2026-07-03 ATS briefing

On the Strait of Hormuz, BBC finds seized ships and shark fishermen as uneasy calm returns

Source: BBC News

The Strait of Hormuz is back to something like normal—fishermen hauling in baby sharks, families returning, shops reopening. But the normalcy is thin, held in place by a ceasefire that could collapse at any moment. The BBC’s visit to Bandar Abbas reveals the material reality beneath the headlines: seized container ships still anchored, dozens of cargo vessels waiting for Iranian permission to pass, and an apartment block half-destroyed by an Israeli strike that killed three people, including a military officer.

This is not a story about ideology or religious conflict. It is about geography as leverage. Iran’s “asymmetric warfare” doctrine turns a narrow shipping lane—through which a fifth of the world’s oil and gas moves—into a weapon. When the US and Israel attacked in February, Iran responded by blocking the strait, sending oil prices surging and disrupting global supply chains. The US countered with its own blockade of Iranian ports. Both sides used the same waterway as a choke point, each trying to strangle the other’s economy.

The ceasefire has not resolved the underlying contradiction. Iran has not fully reopened the strait, keeping it as bargaining capital in negotiations. Trump threatens escalation; the mayor of Bandar Abbas promises to close it again if talks fail. The war’s real victims are the civilians caught between—fishermen who risked their lives to work, families killed in strikes that blur the line between military and residential targets, and the 261 dead in Hormuzgan province.

What this reveals is the fragility of global capitalism’s circulatory system. A single chokepoint, controlled by a state willing to weaponise it, can send shocks through the entire world economy. The ceasefire is not peace—it is a pause in a conflict that will resume as soon as one side believes it can win.

BIMCO: Coal shipments jump 14% in June, driven by Chinese demand

Source: Hellenic Shipping News

The 14% jump in global coal shipments for June 2026, driven by a 41% surge in Chinese imports, is a stark reminder that the energy transition remains subordinate to the immediate demands of accumulation. The proximate cause is a mining accident in Shanxi, but the underlying dynamic is more revealing: China’s domestic production is brittle, and the state is willing to burn through any fuel to keep the grid running.

What makes this interesting is the convergence of multiple contradictions. The Strait of Hormuz disruptions have tightened LNG supply, pushing Korea, Japan, and the EU back to coal. These are economies that publicly posture as climate leaders, yet their import demand rose 13-25% year-on-year. The US-Iran ceasefire has partially reopened the strait, but not enough to restore normal gas flows — so coal fills the gap. This is not hypocrisy; it is the logic of a system that prioritises short-run production over long-run planning.

On the supply side, Indonesia initially set a reduced coal production target, then promptly expanded the quota when prices rose. Russia, meanwhile, increased shipments by 33%, likely desperate for export revenue under sanctions. The market is responding to price signals, not climate targets.

The outlook is genuinely contradictory. El Niño is weakening monsoons in India and Southeast Asia, which means lower hydro output and higher coal demand. But China’s mines will eventually reopen, potentially crashing import demand. And if the Strait of Hormuz fully normalises, LNG could displace coal in East Asia. The system is lurching between energy sources based on geopolitical accidents and weather patterns, not rational planning.

For revolutionary politics, the takeaway is simple: capitalism cannot manage an energy transition. It can only react to crises, and each reaction deepens the ecological damage. The working class will bear the costs — both of the coal burned today and the climate breakdown tomorrow.

Canada’s Carney secures deal for pipeline to expand oil exports beyond US

Source: Al Jazeera

Mark Carney has struck a deal with British Columbia to build a new oil pipeline from Alberta to the Pacific coast, aiming to push 1 million barrels a day toward Asian markets. The route follows the existing Trans Mountain corridor, avoiding the northern coast where a tanker ban remains in place. Alberta’s premier Danielle Smith wants to double provincial output to 8 million barrels a day over the next decade.

