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mercredi 22 avril 2026
Entre Nous By Dr. Pamela Chrabieh on 20 Apr 2026
The Emerging Architecture of the Interregnum - Part II
A Dialogue on the Ageing Hegemon and the Global Majority
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By Nel Bonilla and FuturEarly
A Note to Readers: Welcome to Part II of our joint dialogue exploring the emerging architecture of the interregnum. If Part I focused on the interiors of the imperial core—diagnosing the terminal velocity of the "Bunker State" and its internal collapse—Part II is an expedition into the geoeconomic battlespace. In this second half, the roles reverse: I interview FuturEarly to dissect the external clash between the US-led order and the Global Majority. We explore the friction between the transatlantic "casino" and the Global Majority's "factory," the sovereign bleed of industrialized sanctions, the mechanics of elite capture, and the 21st-century colonial land grab.
PART II: The Geoeconomic Battlespace
Nel Bonilla interviews FuturEarly
1. The Casino and the Factory
Nel Bonilla: The transatlantic economic model has become deeply entrenched in financialization, prioritizing asset management over production. In contrast, the Global Majority countries seem to be choosing re-industrialization. Are we witnessing a permanent divergence of economic models, or is the transatlantic elite actively trying to coerce the Global Majority back into their financialized structures and super-exploitation? How do you characterize the current friction between these two paradigms?
FuturEarly: Thank you for the question Nel—it is both diagnostic and directional in understanding how we arrived here.
The “casino” did not emerge overnight; it was constructed. It opened with the wave of deregulation that shifted the centre of gravity from production to financial engineering—when returns increasingly came not from labour and industry, but from leverage and arbitrage. Offshoring was not merely about efficiency; it rebalanced economic, environmental, and social costs outward, while financial gains were internalized within transatlantic systems. Over time, this logic became embedded—elevated to orthodoxy—across both markets and statecraft. One telling marker of this shift is institutional: the corridors of power came to be populated more by lawyers than engineers, shaping how problems were defined and solved.
Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has simultaneously scaled a different instrument of power—sanctions. Through a layered architecture of legislation, executive authority, and administrative enforcement, sanctions have evolved into a system of continuous application. While only dozens of core laws underpin this framework, successive administrations have issued well over a hundred executive orders, enabling the designation of tens of thousands of individuals, firms, and entities. Sanctions, in effect, have been industrialized into a primary tool of geopolitical and geoeconomic influence.
In parallel, a different model has taken shape elsewhere. Over the same three decades, the United States has industrialized sanctions as a tool of statecraft, while China has industrialized production. Each reflects a distinct theory of power.
Since the reform era under Deng Xiaoping, China’s leadership—from Jiang Zemin (Electrical Engineer) to Hu Jintao (Hydraulic Engineer) and even Xi Jinping, who studied chemical engineering—has been shaped by technical training and systems thinking, reinforcing a focus on infrastructure, manufacturing, and long-horizon planning. By contrast, the United States over the same period has produced no engineer-presidents; leaders such as Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden have largely emerged from legal and political backgrounds. This divergence is not merely biographical—it is structural.
So how should we characterize the current friction?
Not simply as a divergence, but as a contest between two organizing logics of power:
one financialized, institutional, and increasingly reliant on instruments like sanctions;
the other industrial, systems-driven, and anchored in production capacity.
Whether this becomes permanent depends less on coercion and more on performance. The transatlantic model retains enormous financial and institutional reach, but the Global Majority is increasingly experimenting with—and in some cases committing to—models that prioritize sovereignty, industrial depth, and resilience.
The friction, therefore, is not accidental—it is systemic, and likely to persist.
And if one extends the casino metaphor: gambling is not a game or a gamut, but a gut-wrenching condition. In that sense, the financialization that followed deindustrialization resembles a form of structural osteoporosis—gradual, weakening, and difficult to reverse. A pure addiction to Wall Street and the market. No amount of faith placed in technological leaps alone, including AI, will serve as a universal remedy for these underlying imbalances. Recovery, if it is to occur, must be endogenous. External pressures—including those that may arise from strategic dependencies such as rare earth supply chains—may at times act as moments of forced recalibration, but they cannot substitute for internal renewal.
2. Elite Capture
Nel Bonilla: The transatlantic ruling strata are experts at co‑opting leadership through capture or coercion. Looking at the Global Majority countries today, do you see a real threat of internal elite fragmentation? Could the multipolar project be slowed down or derailed from within by domestic elites who are still ideologically, culturally, or financially tethered to the West, or who are actively targeted to sow discord and mistrust?
FuturEarly: I believe one of the major contributors to this pattern is the think tanks – the very factories of “thought leadership”, where one could argue their outputs are more “leadership that were thought” how to serve the establishment.
