2026-07-15 ATS briefing

The World Is Giving Up on America

Source: Foreign Affairs

The Pew data Wike presents is striking not because the world dislikes Trump — that is old news — but because the structure of the disapproval has changed. During Bush and Trump I, foreign publics hated the policies but still believed the United States stood for something: personal freedom, democratic governance, a rules-based order, however imperfectly realised. That baseline faith in the American idea functioned as a kind of ideological reserve currency, allowing Washington to burn through political capital on wars and trade wars without depleting the underlying asset. That reserve is now gone.

The numbers are brutal. In Sweden, belief that the US respects individual liberty fell from 61 percent to 27 percent in five years. Across 15 countries regularly surveyed, the share holding that view has hit all-time lows. This is not a cyclical dip. It is a structural break. When people in Poland, South Korea, and Australia — countries whose security depends on the American umbrella — no longer believe the US government respects its own citizens’ freedoms, the legitimacy of the entire hierarchy is called into question. You cannot lead a liberal order if nobody believes you are liberal.

Wike treats this as a problem of perception, as if better messaging could restore the lost faith. But the material basis for that faith has been systematically dismantled. The January 6 insurrection, the gutting of federal institutions, the open contempt for judicial and electoral norms — these are not public relations failures. They are the political expression of a ruling class that has abandoned even the pretence of liberal democracy because the contradictions it once managed have become unmanageable. The US empire needs authoritarianism at home to sustain itself abroad, but that authoritarianism destroys the ideological currency that made the empire palatable to its subordinates.

The implication for the global order is not that another power will replace the United States — no rival has the capacity — but that the system will operate increasingly through brute coercion rather than hegemonic consent. That is a more unstable arrangement, more prone to miscalculation and rupture. For revolutionary politics, the useful takeaway is this: the liberal-democratic mask was never the thing itself, but its removal still matters. It strips away illusions that once demobilised opposition, and it forces subordinate states and populations to reckon with the nakedness of the power they face.

The Mother of All Economic Shocks Is Chinese Mercantilism

Source: Project Syndicate

The argument is straightforward: Chinese mercantilism — the systematic combination of undervalued exchange rates, export subsidies, and state-directed industrial overcapacity — has been the single most consequential force in the global economy for half a century, and the West has consistently misread it. Subramanian’s target is the US-centric habit of treating American monetary policy, fiscal stimulus, or financial crises as the main plot, while China’s export machine quietly reshaped the material conditions of the entire world.

He has a point. The sheer volume of Chinese manufactured goods depressed global prices for decades, compressing wage shares in importing countries while enabling cheap credit in the West. But the framing is revealing. “Mercantilism” implies a deliberate national strategy of surplus accumulation — and it is that, but it is also something more structural. China’s state-capitalist model, with its permanent overinvestment in export capacity, generates a relentless pressure to dump output abroad because domestic consumption cannot absorb it. The result is not just trade imbalances but a global deflationary bias that central banks have fought with ever-lower interest rates and ever-larger asset purchases.

The real question Subramanian avoids: if Chinese mercantilism is the mother of all shocks, what happens when it falters? The overcapacity that once depressed prices now threatens to become stranded capital. The export machine that disciplined Western labour is now slowing, and the cheap goods that subsidised working-class living standards are becoming less cheap. The West’s response — tariffs, decoupling, industrial policy — is not a coherent alternative but a series of ad hoc attempts to manage the fallout of a system that no longer works as it did. The contradiction is not between China and the US; it is between the global overaccumulation of productive capacity and the shrinking ability of any state to manage the consequences.

Trump retreat over Hormuz tolls suggests he is struggling to end Iran war

Source: BBC News

The 20% Hormuz toll was dead within 24 hours, and the speed of the retreat tells you more than the proposal itself ever could. Trump was trying to solve a political problem — a war that remains unpopular, threatens midterm inflation, and offers no clean exit — with a fiscal gimmick. Charge allies for the privilege of being protected, and maybe the American public swallows the blockade as a revenue stream rather than an open-ended military commitment. But the gimmick collided with the reality that the US needs those allies more than they need this particular war. The Gulf states were never going to pay a toll to have their own oil shipments disrupted; the proposal collapsed under its own diplomatic weight.

