2026-08-06 ATS briefing¶

El Niño could push 50m people into acute hunger before end of next year¶

The WFP’s projection of 50 million additional people pushed into acute hunger is framed as a weather story, but the timing is doing the analytical work. The worst impacts in southern Africa land not during the drought itself but in the 2027-28 lean season, nine months after a failed harvest. That lag is the material expression of how hunger operates as a deferred accounting of capital’s relationship to nature: the crop fails, but the social consequences are mediated through stored grain, debt cycles and the slow exhaustion of household reserves. Farmers are cushioned initially by last year’s unusually good harvest, which means the shock is absorbed privately, household by household, before it becomes a public emergency.

The comparison with 2015-16 is instructive. That El Niño affected 60-100 million people, and the WFP’s hope that anticipatory relief will lower the toll this time is honest about its own limits. The $80m budgeted for early warning and pre-positioned aid is a rounding error against the scale of the crisis, and the admission that data collection has been cut for lack of funding reveals the actual priority ordering. You cannot manage what you have stopped measuring.

The war in Iran sits in the background as upward pressure on food prices, and Bauer’s warning about export restrictions is the quiet core of the piece. When large food-exporting countries close their borders, the international market seizes up precisely when it is needed most. That is not a natural disaster; it is the political economy of scarcity asserting itself. The climate crisis intensifies the weather, but the hunger is distributed according to who holds grain reserves, who controls shipping lanes, and who can absorb price spikes. For the 225 million already in acute food insecurity, the question is not whether El Niño arrives, but whether the system that allocates food can be forced to move it where it is needed rather than where it is profitable.

Dirty tanker loadings drop 62% from Russian ports in the Black Sea and Sea of Azov¶

Source: Hellenic Shipping News

The 62% collapse in dirty tanker loadings from Russia’s Black Sea and Azov ports is a reminder that the Ukraine war’s economic front has shifted decisively to the maritime domain. Operation MoLoChKa, Ukraine’s drone campaign, has done in weeks what sanctions regimes spent years trying to achieve: a genuine, measurable strangulation of Russian oil export capacity. The targeting of the CPC terminal at Novorossiysk is the sharpest detail here — nearly three-quarters of its year-to-date exports went to EU countries, yet Ukraine struck it anyway. This is not collateral damage; it is a deliberate signal that Kyiv considers the distinction between Russian and Kazakh crude irrelevant when both flow through Russian-controlled infrastructure.

The numbers reveal the fragility of the shadow fleet model. A 66% drop in volumes to India, the single largest destination, suggests that the buyers supposedly immune to Western pressure — the refiners in Gujarat and Maharashtra — are not as insulated as the narrative of a sanctions-proof "parallel trade" suggested. Shipowners, even those willing to run the gauntlet of price caps and opaque insurance schemes, are balking at physical drone attacks. The risk premium has moved from the legal to the existential.

For the tanker market, the 5.6% year-on-year decline in global volumes is now compounded by a potential further 3% contraction. This is not a blip; it is a structural re-routing of energy flows that will accelerate as Ukraine expands its reach. The Baltic Dry Index’s rise to a two-month high, noted in the same bulletin, is a reminder that dry bulk and tanker markets are diverging — grain and ore still move, but the oil trade is being actively contested. The question is whether Russia can adapt by shifting more volume to Baltic or Pacific ports, or whether the Black Sea route is now permanently compromised.

Trump administration refunds $100bn in tariffs struck down by Supreme Court¶

Source: Al Jazeera

The refund is the state admitting, in cash, that its own fiscal machinery ran ahead of its legal authority. Roughly $100bn of the $166bn collected has gone back to importers, with CBP’s filing confirming the dispersal is ongoing. That gap between what was seized and what has been returned is not administrative lag; it is the material trace of a ruling that arrived months after the money moved. The Supreme Court’s February decision did not merely invalidate a legal instrument — it retroactively exposed roughly two-thirds of the tariff take as having been, in effect, an unlawful levy on capital circulation.

What matters politically is that Trump has not paused. New tariffs on forced labour grounds, 10-12.5 percent across dozens of countries, are already being challenged by 25 states as a pretext to re-impose precisely what the Court struck down. The administration is testing how far it can stretch the legal fiction before the judiciary catches up again. This is not defiance so much as a treadmill: each ruling closes one emergency-power route, and the executive immediately seeks another statutory door. The states’ lawsuit names the mechanism — pretext — but the deeper issue is that the tariff regime has become a rolling experiment in how much executive discretion can survive judicial review.

