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중도 성향
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From first lady to president? Inside the rise of Peru’s Keiko Fujimori
In her fourth bid to be president, Fujimori faces her best odds yet. But can she overcome scandal and her father's past?
"YET." · 총 61건
필터 보기현재 지수
50.3
0 = 부정 우세
50 = 중립
100 = 긍정 우세
최근 7일 기준 81,924건을 분석한 결과, 뉴스 심리지수는 50.2(균형)입니다. 긍정 4,030건(4.9%)·중립 75,955건(92.7%)·부정 1,939건(2.4%)이며, 중립 비중이 뚜렷하게 높습니다. 성향 지수는 종합 14.7(중도 균형)입니다.
In her fourth bid to be president, Fujimori faces her best odds yet. But can she overcome scandal and her father's past?
Hundreds of supporters of the Cockroach Janata Party, an online joke that drew millions across India, gathered for the first time in the national capital on Saturday, taking the social media movement off screens and into its biggest real-world test yet. The protest at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, marks the movement’s first foray into street politics after weeks of dominating social media feeds and news headlines, attracting millions of online followers and widespread support among young Indians.
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Residents of Gaza, south Lebanon, northern Israel and Kuwait were all under fire this week despite United States-arranged ceasefires supposedly in force in their regions. Israeli airstrikes hit Gaza and Lebanon, with Israeli forces still actively deployed in both places. Hezbollah rockets struck northern Israel, and Iranian attacks hit Kuwait’s international airport. The continued violence prompted US President Donald Trump to comment on Wednesday that ceasefires in the Middle East involved “shooting in a more moderate manner” rather than a total halt in fighting. Three truces his administration has negotiated were meant to have stopped the warfare. But while major fighting has greatly reduced, munitions are still falling and people still dying. This is how the ceasefires — and ongoing fighting — are playing out: What’s happening with the ceasefire in Gaza? The US brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas on October 10, 2025, ending major warfare. The ceasefire deal involved a halt to all fighting, Hamas releasing all its remaining hostages in Gaza, Israel freeing Palestinian prisoners, a phased Israeli withdrawal, ramped-up aid and the opening of a crossing into Egypt. A Trump plan to build out the ceasefire was meant to involve agreements on disarming Hamas, a new Gaza government without the group’s involvement, reconstruction of Gaza and a complete Israeli withdrawal. Palestinians clear debris at the site of an Israeli strike on a house whose residents were warned to evacuate before the attack, in Zawaida, central Gaza Strip on June 5, 2026. — AFP However, while all hostages were released, the amount of aid reaching Gaza has not substantially increased. Hamas has not agreed to disarm. Reconstruction has not begun, and Israel has expanded its control of the territory. Israeli airstrikes on Gaza have continued, killing more than 900 Palestinians since the truce, including nine on Thursday. Sporadic Palestinian attacks have killed four Israeli soldiers in Gaza. Why is there still warfare in Lebanon? After fighting in 2024, a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah was only partially implemented, with both sides accusing the other of violations. Open warfare began again in March after war against Iran erupted, with Hezbollah firing into Israel and Israeli forces seizing swathes of southern Lebanon and pounding other areas with airstrikes. Trump announced a 10-day ceasefire in Lebanon on April 16 after rare contacts between representatives of the Israeli and Lebanese governments. Intense fighting continued in the south, but Israel mainly refrained from striking Beirut. Black smoke billows at a strike scene following an Israeli strike on a car as seen from Nabatieh, Lebanon on June 5, 2026. — Reuters Since April 16, Israeli strikes have killed hundreds of people, bringing the total toll to more than 3,500 since March 2, according to Lebanese authorities, whose data does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. Israel says 26 of its soldiers and four civilians have been killed in Hezbollah attacks since March. Iran wants a ceasefire in Lebanon to be part of any deal to end its war with the United States and Israel and to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. On Wednesday, Trump announced that Lebanon and Israel had agreed to implement a new ceasefire contingent on Hezbollah leaving southern areas. Israel says it can still carry out military operations despite the ceasefire and Hezbollah has rejected the truce. Fighting continues. Will the US and Iran cement their ceasefire? The US and Israel attacked Iran on February 28, seeking to destroy its nuclear and ballistic missile programmes. Both countries voiced hope the ruling theocratic system would be overthrown. That followed a 12-day war last year in which Israel, later joined by the United States, struck many of Iran’s