Beijing Has Gained Political Control of the WHO

How the CCP corrupted the World Health Organization and Global Public Health 

Stuart J Cvrk 

 

 

NOTE: In light of Anthony Fauci’s non-testimony yesterday, in which he took the Fifth an astonishing 111 times, it seems highly appropriate to publish this analysis by Stu Cvrk on China’s complete capture of the World Health Organization, and with it, global public health. Fauci’s own relations with the CCP become more impossible to ignore by the day. — RDM

by Stu Cvrk
July 30, 2026

The World Health Organization (WHO) serves as the directing and coordinating authority on international health work. According to its organizing principles, it connects 194 member states, partners, and people to promote health, keep the world safe, and serve vulnerable populations. U.S. voluntary funding given to the WHO has dwarfed China’s contributions, yet China exercises outsized influence on the WHO.

On Jan. 20, 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14155, formally announcing the intent to withdraw the United States from the WHO. The United States formally completed its withdrawal on Jan. 22, 2026. The reasons for the withdrawal included mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, a persistent refusal to implement urgently needed changes in accountability and transparency, and an inability to demonstrate independence from “inappropriate political influence” by member states (particularly communist China).

Let us examine how, in four phases, China came to exert undue influence over the WHO, justifying the U.S. withdrawal.

Phase 1: Entry and Early Maneuvering (1949–2003)

China’s engagement with the WHO began even before the country’s formal entry. Throughout the history of the WHO’s relationship with China, politicization has been a key factor and point of debate. In 1972, communist China replaced the Republic of China (Taiwan) as a member of the WHO. From the beginning, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) viewed the WHO not simply as a health body but as a geopolitical arena. China’s Ministry of Health wanted to use the WHO as a political arena to influence developing countries.

Even during the Cold War era, there were CCP-aligned figures operating inside the organization. C.K. Chu worked at the Geneva-based organization for 14 years, maintaining close contact with the Chinese Embassy in Switzerland. After his retirement in 1963, he returned to Beijing and was immediately admitted into the CCP.

Phase 2: The SARS Turning Point and China’s Humiliation (2003)

The 2003 SARS outbreak represented a critical juncture — and a rare moment of genuine WHO pushback. Then-WHO Director-General Gro Harlem Brundtland made history by declaring the WHO’s first travel advisory in 55 years, recommending against travel to and from the disease epicenter in southern China. Brundtland also criticized China for endangering global health by attempting to cover up the outbreak through its usual playbook of arresting whistleblowers and censoring media.

This was the last time a WHO director-general would publicly confront Beijing. According to reports at the time, China felt so stung by this “humiliation” that it pushed to limit the agency’s power.

Phase 3: Installing a Loyal Director-General (2006)

China’s response to the SARS rebuke was swift and strategic. In 2006, China helped install its favored candidate, Dr. Margaret Chan, a Chinese national, in the top job. Beijing launched an “extraordinarily aggressive campaign“ to help her win power by canceling debts and doubling donations to voting African countries before the election.

The 2006 appointment of Chan as director-general marked the first time China had successfully elected a candidate to the top leadership position of a specialized U.N. agency.

Under Chan, the organization consistently deferred to Beijing’s political interests. Chan’s two mandates were marked by some polemics at the time of Ebola, a strange episode of praise for North Korea’s health system, and several stands against Taiwan for not “respecting” fully the CCP’s “One China” principle.

Chan also restructured the WHO’s election mechanics: She introduced new “FIFA-style” secret ballot voting rules to give countries vulnerable to diplomatic pressure the same voting power as richer countries. China paid far less to the WHO than other major countries. Instead, it plowed its money into cutting private deals with small voting countries.

Phase 4: Locking in Control — the Tedros Election (2017)

When Chan’s tenure ended, China repeated its electoral playbook, this time for a non-Chinese candidate who would nonetheless reliably serve Beijing’s interests. China was an important ally of Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in the WHO’s director-general election in 2017. Months before the election, Tedros was invited to speak at Peking University, where he called for stronger cooperation between China and the global south on health issues.

Tedros was elected to head the WHO with Chinese behind-the-scenes support, reflecting China’s close relationship with Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, which had become China’s bridgehead in Africa. African nations, many of them heavily indebted to China through Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) loans, voted overwhelmingly for Tedros. Beijing has leveraged its development practices through its BRI, which relies on predatory loans to gain influence over other countries.

The day after his electoral victory, Tedros confirmed to Chinese state media that he and the WHO would continue to support the “One China” principle, which recognizes only mainland China as legitimate and sees Taiwan as an inalienable part of that territory. What this had to do with world health was left unexplained.

How Chinese Influence Was Operationalized

China’s leverage over the WHO rested on several interlocking mechanisms.