Many of these domestic elites – as you so eloquently call them – have been byproducts of Ivy League business schools: Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Sciences Po, LSE, LBS, or McGill. Their intellectual formative years, and their identities, have been very much crafted, chiselled and cast in this Western sociocultural construct.
Through this lens, if you go back as far as Iran’s 1953 coup – orchestrated by MI6 and the CIA – you will see the significant role that the Rashidian brothers played in toppling the democratically elected government of Dr. Mossadegh. One cannot but be, at best, sceptical about the negative impact of domestic elites who have a kilt‑like set of allegiances – allegiances that can be compromised, coerced to collude with the interests of their collective elite class.
Think tanks are the engine rooms for policy, posturing and punitive pronouncement that make their way to the corridors of power. Are these engines of statecraft fundamentally oriented towards de‑escalation and diplomacy, or do they default to deterrence and intervention? The question is foundational to understanding why our world is shaped by cycles of conflict.
Any serious assessment of policy advice must begin not with intent, but with evidence. Before asking what should be done, we must first ask what has been advocated, by whom, and with what recurring bias. A taxonomy of ideas is thus a necessary act of strategic self‑awareness for all sides of the debate.
As such, the Global Majority finds itself in a precarious position. It has not yet built the scale and the cohesion to muster the necessary mass – ideologically (democracy and liberalism), culturally (Hollywood and mainstream media), and financially (the US dollar and the TINA – “there is no alternative” – framework) – to untangle itself from what is at best a passive‑aggressive structure. One that I call the International Ruleless Biased Disorder, where might is right.
In one of my recent articles, titled From Advice to Armaments and Ammunition, I highlighted the importance of assessing and examining the impact of internal elites and think tanks on our global discourse. In it, I proposed a new, fully Global South‑funded tool. Project Athena – named for the goddess of wisdom, not just warfare – would build this public utility. It would serve journalists, academics, diplomats, peace‑builders and concerned global citizens. It would create accountability through transparency. Most importantly, it would shift the discourse from “What do these powerful institutions say?” to “What patterns do their recommendations actually reveal?”
Feasibility: The tools are in our hands.
The barriers are not technical, but of will and resource allocation. The methodology is clear:
· Define the spectrum – categorise output across diplomacy, deterrence, intervention and stabilisation.
· Build the corpus – aggregate six decades of policy papers, briefs and task force reports.
· Classify with precision – employ a hybrid model of keyword dictionaries and semantic framing analysis, audited for neutrality.
· Visualise the truth – create an interactive, public dashboard tracking recommendations by institution, era and conflict.
The computational power required is significant but not prohibitive. The primary investment lies in the initial expert human annotation needed to train and audit the model, estimated at $200,000–$500,000. Subsequent scaling, inference, and dashboard maintenance are comparatively low‑cost once the methodological foundation is established. This cost profile is consistent with comparable natural language processing and policy‑analysis projects in academia and applied research.
For the global community of peace‑builders, family offices and foundations who routinely deploy capital for conflict resolution, this is not a cost. It is a transformative investment in diagnostic clarity – a single mid‑sized grant for a revelation that could redirect billions in philanthropic and policy capital.
3. The Geoeconomic Bullseye
Nel Bonilla: The US- and Israel-ruling strata consistently frame their targeting of Iran in ideological or security terms. But looking beneath the surface, what is the geoeconomic and geostrategy meaning of Iran? In the grand chessboard of energy, transit, and multipolar connectivity, why is the neutralisation of Iran so structurally central to the transatlantic agenda?
FuturEarly: I find the discrepancy between rhetoric and reality ever more glaring. First, let us put things into context.
•
The United States military budget in the latest round is $1.15
trillion, with a supplemental request for an additional $350 billion and
an Iran war supplemental of $50 billion, leading to a whopping $1.55
trillion.
• Israel’s military budget is $47 billion, and
in the past 24 months it has also received another $21 billion from the
United States, bringing it to $67 billion.
• Iran’s military budget is $8 billion.
That is to say, the US and Israel eclipse Iran’s military budget by a factor of 202 times.
This does not include the commitments, support and all the auxiliary “donations in kind” already paid, “contributed by”, or to be charged to GCC states by the United States for the umbrella that never opened.
Iran’s entire military budget is roughly equal to the value of a single aircraft carrier – the Abraham Lincoln – at an estimated $7 billion. Let that sink in. Before any of these carriers sink.
Iran is a civilisational state. A nation that does not have its identity tied to a UN resolution, its creation indebted to a declaration, or its continuity affected by a decapitation. Its resilience throughout millennia is not a byproduct of its armies or defence budgets, but the massive socio-civilisational memory that has been at the centre of its existence, resistance and relevance to this day. Many may be surprised to know Iran sits at the intersection of 15 neighbouring states – making it one of the most geographically and geopolitically encircled countries in the world.