nuclear facilities and military leaders. Despite many of Iran’s senior figures being killed, it has managed to close off the Strait of Hormuz, throttling Gulf energy exports and hitting the global economy. The US announced a ceasefire with Iran in early April, with talks to follow on a lasting end to hostilities, the reopening of Hormuz, the end of a US blockade on Iranian ports and a pathway to negotiations on Iran’s nuclear programme. Iranians stand next to a symbol of a Kheibar missile as they take part during a rally in support of the country’s supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei and commemorate Eid al-Ghadir in Tehran on June 4, 2026. — AFP However, despite repeated rounds of indirect talks mediated by Pakistan and Qatar, there has been no fuller agreement yet. A deal would likely put off negotiation on the nuclear issue to a later stage. Meanwhile, the sides have repeatedly exchanged fire, with Iran also attacking Gulf states including Kuwait this week. Why haven’t the ceasefires been effective? All three deals have come unstuck in their first phase, with interim arrangements failing to move towards more lasting ceasefires. In each case, the combatants have been unwilling to accept painful concessions required to move beyond the first phase of transitional ceasefires. At times, they have turned to military action to try to advance goals they had to set aside when the truces were agreed or to test the boundaries of the agreements. “When there’s no movement and there’s no political horizon, it’s very difficult for a ceasefire to hold, because there’s no real incentive for the parties to that ceasefire to continue abiding by it if it doesn’t actually lead to any changes,” said Urban Coningham, research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London. The diminishing influence of international bodies like the United Nations and the growing assertiveness of regional powers have also made it harder for long-term agreements to stick, he said.
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President Trump on Wednesday congratulated Republican Steve Hilton for “coming in first” in the California gubernatorial primary, but Decision Desk HQ has not called the race yet. “Congratulations to Steve Hilton on coming in first, last night, in the California Vote for Governor,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “If Californians are smart, which...
John D. MacDonald’s novel “The Executioners” has been adapted for film twice as “Cape Fear”: first in 1962, starring Robert Mitchum, and again in 1991, starring Robert De Niro and directed by Martin Scorsese. The latest adaptation, an Apple TV series created by Nick Antosca, is perhaps the most unnerving and intense retelling yet. A […]
A one-and-a-half-month-old baby boy, who does not possess a birth certificate and was reportedly delivered via homebirth, has been temporarily moved to a sheltering facility following a court order. The Social Welfare Department on Wednesday said the baby is under professional care, adding that it has applied for a child protection order from the court following the arrest of a couple said to be his parents. Police, meanwhile said they have obtained the DNA sample of the boy, as well as samples from the couple, for verification. Officers said the test results are not out yet. The couple was arrested on Tuesday on suspicion of child neglect after failing to provide proof that they had taken the infant for medical checks. They previously refused DNA testing to prove their relationship with the baby and failed to register a birth within 42 days set out in the law. Following the couple’s arrest, the baby underwent checks at the hospital and medical workers found no apparent injuries on him. Senior social work officer Stephanie Lee said the department will submit a report to the court to decide the next steps after meeting with the couple. “We will collect the information and then make the assessment and then also involve all other concerned parties. The time [taken for the report submission] will be subject to the progress of this assessment or the information gathered,” she said. When asked if the department will hand the baby back to the couple if it is found they are his biological parents, she stressed that the department will prioritise the baby's well-being. She added that if the couple is proven unfit to care for the child, the department may seek a guardianship order. The couple said they have another child that was placed in foster care in Sweden a number of years ago. The Immigration Department said it has reached out to the Swedish authorities to seek more information, including her identity there and foster care arrangements. The department added that it will take follow-up actions based on their response. Edited by Aaron Tam
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Donald Trump are expected to cross paths at the G7 summit in France, with both leaders confirmed to attend. While a bilateral meeting is being explored on the sidelines, no official engagement has been finalized yet.
