (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/663.md); [736] [Mattereum (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/736.md)
- On the same works, just after: [561] [How the Blockchain can liberate producers and consumers. (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/561.md); [557] [The Future of Real Estate RWA (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/557.md); [556] [ETHCC24: 'Selling physical things using NFTs: what we... (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/556.md)

## Reading it

Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it.

Cite as: Multipolar Realpolitik (Omnibus draft), document, 2024-05-06, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AelylfOU517y0BI184sW7p8TnQl_oH8t4ajH6Fe4vH0/edit; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [243], https://guptaoption.com/texts/243.md.

## Passages, part 2 of 2
[passage 13](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AelylfOU517y0BI184sW7p8TnQl_oH8t4ajH6Fe4vH0/edit) is not only possible, but probable. Climate alone demonstrates this fact, never mind AI issues. The use of military force to suppress chaos, maintain order, and protect trade is still hugely important – even naval piracy is on the rise, threatening global trade. But the destruction of economic value which any serious near-peer conflict would entail could leave the world bankrupt regardless of who the winner was, if there was a discernible winner at all. War simply does not work as a means of capturing value anymore. Opportunities for new governance What is the technology stack required to enable trade between people who do not like or trust each other? Cold multipolarity based on mutual interest rather than soaring vision runs on tightly-policed trade agreements. Artificial intelligence, mutual distributed ledgers such as blockchains, and sensor networks associated with satellites, self-driving cars and drones create rich possibilities for automating huge amounts of the labor associated with maintaining and policing such trade agreements. The world has been down this path of automated monitoring and tightly policed international treaties before. During the Cold War some arms control treaties between the USSR and the USA included On-Site Verification clauses permitting both visual and technical inspections to ensure that the treaties were being properly complied with by all parties. This period is most often remembered by Ronald Reagan’s use of the Russian proverb “trust, but verify” at the signing of the INF Treaty in 1987. While it may seem a stretch to imagine 40 year old methodologies for nuclear arms control being brought to bear for managing commerce, recent events have highlighted how effective control of an enemy’s supply chain can be as a weapon of war. Remarkably, climate change treaties lack all teeth and do not effectively measure what they wish to police (national emissions). Nations sign anything that seems convenient and comply with none of it. The result will be chaos. All parties are threatened by climate change but are unable to coordinate an effective response. In an age of AI, blockchains, and drones, the possibility exists for building automated monitoring systems which could extend right the way down the supply chain all the way into primary resource extraction activities like mining. The processing of such vast quantities of data into actionable conclusions about treaty violations would have been unthinkable prior to the age of AI, but seems likely to become quite tractable in the future. Verified agreement that the primary data capture is accurate using mutual distributed ledgers and modern encryption to control access to data by third parties may further reduce the verification burden. Factor 1000 or 100,000 reductions in the cost of international treaty enforcement mechanisms seem likely in the future. A positive economic effect of such a global regime would be to transform international trade from a low-trust to a high-trust activity: when a gold supplier says “no conflict minerals” there would be every reason to believe them, quite unlike the current situation in which the laundering of conflict

[passage 14](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AelylfOU517y0BI184sW7p8TnQl_oH8t4ajH6Fe4vH0/edit) cost of international treaty enforcement mechanisms seem likely in the future. A positive economic effect of such a global regime would be to transform international trade from a low-trust to a high-trust activity: when a gold supplier says “no conflict minerals” there would be every reason to believe them, quite unlike the current situation in which the laundering of conflict gold and the production of counterfeit bars is a nearly-invisible menace fuelling the regional breakdown of governance in a several countries. In sharp contrast, a high trust global economic order would be much more efficient than the current low trust regime, likely by several points of global GDP. The economic uplift alone might pay for many of the implementation costs. For detailed examples of how new technologies can work in favor of truce and a multipolar rules based order, rather than chaos, see Appendix. Conclusion: Automated fences make good neighbors Negotiating the transition to a multipolar rule based order will have to offer a deal to all parties that is fair enough and profitable enough to incentivise them to embrace the rules rather than reject them, and cover the transaction costs of that process. The window for doing this negotiation during the later stages of Pax Americana rather than the early stages of global chaos is closing. Now is the time to do the negotiating about how to use and regulate new technology to sustain global economic growth, before it is too late to do so under positive conditions. Things are probably as good and as stable as they are going to get and there is no time for delay. The sheer complexity and transaction costs of negotiating, implementing and monitoring any kind of revised rule based global order have thus-far been entirely prohibitive. Even in the brief windows where there was meaningful political will there was no realistic implementation machinery to deliver results. However, in the near future next-generation tools may enable us to get through these negotiation processes more easily and turn political will into the next global system. In this vision of the future, each major bloc, like the European Union, applies its own rule set within its own sphere of influence. Software systems bridge the gaps between these different bureaucratic rule sets so completely and efficiently that we do not experience the shattering impacts of deglobalization as we move into an explicitly multipolar world. In contexts where actions inside of one bloc may negatively affect their trading partners, a high tech monitoring regime is applied as-necessary to ensure that all sides are complying with both their trade treaty and contractual obligations. Each region experiences an increase in effective sovereignty while continuing to trade with minimal friction in most areas. If the Europeans change some rule on consumer privacy or the precise geographic region which owns the right to name its eponymous cheese or wine then the software seamlessly makes the necessary changes in a machine-to-machine transaction. That simple example, repeated a million times, is the structure