It is in this light that one has to take into consideration that besides the most recent attacks on US assets in the GCC, for the past 200 years Iran has not attacked or invaded any other country. Considering the combustive nature of this geography and the fact that the United States has one of the highest numbers of its 800+ military bases all dotted around Iran, this is quite a remarkable and unique picture of a country that has maintained its composure.
One could argue that Iran is the very buckle of the “Belt and Road Initiative” for China, and the recent crises and pre‑emptive attacks by the US and Israel have sharpened the significance of Iran not only from a geostrategic point of view but also the geopolitical and geoeconomic importance of Iran. This is not just related to the Strait of Hormuz and the complications of energy corridors.
To understand why Iran is such an irresistible target, one must look at the ledger – not the headlines. Iran holds the world’s third‑largest proven oil reserves (approximately 208 billion barrels) and the second‑largest natural gas reserves (over 1,100 trillion cubic feet). Yet, because of decades of sanctions, it has been systematically prevented from translating that wealth into national development. For the second‑largest gas reserves on the planet to account for less than one per cent of global gas markets is not an accident. It is the intended outcome of a sustained campaign of “maximum pressure” – a campaign designed not to change Iranian behaviour, but to cripple Iranian capacity.
This geoeconomic strangulation extends beyond energy markets to transit corridors. The Iran‑Pakistan “Peace Pipeline” – a project that would bring affordable Iranian gas to energy‑starved Pakistan and onward to China – has been vetoed or effectively blocked by the United States at every turn. Washington understands what Beijing knows: that the pipeline is not merely an energy project, but the terrestrial spine of a Eurasian connectivity architecture that bypasses the Strait of Hormuz, the Indian Ocean choke points, and ultimately, the US Navy. To neutralise Iran is to keep that architecture broken.
So why is Iran’s neutralisation so structurally central to the transatlantic agenda? Because Iran is not just a country with oil and gas. It is the geographical and civilisational keystone of a multipolar Eurasia. It connects the Caspian to the Persian Gulf, the Caucasus to the Indian Ocean. Any serious vision of a China‑led connectivity order – whether the Belt and Road Initiative, the International North‑South Transport Corridor, or the Asia‑Middle East energy axis – must pass through Iran. To remove Iran from the map, or to keep it in a state of perpetual siege, is to keep Eurasia disconnected and the Western naval empire intact.
And yet, for all its domestic challenges – corruption, mismanagement, the weight of its own revolution – Iran has not collapsed. It has absorbed the blows of the second‑longest sanctions regime in modern history, second only to Cuba, and emerged not as a failed state but as a technological and military power in its own right. The infatuation with breaking up Iran and turning it into a Balkanised model is not a conspiracy theory; it is a documented policy preference, laid out in think‑tank papers such as the Brookings Institution’s Which Path to Persia? – papers that treat Iran not as a nation to be engaged, but as a problem to be solved, a structure to be dismantled.
It is hard to imagine, but perhaps a nuclear Iran would not have been such a bad idea. If Tehran had already crossed the threshold, the US and Israel would never have attacked in the first place. The region would have settled into a cold equilibrium of mutual deterrence – imperfect, but predictable. Instead, by opening the Pandora’s box of pain projection, the United States and Israel have overplayed the hand of hubris, horror and harm. Israel is chasing a unipolar West Asia – drunk on the fall of Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad and Tripoli, mimicking America after 1991. A unipolar world was bad. A unipolar West Asia is worse.
The greatest tragedy of the past four decades is not that Iran has been kept poor. It is that Iran has been kept poor while its subsoil wealth – the third‑largest oil reserves, the second‑largest gas reserves – has been effectively placed under a foreign veto. The Peace Pipeline, vetoed time and again, is a monument to that tragedy. And the current war is not the cause of that tragedy. It is the consequence.
So the geoeconomic meaning of Iran is this: it is the key that unlocks Eurasia – or the lock that keeps it sealed. The transatlantic agenda cannot afford to let that key turn. Hence the decades of pressure, the successive rounds of sanctions, the pre‑emptive strikes, and now the full‑scale war. Iran is not being punished for what it has done. It is being punished for what it represents: a civilisational state that refuses to accept the role of a resource colony, and a geographical reality that, if ever connected to the rest of Eurasia, would redraw the map of global power. That is the bullseye. And it has been there all along.
4. The Loneliness of Strategic Depth
Nel Bonilla: Iran has cultivated immense strategic depth through its Axis of Resistance. Yet, are the other emerging powers (including BRICS) genuinely interested in integrating Iran as a civilisational partner, or are they utilising its geostrategic positioning as a buffer while leaving it to face the hegemon alone (or is it a measure of both)?