After reports of the murder of four Pakistani farmers in Italy, the Foreign Office (FO) said on Tuesday that the “exact nationality” of the deceased was not confirmed yet. The FO’s statement came hours after Corriere della Sera daily reported that Italian police had arrested two Pakistani nationals for the murder of four Pakistani farm workers found dead in a burnt-out minivan in southern Italy. The FO said that while the deceased individuals were reported to be Pakistanis, their “exact nationality” was not confirmed yet. It added that the matter was being investigated by local police, who were also carrying out forensics. “The Pakistani embassy in Italy is following up on the matter and is in touch with local authorities regarding further developments,” the FO said. According to Corriere della Sera, the burnt-out vehicle with four bodies was found at a petrol station near the village of Amendolara in a vast farming area in the Calabria region. CCTV images from the petrol station showed two people blocking the van’s doors from the outside and throwing liquid inside, Corriere della Sera reported citing law enforcement sources. The images showed a fire breaking out and the two people running away, the report said. Firefighters found the bodies inside after putting out the fire. “This is definitely murder, we just have to work out the details,” local police chief Antonio Borelli was quoted by Corriere as saying. The paper said there had been 14 cases of arson involving cars and minivans carrying Pakistanis in recent months in the area, where there are tensions between migrants over the division of farm work and residency papers and accommodation. Additional reporting by Tahir Khan
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It’s easy to understand why so many graduates are booing commencement speakers who tell them how great AI is. They face a brutal job market, with unemployment for recent college graduates nearing recession levels, and AI is often cited as the reason they can’t find jobs or have to drastically reassess their career plans.I have a message for the class of 2026: AI is not ruining your job prospects, at least not yet. A better explanation for the tough job market may be the prevalence of WFH, not the rise of AI.131463654Two new studies, one from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and one from the London School of Economics, look at the recent rise in unemployment among young workers. The authors of the LSE study looked at 243 million new hires and 407 million online job postings from 2017 to 2025 in the US, UK, Australia and Canada. They observed a notable decline since 2022 in the hiring of new graduates. AI was presumed to be the reason, since the falloff tends to be in the sort of industries that are adopting AI.But these are also the same kinds of jobs — reliant on computers, knowledge-intensive, white-collar — that are most amenable to working from home. When they controlled for WFH, the authors found that the impact of AI on hiring was negligible.The study postulates that where WFH is more common, managing junior staff is more expensive. At the same time, young staffers who receive less training may be less productive than they would be otherwise, even as they mature and demand more pay. So the cost of WFH to young graduates is not just a harder job market — it also makes it harder for young employees to get good training, supervision and mentorship, a point also made by the New York Fed study.WFH has always had a superficial appeal. At first, it seems easier and often cheaper for both employers and employees; companies can pay less if they offer more flexibility, and many staffers have commitments that keep them at home. In the long term, however, both management and workers pay a price in terms of lost training and career development of younger employees.This could get even worse as AI is more widely adopted. New hires recently out of college who work on their own may figure out how to do specific tasks (perhaps with AI assistance), but they won’t learn much about how to manage office politics, charm clients or build networks. All these skills will be even more valuable in an AI job market, and none can be gained without coming into the office and observing senior colleagues.The new research doesn’t argue that AI will have no impact on hiring in the future, or that it is currently affecting hiring decisions. It’s also worth noting that many firms are still hiring — just not as much as before. There are a lot of factors that go into the health of the labor market, and if the economy worsens, the combination of AI and WFH could make it even harder for young graduates.What does seem clear is that AI is becoming a convenient villain for a lot of complaints people have about the economy. Tech executives aren’t helping by regularly declaring that AI can replace a lot of jobs. More likely, they are using AI as an excuse when they are letting people go for financial reasons. In the case of WFH, it may be easier to blame AI than to ask reluctant staff to come into the office.I’ve seen this reluctance firsthand: A few years ago I met middle-aged media executive who told me how much she loved working from home (or, often in her case, from a resort in Mexico). When I asked her about junior staffers missing out on mentoring and on-the-job training, she admitted she never would have succeeded if senior people weren’t in the office when she was coming up. But she didn’t seem too bothered by it, either.I’ve never been asked to give a commencement speech, but if for some reason I were, this would be my advice: Find a company where everyone likes going to work. Then try to get a job there — and if you do, go into the office every day.
