2026-07-23 ATS briefing¶

China’s Moment of Weakness¶

China’s export machine is running at full throttle — a record $1.2 trillion trade surplus last year — but the author reads this not as strength but as the symptom of a deeper structural decay. The argument is straightforward: domestic demand has collapsed, so excess production is dumped abroad at falling prices. The property sector is in ruins, household consumption is anaemic, and the financial system is clogged with bad debt accumulated during the wildest credit expansion of the past century. Between 2008 and 2017, Chinese banks added $27 trillion in assets — a third of global GDP. That spigot is now shut. Beijing’s main lever for directing growth, channelling credit through state-owned enterprises and local government vehicles, no longer works.

The strategic implication is sharp. China peaked as a share of global GDP in 2021 and has been declining since. The US share has risen. The author, a Rhodium Group partner, argues that the long-term systemic rivalry is effectively over — not because China has been defeated in a contest of wills, but because its domestic economic engine is seized. What remains is a defensive Beijing, desperate to keep export markets open, and a more dangerous one: as export prices fall and firms scramble for overseas revenue, China will erode industrial capacity in the US and Europe, weaponising supply chain dependencies the way it already has with rare earths.

The opportunity, Wright claims, is that the West can now invest aggressively in its own industrial base, confident that China lacks the fiscal room to retaliate or match. The analysis is written for a US policy audience and carries the usual Foreign Affairs confidence in state-led industrial strategy. What it does not consider is whether the US political economy is any more capable of sustaining long-term public investment than China’s. The contradiction is not between two economic models but between two states that have both exhausted the easy phase of accumulation — one through overinvestment, the other through financialisation. For the working class in either country, the coming decade looks less like a strategic opening and more like a race to shift the costs of stagnation onto labour.

Healthy diet too expensive for one in three people globally, UN report finds¶

Source: The Guardian

The UN report’s headline figure — 2.69 billion people unable to afford a healthy diet — is striking, but the more revealing number is buried in the comparison: the extreme poverty line sits at $3 PPP per day, while a healthy diet costs $4.28 PPP. That 43% gap is not a natural fact. It is the product of decades of policy choices that have systematically subsidised calories over nutrition. As the report’s author notes, governments have historically poured resources into cereals and starchy staples — the commodities that fill bellies cheaply and, not incidentally, form the political backbone of agribusiness lobbies and export-oriented farming. Meat, dairy, fruit and vegetables have been left to market forces, which means they remain priced for those with disposable income.

The geography of this crisis is shifting. Africa now hosts the highest number of hungry people globally — 309 million, overtaking Asia for the first time. The report attributes this to population growth, but that is a demographic description, not an explanation. The real driver is the continent’s position in the global food system: a net importer of staples, vulnerable to currency fluctuations and shipping disruptions, and structurally unable to compete with the subsidised grain dumping that has gutted local farming for generations. The chief economist’s cautious optimism — that the proportion of hungry Africans is finally falling — is undercut by his own warning that cuts in overseas development assistance and the Strait of Hormuz disruptions will hit next year’s figures. The system’s fragility is not an exception; it is the operating condition.

The report’s policy prescriptions — more efficient supply chains, investment in infrastructure, promotion of fruit and vegetable consumption — are technocratic and, within the framework of market-based development, sensible. But they do not touch the core contradiction: a global food system that can reduce the number of hungry people for three consecutive years while simultaneously making a nutritious diet structurally unaffordable for a third of humanity. The obesity figures — adult rates climbing from 12.1% to 16.2% in twelve years — are the other side of the same coin. Malnutrition is not a failure of production; it is a feature of distribution under capitalism, where the cheapest calories are the most profitable and the healthiest foods are the most expensive. The UN’s call for “urgent action” will remain aspirational as long as the price mechanism is the final arbiter of who eats well and who merely eats.

Houthis claim attack on oil tankers as US launches more strikes on Iran¶

Source: BBC News

The Houthi claim to have struck two Saudi tankers in the Red Sea, and the US twelfth consecutive night of strikes on Iran, mark a phase shift in a conflict that has already functionally closed the Strait of Hormuz. The Red Sea was the alternative route for Saudi oil; now the Houthis threaten to close that too. The geography of the crisis is telling: the US-Israeli war with Iran shut the Gulf chokepoint, so capital sought the Bab al-Mandab, and now that passage is being contested by a force Washington cannot eliminate through bombardment alone.

Trump’s threats — to destroy an Iranian bridge or power plant, to “take care of” the Houthis — read as escalatory bluster that betrays a strategic poverty. Twelve nights of strikes have not stopped the Houthis from claiming attacks, nor reopened the straits. The June Memorandum of Understanding, meant to halt operations and reopen Hormuz within 60 days, collapsed after three weeks. The ceasefire was declared “over” by Trump after Iranian attacks on ships — but those attacks were themselves responses to US strikes. The cycle is not a failure of diplomacy; it is the form the conflict takes when neither side can impose a decisive military outcome.

The Houthi slogan “siege for a siege” is worth pausing on. It articulates a logic of asymmetric retaliation that the US strategic apparatus has no answer to. The Houthis cannot defeat the US Navy, but they do not need to. They only need to make the Red Sea costly enough that insurers refuse to cover transits and tanker captains refuse to sail. Seven U-turns near Yemen since the embargo suggests that threshold is being reached. The material effect — disruption to global fuel supply, price volatility — is real regardless of whether every Houthi claim is verified.

