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La semana pasada, el 4 de septiembre, la Asamblea General de las Naciones Unidas aprobó una propuesta africana para un nuevo mapa mundial, que muestra el tamaño real de los países en relación con los demás. Su objetivo es corregir la visión del mundo moldeada por el mapa mundial ampliamente utilizado basado en la proyección de Mercator, creada por Gerardus Mercator, un cartógrafo flamenco del siglo XVI. El problema con el mapa de Mercator es bien conocido; por ejemplo, muestra a la isla de Groenlandia con el mismo tamaño que el continente africano, ¡a pesar de que África es 14 veces más grande que Groenlandia! En pocas palabras, los mapas de Mercator exageran enormemente el norte del mundo —los Estados Unidos y Europa— mientras que reducen África y la mayor parte de Asia. Tampoco trata con benevolencia al resto del hemisferio sur. Sudamérica, que tiene casi tres veces el tamaño de Europa, parece comparable a esta en un mapa típico de Mercator.

Aunque no existe ninguna razón geográfica por la que el hemisferio sur deba ser más pequeño que el hemisferio norte, los cartógrafos lo hicieron significativamente más pequeño porque tenía muy poca masa continental más allá de los 40 grados y, por lo tanto, se recortó. Esto significó que, en la mayoría de los mapas de Mercator, debido a que los cartógrafos occidentales recortaron gran parte del hemisferio sur, el ecuador quedó significativamente desplazado hacia abajo. El doble efecto de comprimir las zonas ecuatoriales, donde se encuentra gran parte de África, y desplazar el ecuador hacia abajo hizo que el norte del mundo, particularmente Europa y América del Norte, parecieran mucho más grandes de lo que realmente son. Por lo general, en la mayoría de los mapas de Mercator, el hemisferio norte parece el doble del tamaño del hemisferio sur, aunque ambos hemisferios son idénticos en tamaño.

Cualquier mapa, ya sea de Mercator o de cualquier otra proyección, presenta el problema de que se puede ser fiel al tamaño o a la forma, pero no a ambos. Se trata de un problema fundamental que surge al proyectar una superficie tridimensional sobre una hoja de papel bidimensional. No hay forma de hacerlo sin distorsiones. Solo un globo terráqueo puede representar fielmente la Tierra tridimensional. Pero entonces, ¿qué hacemos cuando queremos reproducir detalles geográficos para nuestros lectores en libros o artículos?

Las distorsiones evidentes de la proyección de Mercator y su enfoque eurocéntrico dieron lugar a varias alternativas, particularmente entre los cartógrafos de la izquierda amplia o progresista. Otros, especialmente en los Estados Unidos y Europa, se han opuesto a ella, argumentando que el tamaño no importa y que no les molesta que se les muestre mucho más grandes de lo que realmente son. Sin embargo, muchos discreparon e intentaron desarrollar proyecciones alternativas. La proyección de Gall-Peterson, que contó con el respaldo del gobierno socialdemócrata alemán de Willy Brandt, es una de esas proyecciones. La proyección de Hobo Dyer, que se encuentra en el dominio público global —lo que significa que cualquiera puede usarla sin pagar regalías—, es otra. Finalmente, las Naciones Unidas han puesto fin a las guerras de los mapas, con una victoria rotunda a favor de la moción presentada por las naciones africanas para utilizar mapas de área igual. La votación fue de 164 a favor de la moción, con los Estados Unidos como único voto en contra.

El objetivo del mapa de Mercator era facilitar la navegación de los barcos en mar abierto, donde ya no es posible orientarse reconociendo diversas características topológicas, como ríos, colinas, aldeas, pueblos, etc. En mar abierto, si identificamos nuestra ubicación en un mapa de Mercator y el destino al que deseamos llegar, podemos viajar en línea recta, tal como se muestra en el mapa. Conserva la dirección, lo que significa que, si trazamos un rumbo en un mapa de Mercator, podemos fijar nuestro rumbo según él. Es por eso que los países marítimos utilizaban proyecciones de Mercator para la navegación cuando contaban con pocos instrumentos, más allá de la brújula y el sextante, para determinar su ubicación con respecto a su destino.

Es importante señalar que la dirección que se muestra en el mapa no es la ruta más corta entre el punto de partida y el destino.

El camino más corto entre dos puntos en la superficie del globo terráqueo es el arco del gran círculo que va desde su ubicación hasta su destino. Una línea recta en un mapa bidimensional puede parecer la distancia más corta, pero no lo es, ya que no toma en cuenta la curvatura de la Tierra. En pocas palabras, el precio que pagamos por convertir una superficie curva en una plana y bidimensional es que distorsionamos la forma de la superficie. Estiramos ciertas áreas y encogemos otras. En una Tierra plana, la distancia más corta sería la que indica su brújula, pero no así en una esfera.

Anteriormente, los barcos utilizaban las estrellas y el sol del mediodía para estimar dónde se encontraban y hacia dónde debían dirigirse. Fijar un rumbo hacia su destino utilizando un mapa de Mercator y una brújula resultaba mucho más sencillo que tratar de adivinar dónde se encontraba en un océano desierto, sin puntos de referencia, y cambiar constantemente de rumbo en busca de una ruta más corta. La línea constante en el mapa se denominaba “línea de rumbo”, y seguirla ayudaba enormemente a los navegantes. Los mapas de Mercator eran populares en Europa, particularmente en Europa occidental, ya que, aparte de los árabes, eran las principales naciones marítimas.

Mientras que los árabes se enfocaban en el comercio, particularmente en el Océano Índico, los europeos occidentales se dedicaban no solo a la pesca, sino también, fuera de temporada, a la piratería, las incursiones y el saqueo de otras naciones. Los vikingos, importantes figuras románticas en Hollywood, eran particularmente brutales, ya que combinaban el saqueo con el comercio de esclavos. Por supuesto, como todos los piratas, una vez que se alcanza el poder, se puede convertir ese poder marítimo en conquista. Los hombres del norte, o nórdicos, conquistaron Francia y más tarde Inglaterra, y son conocidos por nosotros como normandos. No muy diferentes de las Compañías Holandesa y Británica de las Indias Orientales, que comenzaron con el comercio y la piratería y más tarde establecieron imperios coloniales.

No es de extrañar que los reinos marítimos de Europa occidental, para quienes la guerra, la pesca para alimentarse y la caza de focas, morsas, etc., con el fin de obtener grasa y pieles, constituían las principales fuentes de riqueza, se centraran mucho más en la navegación y la construcción naval. Esto significaba que los barcos construidos para el agitado Océano Atlántico contaban con ciertos avances de los que carecían los barcos árabes e indios, aunque la brújula, el astrolabio, los mapas astronómicos y otros instrumentos náuticos procedían todos de Asia.

Los barcos de Europa occidental contaban con cañones montados en cubierta, lo que les permitía disparar “andanadas”, es decir, disparar múltiples cañones simultáneamente, a diferencia de los cañones montados en la proa y la popa. Esa es una de las principales razones por las que un puñado de países de Europa occidental pudo aprovechar los océanos para, primero, hacerse con el comercio marítimo y, más tarde, construir sus imperios coloniales. A diferencia de los fuertes fijos, los barcos actuaban como fuertes flotantes, lo que proporcionaba a los europeos una movilidad en las guerras navales de la que carecían las fortificaciones terrestres estáticas.

Como muestra la monumental obra de Needham sobre la ciencia y la tecnología chinas, muchos avances náuticos en la construcción naval y la navegación procedían de China. Los siete viajes de los barcos de Zheng He en el siglo XV (1405-1443), que partieron de China, el sudeste asiático y la India, y recorrieron la costa árabe hasta África, demostraron que los chinos habían construido enormes barcos y una poderosa armada. En aquella época, se encontraban muy por delante de Europa y de los árabes, tanto en la construcción naval como en los buques de guerra. Las diferencias internas entre la aristocracia terrateniente y los comandantes navales condujeron a la destrucción de la armada y a la prohibición de construir cualquier buque de alta mar.

Aunque la India suministraba a los árabes la madera necesaria para la construcción naval y en algún momento contó con una poderosa armada, cedió el comercio de alta mar a los comerciantes árabes. Ni China, ni la India, ni los árabes consideraban que la armada tuviera importancia militar. Como dijo un emperador mogol: “Los océanos son para los comerciantes, no para nosotros, los guerreros”. Las divisiones de castas en la India también llevaron, en un momento dado, a prohibir a las castas superiores emprender viajes oceánicos. La travesía del Kala Pani, siempre prohibida por los brahmanes, no se respetó de manera estricta. La India experimentó una gran expansión marítima en el período budista, no a través de la guerra, sino mediante el comercio y la labor de proselitismo de los monjes budistas. Tras el resurgimiento del hinduismo en el sur, el tabú que prohibía a las castas superiores viajar a través de los océanos se aplicó de manera más estricta, dejando los océanos en manos de comerciantes y mercenarios. Por ejemplo, las principales flotas de los reyes indios – ya fuera el rey de Calicut, también conocido como Samundri o Zamorin, o Shivaji – dependían de comandantes navales y buques mercenarios, muchos de ellos al mando de árabes.

Como demuestra la historia, los mapas, el comercio marítimo y la guerra están íntimamente relacionados. Los viajes marítimos y las guerras navales confieren a los mapas una importancia estratégica. No es simplemente la ubicación de las fronteras de cada país lo que importa, sino también su visión estratégica del mundo. Podemos observar cómo esto se está manifestando actualmente en Bab el Mandeb y en el Golfo Pérsico. Un vistazo rápido a un mapa habría convencido a los líderes estadounidenses de que Irán cuenta con una clara ventaja estratégica en el Estrecho de Ormuz, al igual que los hutíes en el Mar Rojo y el paso hacia el Canal de Suez. Descuidar los océanos repite los errores que cometió Asia en una época diferente, errores de los que ha aprendido. Debemos tener esto presente también hoy en día.

Prabir Purkayastha es el editor fundador de Newsclick.in, una plataforma de medios digitales. Es activista en favor de la ciencia y del software libre.

Este artículo fue elaborado por Globetrotter.

Lee en español aquí

On September 4, the United Nations General Assembly adopted an African proposal for a new world map, which shows countries’ true size relative to one another. It aims to correct the view of the world shaped by the widely used world map based on the Mercator Projection, created by Gerardus Mercator, a 16th-century Flemish cartographer. The problem with the Mercator Map is well known; for example, it shows the island of Greenland as the same size as the African continent, even though Africa is 14 times the size of Greenland! Simply put, Mercator maps greatly exaggerate the global north – the US and Europe – while shrinking Africa and most of Asia. Nor does it treat the rest of the Southern Hemisphere kindly. South America, nearly three times the size of Europe, looks comparable to it on a typical Mercator map.

Though there is no geographical reason the Southern Hemisphere should be smaller than the Northern Hemisphere, mapmakers made it significantly smaller because it had very little landmass beyond 40 degrees and was therefore cropped out. This meant that on most Mercator maps, because Western mapmakers cropped out much of the Southern Hemisphere, the equator was significantly displaced downward. The double whammy of squeezing the equatorial areas, where much of Africa lies, and shifting the equator down made the global north, particularly Europe and North America, seem much larger than they actually are. Typically, on most Mercator maps, the Northern Hemisphere looks twice the size of the Southern Hemisphere, though the two hemispheres are identical in size.

Alternatives to the Mercator projection

Any map, whether Mercator or any other projection, has the problem that you can be true to either size or shape, but not both. The problem is a fundamental one of projecting a three-dimensional surface to a two-dimensional piece of paper. There is no way of doing this without distortions. Only a globe can truly represent the three-dimensional earth faithfully. But then what do we do when we want to reproduce geographical details for our readers in books or articles? 

The blatant distortions of the Mercator projection and its Eurocentric approach gave rise to several alternatives, particularly among broad-left or progressive cartographers. Others, particularly in the US and Europe have opposed it, arguing that size does not matter and that they were comfortable being shown much bigger than they actually are. But many dissented and tried to work out alternate projections. The Gall-Peterson projection, which was backed by the German social democratic government of Willy Brandt, is one such projection. The Hobo Dyer projection, which is in the global commons, meaning anybody can use it without paying royalties, is another one. Finally, the United Nations has ended the map wars, with a resounding victory for the motion moved by the African nations for using equal area maps. The voting was 164 in favor of the motion with the US casting the only nay vote.

