2026-07-27 ATS briefing¶

How AI Could Reinforce Dollar Dominance¶

The argument that AI will reinforce dollar dominance is not about US technological supremacy in any straightforward sense. It is about the material infrastructure of computation itself becoming a dollar-denominated system. The authors point to data-centre leases spanning decades, priced in dollars, and to the emergence of dollar-pegged stablecoins tied to AI compute demand. These are not monetary policies; they are commercial contracts with monetary consequences.

The logic is simple but worth spelling out. AI requires enormous, continuous capital expenditure on hardware, energy, and physical plant. That expenditure is overwhelmingly transacted in dollars, because the companies supplying GPUs, cloud capacity, and cooling systems operate within dollar-based supply chains. The revenue those data centres generate — from AI services sold globally — also flows back in dollars, much of it reinvested into US Treasury bonds or other dollar assets. The authors call this a "recycling" mechanism, and it is structurally identical to the petrodollar system of the 1970s, except the commodity is not oil but compute cycles.

What is genuinely interesting here is the implication for the so-called de-dollarisation narrative. If the next general-purpose technology requires dollar-denominated inputs at every stage of its production and consumption, then the dollar's role as the world's reserve currency is not being challenged by multipolarity — it is being deepened by technological path dependency. Countries that want AI capacity must plug into this infrastructure, and plugging in means accepting dollar pricing, dollar settlement, and ultimately dollar-denominated debt instruments as the store of value for the surplus generated.

The contradiction, if there is one, lies in the tension between US state capacity and private corporate power. The infrastructure reinforcing dollar dominance is owned by a handful of American tech firms, not by the US Treasury or the Federal Reserve. If those firms decide to issue their own stablecoins or create private clearing systems, they are effectively privatising a function of the monetary order. That may serve US imperial interests in the short term, but it also concentrates enormous structural power in entities that answer to shareholders, not to any state. For revolutionary politics, the question is not whether the dollar remains dominant — it almost certainly will, for the foreseeable future — but whether the class forces that emerge from this new infrastructure are any more amenable to democratic control than the old ones.

West Africa Needs Its Own Draghi Moment¶

Source: Project Syndicate

The article’s framing is instructive precisely because it is wrong in a revealing way. Morra and Wiedenbrüg argue that Senegal’s debt crisis is not primarily fiscal but structural: the country cannot devalue its currency because it belongs to the West African CFA franc zone, a monetary union pegged to the euro and guaranteed by France. Their proposed solution is a “Draghi moment” — a regional central bank that would buy member states’ bonds, mimicking the European Central Bank’s 2012 playbook.

This is a neat inversion of the problem. The authors correctly identify the constraint — a shared currency that blocks competitive devaluation — but then propose a mechanism that would deepen the very dependency causing the crisis. The CFA franc’s fixed peg is not a technical error; it is the material expression of French imperial control over West African monetary policy, enforced through the requirement that member states deposit 50% of their foreign reserves in the French Treasury. A regional bond-buying programme would not escape this architecture; it would simply allow the central bank to monetise sovereign debt denominated in a currency it does not control, creating a direct channel for French and European creditors to extract repayment without the friction of default.

The real contradiction is sharper than the article admits. Senegal’s hidden liabilities were not an accounting accident but the predictable outcome of a system where borrowing in a foreign-pegged currency forces governments into opaque financial engineering to service debts they cannot repay through export earnings. The choice is not between restructuring and adjustment, but between defaulting on French banks or on Senegalese public services. A Draghi moment would postpone that choice by socialising losses upward — spreading them across the entire monetary union — without altering the underlying flow of value from West Africa to European creditors.

Protests erupt in Libya’s Tripoli as anger grows over power cuts¶

Source: Al Jazeera

The Souq Al-Jumaa Movement’s campaign to “completely paralyse the government” is a revealing choice of words. It signals a political rupture that goes beyond the immediate grievance of ten-hour daily blackouts. The protesters are not petitioning for better service delivery; they are blocking roads, dumping dirt at the foreign ministry, and shutting state telecoms offices. The demand is for the dissolution of the entire political architecture — the Government of National Unity, the House of Representatives, the State Council, the Presidential Council. That is a rejection of the institutional settlement itself, not a negotiation over its performance.

The power cuts are the trigger, but the fuel and liquidity crises, medicine shortages, and currency instability are all symptoms of a deeper paralysis. Libya’s political deadlock has frozen the state’s capacity to manage even basic reproduction — electricity, water, education. The General Electricity Company had to reinstate load-shedding after two years of relative stability, which suggests the network’s fragility was structural, not merely seasonal. When a state cannot keep the lights on in its capital, the legitimacy of every faction claiming to govern collapses.