For the revolutionary left, the key feature is not the morality of the actors but the demonstration that a relatively small, well-positioned force can impose costs on the core of the world system that the core cannot easily absorb or retaliate against. The US strikes degrade Iranian assets; they do not restore shipping routes. That gap between military capability and economic control is the space where the crisis lives.

US signs landmark nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia¶

Source: BBC News

The US has signed a nuclear co-operation agreement with Saudi Arabia that may, for the first time, allow a foreign state to enrich uranium on its own soil with American help. The official language is the usual diplomatic furniture — "peaceful", "nonproliferation", "highest standards" — but the substance cuts against every one of those terms. Enrichment is the threshold technology. Once you can enrich to reactor-grade, the step to weapons-grade is a matter of political will and a few more centrifuges, not scientific breakthrough.

The timing is the real story. This deal lands in the middle of a US war with Iran, two days after the Houthis declared a maritime blockade against Saudi Arabia. The stated rationale for attacking Iran was to prevent it from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Now Washington hands its Gulf ally the very capability it claims to be bombing Iran to stop. The contradiction is not subtle: the US is fighting a war against proliferation in one country while enabling it in another. Senator Markey put it bluntly — the administration is "starting a war with Iran under the guise of preventing an Iranian nuclear bomb" while letting Saudi Arabia develop the same technologies.

What changed? The old condition — Saudi recognition of Israel — has been dropped. The more plausible driver is inter-imperialist competition. Russia and China have been in talks with Riyadh on similar arrangements. The US moved to lock in the contract, both for the billions in reactor construction and for the strategic grip that comes with being the supplier of a client state's energy infrastructure. The nonproliferation norm was always selectively applied; now it is openly discarded when the commercial and geopolitical calculus shifts.

For the region, the logic is straightforward: if Iran ever does build a bomb, Saudi Arabia has publicly said it will follow "as soon as possible". This deal shortens that timeline from decades to years. The US has effectively placed a bet that it can control the Saudis' nuclear trajectory. That bet has no historical precedent, and the stakes are not abstract — they are the architecture of deterrence in a region already on fire.

Canada cancels joint bridge-opening celebration with US amid trade tensions¶

Source: The Guardian

The ribbon-cutting for the Gordie Howe International Bridge was supposed to be a moment of shared infrastructure, a physical link between Detroit and Windsor. Instead, Canada has unilaterally cancelled the joint ceremony after Trump announced a 50% tariff on most Canadian goods. The bridge itself will still open to traffic on schedule, but the political fiction of a harmonious bilateral relationship has been dropped.

What is striking is the timing. The bridge was financed entirely by Canada, which planned to recoup the $4.4bn cost through toll revenue. Trump had already demanded half ownership in February. Now, the newly released terms of the agreement show Canada will share 50% of net revenues with a US-controlled economic development fund — even before Canada has been fully repaid. Carney’s government had been opaque about this, and the detail contradicts his own earlier statements. The tariffs are not the cause of the tension; they are the public expression of a structural asymmetry that Canada has already conceded to behind closed doors.

The contradiction here is not between two equal partners squabbling over trade. It is between the rhetoric of sovereignty and the reality of dependency. Canada built the bridge, paid for it, and will now hand over half the profits to the US before its own costs are covered — all while Carney insists he believes in “free and fair trade” and stands ready to negotiate. Doug Ford’s call for a dollar-for-dollar response is the kind of performative toughness that costs nothing to announce and changes nothing about the balance of power.

For the working class on both sides of the Detroit River, the bridge will carry trucks, not politics. But the terms of its financing — and the ease with which the US extracts concessions — reveal how inter-imperialist rivalry operates within a shared framework. Canada does not challenge the system; it negotiates the terms of its subordination.

Nicaragua’s congress announces ‘work plan’ to suspend elections¶

Source: The Guardian

The formal abolition of elections in Nicaragua is less a rupture than the final shedding of a fiction. Ortega’s regime has not relied on electoral legitimacy for years — the 2021 vote was already a managed affair with opposition candidates jailed or barred — but the pretence of a democratic process served a purpose. It allowed the regime to maintain diplomatic cover, however thin, and to frame its repression as the defence of a revolutionary inheritance against US-backed counter-revolution. That cover is now gone.

The timing matters. Ortega’s announcement came during the anniversary of the 1979 Sandinista revolution, a deliberate invocation of anti-imperialist legitimacy. But the regime’s enemies are no longer the Somoza-era oligarchy or CIA-funded contras; they are its own former supporters, the students and small-business owners who protested in 2018 and were met with live fire. The “wall against the opposition” Ortega promises to build is directed inward, against a population that has already seen nearly a million people — roughly 15 percent of the country — driven into exile.

The US and UN condemnations are predictable, but they obscure a deeper dynamic. Washington has imposed sanctions, backed the OAS’s denunciations, and facilitated the airlift of political prisoners to the US, yet the regime remains standing. This is not because Ortega is strong, but because the US has no credible alternative to offer — and because the inter-imperialist competition that might once have pried Nicaragua open (a Chinese loan, Russian diplomatic cover) has cooled as those powers retrench. The regime survives in a vacuum of alternatives, not a surplus of support.

For the left, the situation is uncomfortable. Ortega still drapes himself in Sandinista iconography, and some international solidarity networks remain reluctant to break with him. But the regime’s base has narrowed to a security apparatus and a party apparatus that has long since abandoned any pretence of working-class politics. The suspension of elections is not a sign of strength; it is the move of a regime that knows it can no longer manage even the appearance of consent.