2026-07-25 ATS briefing¶
Frustration and anger on Syria’s streets¶
Source: Tempest
The fall of the Assad dictatorship in late 2024 was supposed to open a path to recovery for Syria’s majority. Instead, the new administration in Damascus is reproducing the same economic logic that hollowed out the country under the old regime — only now with greater speed and fewer pretenses. Protests have surged across Syria since the beginning of 2025, with nearly eighty demonstrations documented between February and April alone, driven overwhelmingly by social and economic grievances: soaring energy and food prices, electricity price hikes, collapsing living standards. By April, only 13 percent of respondents in one poll believed the government was doing enough on the economy.
The new authorities have deepened a commercial model oriented toward short-term profit, prioritising tourism, real estate, and financial services over productive sectors like manufacturing and agriculture. Trade liberalisation has accelerated: customs duties on 260 Turkish products were slashed in January 2025, and Syria’s trade deficit with Turkey ballooned to $3.26 billion — an 86.5 percent increase from the previous year. No protections for domestic industry have been introduced. Meanwhile, officials have signalled willingness to privatise state assets, including education, health, and potentially state-owned banks. A new tax system, set for 2027, exempts agriculture, bank deposit returns, and stock trading from taxation while introducing a sales tax on essential goods. A new investment law grants permanent income tax exemptions for agricultural and educational projects, up to 80 percent reductions for export-oriented industries, and full ownership rights for foreign investors.
The contradiction is concrete: a transitional administration that came to power promising reconstruction and stability is instead presiding over the accelerated dismantling of whatever remains of Syria’s productive base, while channelling the benefits of its economic policy toward foreign capital and a thin layer of domestic investors. The protests are not simply about hardship — they reflect a growing recognition that the new order is reproducing the old one’s indifference to the needs of the majority. For revolutionary politics, the question is whether this discontent can crystallise into an organised force capable of challenging not just the personnel in power, but the class logic that governs them.
China’s Moment of Weakness¶
Source: Foreign Affairs
The argument that China’s economic weakness is America’s strategic opening rests on a plausible but fragile premise: that export dependence is a vulnerability the West can exploit by building rival industrial capacity. Wright is right that China’s domestic demand is broken — the $1.2 trillion trade surplus is not a sign of strength but of overcapacity dumped abroad because households and firms cannot absorb it. The property collapse and the hangover from a credit binge that added $27 trillion in bank assets between 2008 and 2017 have left Beijing’s usual policy tools — directing credit through state-owned channels — badly impaired. When the financial system is clogged with bad debt, five-year plans become aspirational documents.
But the article’s strategic conclusion — that the US can now “deter and mitigate” China by rebuilding its own industrial base — skips over the material contradiction at the heart of the matter. The same overaccumulation that weakens China domestically is what makes its exports so destructive to competitors elsewhere. Falling export prices are not a choice; they are the mechanism by which China’s surplus capital and labour are valorised when the domestic circuit fails. For Western firms, matching those prices means accepting lower profit margins or state subsidies — neither of which capital readily embraces without a crisis forcing its hand. The “politically popular answer” of new Western investment assumes a coordination and willingness to sacrifice that has been absent for decades.
The real opening may not be for US strategy but for class struggle within China. A regime that can no longer deliver rising living standards through credit-fuelled growth and must squeeze its workforce to maintain export competitiveness is a regime under strain. The Japanese parallel Wright invokes — a lost decade — is instructive precisely for what it omits: Japan’s stagnation was managed without social explosion because the ruling class had room to absorb losses. Chinese capital does not have that luxury, and the Communist Party knows it. That is why the tone of this piece, for all its confidence, reads less like a strategic blueprint and more like a warning shot across the bow of a competitor that still holds the world’s industrial supply chains by the throat.
Iran and the New Rules of Global Power¶
Source: Foreign Affairs
The Gulf War in 1991 did not merely demonstrate American military superiority — it created a shared global belief in its permanence. Robert Pape argues that the images of precision bombing over Baghdad established four assumptions that underpinned the post-Cold War order: that the US could impose military outcomes effortlessly, that it possessed escalation dominance, that it guaranteed global commerce, and that resistance was futile. These assumptions were self-reinforcing. Allies reduced defence spending, investors discounted geopolitical risk, corporations stretched supply chains across continents. The order rested less on coercion than on credibility — states did not need to experience American power, only to believe in it.
That belief has now unravelled. The Iran war around the Strait of Hormuz has inverted the lessons of 1991. Where the Gulf War showed a superpower routing a regional adversary at negligible cost, today's clashes show a regional power imposing huge costs on the superpower. The systems that enabled precision warfare — drones, anti-ship missiles, surveillance technology — have diffused through global supply chains. They are no longer the preserve of great powers. Weaker states have learned that defiance can be cheaper than accommodation, and that disruption pays.
