2026-08-29 ATS briefing

The Fed and the Treasury Are in Denial

Ref: A1 Item-ID: article-565271245b Source: Project Syndicate

Pistor's flat-earth analogy does real work, but the sharper point sits behind it. The postwar dollar system rested on a circular logic: the US issued debt, the world bought it because the dollar was the reserve currency, and the dollar was the reserve currency because the world held US debt. That loop held for decades because the US wrote the rules. The denial now is the refusal to admit that the privilege was never a property of the dollar itself but of the power arrangement behind it.

If the US must compete for buyers of its debt, it must offer terms. Higher yields mean higher borrowing costs, which tightens the fiscal arithmetic exactly when the state needs to spend. The Fed and Treasury are denying that the market they manage is a political construction, its stability resting on coercion and hierarchy rather than equilibrium. The orthodoxy of flat markets persists because it absolves policymakers of responsibility for the institutions they built and can no longer control.

What goes unsaid matters too. An eroding dollar hegemony does not produce a neutral multipolar system but a more fragmented one, where rival blocs issue their own reserve assets and the US loses the capacity to run external deficits without consequence. For working people in the US, that ends the era of cheap imported goods and low inflation financed by foreign savings. The class that benefited from the arrangement will not be the one that pays for its unravelling.

What's in the US-Venezuela 'biggest oil deal in world history?'

Ref: A2 Item-ID: article-18390da0f2 Source: Al Jazeera

Trump's boast of the "biggest oil deal in world history" is a claim about scale that obscures what is actually being signed. The arrangement reportedly gives US companies control over 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan crude, a figure that dwarfs any single concession in the industry's past. Yet the deal is not a commercial contract in any ordinary sense. It is the product of sanctions leverage, with Washington holding the ability to lift or tighten restrictions on Venezuelan exports as it pleases.

The Venezuelan government's willingness to sign suggests the pressure has become unbearable. Oil revenues have been the state's lifeline, and the sanctions regime has strangled access to markets, technology and finance. In exchange for relief, Caracas appears to have surrendered something more fundamental than a share of future profits: the strategic autonomy to decide who buys its oil and on what terms. Critics quoted in the piece call it predatory, and the description fits. A deal negotiated under the threat of continued economic strangulation is not a negotiation.

For the US, the prize is less about immediate supply than about locking in a geopolitical position. Control over Venezuelan reserves, even if nominal, shifts the balance in a region where China and Russia have been courting Caracas for years. The arrangement effectively converts a sovereign resource into a US strategic asset, with the Venezuelan state reduced to a rent collector on its own territory.

The test will come when oil prices move. If prices fall, the economics of extracting heavy Venezuelan crude become marginal, and the US companies holding these rights will face the classic overaccumulation problem: vast reserves that are worthless to develop at current costs. The deal's durability depends on a price environment Washington cannot control.

The Sanctions Illusion

Ref: A3 Item-ID: article-7d332a6fbf Source: Project Syndicate

Trump’s own officials reached for the D-Day analogy when announcing the latest round of pressure on Iran, and the authors of this piece take that framing seriously enough to dismantle it. Sanctions, they argue, are not a scalpel that spares civilians while targeting elites. The empirical record across Russia, Iran, Venezuela and Cuba shows the opposite: the pain lands hardest on ordinary people, and regimes adapt by building parallel economies, shifting trade toward China and other non-Western partners, and entrenching themselves further.

The argument is familiar, but the authors add a useful twist by examining the internal logic of the sanctions regime itself. If the goal is to change behaviour, then the mechanism is self-defeating. Sanctions create the very conditions that make target governments more resistant to pressure: they consolidate domestic support around the flag, give ruling factions a ready-made explanation for economic hardship, and incentivise the development of alternative financial and trading systems that outlast the sanctions themselves. The more comprehensive the sanctions, the more they push the target economy toward self-sufficiency and toward deeper integration with rival blocs.

What the piece does not fully confront is the possibility that the stated goals are not the real ones. If the United States and its allies genuinely believed sanctions would topple the Iranian or Russian governments, the evidence of repeated failure would have changed course by now. The persistence of the policy despite its demonstrated ineffectiveness suggests sanctions serve other functions: signalling resolve to domestic audiences, degrading target economies over the long term, and maintaining the fiction that the West retains instruments of coercion it no longer possesses militarily. The authors gesture at this when they note that sanctions have become a substitute for war, but they stop short of asking what it means when a substitute fails yet remains the policy of choice.

