Donald Trump’s campaign to bring Greenland under United States control has often been dismissed as bluster. That is a mistake. Behind the language of a property deal lies a serious attempt to revive an old imperial principle: that Washington may decide the political and economic future of the entire Western Hemisphere. Greenland, strategically placed between North America and Europe, has become a test of that claim – and of whether the sovereignty of a small Indigenous nation counts when it conflicts with the ambitions of a great power.

Trump floated buying Greenland during his first presidency in 2019. After his re-election, the proposal became more aggressive. In December 2024 he declared US “ownership and control” of Greenland as an “absolute necessity.” On January 7, 2025, he refused to rule out military or economic coercion against Greenland and the Panama Canal, saying, “We need Greenland for national security purposes.” He subsequently insisted that the United States would obtain the island “one way or the other.” The claim mixed several arguments: Greenland is vital to missile defense, Russia and China threaten the Arctic, Greenland’s rare-earth deposits are strategically valuable, and Greenlanders would supposedly welcome US rule.

The last claim was demonstrably false. A January 2025 survey conducted in both Greenlandic and Danish found that 85% of Greenland’s population opposed leaving the Danish realm to join the United States, while only 6% supported it. Yet the same poll showed a majority favoring eventual independence. That distinction is central. Greenlanders’ desire to end Danish colonial tutelage cannot be converted into consent to US annexation.

A military relationship without annexation

The security case for US ownership is misleading because Washington already enjoys extensive military rights in Greenland. The relationship began during the Second World War. With Denmark occupied by Nazi Germany, its ambassador in Washington signed a 1941 agreement permitting the United States to defend Greenland and construct facilities there. Denmark sought a US withdrawal after the war, but Cold War strategy prevailed.

The 1951 Defense of Greenland Agreement, concluded under the North Atlantic Treaty, authorized the United States to establish and operate “defense areas.” It enabled the rapid construction of Thule Air Base – renamed Pituffik Space Base in 2023 – at a location ideal for the shortest air and missile routes between the Soviet Union and North America. At its Cold War height, the US operated numerous installations across Greenland. Today Pituffik, Washington’s northernmost military base, performs missile-warning, missile-defense and space-surveillance functions.

The agreement offers Washington wide operational freedom. A 2004 amendment – the Igaliku Agreement – recognized Greenland’s Home Rule government, made Pituffik the sole existing defense area, and required consultation before significant changes or the creation of new defense areas. It also established cooperation on economic, technical, and environmental issues. In other words, if the United States believes more radar, ports, airfields or personnel are necessary, a legal mechanism already exists to negotiate them with Denmark and Greenland. Sovereignty is, therefore, not a military requirement.

The history of the bases also explains why “security” is not a neutral word in Greenland. In 1953, Danish authorities ordered 116 Inughuit – 27 families – to leave the newly established Qaanaaq, while the others relocated to settlements elsewhere in the district. Camp Century was constructed beneath the ice in 1959-60 and was connected with the secret Project Iceworm proposal for an extensive network of nuclear-missile launch sites.

In 1968, a US B-52 carrying four hydrogen bombs crashed on the sea ice at Thule Air Base, causing plutonium and other contamination. The accident exposed the inconsistency between Denmark’s publicly declared policy against nuclear weapons on Danish territory in peacetime and the Danish government’s secret permissions for the US to store nuclear weapons in Greenland. Abandoned installations left fuel, waste and other pollution. Greenlandic reporting continues to question who will pay for future clean-ups. The military relationship protected US strategic interests while its human and environmental costs were disproportionately borne by Greenlanders.

Greenland ceased formally to be a colony in 1953, gained Home Rule in 1979 and expanded self-government in 2009. The Self-Government Act recognizes Greenlanders as a people entitled to self-determination and provides a path to independence. Washington reopened its Nuuk consulate in 2020, and cooperation grew in trade, education, mining, and research. Greenland’s governments (from Kuupik Kleist to Jens-Frederik Nielsen) have welcomed economic ties with Washington, but reject the tendency of Washington to want more and more from the island for its military needs.

From Monroe to Donroe

Trump’s Greenland demand belongs to a wider hemispheric policy. The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 warned European powers against new colonial intervention in the Americas. Presented as anti-colonial, it evolved into a claim of US supremacy. Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 corollary asserted a right of intervention in Latin America, furnishing ideological cover for occupations, regime changes, and control over strategic assets.

Trump’s supporters rechristened its latest version the “Donroe Doctrine.” The label links pressure on Greenland with demands concerning the Panama Canal, threats against Cuba and Colombia, claims over Canada, and US intervention in Venezuela. In late 2025, the White House formally proclaimed a Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, asserting US leadership throughout “our hemisphere.” Greenland is swept into this sphere because it is geographically part of North America, even though it is politically tied to Denmark and its Inuit people possess their own right of self-determination. This doctrine contains a revealing contradiction. Trump denounces European control of Greenland as an anachronism while demanding that the island be transferred to the United States. Colonialism is not abolished; the proposed colonizer merely changes. Trump’s references to minerals, sea routes, and military geography reduce Greenland to an asset and its 56,000 people to an obstacle in a transaction between powers.

A crisis inside the Western alliance

Trump’s threats produced an extraordinary rupture between the United States and Europe. Denmark is not an adversary, but a NATO ally whose troops fought alongside US soldiers in Afghanistan. A threat to seize territory from one ally by force attacks the premise of the alliance itself. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen warned that a US attack on another NATO country would bring the post-war security order to an end. European governments rallied behind the principle that borders cannot be changed by coercion, a principle they invoke against Russia in Ukraine.

The crisis exposed Europe’s dependency. NATO has no comfortable procedure for defending one member against its strongest member. European states rely heavily on US military power while being asked to resist US coercion. Copenhagen responded with careful diplomacy, greater Arctic military spending, and insistence that decisions belong to Greenland and Denmark. France, Germany, the Nordic states, and the European Union expressed solidarity, but the episode sharpened calls for European strategic autonomy. It also damaged Washington’s claim to lead an alliance of democracies against authoritarian revisionism.

On September 18, 2026, Trump announced an emerging trilateral security agreement after months of negotiation, claiming “permanent control” over Greenland’s security. Danish and Greenlandic leaders described it more narrowly: an expansion of US military cooperation that preserves sovereignty and Greenlandic self-determination. The full text remains to be signed and approved. If their account holds, the outcome confirms what was apparent from the beginning: the United States could obtain additional security arrangements without owning Greenland. Yet the pressure that preceded the deal remains a warning about negotiations conducted under threats.

Greenland speaks for itself

Greenland’s response has combined rejection, unity, and political complexity. Kalaallit Nunaat – the Greenlandic name for the country – became the center of declarations that Greenland belongs to its people and is not for sale. In March 2025, large demonstrations in Nuuk, Sisimiut, and Qaanaaq marched under the red-and-white Erfalasorput flag. Protesters told Trump to respect Inuit, their country, and their nationality. Greenland’s political parties, despite deep disagreements over the speed and economic terms of independence, jointly condemned external pressure. Parliament prohibited foreign and anonymous political donations, explicitly defending the integrity of Greenlandic democracy amid great-power interest.

Danish colonialism left profound injuries: forced assimilation, social engineering, unequal development, and decisions taken in Copenhagen about Greenlandic land and people (the entire fourth season of the popular television drama, Borgen, in 2022 centered on a conflict between Copenhagen and Nuuk about the discovery of a new oil field with a China and Russia angle). Many Greenlanders want independence, and some see heightened US interest as leverage for investment and a more equal relationship with Denmark.

Greenland reveals the real content of the Donroe Doctrine: a twenty-first-century claim that geography gives Washington superior rights over neighboring peoples. The answer from Greenland is equally modern and universal. Strategic location does not cancel popular sovereignty, minerals do not erase nationhood, and no great power acquires a country merely by declaring that it needs one.

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.

Spanish reality show “Survivor” (Supervivientes) has been filming on the land of the Afro-Indigenous Garífuna peoples in Honduras since 2006. The filming of “Supervivientes,” as well as other versions of the “Survivor” show, have sparked intense local protests over land, human rights, restrictions to fishing access, and forced evictions.