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.” — Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias “I am in blood, Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er.” — William Shakespeare, Macbeth PROLOGUE This is and isn’t about America’s illegal war against Iran. It is primarily about hiding an empire in plain sight and now watching it unravel in plain sight. The war against Iran becomes a consequential event in tandem with other structural weaknesses, a fillip of sorts. It reminds one of the Soviet war on Afghanistan. That war, in and of itself, did not bring down the Soviet Leviathan. The process inhered in the very make-up of the Soviet Union. The war just shoved it over the precipice. But let’s get on with our purpose here. In August 2022, then-US President Joe Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act into law. A $280 billion legislative package, it sought to revitalise domestic semiconductor manufacturing. The act was a response to a startling vulnerability: the world’s most advanced chips, essential for everything from F-35 fighter jets to surgical equipment to artificial intelligence, are overwhelmingly manufactured by a single company, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), located on an island claimed as sovereign territory by America’s primary strategic rival, China. This dependence is not an accident of geography or a supply chain anomaly. The semiconductor industry wasn’t even hobbled by Covid 19. Despite its complex and far-flung operations, the industry works smoothly. The US dependence is the logical endpoint of a decades-long corporate strategy that maximised profit by outsourcing physical production while retaining only the high-value design and marketing ends of the value chain, the so-called “Smile Curve” strategy. The undoing of the United States in the Iran war may be far more significant than its defeats in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. It may well mark a historic milestone in the fraying of the position of the US as a global hegemon. But the seeds of this erosion of American dominance, argues Ejaz Haider, were laid long before its misadventure in Iran… The Italian economist and sociologist Giovanni Arrighi, to whom I shall return, would have been amused to see the revered smile curve — taught at prestigious business schools and which encourages firms to outsource capital-intensive manufacturing to focus solely on high-margin research and development (R&D), branding and marketing — as a classic trap of late-stage capitalism. In fact, the CHIPS Act stands as a state-level admission that this strategy, so profitable for individual corporations like Apple and NVIDIA, to name just two, has become a major geopolitical vulnerability for the US. This is the central paradox of America’s declining empire. The very mechanisms that generated unprecedented wealth have systemically dismantled the material and industrial foundations upon which that wealth ultimately rests. The decline of the American empire is not a partisan talking point. The US is a behemoth. It won’t just collapse one day like the Berlin Wall. Nor is a snapshot view the way to go. It is an ongoing structural process and a number of scholars have used longitudinal designs to analyse the trend lines. I argue that it is a slow, systemic unravelling across interconnected domains. First, the financialisation of capital, theorised most rigorously by Arrighi. Capital shifts from productive investment to speculative finance, generating short-term profits at the cost of long-term industrial vitality. It hollows out domestic industrial and political power, a process identified by American sociologist and political scientist Ho-fung Hung, who argues that off-shoring of production destroys the industrial ecosystem, skilled labour base and, ultimately, the social cohesion required for great power competition. Second, the erosion of the alliance system. And no, it’s not just Trump. Three deeper currents are involved: the gradual unravelling of the post-WWII security architecture; the economic failure of neoliberalism; and the imperial outreach baked into the very idea of neoliberalism. Third, the lateral diffusion of technologies, now commodified and everywhere. They help innovative and determined weaker powers offset the asymmetric advantage of bigger powers: Ukraine versus Russia; Hamas/Hezbollah/Houthis versus the US-Zionist duo; and now Iran versus the US-Zionist duo. As I note later in this space, the war against Iran is a much bigger setback for the US than its wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. Corollary: the post-WWII ‘Pax Americana’ is transitioning from a period of hegemonic stability, to use American historian Charles Kindleberger’s concept, into a protracted and likely irreversible, terminal crisis, to borrow Arrighi’s