Read more: US votes against UN resolution promoting maps reflecting Africa’s true size

The objective of Mercator map was for ships navigating in open seas, where we can no longer navigate recognizing various topological features, rivers, hills, villages, towns, etc. On the open ocean, if we identify where we are on a Mercator map and the destination we want to reach, we can travel in a straight line, as shown on the map. It conserves direction, meaning if we plot a course on a Mercator map, we can set our course by it. That is why ocean-going countries used Mercator projections for navigation when they had few instruments beyond the compass and the sextant to determine where they were relative to their destination. 

It is important to note that the direction shown on the map is not the shortest path between where you start from and your destination. The shortest path on two points on the surface of the globe is the arc of the great circle from where you are to your destination. A straight line on a 2-dimensional map may look like the shortest distance, but it is not as it does not account for the Earth’s curvature. Simply put, the price we pay for converting a curved surface to a flat 2-dimensional one is that we distort the shape of the surface. We stretch certain areas and shrink others. On a flat earth, the shortest distance would be what your compass shows, but not on a sphere.

Earlier, ships used stars and the midday sun to estimate where they were and where they needed to go. Setting a course to your destination using a Mercator map and a compass was much easier than trying to guess where you were on an empty ocean with no landmarks and constantly changing course for a shorter route. The constant line on the map was called the thumb line, and following it greatly helped the seafarers. Mercator maps were popular in Europe, particularly in Western Europe, because, apart from the Arabs, they were the major ocean-going nations.

Trade and piracy in the colonial era

While the Arabs focused on trade, particularly in the Indian Ocean, Western Europeans focused not only on fishing but, in the off-season, on piracy, raiding, and looting other nations. The Vikings, major romantic figures in Hollywood, were particularly brutal, combining loot with slave trade. Of course, like all pirates, once you become powerful, you can convert that ocean power into conquest. The northern men, or Norsemen, conquered France and later England, and are known to us as Normans. Not very different from the Dutch and the British East India Companies, starting with trade and piracy and later establishing colonial empires.

Not surprisingly, the ocean-going kingdoms of Western Europe, for whom war and fishing for food and hunting seals, walrus, etc., for blubber and skins were major sources of wealth, focused much more on seafaring and shipbuilding. This meant ships built for the rougher Atlantic Ocean had certain advances that Arab and Indian ships did not, though the compass, astrolabe, astronomical maps, and other nautical instruments all came from Asia.

Western European ships had deck-mounted cannons, which allowed them to fire “broadside,” meaning multiple cannons firing simultaneously, unlike the front- and rear-mounted cannons. That is one of the major reasons a handful of West European countries could use the oceans to first capture the ocean trade and later build their colonial empires. Unlike fixed forts, ships acted as floating ones, giving Europeans mobility in naval wars that static ground fortifications lacked.

Ocean navigation and development in Asia

As Needham’s monumental work on Chinese science and technology shows, many nautical advances in shipbuilding and navigation came from China. Seven voyages by Zheng He’s ships in the 15th century (1405-1443), which traveled from China, Southeast Asia, India, and down the Arab coast to Africa, showed that the Chinese had built huge ships and a powerful navy. At that time, they were well ahead of Europe and the Arabs, in both shipbuilding and warships. Internal differences between the landed aristocracy and the naval commanders led to the navy’s destruction and a ban on building any oceangoing ships.

Although India supplied the timber necessary for shipbuilding to the Arabs, and once had a powerful navy, it ceded the oceangoing trade to Arab merchants. Neither China, India, nor the Arabs saw the navy as militarily important. As one Mughal Emperor said, Oceans are for traders, not us, the warriors. Caste divisions in India also led, at one point, to barring upper castes from undertaking ocean voyages. Crossing Kala Pani, always forbidden by the Brahmins, was not strictly followed. India saw major maritime expansion in the Buddhist period, not by war but through trade and proselytizing Buddhist monks. After the revival of Hinduism in the South, the taboo against upper-caste travel across oceans was enforced more strictly, leaving the oceans to traders and mercenaries. For example, the major fleets of the Indian kings, whether the King of Calicut, also known as Samundri or Zamorin, or Shivaji, relied on mercenary naval commanders and ships, many commanded by the Arabs.

As history shows, maps, ocean trade, and war are intimately connected. Ocean voyages and naval wars make maps strategically important. It is not simply where each country’s borders lie that is important, but also how it strategically views the world. We can see this currently playing out in the Bab-al-Mandeb and the Persian Gulf. A quick look at a map would have convinced US leaders that Iran has a clear strategic edge in the Strait of Hormuz, just as Ansar Allah do in the Red Sea and the passage to the Suez Canal. Neglecting the oceans repeats the mistakes Asia made in a different age, mistakes from which it has learned. We need to bear this in mind today as well.

Prabir Purkayastha is the founding editor of Newsclick.in, a digital media platform. He is an activist for science and free software. 

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Lee en español aquí

The 18th BRICS Summit, held in New Delhi on September 12–13, occurred amid an exceptional intensification of international contradictions. Wars in West Asia, unilateral sanctions, tariff barriers, and the weaponization of finance and technology have exposed the fundamentally unequal character of the imperialist-dominated international order. Against this background, the continued expansion of BRICS reflects the desire of developing countries for greater strategic autonomy and a more democratic system of global governance. At the same time, the summit demonstrated that BRICS+ remains a heterogeneous grouping whose members differ substantially in their political alignments and economic interests.

The New Delhi Declaration, the outcome of the summit, reiterated the demand for reform of the United Nations, international financial institutions, and the multilateral trading system. It opposed unilateral sanctions not authorized by the United Nations Security Council and advocated greater trade in national currencies. The declaration also supported increased representation for developing countries in institutions whose rules continue to be determined primarily by the United States and its allies. These positions have objective significance at a time when Washington increasingly employs sanctions, tariffs, export controls, and control over payment systems to discipline countries unwilling to accept its dictates.

Read more: BRICS nations call for end of US blockade on Cuba, condemn Israeli and US violations in Iran

Ambiguity

Yet the declaration’s carefully-negotiated language also revealed the limitations of the expanded formation. BRICS+ now includes countries subjected to sustained Western pressure, such as Russia and Iran, as well as the United Arab Emirates and other states retaining extensive economic and security ties with the West. Consensus can consequently be maintained only through formulations that acknowledge conflicts without always identifying their political causes. 

This ambiguity was especially apparent in the summit’s treatment of the widening war in West Asia and the position adopted by Iran.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian used the summit to denounce unilateral sanctions and the war of aggression against Iran carried out by the United States and Israel. He correctly stressed that economic resilience cannot be separated from peace, sovereignty, and security. 

Iran also advocated trade in national currencies, greater use of the New Development Bank, and the construction of independent transport and energy corridors (as it has already created through Pakistan, which has provided six roadways for Chinese and Russian goods to enter Iran). For a country subjected to decades of sanctions, exclusion from Western financial networks, and repeated threats of regime change, membership of BRICS+ provides an important diplomatic and economic opening.

Iran’s position, however, contains a marked ambiguity. Tehran presents BRICS+ as an instrument for resisting unilateralism and defending sovereignty. Simultaneously, it must seek accommodation with neighboring Gulf states, several of which are deeply integrated with Western capital and security arrangements. Iran signed a declaration calling for restraint and de-escalation even while accusing the United States and Israel of aggression and defending its own retaliatory actions. Its militancy against hyper-imperialist pressure is therefore combined with a pragmatic effort to avoid regional isolation, secure sanctions relief, and preserve channels of negotiation.

Read more: No new talks with the US until the previous conditions are met, says Iran

This should not be understood simply as inconsistency. Iran confronts a vastly superior military and financial coalition and must maneuver within severe constraints. But it also illustrates the broader problem facing BRICS+. Opposition to Western domination does not automatically produce a coherent anti-imperialist program. The participating states are capitalist states pursuing their respective national interests. Their ruling classes may resist particular aspects of US hegemony while remaining prepared to reach accommodations with global finance or with regional reactionary powers. BRICS+ is consequently an arena of struggle within the changing world order, not an already constituted alternative to hyper-imperialism.

Partners

The summit’s most consequential political development for Asia was the meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Xi’s first visit to India in seven years confirmed the gradual improvement in relations since the military disengagement arrangements initiated in 2024. The two leaders agreed that India and China should regard each other as partners rather than rivals and approach bilateral relations from a long-term strategic perspective. They also discussed the boundary question, trade, market access and supply-chain problems.

Any durable improvement in India–China relations must be welcomed. The prolonged confrontation following the Galwan Valley clash of 2020 damaged both countries, increased military expenditure and strengthened the efforts of the United States to incorporate India into its Indo-Pacific strategy. Washington has consistently sought to turn India into a strategic counterweight to China through the Quad and expanding military and technological cooperation. A continuing India–China confrontation therefore serves US strategy far more than it serves the interests of the Indian or Chinese peoples.

Peace and tranquillity along the Line of Actual Control remain indispensable. Agreements on disengagement must be followed by sustained diplomatic and military-level engagement, clarification of disputed areas and strict observance of existing arrangements. Neither nationalist rhetoric nor competitive infrastructure construction should be allowed to trigger another confrontation. Differences over the boundary cannot be wished away, but they can and must be managed without subordinating the entire relationship to militarised rivalry.

Economic relations present an equally difficult contradiction. China is one of India’s largest trading partners and an important source of machinery, electronic components, chemicals, renewable-energy equipment and other industrial inputs. India’s enormous trade deficit with China, however, reflects both the weakness of Indian manufacturing and the obstacles faced by Indian exports in the Chinese market. Addressing this imbalance requires improved market access, Chinese investment under transparent conditions and, above all, an Indian industrial policy capable of developing domestic productive capacity. Over the past six months, two-way bilateral trade has soared.

The Modi government’s approach has alternated between dependence on Chinese imports and politically motivated restrictions on Chinese investment and technology. Its “China-plus-one” rhetoric cannot conceal the failure of its own policies to generate broad-based industrialisation. Nor can closer strategic alignment with the United States supply India with an independent manufacturing base. The US seeks privileged access to the Indian market while using tariffs, technology restrictions and political pressure whenever Indian policies diverge from its interests. The incoherence of the Modi government is best demonstrated in its inability to actually produce a national development agenda that takes advantage of the buoyancy of the Chinese economy and disengages from a United State more geared towards economic nationalism.

China, for its part, must recognize that stable relations require sensitivity to India’s legitimate concerns. These include the unresolved boundary, unequal market access and the trade imbalance. The considerable asymmetry between the two economies makes reciprocity particularly important. Beijing’s call for partnership will acquire substance only when accompanied by practical measures enabling Indian goods and services to enter the Chinese market and preventing border tensions from repeatedly overwhelming political dialogue.

Cooperation between India and China would give BRICS+ far greater weight in the struggle for democratization of the international order. Together, the two countries represent more than a third of humanity. Their cooperation could advance reform of international institutions, climate finance, technology sharing, public-health initiatives, and a fairer trading system. Conversely, renewed confrontation would paralyse BRICS+ and permit outside powers to exploit divisions throughout Asia. India must therefore pursue an independent foreign policy based on peaceful coexistence, not participate in a US project to contain China.

The New Delhi summit produced proposals for institutional continuity, stronger financial cooperation, and greater resilience among developing economies. But declarations will have limited value unless translated into material arrangements. The New Development Bank must expand lending in national currencies and prioritize socially necessary infrastructure rather than reproduce the conditionalities and corporate orientation of the World Bank. Cross-border payment mechanisms must be developed transparently, without creating new forms of domination by the strongest BRICS economies. The strong statements on behalf of the Cuban Revolution and the Palestinian people’s aspirations for self-determination will need practical application. 

Will the BRICS+ find a way to break the cruel and illegal US embargo on Cuba, and will the BRICS+ provide support for the revival of Palestinian political life?

BRICS+ embodies both the movement towards a new world equilibrium and all the contradictions of that movement. The cautious India–China rapprochement is one example of the contradiction, combining recognition of mutual dependence with unresolved strategic distrust. The future of BRICS+ will depend upon whether such contradictions are peacefully managed and whether cooperation delivers tangible gains to working people rather than merely expanding the room for maneuver of national ruling classes.