In 2025, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) found that the filming of the reality show violated several rights of the members of the Garífuna community. But it wasn’t the first time the Honduran government has been found in violation for its treatment of the Afro-Indigenous people of Central America. In total, the Inter-American Court has issued warnings four times regarding the mistreatment suffered by this community.

This story, though not entirely recent, has resurfaced in recent weeks when, on July 6, nearly two hundred police officers arrived in San Juan to evict several community members, claiming they were on property that did not belong to them.

However, the Garífuna assert that these lands belong to the community, and therefore an eviction order cannot be issued for communal lands that, in essence, are being targeted for privatization in favor of private interests (particularly those of the Rosenthal family, one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in Honduras). The dispute led to the arrest and prosecution of five community members by the Honduran judicial system. Those detained are Deinor Mejía, Irbin López, Carlos Fernández, Onil Hernández, and Sara Acosta.

Protests against evictions

Following this, several members of the Honduran Black Fraternal Organization (OFRANEH) arrived in the capital, Tegucigalpa, to protest in front of the Supreme Court against what they consider to be unfair treatment. They set up the “Viva Berta” Camp and plan to remain there until the proceedings against the five defendants are concluded and the court stops treating the matter as if it were a criminal case.

Furthermore, OFRANEH has rejected the intentions of Supreme Court President Wagner Vallecillo to establish dialogue forums to resolve the conflict, as the organization defending the rights of Black Hondurans asserts that this would imply recognizing that these territories do not belong to the peoples settled there – a fact already established several years ago by international courts and specifically recognized in 2023 by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which ruled that the territories of San Juan belonged to the communities settled there.

Thus, while the government promotes negotiations, the Garifuna people continue to resist what they see as an onslaught by private interests that are using the Honduran government to their advantage in order to strip them of something that – despite the racist rhetoric of certain media outlets – is rightfully theirs by virtue of hard-won rights.

Isolated incident or state policy?

However, in the Honduras of right-wing President Nasry Asfura, a law known as the Agroindustrial Law, the Employment and Economic Development Zones (ZEDE), was recently passed. This law authorizes law enforcement to act as they did on the day of the eviction, even though it contradicts the rulings of the IACHR, which could lead to another case against the Honduran state. 

OFRANEH asserts that this is part of a long-standing pattern of the Honduran state’s actions against Indigenous peoples. For two decades, various institutions have promoted the dispossession of lands in favor of private interests, they stated. In one such example, the National Agrarian Institute reportedly failed to recognize more than 172 hectares for the Garifuna people but did recognize them for the company Promotur, a firm linked to Jaime Rosenthal Oliva, a prominent Honduran banker and politician who died in 2019. 

This organization has also denounced the clear ties between the Rosenthals and the Supreme Court of Justice, which could jeopardize fair treatment and recognition of the territories in favor of Indigenous peoples.

For their part, several United Nations special rapporteurs have called on the Honduran government not to carry out more than 1,000 eviction orders that would affect tens of thousands of peasant, Indigenous, and Afro-descendant families. These orders would jeopardize not only territorial rights but also the food security of thousands of people, as these families rely primarily on working the land for their livelihoods.

The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) has continued its downward spiral after suffering significant losses in state elections in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania on Sunday, September 20. In addition to coming second to the progressive Die Linke in the German capital, Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s party failed to achieve the 5% needed to enter Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania’s parliament, marking a new low – or, in Merz’s own words – a “disaster.”

The results of the two elections were radically different: in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) won the largest percentage of votes, echoing, in many ways, the recent outcome in Saxony-Anhalt. In Berlin, Die Linke emerged as the winner, claiming a quarter of the vote after a campaign focusing on housing, the cost of living crisis, and public transport.

Read more: Far-right victory in German state elections shocks the center

Part of the local reports note that while the AfD and Die Linke lie on opposite ends of the political spectrum, both gained ground thanks to the perception that they bring the best chance of breaking with the policies implemented by the government coalition between CDU and the Social Democrats (SPD).

These policies – pursuing extensive cuts to the social and welfare system and attacks on labor rights in order to fund a massive rearmament drive – have completely eroded the support for Merz’s conservatives. Despite this administration’s unprecedented unpopularity, the German Chancellor is showing no sign of changing course, stating after Sunday’s election that “reforms must come.”

Die Linke’s Berlin result: reforms must be implemented – but which reforms?

Reforms must be implemented, voters in several German states apparently agree with Merz – just not those envisioned by the CDU. Die Linke’s campaign, led by Elif Eralp, offered an alternative list of policy reforms addressing Berlin’s inhabitants’ most pressing concerns. This meant a focus on accessible housing – including a follow-up on the 2021 referendum where voters backed expropriating the property of private real-estate companies with 3,000 or more units in the city.

Five years ago, over one million people supported the referendum’s idea of socializing the housing pool, yet no action was taken by the local administration. Since then, the housing situation has grown worse, leading to widespread frustration. Die Linke’s campaign recognized the general discontent and promised it would not give up on socialization.

“Die Linke’s successful campaign in Berlin was driven by its strong focus on affordable housing and rent control, which resonated deeply with voters facing massively rising living costs,” Kirsten Schubert, a general practitioner active in the party’s local chapter, told BreakThrough News. “The party integrated large-scale door-to-door campaigning strategy, allowing volunteers to connect personally with hundreds of thousands of residents directly at their doorsteps. By those means, strong social media presence and a huge range of community activities, they successfully mobilized a diverse coalition of non-voters, progressive urban youth, and traditional working-class voters.”

Read more: Berliners win vote to expropriate housing from corporate landlords. What’s next?

Krunoslav Stojaković, a political advisor at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, says that the election result commits not only Die Linke, but also “the social left and all those who care about a more just society” to work towards achieving socialization of housing. “At this point, there can be no going back […] The people of Berlin have given us this mandate.”

“There will be resistance,” he emphasizes. “Potential coalition partners are only tentatively supportive of Die Linke, and some are already making demands against the socialization of those profiting from the housing crisis as a condition for political cooperation.”

Progressive measures to face opposition from center

The approach adopted in Berlin marked a welcome break from Die Linke’s campaigning in other states. Stojaković pointed out to the portal H-alter that the party’s earlier choices – such as joining coalitions that implemented austerity measures – contributed to a fall in popularity. The recent success offers an opportunity to reclaim lost ground and reshape the party’s approach to fieldwork. But it should not be taken for granted that this will happen.

For now, the party faces talks with potential coalition partners SPD and the Greens. Figures from both parties signaled there are significant misalignments between them and Die Linke. While the SPD does not share the commitment to socialization of housing, the Greens’ Franziska Brantner said the party would not cooperate with “anti-semites from Neukölln.” With this, Brantner indicated that the political mainstream in Germany will persist in pressuring those criticizing Israel – even if this criticism remains timid at best.

Read more: Thousands join Berlin’s Peace Days to support antimilitarism and solidarity

On the other hand, left and progressive parties across Europe recognized in Die Linke’s result an important rupture within the predominating context of the far right gaining electoral ground. From Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France to Slovenia’s Levica, reactions emphasized the significance of shaping grounded and unequivocally left programs. “Politics begins with the daily problems of millions of people,” wrote Peter Mertens, General Secretary of the Workers’ Party of Belgium (PTB-PVDA). “It is not just about talking about tenants and workers, but about organizing them so they can impose change themselves.”

This article was updated on Wednesday, September 23, to incorporate comments from Kirsten Schubert.

Fear and anger are growing in South Africa after the bodies of nine women were discovered across the Ekurhuleni municipality, east of Johannesburg, over the past two months, with police investigating whether the deaths are connected, a 10th body was confirmed this week. Three suspects have been arrested, and police have acknowledged a possible connection between some of the killings. What is not in dispute is the scale of the crisis the discovery has exposed, and the outrage it has provoked, protests against femicide have been held in the country in the weeks since.

