2026-07-13 ATS briefing¶

Senegal Is on the Brink¶

The IMF and World Bank kept lending to Senegal’s government well after red flags appeared in its financial reporting — as early as June 2021, performance criteria were modified, and by June 2022 they were waived entirely. Yet in 2023, the IMF approved a new $1.8 billion package and the World Bank added $300 million in budget support. The audit that followed Macky Sall’s departure revealed $7-13 billion in hidden debt, pushing the debt-to-GDP ratio from under 75% to over 132%. The institutions now positioning themselves as Senegal’s rescuers were the ones who financed the concealment.

This is not simply a story of corruption catching up with a regime. The IMF and World Bank had electronic access to Senegal’s fiscal data — more detailed oversight than the country’s own parliament enjoyed. They saw the anomalies and kept disbursing. The reason is structural: these institutions cannot afford to call a halt to lending without triggering the very default they are supposed to prevent. Their function is to keep fictitious capital flowing into sovereign balance sheets, even when the underlying solvency is a fiction. The alternative — admitting that decades of “development partnership” have produced a state that can only service debt by cooking the books — would unravel the credibility of the entire Francophone West African lending architecture.

Senegal matters because it was the exception: the one major Francophone West African state where democratic institutions still functioned. The debt crisis now threatens to collapse that exception. If the IMF imposes harsh conditionality, the new government will be forced to cut public services and infrastructure spending — exactly the resources that distinguish Senegal from the coup-ridden Sahel states to its north. The political logic is brutal: the same institutions that enabled Sall’s borrowing will now demand austerity from his successors, and when that austerity fuels instability, Russia will be waiting. The IMF’s role is not to stabilise Senegal but to manage the timing and terms of its crisis — and that timing has everything to do with containing the geopolitical fallout, not with the country’s actual needs.

Developing countries spend more repaying foreign debt than on education, UN reveals¶

Source: The Guardian

The numbers are stark enough to do their own work: 113 developing countries spent more servicing foreign debt than on education last year. Sub-Saharan Africa paid 3.6 times more to creditors than to its classrooms. Eighteen of the most indebted countries spent five times as much on debt as on education; Sri Lanka managed sixteen times. This is not a temporary squeeze. Unesco projects aid to education could fall 30% by 2027, and some countries have already lost over 40% of that funding in three years.

The mechanism is worth naming. These countries are not simply poor; they are trapped in a structure where the creditors — increasingly private lenders based in the US and Britain — hold effective veto power over any restructuring. When Ethiopia recently tried to renegotiate, private creditors blocked the deal to extract more profit. The result is that public revenue flows outward as interest rather than inward as wages for teachers or roofs for schools. Tim Jones of Debt Justice notes that repayments hit a 35-year high last year, with 56 countries spending nearly a fifth of total revenue on loan servicing.

Unesco’s Min Jeong Kim describes a “cycle of austerity, underinvestment and stalled development,” but the phrase understates the dynamic. Each year of debt service at these levels degrades the productive base — fewer educated workers, weaker infrastructure, lower tax revenues — which in turn makes the debt harder to service. The creditors are not just extracting surplus; they are consuming the conditions that would allow repayment. This is not a contradiction that resolves itself through growth. It is a system that cannibalises its own future to sustain present claims. The question for revolutionary politics is whether the coming wave of defaults and aid cuts will produce isolated humanitarian crises or a more generalised crisis of legitimacy for the entire debt architecture.

US launches fresh strikes as Iran closes Strait of Hormuz¶

Source: Hellenic Shipping News

The Strait of Hormuz is closed. Not as a threat, not as a bargaining chip, but as a material fact: Iran’s IRGC has fired on a vessel, shut the waterway, and dared the US to do something about it. The US has responded with 140 targets hit in a third round of strikes. This is not brinkmanship that might tip into war — it is war, with both sides already trading blows across the Gulf and into Jordan.

What makes this different from the tanker seizures and shadow-boxing of previous years is the absence of plausible deniability. Iran is not using proxies or mine-laying under cover of darkness. It has published a map of its own proposed shipping route, fired a cruise missile at a vessel that refused to use it, and declared the strait closed “until further notice”. The IRGC is asserting sovereign control over the chokepoint, not disrupting it. That is a qualitative shift.