Financial dependence and growing contributions. Countries’ assessed contributions had grown by only 3 percent since 2014, while extrabudgetary voluntary contributions grew by 18 percent, to nearly $4.7 billion in 2018–2019. This dependence on voluntary contributions leaves the WHO highly susceptible to the influence of individual countries.

Diplomatic pressure through the global south. China succeeded in leveraging its capacity to influence the WHO — and other such organizations — considerably in excess of its financial contribution, a testimony to its more concerted and focused approach to multilateral affairs.

Structural vote manipulation. By promoting secret ballots and cultivating smaller member states through debt relief and investment, Beijing was able to move votes with relatively modest financial outlay.

BRI health diplomacy. In January 2017, China signed a memorandum of understanding with the WHO for cooperation on the BRI.

In contrast, the United States has invested more than $100 billion to $130 billion in the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief since 2003 (roughly $110 billion in some 10- to 15-year approximations), delivering targeted HIV/AIDS (and related Ebola/tuberculosis) support in Africa and elsewhere. This bilateral approach often achieved strong results by operating with direct accountability outside heavier multilateral bureaucracies such as the WHO.

Significant Pro-CCP Decisions by the WHO and Their Consequences

Beijing has gained much through its political capture of the WHO.

1. Suppression of Taiwan’s participation. Since China acceded to the United Nations in 1971, it has periodically blocked Taiwan’s WHO membership. From 2009 to 2016, China allowed Taiwan to join the World Health Assembly as an observer. After the election of Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen in 2016, cross-strait relations chilled, and China blocked Taiwan’s future participation. This exclusion had catastrophic public health implications — Taiwan’s health officials warned the WHO of the possibility of human-to-human transmission of COVID-19 in the early days of the outbreak. Taiwan was frozen out of emergency meetings and briefings despite having one of the world’s most effective COVID-19 pandemic responses. Knowing this, the Trump administration sent U.S. Health Secretary Alex Azar to Taiwan in August 2020 to better understand Beijing’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic and hone domestic responses.

2. Delayed declaration of COVID-19 pandemic emergency: As the coronavirus spread beyond China’s borders, Chinese leaders successfully lobbied the WHO not to declare a public health emergency of international concern. Soon after this disastrous decision, the CCP blocked a WHO team from investigating the COVID-19 pandemic’s source and China’s response, in violation of the international health regulations.

3. Endorsement of China’s false early narrative: WHO’s failure to recognize proven human-to-human contamination — going along with China’s refusal to admit human-to-human transmission — despite strong and persistent indications to the contrary and alerts by Taiwanese health officials contributed directly to global delays in response.

4. Lavish false praise of China’s “transparency”: The WHO director-general thanked Chinese leader Xi Jinping for his “detailed knowledge of the outbreak” and said that China was “setting a new standard for outbreak control” — this despite the month-long delay in responding and the cover-up that included punishment of whistleblower doctors.

5. Delayed COVID-19 pandemic declaration: The organization refused to declare a COVID-19 pandemic until March 11, by which time 114 countries had already reported 118,000 cases. These decisions had global consequences, as WHO guidelines are followed by countries and private actors who base — and later justify — their actions on those guidelines.

6. Obstructed COVID-19 origins investigation: When the WHO produced a report evaluating the possible origins of COVID-19, it became evident that the entire report was nothing but Chinese propaganda. The former head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, himself stated that there were “considerable concerns” due to “a lot of restrictions on the ability of the people who went there to really take a look.”

Concluding Thoughts

The CCP’s approach to gain control of the WHO was calculated and methodical: entry through U.N. displacement of Taiwan, placement of sympathetic personnel over decades, exploitation of the organization’s financial vulnerabilities, debt diplomacy to control developing-world votes, and installation of compliant leadership.

The result was an organization that, at the most critical moment in living memory, delayed global response to COVID-19 by repeating information from Chinese authorities, ignored warnings from Taiwanese doctors, and was reluctant to declare a public health emergency of international concern.

The WHO’s institutional credibility has never recovered. Trump’s decision to leave and end U.S. subsidies to the politically corrupted WHO was entirely justified.

 

 

 Can Iran Break the Political Foundations of US Power in the Middle East?

 Iran does not Need to Expel the US from the Gulf. It only Needs to Make the American-Led Regional Order progressively More Precarious, Expensive and Politically Untenable

Kautilya The Contemplator 

 

 

A week ago, I argued in my essay Why Iranian Missiles Alone Will Not End America’s Presence in the Middle East that Iran is unlikely dislodge American power from the Middle East through missile strikes against US military bases alone. The latter are not ordinary real estate, but geopolitical assets embedded within a dense network of political relationships, security partnerships and strategic investments that have been built over decades.

This essay further builds on that argument by trying to answer the following question: if Iran cannot compel a US withdrawal through military force alone, can it gradually increase the political costs of America’s military presence to the point that the political foundations that sustain it begin to shift?