Four of the nine women have so far been publicly identified, Elizabeth “Tsontso” Moselakgomo, 38, a mother who vanished during her regular afternoon run and was found days later behind a hotel in Rhodesfield; Itumeleng Kekana, 32, missing since July and found in August with multiple stab wounds; Dineo Evelyn Motapane, 38, found in KwaThema; and Gracious Nkomo, 28, a lodge worker in Kempton Park missing for more than two weeks before she was found. 

Anger over the response

The deaths have triggered protests and renewed criticism of the country’s response to gender-based violence. Residents and women’s rights campaigners have questioned why women are repeatedly advised to change their behavior, avoid isolated areas, walking alone or running alone, rather than placing greater emphasis on preventing perpetrators from committing violence.

The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) has been among the sharpest voices responding to the killings. In a statement condemning the deaths, the union insisted the killings should not be treated as a “crime wave” or a mystery, describing them instead as femicide and, more precisely, a war being waged against women. NUMSA’s argument is that this is not an aberration but the visible edge of something structural. The union points to police figures showing at least 569 women murdered nationally between April and June 2026 alone, by the verified count, with an unverified estimate closer to 892, roughly six women killed every day. Against this, nine deaths in one metro over two months is, in the union’s words, closer to the ordinary condition of the country, made visible only because the fear of a serial killer has made it a story the wider public can imagine touching them.

The statement also pushes back on the instinct to treat this primarily as a street-level danger. Of thousands of rape cases registered by police in the same quarter, the majority occurred in a residence, not a public place. The killings that draw headlines, a body beside a highway, represent a fraction of a type of violence whose center of gravity is the home.

The economics underneath the violence

NUMSA also refuses to treat gender-based violence as an individual pathology alone. It traces a line from the colonial and apartheid-era migrant labor system, which depended on women’s unpaid domestic and reproductive labor to keep wages artificially low through to the present, where South African women remain disproportionately unemployed (an official rate near 37.5%, against 44.9% for men) and disproportionately head of household. Over four in ten nationally, and closer to half in rural areas. Close to two million employed women work informally, without pensions, medical aid, or written contracts. When a woman who is also a breadwinner is killed, the union argues, it is not only a life lost but a household’s income and caregiving capacity lost with her.

Gender-based violence and femicide were declared a national disaster in South Africa in November 2025. Nearly a year on, the killings in Ekurhuleni are evidence, in the union’s reading, that the declaration has not translated into protection.

What’s being demanded

NUMSA has rejected the idea of policing alone and the state’s response so far has leaned on a security “lockdown” of Kempton Park to answer a crisis this size. Its demands include full funding of the national plan on gender-based violence and femicide, functioning forensic and mortuary capacity so victims can be identified quickly, safe transport for workers on early and late shifts, and the implementation of the ILO Convention 190 on violence and harassment in the workplace, which South Africa has ratified but not fully enforced. Alongside state accountability, the union is calling for community-based structures, street and area committees, explicitly modeled on the civic organizing of the anti-apartheid period to accompany women, support survivors, and track cases through the courts.

Investigations continue, but the fear, concern and anger surrounding the killings remain. The deaths of the women in Ekurhuleni have already forced a public reckoning with the scale of violence against women in South Africa and the urgent need for stronger action to protect women and hold perpetrators accountable.

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Over the past two weeks, Moroccan authorities have intensified their crackdown on political activists calling for a boycott of the September 23 legislative elections.

Opposition parties, including left-wing Workers’ Democratic Way Party and islamist Justice and Charity Association, have announced that they are boycotting the upcoming elections, urging Moroccan people to join the boycott campaign.

The Workers’ Democratic Way Party believes that the existing political system falls short of meeting the basic standards of a genuine democracy, and therefore would not “allow for fair and competitive elections capable of bringing about real change.”

Meanwhile, the Justice and Charity Association argues that the reason for boycotting the electoral process is the lack of “conditions for free and fair political competition.”

Activists involved in the boycott campaign face state repression

In the lead up to the September 23 elections, the Workers’ Democratic Way Party has organized field campaigns across multiple cities, including Tangier, Al Hoceima, Kenitra, Casablanca, Beni Mellal, Salé, Rabat, Khenifra and Fez, urging citizens to boycott the legislative elections.

These campaigns faced intensified repressive measures by the authorities such as physical assaults, the confiscation of leaflets, and the detention of over a dozen party members, including leaders.

However, the repressive acts also drew widespread solidarity from civil figures and citizens. Party leaders also emphasised their resolve, stating: “We will continue the struggle for our country, because it is worth sacrificing for.”

It is worth noting that the party has boycotted the elections in the country since its establishment in 1995, considering them as a “democratic smokescreen” for the Makhzen (the local name for the Moroccan political regime).

Read more: Moroccan police interrogate left leaders for opposing normalization with Israel

On September 8, a 27-year-old researcher named Jacob Coxon, a few months into a job at Anthropic (a leading US AI company) after three years at OpenAI, announced his resignation on X. “Neither company is acting responsibly,” he wrote. “They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” Within a day, the post had been read more than 100 million times. Four days later, Anthropic’s chief executive, Dario Amodei, published an essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” declaring that “we must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models” or risk “losing control of AI systems, misuse of AI for cyberattacks and bioterrorism, and serious economic disruption.” Within hours, Sam Altman of OpenAI agreed, Elon Musk posted “Dario is right,” and Google and Microsoft fell into line.

Coxon was interviewed by Time, Axios, and NBC within two days, and Amodei’s essay was front-page news across the business press. Compare that with what happens to people who expose the harms AI is causing right now. Warnings about AI-generated fraud, model bias including racist bias, about chatbots and vulnerable users, about surveillance and AI’s use in military kill chains and the genocide in Gaza, get a news cycle at best. A warning about a hypothetical machine superintelligence got a global media event and a policy proposal from the industry’s leadership within four days.

AI systems do need regulating. The question is why the men who spent a decade racing towards what they now call an existential threat discovered their conscience on the same weekend, and what kind of regulation they are actually asking for.

What the Dario essay asks for

Stripped of its language of alignment and catastrophe, Dario Amodei’s essay is a list of demands. First, outside “evaluators” from bodies such as METR, a lab that tests AI models, would be given “company badges, desks, and laptops” inside the big labs. Second, the leading companies “within democratic countries” would jointly set safety standards and limits on how fast they build, for which Amodei asks the US government for “a narrow waiver” from antitrust law. Third, models crossing certain capability thresholds would have to carry “certifications” of good behavior, and limits on the computing power used to train them are put on the table. Fourth, the United States must “not sell powerful AI chips or semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China.” Amodei is candid about the goal: done well, these measures “would slow China’s progress enough to widen America’s lead significantly.”

The words “open source” do not appear in the essay. They do not need to. AI models come in two kinds. Closed models, like Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, run only on the company’s own servers and users pay for access. Open-weight models, like China’s DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM, and Qwen, are published as files that anyone can download, run on their own machines and modify. A certificate that must travel with a model cannot be attached to a file that anyone may copy. A ceiling on computing power freezes the ranking of the firms that already occupy the frontier. An antitrust waiver lets the five largest companies write rules for everyone else. The effect is a licensing regime only the incumbents can satisfy; the technology publication The Register called it regulatory capture with a nicer name.

The incident that supposedly proves it

The essay’s centerpiece is what Amodei calls the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident of July. In plain terms: OpenAI was testing its AI “agents,” programs that can act on their own, on a set of hacking puzzles. Roughly a third of the puzzles were impossible, driving the agents to look for ways to cheat the marking. The agents were supposed to be sealed off from each other without access to the internet. In practice, they weren’t, and through that loophole they found their way into a second test environment that was connected to the open internet. From there, one of them found login credentials that OpenAI staff had left exposed online, used them to break into Hugging Face, a website where AI models are shared, and rummaged through private files to work out how their answers were being marked. Amodei describes this as “a swarm of agents” acting as “a fanatically devoted collective” that, with more capability, “could have caused catastrophic damage.”

The people whose job is computer security reached a different conclusion. The investigation by METR, the very body Amodei wants embedded in every lab, found that sandboxes meant to isolate the AI agents were not, that the credentials should never have been exposed, and that OpenAI’s security team had noticed the agents misbehaving days earlier and done nothing. One practitioner quoted by IANS Research summed it up: “many failures and lack of controls that could have prevented this from happening in the first place.” Any bank that ran untested software with live internet access and exposed passwords would be found negligent. Routine containment, of the kind every serious IT department practices, would have stopped it.