The trigger is the assassination of Ali Khamenei in February, but the logic is structural. The strait carries roughly a fifth of the world’s oil. For Iran, closing it is the one card that forces the global economy to treat it as a state rather than a target. For the US, reopening it is non-negotiable — not because of oil prices, but because a medium power successfully dictating terms to the world’s dominant navy is a precedent that cannot stand. The contradiction is not between two irrational actors; it is between two necessities that cannot both be satisfied.

The ceasefire is dead. Trump says talks continue, but the IRGC is not negotiating. The new Supreme Leader has staked his legitimacy on vengeance, and the US has staked its credibility on the strait staying open. Neither can back down without losing something more fundamental than a battle. For the shipping industry, the question is not when the strait reopens, but what the world looks like when it does not.

Iran attacks US military bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan¶

Source: Al Jazeera

The Strait of Hormuz standoff has escalated into direct Iranian strikes on US military assets in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan — a qualitative shift from the proxy skirmishes and naval harassment that defined the previous phase. Iran is no longer signalling; it is striking sovereign territory of Gulf states that host American forces, collapsing the distinction between a blockade dispute and a regional war.

The choice of targets is instructive. Bahrain hosts the US Fifth Fleet; Kuwait is a logistics hub; Jordan borders Iraq and Israel. Iran is not trying to sink carriers — it is attacking the command-and-control and supply architecture that enables US power projection into the Gulf. This is a military logic aimed at degrading capacity, not winning a decisive naval battle. It also carries a political message to the Gulf monarchies: hosting American bases makes you a target, not a sanctuary.

The US response — another round of strikes — suggests Washington is trapped in a cycle of reciprocal escalation with no off-ramp. Each side frames its actions as defensive, but the material dynamic is one of competitive risk-taking where miscalculation becomes structural. For the Gulf states, the nightmare scenario has arrived: they are the battlefield in a war between their security guarantor and their regional rival, with no control over either.

For the global economy, the Strait remains the choke point. If insurance rates spike or tanker traffic drops, the price of oil becomes a political weapon that neither Washington nor Tehran fully controls — and that hits every importing economy, including China’s. The working class in Europe and Asia will feel this before the belligerents do.

Why This Energy Shock Is Different¶

Source: Project Syndicate

The article’s central claim — that this energy shock is different because it destroys supply rather than rerouting it — is worth taking seriously, but it also papers over a more uncomfortable truth for the policy class. Frieda is right that the Strait of Hormuz closure in April was a supply-destruction event, not a rerouting one. Tankers cannot simply take another road. But the muted price response to renewed hostilities in July — Brent at $79 versus April’s $120 — suggests markets are pricing in something the author only gestures at: the possibility that the US-Iran confrontation has become a managed, ritualised affair, a violent renegotiation of passage terms rather than a return to full blockade.

What Frieda does not say is that this managed conflict suits the major powers precisely because it keeps energy markets tight enough to sustain high prices without triggering a demand-destroying spike. The real difference from 1973 or 2008 is not the nature of the supply shock but the structure of the financial system absorbing it. Fictitious capital has become so bloated — $300 trillion in global debt and derivatives — that a genuine supply crisis would blow a hole through the collateral chains linking energy futures to pension funds and sovereign wealth vehicles. Central banks cannot fight inflation and defend asset prices simultaneously. The policy toolkit is not merely limited; it is contradictory.

For the revolutionary left, the implication is that the ruling classes are now managing energy shocks the way they manage everything else: by socialising losses onto the most exposed — the Iranian working class under sanctions, the European industrial workforce facing de facto deindustrialisation — while protecting the financial architecture that concentrates the gains. The question is not whether the next blockade comes, but whether the working class in the belligerent states will recognise that their governments are waging war on their behalf to defend a system that offers them nothing but higher prices and lower living standards.

The Israel-Lebanon Recipe for Never-Ending War¶

Source: Project Syndicate

The framework agreement signed between Lebanon and Israel last month conditions Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon on Hezbollah’s “verified disarmament,” yet contains no mechanism to cut the group’s supply lines from Iran. This is not an oversight. The US-brokered deal effectively outsources the problem of Hezbollah’s military capacity to a Lebanese state that has neither the political unity nor the coercive power to carry it out. The result is a permanent justification for Israeli occupation: the condition can never be met, so the withdrawal never happens.