To answer this question, it may be useful to examine how past oversees military deployments have actually ended. If the history of the last seventy years is any guide, military bases have rarely closed because they were physically destroyed. Instead, their closure has largely followed political decisions that terminated the military presence. As such, understanding the politics that sustain US power in the Middle East is more important than the destructive power of Iranian missiles.

How US Overseas Military Deployments End

Figure 1 illustrates the primary mechanisms through which US overseas military deployments have ended between 1955 and 2025. Forty-eight significant base closures were identified during this period. Of these, thirty-one (or 65 percent) resulted from political decisions by host governments, making sovereign political choice by far the most common mechanism through which American military deployments have ended.

The historical examples are striking. In 1966, President Charles de Gaulle withdrew France from NATO’s integrated military command while remaining part of the alliance. He then required NATO headquarters and foreign forces to leave French territory, leading to the relocation of SHAPE headquarters to Brussels and the withdrawal of US forces. In 1992, the Philippine Senate rejected renewal of the Military Bases Agreement, leading to the closure of Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base. Similar sovereign decisions later brought about the closure of major American military installations in Panama, Ecuador, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Thailand.

 

 

A further six cases (~13 percent) followed revolutions or the collapse of allied governments. Muammar Gaddafi’s seizure of power in Libya in 1969 led to the closure of the Wheelus Air Base. The 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran ended the presence of the US Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) in the country and the closure of three American signals intelligence stations. More recently in 2024, Niger’s military government revoked its defense cooperation agreement with the United States, requiring the withdrawal of approximately 1,000 US military personnel and the evacuation of Air Base 101 in Niamey and Air Base 201 in Agadez.

A small number of cases resulted from military defeat. In both Vietnam and Afghanistan, the United States ultimately lost its extensive network of military bases following the collapse of the governments it supported. However, here also, the bases were not rendered unusable through military destruction. Instead, they were abandoned as part of a broader political decision to end prolonged wars whose strategic and domestic costs had come to outweigh the anticipated benefits. Once US forces withdrew, the bases were taken over by their adversaries.

The Political Foundations of American Power

The historical record suggests that US military deployments would endure as long as host countries found the benefits derived from their presence outweighing the political costs. In the Gulf, there may be four foundations of US power that are interrelated.

Regional Security Architecture

Following the outbreak of war in February 2026, numerous commentators have stated that the US bases do not provide any security umbrella for the Gulf states. From the standpoint of these governments, however, the network of US bases has underwritten a regional security order for four decades that individual Gulf states cannot readily replace. None of those states have the intelligence networks, command-and-control systems and power projection capabilities required to secure the region independently. Hosting American forces thus reflects participation in a collective security arrangement that distributes deterrence across the region.

Economic Underwriting

The American forces have enabled the Gulf countries to pursue an economic model that is considerably less expensive relative to strategic self-reliance. Instead of building the military and logistics capabilities required to secure the region independently, governments have been able to direct vast financial resources toward sovereign wealth funds, economic diversification and ambitious development projects. In this sense, from the perspective of the Gulf governments, the American security umbrella functions also as an economic enabler.

Political Stability

The US presence reinforces a political model whose legitimacy depends less on popular participation than on continued stability, prosperity and elite cohesion. Gulf monarchies have remained remarkably resilient, but that resilience rests on their ability to provide security, rising living standards and economic opportunity while insulating their societies from regional instability. Hosting US forces has therefore been viewed as an instrument for preserving the domestic conditions upon which regime legitimacy depends.

Strategic Coordination

The bases substitute for the absence of a Gulf security community. Although the monarchies broadly share concerns about regional stability, they have not created a collective defense organization capable of coordinating military planning across the region. American bases, therefore, reduce the political coordination problems that would otherwise exist among the Gulf states. Without that external coordinating role, regional security would depend on a level of strategic trust and military integration that has yet to emerge.

If history demonstrates that oversees military deployments usually end when these political foundations change, the central question is whether Iran possesses the ability to erode them.

Can Iran Dismantle These Political Foundations?

Undermining the Security Relationship

The first political foundation is the security relationship itself. For Iran to weaken America’s regional position, it would need to convince the governments that the costs of hosting US forces exceed the security benefits they receive.

Despite Iranian retaliations on military and civilian infrastructure, the available evidence to date suggests that the Gulf states continue to deepen their military integration with the US. In March 2026, less than three weeks after the war began, the US State Department approved a $8.4 billion Foreign Military Sale (FMS) to the UAE comprising interceptor missiles, armed drones, advanced air defense radars and F-16 fighter upgrades and munitions. The same announcement approved around $8 billion for Kuwait in missile-defense radars.

In fact, during the first quarter of 2026, of the $45 billion worldwide in FMS approved by the US government, the Gulf countries accounted for 81 percent of that amount. While a prolonged campaign against Gulf infrastructure could eventually shift regional political calculations, the evidence to date suggests that Iran is reinforcing, rather than undermining the US–Gulf security relationship.