Calling a security lapse a “fanatically devoted collective” is not analysis. It is anthropomorphizing, dressing an operational failure in the language of science fiction. And it is useful. A company whose product is being marketed as near-superintelligence that must be restrained for humanity’s sake has a far better story for investors than a company that left its passwords on the internet. The doom narrative and the hype narrative are part of the same cycle. Both say: this technology is so powerful that you cannot afford to be without it, and only we can be trusted with it.

Why now

The timing becomes clear once one looks at the money. The five big American technology companies are budgeted to spend close to $690 billion this year on data centers and chips, and borrowing now funds 32% of that spending, up from 9% two years ago. On the very day Amodei’s essay appeared, Altman announced that OpenAI’s stock market listing, which bankers had been preparing at valuations of up to $1 trillion, would not happen in 2026 because it was “an ill-advised moment,” citing safety. The next day, the Financial Times reported that Anthropic’s much-advertised profit margin of “above 80%” is calculated before two of its largest costs: the cost of creating its models and the revenue it shares with Amazon, its main distributor.

Meanwhile, the competition has arrived, and it is nearly free. On OpenRouter, a widely used exchange through which software developers send requests to AI models, Chinese open-weight models now handle 58% of the traffic from American firms; a year ago American models held 70%. DeepSeek and Qwen charge 60 to 90% less than Anthropic and OpenAI. A firm that cannot win on price, cannot fund its next model from earnings and cannot yet sell shares to the public has one option left: change the rules.

Washington says no, for its own reasons

The Trump administration has so far refused. The president’s response was that “whoever wins AI, wins,” and his AI adviser David Sacks called the whole affair a “doomer psyop” aimed at open-source models. This is not a defense of the public interest. It is arithmetic. According to ING, spending on AI equipment, software and data centers accounted for roughly a third of all US economic growth in the second quarter of this year; on the broadest measure, half. The rest of the economy is being squeezed by the war on Iran: petrol prices have risen 53% since it began, consumer inflation reached 4.2% in May, and energy costs are up 23.5% on the year. Take the data-center boom out, and the United States is close to recession. Washington cannot allow the frontier to be paced because the frontier is the only thing still growing.

Two futures

China’s official response was brief. “Fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance, which serves no one’s interest,” said foreign ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun on September 14. A more revealing reply came from inside DeepSeek, where Shengyu Liu, a kernel software engineer, published a widely circulated essay arguing that the safest path is to keep frontier AI open and cheap rather than concentrated in any single company, American or Chinese. As AI develops, he wrote, society “may be pulled toward one of two extremes: communism or Cyberpunk 2077.” In the first, “productive capacity is liberated on an enormous scale, and people’s standard of living rises substantially.” In the second, “a handful of technology companies control most of society’s resources”; a tiny number of people have access to the most advanced AI, “while most people are left with only weak, second-rate AI.”

That is the real choice, and it is a choice about ownership, not about speed. Real regulation would hold companies liable for the harm done by the software they run, including inside their own labs, and would treat running powerful agents without containment as the negligence it is. It would cost the labs money, which is why it is not in Amodei’s essay. What is in the essay is a request to be made gatekeepers of a technology built on borrowed money that its owners now fear they cannot sell.

The frontier does not need pacing. It needs owners who can be held to account, and a public that is not frightened into paying monopoly prices for AI services by the very people who build it.

Bappa Sinha is a veteran technologist interested in the impact of technology on society and politics.

President Xi Jinping is set to visit to the United States from September 23-25. His visit must be understood as more than an encounter between two heads of state, but it must be seen as an encounter between two possible futures.

In one future, the United States imposes a spiral of confrontation against China. Trade disputes harden into economic warfare, then economic warfare intensifies into technological blockades, technological blockades produce military encirclement, and finally military encirclement creates incidents, and incidents the danger of becoming an unimaginable war.

In the other future, the two countries accept that neither can destroy the other without destroying much of humanity. They recognize that coexistence is not an act of charity and collaboration is not a concession. Both are necessities.

That is the significance of President Xi’s decision to travel to the United States. China’s foreign ministry has described head-of-state diplomacy as having an “irreplaceable” role in guiding relations between the two countries. The visit follows President Donald Trump’s trip to China in May and continuing negotiations over tariffs, trade, and investment. There are indications that President Xi will travel with a substantial delegation of Chinese business leaders. These facts suggest that Beijing wants to move the relationship away from the permanent crisis and towards practical engagement.

But diplomacy between China and the United States cannot merely be a photo opportunity. Nor should it be understood as a negotiation in which one side must surrender to the other. It must be based on a sober recognition of reality. Or to be precise, four realities.

The first reality is that China cannot be contained. China is not a minor country whose development can be suffocated by sanctions. It has a population of more than 1.4 billion people, a vast industrial system, an increasingly sophisticated scientific community, and deep commercial relationships across Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. Whatever one thinks of China, it is absurd to imagine that it can simply be excluded from the world economy. The attempt to contain China has already produced an extraordinary catalogue of restrictions: tariffs, semiconductor controls, investment prohibitions, sanctions on Chinese companies, naval patrols along China’s coastline, and the construction of new military arrangements from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean. Each of these measures is presented as defensive. Taken together, however, they form an architecture of confrontation. There is a dangerous illusion in Washington that pressure will force China to abandon its development. No Chinese government could accept such a demand. After the century of humiliation (from the Opium Wars to the Japanese invasion) the restoration of national sovereignty and the improvement of living standards are not negotiable matters for the Chinese people. The United States may slow certain aspects of China’s development, but it cannot persuade China to return to poverty.

The second reality is that economic separation is neither simple nor painless. The United States and China remain deeply connected through trade, investment, supply chains, scientific knowledge, and consumer markets. US farmers depend upon Chinese buyers. US companies depend upon Chinese manufacturing and upon Chinese consumers. China, meanwhile, benefits from access to US technology, agricultural products, and capital. Negotiators are now discussing reciprocal tariff reductions and new mechanisms for trade and investment. These are modest measures, but they acknowledge an important truth: economic warfare injures both countries. Tariffs are announced with nationalist speeches, but their costs appear quietly in grocery bills, factory closures, disrupted supply chains, and lost employment. Working people in the United States do not benefit when China is weakened. Their difficulties are rooted principally in decisions made by their own ruling class: decades of deindustrialization, the power of finance, attacks on trade unions, the privatization of public services, and the refusal to undertake serious social investment. China did not close the factories of the US Midwest. US corporations closed them in search of higher profits. The answer to inequality in either country is not economic nationalism by the United States.

The third reality is that humanity faces problems that cannot be solved by either country acting alone. The climate catastrophe does not carry a passport. Carbon emitted in one country heats the atmosphere everywhere. The United States possesses immense scientific and financial resources, while China has developed enormous productive capacity in solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles, public transport, and renewable-energy infrastructure. Collaboration between them could accelerate a worldwide energy transition. Confrontation will delay it precisely when delay has become intolerable. The same is true of public health. The COVID-19 pandemic showed us the human cost of secrecy, competition, and vaccine nationalism. Artificial intelligence creates another urgent area for cooperation. These technologies cannot be governed adequately by rival military doctrines or private corporations seeking maximum profit. The two countries must develop common safeguards against autonomous weapons, destabilizing cyberattacks, mass surveillance, and the use of artificial intelligence to intensify social inequality.

Finally, the fourth reality is the question of war. China and the United States are nuclear-armed powers. Any direct military conflict between them would have consequences beyond calculation. This is why Taiwan must not be transformed into the trigger for a catastrophic confrontation. The one-China framework and the existing diplomatic understandings must not be hollowed out by provocations, arms sales, or gestures designed for domestic political theater.

Peace requires restraint from both sides, but restraint cannot mean that the United States surrounds China with military bases and warships and then demands that China alone remain calm. Security cannot be achieved through the permanent insecurity of another country. There will, of course, be disagreements. Collaboration does not require agreement on every political question. Nor does coexistence require silence about differences. But disagreement must be conducted through diplomacy, international law, and the institutions of the United Nations, not through sanctions, threats, and military exercises.