Ben-Ami notes that Hezbollah’s integration into Lebanese politics — it holds seats in parliament and ministries — means any attempt at forcible disarmament risks civil war. The Lebanese Armed Forces, deliberately kept weak relative to Hezbollah since the Taif Accords, cannot do the job. Meanwhile, Iran’s regional position has only strengthened since the Gaza war, making it unlikely to abandon its most effective deterrent against Israel. The agreement thus reproduces the very conditions it claims to resolve: a weak Lebanese state, an armed non-state actor backed by a regional power, and an Israeli security doctrine that prefers managed conflict to political settlement.

What is striking is how the framework’s structure mirrors the logic of the 2006 UN Resolution 1701, which also demanded Hezbollah’s disarmament and also failed. The difference now is that Iran’s regional network is more entrenched, and Israel’s willingness to accept a diplomatic solution — one that would require recognising Palestinian rights and a viable Lebanese state — has, if anything, diminished. The agreement is not a step toward peace but a mechanism for indefinite escalation, dressed in the language of sovereignty.

A revolution in ruins: fury amid the rubble of a housing project in quake-hit Venezuela¶

Source: The Guardian

The OPPE 25 housing project in Caraballeda was not just a set of tower blocks. It was a physical monument to the Bolivarian revolution’s promise: the poor, finally given beachfront property in an affluent enclave. When the twin earthquakes hit, those towers collapsed in seconds, killing over 4,000 people. The concrete of the revolution literally gave way.

Gabriel González, a construction worker who once wept with gratitude for his apartment, now sleeps in a donated tent on a golf course, his son still buried. His trajectory from Chávez loyalist to describing the government as a “dictatorship” is the story of a class whose hopes were concretised, then hollowed out by hyperinflation, migration, and authoritarian drift. The earthquake did not create this rupture; it exposed the fault lines already running through the social base.

The state’s response has been catastrophic in its own right. Survivors report that for days, the only people digging through the rubble were volunteers, while soldiers stood guard with rifles. “More rifles than pickaxes,” one woman noted. This is not merely incompetence. It is the logical expression of a regime that has spent years prioritising political control over infrastructural maintenance, that allowed building codes to rot alongside the economy, and that now finds itself governing a wreckage it cannot even begin to clear.

The contradiction is not between a good revolution and a bad earthquake. It is between a project that once mobilised the poor through material hope and a successor state that can only offer them propaganda murals of the “eternal giant” while their children decompose under concrete. For the working class of La Guaira, the revolution is not betrayed from above — it has simply stopped working. And when a state cannot dig bodies out of rubble, it has lost the last shred of legitimacy that kept its base from walking away.

Nigeria says army has killed 300 bandits in north-western state of Zamfara¶

Source: The Guardian

The Nigerian state announces it has killed 300 bandits in Zamfara, presenting the operation as a breakthrough. But the framing — government troops and vigilantes versus criminal gangs and jihadists — obscures a more tangled reality. These gangs are not external enemies of the state; they are products of the same impoverished rural conditions the state has failed to address. Cattle rustlers, kidnappers, and Islamist insurgents have found common cause not through ideology but through a shared interest in a weak central government that cannot police its own periphery. The state responds with military force, killing bandits in large numbers, yet the conditions that produce banditry — poverty, land dispossession, the absence of any functioning economy outside extortion — remain untouched.

The US-Nigerian partnership against jihadists adds another layer. Washington deploys hundreds of troops to kill Islamic State commanders, but this is not a war on terror in any meaningful sense. It is the management of a crisis that the Nigerian state, with its vast oil wealth and entrenched elite, has no incentive to resolve. The kidnapping of schoolchildren in the south-west, previously considered safe, shows the rot is spreading, not retreating. The army suffers casualties rescuing children, but the next kidnapping is already being planned.

For revolutionary politics, the lesson is not that the state is failing — it is that the state succeeds precisely by failing. A weak central government allows local strongmen, bandits, and foreign powers to carve up territory and resources, while the population is left to choose between protection rackets and military reprisals. The only force that could break this cycle is one that refuses to play either side.