[passage 15](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AelylfOU517y0BI184sW7p8TnQl_oH8t4ajH6Fe4vH0/edit) in effective sovereignty while continuing to trade with minimal friction in most areas. If the Europeans change some rule on consumer privacy or the precise geographic region which owns the right to name its eponymous cheese or wine then the software seamlessly makes the necessary changes in a machine-to-machine transaction. That simple example, repeated a million times, is the structure of a functional future for global trade. Strengthening the fabric of the daily business of trade will give us global resilience in the face of the extraordinary challenges we know are coming. ________________ APPENDIX Properly integrated with things like sensor networks, drones, satellites, DNA testing and other, possibly yet to be conceived, innovations, we expect technologies like these to provide transformative levels of insight and clarity into the physical facts of our world. Here are some speculative examples of recent technological innovations that could be brought together into an integrated system to make treaties enforceable, support governance, and facilitate global trade. a : AI systems can potentially help with: 1. Translation, particularly of contracts and descriptions of goods 2. Interpretation of foreign law (customs and excise, taxation, product safety, consumer protection, anti-counterfeiting and financial crimes) 3. Understanding how law differs or is similar across jurisdictions and how law can be understood in ways which promote and facilitate transactions and trade 4. Provisional dispute resolution (with appeal to human arbitrators available for all cases) – a particular boon when parties to the dispute do not share a language 5. Comprehensive systematic analysis and identification of unnecessary and unprofitable bottlenecks inside the global trade system. As a simple example: standard pallets do not pack neatly into standard sea containers. Mapping and evaluating the cost/benefit of fixing problems like this is too costly to do with human intellectual labor but with AI assistance there may be great gains in fundamental economic efficiency. 6. These kinds of measures connect trading partners together using artificial intelligence technology to bridge over the historical divides (metric versus Imperial measurements) which have proven to be too expensive and difficult to fix so far. The world is awash with garages with two sets of wrenches and other tooling for two different measurement standards. These differences in norms and the associated trading frictions are enormous brakes: easy to see in a wrench, harder to spot in 800 pages of documentation for a car engine transaction. The point is not that these problems can be solved today, but to paint a clear picture of the kinds of long-term economic benefits which can be realized with disciplined deployment of these new technologies. 6. Blockchains, mutual distributed ledgers, digital identity systems for goods, companies, and physical assets (like real estate or vehicles) help with: 1. Correctly identifying trading partners prevents fraud 2. AI systems need trustworthy inputs when (for example) evaluating contract paperwork: some classes of fraud are discouraged by permanently stored immutable documents 3. Serialization and registration of assets like cars is already standard and the motor vehicle industry would be impossible