FuturEarly: This is a very good question. When you look at BRICS + you will see a set of actors and nations that all have very different relationships with Iran. One could argue that China, Brazil, Russia and South Africa have the closest set of relationships or perhaps the most coherent relationships with Iran. Each in their own way. India has been more of a seasonal actor. As the term “Swing Producer” among OPEC + is well recognised, in the geopolitical sphere India has acted as a “Swing Operator”. The merits of this posturing are questioned by many of the geopolitical sages and also challenged domestically in Delhi and beyond. So moving beyond the core founding members of BRICS you then have KSA, United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia, Egypt and Indonesia. The relationships with KSA have come to a defrosting after the intervention of China bringing these two regional players together. Obviously as a result of the latest pre‑emptive strikes and the policy of eye‑for‑an‑eye by Iran targeting US bases and the energy infrastructure of KSA, these recent progresses have taken a backseat. There is no shortage of chatter, openly and discreetly, that behind the scenes Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have been quietly lobbying in Washington for “finishing the job” in Iran. Which brings us to the bilateral relationship with the UAE – one that has been in itself a completely different level of engagement and nuance between Abu Dhabi and Dubai. As if these two city states have been part of a different balance sheet historically.
What your question captures so well is the difference between transactional solidarity and strategic integration. Iran has invested decades in building the Axis of Resistance – a network of non‑state actors from Lebanon to Yemen that serves as its forward defence. But that is not the same as having great powers willing to bleed for its survival.
China sees Iran as a node on the Belt and Road, a gas station for its energy needs, and a geopolitical irritant to the United States – useful, but not indispensable. Russia views Iran as a partner in the “caspian‑persian‑caucasus” energy and security architecture, but Moscow has its own history of abandoning Tehran when convenient (witness the delays on the INSTC railway, the silence during the 2026 strikes, and the Kremlin’s careful dance with Israel). South Africa and Brazil are solid in rhetoric but distant in capacity. Their votes in international forums matter; their military or economic support, less so.
India’s “swing operator” posture is perhaps the most revealing. New Delhi wants Iranian energy, access to Chabahar port as a counterweight to Gwadar, and influence over Afghanistan. But it also wants close ties with Israel, the United States, and the Gulf monarchies. When push comes to shove – as in 2026 – India tilts toward Washington, and Tel Aviv not Tehran. That is not betrayal; it is the logic of a swing state.
The defrosting between Riyadh and Tehran, mediated by China, was a genuine achievement. But it was always shallow: economic and diplomatic, not strategic or military. The moment Iranian missiles struck Saudi oil infrastructure in retaliation for US‑Israeli strikes, the old wounds reopened. The chatter from Riyadh and Abu Dhabi about “finishing the job” is not just gossip; it reflects a fundamental reality. The Gulf monarchies fear the Islamic Republic’s revolutionary ideology more than they fear American withdrawal. They will take US protection over Iranian partnership any day.
So, to answer your question directly: the emerging powers are not leaving Iran entirely alone – but they are also not coming to its rescue. Iran is a buffer, a shield, a useful distraction for the hegemon. It is not a civilisational partner in the sense of equal burden‑sharing. The BRICS+ framework provides diplomatic cover, trade corridors, and a narrative of multipolarity. But when the bombs fall, the phone calls from Beijing, Moscow, and New Delhi are expressions of concern – not commitments of force.
Iran understood this long ago. That is precisely why it built the Axis of Resistance – because strategic depth cannot be imported. It must be cultivated at home, with allies who have no choice but to stand or fall together. The loneliness of strategic depth is not a failure of Iranian diplomacy; it is a structural condition of a world where every power guards its own interest first, and Iran’s interest remains, for most, a distant second. That is why Iran has developed a homegrown, non‑negotiable ballistic missile doctrine – on a budget of just $7.5 billion, a fraction of what the US and Israel spend annually. The expenditure is easily eclipsed by their defence budgets, but in effectiveness and strategic impact, the returns have been undisputable. Iran is not dependent on any BRICS+ member for its core deterrence. It has built that itself.
5. The Ghost of “Which Path to Persia?”
Nel Bonilla: Looking back at influential think‑tank papers like the Brookings Institution’s 2009 Which Path to Persia?, which explicitly outlined strategies for provocation and regime change in Iran. How relevant are these legacy blueprints today? What is the meaning of such papers in the current geopolitical landscape?
FuturEarly: The official narrative for the past few decades tells us it is about Iran’s nuclear capacity. The headlines speak of missile arsenals, drone fleets, and the proxies. But these are alibis, not causes. They are the pretext draped over a much older, much deeper fixation.