term. But let’s first begin with the peg: the war against Iran. THE PRESENT Since its inception, America has been at war: wars of choice, wars of conquest, wars for resources, wars to defend its hegemony, wars to spread “American values.” How or why does the Iran war stand out? Foremost, the conflict has confirmed the structural limits of US coercive diplomacy in a shifting multipolar world. It has exposed acute structural vulnerabilities in defence economics and inventory endurance, as well as a critical absence of pragmatic post-war planning and a misreading of societal resilience. The conflict has also underscored the changing nature of global alignments in a multipolar world. This comes with the collapse of coercive economic power. For four decades, the US has relied on sophisticated sanctions and lawfare to pressure Iran into subjugation. It has failed, showing the limits of sanctions, especially on fungible commodities. Even sanctions on non-fungible elements like technology can be circumvented. As in Iran’s case, the sanctioned state can develop indigenous expertise through varied strategies. There’s clear evidence that Tehran has developed complex and sophisticated non-dollar lifelines with China and Russia, rendering unilateral sanctions increasingly ineffective. It has used an array of strategies to blunt the effect: interchangeability (can’t sell to X; sell to Y); value retention (barter, use of cryptocurrencies); substitution and evasion (relying on third parties, covert ship-to-ship transfers, use of shell companies). Unlike the insurgencies in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, the US is not involved in ground combat in Iran (so far). It has relied on high-tech aerial and missile attacks through its formidable ISTAR (Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance) capabilities. Iran has not responded through elusive, hit-and-run ground attacks. It has countered US technology through technology in a non-contact war. But its employment of technology is grounded in asymmetric capabilities: a large arsenal of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and one-way attack drones. The cost-exchange ratio, by most accounts, is unfavourable for the US. For instance, the Iranian Shahed-136 one-way attack drone has an estimated unit cost of $20,000 (some estimates put it at around $10,000). It is a simple, slow-moving, and relatively easy to detect drone. But it is also cheap and plentiful. To intercept it with costly SM-2 or ESSM missiles creates a cost-exchange ratio of between 30 to one and 100 to one. It is also a shoot-and-scoot system. Iran can afford to lose hundreds of such drones and produce some 1,000 per month. The US cannot afford to fire thousands of interceptors at them. And those interceptors take three to four years to manufacture. It is a cost-asymmetric war. Similarly, the US has been pulling out assets from the Pacific to the Gulf. The USS Boxer amphibious group is an example. Diverting naval assets from the Pacific physically manifests deployment overstretch. As Robert Farley, visiting professor at US Army War College notes, resources needed to prevail in one theatre guarantee weakness in another. It’s the same with all force deployments and employments: “Every missile allocated to one target is unavailable for another.” The contrast with Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan is instructive. In those theatres, the US was defeated by determined insurgencies, even as it bombed and bombed. The adversaries were willing to absorb enormous casualties, drag it out and inflict mission fatigue on the US. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, broadly speaking, the US won the conventional war expeditiously but then got bogged down. In the Iran conflict, while Tehran has demonstrated the ability to absorb much pain, the US is not facing elusive insurgents but a state with a sophisticated missile programme, a sharp understanding of force employment, a network of allies across the region (Hezbollah in Lebanon, Ansar Allah in Yemen, and Hashd al-Shaabi in Iraq and Syria), and the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil passes. Iran has also demonstrated adaptation under fire, used the operational strategy of dispersal and delegation, exercised deception, demonstrated growing targeting capabilities through ISR, rapid repair of underground sites after US-Zionist bombing and consistently shifted locations for counterattack operations. Can the US still bomb Iran? Of course. Will that be painful? Yes. Will Iran respond? Hell, yes. Would that raise the overall cost? You can bet your dime on it. It will be proof, yet again, that it is a slow grind and the US cannot achieve its objectives at a sustainable cost. Yet, it is stuck, because to walk away means it loses credibility. Trump needs a win; Iran is not prepared