For India, the necessary course is clear: restore normal and peaceful relations with China, resist incorporation into the United States’ military strategy, oppose aggression and unilateral sanctions against Iran, and work for a genuinely democratic multilateral order. A new world equilibrium will only be when it restricts hyper-imperialist domination and enlarges the sovereignty and developmental possibilities of peoples. The New Delhi summit marked another step in that contested transition, but the direction and social content of the emerging order remain matters of political struggle.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist. He is the author of forty books, including Washington Bullets, Red Star Over the Third World, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, and How the International Monetary Fund Suffocates Africa, written with Grieve Chelwa. He is the executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, the chief correspondent for Globetrotter, and the chief editor of LeftWord Books (New Delhi). He also appeared in the films Shadow World (2016) and Two Meetings (2017).

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

The lethal repercussions of Israel’s three-year genocidal aggression on Gaza continue to unfold. Aside from Israel’s ongoing military assaults after the nominal ceasefire deal, the humanitarian crisis inflicted by the genocide – affecting food, sanitation, medication, and shelter – has become another driver of persistent fatalities. 

At least 21 Palestinians, including 12 children, died in the collapse of the Al-Saadah building in Gaza City on Wednesday, September 16, while 45 people were rescued from under the rubble. 

According to media reports, the building, already damaged by Israeli airstrikes, was housing 100 displaced people, amid a deepening shelter crisis caused by Israel’s ongoing restrictions on reconstruction materials and humanitarian aid.

Read more: Israel escalates aggression in Gaza, Kushner returns to Washington empty-handed

Hamas holds Israel “responsible for the disaster”

Hamas issued a statement, holding Israel “responsible for this disaster,” and affirming that “the building collapse represents a new chapter in the catastrophic humanitarian repercussions of the war.”

The Palestinian movement pointed out that the massive home and neighborhood destruction has forced thousands of displaced people to take refuge in ruined structures. 

It further cautioned that the severe shortage in heavy machinery for clearing debris and conducting rescue operations endangers more lives. 

Hamas also urged mediators, the US administration, and relevant international bodies to take immediate action to lift restrictions blocking the entry of necessary rescue equipment and vehicles, and to secure safe shelter for the displaced population. 

Meanwhile, the Gaza-based Ministry of Public Works and Housing warned that roughly 3,000 buildings across the war-ravaged enclave are currently deemed dangerous or at risk of collapse, which in turn poses a significant threat to thousands of inhabitants.

In July, Saudi Arabia joined the US-Israeli war on the West Asia region with strikes on Yemen. The Ansar Allah-led Yemeni Armed Forces retaliated by launching a maritime blockade alongside attacks targeting vital Saudi interests.

The renewed fighting between the two West Asian nations resulted in Ansar Allah’s takeover of the strategic Red Sea port city of Mokha last week and the liberation of all the group’s prisoners held by Saudi-backed forces on Yemen’s western coast.

Ansar Allah’s seizure of Mokha seaport is reshaping regional and global geopolitics, particularly because it serves as a primary gateway to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and coincides with developments in the Strait of Hormuz.

As these major shifts underscore, Yemen holds immense strategic geopolitical significance.

Situated on the southwestern corner of the Arabian Peninsula and overlooking the Bab al-Mandab Strait, Yemen represents a vital chokepoint connecting the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean

Consequently, internal political developments in Yemen can have global political and economic repercussions.

This fact, in turn, has put Yemen in the crosshairs of the US-led Western imperialist bloc and their allies in West Asia, which have endeavored to subjugate the country through a devastating decade-long war and blockade. 

The origin of this war coincides with the emergence of Ansar Allah, beginning when the group managed to take control of large swathes of the country, including the capital, Sanaa, in 2014.

The rise of Ansar Allah

Ansar Allah was first established in the early 1990s in the northern Yemeni governorate of Saada as a cultural and educational organization called Al-Shabab al-Mumin (the Believing Youth).

Initially, the organization introduced itself as an unarmed theological movement aimed at reviving and preserving Zaydi Shia Islam and countering the threat of state-backed Sunni Salafism, which sought to uproot the Zaydi religious identity in its homeland of Saada.

From its inception, the movement opposed the government, led by President Ali Abdullah Saleh, accusing it of corruption and criticizing its ties to the United States and its ally Saudi Arabia.

Tensions between the group and the government drastically escalated following the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. It was at that time that the group adopted the slogan (Death to America, Death to Israel), during mass protests opposing the war on Iraq.

These slogans posed a political threat to Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was attempting to position his government as a key ally in the “US War on Terror” in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. As a result his government led a brutal crackdown on protesters.

Security forces and riot police suppressed protests using live ammunition, tear gas, and batons, and arbitrarily detained hundreds of political activists, students, and opposition organizers without trial.

In 2004, tension between the Al-Shabab al-Mumin and the Yemeni government boiled over, sparking a series of six internal conflicts known as the Saada Wars. 

These clashes began with the government’s assassination of Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, the group’s founder, and triggered five subsequent rounds of fighting that lasted until 2010. The followers of the group became widely known as the Houthis ever since. 

Saudi Arabia reportedly engaged in the Saada wars by providing immense financial, political, and material support to the Yemeni government. Saudi intervention in Yemen escalated in 2009 with a direct military incursion and unilateral airstrikes against positions held by the Houthi movement.

In 2011, the group joined nationwide demonstrations, calling for the overthrow of President Ali Abdullah Saleh. It was then that the Houthi movement formally adopted the name Ansar Allah (Supporters of God). 

The ousting of Saleh weakened the central government and triggered a sweeping power vacuum, which allowed Ansar Allah to rapidly expand its territorial dominance. By 2012, the Yemeni movement consolidated firm control across the Saada governorate and large swathes of northern Yemen.

In early 2012, vice president to Saleh, Abed Rabbu Mansour, Hadi became the President of Yemen via a transition framework brokered by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), as he was  considered as a quiet consensus figure. Hadi was also strongly backed by the Obama administration. 

In late 2014, Ansar Allah allied with forces loyal to ousted president Ali Abdullah Saleh against the transitional government headed by Abed Rabbu Mansour Hadi. The fighting that followed led to Ansar Allah’s seizure of the capital Sanaa, forcing Hadi to flee the country.

2015-2022: The Saudi-led coalition’s protracted war against Yemen

From exile in 2015, Hadi requested the Saudi-led coalition to intervene in the conflict, opening the door to one of the bloodiest prolonged wars in West Asia. A conflict that, according to UN estimates, resulted in 377,000 deaths by 2022. 

Saudi Arabia was the main pillar of the coalition, leading the military campaign dubbed “Operation Decisive Storm” with a massive force, including extensive warplanes and ground troops.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) also played a key role by commanding ground and air operations particularly in southern Yemen and along the critical coastal strip.

Bahrain took part in the operation with 12 fighter jets (some sources say 15), and deployed ground troops in the southern Saudi borders to protect Saudi Arabia from Ansar Allah’s attacks. Meanwhile, Kuwait contributed with 15 warplanes.

At the beginning of the campaign, Qatar participated with roughly 1,000 ground troops, armored vehicles, a dozen fighter jets, and transport helicopters until it was expelled from the coalition in June 2017 over a diplomatic crisis with Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt.

Jordan and Morocco contributed six fighter jets each, while Sudan under deposed president Omar Al-Bashir sent three aircrafts and thousands of ground troops. Furthermore, Senegal committed 2,100 troops.

Western countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and France provided logistic and intelligence support, such as aerial refueling for coalition jets, technical assistance, military equipment, coordination support, and maritime surveillance.

The 2022 UN-brokered truce de-escalated the war rather than ending it

In April 2022, the United Nations announced an official two-month nationwide truce agreement, which temporarily halted cross-border attacks, ground and air operations, and allowed fuel imports into ports held by Ansar Allah. It also reopened commercial flights from Sanaa International Airport after years of sea, land, and air blockade imposed by Saudi Arabia. 

Rather than completely removing the blockade, the agreement only resulted in the partial easing of restrictions, while regions under the control of Ansar Allah have continued to face a near-total blockade.

Read more: Yemen demands Saudi-led blockade on the country be lifted immediately

The agreement was renewed in June and extended a second time in August 2022 for an additional two months before it lapsed in October. 

Regional developments reignited the conflict (2023-2026)

In November 2023, Ansar Allah launched a ban on all Israeli maritime navigation in the Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait in retaliation for Israel’s genocidal aggression on Gaza.

About one month later, the group significantly expanded the ban to include all ships heading to Israeli ports, regardless of their nationality or flag.

The ban continued until October 2025, despite waves of deadly airstrikes launched by the US, UK, and Israel on Yemen.

An Omani-mediated ceasefire deal between the US and Ansar Allah was reached in May 2025. The deal stipulated halting Ansar Allah’s attacks on US ships in the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab Strait, and ending US aggression on Yemen, without preventing the Yemeni resistance movement from launching attacks or naval operations against Israel. 

This same period saw a shift in the conflict between the Saudi-led coalition and Ansar Allah from active military engagement toward a tense, fragile diplomacy.

In early 2026, friction between the two major pillars in the anti-Ansar Allah coalition – namely Saudi Arabia and the UAE – surfaced as different Yemeni groups backed by the two countries clashed, apparently over territorial control in Yemen.

Read more: Tensions in Yemen: Are Saudi Arabia and the UAE becoming frenemies?

The US-Israeli war on Iran has drawn Yemen back into the regional conflict

Although Ansar Allah was established as an independent Yemeni movement, it evolved into a key component of the Axis of Resistance over time. This alignment was driven by mutual ideological foundations, shared anti-imperialist ideology, and deep strategic and military cooperation with Iran and Hezbollah.

Despite its affiliation with the resistance alliance, Ansar Allah chose not to get involved in the recent regional war waged by the US and Israel against Iran, for ostensibly strategic considerations and military coordination tactics with its allies.

Read more: Reflections on the US-Israeli multi-front war in West Asia: How the Axis of Resistance remains resilient

However, because the United States and its allies in the region seemingly view the current war as an ideal opportunity to dismantle the Axis of Resistance, Saudi Arabia decided to resume its aggression against Yemen by attacking Sanaa International Airport in July. The attack aimed to prevent an Iranian plane from landing.

Consequently, Ansar Allah launched retaliatory attacks on Saudi interests inside Saudi Arabia and on Yemeni soil. It further declared a maritime blockade against Saudi-linked commercial vessels passing through the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, demanding Riyadh end its decade-long blockade on Yemen.  

Concurrently, ground clashes over territorial dominance between Ansar Allah and Saudi-backed forces intensified, leading to key victories for the Yemeni group. Escalations have persisted up to the time of publication.

On Wednesday, September 16, Saudi Arabia accused Ansar Allah of attempting a drone attack against the city of Mecca, the holiest city for Muslims, located in western Saudi Arabia.

Ansar Allah dismissed Saudi accusations as false, saying that they reflect a “desperate attempt to mobilize public opinion.”

As the US-Israeli war on West Asia continues to reshape geopolitics, Ansar Allah’s emergence as a regional force has placed Yemen at the center of a struggle that may define the future of West Asia.

A group of 50 family members and descendants of wartime forced laborers in China filed a lawsuit against six companies on Wednesday, September 16, demanding compensation for their suffering during the Japanese occupation. 

In their lawsuit at a local court in Hebei, southwest of the capital, Beijing, the group is seeking around $55,000 in compensation for each member, along with an apology published in at least 10 Japanese and Chinese media outlets.

The plaintiffs accuse six Japanese firms of being beneficiaries of the forced labor, causing long-term pain, suffering, and the deaths of their family members, Kyodo News reported. 

According to Kyodo News, the six Japanese firms named in the lawsuit include construction firm Taisi Corp, mining firm Nittetsu Corp, and heavy industry manufacturer IHI Corp. 

Japan occupied large parts of China, the Korean Peninsula, and other parts of Southeast Asia at various times between the last decade of the 19th century to the end of the Second World War.

The Japanese military committed systemic torture, sexual exploitation, forced labor, and other cruelties against Chinese and other Asian peoples during the occupation, all which have been well documented.