For those watching from the left, the relevant point is not whether sanctions work but what their continued use says about the declining capacity of Western states. A policy that inflicts mass suffering without achieving its political objectives is not a failed tool. It is the current form of imperial management, one that outsources the costs of confrontation to civilian populations while preserving the appearance of measured statecraft.

Technocracy Can't Fix Europe

Ref: A4 Item-ID: article-7e34aff40c Source: Project Syndicate

Mario Draghi and Patrick Collison have launched the Rhine Group, a private club of European business, finance and tech elites tasked with restoring the continent's capacity to innovate and grow. The initiative's premise is that Europe's problem is technical: a competitiveness gap that can be closed by smarter industrial policy, better regulation and more risk capital, all designed by experts and insulated from the messy business of democratic politics.

That premise inverts the actual relationship between Europe's economic stagnation and its political arrangements. The Rhine Group's members are not outsiders arriving to fix a broken system; they are the system's most successful products. The same regulatory state they now propose to streamline was built with their input and serves their interests. The fragmentation of European capital markets they lament reflects the absence of a European political authority capable of forcing integration, and no private club can conjure that authority into being.

What makes the initiative revealing is its timing. Draghi's own 2024 competitiveness report identified the core problem as a coordination failure among member states, yet the response is a voluntary association of the already powerful. This is the political form of a ruling class that has lost confidence in the institutions it controls: when the European Commission cannot act, the elites assemble privately to do its work. The Rhine Group may produce useful policy papers, but it cannot resolve the contradiction at the heart of its own project, which is that restoring European competitiveness requires political decisions that would hurt the very interests now gathered in Alpbach.

Leave Europe to the Europeans

Ref: A5 Item-ID: article-faba7e1fd6 Source: Foreign Affairs

The 1987 newspaper ad follows Trump around like a shadow, and now the shadow has a Pentagon review attached to it. Kavanagh and Logan, writing from the libertarian think-tank wing, make the case that Washington should actually follow through on the rhetoric this time: pull tens of thousands of troops out of Europe within two years, force the continent to build its own conventional defence, and let the alliance's command structure follow the money out the door.

Their argument rests on a fiscal arithmetic that is hard to dispute. The United States carries $40 trillion in debt, adds $2 trillion a year, and spends roughly $100 billion annually on Europe's defence. Europe, by contrast, has the aggregate wealth to fund its own security but has spent seventy years discovering reasons not to. The authors are clear-eyed about why: as long as the American guarantee holds, European governments will keep cashing the peace dividend and expanding social programmes. The only credible signal, they insist, is the physical removal of troops. Words have failed since Eisenhower; only boots on planes will concentrate European minds.

There is a genuine analytical tension here. The authors frame the drawdown as a correction of European free-riding, but the deeper logic of NATO was never primarily about defending Europe from the Soviet Union, and after 1991 it became explicitly about institutionalising American power on the continent. The alliance's eastward expansion, which they mention almost in passing, offered security guarantees to vulnerable states without any serious calculation of what defending them would require. That is an American overcommitment problem Washington created for itself.

The authors' solution is coherent within its own terms. A smaller footprint would relieve American overextension and free resources for the Pacific. But they glide past the obvious collision: the same Congress that will resist any troop reduction is the institution that authorised the expansionist posture in the first place. And the Europeans they expect to step up have spent three decades structuring their militaries around the assumption that they would never have to fight alone. The posture review may produce a plan, but the political forces that sustain the current arrangement are not going to dissolve because a think-tank memo says they should.

Shipping's new order is Eastern

Ref: A6 Item-ID: article-562f6df6eb Source: Hellenic Shipping News

The 96% figure deserves to sit at the centre of this. Nearly every shipowner and executive surveyed by Kapa Research regards China as important for strengthening global shipping, a rating that leaves the EU and US trailing. That is not a commercial judgement about freight rates. It is a statement about where the industry believes the future is being manufactured, quite literally. The executive quoted puts it as "the speed, the organisation and the sense that the future is being made there".

The survey's own language is unusually frank. China is pushing the international system "less based on values and more on transactions", and the report openly describes a "battle of impressions" that the East is winning. What makes this material for a Marxist reading is the split between the industry's perception and its own expertise. The same respondents who hand China the fleet, the shipyards and the economic weight give Greece the management crown by a wide margin. Kapa calls this a paradox. It is better understood as a division of labour within capital itself: the Chinese state has built the productive base, while the traditional maritime centres still hold the operational knowledge. That knowledge is itself a form of property, and it is what China's shipbuilding expansion will eventually absorb or render redundant.