Raising the Economic Costs of Hosting US Forces

This is where Iran may possess the most leverage. Tehran can raise the economic costs of America’s regional presence by threatening shipping, energy infrastructure and investor confidence. Exerting control over the Strait of Hormuz is the critical leverage that Iran wields. It aims to convince regional governments and global markets that continued confrontation with Tehran carries mounting economic costs.

Following the outbreak of war earlier this year, Lloyds of London launched a $400 million marine war-risk insurance facility, reflecting expectations of sustained commercial risk in the region. Premiums for vessels transiting the strait rose significantly, several Gulf states were designated high-risk maritime areas and shipping companies temporarily suspended Gulf operations.

While Iran has demonstrated an ability to raise the economic costs of the existing security order, there is little evidence that these costs have translated into a weakening of the US-Gulf security relationship. A longer drawn-out conflict with repeated disruptions to maritime trade and Gulf energy infrastructure could eventually alter that calculation.

Changing Domestic Political Considerations

This is perhaps Iran’s most difficult objective. The Gulf monarchies derive much of their legitimacy from a rentier social contract. Under this mechanism, governments use revenues to provide public employment, infrastructure, education, healthcare and high living standards in exchange for stability.

Research from the IMF suggests that in Kuwait, 80 percent of employed nationals work for the public sector, where wages are 40-60 percent higher than comparable private sector jobs. The public-sector wage bill exceeds 31 percent of GDP, one of the highest in the world.

Iran’s more plausible pathway could be one of economic attrition. If repeated attacks on energy infrastructure and maritime trade were to significantly reduce government revenues over time, Gulf states could find it increasingly difficult to sustain the patronage and public spending that underpin domestic stability. Since these benefits form the basis of the Gulf’s rentier social contract, sustained fiscal retrenchment could gradually weaken government legitimacy and increase domestic political pressures because the state could no longer finance the economic bargain on which political stability rests.

Fracturing the Regional Coalition

Disrupting the current strategic alignment of the Gulf countries with the United States is likely a long-term objective for Iran. If Gulf governments increasingly conclude that accommodation with Tehran offers greater stability than confrontation, the political foundations of the American military presence could gradually weaken without a single base being destroyed.

There is some precedent to this strategy. In March 2023, Saudi Arabia and Iran restored diplomatic relations through a China-brokered agreement that revived earlier security cooperation. It committed both sides to respect sovereignty and reduce regional tensions. Since then, Gulf states have sought to balance deterrence with dialogue, recognizing that geography makes coexistence with Iran unavoidable.

The evidence, however, thus far suggests that the current conflict has reinforced rather than fractured the regional coalition. While the Saudis and the Emiratis continue to pursue diplomatic engagement with Tehran, they have simultaneously deepened security cooperation with the United States, reflecting a strategy of deterrence and diplomacy instead of strategic alignment.

Implications for the Current War

There are several implications from this analysis. First, time increasingly favors Iran even though there is yet no evidence that points to otherwise. At present, Iran has not weakened the political foundations of the American military presence in the Gulf. Its strategy is likely to focus on gradually increasing the political and economic costs of sustaining the existing regional order.

The conflict is thus becoming a contest over political risk instead of military power. Iran’s objective is to convince Gulf governments, investors, insurance and shipping companies that continued confrontation carries mounting economic consequences. Military strikes become a means of generating political and financial uncertainty rather than an end in themselves.

The principal battleground is likely to shift from military bases to the economic infrastructure underpinning Gulf prosperity. Oil and LNG export facilities, ports, electricity networks, desalination plants and the Strait of Hormuz because they affect investment, trade, insurance costs and government revenues. A prolonged cycle of US strikes followed by Iranian retaliation could thus expose Gulf partners to increasing economic costs, prompting regional governments to question whether continued confrontation is enhancing security or inadvertently increasing insecurity.

The most significant implication, however, is that Iran's measure of success differs fundamentally from that of the United States. Success need not be defined by forcing an American withdrawal from the Gulf. A more attainable objective is to progressively erode the strategic advantages of the existing security framework by raising insurance premiums, discouraging foreign investment, increasing the cost of maritime commerce and encouraging Gulf governments to place greater emphasis on accommodation alongside deterrence. In that sense, Iran's strategy is one of gradually making the American-led regional order more politically and economically costly to sustain.

 

 Brazil Is Catching America in Agriculture

The United States remains the Deeper Farming Power. Brazil is becoming the Exporter Best Placed to Supply the Next Wave of Global Demand 

The Contour 

 

 

A recent Financial Times article pointed to a remarkable convergence. In 2025, the United States exported roughly $171 billion in agricultural goods. Brazil exported $169.2 billion in agribusiness products.