Millions had to do forced labor in the territories occupied by Japan, including hundreds of thousands of Chinese people. Some Chinese forced laborers were also sent to Japan to work in mining and other industries. Thousands of these forced laborers were killed due to harsh working conditions and torture inflicted by their employers. 

Compensation and apology for crimes during occupation

The survivors of Japanese atrocities and their descendants have in different moments raised demands for compensation and apologies.

In 2014, a similar lawsuit was filed by hundreds of people in a Chinese court against Mitsubishi Materials Corp and others. The case ended in an out-of-court settlement, with Mitsubishi offering an apology and compensation to the plaintiffs.

In China, survivors cite their lack of faith in the Japanese system as the reason for filing the suit in a domestic court. 

Japanese courts have dismissed all such lawsuits. A 2007 Japanese Supreme Court’s judgment stated that all such claims were settled when Japan and China established their diplomatic relations in 1972.

However, China has maintained that the 1972 documents did not denounce an individual’s right to seek legal action. China has also often invoked Japan’s failure to acknowledge its repressive and atrocious colonial period and apologize to its victims in the region.

Reacting to the news on Wednesday, the official spokesperson of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs Guo Jiakun underlined that “forced recruitment and enslavement of laborers is one of the serious crimes committed by Japanese militarists during their foreign aggression and colonial rule.”

He urged “Japan to look history in the eye, reflect on past crimes, earnestly heed and respond to the just calls and legitimate claims of the people of victims countries in Asia, and properly resolve relevant issues left over from history with a responsible attitude.”

Protests rocked the Democratic Republic of Congo on Tuesday, September 15, as opposition supporters took to the streets in Kinshasa and several other cities to oppose proposed constitutional changes that they say could allow President Félix Tshisekedi to seek a third term.

The demonstrations were called by the opposition coalition C64 (Coalition Article 64), which has campaigned against changes to the Constitution and what it considers an attempt to remove the existing two-term presidential limit.

The demonstrations were also reported in several cities. In Kinshasa, hundreds of protesters gathered around the Limete area before the march was disrupted by clashes involving demonstrators and people identified as members of the Force du Progrès, a group affiliated with Tshisekedi’s ruling UDPS party. Police used tear gas and warning shots to disperse the crowd. At least 10 people were arrested in Kinshasa.

Opposition accuses authorities of an “ambush”

Martin Fayulu, leader of the Engagement for Citizenship and Development (ECiDé) and a leading C64 figure, accused authorities of deliberately allowing pro-government militants to attack the opposition march.

In a post following the confrontation, Fayulu said the C64 had agreed on its route with Kinshasa’s city authorities before the march. He alleged that protesters were then confronted in Limete by armed members of the Force du Progrès while police used tear gas against the marchers.

Fayulu wrote that the C64 had been “the victim of an ambush” and accused the authorities of using a political militia alongside security forces. He called on Kinshasa’s city authorities and the national government to explain what happened.

Read more: Lithium mining in the DRC: A new mineral rush spearheaded by the US, EU, and other major powers

The confrontation prevented the C64 march from reaching its planned destination and from delivering its memorandum to the authorities at the People’s Palace.

Opposition resistance has been building 

Tuesday’s demonstrations were the latest escalation in an opposition campaign that has been building since June, when there were protests after Congo’s parliament approved legislation allowing constitutional amendments to be submitted to a referendum.

The National Assembly and Senate have both backed the referendum legislation. Critics argue that the process could eventually open the way for amendments to the presidential term-limit provisions.

Tshisekedi was first elected president in 2018 and re-elected in 2023. Under the current Constitution, the president serves a maximum of two five-year terms. His current term runs until 2028.

The proposed constitutional changes have therefore become a major point of confrontation between the government and opposition. The C64 says it is defending the existing constitutional order and has rejected any change that could enable Tshisekedi to seek another term.

The protests and the crisis is happening as the government faces other major challenges, including conflict in eastern Congo and an Ebola outbreak.

Read more: Ebola spreads to 60 health zones in eastern DRC; UN warns of funding shortfall

At the end of August, at the Silverbird Cinema in the Accra Mall in Ghana, two Israeli feature films were screened alongside Ghanaian student productions. 

For the second year running, the seats for this Israeli film festival were empty. Ordinary Ghanaians declined the Israeli Embassy’s films, and a peaceful demonstration outside held placards for Palestine and against the continued killing of civilians in Gaza.

There is another screen Ghanaians must refuse to look away from, protestors asserted. The screens on which we have watched Gaza reduced to rubble, families displaced again and again, hospitals and schools destroyed, and children carried from the wreckage of a war that, despite the ceasefire announced in October 2025, has not stopped killing them.

However, something else walked through the doors of the film festival: schoolchildren. In uniform. On a Sunday.

Students from Achimota School and Accra Girls Senior High School, two of Ghana’s most prominent public secondary schools, were brought into an embassy-sponsored event at the center of a serious political controversy. Those of us who were there saw them. We have photographs and videos. The question Ghana must now answer is not about cinema. It is about who sent our children, and why.

The 2025 Israeli Film Festival

Last year, the Embassy staged a week-long Israeli Film Festival at the same venue and called it an exercise in “dialogue and mutual understanding.” Nearly 400 Ghanaian organizations, student movements, trade unions, faith communities, civil-society groups, signed one statement calling for a boycott. Protesters gathered outside. Sponsors pulled out. The Embassy still declared the event a success.

The veteran editor Kwesi Pratt Jnr., who joined the picket, recalled what that “success” looked like a year ago for the “Alhaji and Alhaji” program:

“This is the first time in my life that I’ve seen 400 organizations come together to sign one statement calling for a boycott of the film festival. I joined the picket at the Silverbird Cinema, and a few, very, very few, prominent Ghanaians, including Afenyo-Markin, attended in spite of the protest. But it was a fiasco. The room was empty. Ghanaians rejected the film festival completely.”

So the Embassy returned smaller: two Israeli films on a single Sunday, free entry, free popcorn, raffle prizes, and an invitation aimed squarely at young people. When adults again refused to fill the room, uniformed students appeared. If Ghanaian adults will not lend legitimacy to this event, should Ghanaian children be made to supply it?

The timing makes it harder to dismiss as a routine outing.

President John Dramani Mahama has publicly described what is happening in Gaza as genocide. The Israeli Ambassador to Ghana has publicly rejected that position and defended his government’s conduct. He is entitled to make his case, but he is a guest of a sovereign state, not the author of its policy.

Against that backdrop, the presence of uniformed students inside an embassy program, days after this very public disagreement, demands an accounting. Pratt put the question bluntly:

“At the time that the ambassador was attacking our president, some authorities in our secondary schools decided to side with [the embassy]. What judgment was exercised by the school authorities when they agreed to bus their students to this film festival? What were they expecting? What checks did they do on the quality of the films?”

Those are the right questions, and they are not rhetorical. They have not yet been answered and there has been no investigation.

What the students deserve

None of this is an accusation against the children. They may have had little understanding of the political purpose around the event. The responsibility belongs to the adults who placed them there.

Ghana rejected the Israeli film festival not because cinema or cultural exchange is evil. Not because Israeli artists have no right to make films. The rejection is not an attack on Jewish people. Antisemitism is hatred and must also be rejected. 

The problem is that this festival is not an example of artists meeting freely across borders. It is an Israeli Embassy-backed initiative staged while the Palestinian people continue to pay with their lives. Amid the killing of civilians and the destruction of Palestinian life, the use of state diplomacy to manufacture an appearance of normality while those questions remain unresolved is nothing less than political soft power.

Ghanaian children are not diplomatic props, and Ghanaian schools must never become extensions of a foreign embassy. Teach them, yes. Teach them the Holocaust, the Nakba, occupation and international law, and give them the evidence to think critically. That is education. Busing uniformed children into a controversial embassy function, and letting their presence become evidence of Ghanaian acceptance, is the opposite.

That is why the demand is simple, and now directed at the Ministry of Education and the Ghana Education Service: did you know? If yes, explain. If not, investigate. And if any official bypassed procedure or abused authority to place schoolchildren inside a foreign government’s public-relations exercise, hold them accountable.

Ghana’s revolutionary legacy

There is a longer tradition at stake. Ghana is the country from which Kwame Nkrumah declared that our independence was meaningless unless linked with the total liberation of Africa. Africa understands what cultural normalization is for: domination has rarely arrived only with rifles. It seeks respectability, the reception, the festival, the partnership, until oppression becomes a disagreement to be discussed politely while business continues.

Palestine poses that old question to the African conscience once more. And a small part of the answer is being written by who walks into a cinema in Accra Mall, and who is made to walk in.

For the second year, the empty seats have spoken. Now Ghana’s own institutions must speak. Our children deserve education, not enlistment. And a sovereign state deserves to decide, in the light of its own conscience, what its schools lend themselves to.

Stay away. Let the empty seats speak, for the Palestinian child who will never again enter a classroom, and for the proposition that human life is worth more than diplomatic image-building.

The Lee Administration leaked the possibility of deploying Korean forces to the Strait of Hormuz on September 3. The backlash was immediate from Korean civil society that opposes any type of support for Trump’s war of aggression. Furthermore, recent polls reveal that even 55% of Lee’s supporters oppose the dispatching of forces. And while the Lee administration has publicly backtracked, stating that nothing has been decided, it is, nonetheless, quietly undergoing the process of deployment: more than simply an assessment of the security conditions on the Strait of Hormuz, the Lee administration sent a team to check key military bases and ports that could be used at the United Arab Emirates.

Despite growing public opposition, the Lee administration is expected to introduce at the end of September a motion into the National Assembly, where it is likely to pass given his party’s considerable majority. Unlike his predecessor, the impeached Yoon Suk-yeol, President Lee is not a pro-US ideologue; he is a pragmatist. Why then is Lee going out on a limb with this deployment when the rest of the world is staying out of it?

Well, South Korea’s history has always been entangled and shaped by US foreign policy. The darker side to South Korea’s pop-culture is a country dominated and shaped through US policy and interventions. Today, it hosts the largest overseas US military base and controls the Korean military (through wartime operational control). In effect, it’s never been a sovereign state. Its economic, political, and military interests have always been beholden to the United States. 

Today, Lee is horsetrading with Trump: military support in exchange for more favorable terms in the US’s AI global supply chain of semiconductors and data centers along with a return of wartime operational control. While Lee’s pragmatism is navigating the real structural constraints on South Korea, it is ultimately short-sighted and harmful to Koreans and the world.

The war in Iran is inflicting considerable pain to the world’s economies, including South Korea that imports 61% of its crude oil through the Strait of Hormuz. Yet, even from a completely pragmatic perspective, sending Korean forces to the Hormuz does nothing to resolve this problem. In fact, getting entangled with US aggression against Iran would strain the 64-year diplomatic relations with Iran while putting a target on South Korean assets in the region. Furthermore, if the world’s greatest naval and air power cannot secure freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz, how could South Korea’s contribution make a difference? In fact, the deployment of Korean troops prolongs this war of aggression by giving Trump cover and leverage to demand that other countries, such as Japan, also deploy forces.

This isn’t the first time that South Korea would deploy forces due to US requests. In 2004, after pressure from the George W. Bush Administration, the Roh Moo-hyun administration deployed non-combat support troops to Iraq. In response, a militant Islamic group kidnapped a Korean translator and, when the Roh administration refused to cancel further and withdraw current deployment, beheaded the translator.

Most importantly, this war of aggression is not only illegal under international standards, but deployment also violates article five of the Korean constitution that mandates the government to “maintain international peace” and “renounce all aggressive war.” Thus, whether intervening in the frontlines, or in the rear, whether combatant or non-combatant, any deployment would be complicit in Trump’s war of aggression.

Ultimately, as Hamid Shahrabi, an Iranian activist and co-founder of the Global Resistance for Peace & Justice states, securing free passage through the Strait of Hormuz can be achieved but not through military pressure and destruction but by adhering to the “Islamabad MOU, which outlined measures to ensure free passage through the Strait.”

Being dominated by the US brings out the pragmatic among South Koreans. Yet, the world demands that we fight and that we hold the line against Trump. Deploying forces will prolong Trump’s illegal war of aggression. Fortunately, if Koreans can be pragmatic, they can also be fierce fighters against US imperialism when provoked. Instead of fanning the flames of war, we should fight to extinguish Trump’s forever wars.

