2026-07-18 ATS briefing¶

A seventh night of US strikes cuts water to villages in Iran’s south¶

The seventh consecutive night of US strikes on Iran has shifted from purely military targets to infrastructure that sustains civilian life — bridges, energy grids, and, in Hormuzgan province, the water supply to several towns. This is not collateral damage in the usual sense. Cutting water to villages is a deliberate tactical choice, one that weaponises basic reproduction against a population already under blockade conditions. The strikes are no longer about degrading Iranian military capacity; they are about making daily existence impossible.

Iran’s response — attacks on US bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Jordan — widens the theatre without altering the asymmetry. Hitting bases in Gulf states risks drawing those governments directly into the conflict, but it does not address the structural problem: the US can strike Iranian infrastructure from platforms outside Iran’s effective range, while Iranian retaliation remains constrained by the need to avoid a ground war it cannot win. The escalation pattern suggests the US is testing whether sustained infrastructural attrition can fracture the Iranian state’s domestic legitimacy faster than the state can mobilise nationalist resistance.

The water cuts in Hormuzgan are the material form of a strategic bet: that the Iranian population’s tolerance for war will collapse before its willingness to endure sanctions did. Whether that bet pays off depends less on military outcomes than on how the Iranian state manages the contradiction between defending the nation and preserving the conditions of life within it.

US strikes hit Iran for seventh consecutive night¶

Source: BBC News

Seven consecutive nights of US strikes on Iran, and the Strait of Hormuz is effectively shut. One-fifth of the world’s oil and LNG supply normally passes through that chokepoint; commercial traffic has now largely stopped. The US is hitting surveillance sites, logistics, underground storage, maritime capabilities. Iran is retaliating against US allies in the region — Kuwait, Jordan, Bahrain, Syria — and claiming hits on oil tankers south of the strait. Both sides deny the other’s claims about civilian casualties and infrastructure damage, but verified footage shows a bridge in Hormozgan province reduced to rubble and seven people confirmed dead.

The ceasefire Trump declared “over” lasted long enough for talks to collapse, not long enough to prevent this. What is striking is the rhythm: nightly, calibrated, almost ritualistic. Centcom announces the strikes have ended at 21:30 ET, as if clocking off a shift. This is not the frenzy of a war of survival; it is the steady application of force to a specific strategic problem — the strait — that neither side can solve politically.

Iran’s response is geographically dispersed but militarily contained: drones and missiles aimed at US bases and regional allies, not at the US fleet itself. The US, for its part, is not striking Tehran or nuclear facilities. Both are fighting to control the terms of access to a global commodity artery, not to destroy each other. The contradiction is not between two irreconcilable enemies but between two states that need the strait to function and cannot agree on who controls it. The strikes are a negotiation by other means, conducted at a tempo that keeps the oil market guessing but does not force a resolution. For as long as that holds, the real cost is borne by the region’s populations — and by anyone waiting for a tanker that never arrives.

The Coming Clash Between China and Europe¶

Source: Foreign Affairs

The piece frames the coming EU-China trade war as a collision that Europe cannot avoid, but the real story is how late and how weak the European response has been. A decade after Made in China 2025 laid out the roadmap for displacing European industry, Brussels is only now waking up to the fact that its carmakers, chemical plants, and machinery firms are being systematically undercut. The numbers are brutal: China’s share of global manufacturing has climbed from six to thirty percent since 2000, while the EU’s has halved. Germany alone is losing 10,000 industrial jobs a month.

What is striking is the asymmetry of leverage. Europe is the last major open market with high purchasing power, and Beijing needs it desperately because domestic demand is weak and Chinese firms are struggling to turn a profit. But that dependence cuts both ways. The Chinese state has spent years mapping European supply chain vulnerabilities and building a legal framework for export controls. Europe, by contrast, spent the Biden years more worried about US subsidies than about China, and then wasted 2025 trying to coordinate with a Trump administration that was busy threatening Europe itself.

The contradiction is not between free trade and protectionism. It is between the scale of the threat and the political fragmentation of the response. France proposes a 30 percent general tariff; Germany hesitates; Spain breaks ranks. The European Commission is tasked with producing options, but unity is a precondition for effective action, and unity is precisely what the structure of the EU makes hardest to achieve. The coming clash will test whether a bloc built to manage commerce can survive a war over industrial survival.

The Lost Art of Coercion¶

Source: Foreign Affairs

Trump’s second-term foreign policy is a study in the gap between intention and outcome. He has threatened over twenty countries with economic or military punishment, yet the results are uniformly poor: Russia’s war continues, Iran has tightened its grip on the Strait of Hormuz, and tariffs remain high with little to show for them. The authors argue this is not because Trump is insufficiently aggressive but because he misunderstands what coercion actually requires.

Coercion is not the same as brute force. It depends on a conditional threat: the target must believe that compliance will actually stop the punishment. Trump’s approach—maximalist demands, escalating threats, and a demonstrated willingness to follow through on punishment regardless of concessions—destroys the credibility of any offer of relief. If a target expects to be attacked or sanctioned no matter what it does, it has no incentive to comply. The assurance dilemma is real: the very actions that make a threat seem credible—mobilising troops, imposing sanctions, forming coalitions—also make it harder to signal that the punishment will stop if demands are met.