The Court left intact the 1962 Trade Expansion Act duties on steel, autos and copper. That carve-out is the revealing detail. The justices were willing to police the boundary of emergency powers while leaving the industrial-protectionist core untouched. The refunds, then, are a cost the state absorbs to preserve the legitimacy of the remaining tariff architecture. For class politics, the question is who ultimately carries that $100bn — the importers who fronted the cash, or the workers and consumers further down the chain who never see the refund.

America Must Let Go of the Middle East¶

Source: Foreign Affairs

The war with Iran has done what decades of strategic review could not: it has made the case for withdrawal in the only language Washington respects, which is failure. Eighteen American dead and a closed Strait of Hormuz are not abstractions; they are the direct return on a policy of permanent basing that was supposed to guarantee security. Fuchs's argument is essentially that the footprint generates the threats it claims to deter — each base a hostage to fortune, each host country a target precisely because it hosts.

The numbers he marshals are devastating in scale: $8 trillion, 940,000 dead from direct violence, 38 million displaced. But the more interesting analytical point is the one he makes almost in passing. The Gulf War of 1990-91 was the high point of post-Cold War American power, and it became a decades-long obligation. That is the trajectory of imperial overreach in miniature — the moment of maximum dominance producing the permanent entanglement that erodes it. The bases were supposed to protect the free flow of energy; instead they now sit astride a closed strait. The war to contain Iran has produced Iranian retaliation that has done more damage to the global economy than any Iranian action in decades.

There is a genuine contradiction here that Fuchs identifies but does not fully develop. The United States cannot simply leave, because its presence has created the conditions that make departure look irresponsible. The ISIS resurgence after the 2011 Iraq withdrawal is the cautionary tale every interventionist will deploy. Yet staying means continuing to absorb attacks, prop up abusive regimes, and generate the very instability that justifies the next escalation. The way out he proposes — withdraw, stop arming governments that violate international law, end the guarantor role — is politically impossible for any administration that wants to survive a news cycle, which is precisely why the disaster had to happen first.

For those watching from the left, the lesson is not that a chastened Washington will see reason. It is that the empire's own logic has reached its terminus: the cost of maintaining order now exceeds the benefit of the order maintained. Whether that produces withdrawal or simply more desperate escalation is the open question.

How the Axis of Resistance Recovered¶

Source: Foreign Affairs

The octopus doctrine was always a metaphor in search of a mechanism. The assumption that Iran functioned as a central nervous system, with allied groups as mere appendages, justified a strategy of decapitation: kill the leadership, bomb the supply lines, and the arms would shrivel. The past five months of war have falsified that theory empirically, and the authors are honest enough to say so. The axis has absorbed the loss of its senior figures and kept fighting, which forces a question the strategists who launched this war never asked: what exactly was the head of the octopus, and was it ever the thing that mattered?

The answer embedded in this analysis is that the axis has undergone a qualitative organisational shift. Twenty years ago, these were cell-based insurgencies dependent on Tehran for arms, technology, and know-how. Today, the IRGC has deliberately cultivated a networked structure in which manufacturing capacity, technical knowledge, and even decision-making are distributed across multiple nodes. Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis can now build their own one-way attack drones from imported parts, with ranges up to 1,600 miles. The supply chain is no longer a pipeline from Tehran but a web of smugglers, traders, and engineers embedded in each group's own social base. When a leader is killed, the organisation adapts because the knowledge is no longer concentrated in that leader.

There is a material logic here that the authors gesture toward but do not fully name. The low-cost drone is the great leveller of modern warfare, and it has a specific economic character: it is cheap, diffuse, and reproducible. You cannot bomb a factory into submission when the "factory" is a workshop in a residential neighbourhood and the components are commercially available on the open market. The United States and Israel have spent decades and trillions of dollars building a military apparatus optimised for destroying large, centralised targets. The axis has responded by making itself small, distributed, and redundant. This is not a tactical adaptation but a structural one, and it renders the entire US toolkit of sanctions and air strikes increasingly obsolete.

The authors' prescription—containment, deals, and engaging China to limit technology transfer—is a tacit admission that victory is off the table. What they do not say is that this networked model of warfare is itself a product of the very asymmetry the US created. When you monopolise the high end of military technology, your adversaries will find the low end. The drone is the weapon of the weak, and the weak have learned to build it themselves.

