> The Arab spring in 2010 was triggered by a food price spike essentially driven by a rally on wheat futures The article tries to blame "financial speculators"

> The Arab spring in 2010 was triggered by a food price spike essentially driven by a rally on wheat futures The article tries to blame "financial speculators" for everything but IMHO, the actual root cause beyond this, which we again see at play with supply issues caused by the Ukraine war, is that those Arab countries have seen a huge population boom since the 1950s and are extremely reliant on wheat imports to feed their population (bread being a staple food). When you're not very rich and rely on imports for basics like food, any bumps in the road will trigger big problems. As an example of a country extremely vulnerable and heavily impacted by the Arab Spring: Egypt's population was 21 million in 1950 and it is 105 million today. It is also, and as a consequence, a top importer of wheat... > It was very clear that Brexit was in large part driven by the global refugee crisis Nothing obliged Europe (especially Germany) to adopt essentially an open door policy. The "refugee crisis" was a policy decision, which was clearly a bad idea but the narrative is so skewed that just pointing this out means being labelled "rightwing populist" as in the article.