What is striking is how little has changed since the war began. The MOU was always a holding pattern dressed as a breakthrough — vague enough for both sides to claim victory, concrete enough to pause hostilities. Now it is gone, and the underlying geometry is identical: Iran cannot defend its territory or export oil, but it can still choke Hormuz, and the US cannot stop it without an escalation it does not want to attempt. The military balance favours Washington on paper; the strategic balance favours Tehran in practice, because denial of access is cheaper than assurance of passage.

Trump is now recycling threats — Pickaxe Mountain, renewed strikes — that have already been tried without producing Iranian surrender. The war of attrition Kelanid describes is not a stalemate of exhaustion but one of asymmetric patience: Iran can absorb punishment indefinitely as long as it retains its one trump card, while the US faces a clock ticking toward November. The midterms are the material constraint that no number of destroyed targets can remove.

Interest rates to ‘rise by September’ as oil prices surge

Source: The Telegraph

Oil price shock from the Iran war forces central banks toward rate hikes, tightening credit and accelerating the cost-price scissors phase of the organic crisis.

Oil Shocks Are No Longer So Shocking

Source: Project Syndicate

The article is paywalled, but the headline and opening paragraphs are revealing enough. Roubini’s argument is that a full-scale US-Israeli war with Iran, shutting the Strait of Hormuz, has produced the largest oil supply disruption in history — yet the economic shock is muted compared to 1973 or 1979. His explanation: markets and policymakers have adapted to oil-as-weapon over decades.

This is true but superficial. The deeper reason the 1970s oil shocks hit harder is that they struck at the end of the post-war boom, when industrial capital was still expanding into a world of relatively full employment and strong labour bargaining power. A spike in energy costs then translated directly into wage pressure, inflation, and class conflict — the profit squeeze that capital spent the next decade breaking. Today, the same spike lands in a world where labour is globally fragmented, supply chains are financialised, and the major economies are carrying debt loads that make the 1970s look quaint. The shock is absorbed not by workers’ living standards — those were already being compressed — but by fictitious capital: central banks can print, hedge funds can short, and the real adjustment falls on the Global South importers who cannot.

What Roubini misses is that the very “adaptation” he credits — strategic reserves, diversified suppliers, financial derivatives — is itself a symptom of a system that has learned to manage crises without resolving them. The oil weapon still works; it just no longer triggers the kind of political crisis that might force a restructuring of the global order. That is not resilience. It is decay.

‘God is punishing the politicians’: anger at earthquake response grows in Venezuela

Source: The Guardian

The image of a bereaved mother screaming at Nicolás Maduro Guerra that she lost a daughter, not a kitchen, condenses the entire crisis into a single unbearable moment. The housing project named after Hugo Chávez, where the confrontation occurred, was supposed to be the material proof of the Bolivarian revolution’s legacy. Instead, it collapsed, killing the people it was meant to shelter. The government’s response — sending the former president’s son, an economist who cannot answer basic questions about construction standards, to tour the rubble — reads as a category error so profound it borders on the surreal.

Delcy Rodríguez, installed by Washington after Trump’s abduction of Maduro, now presides over a state that is simultaneously a US protectorate and a hollowed-out shell of its predecessor. Her threat to bury critics, delivered to troops while avoiding the bereaved, reveals the core dynamic: a regime that can no longer claim popular legitimacy, only the backing of foreign bayonets. The US has sent nearly 1,000 military personnel for “emergency response”, but the New York Times reports that Marco Rubio is effectively running the country from Washington. This is not a humanitarian intervention; it is the management of a colony whose primary asset is oil and whose primary liability is a population that has just been handed proof that neither the old government nor the new one cares whether they live or die.

