2026-08-17 ATS briefing¶

The Cost of Keeping China Out¶

The Biden-era consensus that China could be contained by walling off its technology has curdled into something stranger under Trump: a policy of pure denial, where the US market simply refuses to acknowledge that Chinese firms now lead in the very sectors Washington wants to rebuild at home. Cowhey and Rithmire's central observation is that the 250 percent EV tariff and the CFIUS blockages do not protect American industry so much as quarantine it from the technological frontier. US firms and consumers are being shielded from the future, and that shielding has a cost measured in lost competitiveness.

The authors propose a remedy that is both pragmatic and quietly devastating to the nationalist framing: Washington should copy China's own playbook. Beijing spent decades forcing Western investors into joint ventures, technology transfers, and local supply chains, using access to its market as leverage to build domestic champions. GE's experience is the template. The US could now do the same to Chinese EV makers and battery firms like CATL, which are desperate for access to the world's largest consumer market precisely because overcapacity and hypercompetition at home have squeezed their margins. Selective openness, with stringent safeguards, would let Washington extract investment and technology from Chinese firms while managing the security risks.

The argument is sound on its own terms, but it rests on an assumption the authors do not interrogate: that the US state is capable of the kind of disciplined, long-horizon industrial strategy China deployed. The political economy of American governance, with its revolving doors, lobbying, and election cycles, is not built for the patient extraction of technology rents over decades. More fundamentally, the proposal assumes the US can manage a relationship of managed interdependence with a rival it has spent a decade trying to isolate. The contradiction is that the more Washington treats Chinese capital as a Trojan horse, the harder it becomes to build the political confidence needed to let it in on terms that actually benefit the US. The board of investment Trump floated with Xi is a ghost; the regulatory capacity to run a selective openness strategy does not yet exist.

Africa Can’t Afford to Squander Its Demographic Opportunity¶

Source: Foreign Affairs

The demographic transition is usually told as a promise: get the dependency ratio right and growth follows, as it did in East Asia. Cilliers tells it as a warning. Africa's working-age share is rising, but the continent's median age of 19.5 means the window of opportunity is still decades away for most countries, and the conditions that produce the window are the same ones that produce combustion when jobs fail to materialise. The Arab Spring and the current instability belt from Mali to Somalia are offered as evidence of what youthful populations do when the economy cannot absorb them.

The historical burden is worth sitting with. The slave trade removed working-age people, colonial rule left populations poorly educated and disconnected from postwar trade and technology, and disease kept mortality high enough to slow population growth even with high fertility. Africa's dependency ratio was stuck or declining until the 1980s, and the growth spurt of the 2000s and 2010s was driven by commodity prices tied to China's expansion, not by a favourable age structure. That distinction matters: the earlier boom was borrowed from elsewhere, and the coming one has to be built domestically.

Cilliers' own modelling suggests the 1.7-to-one threshold arrives around 2053, with the right policies accelerating it by a decade. That is a long runway, and the policy prescriptions are the usual ones: education, health, women's empowerment, job creation. What is missing is any serious account of where the capital for those investments comes from, or what happens to the commodity-export model when the Chinese demand that underpinned it slows. The demographic dividend is real, but it is not automatic. It depends on a political economy that the article does not examine.

Kharg’s Western Terminal Reactivates as the Caspian Corridor Structurally Expands¶

Source: Hellenic Shipping News

The CAROLINE BEZENGI has been leaking for two months inside a protected marine reserve off Oman, and the first public disclosure came only on August 10. The slick has grown from roughly 20 to 400 square kilometres in ten days, the vessel was carrying a million barrels of Russian crude from Novorossiysk to India, and no salvage vessel has arrived. The silence is the story: a sanctioned tanker, an Iranian-aligned cargo, and a regional state that evidently calculated that acknowledging the spill was worse than letting it spread.

Kharg's western terminal reactivated on August 12 after 25 empty days, with a dark VLCC that had been holding in the waiting area since July 11 finally berthing. The eastern and LPG terminals stayed empty. This is not a recovery; it is a managed trickle. The waiting area still holds 16 dark tankers, the North Larak anchorage has absorbed ten sanctioned hulls, and the dark share of that cluster sits at 74%. Iran's claim to control the Strait of Hormuz, complete with a proposed toll system, collides with the reality that its own export infrastructure runs on vessels that cannot transmit their positions. The toll is a threat aimed at the blockade, but the blockade has already rerouted the trade.