The figures are not perfectly comparable. The two countries classify agricultural exports differently, commodity prices move the totals and the United States still remained narrowly ahead. But the near-overlap captures a shift that matters more than the ranking itself.

For decades, the United States represented agricultural power in its most complete form: mechanised farms, deep capital markets, advanced crop science, vast river and rail networks and an export system capable of shaping prices far beyond its borders.

Brazil has not simply copied that model. It has built a different one.

Its advantage lies in its ability to expand. When global demand for soy rises, Brazil has more room to plant. When Asia needs more animal feed, Brazilian farms can often produce maize after soy on the same land. When importers demand more chicken, beef or sugar, Brazil is increasingly the country able to provide the additional volume.

The question is no longer only who produces more.

It is who can supply the next tonne.

That capacity was not created by geography alone. The Cerrado had to be transformed through public research, soil correction, tropical seed development, subsidised credit and new farming systems. China then gave that productive base a market large enough to reorganise global trade around it. New transport corridors connected Brazil’s interior more directly to Asian demand, while multiple annual harvests turned a tropical climate into an advantage few temperate systems can reproduce.

The result is a new division of agricultural power. The United States remains stronger in finance, insurance, technology, infrastructure and high-value production. Brazil is becoming stronger where future demand is growing fastest: bulk food, animal feed and exportable volume.

But Brazil’s rise is less autonomous than it appears. Its farms depend heavily on imported fertiliser. Its exports rely on costly transport corridors and global commodity traders. Its long-term advantage rests on rainfall patterns that continued agricultural expansion may itself weaken.

Brazil is catching America in agriculture because it has become better positioned to absorb the growth in global demand. Whether it can turn that position into durable power will depend on something more difficult than producing the next harvest: controlling the systems beneath it.

Brazil’s agricultural rise is often described as a triumph of scale. The country had land, sun and water; once global demand grew, it simply put more of them to work.

That explanation misses the most important part of the story.

Much of the land now producing Brazil’s soy, maize and cattle was not once considered a natural agricultural heartland at all. The Cerrado, a vast tropical savannah across central Brazil, was long viewed as too acidic, too nutrient-poor and too difficult to farm at scale. Its transformation required decades of public research, soil correction, tropical seed development, rural credit and new production systems.

Embrapa, Brazil’s state agricultural research institution, became central to that process. Researchers adapted soybeans to tropical conditions, improved pasture grasses, promoted no-till farming and developed methods that made degraded soils commercially productive. The result was not the discovery of a ready-made frontier. It was the creation of one.

That distinction matters because it explains why Brazil’s advantage is more durable than a simple abundance of land would suggest. Over the past four decades, Brazilian grain production rose far faster than the area under cultivation. Expansion played a role, but so did higher yields, better crop management and, increasingly, the ability to harvest more than once from the same land.

The clearest example is maize. In large parts of central Brazil, farmers now plant soybeans first and maize immediately afterwards. This second crop, known as the safrinha, has become the backbone of Brazilian maize production and now accounts for the large majority of the national harvest. A single hectare is therefore not only producing more. It is producing twice.

That is one of the structural advantages the United States cannot easily replicate. American agriculture remains more heavily capitalised and better supported by insurance, finance and infrastructure. But its temperate climate usually limits farmers to one main annual cycle. Brazil’s tropical calendar allows the same land to move from soy into maize, and in some regions into further livestock or integrated crop systems, within a single year.

This is what makes Brazil so important to the next phase of global demand. Its rise is not simply about catching the United States in export value. It is about building a system with more room to respond when the world needs more.

That capacity existed before China became the dominant buyer, but Chinese demand gave it scale. As China’s livestock sector expanded, its need for soy-based animal feed grew with it. Brazilian production was already moving into the Cerrado; Chinese imports turned that expansion into one of the largest trade shifts in the modern food system.

By 2024, roughly 71 per cent of China’s soybean imports came from Brazil. In the first half of 2025, nearly three-quarters of Brazil’s soybean exports went in the other direction. The relationship is now large enough to shape planting decisions, logistics investment and export infrastructure across central and northern Brazil.

Trade tensions with the United States accelerated the process. China did not reduce its exposure to foreign food by importing less. It reduced its exposure to American agriculture by concentrating more of its demand in Brazil.

That shift helped turn Brazilian agriculture from a national success story into a global dependency. When China needs more soy, when feed demand rises in Asia, or when importers seek more chicken, beef or sugar, the additional supply increasingly comes from Brazil. The country has become the place where global demand expects the system to stretch.

That does not mean Brazil has built a superior version of American agriculture.

The United States still possesses the deeper system. Its farmers operate inside denser financial markets, stronger crop-insurance structures, better river and rail networks and a far larger ecosystem of machinery, biotechnology, processing and agricultural services. American exports are also increasingly concentrated in higher-value products rather than only bulk commodities. The US remains more resilient, more capitalised and more technologically embedded across the global food economy.