to give him that. The war has changed the ground realities. There is no status quo ante. The objectives remain strategically incompatible — ie we might get a pause, even a long one, but the essential causes remain unaddressed. Spoiler alert: Zionist entity. US President Donald Trump attending the return of the bodies of the first six American soldiers killed during the war with Iran on March 7, 2026: the lateral diffusion of technologies help innovative and determined weaker powers, such as Iran, offset the asymmetric advantage of bigger powers, such as the US | AFP THE POINTILLIST EMPIRE: HOW IT BEGAN American imperialism did not begin with grand pronouncements like the Monroe Doctrine or the Big Stick diplomacy of Theodore Roosevelt, though they give us a potent sense of a rising, expansionist power. It literally began with bird poop, which sounds about right if one were to understand imperialism as a crap enterprise. The Guano Islands Act of 1856 allowed US citizens to claim uninhabited, guano-rich islands. The act set a precedent for later overseas acquisitions. Historian Daniel Immerwahr calls this a “pointillist” empire. This practical, resource-driven, and often hidden expansion set a pattern that would define America’s power and military bases for the next century. The Mexican-American War (1846-1848) established the continental empire, seizing vast territories from Mexico. This wasn’t a war of liberation but a war of conquest, not manifest destiny but a fig leaf to cover the musty crotch of violent expansion, economic greed and racial supremacy. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo formalised the seizure of over half of Mexico’s territory. The Spanish-American War of 1898 definitively projected American power overseas. Theodore Roosevelt’s Secretary of State John Hay, in a personal letter to Roosevelt, called it a “splendid little war.” By its end, the US had seized Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. But the “splendid” label concealed a brutal reality, just like the payload of Trump’s “gorgeous B-2 bombers.” The subsequent Philippine-American War (1899-1902) resulted in Filipino genocide. That savagery has been systematically erased from American popular memory, even as Mark Twain was scathing in his condemnation and also did a fantastic job of calling out Rudyard Kipling for The White Man’s Burden. But this wasn’t all. Immerwahr documents that American forces employed waterboarding (yes, much before the darned ‘War on Terror’), concentration camps (“black sites”), and scorched-earth tactics that would be recognisable to any student of colonial atrocities. After World War I, US President Woodrow Wilson attempted a new form of imperialism: liberal internationalism, rather than direct territorial control. Much has been written about the “Wilsonian moment.” British historian and diplomat E. H. Carr called it a utopian project, divorced from the reality of power politics. In fact, it wasn’t. The project was essentially colonial and Wilson’s liberal internationalism fit it perfectly. The mandates were thriving. The US Senate’s refusal to join the League of Nations left a vacuum that no amount of idealistic pronouncements could fill. War did come. Carr gives us insights into why it became inevitable. The US emerged from the war as the leading power. The post-WWII order was a direct lesson learned from the intervening two decades. No more “isolationism”. The US must play the role of the hegemonic stabiliser. The core argument was simple and powerful: a stable world economy requires a single power to act as lender of last resort, maintain an open market for distressed goods, and coordinate macroeconomic policies. The US did that via the Bretton Woods system, the Marshall Plan and a vast security architecture that spanned the globe. The quid for the quo? American dominance. The US was now fully involved. It bore the cost but the return on investment was handsome. It kept the US in the lead, even during the bipolarity of the Cold War and beyond. With the Berlin wall crumbling, American political scientist Francis Fukuyama became the mascot for neoliberalism. History had ended; all the wagon trains were destined for one town. Some might arrive late, but arrive they would. Europe was pacified and rebuilt. Japan was demilitarised and transformed into a manufacturing powerhouse. The dollar became the world’s reserve currency, giving the US what French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing called “exorbitant privilege.” For three decades, from 1945 to the early 1970s, this system appeared to confirm the virtues of hegemonic stability. Real GDP growth in Western Europe averaged nearly five percent annually, and the US share of world manufacturing output remained above 40 percent. But beneath the surface, the seeds of decline were already being