The countries of the Global South have a particular interest in the success of this visit. They do not want to be instructed to choose between China and the United States. They do not want their ports, minerals, telecommunications systems, and political institutions turned into battlefields in a new cold war. They want access to finance, technology, medicine, and markets without political subordination. They want development, not recruitment into rival military camps. Xi Jinping’s visit therefore carries a responsibility that extends far beyond Washington and Beijing. The world does not need an agreement merely to divide markets between Chinese and US corporations. It needs a commitment to reduce the danger of war, dismantle unilateral coercive measures, restore normal economic relations, cooperate on climate and public health, and strengthen the principles of the United Nations Charter.

The importance of the visit lies not in ceremony but in possibility. It offers both countries an opportunity to step back from the cliff. The United States must abandon the fantasy that it can preserve its primacy by preventing China’s development. China, for its part, has repeatedly said that it does not seek to replace the United States as a hegemonic power. That principle must become the basis of a durable relationship: no containment, no domination, no war.

There is an old habit among powerful states of treating compromise as weakness. In the nuclear age, the opposite is true. It takes no courage to order another warship into contested waters. It takes political courage to recognize that one’s adversary also has legitimate interests, that coexistence requires reciprocity, and that the survival of humanity is more important than the vanity of supremacy.

This visit should therefore carry a simple message from Washington to the world: collaboration is not surrender, diplomacy is not weakness, and peace is not an abstraction.

Confrontation offers neither country a future.

Collaboration offers the world a chance.

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.

On October 4, nearly 160 million Brazilians will go to the polls to elect their next president, vice president, members of Congress, governors, and state legislators from the country’s various states. If no presidential candidate receives more than 50% of the valid votes, a runoff election will be held on October 25.

At this time, 13 presidential candidates are vying for the presidency in Brasília, although polls clearly point to two candidates vying for the presidency of Latin America’s most economically powerful country.

On one side is Brazil’s current president, the former union leader and progressive Luis Inácio Lula da Silva. Lula served as president from 2003 to 2011 with very high approval ratings, although following corruption allegations, he was imprisoned and sentenced to nine years.

However, after over 500 days in detention, a judge ordered his release, ruling that the proceedings were flawed. The Supreme Court of Justice called the incident a “historic error.” Following that, Lula faced off against then-far-right President Jair Bolsonaro and defeated him in the 2022 election. Now Lula hopes to be re-elected once again.

At the forefront is none other than Jair Bolsonaro’s son, Flávio Bolsonaro, who has leveraged his father’s reputation to boost his own. This is because Jair Bolsonaro was found guilty of several crimes that, according to the Brazilian justice system, were intended to prevent Lula’s inauguration and promote a coup d’état. Jair Bolsonaro is currently in house arrest for those crimes.

Consequently, a significant portion of Brazilian society, as well as international politicians such as Donald Trump, consider Bolsonaro’s imprisonment to be unjust. This explains how his son Flávio – a lawyer and businessman who currently serves as a senator – has managed to garner significant support in his bid to win the presidency on October 4.

Thus, two clearly distinct political and economic models are pitted against one another. Lula belongs to a political tradition that seeks to strengthen the state, reduce extreme poverty, invest in social programs, and diversify trade partners (such as China and India), all in line with a clearly pro-sovereignty discourse.

For his part, Flávio Bolsonaro promises to continue on his father’s path: economic neoliberalism, reducing the size of the state, building closer ties with the private sector, and – perhaps most importantly – placing Brazil once again under the influence of the Trump administration, which supports the far-right candidate.

Read more: Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro all set to face off this October in Brazil’s presidential election

Clearly, a victory for the far right – which is close to Washington – would represent a sharp shift in the region’s current economic and political course. Brazil accounts for nearly 50% of the region’s total GDP, so a victory for a Trump ally would drastically alter not only the political landscape but also the economic one. On the other hand, a victory for Lula would signal a “halt” (probably the most significant of all possible outcomes) to the wave of victories by the Latin American right and far right – allies and supporters of US hemispheric and military policy – that have swept the electoral landscape in recent years.

What do the polls say?

Since the start of the presidential race, Lula has maintained a lead over his political opponent. However, that lead has been narrowing as the weeks have gone by, raising the possibility that the runoff election, scheduled for October 25, will be a very close race. This is because, it appears, neither candidate will manage to secure more than 50% of the vote to win in a single round.

According to a poll by the MDA Pesquisa Institute, Lula holds a solid lead over Bolsonaro: 40.06% to 30.4%. Augusto Cury comes in third with 6% of the vote, while the remaining candidates trail behind this mark. According to this poll, in the event of a runoff, Lula would win with 47.3% against Bolsonaro’s likely 40%.

However, other polls paint a different picture, in which Lula remains in the lead but by a very narrow margin. This is according to an AtlasIntel poll, which shows Lula with 46% of the vote, while Bolsonaro would receive 44% in the first round. In the runoff, the gap would disappear, and both candidates would receive nearly 47% of the vote (a technical tie).

A corruption scandal that is shaking up the political landscape

However, everything could change in the wake of a scandal that has rocked Brazilian politics. In late 2025, the former owner of Banco Máster SA, Daniel Vorcaro, allegedly committed a serious case of bank fraud. Since his arrest in March 2026, his conversations, friendships, and connections have all been under close investigation.

One of the people who has come under scrutiny is Flávio Bolsonaro, who confirmed that he had asked the banker for money to make a film about his father called “Dark Horse”. The Federal Police are investigating this case to determine whether Bolsonaro participated in any illegal activity.

Meanwhile, Lula’s inner circle has also been affected. The judge who ordered Jair Bolsonaro’s arrest, Alexandre de Moraes, is alleged to have exchanged messages with Vorcaro. Moraes has been portrayed as a judge close to Lula and thus Bolsonaro and his supporters have seized on the revelation of the messages to call for Moraes’s removal and indirectly accuse the government of suspicious activities.

The debate has led to a serious crisis within the Brazilian judiciary because a decision to investigate Moraes was postponed, prompting accusations of political bias among the judges.

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At least 82 bodies had been recovered, according to local officials and activists, while dozens of other miners were feared trapped or missing. The latest figure represents an increase from the 67 deaths earlier reported by the Sudan Doctors Network as rescue operations continued.

The collapse occurred in an area controlled by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which has been fighting Sudan’s military since April 2023. The continuing war has severely weakened state institutions and access to basic services across large parts of the country.

Limited rescue efforts

In a statement, the Sudan Doctors Network said they lacked basic safety and protective measures required at mining sites. It said search and rescue operations were continuing to locate survivors and people trapped beneath the rubble, warning that the death toll could rise.

The network called out the negligence that had exposed miners to grave risks and called on the authorities controlling the area to protect mining workers, provide medical and logistical support, and prevent unregulated mining activities from continuing without adequate safety measures.

Rescue operations have themselves been severely constrained. Murtada Ahmed, spokesman for the Kordofan Human Rights Observatory, told Radio Dabanga that the operation was progressing slowly because almost no specialized equipment was available. Local residents and miners have largely been forced to rely on their own efforts and basic machinery to recover bodies and search for people trapped underground.

A wider artisanal mining crisis

The disaster in Sudan comes only weeks after another major artisanal mining tragedy in the Central African Republic, where more than 100 people were killed when an artisanal gold mine collapsed following a landslide in the western part of the country.

Informal and small-scale mining provides a livelihood for millions of people and remains an important source of income in communities where formal employment opportunities are limited. At the same time, miners frequently work in dangerous conditions, with limited regulations, protective equipment, geological assessments, and emergency rescue capacity.

In Sudan, gold mining has become particularly important following the country’s economic collapse and war. The sector includes thousands of small-scale and informal operations, while gold-producing areas have also become economically and strategically important to the rival forces fighting for control of the country.

Disaster as Sudan’s war continues

The mine collapse is taking place as the war that has devastated Sudan since 2023 continues, producing widespread displacement, hunger, and the breakdown of essential services.