The historical data bears this out. Militarily superior states succeed in coercion only about 36 percent of the time, slightly below the average. Power alone does not produce compliance; credible conditionality does. Trump’s belligerence is not a negotiating tactic gone awry but a systematic erosion of the one thing that makes coercion work: the target’s belief that acquiescence offers a genuine escape from pain.

For the US state, this is a structural problem that outlasts any single administration. The damage to the credibility of US assurances—accumulated over decades of threat-heavy signalling and now accelerated by Trump’s approach—will constrain future presidents regardless of their strategic sophistication. A tool the US has relied on to manage its global position is being blunted by the very person most eager to use it.

Washington's stranglehold on Yemen¶

Source: Le Monde Diplomatique

The US designation of the Houthis as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation is not primarily a counter-terrorism measure. It is a mechanism for economic strangulation that operates through legal intimidation rather than military blockade. The article makes this clear by tracing the cascade: an FTO designation criminalises any "material support" to a listed entity, defined so broadly it includes providing a bank account or telephone. Any commercial actor, humanitarian NGO, or shipping line that touches Houthi-controlled territory risks twenty years in prison and million-dollar fines. The chilling effect is the point.

Yemen imports 85% of its food. Seventy percent of commercial imports and 80% of humanitarian aid flow through Hodeidah port, which sits in Houthi territory. Fuel imports are equally vital — not as a commodity but as the precondition for food distribution, agricultural production, and cooking. The US bombed the Ras Issa oil terminal in April 2025, killing over 70 people, explicitly to deprive the Houthis of revenue. But the FTO designation achieves the same result without bombs: it deters shipping companies and banks from engaging with any port the Houthis control, regardless of whether the cargo is military or nutritional.

The contradiction is not between humanitarian intent and collateral damage. It is between the stated goal of relieving civilian suffering and a policy architecture that systematically blocks the material conditions for civilian survival. The Biden administration revoked the FTO in 2021 precisely because it would "undermine the delivery of humanitarian assistance." The Trump administration reimposed it in 2025 anyway. The NGOs warned explicitly that the designation would criminalise life-saving transactions. The US proceeded.

For revolutionary politics, the relevant point is not the cruelty — that is familiar — but the method. Sanctions have become a form of remote administration: they allow the US to inflict severe deprivation without occupying territory or sustaining casualties, while maintaining plausible deniability about humanitarian outcomes. The legal infrastructure of blacklisting turns every commercial relationship into a potential crime, outsourcing enforcement to risk-averse corporations. This is not a breakdown of the system. It is the system operating as designed.

UK aid cuts ‘reduce bilateral support to some African countries by 90%’¶

Source: The Guardian

The 90% figure is the headline, but the more revealing number is the shift itself: bilateral aid to Mozambique and Malawi slashed to a tenth of its 2019 level by 2029. That is not trimming around the edges. It is a structural withdrawal from direct state-to-state relationships with specific African countries, replaced by channelling money through multilateral institutions like the World Bank. The Labour government’s defence of this — “making every pound work harder” — is the standard language of austerity applied to foreign policy, but the material logic is clearer than the rhetoric.

The timing matters. The UK takes the G20 chair next year, a position that normally demands some claim to global leadership. Slashing bilateral aid to some of the poorest countries on the continent while preparing to chair a forum that includes China, India, and Brazil is a peculiar kind of positioning. It suggests a calculation that multilateral influence — voting shares, board seats, the ability to shape World Bank lending criteria — matters more than the messy, visible work of direct programmes. The charities are not wrong that this sends a signal, but the signal is not simply about abandonment. It is about a shift in how the British state conceives of its power: less the patron with a flag on a project, more the shareholder in a system that manages the periphery at arm’s length.

The contradiction is not between Labour’s stated values and its actions — that is too easy. It is between the claim that crises in one part of the world now affect everyone (the development minister’s own words) and the decision to reduce the direct levers through which the UK might respond to those crises. The G20 chair offers a platform for “global reforms”, but a platform without bilateral relationships is just a podium.

Subsidies Do Not Explain China’s Competitiveness¶

Source: Project Syndicate

The OECD report that landed in July 2026 is the latest weapon in the West’s tariff arsenal: if China’s industrial supremacy can be blamed on state subsidies, then protectionism is just levelling the playing field. Kai Guo’s counter-argument is worth taking seriously, not because he denies subsidies exist — he concedes they have mattered — but because he insists they are no longer the decisive factor. The real story, he claims, is something more unsettling for Western capital: Chinese firms have simply become better at innovating, scaling, and competing.

Guo points to the EV sector, where Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory — a wholly foreign-owned venture — achieved cost and quality benchmarks that Tesla’s US and German plants cannot match. No subsidy explains that. The advantage is systemic: a dense network of suppliers, an engineering workforce produced by the world’s largest higher-education system, and a domestic market large enough to absorb initial overcapacity before firms turn outward. The OECD’s subsidy narrative conveniently ignores that Chinese firms now file more international patents than any other country, and that their R&D spending, while still below the US in absolute terms, is growing faster and is more concentrated in applied manufacturing.

The political stakes are clear. If Western governments accept Guo’s analysis, they can no longer pretend that tariffs are a proportionate response to unfair state aid. They would have to admit that the problem is not Chinese cheating but Chinese competence — and that the only remedy is to compete on the same terrain. That would mean confronting their own capital’s preference for financial engineering over productive investment, a contradiction no G7 leader is eager to name. For now, the subsidy story is too useful to abandon.