This is about the fact that Iran – Persia – is a civilisational state. It is a nation with memory, with poetry, with philosophy, with a sense of self that predates the American republic by millennia and the modern state of Israel by thousands of years. And its unforgivable sin? It has not yet kissed the ring.
The very same powers that today are flag bearers of democracy and “rooting” for a new regime in Iran are the very ones who have aborted that trajectory in various iterations and corners of Iran’s history, in all kinds of nefarious forms – from sending Reza Shah into exile, to the infamous 1953 coup.
I am glad you brought up the Brookings Institution paper. For those who wish to truly understand how we arrived here – at a moment of open confrontation, of strikes on sovereign territory, of children paying the price for geopolitics – there is a document that offers sobering clarity.
It is a 2009 analysis paper from the Brookings Institution’s Saban Centre for Middle East Policy, published at the height of America’s “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan, while body bags were still coming home. Its title: Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy toward Iran.
The paper laid out nine distinct paths – from coercive diplomacy and covert action to regime change through proxy militias – and openly discussed the feasibility of an Israeli pre‑emptive strike. Its lead authors later served in the Obama and Trump administrations, turning blueprints into policy.
Reading it seventeen years later in 2026 is an act of excavation. The authors’ allegiances and loyalties speak for themselves, as do the brazen options laid out in its chapters. This was not a fringe document; it was the product of one of Washington’s most respected foreign policy establishments, published at a moment when the United States was bogged down in two disastrous ground wars.
The tragic irony is that this fixation has blinded its authors to the actual consequences. The 2009 report was written while America was mired in Iraq and Afghanistan – wars of choice that cost trillions and thousands of lives, wars justified by threats that turned out to be mirages. The body bags kept coming. And yet, even as the ground swallowed American soldiers, the Washington policy machine was already sketching the next target, the next “indispensable” war.
Iran did not wait. It read the same paper. Its response – a nuclear breakout capability, a missile arsenal that now reaches Tel Aviv, and a network of proxies from Beirut to Sana’a – is the direct consequence of those seventeen years of pressure. Israel, meanwhile, needed no Brookings permission slip; it had its own red lines. But the paper gave Washington’s blessing to an Israeli strike – a permission slip that proved decisive.
Now, in 2026, the children of that next war have arrived. One hundred and sixty‑eight little innocent girls, gone on a single day. Their school, struck not once but twice – a double tap that suggests the first explosion was not enough. It seems neither was the first coup in 1953, nor the regime change of 1979.
So here we are. Seventeen years after one of the most influential Washington think tanks published a menu of options for “handling” Iran – options that included encouraging an Israeli strike – that strike has come.
All of this goes back to your earlier question and my assessment of the predominantly nefarious role of think tanks and the elite, who use such papers as an upstream for policy design, which then find their ways to the legislative bodies of Congress, the Senate, and the Treasury, only then to find their implementation through campaigns of maximum pressure, economic statecraft (crippling sanctions), and ultimately in the barbaric manifestation of military might in campaigns like Midnight Hammer or Epic Fury.
Despite the growing excitement around the Islamabad‑hosted ceasefire talks – which are very much a Chinese‑led, supported and steered set of negotiations – I sincerely believe that one has to be more pragmatic about the entrenched and rather decades‑long planned, cast, and funded covert and overt efforts that go into these macro geopolitical strategies. In other words, maybe we are facing a pause, an encore as they say – but the cast, the producers, and the executioners of these scenarios do not give up.
This is a perpetual, decades‑long, coercive coalition of decapitation that has no mercy and is relentless in its endeavour.
The only thing that could break this cycle is not a ceasefire in Islamabad, but a genuine reckoning in Washington – that Iran’s sin is not its behaviour, but its existence. Until that delusion is cured, the papers will keep being written, and the children will keep falling.
6. The Return of the Great Land Grab
Nel Bonilla: The current scramble for energy, minerals, and financial control feels distinctly Machiavellian. Are we witnessing a return to a 19th‑century style, World War I‑esque colonial land grab from the US‑led crumbling empire, merely dressed up in 21st‑century technological and financial language, and orchestrated to secure hard assets before its financialised system fractures?
FuturEarly: I am glad you raised this. Because if you remember, just earlier this year at the Munich Security Conference, Marco Rubio – who wears two hats in the current administration as both Secretary of State and White House National Security Advisor, it seems, a nostalgic historian of empire – openly displayed his longing for the golden age of colonialism. He said: “The great western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti‑colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come.”
Those are not the words of a post‑colonial realist. They are the echoes of a worldview that never truly accepted decolonisation. And we see that same instinct in the loud proclamation of “energy dominance” from the White House. But here is the catch: you can chase energy resources around the world, but if your own society is as polarised, fragmented and disoriented as the United States – or many European nations – then dominance rings hollow. Dominance is not just a posture; it depends on the theatres where you wish to be a dominant player. Acceptance, in other words, is a two‑way street.