sown. ARRIGHIAN COUNTER World-systems theorists like Immanuel Wallerstein and Giovanni Arrighi were not focused on immediate “imperial overstretch” in the manner of British historian Paul Kennedy. Kennedy argued that empires declined when their military commitments outpaced their economic base. The US, he warned, was suffering from imperial overreach. For Arrighi, the decline was gradual and subtle. He argued that capitalist hegemonies move through repeating “systemic cycles of accumulation.” A phase of material expansion where capital is invested in production, infrastructure and trade, inevitably gives way to a phase of financial expansion, where capital seeks profit through speculation, lending and financial engineering. The material foundation is hollowed out even as the financial superstructure appears to boom. This was the logic of capitalism. The “autumn” of each hegemon is marked by a dazzling financial belle époque that masks terminal decline. The smile curve strategy is the purest expression of this financialisation and Apple is a textbook case. It designs its products, develops its chips, creates the operating systems, controls the branding, marketing and the retail experience. But it manufactures almost nothing. The iPhones and MacBooks are assembled by Foxconn in Zhengzhou and by Pegatron in Shanghai. The advanced chips are fabricated by TSMC in Taiwan. The displays come from Samsung in South Korea and LG Display. Apple captures an estimated 80-90 percent of the profit from each device, while the suppliers who do the actual physical work fight over the remaining scraps. Business schools love this strategy because it maximises corporate profits and shareholder value. But as Hung argues in his work on global value chains and the Arrighian counter, what maximises corporate profits does not necessarily maximise national power. In fact, it may systematically undermine it. By outsourcing the middle of the smile curve, the US has drastically hollowed out its industrial ecosystem. Combine it with the faith in short, sharp wars of shock and awe through high-tech precision weapons and we get the full picture of what has happened in the war against Iran. This is very different from the WWII industrial base of America. This brings us to TSMC and the chokepoint crisis. It manufactures chips designed by other companies (Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm) rather than designing and selling its own chips. Over three decades, TSMC has built an unassailable lead in advanced process nodes. By 2025, it was manufacturing 92 percent of the world’s most advanced chips. The entire global technology industry (including the US military and intelligence apparatus) became dependent on a single cluster of fabs (fabrication plants) in Hsinchu, Taichung and Tainan. China, which views Taiwan as a breakaway province to be reunited with the mainland by force if necessary, has the physical means to blockade or invade the island. Whether it would do so or should is a different debate. On ground, the People’s Liberation Army has been systematically building anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) capabilities, to prevent US intervention in a Taiwan scenario. It’s a fairly absurd position from the US point of view! Its technological supremacy is guaranteed by a factory complex on an island which, in theory, its primary strategic rival could potentially seize or blockade. To circle back to the CHIPS Act, this is the background. TSMC is now building a fab complex in Arizona. Intel is expanding in Ohio and Arizona. Samsung is building in Texas. But, as a 2023 Marketplace report noted, replicating TSMC’s “deep, deep process knowledge” will take years. The fab in Arizona has already faced delays, cost overruns, and labour disputes. Taiwanese engineers are reluctant to relocate to the United States. The set goes to Arrighi. America’s weaponisation of the dollar has accelerated efforts by China, Russia and other BRICS members to create alternatives | Shutterstock THE DOLLAR DILEMMA The dollar’s role as the world’s primary reserve currency has been a central pillar of American power since the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944. This exorbitant privilege allows the US to borrow in its own currency, run persistent trade deficits without penalty and, crucially, impose unilateral financial sanctions on states, corporations, and individuals. This weaponisation of the dollar has accelerated efforts by China, Russia and other BRICS members to create alternatives. China has been aggressively promoting its own Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) as an alternative to Swift. The People’s Bank of China has signed bilateral currency swap agreements with dozens of countries, allowing trade to be settled in renminbi rather than dollars. Russia has demanded payment in rubles