Dae-Han Song is a part of the International Strategy Centerand the No Cold War collective and is an associate at the Korea Policy Institute.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

After the US officially admitted it deployed weapons into outer space earlier this week, Russia and China expressed concerns, calling it a threat to international peace and demanding the immediate stoppage of all such activities.

During a regular press conference on Tuesday, September 15, Guo Jiakun, official spokesperson of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said that “China opposes any arms race in outer space or any attempt to weaponize it and turn it into a warzone.”

He further said that “China stands for the peaceful use of outer space and keeping it safe” and urged the US to “stop expanding military build-up in outer space, and uphold global strategic stability with concrete actions.”

Russia’s Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova said that the US weapons deployment is a threat to international security and puts a question mark on the stability in outer space. 

“Russia has for many years been consistently drawing the attention of the global community to the grave consequences for international security that Washington’s destructive course may lead to,” Zakharova said.  

She said her country seeks “urgent practical measures to prevent arms race in outer space” and reiterated Russia’s push for a “multilateral legally binding instrument banning the deployment of weapons in outer space.” 

Though it has long been a subject of speculation, a couple of US military officials, earlier this week, admitted that its military is operating weapons deployed in outer space.  

The admission was made by US Air Force Secretary Troy Meink on Monday during a conference. He said that the US “has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action.”

Meink’s statement was substantiated by US Space Force chief Douglas Schiess, who a day later, on Tuesday, said that in the coming years the US is even planning to increase the number of orbital weapons already used by the members of his military unit.

Urgent need of legal prohibitions

Underlining the threat that the deployment of weapons in outer space poses, several countries, including Russia and China, have been calling for an international treaty to prevent any arms race in outer space for decades now.

The existing instrument, the UN Outer Space Treaty (1967) makes clear that “outer space is not subject to national appropriation by claims of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.”

It also prohibits the deployment of “nuclear weapons, or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies or stationing them in outer space in any other manner,” but it says nothing about the deployment of conventional weapons, despite declaring it should be used for peaceful purposes only.

None of the US military officials spoke about the nature of weapons deployed by the US in outer space.

Though only a handful of countries have the technological capability to explore outer space in any significant way, several countries have used satellites for military and war purposes for decades now.

The US has a dedicated space force which has recently held exercises related to possible military conflicts in space.

The deployment of weapons and claims of exclusivity, apart from increasing possibilities of an arms race between the existing powers in space; the US, Russia, and China, may also make the rest of the world more insecure.

Zakharova said that Russia is planning to submit a proposal for the creation of an international instrument legally prohibiting all weapon deployment in outer space during the upcoming annual UN General Assembly session.

She asked for more countries to join the Russian initiative and co-author the treaty document.

A little over a month into his term, far-right President Abelardo de la Espriella continues to advance a security agenda that often conflicts with certain rights historically won by Colombians.

This time, De la Espriella has signed a decree allowing police access to university campuses. In several Latin American countries, the prohibition of police access to universities has been established through student struggle to prevent abuses by authorities against student movements.

Thus, universities have historically become places where students seek refuge from repression, arrest, and regroup during times of intense social mobilization.

This was evident during the 2021 protests, known as the “National Strike,” in which students, workers, left-wing political parties, young people, and others took to the streets to protest against the right-wing government of Iván Duque. The mobilization, which lasted several months, was considered a true “social upheaval,” and many experts have seen in it the consolidation of a democratic alternative (the government of Gustavo Petro) to decades and decades of right-wing rule.

During these protests, universities became hubs of popular mobilization, driven primarily by the youngest members of society. On university campuses, protesters were able to regroup, defend themselves against police repression, and coordinate new demonstrations – among other things – always protected by the fact that police are barred from entering university grounds.

De la Espriella calls popular protests “terrorism”

Clearly, De la Espriella seeks to nip this possibility in the bud – that is, to prevent universities from once again becoming coordination centers for the protests. Many have speculated that the president is signing this decree precisely because he knows that his radical neoliberal agenda could spark major protests, and in this way, he hopes to proactively undermine the protest movement.

Read more: One month of De la Espriella’s administration in Colombia

Whether or not this is De la Espriella’s primary intention, only time will tell. What is certain is that the president views university autonomy as an obstacle to the implementation of his security agenda, which also includes curtailing the ability of informal opposition political groups to participate in public life.

“Under no circumstances will I allow public universities to continue to be sanctuaries of violence. I respect and guarantee peaceful protest, but I will not allow universities to continue to be used as sanctuaries of vandalism and crime,” said De la Espriella on X.

Furthermore, true to his combative rhetoric, he compared social protests to terrorism – a common trope in the historical discourse of the Colombian right: “University autonomy is not a blank check for impunity: I have issued precise instructions for a national protocol of action that allows us to distinguish between the legitimate exercise of protest and acts of violence, flagrant offenses, danger, or extraordinary disturbances of public order that require intervention by the authorities. The university is for knowledge and ideas, not to serve as a refuge for violence and terrorism.”

A violation of the Constitution

However, the opposition has viewed this decision as a serious attack on university autonomy. Ana Erazo, a member of the House of Representatives from Valle del Cauca, wrote: “It is an ATTACK ON UNIVERSITY AUTONOMY and a direct threat to the young people at the country’s public universities. With this, Mr. Abelardo de la Espriella is beginning to reveal what could become a BRUTAL RETALIATION against the student movement, against its ability to organize and mobilize, and against thousands of young people who historically have not supported his political agenda.”

Some universities have joined in this criticism. One of them is the National Pedagogical University, whose academic council stated that in the past, “the serious consequences of resolving conflicts within public universities through militarization have been demonstrated on repeated occasions.” Furthermore, the council stated that university autonomy is one of the pillars of Colombian democracy, along with freedom of thought and research, among other things. Losing autonomy means jeopardizing these values of the republic, it stated.

For his part, former presidential candidate Iván Cepeda said that De la Espriella’s measure contradicts Article 69 of the Constitution, which guarantees university autonomy. Regarding the announcement, Cepeda also said: “Such an announcement is not only an affront to university autonomy. It also demonstrates, once again, the authoritarian and despotic nature of De la Espriella, who seeks to stigmatize, persecute, and violate the rights of Colombian youth and the university community. Colombia has not forgotten the victims of police abuse during the National Strike, nor the history of security forces intervening on university campuses, resulting in student deaths. Young people cannot once again be persecuted or treated as an internal enemy and an enemy of the state.”

Right-wing and far-right governments in Latin America have adopted a very similar discourse regarding insecurity. The leaders share a narrative that describes how in the 1980s and 1990s, a sort of neoliberal panacea reigned supreme, but then, as if speaking of a biblical plague, the progressive governments of the early 21st century arrived. Then, their story goes, through rampant corruption, they destroyed paradise on earth and brought about various evils such as insecurity, migration, and the destruction of traditional values.

Thus, several of these new – and not-so-new – right-wing governments have won the presidency, almost always in elections where they prevailed by a narrow margin, asserting that the solution to the “disaster” is to return to radical neoliberalism and implement a security policy that restores an order which, they claim, existed before the “original sin.” This “salvation,” no doubt, will come hand in hand with military, intelligence, and operational oversight from Washington – an ally that, they say, was alienated by regional center-left governments. The most serious consequence of this distance was the infiltration of drug trafficking into all strata of society.

It matters little or not at all to these new governments that during the era of progressivism, the region enjoyed a certain positive level of security, as argued by critics of the far right. In the case of Ecuador, this supposedly only happened due to an alleged peace pact between the center-left governments and criminal groups. So that peace was, in reality, merely the prelude to what would later erupt.

A US-backed regional security program

In light of this, the region’s security policy appears to be nearly identical across all countries governed by the Latin American right and far right: 

• Expand the executive branch’s power to declare states of emergency and prolong them over time (sometimes for years, as has happened in El Salvador and Ecuador, with the consequent erosion of individuals’ constitutional guarantees); 
• Sign security agreements with the United States and become part of its hemispheric military and security policy (such as the well-known “Shield of the Americas”); 
• Attempt to facilitate US military and intelligence operations within each country’s territory (whether or not there are military bases on the ground); 
• Promote extradition proceedings to the United States; 
• Increase security spending while cutting spending in other areas such as health care, education, and housing; 
• And various other measures.

However, with the exception of El Salvador and, to some extent, Chile, the results these governments promise – to reduce organized crime and insecurity in the region through the quasi-militarization of daily life and security agreements with Washington (which many accuse of undermining sovereignty) – have not materialized.

Read more: Shield of the Americas, military operations, and decorations: Rubio’s fruitful visit to South America

Ecuador, which is facing the most serious security crisis in its history, has failed to reduce violence as promised by the executive branch, even though the country is currently under a nearly permanent state of emergency and foreign military operations are underway. According to some experts, 2026 could become the second most violent year in the country’s history, with nearly 5,000 homicides in just six months. The Noboa administration says that positive results take time and that better days are ahead. The local elections at the end of the year will surely provide a better gauge of the government’s credibility than any speculation.

In Chile, Kast managed to rally support to win the election by focusing on his security policy, which asserts that the rise in insecurity in Chile is largely due to migration from other South American countries. In response, he promised to build various infrastructure projects that would prevent new migrants from entering the country, similar to the US border wall. For now, the government is celebrating a reduction in certain crime rates, although several polls indicate that the public still feels concerned.

In Colombia, the recently inaugurated government of Abelardo de la Espriella has declared that the time for peace talks with certain insurgent groups is over and has resumed the country’s long-standing policy of waging war against insurgent and drug-trafficking groups. So far, there have already been several dozen deaths, with the bodies displayed as war trophies that the president showcases in his addresses to the nation. It is still too early to tell whether De la Espriella’s war will have a direct impact on reducing insecurity, which, according to the executive branch, spiked during Petro’s administration – a claim that Petro categorically denies.

For now, Washington has expressed its support both verbally and by providing funds to many of these countries to bolster their security, while also carrying out actions in the region, such as those already mentioned in Ecuador or operations in the Caribbean Sea. Furthermore, during a recent visit by Rubio to Peru, the secretary of state stated that US forces will act wherever invited by local governments, which foreshadows new military operations in South America.

Read more: The ugliness of Latin America’s angry tide

Without a doubt, the growth of US influence and presence in South America is undeniable. But it would be a mistake to think that this is something new. The history of Latin America in the 20th century has shown how Washington has managed to steadily increase its military presence in the region by invoking various justifications that have proven very effective in winning public support, especially those concerning the security of the population.

Decades of US intervention in Latin America

During World War II, the United States significantly increased its military presence in the region under the pretext of defense against potential military actions by the Axis powers, specifically Japan and Germany. Thus, the United States and its powerful fleet established several military bases in South America and succeeded in getting virtually all governments to align themselves with Washington’s geopolitical interests.

Shortly thereafter, Washington justified increasing its military presence in the region to halt the dangerous “communism” that, they claimed, would sweep through the region and had become a cause for concern not only for US security but also for the internal security of each country, where “dangerous” revolutionaries would destroy the social foundations of each nation. Thus, the United States and a large portion of the Latin American militaries carried out joint intelligence and other operations to promote, by any means necessary, the destruction of leftist political movements in the region – which meant killing thousands of Latin American revolutionaries through various methods, such as the imposition of bloody military dictatorships (such as those in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Bolivia, etc.) and/or boycott and conspiracy operations against anti-imperialist governments, such as Castro’s Cuba, Allende’s Chile, or so many other political movements violently aborted through the active participation of US and local forces.

However, the socialist bloc collapsed in the 1990s and brought on a crisis within the revolutionary left. Right-wing governments, incidentally, took advantage of these events to promote ultraliberal economic policies, but began to lack a new justification for expanding military and police forces, and the US presence in the region. 

One exception to this was Colombia, where the internal war served as a justification for the establishment of several US bases during the 21st century.

Read more: The ‘War on Drugs’ has always been more about war than drugs

Now that drug trafficking has become the region’s primary security threat, Latin American right-wing forces, alongside Washington, have once again raised the alarm about the threat of insecurity to promote securitist policies and an increased US military presence. Nazis, communists, and now narco-terrorists seem to be the lineage of a political strategy designed not only to promote a greater military presence in social life but also to advance neoliberal policies that are often accompanied by the aggressive influx of international capital, which typically appropriates the economic resources of this part of the Third World. 