What the 19th‑century land grab had – and today’s scramble lacks, or rather tries to counterfeit – is territorial permanence. The old empires seized land, drew borders, and imposed direct administration. Today’s version is lighter, more financialised: contracts, debt, equity stakes, supply chain leverage. It is a land grab by other means. But the underlying driver is the same: securing hard assets – lithium, cobalt, rare earths, oil, gas – before the financialised system fractures under its own weight. What we are witnessing is a form of global resource securitisation dressed in 21st‑century technology and legal language. And when that financialised coercion fails, the old methods return: the snatching of sitting presidents – as in the case of Nicolás Maduro – reminds us that the empire still knows how to stage a scene of righteousness while committing the very theft it claims to oppose. The glare of that hypocrisy is blinding.
But the hunger – the salivation – for resources remains intact. The means have changed; the malign intentions have not. Consider Congo and why the rubber curse is now the cobalt curse. The substance changes; the structure endures. Between 1890 and 1910, rubber transformed from a luxury good to an industrial necessity. The Force Publique enforced production quotas through systematic violence. Villages that failed to meet their assigned weight of latex were subject to hostage taking and amputation. Severed hands were collected and counted as proof of efficiency. That was not an aberration; it was the colonial system operating as designed. When atrocity statistics became impossible to suppress, Leopold commissioned an international commission of inquiry. The commission confirmed the abuses and recommended reforms. The system continued, marginally less theatrical in its violence but undiminished in its output.
Today, Congo remains a site of extraordinary extraction and negligible local benefit, its subsoil wealth converted into infrastructure elsewhere – European roads in the 1910s, American nuclear weapons in the 1940s, Japanese electronics in the 1980s, Chinese batteries in the 2010s, and now the neural networks of Silicon Valley. Each generation discovers Congo anew, expresses shock at its conditions, and devises mechanisms to ensure the flow of ore continues uninterrupted.
The new apparatus of AI‑empowered neo‑colonialism is distinguished by three features. First, the digitisation of colonial archives – the Tervuren documents contain geological surveys from when outcropping ore was visible on the surface, before a century of artisanal mining obscured the original contours. For a mining company equipped with machine learning algorithms, these digitised archives become a competitive advantage of the first order. Second, the application of artificial intelligence to mineral exploration. KoBold Metals, a U.S.‑based mining venture backed by Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Jeff Bezos, applies AI and data‑driven modelling to locate potential deposits of copper, cobalt and lithium. In 2025, KoBold obtained exploration permits in the Democratic Republic of Congo for lithium‑rich areas around Manono. The digitised archives are the MRI of Congo’s mineral wealth, rendering in high resolution the geological anatomy of one of the most richly endowed territories on earth. KoBold is not the radiologist; it is the surgical team, reading the scan for incision points rather than diagnosis. The radiologist should be a Congolese public institution – independent, technically equipped, and empowered to interpret the images in the national interest and determine who, if anyone, is permitted to operate. That institution does not exist. Its absence is structural, not incidental.
Third, the formalisation of American strategic interest: in April 2025, the Biden administration finalised the U.S.–DRC Mineral Partnership Agreement, negotiated by Amos Hochstein. It offers Congolese authorities a counterweight to Chinese dominance – American capital, infrastructure investment and security cooperation – in return for preferential access to Congolese cobalt, lithium and copper. This is not partnership; it is a new lease on an old concession.
What China does not have in Congo is a colonial footprint. It did not carve up the continent at Berlin in 1885. It did not administer the Congo Free State, extract rubber under Leopold’s atrocities, or preside over the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. Its presence in Africa is recent, transactional and – crucially – negotiated with post‑independence African governments that possess, at least formally, the attributes of sovereignty. This does not immunise Chinese companies from legitimate criticism – nor should it. But it does mean that Beijing operates without the historical baggage that encumbers Brussels, Paris, London and Washington. And in the eyes of many post‑colonial nations, that absence of baggage is not a minor detail; it is the difference between a partner and a former overseer.
Beneath all of this is the dollar – the real weapon. Sanctions, SWIFT exclusion, and secondary penalties are the silent cavalry of the new land grab. Without the dollar’s role as the gatekeeper of global finance, the coercive power behind these resource contracts would be vastly diminished. The empire that controls the reserve currency controls the terms of extraction.
The strategic takeaway for policymakers is this: the return of the great land grab is real, but it is not a replay of the 19th century. It is a scramble for contracts, corridors, and currency settlements, now supercharged by artificial intelligence and digitised colonial memory. The empire that fails to offer a partnership free from lecture and looting – and that refuses to build genuine local institutional capacity rather than bypass it – will find itself locked out. Not by armies, but by the quiet choices of sovereign governments. And that is a defeat that no aircraft carrier, and no algorithm, can reverse.