Brazil’s advantage is different. It is more expandable.

Lower land costs in frontier regions, multiple harvests, rising productivity and a trade structure geared toward bulk demand allow Brazil to release more volume onto world markets when demand grows. The United States still produces at extraordinary scale, but more of its output is absorbed at home by livestock, food processing and biofuel mandates. Roughly 40 per cent of American maize is tied to ethanol and related products, while a growing share of soybean oil is consumed by the domestic biofuels industry.

Brazil also links food and energy, but in a more flexible way. Its sugarcane sector can shift between sugar and ethanol, while maize ethanol is expanding alongside, rather than fully displacing, export agriculture. The comparison is therefore less about one country rising while the other collapses than about two different forms of power.

America remains the more complete agricultural machine. Brazil is becoming the more available one.

That availability, however, depends on a system far larger than the farm itself.

Soy grown in Mato Grosso has little geopolitical value if it cannot reach a port at a competitive price. For years, Brazil’s interior producers paid a heavy logistics penalty, moving grain thousands of kilometres by truck toward southern ports such as Santos and Paranaguá. That gap helped preserve America’s advantage even when Brazilian production costs were lower.

It is now narrowing.

Northern export corridors have begun to redirect grain through the Amazon basin and Atlantic ports closer to Asia. River terminals, storage facilities, highways and private port investments have turned places such as Miritituba, Barcarena, Santarém and Itaqui into increasingly important links in the global food chain. In the first eight months of 2023, four northern ports handled a larger share of Brazil’s maize exports than Santos.

This shift matters because it changes the effective geography of Brazilian agriculture. Mato Grosso is still deep inland, but it is no longer connected to the world through a single expensive route south. The expansion of the Arco Norte shortens shipping distances, lowers costs and makes Brazil’s agricultural frontier more responsive to Asian demand.

The Brazilian harvest may begin on the farm, but it becomes global power only at the port.

Yet the same system that makes Brazil indispensable also exposes how incomplete its autonomy remains.

Brazil imports around 85 per cent of the fertiliser it uses. Its dependence is especially high in nitrogen and potash, linking its farms to suppliers such as Russia, Canada, China and Morocco, as well as to gas prices, sanctions, maritime routes and geopolitical disruption far beyond South America.

This is the hidden inversion beneath Brazil’s rise.

The country exports food security while importing many of the minerals that make that security possible.

A disruption in the Black Sea, a shock to natural-gas markets or a breakdown in maritime trade would not stay outside Brazil’s agricultural system. It would move quickly into farm margins, planting decisions and global food prices. Brazil may be the supplier the world increasingly depends on, but Brazil itself depends on an international input system it does not control.

The same is true of finance and trade. Global commodity groups still play a central role in storage, credit, terminals and exports. Cargill, Bunge, ADM, Louis Dreyfus and COFCO sit alongside Brazilian firms such as Amaggi, JBS and Marfrig in the infrastructure between farm and market. Brazil controls an extraordinary productive base, but the margins, routes and commercial intelligence surrounding that production are shared with transnational capital.

Agricultural power therefore does not belong to the Brazilian state alone. It is distributed across research institutions, banks, traders, port operators, regional governments and large domestic conglomerates. Brazil is powerful because the production happens on its territory. That does not mean it controls every system through which that production acquires value.

The most difficult limit may be ecological.

Brazil’s competitive advantage rests on expansion, but expansion can weaken the environmental systems that make further production possible. The Cerrado and Amazon are not simply landscapes beside the agricultural frontier. They influence rainfall, river flows, soil moisture and the stability of planting seasons across much of the country.

Deforestation is therefore more than a reputational problem or a dispute between farmers and environmentalists. It is a threat to the physical foundations of Brazil’s export model.

Research increasingly links forest loss to changes in regional rainfall and lower yields in soy and maize. At the same time, droughts, extreme heat and severe flooding have already disrupted important agricultural regions. Southern Brazil has moved between water shortages and destructive floods, while producers elsewhere face less predictable rains and higher temperatures.

Brazil’s geographic size provides some protection. A poor harvest in one region can be offset elsewhere. But the system still depends on stable seasons, navigable rivers and rainfall patterns that large-scale land conversion may itself be altering.

The ultimate limit to Brazilian agricultural power may not be land.

It may be rain.

That tension will increasingly shape Brazil’s external relationships. The European Union can use traceability and deforestation rules to condition market access. China can use purchasing power and phytosanitary controls to influence trade. Fertiliser suppliers can transmit geopolitical shocks into production costs. Global traders and infrastructure owners can determine how cheaply crops reach the market.

Brazil’s agricultural rise gives it leverage, but not independence.