[passage 16](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AelylfOU517y0BI184sW7p8TnQl_oH8t4ajH6Fe4vH0/edit) companies, and physical assets (like real estate or vehicles) help with: 1. Correctly identifying trading partners prevents fraud 2. AI systems need trustworthy inputs when (for example) evaluating contract paperwork: some classes of fraud are discouraged by permanently stored immutable documents 3. Serialization and registration of assets like cars is already standard and the motor vehicle industry would be impossible without it. As transaction costs are slashed by technology similar registers could exist – with facilitation of both consumer and trade finance – using new technology cut the price of creation and maintenance of such registers. Mobile phones are a good candidate for this kind of technology. 4. Opaque black markets in weapons, drugs, money laundering, tax evasion and so on are absolutely toxic to multipolar rule based order. Even relatively benign issues like counterfeit designer clothes are enough to sour international relations between trade blocs. Any persistent and egregious breach in the rule based order brings into question the validity of the system overall. Legitimacy is the lifeblood of any attempt to stabilize the world in this way. Legitimate order is the opposite of chaos. 7. Remote sensor systems, satellite imaging, drones, self-driving cars help with: 1. Monitoring the impacts of weather conditions, climate change, plant and soil health (including biota, contamination, and structural changes like groundwater exhaustion) to help forecast future harvests, including triggering mitigations like parametric insurance 2. Direct capture of supply chain data on goods in transit. For example, verification of the international cold chain for medical or food transport 3. High resolution chemical makeup data allowing near-certainty about the origin of items like diamonds, minerals, and even agricultural products in some instances to prevent tariff/sanctions evasion 4. Predictive analytics for power supply from renewables, paired to industrial power users for management of international energy grids in a capital-efficient way using peak shaving and demand-side reduction 5. Creation of complex markets for energy derivatives designed to (for example) use the batteries in self-driving cars to support international energy grids during periods of peak load or output. These cross-infrastructure international optimisations seem unimaginably complex now but having empty cars in a city drive to chargers, plug themselves in, and fill up on solar excess is a good move all round. All this can provide the stability and opportunities needed for the trustable trade, transparency and economic flourishing that will deliver a safe and cooperative future. HOW TO HANDLE CHINA Context This document attempts to stop Americans painting China as the next “evil empire” based on a severe misreading of Chinese history, culture and doctrine. It’s written by a nonspecialist with no particular China or defense credentials, but some track record of saying insightful things early. You should confirm anything you use with Real China Specialists. If you can find one. China becomes much more dangerous to America if approached as an “evil empire” because it will blind us to the real problem, which is trade policy. ________________ What is China? China is a myth, as America is

[passage 17](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AelylfOU517y0BI184sW7p8TnQl_oH8t4ajH6Fe4vH0/edit) some track record of saying insightful things early. You should confirm anything you use with Real China Specialists. If you can find one. China becomes much more dangerous to America if approached as an “evil empire” because it will blind us to the real problem, which is trade policy. ________________ What is China? China is a myth, as America is a myth. Anybody contesting with the Americans is fighting with blue jeans and rock music and Superman both in their concept of America, but also in the American’s concept of themselves. The belief that We Are Doing The Right Thing As Best As We Can for example makes Americans morally resilient in situations where post-WW2 Europeans would turn around and go home. Myth counts. The Chinese myth has four essential layers, for our purposes: * The myth of continuity with Ancient China Lest we forget, the Ottoman Empire believed themselves to be the last remnant of the Roman empire, converted to Islam. To what degree is modern China really the same thing as ancient China? That’s entirely a question of perception. America is the freest civilization on earth, in the same way that China is the oldest. It’s a fact. 5000 years of Ancient foundation. * The myth of Imperial China Here I mean the entire iconography: bureaucrats in hats and silk robes with dragon claws in lacquered wooden palaces. The Forbidden City. All of that. Goes on forever, has many phases, spiritual and temporal aspects. Life was good/bad/different and the land prospered/flourished/starved/died by turns. As with all myths it is what you make it. * The myth of Communist China Mao. Great Leap Forwards. Recovery from the catastrophe and horror of WW2. Fixing the problems of Feudal China. A fresh new start. Thousands of years of political reforms crammed into a few decades resulting in unbelievable changes without centuries of incremental development of new governance concepts to match the new technological age. Problems we don’t talk about. The silence. * The myth of Capitalist China Industrial manufacturing. Real estate. Booming economy. Rice made of plastic. Industrial pollution. Orange sky you can’t breathe the air. The world’s manufacturing powerhouse. You can’t make a cutting-edge phone anywhere else. Production lines longer than jet airplane runways. The core point: I want you to walk away with a sense of the gigantic scope of Chinese identity. You as a modern Chinese person could draw inspiration from this vast landscape of mythic identity. Within the Imperial China period philosophical and political stances which may or may not still be relevant going back 3000 years. It’s not “5000 years of nothing happened” it’s “5000 years of we did this for 800 years and it was no good, then we had 300 years of this and it was great, then that got over-run by a new thing, and...” All and any of this can filter through into the present by virtue of Chinese thinkers looking at their own history for resources. American history has various wars,