7. The Sovereign Bleed of Sanctions
Nel Bonilla: Sanctions are the weapon of choice for the transatlantic empire. Beyond the immediate economic pain, what is the meaning of sanctions for the targeted countries? How do they fundamentally cripple a nation’s ability to exercise true sovereignty, care for its populace, and participate meaningfully in the multipolar transition?
FuturEarly: We see sanctions as headlines. But they are about headcounts. Headcounts of students who cannot receive remittances from their parents to pay for their education. They are the feedstock of brain drain from every nation in the crosshairs of what Scott Bessent and his class call “economic statecraft”. Sanctions are the shortages of life‑saving cancer and oncology drugs. According to reports, Iranian patients have died waiting for medicines that were legally exempt but blocked by bank de‑risking – a designed chilling effect, not a bug.
Sanctions are the impediments that prevent a vibrant auto manufacturing sector – the largest in West Asia – from upgrading its homegrown combustion engines supply chain, resulting in thousands of preventable road accidents. They block the import of unleaded fuel and prevent refineries from proper maintenance, repair and operations (MRO), leading to an official death toll from respiratory diseases that should never have been counted. For 47 years, sanctions have deprived a nation of 93 million people of the ability to acquire a new civilian aircraft fleet. The result: over 1,800 people have died in aviation accidents directly linked to fleet sanctions, according to the Civil Aviation Organization of Iran.
This is only the shortest catalogue of the thousands of scars that sanctions carve into the body of a nation.
Primary sanctions block direct US‑Iran trade. But secondary sanctions are the silent noose. They cut Iran off from the global financial system, not just American markets – forcing even humanitarian transactions into a paralysed grey zone. The UN and EU maintain humanitarian exemptions, but fear of US penalties drives banks to deny even food and medicine transactions.. The result is de‑development – a deliberate strategy to cripple a nation’s future capacity, not just its present. Sanctions are not a scalpel; they are a sledgehammer aimed at preventing a new generation of engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs from emerging.
Yet what Iran has accomplished under these draconian measures is nothing short of mind‑boggling. For a nation to stand tall – let alone advance in aerospace, nanotechnology, and stem cell research – after nearly half a century of stigmatisation and a global branding machine that has skilfully inverted every title associated with a civilisational state, is a feat that deserves sober acknowledgment. Sanctions do not collapse the target; they harden it. They accelerate indigenous innovation, shift trade corridors eastward, and create a generation that sees the West not as a model but as a menace.
Only North Korea faces a thicker sanctions wall. Yet Iran’s economy, unlike Pyongyang’s, remains integrated enough to feel every cut – and still innovate.
Whether you admire the Iranian government or despise it, one fact remains stubbornly on the record: a nation cut off from the world, with a military budget roughly equal to the value of a single US aircraft carrier – the USS Abraham Lincoln – has endured, responded to, and actively challenged the two most unforgiving, merciless, and by any standard savage militaries on the planet for sixty days in less than one year. That is not a statement of sympathy. It is a statement of strategic reality. And whether you like it or not, it is nothing short of impressive.
A nation whose musicians gather in the rubble of their studios after Israeli strikes recording tunes of hope, whose professors return to the demolished classrooms of Sharif University of Technology to deliver lectures online, and whose families form human chains around power plants and bridges after Donald Trump’s threats for eradicating a civilization in the most expletive language – that is not merely survival. That is something profoundly moving.
Sanctions are not only external pressure; they are internal ammunition. They empower the hardline establishment and weaken moderate voices who might otherwise push for genuine opening. Reformers are discredited as unable to deliver relief, while hardliners point to sanctions as proof that negotiation is futile. The very moment a nation is called not a government but a “regime”, an immediate stigma attaches. The moment it has to justify its existence after being framed as the “largest sponsor of terrorism” – while an open and active program to subvert it operates at every corner – the irony takes on a darker shape.
Sanctions are not merely about trade. They are about tormenting a population, defining them as the “Axis of Evil” just after that same nation helped the United States uproot the Taliban in Afghanistan. That famous speech, crafted by David Frum, framed a proud nation.
For senior policymakers, the lesson is this: the multipolar transition will not wait for Washington to lift its embargo. It is already happening – through Chinese yuan, Russian energy, and Iranian defiance and trade corridors or strait dominance. For Iran to join the multipolar order as a full partner, sanctions relief must be sequenced with verifiable nuclear and regional confidence‑building measures. But no amount of diplomacy will succeed if the underlying stigma – “regime”, “terrorist sponsor” – remains weaponised. The multipolar transition requires not just new trade routes but a new vocabulary.