US to shut five consulates as critics fear China could fill diplomatic vacuum¶

Source: The Guardian

The State Department's cost-cutting rationale for closing five consulates is doing a lot of ideological work. The White House's budget office wants to go further, shuttering up to thirty missions, and the justification is efficiency — a diplomatic footprint that "delivers results for the American people." But the actual sums involved are trivial next to the department's overall budget, as Senator Shaheen notes. This is not a genuine austerity measure; it is a political project of state retrenchment dressed in managerial language.

The interesting tension is that the closures are not evenly distributed across the globe. They hit secondary posts in Canada, Japan, Indonesia, Cameroon and Grenada — places where US capital already has deep structural access through trade agreements and corporate networks. The consulates being cut are precisely the ones that lubricate mid-level commercial and political relationships. Winnipeg, for instance, exists to facilitate trade with Manitoba; its closure saves pennies while forfeiting the kind of granular local knowledge that cannot be rebuilt on short notice. The US is not withdrawing from the world so much as consolidating its presence in primary nodes, betting that its economic weight makes the peripheral infrastructure redundant.

China's presence in three of the five locations is the obvious counterpoint. Beijing does not need to match the US consulate-for-consulate; it simply needs to be present where Washington is absent. The vacuum is real, but the Democrats framing it as a loss of influence misses the deeper point. The US is not being outcompeted so much as choosing to vacate the field, prioritising a leaner state apparatus over the maintenance of diplomatic hegemony. For the left, the relevant question is not whether this weakens American imperialism — it does, marginally — but whether the resulting multipolar scramble for influence creates any additional space for movements in the affected countries. So far, the evidence suggests the space will be filled by Beijing's own version of state-backed capital, not by any opening for popular sovereignty.

Strait of Hormuz tolls would harm livelihoods worldwide, shipowners warn¶

Source: Al Jazeera

The shipping industry’s letter to the UN frames the Strait of Hormuz tolls as a violation of legal norms, but the real disturbance is to the cost structure of global capital. Eight associations representing owners and operators are not defending a principle; they are defending the margin between freight rates and operating costs. A toll is a direct levy on circulation itself — capital that moves through the strait without adding value, only realising it elsewhere. The shipowners’ warning about higher energy prices and inflation is accurate but partial: the deeper issue is that Tehran has found a way to tax the metabolic core of the world economy without firing a shot.

Iran’s de facto toll booth is a novel form of leverage in a war where its military cannot match US firepower. By monetising its ability to disrupt, Tehran converts a military vulnerability into an economic instrument. The IMO’s 64 confirmed incidents and 17 deaths show the violence underpinning this toll regime, but the authority it grants Iran is what makes the fee system politically potent. The shipowners’ appeal to the UN is telling — they know Guterres and Dominguez have no enforcement power. Thompson’s point about Trump’s ambivalence is the crux: the US president has the means to use violence but has shown no appetite for defending the legal framework the shipping industry invokes. The strait’s tolls are not a departure from international practice; they are a symptom of its breakdown. For the Gulf’s Asian buyers, the cost is immediate — diesel, fertiliser, plastics. For the rest of the world, the precedent matters more: if Hormuz can be tolled, no chokepoint is safe.

Global Tax Reform Is the Key to a Fair AI Economy¶

Source: Project Syndicate

The OECD’s global minimum tax was supposed to be the end of the profit-shifting era, yet the architecture it built is already crumbling precisely because it was designed to accommodate the firms it claimed to discipline. Milin’s argument is that AI has made this obsolescence visible: when training data, compute, and intellectual property are scattered across jurisdictions, the old physical-presence test for taxing rights becomes a legal fiction that US tech giants exploit with ease. The Apple case, with its Irish subsidiaries paying 0.005%, is the template, and OpenAI and Anthropic are poised to follow it.

The interesting move here is the defence of digital-service taxes as a stepping stone rather than a betrayal of multilateralism. DSTs on gross revenues bypass the problem that many AI companies have yet to book taxable profits — they tax the activity itself, not the accounting. This is a pragmatic concession to the fact that the UN Framework Convention negotiations will drag on while value is being extracted now. The threat of US retaliatory tariffs against DST-adopting countries shows the real friction: this is not a technical debate about tax architecture but a distributional struggle over where AI-generated surplus lands, with Washington defending its firms’ ability to park profits in havens.

What Milin leaves implicit is that the global minimum tax’s stall is not an implementation failure but a political one. The reallocation of taxing rights from headquarters to market countries would shift revenue from the US to the Global South, which is precisely why it has stalled. The backlash against AI, she argues, will harden into a legitimacy crisis if the gains remain concentrated. That is the contradiction worth naming: the same states that fear public anger over AI’s social costs are unwilling to surrender the fiscal privileges that make those costs unbearable.