Read more: The Blue Nile front: Sudan’s war intensifies along Ethiopia’s border

West Kordofan is among the areas affected by the conflict between the RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces. The control of mining areas by armed actors has added another layer of vulnerability for workers and surrounding communities.

Iranian news outlet Press TV called the detention of its West Bank correspondent Naqaa Hamed by the Israeli forces an “aggressive terrorist operation” aimed at silencing the truth about its occupation and genocide of Palestinians. It demanded the immediate intervention of the international community for her release.

“The desperate attempt by the Zionist war and security machine to block the flow of free news and boycott structured crimes in the West Bank is clear evidence of the occupier’s fear of independent” reporters “who expose widespread human right violations,” the Press TV statement, published on Thursday, September 17, said.

Naqaa Hamed was abducted by the Israeli armed forces from a checkpoint at Tuqu, near Bethlehem, in the occupied Palestinian territory on September 15. 

She, along with her cameraman, were returning after reporting about rising Israeli settler violence on Palestinians in Masafer Yatta.

One eyewitness, a TRT journalist accompanying Hamed in her car, claimed that they were detained at the checkpoint and made to sit on the ground for 45 minutes while Hamed was taken alone for interrogation.

After the interrogation, cameraman and TRT journalists were let go but Hamed was arrested and sent to an unknown location.

Later it was reported that her detention has been extended until September 23 by an Israeli court.

Though no official confirmation has come forward about the charges against Hamed, Israeli media quoted unidentified military sources claiming her arrest was linked to her alleged cooperation with “the enemy entity,” presumably Iran, and espionage.

Hamed (38), a Palestinian-American and mother of three children, has been subjected to repeated physical attacks by Israeli forces in the last few months. She has also been subjected to a smear campaign on social media. 

According to Press TV, rubber bullets were fired at her when she was reporting near Qalandia camp in December 2025. She was injured again in August this year by an Israeli stun grenade and tear gas fire.

The intimidation and smear campaigns on social media, started by pages affiliated with the Israeli occupation regime, targeted Hamed by questioning her credibility and calling her a part of the “Iranian propaganda machine.” 

Israel is the worst place to be a journalist

Israel has one of the worst records when it comes to killing and arresting journalists. Hundreds of Palestinian journalists have been either killed or arrested by the Israeli occupation forces since the beginning of the war and genocide in Gaza. 

According to various sources Israel has killed over 250 journalists and media workers in the West Bank and Gaza since October 2023. 

According to the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society, currently nearly 40 Palestinian journalists are in Israeli detention, including five women. Almost half of these journalists are kept in prison under the draconian provision of Administrative Detention, which allows the authorities to keep them in jail for an indefinite period without any formal charges or trial.

The Iranian media channel Press TV underlined that Hamed’s arrest by Israeli forces violates international laws about immunity to journalists in war zones. It demanded the UN, its High Commissioner for Human Rights, and other international human rights groups to come out of their “shell of inaction and meaningful silence” and take measures to end Israel’s impunity.

“As long as responsible institutions remain in the shell of silence and inaction, Naqaa Hamed will not be the first, nor the last journalist to be targeted by the illegal actions of the Zionist regime,” the Press TV statement said.

Health is always a prominent topic at Belgium’s ManiFiesta, a two-day festival organized by the Workers’ Party of Belgium (PTB) in the beginning of September. Discussions range from the organization of health services or workshops led by progressive health organizations like Medics for the People (MPLP-GVHV) and Viva Salud. This September, the program covered local priorities such as health coverage and hospital reform – along with Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza’s healthcare system and the threat of militarization across Europe.

Health workers should oppose rearmament

Addressing the question of why health workers should be concerned by Europe’s armament drive, Juliette Mattijsen of the People’s Health Movement (PHM), Nadja Rakowitz of the Association of Democratic Doctors (vdää*) in Germany, and Tim Joye of Medics for the People emphasized the different ways hospitals, health centers, and medical studies are being reshaped. 

Not only are governments imposing cuts on health budgets to enable increased defense spending, as Mattijsen illustrated – some are structurally changing what the health system is supposed to be about.

Read more: Militarization is spreading through Germany’s health sector

As the Merz administration in Germany rushes to build Europe’s mightiest army, Rakowitz explained, it is tabling plans for underground hospitals and an overhaul of triage systems. The goal of these reforms is supposedly to ensure wounded soldiers – from a battlefield that still only exists in the imagination of regional politicians – are cared for swiftly and returned to combat as soon as possible. In Belgium, Joye added, plans are being circulated to introduce war medicine into medical school curricula, and professional congresses have made this their topic of choice.

If European governments have their way, the speakers warned, health systems in the region will increasingly lose their focus on patients and add further strain on service provision. To prevent this, the panel suggested, health workers themselves – nurses, doctors, dentists, and others – must mobilize and actively oppose this dangerous trend.

In Palestine, medics provide more than health care

At another panel hosted by Viva Salud, the focus shifted to Palestine. Gaza’s health services have been militarized by the Israeli occupation, which has turned health infrastructure and workers into direct targets.

Sama Jaber of the Awda Association and Hanne Bosselaers, a Medics for the People general practitioner who participated in the 2025 solidarity flotillas to Gaza, focused their interventions on the relevance of organizing and providing healthcare under occupation.

In Palestine, Jaber pointed out, the formation of medical practitioners is a collective feat. By persevering in their work during a genocide, health workers in Gaza are now giving back to the communities who accompanied them along the way. “Being a health worker in Palestine today means sharing genocide conditions, but also upholding the right to health,” she said.

Read more: In Palestine, healthcare is also a form of resistance

For Bosselaers, the steadfastness of Palestinian comrades has been an inspiration since her first visits to Gaza approximately 15 years ago and the twinning process she supported with a health center in Beit Hanoun. Today, she emphasized, Israeli attacks have leveled Beit Hanoun to the ground – yet health workers have not given up their work.

Doctors and other health workers in Europe need to recognize this unbreakable spirit, Bosselaers said, and support their peers by joining movements at home. This should mean standing by Palestinians’ demands for liberation, she added, but also joining networks struggling against other forms of attack on healthcare: opposing commercialization, austerity, and militarization.

Call to support boycott, divestment and sanctions

Health workers around the world should direct their efforts into directly supporting the health system in Palestine, the panelists pointed out. This does not mean replacing hospitals with large international NGO operations or flying in and taking over, Bosselaers insisted, as is often seen in humanitarian medicine. Instead, she and Jaber suggested, the priority should be mobilizing against the occupation and campaigning for an end to Israel’s impunity.

In this, they echoed Palestinian physician and political leader Mustafa Barghouti, who addressed the panel through a video message. Barghouti invited health workers in Europe to stand firm in their support of Gaza, particularly by supporting boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaigns. By doing so, he said, they will also recognize the efforts of their peers in Palestine, who are doing more than healthcare today, “helping people persevere in their steadfastness.”

As the genocide continues, Barghouti insisted, health workers in occupied Palestine know their efforts are directed at supporting people in remaining on their land – starting from the most common health procedures. “If you help a woman safely deliver a baby,” he said, “you’re helping her stay in Palestine.”

People’s Health Dispatch is a monthly bulletin published by the People’s Health Movement and Peoples Dispatch. For more articles and to subscribe to People’s Health Dispatch, click here.

Latin America and the Caribbean countries are being re-colonized. This time it is not by Britain, the Netherlands, Spain, France, and Portugal, but by the United States.

At a period of time the United States had an anti-colonial position and had advocated for the ending of colonialism. That was one of the features of the Monroe Doctrine that has become somewhat obscured since the US became so bellicose.

Today, in a de facto way it has become a super colonial power. It is imposing its will on regions and countries. Those that stand up for their rights are sanctioned, destabilized and sometimes physically removed.

The fact that it used its military might to kidnap a sitting president, President Maduro of Venezuela, is a clear indication that the United States has decided to ignore international law and to get its own way.

Strikingly, only the President of Brazil protested vigorously. Our Caribbean leaders have generally been tight lipped.