The anger is not abstract. It is concentrated in the working-class areas that were once the regime’s base. Francisco González, a removal man, contrasts the current response with Chávez’s 1999 disaster relief, when the president personally waded into the mud. The comparison is devastating precisely because it is not ideological — it is about boots on the ground. When a man says God is punishing the politicians, he is not making a theological argument. He is saying that the state has become so alien from the people it governs that only divine intervention could explain its indifference. The question for Washington is whether its new viceroy can manage a population that has learned, through the most brutal possible teacher, that it has no protectors.

Killings continue on Del Monte farm in Kenya, families say, after G4S hired for security

Source: The Guardian

The outsourcing of violence is a well-established corporate strategy, and Del Monte’s hiring of G4S for its Kenyan pineapple farm follows the pattern precisely. After the Guardian exposed killings by the in-house security team, the company needed a response that looked like reform without disrupting production. G4S, a British firm with global branding and a veneer of professionalism, provided that. The result: three more deaths in a year, with the same basic dynamic — men suspected of stealing pineapples are killed, and the company denies responsibility.

What is worth noting here is how the state steps in to reinforce the private security apparatus. Kenyan police now work alongside G4S guards, and a “critical infrastructure protection unit” has been established. This is not simply outsourcing; it is the fusion of corporate and state violence. Campaigners point out that police involvement makes prosecution harder — lethal force by officers is far more difficult to challenge than by private guards. The state absorbs the liability while the company maintains deniability.

The material stakes are clear. The farm is Kenya’s largest exporter of produce, worth over $100m annually, supplying UK supermarkets. The average monthly wage in Murang’a county is about £280. Pineapple theft has been a problem for decades. The contradiction is not abstract: a workforce paid poverty wages lives alongside a highly valuable crop that must be protected from the very people whose labour generates its value. When G4S guards kill a man for stealing pineapples, they are enforcing the property relations that make that wage possible.

The question for revolutionary politics is whether these killings can be turned into a point of organisation. A senator has called for an investigation; protests have already burned a G4S van. But without a movement capable of challenging the property structure itself, the cycle will continue — one security contractor replaced by another, the bodies piling up while the pineapples reach British shelves.

1H 2026 Shipping Market Trends & Highlights

Source: Hellenic Shipping News

The Strait of Hormuz closed in late February after US-Israeli operations against Iran, and the shipping data for the first half of 2026 is essentially a map of how capital tried to navigate that rupture. VLCCs are the clearest signal: one-year time charter rates ran 136% above the previous year, and Greek owners placed orders for 229 vessels — a 650% year-on-year jump in their ordering alone. That is not a bet on stable demand. It is a bet on prolonged dislocation, on the premium that a scarce asset can command when a chokepoint is shot through.

But the picture is uneven in ways that matter. VLGC spot rates surged 150% after roughly 30% of global LPG exports were cut off, yet S&P transaction volumes fell even as values climbed. Owners held tonnage rather than trading it. That is a market where the price signal says "sell" but the strategic calculus says "keep" — because replacing that vessel in a disrupted newbuilding queue is uncertain. The same logic appears in offshore: AHTS values firmed across every age band, yet newbuilding orders fell 74% year-on-year. Capital is willing to pay more for what exists, but not to commit to what does not yet exist.

China exported 4.06 million light vehicles in five months, up 63% year-on-year, and newbuilding orders for car carriers rebounded 1,350%. But a meaningful share of those exports still moves on container ships. The infrastructure of trade is being rebuilt mid-crisis, not in advance. The Baltic Dry Index rose for four consecutive days in mid-July, but that is a weathervane, not a foundation.

The underlying tension is between the value locked in existing assets and the cost of reproducing them. The Strait of Hormuz closure did not create that tension — it concentrated it. For revolutionary politics, the relevant question is not whether shipping markets will stabilise, but whether the working class that moves these goods — seafarers, dockers, logistics workers — can leverage that concentration of value and disruption into organisation before the owners find a new equilibrium.