for its natural gas exports. India has established a rupee settlement mechanism for trade. Brazil and China have agreed to trade in their own currencies. The Central Bank of Brazil has announced that it is diversifying its reserves away from the dollar. And yet, the actual pace of de-dollarisation has been glacial. Several structural factors explain this “stickiness”, to use American political economist Benjamin Cohen’s term. First, there is network stickiness. The dollar’s dominance is not simply a matter of policy; it is an issue of deep, self-reinforcing infrastructure. Global supply chains, commodity exchanges, derivatives markets, and correspondent banking networks are all built around the dollar. Second, as various experts have argued, there is a lack of viable alternatives. The Chinese renminbi, despite China’s enormous economic weight, is not a free-floating, fully convertible currency. China maintains capital controls, a heavily regulated financial system, and a non-independent central bank. No foreign investor can be certain that their renminbi holdings would not be frozen or devalued by arbitrary state action. The euro, the second-largest reserve currency, is hobbled by the Eurozone’s fragmented fiscal system and the lingering scars of the 2011 debt crisis. Gold is impractical for everyday transactions. And cryptocurrencies are far too volatile and illiquid to serve as a reserve asset. Third is the absence of a deep, liquid and open bond market. A reserve currency requires a “safe asset” in which foreign central banks can park their surplus reserves. The US Treasury market, with $25 trillion in outstanding debt and extraordinary liquidity, is the only game in town. Result: while China and Russia publicly call for de-dollarisation, their central banks have themselves continued to accumulate US Treasury securities, because there is nowhere else to go. Corollary: the near-term prognosis for de-dollarisation is not collapse but slow erosion. IMF data shows the dollar’s share of global reserves has declined from over 70 percent in 2000 to approximately 58 percent in 2025. This is not a precipitous decline, but it is a steady one. The debate is not if the dollar will lose its dominance but when. I have no expertise in this area and I have relied on studying existing expertise. Most analyses measure the timeframe in decades, not years. From that, my understanding is that increasing uncertainty, further weaponisation of the dollar, continuing application of sanctions and asset freezes will (a) erode the confidence that underpins the entire system and (b) force experts (and governments) to find alternatives. EPILOGUE: TERMINAL CRISIS Two other issues are important but I am only flagging them here for paucity of space: the implosion of neoliberalism and its internal effects and the fraying of the transatlantic alliance. Both are exacerbated by Trump but neither is a direct result of his election. Both are extremely consequential. The United States has not collapsed; not yet. Nor can it be defeated from outside. But it can crumble from within. The future is not about a return to US hegemony, certainly not in a unipolar sense. The industrial base may be gone but it can be rebuilt, albeit not overnight. Alliances are frayed; trust cannot be easily restored. The fiscal position is precarious, with a $35 trillion US national debt. Internal politics is deeply polarised, with a significant portion of the American electorate believing that the system is rigged against them. A lot of these factors, singly and in combination with other factors, are self-reinforcing. The future also lies in terra incognita, a contested transition to a multipolar world, whose contours remain unknown. A recent book by German political analyst Marc Saxer, Geopolitical Conflict in the Wolf World, is a sobering structural assessment of where the world and the US are headed. “Homo homini lupus est” (Man is a wolf to man) is how Saxer begins. With that statement, we are back to Plautus and Hobbes. This is not mere rhetorical flourish. Saxer’s wolf world is an analytic category, a systemic condition characterised by the absence of a hegemon capable of enforcing rules, the demise of neoliberalism, the collapse of shared legal-normative frameworks, the return of great-power competition, the rise of Middle Powers, many with regional hegemonic aspirations, and the normalisation of coercion as a primary instrument of statecraft. As I said to Saxer during the launch of his book in Lahore, for the Global South, it has always been a wolf world. Pax Americana did not keep the peace for the periphery. It financed selective peace on credit. The bill has now come due. The writer is a journalist interested in security and foreign policies. X: @ejazhaider Published in Dawn, EOS, May 31st, 2026
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