[passage 18](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AelylfOU517y0BI184sW7p8TnQl_oH8t4ajH6Fe4vH0/edit) of we did this for 800 years and it was no good, then we had 300 years of this and it was great, then that got over-run by a new thing, and...” All and any of this can filter through into the present by virtue of Chinese thinkers looking at their own history for resources. American history has various wars, westward expansion, railroads, space race, cold war and similar periods. American thinkers draw lessons from these periods. China is like that but extremely long. You can’t tell what specific mythic framework any specific Chinese thinker is running until they tell you, and we are never going to understand it well enough to work it out. Maybe we can read their textbooks, but the real thinkers are going to be reading history for themselves. This is not like the Russians or the Nazis or the French or the English or anybody else the Americans have contested with over the years. Particularly the authoritarian regimes usually had very few surprises ideologically speaking and very rigid versions of their own myths. China is different. Chinese identity is different. Chinese mythology is different. Chinese political strategy is different. We have to start from scratch. Under Communist rule the Chinese acted in ways driven by relatively simple official doctrine hammered home with the intention of creating massive conformity. That made understanding the doctrine tractable to some degree. That is no longer true. The modern Chinese increasingly have access to their entire cultural landscape to work with. Doctrine is published, but the dialogue is of ever-increasing complexity. We should not underestimate these resources or our lack of understanding of them, both in practice, and in theory. History is identity. Who is China? Four key stats * Four times the population of America. Three times Europe. * Very, very unusual demographics because of One Child Policy * City people have roughly three times the income of rural people * 1/6 the arable land per person of America What we can learn from this in seconds: * Food is the key issue * Rural areas grow it, urban areas eat it, and there’s a huge income gap there * In theory communism might have fixed all of this; that’s always the claim What we know in practice: * Gleaming mega-cities that went up in a heartbeat * Farmers trying to eke out a living under immense government pressure * Deep angst about sustaining economic growth * No sense that political doctrine controls the society: increasingly a free market of ideas albeit with strong attempts to control the dialogue from central government * “Newly Minted Superpower” questions about international role, much as America post-WW2 * No simple political doctrine. It’s the full-bore complexity of an ancient culture now. That last point is critical. Having recovered from the period in which central government attempted to start from scratch, China is recovering access to the complexity of its own cultural tradition and that makes getting a grip on what they’re doing

[passage 19](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AelylfOU517y0BI184sW7p8TnQl_oH8t4ajH6Fe4vH0/edit) role, much as America post-WW2 * No simple political doctrine. It’s the full-bore complexity of an ancient culture now. That last point is critical. Having recovered from the period in which central government attempted to start from scratch, China is recovering access to the complexity of its own cultural tradition and that makes getting a grip on what they’re doing very, very hard. Nothing that counts is written on banners any more. What does China want? A secure, adequate food supply. The rest is details. ________________ What does China want for and from us? 1. They don’t know: they’ve never done “the outside world” in a serious way. Some trade with the British Empire which was “a mixed bag at best” (he said with typical British understatement). What are their options? 2. “Keep buying our stuff. Keep paying for it.” Probably the world’s best manufacturing in terms of value for money and (often) product quality. That was true when dealing with the Europeans too. So that’s a good thing for China: we make, you buy. 3. Grain? Huge seas of wheat. Cattle for thousands of miles. Can a “consumer electronics for food” situation run indefinitely? Is that a thing they can trust to feed their people in the 22nd century, never mind the 21st. Seems unstable; a temporary favorable condition. 4. To be left alone. Outside interference in Chinese affairs has been uniformly disastrous. India’s “national myth” largely ignores the downsides of the British Empire in favor of railroads, democracy, and an excellent selection of hats. In fact a lot of crappy stuff happened, but the Indians chose to ignore it at least until after they graduate from MIT. It’s not in the national story. Not so for China. Very clear: “outside world did very bad stuff to us.” So it would not be an overwhelming misread to say that China’s core question is “how do we get the outside world to reliably sell us food at prices we can afford” which could also be read as “how do we get control of more agricultural land”. That’s a fairly sensible sort of “dialogue between civilizations” thing which under good conditions is worked out by economic competition and international trade in semi-free or free markets. It does not say “we will go to war to take your land” up front. It says “if we’re doing OK we’ll keep trading for food.” War is a worse way to get calories than sewing jeans. Conclusion Global warming represents an apocalyptic threat to China, and we don’t understand their viewpoint on food security at all. Global warming is universally expected to slash global agricultural productivity and raise food prices, reduce food security, and destroy huge areas of agricultural land. The west, and in particular the petro-dollar system and the American fondness for very large cars, likely read from a Chinese perspective as a feckless peasant culture destroying the vital agricultural resources which cannot be replaced and should be stewarded as carefully as possible, and