The Caspian corridor's structural shift matters more than the Gulf theatre. Wet cargo movements from Russia to Iran rose 2.9 times in the 164 days after the February escalation. That is not a wartime improvisation; it is a permanent re-routing of energy trade that bypasses the strait entirely. CARUZO's emergence from 66 days dark, wrapped in anti-drone nets and IBC water tanks, shows the commercial fleet adapting to Ukraine's drone campaign as a fixed cost of doing business. Every layer of protection added to a tanker is capital that produces nothing, absorbed into the price of moving oil through contested water. The system is learning to function with its own arteries under attack, and the slick off Oman is what that functioning looks like from the shore.

Bullish outlook for tanker market amid global uncertainties¶

Source: Hellenic Shipping News

The sanctioned fleet is the shadow that makes the mainstream tanker market's boom legible. DNV's Catrine Vestereng frames the bullish outlook as a function of "longer voyage distances, driven by sanctions and subsequent trade realignments," and the numbers bear this out: VLCC earnings above $100,000/day, rates 60% over the ten-year average, capacity utilisation past 90%. The geopolitical disruption of Russian crude flows has not destroyed the market; it has re-routed it, pushing Chinese and Indian importers toward the Middle East and Atlantic Basin and stretching tonne-mile demand to record highs.

This is a market whose prosperity is structurally dependent on the very instability that regulators claim to manage. The sanctioned fleet, operating outside compliance frameworks without proper insurance, absorbs the oldest, least efficient tonnage that the mainstream market is increasingly unwilling to touch. Charterers have pushed age limits from 20 to 25 years in some trades, but 23% of tankers are now over 20 years old and 45% are 15 or older. The economics of scrapping are deferred by elevated freight rates, yet the logic is inescapable: once earnings ease, a wave of demolition follows, and the sanctioned fleet becomes the dumping ground for vessels that can no longer compete.

The newbuild response is telling in its conservatism. Owners are ordering at a pace that leaves the orderbook at just 17% of fleet capacity, insufficient to offset ageing tonnage, and they are refusing to commit to alternative fuels. Instead, the investment is in silicon hull coatings, waste-heat recovery, and scrubbers. The industry is betting that efficiency gains and biofuels will bridge the gap to emissions targets without disrupting the existing engine architecture. This is capital seeking to extend the life of its current asset base rather than confront the structural transformation decarbonisation demands.

The contradiction is not between oil and the energy transition. It is between a market whose record profits depend on geopolitical fragmentation and a regulatory framework that presumes its own authority over the same vessels. The sanctioned fleet is not an anomaly to be corrected; it is the pressure valve that allows the mainstream market to maintain its standards while the oldest ships keep trading. For those watching the class struggle in shipping, the question is whether the coming scrapping wave, when it arrives, will be absorbed quietly into the shadow fleet or force a reckoning over who bears the cost of the industry's ageing infrastructure.

Ebola outbreak in Democratic Republic of Congo now deadliest in country’s history¶

Source: The Guardian

The UN warning that "Ebola is winning" in the DRC is a rare official admission that the response apparatus has lost the initiative. With 2,325 dead and 101 new cases in a single day, the outbreak is not merely growing; it is accelerating faster than any previous Ebola epidemic on record. The case fatality ratio should be falling as contact tracing improves, but MSF's Thomas Parisch reports patients are still being identified only after death in the community. That single fact indicts the entire containment strategy.

The Bundibugyo strain has no approved vaccine or treatment, which strips away the technological fix that contained the 2018-20 outbreak. What remains is the unglamorous work of community engagement, safe burials and early detection, precisely the labour that has been chronically underfunded and understaffed. Six provinces are now affected, concentrated along the north-eastern border with Uganda, where Kinshasa's administrative reach has always been thinnest and where armed group activity has repeatedly forced health workers to suspend operations.

The comparison with West Africa's 2014-16 catastrophe, which killed 11,310 people, frames the current crisis as a regional problem. But the WHO's declaration of a public health emergency of international concern in May reflects a different calculus: the outbreak has already reached Kampala, and the longer it burns through the DRC's border regions, the greater the chance of wider regional spread. The global health architecture built after 2014 was supposed to prevent exactly this scenario. Its failure here is not a matter of insufficient scientific knowledge but of the political economy of outbreak response, where surveillance and treatment capacity are concentrated in wealthy countries while the Congo Basin remains a zone of extraction, not investment. Each death in Ituri is a measure of that imbalance, and the virus is exploiting it with brutal efficiency.