This is not simply a trade diversification play. It is a response to a structural contradiction: Canadian oil is trapped inside a single buyer market — the United States — which forces producers to sell at a discount. Trump’s tariffs have sharpened that dependency into a crisis. Carney’s move is an attempt to break the bottleneck by building new export capacity, but it does nothing to address the underlying overaccumulation in the tar sands. Smith’s target of 8 million barrels a day would require massive new investment in a sector already struggling with declining margins and growing global overcapacity.

The political calculus is revealing. Carney is buying off British Columbia with compensation for environmental risk and a promise to keep the northern coast protected. Alberta gets its pipeline and a reason to stay in Canada — the separatist referendum threat is quietly neutralised. The real loser is the climate, but that was never on the table.

For revolutionary politics, the lesson is straightforward: capital will always seek new outlets for its accumulated surplus, even when the market is saturated and the planet is burning. The working class in Alberta and British Columbia will bear the costs — through intensified extraction, environmental degradation, and the continued subordination of social need to export competitiveness.

Tanker Market: Venezuelan Oil Market Coming Into Play Once More

Source: Hellenic Shipping News

The reintegration of Venezuelan crude into the global tanker market is a textbook case of how sanctions policy, when reversed, can rapidly restructure trade flows and boost demand for shipping capacity. The numbers are stark: exports more than doubled between the first halves of 2025 and 2026, from 13.25 million metric tonnes to 28.25 million. But the composition matters more than the volume.

Under sanctions, Venezuelan oil moved almost exclusively on VLCCs to China — a narrow, shadow-fleet channel. With US sanctions lifted, the destination mix diversified. The US became the primary buyer, India emerged as a major receiver, and the vessel profile shifted decisively toward smaller Aframaxes and Suezmaxes. This is not just more trade; it is a different kind of trade. More frequent, shorter-haul voyages across multiple vessel classes generate more fixture opportunities and absorb more tonnage than a simple VLCC pipeline to China ever did.

The earnings data for early 2026 — VLCCs at $101k/day, Suezmaxes at $93k/day, Aframaxes at $73k/day — reflect a broader market buoyed by geopolitical tensions in the Arabian Gulf. But the Venezuelan factor is real: a previously isolated crude stream has been reabsorbed into the mainstream, bringing conventional owners, charterers, and oil majors back into the trade.

What this reveals is the plasticity of global oil logistics under shifting political conditions. A state that was effectively quarantined is now a significant source of demand for tanker capacity. For shipowners, it is a windfall. For the broader picture, it underscores how quickly capital can reanimate idle circuits when the political obstacles are removed — and how dependent the shipping market remains on the caprice of great-power sanctions policy.

Durable goods inflation and effective tariffs

Source: FRED Blog

The FRED Blog notes a striking correlation: as the US effective tariff rate quadrupled from roughly 2.5% to over 11% in 2025, durable goods prices flipped from 3% annual deflation to 2-3% inflation. The implication is straightforward — tariffs are ending a period where consumers saw falling prices for appliances, electronics, and furniture.

This is worth pausing on. For most of 2023 and 2024, durable goods deflation was the norm. That deflation was not a gift to workers; it reflected overcapacity in global supply chains, particularly from China, and the ability of capital to squeeze producers at the point of import. Falling prices for finished goods masked rising exploitation in the factories that made them. Tariffs now disrupt that arrangement. They raise the cost of imports, allowing domestic producers to raise prices without losing market share, and pass the cost down the line.

The article frames this as a technical question of trade policy. But what it reveals is the state managing the terms of competition between capitals. Tariffs do not protect "American workers" — they protect uncompetitive domestic producers from cheaper foreign rivals, while workers pay more for the same goods. The brief return to deflation if tariffs ease would not signal recovery, but a resumption of the race to the bottom in production costs.

For the class struggle, the lesson is blunt: the state can flip the switch from deflation to inflation at will. Neither outcome serves labour.