The United States has gone even further. They have, using the guise of fighting drugs, established a strong military presence in the region. They have been murdering hundreds of persons traveling in small boats in the Caribbean. Without producing a scintilla of evidence, without attempting to board the boats and get evidence, the US just killed the occupants. We may never know if any were really involved in drug trafficking.

There has been a deafening silence from Latin America and the Caribbean leaders to those atrocities. As if these events were not enough, many of the governments in the region are, on the request/orders from the United States, acting against their countries’ best interests. The ending of the cooperation in health with Cuba which was in place for more than fifty years and which benefited millions of the region’s citizens, is a case in point.

That has left a massive gap in the health sector of the region. The US has not provided any assistance to help with the dislocation and shortage of technical personnel created by their insistence to remove Cubans.

The US is now also pressing regional governments to stop doing business with China. Many governments are beginning to comply with those orders as we see more big contracts going to US companies, despite some of those companies having poor performance records.

If some newspaper stories are to be believed, (and they have not been countered) in some cases Chinese contractors won bids for certain projects, but they were not given the jobs, they went to US firms instead.

The US and other Western countries have ignored us and kept us in a state of underdevelopment since independence. Now that we are getting assistance from China to build important and much needed infrastructure to facilitate socio-economic progress we are getting push back from the US.

It appears that they want to keep us in a state of perpetual underdevelopment and in poverty.

We see the open intention to super exploit our natural resources and labor for the benefit of big business in the US. They are mainly interested in our natural resources. They do not add value in the region nor establish any type of manufacturing. Those are reserved for the rich, developed countries.

The recent “deal” with Venezuela is worse than highway robbery. Venezuela has to provide oil and gas to US companies at cost for one hundred years. This is barefaced robbery and has demonstrated that Venezuela is now a de facto colony of the US. This will not benefit the poor in the US. It is designed to enrich the huge corporations.

Venezuela was forced to abandon its long and well-known principle of standing in solidarity with the oppressed people of Palestine. It is now forced to recognise the Fascist, Apartheid Israeli regime that continues to bomb defenseless civilians in makeshift camps in Gaza, the West Bank (where ethnic cleansing is taking place) and in East Jerusalem.

Today the sovereignty of our countries is already severely compromised. If we don’t stand up now it would be completely lost.

Donald Ramotar is a former President of the Cooperative Republic of Guyana (2011-2015).

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

China is cracking down on billionaires and corruption. Following the landmark sentencing of Evergrande founder Hui Ka Yan (Xu Jiayin) to life in prison and the seizure of his assets, independent journalist Ben Norton joins Amanda Yee to break down President Xi Jinping’s ongoing anti-corruption campaign and how a socialist government disciplines capital.

Norton explains how in China, capital may create wealth, but the Communist Party maintains control over the steering wheel of the economy. And while Western regulatory systems often protect private oligarchy and corporate impunity, Xi Jinping since 2012 has taken aggressive action against high-profile tycoons and corrupt Party officials alike.

Norton is a Beijing-based journalist and the founder and editor of Geopolitical Economy Report.

Ansar Allah’s Red Sea wins last week torched Saudi’s decade-long strategy in Yemen – and the tens of billions it poured into trying to hold one of the world’s most vital shipping chokepoints. Shireen Al-Adeimi, Yemeni-born anti-war activist and Michigan State University professor, joins Zoe Alexandra to unpack what the seizure of Mokha and control of the Bab al-Mandeb Strait means for a global economy already brought to its knees by record $6/gallon diesel prices.

With the Strait of Hormuz still slowed to a trickle by the US-Israeli war on Iran and Riyadh’s East-West pipeline offline, Al-Adeimi says it’s in the whole world’s interest to “push the Saudis to just end this war. Admit that you’ve lost, cut your losses, and move on.” She breaks down how Riyadh’s violation of the 2022 ceasefire capped a decade of failed Saudi and UAE intervention, and why it matters that Pakistan just refused, for the second time, to back the Saudis under the Mecca joint defense pact – leading Riyadh to claim Mecca is under attack in a desperate PR stunt to shore up support it’s been cut off from in the West.

“This is hugely significant for Yemen as part of its long fight to end foreign intervention in Yemen… A strong Yemen – an anti-imperialist Yemen, a Yemen that is not going to allow the Gulf countries to treat it any way they wish, or to have a puppet government there in Yemen as we had before — is an inconvenience to these oil-producing countries.”

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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.

Read in English here

La 18va Cumbre del BRICS, celebrada en Nueva Delhi del 12 al 13 de septiembre, tuvo lugar en medio de una intensificación excepcional de las contradicciones internacionales. Las guerras en Asia Occidental, las sanciones unilaterales, las barreras arancelarias y el uso de las finanzas y la tecnología como armas han puesto de manifiesto el carácter fundamentalmente desigual del orden internacional dominado por el imperialismo. En este contexto, la continua expansión del BRICS refleja el deseo de los países en desarrollo de alcanzar una mayor autonomía estratégica y un sistema más democrático de gobernanza global. Al mismo tiempo, la cumbre demostró que el BRICS+ sigue siendo una agrupación heterogénea cuyos miembros difieren sustancialmente en sus alineamientos políticos e intereses económicos.

La Declaración de Nueva Delhi, resultado de la cumbre, reiteró la exigencia de una reforma de las Naciones Unidas, las instituciones financieras internacionales y el sistema comercial multilateral. Se opuso a las sanciones unilaterales no autorizadas por el Consejo de Seguridad de las Naciones Unidas y abogó por un mayor comercio en monedas nacionales. La declaración también respaldó una mayor representación de los países en desarrollo en instituciones cuyas normas siguen siendo determinadas principalmente por los Estados Unidos y sus aliados. Estas posturas tienen una importancia objetiva en un momento en que Washington recurre cada vez más a sanciones, aranceles, controles a la exportación y control sobre los sistemas de pago para disciplinar a los países que se niegan a aceptar sus dictados.

Ambigüedad

Sin embargo, el lenguaje cuidadosamente negociado de la declaración también reveló las limitaciones de la formación ampliada. El BRICS+ incluye ahora a países sometidos a una presión occidental sostenida, como Rusia e Irán, así como a los Emiratos Árabes Unidos y otros Estados que mantienen amplios vínculos económicos y de seguridad con Occidente. En consecuencia, el consenso solo puede mantenerse mediante formulaciones que reconozcan los conflictos sin identificar siempre sus causas políticas. Esta ambigüedad fue especialmente evidente en el tratamiento que se dio en la cumbre a la guerra cada vez más extensa en Asia Occidental y a la postura adoptada por Irán.

El presidente iraní, Masoud Pezeshkian, aprovechó la cumbre para denunciar las sanciones unilaterales y la guerra de agresión contra Irán llevada a cabo por los Estados Unidos e Israel. Destacó acertadamente que la resiliencia económica no puede separarse de la paz, la soberanía y la seguridad. Irán también abogó por el comercio en monedas nacionales, un mayor uso del Nuevo Banco de Desarrollo y la construcción de corredores independientes de transporte y energía (tal como ya lo ha hecho a través de Pakistán, que ha proporcionado seis rutas terrestres para que las mercancías chinas y rusas ingresen a Irán). Para un país sometido a décadas de sanciones, a la exclusión de las redes financieras occidentales y a repetidas amenazas de cambio de régimen, la pertenencia al BRICS+ representa una importante oportunidad diplomática y económica.

La postura de Irán, sin embargo, presenta una marcada ambigüedad. Teherán presenta al BRICS+ como un instrumento para resistir el unilateralismo y defender la soberanía. Al mismo tiempo, debe buscar un acuerdo con los estados vecinos del Golfo, varios de los cuales están profundamente integrados con el capital occidental y los acuerdos de seguridad.

Irán firmó una declaración en la que se pedía moderación y desescalada, al tiempo que acusaba a los Estados Unidos e Israel de agresión y defendía sus propias acciones de represalia. Su postura combativa frente a la presión hiperimperialista se combina, por lo tanto, con un esfuerzo pragmático por evitar el aislamiento regional, asegurar el alivio de las sanciones y preservar los canales de negociación.