Brazil’s Lula launches historic fourth term bid – but son of jailed Bolsonaro stands in his way¶

Source: The Guardian

Lula launched his fourth-term bid from the Vila Euclides football stadium, the same ground where he led the strikes that broke the military dictatorship, and the symmetry is doing a lot of work. The 80-year-old is running against the son of the man who jailed him, and the son of the man he beat in 2022, and the son of the man now serving 27 years for attempting a coup. Flávio Bolsonaro's Copacabana launch drew a crowd far smaller than his father's rallies, and his pitch is the same "fight this system" rhetoric, only now the system he claims to fight is the one that locked up his dad.

The election is close, 43% to 40%, but the more consequential contest is being staged by Washington. Trump has designated Brazil's two biggest crime groups as terrorist organisations, Hegseth is promising to pursue Latin American traffickers "just like Isis and al-Qaida", and the state department is publishing videos declaring American dominance over the hemisphere. Lula's supporters at the stadium were handing out "Fuck Trump" stickers and drawing Saddam Hussein comparisons. Flávio Bolsonaro, meanwhile, is running as the man who can "sit down with the US".

The shape of the race is therefore not left versus right in any domestic sense. It is a question of which Brazilian faction can best manage the empire's escalating pressure, and the far-right candidate is openly offering subordination as a virtue. Lula's promise to go after crime bosses in penthouses rather than favelas is a genuine class intervention, but it collides with a US policy that treats those same organisations as targets for military action. The real fight in October will be over whether Brazil's sovereignty survives the winner.

Zambia incumbent takes early election lead as opposition alleges armed raid¶

Source: Al Jazeera

Hichilema’s near-60 percent tally with half the constituencies counted looks like a mandate, but the count itself is the contested terrain. The EU observers called the suspension of tallying “disproportionate” after a handful of incidents, a word that does odd work here: it suggests the pause was an overreaction, while the killing of a polling agent and the alleged armed seizure of people from Mundubile’s home point to something more systematic than a few bad apples. The NRPUP’s claim that soldiers fired live ammunition and removed people whose whereabouts remain unconfirmed is either a fabrication or a description of state violence against an electoral rival. The UPND’s pre-emptive framing, that the opposition is exaggerating to delegitimise a fair result, is the standard script, but it does not explain why armed personnel would be needed to manage a party trailing by twenty-five points.

The deeper tension is economic. Zambia has returned to growth on the back of copper, yet three-quarters of the population live on under three dollars a day. Hichilema’s first term has been a stabilisation project, and the election is being fought over who gets to manage the extraction. The violence, the bias in state media, the blurring of government and party: these are not aberrations from an otherwise functioning multiparty system. They are the mechanisms by which a resource economy distributes its rents upward while exporting the costs of adjustment downward. A first-round victory for Hichilema would extend that arrangement, but the armed raid allegation, if substantiated, would mark a shift from electoral management to outright coercion, the kind of escalation that tends to follow when the margins narrow and the stakes in the ground stay high.

Trump says US to scale back South Korea military drills after it stayed out of Iran war¶

Source: BBC News

Trump's Truth Social post folds three separate grievances into one announcement: the cost of the drills, their "inappropriate and hostile" signal to Kim Jong Un, and Seoul's refusal to join the "denuclearisation" of Iran. The sequencing matters. He announced the scale-back less than 24 hours after posting a 2019 photo of himself with Kim, and the same week South Korea's president proposed formal talks to end the Korean War. The diplomatic choreography is aimed at Pyongyang, but the leverage is being applied to Seoul.

The professed rationale collapses under its own weight. Trump calls the exercises costly and provocative, yet the Pentagon and Seoul both confirmed the 11-day Ulchi Freedom Shield would proceed at full scale with 18,000 South Korean troops. The US military spokesperson explicitly framed the training around North Korean soldiers returning from Ukraine. So the reduction is announced but not yet enacted, and the stated reason for it, the friendship with Kim, sits awkwardly against Pyongyang's recent missile tests and its condemnation of the drills as "a rehearsal for an aggressive war".

What actually shifted is the price of the alliance. Trump has spent years complaining that the US provides South Korea's security "without getting much in return". Seoul committed $350bn to US investment earlier this year in an attempt to defuse that tension. It evidently was not enough. The Iran snub gave Trump a public pretext to demand more, and the drills became the bargaining chip. This is the logic of a protection racket: the security guarantee is not a commitment but a bill that can be reissued at any time.

The experts quoted are right that the military cost of scaling back drills is marginal while the diplomatic benefit is doubtful. But that misses the point. The exercise reduction is not aimed at North Korea at all. It is aimed at extracting payment from an ally who has already paid once and will now have to pay again. For Seoul, the dilemma is sharp: engage with a president who treats the alliance as a transaction, or watch the transaction terms worsen. The troops stay, the drills continue, and the invoice grows.