The political ratings sharpen the picture. Xi Jinping's +44 net favourability among shipowners is explained by the report as a preference for predictability over the "unpredictable source of tariffs" in Washington. An authoritarian state appears as the guarantor of stable accumulation. Shipping capital has no loyalty to any political model. It rates whoever can secure the conditions for the next voyage.

The industry's confidence amid crisis is the other notable finding. Seventy per cent say shipping has improved over five years, and nearly half say the industry benefits from turmoil. "Instability is our new operating environment" is the honest formulation. Shipping has become a rentier on disruption, collecting higher rates from rerouted vessels and longer transits. The EU's Emissions Trading System is resented because it taxes that rent-seeking, while Chinese yards build cheaper ships without the same green constraints. "We pay to be green. They pay to be competitive" is the class position of the Western shipowner in one sentence. The next competitive divide, data and AI, will determine whether the East's industrial lead extends into the informational layer of the industry, or whether the Greek management model survives by selling its expertise back to the yards that threaten it.

Ecuador sentences ex-president Moreno to five years in jail in bribery case

Ref: A7 Item-ID: article-4fcf35fdaa Source: Al Jazeera

Moreno's defence rests on a narrow reading of his own signature: he was vice president, not president, when the bribes flowed, so the contracts were someone else's. The court has rejected that distinction, and the sentence lands on a man who was already a peculiar figure in the regional landscape, a Correa successor who governed as a right-wing austerity project. The bribery conviction now gives that political trajectory a legal coda, though the timing deserves attention. The investigation opened in 2023, the trial concludes in 2026, and the sums involved, roughly $76m in fraudulent consulting contracts from Sinohydro, are substantial but hardly exceptional by regional standards.

What makes the case structurally interesting is the Chinese state-owned firm at its centre. Sinohydro paid, the prosecution alleges, and the former Chinese ambassador to Quito has been sentenced alongside Moreno. That is a rare public acknowledgement from the Ecuadorian judiciary that the corruption network ran through the diplomatic channel of a major creditor state. Coca Codo Sinclair was a flagship of Chinese infrastructure lending in Latin America, and its persistent technical failures have already strained the relationship. The conviction formalises what the engineering reports suggested: the project was overpriced, poorly built, and lubricated with kickbacks at every level.

The permanent ban from public office matters more than the five-year sentence. Moreno is 73 and politically finished regardless, but the ruling strips the right-wing bloc of a figurehead who could have been rehabilitated as an anti-Correo symbol. For the left, the temptation is to treat this as vindication of the Correa line that Moreno was always a traitor to the project. That reading is too comfortable. The court has convicted a corrupt administrator, not the system of extractive infrastructure financing that made his kickbacks possible. The next Coca Codo will be built by someone else, and the bribes will find a new route home.

New! Chris dePloeg's 'The Exterminating Empire'

Ref: A8 Item-ID: article-ca74763851 Source: Monthly Review

The interview with Chris de Ploeg lands at a moment when the exterminatory logic he describes has become impossible to fence off as a colonial aberration. Genocide in Palestine is the form accumulation takes when the expansionary frontier closes. De Ploeg's argument, as presented here, refuses the comfortable distinction between the violence of the periphery and the orderly exploitation of the core. Slave plantations and scorched-earth campaigns were laboratories where the relation between profit and annihilation was worked out, not pre-capitalist holdovers.

The book's insistence on omnicide as a persistent tendency cuts against the liberal hope that empire can be reformed into a benign regulatory order. If the drive to kill everything has always been present, then climate apartheid is a policy failure only in the sense that it treats the biosphere as a cost to be externalised. The claim that these tendencies could annihilate the imperial core itself is the sharpest provocation. It suggests that the same metabolic rift that destroys the conditions of life in the Global South will eventually consume the metropolitan centres, not through revolutionary agency but through the sheer momentum of accumulation.

What remains underdeveloped in the summary is the question of resistance. If exterminism is structural, then reformist pressure within imperial states is exhausted before it begins. The only politics adequate to the threat is one that breaks with the imperial division of labour entirely, which is to say, the politics of the revolutionary left in the core refusing its own material privilege. That is a harder demand than solidarity, and the interview's framing does not yet say how de Ploeg addresses it.