For we must not forget that every cycle of increased security-oriented policies has been followed by lucrative and substantial profits for the wealthiest in Latin America and around the world.

In the year of the 250th anniversary of US independence, the bipartisan US Semiquincentennial Commission released “America’s Soundtrack: The Sound of 250 Years.” Perhaps unsurprisingly – because the initiative was planned over the course of a decade with the support of corporations like Amazon, Oracle, and Palantir – the playlist is a romantic ode to the most paternalistic and militaristic sides of the United States.

However, activists have pointed out that there are “Two Americas at 250.” In other words, there is a working-class history and culture that directly contradicts the imperialist project of the billionaire class. Therefore, we must study another soundtrack: one based on the struggles, desires, and traditions of the people. One person that represents this soundtrack is “America’s favorite blues man,” 34-year-old Buffalo Nicols.

Music characterized Carl Nichols’s upbringing in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Though not surrounded by musicians, he always had the sounds of jazz on the radio, his mother‘s music collection, his older brother’s hip-hop, and his older sisters, R&B, punk, and metal. This was the context in which he taught himself to play his sister’s guitar at the age of 12.

Performing with bands throughout high school, Carl found kinship among the West African community. As he played a cheap banjo along with a friend on the instrument known as the xalam, he embraced music as an opportunity to learn about other cultures. Traveling through countries like Senegal, Romania, Hungary, and Ukraine in his early 20s and learning their sonic traditions, motivated him to study Black American music with the same rigor.

Performers like Lead Belly, Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie left a lasting mark on him, specifically relating to communal and commercial music. Similarly, the writing of Etheridge Knight, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Amiri Baraka helped him understand the blues as “a living thing” rather than a set of important names and dates. He said, “There’s always been this connection between activism and folk music because I think trying to exist as an artist in America has been a political thing.”

His 2025 song “Belly of the Beast“ is one example of this because it asks about the responsibility which domestic victims of US imperialism have for protecting victims abroad. Written during the heightened media coverage of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the song calls attention to the relationship between Black Americans and Palestinians. He conceptualized the song following a period of political education defined by a collection of Malcolm X speeches and Régis Debray’s 1967 “Revolution in the Revolution?”

I live in the belly of the beast

Though I only meant to look into his mouth

It was not opportunity but chains he used to capture me

And every day I’ve tried to get back out

While these lines of the chorus speak from the individual or first person perspective, Nichols uses them to describe a common experience.This is why the song ends with the collective “we live in the belly of the beast.” The song is neither nihilistic or romantic in its allusion to topics like police killings, occupation and ethnic cleansing. Rather, in verse four, the singer puts his hope for change in the hands of the people, saying “we cannot win ’till we get organized.”

Read more: Studying the changes: a Palestinian music teacher’s lesson on will

Some, who mistake folk music as apolitical, took offense to this song. They attack him in social media comments, direct messages, and hate mail. In the spirit of the blues, Nichols said he laughs at their assumption that they can hurt him. The same minority of listeners attacked him for his 2025 song “Ice Age Blues.”

He wrote the song in response to the second Trump administration’s escalation of ICE terror. Specifically, on the widespread sense of surprise that law-enforcement would use deadly force against the US residents. He said that it reminded him of the same realization among new activists during the 2020 uprising for George Floyd. However, Nichols shows that he was not shocked by the contradiction – he ends the song by asking,

You think all that money is for war fought abroad?

They won’t hesitate to kill you in your own backyard. 

They’d be happy to kill you in your own backyard.

Nichols said that political finger pointing will not help identify the common perpetrator of a shared oppression. Instead, he urges readers to understand the state and how it works against the people; to study the basis of its patterns and changes. By doing so, he calls listeners attention to the basis of repression rather than simply what accelerates it. 

Similarly, he recommends the new generation of blues people to “return to the root.” That is, to disregard stereotypes about their Black art and study those – like Zora Neal Hurston – who preserved long-standing traditions. By reclaiming their legacy, he said that culture workers can affect consciousness on a mass level.

I know no artist really wants to be a role model or to be representing an entire people but the reality is that Black culture is such a fragile, delicate and important thing that we have to be more mindful of how we share it and how we interact with it. 

Buffalo Nichols is currently touring through states like West Virginia, North Carolina, Illinois, and Minnesota.

At the BRICS Business Forum in Bharat Mandapam on Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin read out the numbers. The eleven members of this grouping now produce more than 40% of the world’s output. The G7 produces 29. Over the last five years, BRICS countries generated more than half of all global growth. The G7 managed 18%. Narendra Modi, speaking at the same event, added that the bloc is home to half of humanity and a quarter of world trade.

This is not rhetoric. The center of gravity of the world economy has moved, and India is in the chair while it happens.

Now recall something else that took place in that same hall. On May 24 of this year, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio sat down in Bharat Mandapam for an interview with India Today. Asked about Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, he called it “illegal, unlawful, reckless, dangerous, and unacceptable.” Then he said something more revealing. “I think the whole world needs to say that, and most of the countries in the world are saying that. India is saying that.“

A US official, sitting in Delhi, announced India’s foreign policy position on its behalf. Nobody in the room corrected him. In the same interview Rubio said the trade agreement was “weeks, not months” away. Four months later, it is still unsigned.

India and the construction of the Global South

In March 1947, months before independence, Delhi hosted the Asian Relations Conference. At the Bandung Conference in 1955, India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was among the chief architects of an idea that seemed audacious then and remains unfinished now: that newly free countries did not have to rent themselves to Washington or Moscow to be taken seriously. The Bandung spirit produced the Non-Aligned Movement, then the Group of 77 in 1964, and then the demand through the 1970s for a New International Economic Order, which was simply a demand that the IMF and the World Bank stop working only for the countries that funded them. India made those arguments first and made them at a time when the material conditions were not as conducive as we see today.

What India has done inside BRICS follows directly from that. At the Delhi summit of 2012, under Manmohan Singh, the group took up the idea of a development bank and asked its finance ministers to study it. That became the New Development Bank, with an Indian, K.V. Kamath, as its first head. The same summit set up the $100 billion Contingent Reserve Arrangement. At Goa in 2016 both were made operational, and India put forward the idea of a BRICS credit rating agency, aimed squarely at the three Western firms whose verdicts decide what every poor country pays to borrow. In 2021 India proposed the BRICS platform for digital public goods. Across four chairships and two very different governments, India’s contribution has been consistent: turning complaints about an unfair world into institutions that can actually be used.

Now look at how Washington talks about the country.

In July 2025, announcing his first tariffs, US President Donald Trump called India and Russia “dead economies” and said they could “take their dead economies down together, for all I care.” He has called India the “tariff king” and its trade rules “obnoxious.” After Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi went to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit, Trump called the relationship “a totally one-sided disaster.” In April this year he shared, without comment, a post describing India as “some other hellhole on the planet.” Our foreign ministry replied that this was “uninformed, inappropriate and in poor taste.” When Rubio was asked in Delhi about the racist abuse Indians face in America, he said that “every country in the world has stupid people.”

No country of India’s size is spoken to this way. The damage is not to anyone’s feelings. It is what other governments now expect of us.

Standing is not a sentiment. It is a prediction that other capitals make about how you will behave when you are pushed. For seventy years, the prediction about India was that it would not be told what its position was.

Five things India should do this week

Start with Iran, because the silence there has cost us the most.

Standing with Tehran has nothing to do with liking its government. A member state of the United Nations was illegally bombed by Israel and the United States of America, and its leadership killed. If the largest grouping of developing countries cannot say so plainly, then sovereignty becomes a privilege granted at Washington’s pleasure, and every country sitting in Bharat Mandapam holds it on loan. Bandung was convened to reject exactly this, and India wrote the rejection.

Our own losses are not abstract. The frigate Dena was sunk on March 4 with 87 men aboard, days after exercising with the Indian Navy at Visakhapatnam. Admiral Arun Prakash, a former navy chief, called it “a perverse act” by a country “supposed to be friends and partners.” More than 11 Indian sailors have been killed since. The Hormuz carries most of our cooking gas, and its closure puts queues outside Indian kitchens. The Iranian port city and free-trade zone Chabahar, representing a decade of Indian money and our only road to Central Asia that avoids Pakistan, was abandoned when an American waiver was allowed to lapse in April. We have been here before. In Trump’s first term, India resisted American sanctions on Iran and then gave in completely, ending every barrel of Iranian oil and damaging a relationship built over centuries.

So why does the Indian state keep walking towards Washington after every humiliation? Not out of confusion. The corporate class that matters politically in this country raises money in New York, lists there, sells services there and answers to regulators there. For them, alignment is good business. For the sorghum farmer in Rajasthan, whose tariff protection was traded away in February, it is ruined. Over 45% of Indians still depend on farming.

The chairship is the one thing Washington cannot take from India this week. Five demands would make the Delhi Declaration an important step towards global south solidarity and action.

One. Name it. The declaration must say what was done to Iran and to the Strait of Hormuz and must reject unilateral secondary sanctions as a category. Washington has increased sanctions on its targets by 933% in recent decades. A bloc that cannot describe the main act of force in its own year has told everyone what its words are worth.

Two. Put Global South debt at the center. Some 3.4 billion people live in countries that spend more on debt interest than on health or education. In 2023 the poorer nations paid $25 billion more to foreign creditors than they received. India should make debt relief the bloc’s headline demand and push the New Development Bank to lend without IMF-style conditions attached.

Three. Open the door wider. BRICS should stop behaving like a club of the eleven. Expand New Development Bank membership to developing countries outside the grouping, give partner states a real say rather than a seat at the back, and have India publicly champion Africa’s place in the bloc’s decision-making.

Four. Build food security together. Set up the grain exchange, and behind it a shared reserve that member and partner countries can draw on. India, of all countries, knows what it means to depend on someone else’s harvest. We must remember the history when India went to Washington for wheat in the 1960s and spent thirty years making sure we would never do it again.

Five. Make reform a demand of the bloc, not a bid for ourselves. India has spent two decades asking for a permanent Security Council seat. It should spend this week asking for Africa’s, and for an end to the 85% voting rule that gives the United States a permanent veto at the IMF. Ask for everyone, and the asking carries weight. Ask only for yourself, and it looks like what it is.

In 1947 India convened the Asia Relations Conference in Delhi with no power and enormous standing. In 2026 it has real power and is spending the time standing down. A new Bandung will not be built by a country that waits to be told what it thinks.

Atul Chandra is the Asia Co-Coordinators of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council Mohsen Rezaei refuted United States President Donald Trump’s latest claims about his country seeking fresh talks. He reiterated that there will be no new talks with the US until it implements the conditions already agreed upon.

“Dont get distracted by the US president’s mix signals-from ‘no negotiations’ to ‘we are ready to talk.’ The stakes around oil and the straits have changed. Damage control won’t stop what’s coming,” Rezaei said in a post on X on Tuesday, September 15.

Rezaei was responding to Trump’s latest claims made on his social media post about Iran seeking a deal “quickly and badly.” Trump called Iran a “failing nation” and said he will decide “whether or not the US will choose to engage.”

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, during his visit to the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi earlier this week, also said there is no need for fresh talks with the US until the conditions in the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), signed between the two countries in June, are implemented.

Iran and Oman are seeking regional consensus

On Monday, Iran claimed it had finalized an agreement with Oman regarding the management of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz and said it’s details would be announced soon. 

“The understanding between Iran and Oman, as two littoral states, has been finalized. In consultation with Oman, we will decide on the next step, including how to announce or register the understanding,” official spokesperson of Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs Esmail Baghaei said in a press conference on Monday, September 14.

He also claimed that a scheduled discussion over the issue with the Persian Gulf countries on Monday was canceled at the last minute after Saudi Arabia’s intervention. He called the Saudi move “ill-advised” and a lost opportunity.

It is speculated that the Saudi intervention is linked to recent attacks carried out by Yemen’s Ansar Allah forces inside its territories, hitting a crucial oil pipeline and King Khalid Air Base, along with other infrastructure.

Ansar Allah claimed its attacks inside Saudi Arabia were in retaliation to hundreds of Saudi airstrikes and over a decade-long blockade of the country.