[passage 20](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AelylfOU517y0BI184sW7p8TnQl_oH8t4ajH6Fe4vH0/edit) productivity and raise food prices, reduce food security, and destroy huge areas of agricultural land. The west, and in particular the petro-dollar system and the American fondness for very large cars, likely read from a Chinese perspective as a feckless peasant culture destroying the vital agricultural resources which cannot be replaced and should be stewarded as carefully as possible, and all in return for the enjoying feeling of driving around in a alone in a luxury SUV with 25 cup holders and a small fluffy dog in the passenger seat. They’ve got a point. Until we accept that they have a point all discussions with China are going to be, under the surface, at the deep root, this: * China: Food. We want food. We want to be sure there will be food. Why are you destroying the food? WHY ARE YOU DESTROYING THE FOOD? * America: we’d like to talk to you about civil rights, democracy, and patent enforcement. * China: THE. FOOD. WHAT ARE WE GOING TO EAT IN 30 YEARS? WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO EAT IN 30 YEARS? WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT THE FOOD. * America: also these islands... * China: <muffled screaming> 5000 years of THE FOOD as the central issue, and it is still the central issue. If we can see our way to having an honest conversation with China about the food, an enduring stable peace should be possible. They really need our agricultural products. We really like their manufactured goods. Surely, surely we can cut a deal. It’s not like they don’t make good stuff. It’s not like we don’t grow more than we know what to do with. There is every basis to resolve this through trade. But only if we stop global warming. The basis of this dialogue is quite simple: * All side have to keep their population happy * Everybody loves consumer goods * Everybody needs food * Nobody knows how to run a consumer society without oil The way out of the strategic impasse is to get the oil out of consumer society, as a measure to prevent a total global confrontation over climate change and food supply. That effort could be a shared effort between producers and consumers of manufactured goods and agricultural products. Vinay Gupta May 6 2024 [email removed] I’ve also left out a lot of notes about food security and war in the Chinese historical context, feel free to reach out for additional material. ________________ THREADING THREE NEEDLES The Problem Humanity is in much the same position as a gang of octopuses in a fish tank, each smashing their own rock against the tank glass. In many areas there is an inverse relationship between objectives and outcomes. Nations race against competitors to achieve goals that are probably bad for both. Everybody has to put their rocks down and nobody knows how to negotiate or enforce it. But if the octopuses cannot coordinate stopping, eventually one of those rocks is going through the glass,

[passage 21](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AelylfOU517y0BI184sW7p8TnQl_oH8t4ajH6Fe4vH0/edit) tank glass. In many areas there is an inverse relationship between objectives and outcomes. Nations race against competitors to achieve goals that are probably bad for both. Everybody has to put their rocks down and nobody knows how to negotiate or enforce it. But if the octopuses cannot coordinate stopping, eventually one of those rocks is going through the glass, and all parties hit the glassy floor. Also, the fish tank is leaking which is why they are attacking the glass in the first place. ________________ Different disciplines discover the problem by different names: ratchets in game theory, polycrisis, AI safety, wicked problems, market failures, rising small group lethality, climate governance all refer to much the same problem: 1. we are spending money to arrive at a destination nobody wants 2. because somebody else might get there before we do. Somehow the world survived the Cold War and Mutually Assured Destruction. A disturbingly large part of our survival came down to specific individuals failing to behave as expected by their chains of command. There has to be a better way of ensuring human survival. The three needles are hard governance problems. We have to thread these needles in order to usher in a lasting age of increasing human security. Needle 1: Multipolar Realpolitik replaces Pax Americana Since the dawn of the nuclear age there have been three eras of global governance: * The Cold War in which a huge technological lead in the hands of peer competitors pulled the world taught. Little moved without superpower say-so. * Pax Americana in which America won and terms like “permanent sole superpower status” were discussed. * Post-2008 void in which the bills came due and a multipolar future became more likely, but proved impossible to negotiate because the UN’s multilateral model does not work. Multipolar Realpolitik (expanded here) could fill this void. It suggests a return to the Cold War in which a balance of nuclear powers maintained global stability in a competitive-cooperative model. With only two powers the game was unstable. A three-or-more power system might be long-term stable as shifting alliances tend to contain breakouts. While this is certainly no Pax Americana it does provide a potential platform for solving global problems which must be solved or we all face ruin. We do not have to like it. We only have to be able to live with it. The multipolar realpolitik model suggests running the world through a series of bilateral or small-N multilateral treaties managing areas like nuclear and biological weapons, but also licensing technologies like elective gene modification or geoengineering. The expectation is that the superpowers would take responsibility for imposing some treaty terms on their back yards, in a hierarchical model which is much more realistic than the UN model in which one flag equals one vote. There may be some dispute about who is in whose back yard, but nobody with the capacity to export substantial global risk would be outside of the system. We are not