The White House call with Dbeibah on the same day, discussing “interoperability between Libyan forces and Africom”, is a reminder that the US is still pursuing unification through the existing factional leadership. The protesters are effectively saying that unification under these figures is not a solution. The contradiction is not between east and west, but between a population enduring the decay of public services and a political class that remains preoccupied with carving up the spoils. The Souq Al-Jumaa Movement’s refusal to distinguish between the unity government and the House of Representatives suggests that the next phase of Libya’s crisis may not be fought along the old civil war lines, but against the entire framework of post-2011 state-building.

How Asia Learned to Live With 'America First'¶

Source: Foreign Affairs

The article presents a familiar realist argument dressed in new clothes: that Asian allies have adapted to Trump’s “America First” because they face a genuine existential threat from China, while European allies remain in a fantasy of post-war liberal order, unwilling to pay for their own defence. The author, a former Australian national security adviser, is effectively telling Europe to stop whining and accept that the US is no longer a sentimental patron but a transactional hegemon.

What is striking is how the piece naturalises the very thing it describes. The “unique threat from China” is presented as a fixed geographical fact rather than the product of decades of US strategic positioning, including the encirclement of China through military alliances and the deliberate stoking of tensions in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait. Asian allies are not simply “living with” America First; they are doubling down on a relationship that has always been unequal. The article admits as much: they “are willing to take unequal deals from Washington because they know that taking orders from Beijing is far worse.” This is not adaptation but submission dressed as pragmatism.

The real contradiction the piece cannot name is that the US is simultaneously demanding that allies pay more for their own defence while also insisting on maintaining the military architecture that keeps them dependent. Japan and South Korea are expected to increase defence spending to 3.5 percent of GDP, but this spending will largely go towards purchasing American weapons systems and hosting US bases. The “stronger security guarantees” the article promises are actually deeper integration into a US command structure that has no democratic accountability to the populations of those countries.

For Europe, the article’s advice is to abandon the fantasy of a rules-based order and accept that the US will only defend interests it defines unilaterally. But this is not a new insight; it is the logical endpoint of NATO’s existence as a US-led alliance. The European welfare states the author sneers at are precisely what made post-war social peace possible. The demand to gut them for defence spending is a demand to sacrifice living standards on the altar of inter-imperialist competition. The article does not ask who benefits from this reallocation, or why working people in Europe or Asia should accept it.

Can Renewables Industrialize Africa?¶

Source: Foreign Affairs

The Iran war is doing what the Ukraine war started: forcing African states to confront the material vulnerability of fossil fuel dependence. Import bills for diesel and other fuels rose by over 35 percent across sub-Saharan Africa in the year after Russia’s invasion, and the new instability in the Middle East has reinforced the lesson. The result is a pivot toward what the article calls the “electro-state” model — Chinese-backed renewable infrastructure as the basis for industrialisation.

China is not simply selling panels. It is building transmission lines, battery-swapping networks, and EV assembly lines. It is embedding itself in the physical architecture of the continent’s future energy system. The United States, meanwhile, is still trying to revive a $4.7 billion LNG project in Mozambique — a bet on a technology that locks in the very dependency African states are trying to escape. The contradiction is not abstract: Washington is offering hydrocarbons at a moment when the economics of solar and storage have shifted decisively. Solar costs have fallen roughly 90 percent since 2010; battery prices 93 percent. Decentralised systems can reach rural populations in months, not years. The old logic of large centralised plants serving cities and mines is breaking down.

The scale of the shift is visible in the trade data. Africa’s solar panel imports surged 60 percent between mid-2024 and mid-2025. Algeria’s rose over 3,000 percent; Botswana’s 700 percent. These are not donor-driven pilot projects. They are states placing serious bets on a technology that now works faster and cheaper than the alternatives.

For the United States, the geopolitical stakes are clear: whoever builds the infrastructure shapes the standards, supply chains, and diplomatic relationships of the coming energy system. But the more immediate point is that African governments are not being ideologically converted to renewables. They are responding to a concrete problem — volatile fuel costs and unreliable grids — with a solution that Chinese capital and manufacturing have made available at scale. The electro-state model is not a development theory. It is a practical response to the crisis of imported energy.

