Quit All That Yellen, The Chips Fall Where They May, Multipolar Metallurgy

This week, ordinary geopolitics lads Andrew Collingwood and Philip Pilkington are back on the case of Janet Yellen.

A week ago, she made incoherent comments about American foreign policy. Now, she's giving a big speech about China, and the results are only marginally better. Is Yellen being given contradictory objectives by her boss? Or is it simply the case that, with US hegemony haemorrhaging away, all the options are now bad?

As China retaliates over the US chip ban, the global microprocessor chess game has become its own form of geopolitics chess. With both the US and its rivals seeking to build self-contained chip processing infrastructure, smaller countries are being asked to pick winners. At the same time, with Ukraine also bisecting the developing world, being a minnow nation has never been trickier. Does America have enough diplomatic gas in the tank to both support Ukraine and sew up the high-end chip market? Philip Pilkington is skeptical.

Finally, with Chile nationalising its lithium, Indonesia imposing an export ban on nickel, and the 'OPEC for lithium' idea still floating around, Andrew Collingwood updates us on the race to define how the market for key 21st century metals will operate.

After all, if green technology simply results in different cartels and political misadventures in different parts of the world to oil - is it really a win at all?