The real sovereign bleed is not Iran’s. It is the slow, self‑inflicted erosion of the empire’s own credibility. Sanctions have become a habit, not a strategy. And habits that outlive their purpose become addictions – costly, self‑defeating, and ultimately ungovernable.
Epilogue: The Ledger and the Knowing
FuturEarly: I often ask my friends: what is the most dangerous threat – napalm bombs, nerve gas or nuclear weapons? Before they answer, I remind them that none of the above is as dangerous as the narrative. The narrative that justified napalm in Vietnam. The narrative that supplied nerve gas to Saddam Hussein, paid for by Western capital, to be used against young Iranian men. The narrative that paints a country which signed the Non‑Proliferation Treaty as a target, to be attacked by two nuclear powers that have acted as rogue states for a century without consequence, still destroying, demeaning and devouring others at will. This is not a competition for the upper hand in a war of stories.
We stand at a crossroads. The Axis of Occupation (Israeli and United States) – militarily, physically, geographically, financially through the dollar, morally through the quadruple tap on civilian infrastructure – must be called out. Not out of pity or pluralism, but out of sheer realism. What yesterday seemed like an unassailable advantage in drones and air dominance is now enhanced and advancing in the hands of Iran and Russia. For Western capitals to remain delusional about the closing gap in creativity and ingenuity is the greatest threat to the very mirage they are trying to preserve.
The world’s biggest emission today is not the carbon dioxide of forever wars and wanton aggression. It is the emission of ego and greed that propels those wars.
America must learn to live at peace within itself before it can chase peace beyond its borders. On its current trajectory, the greatest threat to the United States does not reside in Tehran or Beijing. It resides in the fractured body of a nation, separated by two mighty oceans, that has plundered its own endowment for the intoxication of a unipolar moment. Failing to champion a multipolar world is America’s lost opportunity of the 20th century. One could argue that the United States needs therapy – a national healing at home.
Consider this: 93% of its history. Eight trillion dollars.
Since its founding in 1776, the United States has been at war for roughly 93% of its existence – just sixteen years of peace in nearly two and a half centuries. Since the September 11 attacks alone, the bill for America’s forever wars has climbed past $8 trillion, an amount larger than the annual GDP of Germany and Britain combined. The doors would shake.
The phones would melt. The quiet career of plausible deniability would finally face its overdue arraignment.
Not because the facts are hidden, but because the scale of the knowing was always the crime.
The American administrations, congress and the senate knew the taxes would go to wars, not bridges. They knew homelessness would rise while arms budgets never fell. They knew the infrastructure would rust and the economic well‑being of the masses would be treated as an externality. They knew the few would profit, the many would pay, and the ledger would never balance. And still they briefed. Still they approved. Still they called it national security while the nation crumbled.
So yes: if the American people knew what the American deep state knew – not just the secrets, but the choice – there would be a riot. Not of anger, but of recognition. That the only currency they could not print, the only invoice that never got paid, was their own children.
Nel Bonilla: As FuturEarly so powerfully points out, the scale of the knowing is the crime we must reckon with. The interregnum is a shift in trade routes and supply chains but it is also a moral and structural reckoning. Surviving this transition requires us to look past the managed consensus and confront the architecture of the crumbling empire head-on.
Join the Conversation
If this framework holds, if the transatlantic elite is actively using industrialized sanctions and an AI-empowered colonial land grab to coerce the Global Majority back into a system of super-exploitation, then we have to look at how this impacts our own societies and regions.
Do you see the consequences of the “casino” logic and structural osteoporosis playing out in your own economies? Have you witnessed the “sovereign bleed” of sanctions, where economic statecraft is deployed as a sledgehammer to enforce de-development? Have you encountered the elite capture we discussed—the point where Western think tanks, unipolar narratives, and transatlantic institutions converge to co-opt domestic leadership and derail genuine multipolar independence? The crumbling empire’s coercive machinery is built locally in every unequal resource contract, every blocked trade corridor, and every attempt to keep Eurasia disconnected.
Where do you see this transmission belt of coercion breaking down? Are you witnessing the “factory” outpace the “casino”—whether through local re-industrialization, the building of new multipolar architectures, or genuine sovereign resilience—taking root around you? Where do you see resistance? Let’s discuss in the comments below.
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To map the architecture of the Bunker State and the geoeconomic battlegrounds we’ve explored in this dialogue, one must be able to operate outside of institutional path-dependencies. As FuturEearly and I discussed regarding the “intellectual supply chain” of Western think tanks, the “casino” economy, and the new colonial land grab, this kind of analysis relies entirely on the freedom to research without the filters of the transatlantic establishment or the military-industrial complex.
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Stay curious,
Nel