Canadian government urged to block Thomson Reuters data deal with US ICE¶

Source: The Guardian

A Canadian media conglomerate is selling the Trump administration a database tool explicitly marketed for "continuous monitoring" of millions of people, and the NDP wants it stopped. The $125m deal between Thomson Reuters and ICE to access the Clear database — property records, social media, geolocation data — is framed around detecting "voter fraud" and "immigration fraud." The first is a phantom the president keeps chasing; the second is the real work of deportation.

The contradiction here is not between a virtuous Canadian state and a rogue US agency. Thomson Reuters has been feeding ICE data since 2015. What has changed is the political temperature. Mark Carney’s government talks about Canadian economic independence, but the Woodbridge Company, owned by Canada’s richest family, sees no conflict between that rhetoric and a lucrative contract with a foreign law enforcement apparatus. The company insists Clear is "not a surveillance tool" — a denial that only confirms what the tool does.

Avi Lewis is demanding export permit denials and the pulling of public subsidies from companies dealing with ICE. Joel Bakan points out that Canada’s Special Economic Measures Act could theoretically be invoked against human rights violators, but concedes the government will not use it against the US. That is the real structure: the legal framework exists, the political will does not. The state will not block a contract that enriches a family with deep connections to Canadian media and political power, even when that contract puts Canadian data infrastructure at the service of Trump’s deportation machine.

For the left, the question is not whether Carney’s government will act — it will not — but whether the NDP’s demand can be turned into a wider fight against the logic that treats data as a commodity and people as trackable objects. The deal is a small piece of a larger machinery, but it exposes how quickly liberal outrage at Trump’s excesses collides with the profit interests of capital at home.

Masked men invading and taking Amazon communities 'hostage' in organised crime surge¶

Source: The Guardian

The Asháninka delegation arriving in Brasília this week is not asking for development projects or land demarcation — they are asking for armed protection. Masked men with semi-automatic weapons have been entering homes in the Kampa do Rio Amônia territory, searching for leaders. The community describes it as being taken hostage. This is not a spillover from local disputes. As Francisco Piyãko puts it, transnational criminal networks are expanding into territories that function as barriers against illegal occupation of the region.

The geography matters here. The Brazilian side of the border in Acre state still has relatively healthy forest. The Peruvian side, Ucayali, has the widest network of illegal roads in the Peruvian Amazon, and coca cultivation there has tripled in five years. Isolated Indigenous communities have been crossing into Brazil to escape loggers and cartels. The armed men follow. The forest itself becomes a corridor for drug trafficking, illegal mining, logging, and the construction of what are called "virus roads" — unlicensed tracks that push deeper into the territory.

What the Asháninka are describing is a situation where the state's absence is not neutral. The army arrived at midnight, after the gunmen had already disappeared. The Igarapé Institute calls for better intelligence and strategic prioritisation — strengthening state authority to deter and repress. But Piyãko's warning is sharper: either the state steps in, or communities will organise to defend themselves. He calls that prospect disastrous.

The tension is not between criminals and law-abiding citizens. It is between a state that cannot or will not project force into the Amazon borderlands, and a population that knows it is the last obstacle before the territory is fully absorbed into the criminal economy. The gunmen entering homes in Apiwtxa are not a local anomaly. They are the leading edge of a process in which the forest's remaining barriers — Indigenous territories — are being systematically breached.

Thousands march in Pakistan-administered Kashmir amid election unrest¶

Source: Al Jazeera

The march from Rawalakot toward Muzaffarabad is the latest convulsion in a crisis that has already killed 45 people since June, with hundreds more wounded. The trigger is ostensibly electoral — regional elections scheduled in Pakistan-administered Kashmir — but the unrest has been building around governance and constitutional reforms that have hollowed out whatever democratic substance the territory’s limited autonomy once held.

What makes this more than a routine protest cycle is the timing. Pakistan itself is deep in economic crisis, with inflation eroding real wages and the state dependent on IMF tranches that demand austerity. The Kashmir administration, formally separate but materially dependent on Islamabad, cannot offer its population relief from the same pressures. When the central government in Pakistan pushes through reforms that further centralise control over the territory’s finances and political appointments, it is not simply a power grab — it is a response to the impossibility of managing a fiscal crisis while maintaining even the fiction of regional autonomy.

The violence — 45 dead — suggests the state apparatus has moved beyond crowd control into active suppression. That is what happens when a government’s legitimacy rests on nothing but force. The protesters are not demanding independence; they are demanding that the existing political framework deliver what it promised. That the framework cannot do so, because the resources are not there and the central state will not surrender control over what remains, is the material contradiction driving the unrest. The elections, when they come, will resolve nothing.