The material basis of unipolarity has eroded, but the more significant shift is in expectations. The post-Cold War order was always a psychological construct as much as a military one — a shared assumption that American power was a fixed feature of the landscape. Once that assumption breaks, it cannot be restored by a show of force, because the problem is not that the US lacks capacity but that everyone now knows the costs of using it. The new rules favour the disruptor, not the hegemon. For revolutionary politics, the question is whether this volatility creates openings for working-class movements or simply multiplies the points at which capital can demand sacrifice.
West Africa Needs Its Own Draghi Moment¶
Source: Project Syndicate
Senegal’s hidden debts have forced the question of restructuring, but the authors argue the real problem is not fiscal. It is structural, and it is shared across the West African Economic and Monetary Union. Eight countries, one currency pegged to the euro, no individual control over monetary policy. Senegal cannot devalue to regain competitiveness or ease its debt burden. It can only squeeze internally — cut spending, raise taxes, suppress wages — or earn more foreign currency through exports. Neither is a quick fix when the export base is narrow and import dependence is high.
The comparison to Mario Draghi’s 2012 “whatever it takes” moment is telling. Draghi’s promise worked because the European Central Bank could create euros without limit to backstop sovereign bonds. The BCEAO, West Africa’s central bank, operates under different constraints. It holds foreign reserves partly as a guarantee for the French Treasury, a remnant of colonial monetary arrangements. The capacity to act as lender of last resort is politically and institutionally limited.
What the article gestures toward but does not fully name is the underlying dynamic: the region’s monetary architecture locks member states into a deflationary adjustment mechanism precisely when global capital flows are tightening and commodity revenues are uncertain. The choice between restructuring and austerity is a false one if neither addresses the inability to generate the foreign exchange needed to service external debt. For the region’s working classes, the adjustment will arrive regardless — through higher unemployment, eroded public services, and falling real wages. The question is whether the political elite can sustain the monetary union’s discipline when the costs become impossible to absorb.
How AI Could Reinforce Dollar Dominance¶
Source: Project Syndicate
The argument here is that the AI boom is not just a technological shift but a mechanism that could lock in the dollar’s hegemony for another cycle, precisely when many analysts expect it to fray. The authors point to a concrete circuit: the vast data centres needed to train and run AI models consume enormous amounts of energy and hardware, and the companies building them — hyperscalers like Amazon, Microsoft, Google — operate overwhelmingly in dollars. Their capital expenditure, their cloud-service billing, their cross-border payments all flow through dollar-denominated systems. Add to this the emergence of dollar-pegged stablecoins designed to facilitate AI-to-AI transactions or micro-payments for compute power, and you have a new layer of demand for dollar assets that did not exist a decade ago.
The real insight is not that the dollar remains dominant — that is the starting assumption — but that the infrastructure of AI is being built on dollar rails from the ground up. A 20-year data-centre lease is a fixed commitment to dollar-denominated operating costs. A stablecoin pegged to the dollar creates a synthetic dollar liability that must be backed by dollar reserves. The result is a self-reinforcing loop: the more the global economy depends on AI compute, the more it depends on the dollar as the unit of account and store of value for that compute. This is not a policy choice by the US Treasury; it is the cumulative effect of private investment decisions by a handful of American tech firms.
For the rest of the world, the implications are stark. Countries like China or the EU that hope to challenge dollar dominance through trade settlement or reserve diversification now face a new front where the dollar is entrenching itself not through geopolitics but through the physical and financial architecture of a general-purpose technology. The contradiction, if there is one, lies in the fact that this very concentration of compute infrastructure in US-aligned jurisdictions creates a single point of failure — and a strategic vulnerability that rival states will eventually have to address, by force or by building their own parallel stacks.
Tanker Market: Saudi Oil Exports Down Significantly¶
Source: Hellenic Shipping News
The headline is almost misleading: Saudi exports are down, yes, but the real story is the reconfiguration of global crude flows under the pressure of the Persian Gulf war. Arabian Gulf exports as a share of global seaborne trade have collapsed from a historical norm of roughly 40% to just 29.5% in the first half of 2026. That is not a blip; it is a structural shift driven by active conflict in the world’s most concentrated oil-producing region.
The numbers reveal who is filling the gap. South American exports surged 31.5% year-on-year, US exports rose 20.5%, and Russian ports — including Kazakh oil — edged up 3.5%. The war is not reducing global oil supply so much as rerouting it, lengthening tanker voyages and reshuffling the hierarchy of exporters. The Baltic Dry Index is not cited here, but the logic of tonne-mile demand is implicit: oil from Brazil or the US Gulf to Asia travels much further than crude from Ras Tanura to China, which means the same volume of consumption requires more tanker capacity.