The US as the World’s Robber Baron

Source: Project Syndicate

Dani Rodrik’s piece draws a direct line between the Gilded Age robber barons and the current US trade strategy under Trump. The key development is not merely that Washington is acting unilaterally — that is old news — but that its surrogates are now openly admitting the goal is to extract value from the rest of the world for America’s exclusive benefit. This is a shift from even the cynical multilateralism of previous administrations, which at least paid lip service to a rules-based order.

Rodrik’s analogy is useful but incomplete. The original robber barons operated within a single national market, using monopoly power to crush competitors and capture the state. The US today is attempting something similar on a global scale, but it faces a crucial difference: there is no world state to capture. Other major powers — China, the EU, India — are not passive victims. They have their own states, their own currencies, and their own capacity for retaliation.

The real contradiction here is between the US need to maintain its global dominance and the means it is using to do so. Extracting tribute through tariffs and financial coercion may yield short-term gains, but it accelerates the very thing Washington fears most: the formation of alternative economic blocs that can bypass the dollar and US markets. The robber baron strategy, in other words, undermines the structural conditions that made US hegemony possible in the first place. That is not a policy failure — it is an expression of the deepening inter-imperialist rivalry that defines this stage of capitalist crisis.

Why Trump’s Congo Deal Is Falling Apart

Source: Foreign Affairs

The Trump administration’s Congo gambit reveals the internal contradictions of a transactional foreign policy that mistakes deal-making for statecraft. The December 2025 peace summit in Washington was pure theatre — Tshisekedi and Kagame refused to shake hands, Rwandan troops were already massing, and within days M23 had taken Uvira, opening the path to Katanga’s mineral wealth.

The article’s authors, writing in Foreign Affairs, describe how Trump’s team bypassed normal interagency processes, concentrating power in Massad Boulos — a presidential relative with no government experience but perceived proximity to Trump. This is not merely administrative sloppiness. It reflects a deeper logic: when diplomacy is reduced to personal brokerage, it cannot sustain the institutional pressure needed to enforce agreements against the interests of regional powers.

Washington’s real objective is clear: wrest control of Congolese cobalt, copper and lithium from Chinese supply chains. But the “America First” method undermines itself. By prioritising quick deals with Kinshasa’s political elite over democracy and human rights, the US props up a corrupt, authoritarian state apparatus incapable of delivering the stability investors need. The very conditions that make Congo’s minerals accessible — state weakness, militarised extraction, regional conflict — are reproduced by the policy meant to overcome them.

This is not a failure of execution but of conception. Transactionalism treats sovereignty as a commodity to be purchased, ignoring that the price is always paid in violence. For revolutionary politics, the lesson is clear: inter-imperialist rivalry over strategic minerals intensifies rather than resolves regional crises, and the working class of the Great Lakes region will continue to bear the cost.

Côte d’Ivoire floods kill 59 as west Africa endures torrential rains

Source: The Guardian

The Guardian reports that 59 people have died in Côte d'Ivoire since May, with neighbouring Ghana counting 13 dead and further flooding across Benin, Togo and Nigeria. The article frames this as climate breakdown, noting Africa's minimal contribution to emissions but acute vulnerability.

What is more revealing is the detail buried in President Mahama's remarks about Accra. The city was built between a mountain range and the ocean — a natural constraint that was manageable when the city was small. Population growth has since pushed construction into stream paths and wetlands, while garbage clogs drainage systems. This is not simply a climate story. It is a story of urbanisation driven by displacement from the countryside, itself a product of land concentration and the relentless expansion of export agriculture — cocoa, rubber, palm oil — that has made Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana the world's top cocoa producers.

The floods expose a contradiction: the very process that has generated export revenues and attracted foreign investment has also packed people into flood-prone urban peripheries with inadequate infrastructure. The state, meanwhile, responds after the fact — aerial tours, rescue operations, cabinet briefings — while the underlying dynamic of accumulation and displacement continues.

The rainy season is getting deadlier, but not simply because the rain is heavier. It is deadlier because capital has rearranged the landscape and the people on it.