Read more: Over 300 killed in Yemen in clashes between Ansar Allah and Saudi-backed forces

Ansar Allah has also announced it will target Saudi ships carrying crude through the Bab-al Mandeb in the Red Sea.

In the past, Saudi Arabia had accused Iran of supporting Ansar Allah militarily. Iran has denied such claims, calling Ansar Allah an ally with its own independent agenda. 

Earlier, both Iran and Oman had claimed that the regional meeting on Monday was not postponed for a later date, with Omani Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi saying the delay was in the “interest of consensus.”

The talks for an agreement over the joint management of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz with Oman began in June, after Iran proposed it.

On August 25, Iran and Oman announced an initial agreement on the establishment of a temporary joint maritime corridor and a joint-mine clearance project.

The agreement, once finalized, is expected to “restore safe navigation” through the Strait while preserving the sovereignty and sovereign rights of coastal states, Press TV reported.

Strait of Hormuz is closed

On the evening of September 14, a super tanker hit a mine after trying to cross the Strait of Hormuz through what Iran calls the “illegal route” near Omani waters, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said in a statement.

Later it was reported that several of the crew members of the said ship were missing.

The IRGC reiterated its warnings to all the ships in the Persian Gulf to refrain from using the US-backed Omani route, repeating the claims about the Strait of Hormuz being shut and under its full control.

The IRGC has repeatedly questioned US President Donald Trump’s claims of the restoration of free navigation through the Strait, calling them lies. 

The Strait, through which nearly 20% of the global energy trade flowed before the US-Israeli war on Iran began in February has seen a massive fall in traffic, causing disruptions in energy supplies after the Iranians restricted traffic in retaliation.

Oil prices have crossed USD 100 per barrel several times since then. They again crossed the mark earlier this week due to the renewed escalation and fear of a blockade of oil trade through the Bab-al-Mandeb, after Ansar Allah’s warnings of targeting Saudi ships.

Nearly 12% of global trade in energy happens through the Bab-al-Mandeb. 

On Monday, Iran reiterated that the US is solely responsible for the global impacts caused by the blockade of oil trade in the region.

The US war and naval blockade against Iran are the direct reasons for the closure of the Strait, Ali Bahreini, Iran’s permanent representative at Geneva, said during a UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD) meeting asking the international community to acknowledge the fact that such unilateral actions are harmful for the global economy.

Iran assured that it will lift the blockade on the Strait of Hormuz the moment the US announces the end of its war and lifts the naval blockade and economic sanctions on Iran.

The enlargement of BRICS presents Africa with a wider field of economic possibilities by bringing the continent into closer relationship with some of the world’s largest markets, important sources of development finance and countries possessing substantial capabilities in manufacturing, energy, infrastructure, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, and advanced technologies. At a time when international economic relations are becoming increasingly fragmented, this wider range of relationships gives African countries greater room for maneuver.

But a wider choice of trading partners, financiers, and technological partners will mean considerably less if Africa continues to export raw materials, import sophisticated technologies, and occupy the lower reaches of global value chains, because the destination of our commodities may become more diversified without fundamentally altering our position in the international division of labor. It is not the direction of extraction that has ever been the problem, but its structure.

20 years of BRICS

This should therefore be the central African question about BRICS as it enters its third decade: how do we use this changing configuration of economic relationships to build productive power on the continent? The measure of Africa’s engagement with BRICS cannot simply be the increase in trade, investment or infrastructure finance, but must increasingly be whether these relationships enable African economies to convert their minerals, energy resources, labor, knowledge and expanding continental market into greater productive, technological and institutional capability.

Africa’s experience gives this question particular historical significance. The continent has been deeply integrated into the world economy for centuries, but largely through an economic structure in which minerals and agricultural commodities traveled enormous distances while much of the processing, manufacturing, technology, and financial value associated with them accumulated elsewhere. That structure remains recognizable in economies that export crude oil while importing refined petroleum products, export mineral ores while importing machinery and manufactured components and export agricultural commodities while importing processed goods derived from the same productive base.

Barriers to development

The post-colonial challenge has therefore never been to trade more but to build the productive capabilities that allow African economies to retain more value from what they produce. Yet this has become more difficult as several economies have experienced premature deindustrialization before manufacturing reached the scale needed to absorb large numbers of workers and sustain productivity growth. Domestic firms are frequently small, supplier networks remain shallow, and the relationship between universities, technical institutions and industry is often weak. Infrastructure still too often reflects the historical logic of moving commodities from sites of extraction to ports rather than connecting African centers of production.

Read more: The International Monetary Fund’s Africa policy is underdevelopment

The African Continental Free Trade Area creates the possibility of changing the scale at which we approach some of these problems. A continental market can support forms of industrial specialization that smaller national markets cannot, but the agreement will acquire its full developmental significance only when African firms possess the productive capacity to supply that market. Lowering tariffs creates trade opportunities; it does not by itself produce the firms, electricity, logistics, finance, skills and technical standards required to take advantage of those opportunities.

The emergence of BRICS creates new possibilities within this African project, but it does not guarantee the outcome. Consider the minerals required for the global energy transition. African countries possess significant deposits of manganese, platinum-group metals, cobalt, lithium, and other minerals required for batteries, electric mobility, renewable-energy systems and the wider low-carbon economy. Several BRICS economies already represent substantial sources of demand for these minerals, and their industrial and technological ambitions are likely to further increase that demand. The question is whether it can be structured to support African processing, refining and manufacturing rather than simply accelerating the export of unprocessed ore. For South Africa, this means asking whether its mineral endowments, established industrial base, scientific institutions and engineering capabilities can support new activities in batteries, fuel cells, electric mobility, and renewable-energy equipment. Elsewhere on the continent, mineral extraction can be progressively connected to refining, processing, component manufacturing, engineering services, and technical skills.

Regional integration consequently must become as much an industrial project as a trade project. A viable African battery value chain need not be reproduced inside the borders of a single country. Minerals extracted in one economy can be processed in another, components can be manufactured where industrial capabilities already exist, with assembly occurring close to sufficiently large markets. The strategic objective should be to connect these capabilities across the continent so that regional integration progressively expands the number of African firms, workers, and economies participating in higher-value activities. Regional institutions have recognized this opening. Both SADC and SACU have recently developed strategies to leverage their members’ critical mineral endowments for industrial development rather than raw export, embedding the beneficiation agenda within regional frameworks rather than leaving it to individual countries to negotiate alone. The question for BRICS partners is whether their infrastructure finance can connect regional production rather than reinforcing the extractive economic geography that routes everything to ports.

The experience of Indonesia is instructive in this respect. By restricting the export of unprocessed nickel ore, Indonesia used its resource endowment as an instrument of industrial policy, compelling downstream investment in domestic refining and processing and generating a measurable expansion of manufacturing activity around the minerals sector. The conditions in Indonesia differ from those across African mineral-producing economies, and no single approach transfers without adaptation, but the underlying logic, that a country with significant mineral endowments can use its position in global supply chains to anchor productive capability rather than to service demand, is directly relevant to the African debate. SADC and SACU frameworks enable the collective pursuit of that logic rather than individually, which considerably strengthens the negotiating position of member states.

Read more: For Africa to have digital sovereignty, it must control data and AI technology

A vehicle for regional integration and development

BRICS cooperation can be brought directly into this developmental space. Its members collectively possess capabilities that African economies require industrial finance, advanced manufacturing, energy technologies, digital systems, agricultural technologies, pharmaceuticals, logistics expertise and large consumer markets. The strategic African objective should therefore be to use these relationships to close specific productive gaps, rather than to approach BRICS principally as another destination for commodities. The test of each partnership is whether it leaves firms stronger, engineers more capable, supplier networks deeper, and regulatory institutions better equipped than before.

This requires developmental statecraft, understood not as a rhetorical commitment to the state’s role in development but as the organized capacity of public institutions to identify productive opportunities, direct finance towards them, negotiate technology partnerships on terms that leave capabilities behind, coordinate the different policy instruments that productive transformation requires, and sustain that effort through the inevitable difficulties of implementation. State capability, in this sense, is the operational form of sovereignty in practice. A government may possess all the formal attributes of sovereign authority whilst systematically lacking the institutional capacity to negotiate effectively with international capital, enforce agreements, direct finance towards developmental ends or build the regulatory knowledge that separates a beneficial technology partnership from another form of dependency.

The infrastructure and technology challenges illustrate the practical implications. Much of Africa’s transport network still reflects an extractive economic geography. The next generation of infrastructure must connect African economies and link transport corridors to processing facilities, industrial parks, energy systems, universities, cities, and regional markets rather than simply moving commodities more efficiently to ports. When an African country acquires sophisticated technology, the relevant question is what remains after the transaction: whether our engineers understand it, whether our universities can teach and improve it, whether domestic firms can enter its supply chains and whether we can progressively adapt it to local circumstances. The developmental value of technology partnerships lies ultimately in the capabilities they leave behind, and state capability is what determines whether those conditions are written into agreements and enforced when partners resist them.

Finance is an equally pressing matter in the African context. Large infrastructure projects can attract BRICS capital, but smaller domestic manufacturers and regional suppliers frequently lack the patient finance required to expand production, meet technical standards, and enter value chains. BRICS financing mechanisms, including the New Development Bank, could make a particularly consequential African contribution by complementing large infrastructure investment with financing for productive enterprises, supplier networks, and industrial projects.

Africa and BRICS

For Africa, these possibilities will not materialize automatically. The continent possesses many of the minerals upon which emerging industries will depend, the youngest population of any continent, enormous renewable-energy potential and a continental market whose importance will grow considerably during this century. But history provides ample evidence that endowments do not, by themselves, produce development, and the responsibilities that follow from this understanding fall primarily on African states rather than on any external partner. BRICS cannot perform these functions on Africa’s behalf, nor should it. What it can do is enlarge the range of instruments available to countries pursuing productive transformation.

Africa, therefore, confronts BRICS with both an opportunity and a test: the opportunity is a wider range of markets, finance, technologies, industrial partners, and development experiences, while the test is whether the continent uses this greater room for maneuver to change its productive structure or merely to diversify the destinations to which its commodities are exported. BRICS can enlarge Africa’s field of possibilities, but it cannot determine what Africa builds within it. The changing international order can give Africa greater room to act, while productive power will determine what we can do with that room.

Busani Ngcaweni is Director of the Centre for Public Policy and African Studies at the Johannesburg Business School, University of Johannesburg.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Abelardo de la Espriella has now been in office for one month. The far-right president won the election by a narrow margin over leftist Iván Cepeda (less than 1% of valid votes), despite allegations of irregularities made by then-President Gustavo Petro.

However, De la Espriella dismissed the allegations of irregularities and began his administration by attempting to demonstrate military strength, an overt religious faith (for which he had to issue a public apology), and a clear alignment with Washington’s political doctrine.

The earthquake and the return to a state policy of war

However, just three days after he took office, a powerful earthquake struck the western part of the country, leaving more than 300 dead and nearly 5,000 injured. The government’s actions drew controversy. His supporters applauded the government’s response, while critics accused the administration of exploiting the tragedy to boost his public image and giving certain countries – such as Israel – priority in search-and-rescue efforts, while denying entry to rescue teams from other countries.

Added to this is the rhetoric of a return to all-out war against subversive armed groups and criminal organizations that De la Espriella already put forward during his election campaign. But this has not been merely a matter of rhetoric. Since taking office, the executive branch has ordered a series of attacks against positions held by these groups, some of which were engaged in peace talks aimed at their demobilization.

In fact, De la Espriella canceled the peace negotiations, which had been resumed by the Petro administration as part of his “total peace” policy.

Read more: President De la Espriella cancels peace talks in Colombia

In addition, the government’s death-defying political communication strategy has caused quite a stir. In some videos, the president can be seen walking among the bodies of alleged “bandits and terrorists” (as the government calls them), which, according to the Executive Branch, number 40, in addition to the capture of nine people allegedly linked to illegal organizations.

But the bombings have also drawn significant domestic criticism. In the Guaviare Department, three minors were reported killed following the bombings ordered by the president, which were part of a series of attacks that left a total of about ten people dead. And while De la Espriella said that armed groups are responsible for the deaths of the minors, he has not been able to escape criticism from human rights organizations that view indiscriminate bombing as a dangerous threat to innocent people and the civilian population.