It has become more important to China, the Middle East and other import-dependent regions because it supplies commodities that cannot be easily replaced at the same scale. A crop failure, export disruption or disease outbreak in Brazil now has consequences far beyond Brazilian consumers. It can raise animal-feed costs in Asia, meat prices in the Middle East and sugar prices across world markets.

That creates a form of power. Brazil does not need to threaten export restrictions to matter. Its importance is embedded in the calculations of every country that depends on its soy, meat, sugar or maize.

But this is not absolute food sovereignty. Brazil remains exposed to its largest buyer, to imported inputs, to private infrastructure and to the ecological stability of the territory it is still converting.

The United States is therefore not simply being replaced. It is being joined by a different kind of agricultural power.

America remains stronger in the systems around the farm: finance, insurance, technology, processing and high-value trade. Brazil is becoming stronger in the part of the market where the next increment of demand must be met.

That distinction matters because the future of food power will not be decided only by who produces the largest harvest. It will be decided by who can expand when the rest of the world cannot.

Brazil is catching America because it has built the system best positioned to do exactly that.

Its lasting power will depend on whether it can also secure the fertiliser, infrastructure and rainfall beneath the next tonne.

 

 

 Chicago Spent Millions to Help ‘People Who Cause Harm’

‘Trauma Reducing Book Clubs’ and Acupuncture for Criminals 

Daniel Greenfield 

 

 

Chicago commemorated the Juneteenth weekend by shooting 39 people and leaving 6 of them dead and surpassing last year’s relatively mild 5 dead and 16 wounded weekend. According to politicians and the media, crime is down in Chicago. According to reality, 861 people have been shot and 207 people have been killed so far this year and we haven’t even reached July.

(Editor’s note: it’s now 864 people shot and 208 killed. It’ll be higher when you read this.)

Mayor Brandon Johnson (pictured above) responded to the weekend massacres by declaring a ‘Transfemicide State of Emergency’ even though none of the people shot were transgender and the only transgender man killed this year was killed by his boyfriend, and calling for a $100 million Department of Gun Violence Prevention even as Chicago faces a $1.3 billion budget deficit.

The $100 million Department of Gun Violence Prevention campaign had been advanced by radical clergy, including Obama mentor Father Michael Pfleger, an associate of other Obama allies like Louis Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright, as the solution to Chicago’s problems.

But what would that $100 million actually do?

The Biden administration had created a White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, that the Trump administration shut down, to largely push gun bans, but Chicago can’t do that.

Dozens of media stories have been filed pushing the permanent $100 million Department of Gun Violence Prevention without ever describing its function or how it would do anything.

The real goal is to take the Office of Violence Prevention championed by Mayor Brandon Johnson and make it a permanent institution in Chicago. This would implement the agenda of police defunding by treating its non-police strategies as equivalent to the police department.

So what does the Office of Violence Prevention and the various non-police alternatives to which Chicago politicians have already allocated $100 million to, despite the massive budget deficit and the looming pension bomb, actually do? ‘Trauma Reducing’ book clubs.

There’s no actual information about what ‘Trauma Reducing Book Clubs’ are or how they stop weekend shootings, but they’re packaged alongside ‘Self-Expression Creative Writing’ and Acupuncture as ‘Wellness Oriented Services’ even though the only ‘puncture’ that stops a shooter before he opens fire uses lead.

But the Office of Violence Prevention isn’t providing the book clubs, creative writing and acupuncture to victims of violence anyway, but to the perpetrators because it’s part of the Office of Violence Prevention’s Chicago Torture Justice Center (CTJC) whose services are provided to ‘victims’ of “police torture and other residents who report being traumatized by law enforcement actions.” In short, acupuncture and book clubs are for the criminals who get busted by police.

The Office of Violence Prevention also boasts Services for People Who Cause Harm (PWCH) also known as violent criminals or more specifically domestic abusers. PWCH vaguely describes the wife beaters “as individuals who are actively causing harm to their intimate partner.”

The rebranding of domestic abusers as “Services for People Who Cause Harm” is part of the larger trend of police defunding and ‘restorative justice’. Earlier this year, the Illinois Domestic Violence Hotline announced that it was also launching a hotline for domestic abusers.

Much as burglar alarm companies generally focus their marketing on homeowners rather than burglars, Jennifer Rosenkranz, the head of a domestic violence non-profit arm, explained that,

“We realized that the area of working with people who cause harm was underinvested and there was a lack of innovation in that space.”

It’s unknown if any book clubs or acupuncture is involved, but a similar operation in New York City which helped kickstart programs for ‘people who cause harm’ involved typical ‘restorative justice’ elements such as sessions focused on “trauma-informed healing” and accountability.

Its premise, like that of all pro-crime ‘restorative justice’ programs, was that police were the real enemy, not the abusers. Under New York’s DeBlasio administration, the forerunner of Mamdani, a report argued that there was debate about compelling “the state to treat intimate partner violence as severely as violence between strangers” especially in “communities of color and queer communities, to whom the system represented more of a threat than a sanctuary.”