On the demand side, Chinese imports fell 14.2% year-on-year. That is the biggest single drag. Japanese imports dropped 22.5%, South Korean 18.5%. The EU, by contrast, increased imports 1.7% and now accounts for a slightly larger share of global arrivals than China. The war is accelerating a pattern already visible before 2026: Asian economies, heavily dependent on Gulf crude, are absorbing the disruption through reduced consumption and diversified sourcing, while Europe — still weaning itself off Russian pipeline gas — is turning to seaborne crude from wherever it can get it.
Saudi Arabia’s own export data tells a sharper story. Direct shipments to China fell 29.6%, to Japan nearly 48%, to South Korea 25.9%. The only destination showing growth was the EU, up 79.3% — but from a negligible base of 0.4 million tonnes. The Saudis are not redirecting their lost Asian volumes to Europe in any meaningful way; they are simply exporting less. The war has taken a direct bite out of the kingdom’s production and loading capacity, and the tanker market is registering that as a permanent loss of market share, not a temporary dip.
For the shipping industry, the implication is clear: the war is not a shock that will normalise once peace returns. It is remaking trade routes in real time, and the longer it continues, the more those new routes become embedded in infrastructure, contracts, and fleet deployment. The VLCCs that once queued at Ras Tanura are now competing for Brazilian and US cargoes, or sitting in floating storage. The tanker market is not just reacting to a war; it is being restructured by one.
‘We have done it’: Joy as ‘Cockroach’ protests push India minister out¶
Source: Al Jazeera
The resignation of India’s Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan is a genuine political scalp, but the movement that took it — the Cockroach Janta Party — is worth dwelling on precisely because it began as a joke. A chief justice called unemployed youth “cockroaches and parasites”; a young man asked what would happen if all cockroaches came together; thirty-six days later, a minister resigned. The speed and the absurdity are the point. This was not a trade union campaign or a party machine grinding through procedure. It was a satirical identity that became a real weapon because the material conditions — mass unemployment, exam paper leaks, student suicides — gave the joke a cutting edge.
The movement’s success exposes a brittleness in Modi’s strongman image that is easy to miss when focusing on electoral dominance. Twelve years in power, a personality cult built on invincibility, and yet a youth-led protest over exam corruption forced a ministerial resignation. The state responded with batons, tear gas and internet blackouts — the standard toolkit — but the video of the crackdown on July 20 did not suppress the protests; it multiplied them across cities. The state’s violence became the movement’s best organiser. That is a pattern worth watching: when repression no longer intimidates but instead radicalises, the ruling class loses one of its most reliable instruments.
What comes next is less clear. The CJP called for a return home after the resignation, and the demands — compensation, amnesty, an apology — are redress, not power. But the 18-year-old with the spray paint can who spoke of “total takeover” and the protesters who chanted that government power is not absolute suggest a current that will not dissolve into the satisfaction of a single resignation. The movement found its voice through mockery and occupation; whether that voice can sustain itself beyond the victory celebration is the open question. For now, the cockroaches assembled, and a minister fell. That is not nothing.
More than 250,000 flee wildfires in France and Spain¶
Source: BBC News
The evacuation of a quarter of a million people from the path of wildfires in France and Spain is presented as a natural disaster amplified by weather, but the numbers tell a different story about the ground beneath the flames. Spain has already burned 130,000 hectares this year, 30 percent above its annual average; France has lost 98,000. The EU’s crisis management commissioner expects this season to surpass last year’s record of one million hectares burned across the continent. These are not anomalies in a stable system — they are the new normal of a mode of production that has spent two centuries treating the atmosphere as an open sewer.
The response is revealing. France mobilises its military to clear brush and create fire breaks. The Tour de France shortens its final stage so security forces can be redeployed. Macron convenes an emergency meeting. The state scrambles to manage the consequences of a crisis it cannot prevent, because prevention would require dismantling the fossil fuel infrastructure that the same state subsidises and protects. EU solidarity takes the form of water bombers and helicopters — firefighting as border management, treating symptoms while the cause accelerates.
The human cost is unevenly distributed. A British couple mistakes smoke for a barbecue; a man in his 70s is found dead in his car. The tourist who fled to a hotel 100 miles away can still smell the fire. The 28,000 Spaniards confined to their homes cannot leave at all. Class determines not only who burns but who gets to watch the flames from a distance. The fires are a crisis of accumulation, not of nature — and the evacuation order is a temporary fix for a system that has no exit plan.