[passage 22](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AelylfOU517y0BI184sW7p8TnQl_oH8t4ajH6Fe4vH0/edit) for imposing some treaty terms on their back yards, in a hierarchical model which is much more realistic than the UN model in which one flag equals one vote. There may be some dispute about who is in whose back yard, but nobody with the capacity to export substantial global risk would be outside of the system. We are not far from here already. Needle 2: Accelerating the Adoption of Technologies Beneficial to Lasting Human Security Civil engineering is the most widespread and enduring family of technologies beneficial to lasting human security (TecBLHS). Aqueducts and canals are far older than effective doctors. International systems are slow to support new technology. Electric bicycles, for example, are an unexpectedly huge innovation which is displacing gasoline cars far more quickly than electric cars (according to some reports). With the correct international frameworks these vehicles could be made even better value for money through standardization of replaceable components like batteries and wheels. Strong norms would also promote the infrastructure to support electric bikes (most notably secure enough bike parking for expensive vehicles). Taking things which work and scaling them globally through standardization and norms has been effective in the past: container shipping, the internet, and cell phone radio specifications are good examples. In the areas where these processes succeeded (even partially) they became invisible. Even getting down to two systems of weights and measures, Metric and Imperial, and a handful of electricity standards (110v vs 240v, 50hz vs. 60hz) still permits vast economies of scale. Container shipping is said to have boosted global GDP by 7% alone. The first reward for effective global governance is accelerated economic growth. A surprising number of supposedly “fundamental” problems would simply evaporate with a small number of very powerful nations cooperating to identify solutions, setting standards, and putting their foot down to get them enforced. The modern style of standardization has bogged down in endless bureaucracy and is not effective. A smaller number of players who are willing to push standardization processes hard unlocks huge global economic benefits for all players even if they are not involved in the standardization processes. Big players unlock universal progress. However, in the modern era many of the most potentially beneficial technologies are also potentially existentially dangerous: genetic engineering and artificial intelligence are both expected to produce real trouble in almost all future scenarios. All that is debated is the scale and scope of those problems, relative to the good delivered. At the core of this debate is geoengineering, likely via Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI). Quick, dirty, and risky, SAI could potentially buy the necessary time for cheap renewable electrical grids to end the age of gas, coal, and oil. Right now the available global governance mechanisms stand no chance of authorizing serious evaluation of these technologies and have no capability to authorise them: the risks are real, but the risks of inaction look increasingly large, given the failure of climate governance overall. Needle 3: Blocking and Locking Technologies Destructive to Lasting