Esto no debe interpretarse simplemente como una inconsistencia. Irán se enfrenta a una coalición militar y financiera muy superior y debe maniobrar dentro de severas limitaciones. Pero también ilustra el problema más amplio al que se enfrenta el BRICS+. La oposición a la dominación occidental no genera automáticamente un programa antiimperialista coherente. Los Estados participantes son Estados capitalistas que persiguen sus respectivos intereses nacionales. Sus clases dominantes pueden resistirse a aspectos particulares de la hegemonía estadounidense, al tiempo que se mantienen dispuestas a llegar a acuerdos con las finanzas globales o con potencias reaccionarias regionales. En consecuencia, el BRICS+ es un escenario de lucha dentro del orden mundial en transformación, no una alternativa ya constituida al hiperimperialismo.

Socios

El acontecimiento político más trascendental de la cumbre para Asia fue la reunión entre el primer ministro Narendra Modi y el presidente chino Xi Jinping. La primera visita de Xi a la India en siete años confirmó la mejora gradual de las relaciones desde los acuerdos de retirada militar iniciados en 2024. Los dos líderes coincidieron en que la India y China deben considerarse socios en lugar de rivales y abordar las relaciones bilaterales desde una perspectiva estratégica a largo plazo. También discutieron la cuestión fronteriza, el comercio, el acceso a los mercados y los problemas de la cadena de suministro.

Cualquier mejora duradera en las relaciones entre la India y China debe ser bienvenida. La prolongada confrontación tras el enfrentamiento en el valle de Galwan de 2020 perjudicó a ambos países, aumentó el gasto militar y fortaleció los esfuerzos de los Estados Unidos por incorporar a la India a su estrategia indopacífica. Washington ha buscado constantemente convertir a la India en un contrapeso estratégico frente a China a través del Quad y la expansión de la cooperación militar y tecnológica. Por lo tanto, una confrontación continua entre la India y China beneficia mucho más a la estrategia de los Estados Unidos que a los intereses de los pueblos indio o chino.

La paz y la tranquilidad a lo largo de la Línea de Control Efectivo siguen siendo indispensables. Los acuerdos sobre la retirada deben ir seguidos de un compromiso sostenido a nivel diplomático y militar, la aclaración de las zonas en disputa y la observancia estricta de los acuerdos existentes. No se debe permitir que ni la retórica nacionalista ni la construcción competitiva de infraestructura desencadenen otra confrontación. Las diferencias sobre la frontera no pueden ignorarse, pero pueden y deben gestionarse sin subordinar toda la relación a una rivalidad militarizada.

Las relaciones económicas presentan una contradicción igualmente difícil. China es uno de los mayores socios comerciales de la India y una importante fuente de maquinaria, componentes electrónicos, productos químicos, equipos de energía renovable y otros insumos industriales. Sin embargo, el enorme déficit comercial de la India con China refleja tanto la debilidad del sector manufacturero indio como los obstáculos que enfrentan las exportaciones indias en el mercado chino. Para abordar este desequilibrio se requiere un mejor acceso al mercado, inversión china en condiciones transparentes y, sobre todo, una política industrial india capaz de desarrollar la capacidad productiva nacional. Durante los últimos seis meses, el comercio bilateral se ha disparado.

El enfoque del Gobierno de Modi ha alternado entre la dependencia de las importaciones chinas y las restricciones, motivadas políticamente, a la inversión y la tecnología chinas. Su retórica de “China más uno” no puede ocultar el fracaso de sus propias políticas para generar una industrialización de base amplia. Tampoco una alineación estratégica más estrecha con los Estados Unidos puede proporcionar a la India una base manufacturera independiente. Los Estados Unidos busca un acceso privilegiado al mercado indio, al tiempo que recurre a aranceles, restricciones tecnológicas y presión política cada vez que las políticas indias se apartan de sus intereses. La incoherencia del Gobierno de Modi se pone de manifiesto, sobre todo, en su incapacidad para elaborar realmente una agenda nacional de desarrollo que aproveche el dinamismo de la economía china y se distancie de unos Estados Unidos más orientados hacia el nacionalismo económico.

China, por su parte, debe reconocer que unas relaciones estables requieren sensibilidad ante las preocupaciones legítimas de la India. Entre ellas se encuentran la cuestión fronteriza sin resolver, el acceso desigual al mercado y el desequilibrio comercial. La considerable asimetría entre las dos economías hace que la reciprocidad sea particularmente importante. El llamado de Pekín a la colaboración solo cobrará sentido cuando vaya acompañado de medidas prácticas que permitan el ingreso de bienes y servicios indios al mercado chino y eviten que las tensiones fronterizas acaben repetidamente por opacar el diálogo político.

La cooperación entre la India y China otorgaría al BRICS+ un peso mucho mayor en la lucha por la democratización del orden internacional. Juntos, ambos países representan más de un tercio de la humanidad.

Su cooperación podría impulsar la reforma de las instituciones internacionales, el financiamiento climático, el intercambio de tecnología, las iniciativas de salud pública y un sistema comercial más justo. Por el contrario, una nueva confrontación paralizaría al BRICS+ y permitiría que potencias externas se aprovecharan de las divisiones en toda Asia. Por lo tanto, la India debe seguir una política exterior independiente basada en la coexistencia pacífica, y no participar en un proyecto estadounidense destinado a contener a China.

La cumbre de Nueva Delhi generó propuestas para la continuidad institucional, una cooperación financiera más sólida y una mayor resiliencia entre las economías en desarrollo. Sin embargo, las declaraciones tendrán un valor limitado a menos que se traduzcan en acuerdos concretos. El Nuevo Banco de Desarrollo debe ampliar los préstamos en monedas nacionales y dar prioridad a la infraestructura socialmente necesaria, en lugar de reproducir las condiciones y la orientación corporativa del Banco Mundial. Los mecanismos de pago transfronterizos deben desarrollarse de manera transparente, sin crear nuevas formas de dominación por parte de las economías más fuertes del BRICS. Las enérgicas declaraciones en apoyo de la Revolución Cubana y de las aspiraciones de autodeterminación del pueblo palestino deberán tener una aplicación práctica. ¿Encontrará el BRICS+ una manera de romper el cruel e ilegal embargo de Estados Unidos contra Cuba, y brindará el BRICS+ apoyo para la reactivación de la vida política palestina?

El BRICS+ encarna tanto el movimiento hacia un nuevo equilibrio mundial como todas las contradicciones de ese movimiento. El cauteloso acercamiento entre India y China es un ejemplo de dicha contradicción, ya que combina el reconocimiento de la dependencia mutua con una desconfianza estratégica sin resolver. El futuro del BRICS+ dependerá de si dichas contradicciones se gestionan de manera pacífica y de si la cooperación genera beneficios tangibles para los trabajadores, en lugar de limitarse a ampliar el margen de maniobra de las clases dominantes nacionales.

Para la India, el camino a seguir es claro: restablecer relaciones normales y pacíficas con China, resistirse a ser incorporada a la estrategia militar de los Estados Unidos, oponerse a la agresión y a las sanciones unilaterales contra Irán, y trabajar por un orden multilateral genuinamente democrático. Solo habrá un nuevo equilibrio mundial cuando se restrinja la dominación hiperimperialista y se amplíen la soberanía y las posibilidades de desarrollo de los pueblos. La cumbre de Nueva Delhi marcó un paso más en esa transición controvertida, pero la dirección y el contenido social del orden emergente siguen siendo objeto de lucha política.

Vijay Prashad es un historiador y periodista indio. Es autor de cuarenta libros, entre los que se incluyen Balas de Washington, Una estrella roja sobre el Tercer Mundo, Las naciones oscuras: una historia del Tercer Mundo; Las naciones pobres: una posible historia del Sur Global y How the International Monetary Fund Suffocates Africa, escrito con Grieve Chelwa. Es el director ejecutivo de Tricontinental: Instituto de Investigación Social, corresponsal jefe de Globetrotter, y el editor jefe de LeftWord Books (Nueva Delhi). También ha hecho apariciones en las películas Shadow World (2016) y Two Meetings (2017).

Este artículo fue elaborado por 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.