A return to neoliberalism

Ultimately, the contrast between Petro’s and De la Espriella’s administrations seems so evident that many wonder whether it is precisely this political distancing that serves as the compass guiding the new government – or whether Colombia is, in fact, attempting to establish a new form of state.

To understand this transformation, BreakThrough News spoke with Danilo Urrea, philosopher at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, who sees in this first month a clear shift toward a return to a state policy of war – one that had previously been implemented with negative results: “In Colombia, this was historically known as the era called ‘La Violencia,’ which was one of the worst periods the country has ever experienced in terms of the barbarity it generated.”

“The president presents the killing of people to the country as a success,” he added. “But he also does so with an aesthetic and a semiotics that portray death, murder, and the like as a possibility for the country. And in a context like Colombia’s – where we have the highest death toll on the entire continent, surpassing even the combined death tolls of all the region’s dictatorships – this shows us that it is a step backward in terms of the possibility of building a country based on dialogue and reconciliation.”

Urrea also says the current government is trying to push the idea that the country it has inherited is in a disastrous financial situation, which is why it must promote a radical neoliberal policy: “We’ve identified efforts to promote a supposed economic turnaround for the country through old formulas that have already been tried and proved disastrous for social cohesion, for the territories, and for the relationship between humans and nature – with negative impacts on the communities living in the very places where this return to an extractive economy is once again being proposed.”

Furthermore, he warns that in the short time De la Espriella has been in office, there has been a setback in environmental and labor matters: “He has also come under attack during this first month, as he has begun to dismantle the gains made in terms of wages, recovery, overtime pay, and certain labor protections … which had been restored under President Petro’s administration through reforms and which this administration is now once again rapidly undoing with the stroke of a pen, supposedly to improve economic conditions. That, in very general terms, is what we’re seeing and what’s projected: the deregulation of all social benefits, of all the hard-won gains; the complete dismantling of all reforms; and the surrender of the country – in the areas of health, education, food, and all fundamental rights – to privatization processes primarily for the profit of transnational corporations.”

A new (old) geopolitical doctrine

Following the Petro administration’s attempts to defend the Palestinian people against Israel’s onslaught, as well as its various clashes with Washington’s hemispheric geopolitical agenda, Urrea asserts that Colombia has joined a regional strategy of control orchestrated by Washington: “The rise of the far right, which is well known … Through this administration, Colombia has become yet another outpost of U.S. imperialism’s advance across the region. And obviously, this has far-reaching consequences for the geopolitics of Latin America and the Caribbean in particular.”

WATCH: Colombia’s new president declares ‘colonial allegiance’ to US & Israel

Furthermore, Urrea highlights the historical importance Colombia – a country with access to both the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea – has held in the United States’ geopolitical strategy to control natural resources: “From a geopolitical standpoint, conditions are being created for Colombia to once again become one of the countries that facilitates U.S. military control – but above all, control over the natural resources and assets that are so coveted in this era of challenges for the United States in terms of its economic capacity, its dispute with China, and everything related to critical minerals.”

What is the opposition doing?

Urrea notes that, for now, the opposition parties have not managed to formulate a clear response to De la Espriella’s project. First, he points to a certain caution regarding a state policy that promotes violence and war: “There is obviously a great deal of fear regarding the actions I mentioned earlier – this language of violence, death, and murder. And obviously, in a country like Colombia, this has repercussions for the ability of those opposed to the current regime to act. Furthermore, because there has been an increase in the targeted killings of social leaders in various parts of the country, especially in areas most affected by geopolitical disputes as well as conflicts over economic and commercial control, illegal economies, and so on.”

However, Urrea notes that a coordinated opposition to the popular sectors could emerge, and the people might offer a peaceful and better-coordinated response: “We should consider an opposition that stems more from the popular sector, and there, I believe, there is also fear about how to react in the face of a violent scenario, a dangerous scenario, and manipulation. But I believe that organizations are now focusing on analyzing what the main peaceful and strategic causes might be to address the current situation. It seems to me that one of these fundamental aspects will undoubtedly be, and is already taking shape in the country through popular organization and mobilization, the defense of the environment, the defense of territories that are already being targeted for the control and exploitation of natural resources by transnational corporations, and the issue of fracking.”

Following a fresh escalation in the war in Yemen over the last few days and reports of possible US involvement, Iran called for an end to all forms of external interference in the country and reiterated the need for the resumption of Yemeni-Saudi dialogue to end the decade-long conflict.

Iran “reiterates its principled and steadfast position regarding the necessity of respecting Yemen’s independence, national sovereignty and territorial integrity, and the need to end the illegal and inhuman blockade of the country,” its Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement on Friday, September 11.

The statement followed the news of Saudi Arabia seeking fresh assistance from the US against the Ansar Allah-led Yemeni forces, who captured various strategic locations around the country’s Red Sea coast earlier this week in a fresh escalation in fights with Saudi-backed forces.

Saudi Arabia has already carried out over 60 air strikes in Yemen since the outbreak of the recent fights. On Thursday, Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman reportedly called President Donald Trump asking for US military intervention as well.

The US has previously supplied key military assistance and weapons to the Saudi Arabia-led coalition in the war against Ansar Allah. It was withdrawn during the Joe Biden administration briefly, after a massive popular campaign against US involvement.

The US has bombed Yemen on several occasions in the past months, citing its alleged attacks on “freedom of navigation” in the Red Sea during the Yemeni campaign against Israel in support of the Palestinian people in Gaza.

US military involvement in Yemen

On Thursday, US officials admitted the US was ready to assist Saudi Arabia and forces backed by it in Yemen once again in order to “protect its core national security interest” in the region.

The US has once again defined its core interest in the region as the “protection of freedom of navigation” in the Red Sea through which around 12% of global trade passes.

The US claims Ansar Allah is acting as a proxy of Iran and sees the escalation in Yemen as an Iranian attempt to block oil trade through the Red Sea as well, after its ongoing blockade in the Strait of Hormuz.

This is despite Ansar Allah rejecting such media reports and assuring that their latest campaign does not threaten ship movements through the Bab al-Mandab.

Iran maintains that Ansar Allah is not a proxy but an independent force and an ally.

The US has already deployed over a 100 military advisors to Saudi Arabia to assist it in the war, according to reports in US media.

Saudi Arabia has imposed a comprehensive land, sea, and air blockade on Yemen since an international coalition led by it started the war in 2015. The blockade prevented the flow of crucial humanitarian supplies to the country causing a massive crisis, including hundreds of thousands of Yemenis dying due to the lack of food and medicine during the COVID outbreak.

The Saudi blockade even threatened flights carrying patients and people trapped outside the country from landing at Sanaa airport. The only exception was during a short period in 2022 when a pause in the war after rounds of negotiations facilitated by the UN had temporarily provided some relief.

Ansar Allah announced the end of the 2022 ceasefire following Saudi Arabia’s attacks on Sanaa airport in July, threatening an Iranian aircraft with diplomats demanding the immediate end of the decade-long blockade.

Noting that the people of Yemen have a right to “a dignified life free from pressure, intimidation and oppressive blockade,” Iran demanded the immediate resumption of the dialogue on the roadmaps already agreed upon in the past.

Iran also offered its offices to facilitate the Yemeni-Saudi dialogue.

The Israeli army announced on Thursday, September 10, that it dismantled Hezbollah’s underground infrastructure beneath Ali al-Taher ridge in southern Lebanon.

The army claimed that the strategic facility contained scores of Iranian-made rockets, missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), machine guns, and hundreds of mines and explosive devices.

It added that a central command complex of Hezbollah’s Badr Unit was located within the infrastructure, and included command centers, weapon storage rooms, and living quarters, which enabled the group’s fighters to operate underground for long periods of time.

The Israeli forces used 1,100 tons of explosives in the operation to demolish the two-kilometer tunnel network beneath Ali al-Taher, triggering a 4.1-magnitude tremor.

Israeli media outlets quoted unnamed military officials as saying that Hezbollah fighters, who were holed up inside the tunnels, chose to resist the Israeli forces, though they were given the option to surrender.

The massive operation in the Ali al-Taher ridge came one week after the Israeli forces declared that they had seized the highland.

What makes the Ali Al-Taher ridge a strategic target?

Besides serving as a nerve center for Hezbollah’s Bader Unit, Ali al-Taher provides a commanding vantage point over the city of Nabatieh and the Iqlim al-Tuffah region, which represent primary operational, logistical, and command centers of the Lebanese resistance group.

Furthermore, the highland, which rises about 600 meters above sea level, overlooks vital transportation routes and areas around the Litani river, and those connecting the coast to the Bekaa Valley.

On Saturday, September 5, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee visited Turmus Ayya village northeast of the West Bank central governorate of Ramallah and Al-Bireh.

The purpose of the visit was apparently to meet the residents of Turmus Ayya, the majority of whom hold US citizenship, and hear about the spike in Israeli settler violence against them in recent years that resulted in deaths and damages to their properties.

Read more: Family of Palestinian-American man killed by settlers in West Bank demands US take action

A symbolic and contradictory visit

While the unusual visit was seen by some as an important diplomatic engagement, commentators and analysts slammed the move as “largely symbolic,” doubting its ability to put an end to these ongoing crimes against Palestinian-Americans in the West Bank.

Critics also highlighted a contradiction in Huckabee’s rhetoric, pointing out that his condemnation of violent settler attacks as “criminal acts” and “terror” clashes sharply with his long-standing, unwavering support for the settlement movement.

“I hope you recognize that I’ve been very clear in public statements saying that when someone takes over another person’s home, if there are squatters that come in and put up their own flags and take possession of something that does not belong to them; if they burn a car, if they torch a mosque, if they go into someone’s home and vandalize it, paint graffiti on the walls, that’s a criminal act,” Huckabee stated at his town hall meeting with the residents of Turmus Ayyah in the presence of reporters. 

“But it extends beyond a criminal act. It’s an act of terror. I’ve been criticized a little bit for calling that terror, but terror is when a person is forced to change his or her behavior because of the behavior of someone else who is trying to use intimidation to make them afraid to live in their own homes, to make their children afraid to play in their own yards, to be able to walk their own streets,” he continued.

During the meeting, the US Ambassador admitted the Trump administration’s inability to stop settler attacks or even investigate them.

“There are things the American Embassy cannot do. We cannot investigate criminal activity, because we don’t have that authority in another country. We cannot adjudicate criminal activity in another country because we don’t have the authority to do that,” Huckabee noted. 

Huckabee was censured for downplaying the scale of settler violence by describing the perpetrators as “a very tiny minority,” “a tiny little group of marauders,” and “a few hundred people.” Critics suggest that this perspective diminishes the gravity of the situation, especially as reports indicate that over 4,500 settler attacks have been carried out in the West Bank since the beginning of 2026.

Moreover, the US diplomat drew heavy criticism for using the biblical terms “Judea and Samaria” to refer to the occupied West Bank, during his discussions with Palestinians in Turmus Ayya.

This in turn pushed Sky News correspondent Adam Parsons to challenge him on the use of these terms.

“You’ve called it Judea and Samaria, that’s not what the rest of the World calls it, it’s not what Palestinians call it, and you’ve said that there is a small number of settlers across the West Bank. People here say that your words are empowering violent settlers who live over there to intimidate and to commit acts of violence on a daily basis. Do you take personal responsibility?”  Parsons asked.

Huckabee answered, saying:

“I strongly disagree with your conclusion that I am endangering people. I am here today to listen to people who have their legitimate grievances. The reason I use the terms Judea and Samaria is because they’re ancient biblical terms of this land. 80% of the bible happened in the area of Judea and Samaria. The West Bank is a nebulous term to me.”

For many, Huckabee’s justification has not absolved him from the responsibility. It rather lays bare his pro-Israel stance, deeply anchored in his evangelical Christian faith and Christian-Zionist convictions.

It is worth noting that even during Huckabee’s visit to Turmus Ayya, two Israeli settlers drove directly past the home hosting the visiting delegation. While this provided a striking example of the routine intimidation the village faces, it was also widely interpreted as an act of direct defiance of the US delegation.