[passage 23](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AelylfOU517y0BI184sW7p8TnQl_oH8t4ajH6Fe4vH0/edit) end the age of gas, coal, and oil. Right now the available global governance mechanisms stand no chance of authorizing serious evaluation of these technologies and have no capability to authorise them: the risks are real, but the risks of inaction look increasingly large, given the failure of climate governance overall. Needle 3: Blocking and Locking Technologies Destructive to Lasting Human Security In most cases technologies beneficial to lasting human security will eventually scale. Market failures and similar problems can delay such technologies but in many cases they will struggle through into global adoption. The world can ill-afford such delays. Governance failures in existential risk technologies like biotechnology and artificial intelligence are potentially much more severe. Nobody can prove that AI is going to destroy the world until it does. But enough smart people are vocally worried and enough money ($500 million?) has been spent to make that risk rational to consider. Right now the global AI arms race seems almost guaranteed to maximize the risk. This was also true of nuclear weapons, before the golden age of arms limitation talks. We have been through this before: nuclear power technology is essential, nuclear weapons capability must be very tightly held. AI may help in all areas of life, but out-of-control AI could end it according to some informed experts. It’s the same basic structure as in the nuclear age. There are probably half a dozen similar worries: battlefield robots, biotechnology, space-based problems of various kinds, and weirdly, oil wells and coal mines. Although they are ancient, the world’s reliance on oil and coal is placing us all in harm's way and the processes around governing that risk are even less effective than abstinence-based sex education is at preventing teen pregnancy. The results are horrible but the process is philosophically attractive: multilateral solutions are being discussed. As long as the problem is seen to be being approached in the right way the solution does not ever have to work. We have several success stories in eliminating toxic technologies: * Nuclear arms controls have, so far, worked * Lead is out of almost all gasoline * The ozone layer is protected by changes in refrigerator design * A wide variety of dangerous pharmaceuticals have been effectively banned globally * Nobody doubts the oil age will end because of batteries and renewable energy, it’s just a question of when However, the current situation is very clearly out of control. Even nuclear proliferation is uncomfortably close to unsavoury actors getting usable capability: dangerous weeds are growing up in the cracks between the superpowers. The world has to be pulled tight again, these cracks closed up, and those weeds choked off. The superpower count is between two and five (or more) depending on our area of interest: Russia is a nuclear superpower, but not likely to be an AI superpower. The Solution: Bilateral and Small-N Multilateral Treaties with Technological Support So the proposal is that a small group of superpowers anchored by America, Europe and

[passage 24](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AelylfOU517y0BI184sW7p8TnQl_oH8t4ajH6Fe4vH0/edit) up, and those weeds choked off. The superpower count is between two and five (or more) depending on our area of interest: Russia is a nuclear superpower, but not likely to be an AI superpower. The Solution: Bilateral and Small-N Multilateral Treaties with Technological Support So the proposal is that a small group of superpowers anchored by America, Europe and China with India, Russia and others allied, simply start negotiations templated on the successful arms control work of the past, but covering a wider range of technologies: climate change, AI, nuclear, biotechnology and a few others. The carrot is economic standardizations, the stick is existential risk technologies. The objectives are threefold: * Harness what is useful and get it to scale (nuclear energy for example) * Suppress what is dangerous and eliminate or restrict it to superpowers (new AI models) * Use intra-superpower monitoring agreements to provide the rest of the world with reason to trust that the superpowers are playing by their own rules, generating an effective mandate. Without this the global population will lose faith quickly. The resulting system is not a simple one: 5 superpowers negotiating bilateral treaties on 10 technologies is 250 agreements to create and police. This is not the same situation as the US and USSR arms control work. The superpowers also have to impose these agreements on anybody in their back yards who is capable of breaking them; more of an issue for some areas than others. Biotechnology is a particularly slippery problem: supply chain lockdowns perhaps? However, the cause of the problem and the cure may be the same thing. Near-future AI systems can help draft treaties and interpret monitoring data. They can suggest whether a draft treaty violates applicable laws and agreements. A lot has to be built for this to be feasible but none of it looks impossible. America and China certainly have the capacity to build such systems fast. The Near Term Opportunity Stratospheric Aerosol Injection geoengineering may be the only technically feasible offramp from a 3C+ warmer world. Such a world has many highly unpredictable feedback loops leading to unguessable future outcomes. Current models of global governance cannot authorise testing of SAI and it is not really part of the current UN climate process. As a result the window for using SAI (if it even works) may be missed because the UN process cannot move fast enough to get the job done. A near-peer/superpower pact to push SAI to the front of the global research agenda on climate change is likely to be a critical turning point in the fight against climate change. If SAI is proven unworkable quickly, then draconian measures will likely be needed to stabilize the climate. However, if SAI is proven to work, the superpowers can agree on the terms and get it done in time to avoid more damaging measures to control climate risk.

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End of [243] Multipolar Realpolitik (Omnibus draft), part 2 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [561](https://guptaoption.com/texts/561.md) How the Blockchain can liberate producers and consumers. (2024); the most closely related, [826](https://guptaoption.com/texts/826.md) Index of /in_a_page (2010); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.