Alex Turnbull

You know, people have to pay up for a smaller supply of diesel, the places that are going to be able to afford it are Korea, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan.

These places will not be able to pay that and they will get desperate.

And I think there will be consequences to that.

And just to be clear, what islands are we talking about here?

And Fiji, Tonga, numerous others around that area, Vanuatu and New Caledonia.

I mean that they could vote for full separation from France and become a quasi Chinese client state.

They're also a big producer of nickel, which is quite important for batteries.

So there's a lot of things that could go wrong here, even if these places look like they're in the middle of nowhere.

And Derek, I just want to say,

Asia is a long way away.

It's a lot of Americans.

It's easy to ignore, but I don't think people realize how acute the crunch is getting and how quickly it is here.

Um, there are,

Korea is already going towards language and savings on fuel that we last saw in the 1970s.

There is a horrific crunch in the poorer countries in the region, some of which host the US military, like the Philippines.

There is an acute level of pain in the Pacific Islands.

I...

I think if this goes on for a month or two, politics here will change in a way that will be very hard to change back.

And for US's strategic interests, I think things will go away that no other administration would have let go away in their right mind.

And it's quite scary, but I'm watching it happen day by day.