The Left had taken a full turn from feminism and argued against protecting battered women.

Back in 2021, former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot had already been spending $500,000 on ‘Services for People Who Cause Harm’ offering “culturally appropriate non-mandated services for adults who cause harm within intimate-partner relationships” to be culturally sensitive to criminals.

“Our efforts to reduce gender-based violence throughout our city must not only respond to victims of violence and their needs, but the individuals and trauma of those who cause harm,” Lightfoot had argued.

This was in keeping with the central premise of pro-crime ideology that everyone had been paying far too much attention to crime victims and not nearly enough to the feelings of the criminals or ‘People Who Cause Harm’ who are really the victims of ‘systemic racism’.

5 years later, there’s no sign that catering to ‘People Who Cause Harm’ has done anything except harm. By 2025, domestic violence homicides were actually up 33%. Catering to ‘People Who Cause Harm’ was, like all pro-crime policies, leading to harm to victims of crime.

(The Chicago Police Department however conveniently erased its domestic violence statistics.)

After millions of dollars spent, domestic violence now accounts for 1 in 4 crime victims in Chicago. Most of the victims had taken out protective orders against their future killers, even as Chicago’s radical city government was wrecking the police department that might have saved their lives and instead spent millions helping their killers while also offering acupuncture and book clubs to the criminals who they claimed were really the innocent ‘victims’ of ‘police torture’.

Pro-crime policies always work, not by reducing violence, but by creating far more of it.

When President Trump proposed sending the National Guard to Chicago to stop the constant shootings, Illinois Gov J.B. Pritzker gave a press conference in which he complained that, “If Donald Trump was actually serious about fighting crime in cities like Chicago, he… would not be cutting over $800 million in public safety and crime prevention grants nationally, including cutting $158 million in funding to Illinois for violence crime-prevention programs.”

Chicago is proof that every penny that goes to so-called ‘prevention programs’ should be cut. Not unless taxpayers want to keep funding book clubs for criminals and funds being shifted from the victims of domestic abuse to the perpetrators of domestic abuse by pro-crime radical leftists.

 

 The Ottoman Playbook

Turkey is Rediscovering the Power of Sitting between Worlds 

Atlas 

 

 

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump travelled to Ankara for a NATO summit and sat beside a man he has rarely tried to hide his admiration for.

Over more than two decades in power, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has survived everything politics and geopolitics could throw at him: elections, sanctions, a coup attempt, mass protests, pressure from Washington, pressure from Moscow, and repeated predictions of his political demise. Through it all, he has remained firmly in control. Trump, who has long admired leaders capable of turning political longevity into power, appeared pleased to be back in his company:

“I was very disappointed with NATO. Frankly, if it (the summit) weren’t held in Turkey, where my friend happens to be a very strong leader, a very strong person, it’s possible that I wouldn’t have attended”.

The optics were difficult to misread. Two presidents smiling in Ankara. Two NATO allies presenting themselves as friends. And, at least on the surface, a relationship considerably warmer than much of the alliance surrounding them.

Yet, behind the handshakes, Turkey has made a series of decisions that point toward something far more consequential.

In May, marking Eid al-Adha, Erdoğan predicted that once the instability surrounding Turkey subsides, the country would emerge as “one of the shining stars of the new era”, invoking the restoration of Ottoman-era influence across the region.

It is tempting to dismiss such language as the usual theatre of Turkish politics. Erdoğan has spent much of his career wrapping modern Turkish ambitions in the symbolism of an older empire. But empires, even dead ones, leave behind maps. Turkey happens to sit at the centre of one of the most important.

For centuries, Ottoman power rested not simply on territorial conquest, but on controlling the spaces between other powers. Constantinople connected the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Anatolia connected Europe with Persia and Central Asia. The Levant opened the road toward Arabia and Egypt. The Balkans pushed Ottoman influence deep into Europe. The empire sat between worlds, and that position mattered more than almost anything it possessed beneath the ground. 

 

 

 When the Ottoman Empire collapsed after the First World War, the territory disappeared, but the geography remained. The Bosphorus was still there, and so were the Dardanelles. Russia still needed access to warm-water seas, Europe still bordered the Middle East, and trade still moved between Asia and the Mediterranean.

During the Cold War, Washington understood this perfectly. Turkey joined NATO in 1952, only three years after the alliance was created. The reason was hardly ideological sentimentality. The Soviet Union sat immediately to Turkey’s north-east, while the Turkish Straits controlled the maritime exit from the Soviet Black Sea Fleet. American nuclear weapons eventually arrived on Turkish soil, and NATO installations followed. Turkey became the southeastern wall of Western containment.

The Turkish Republic inherited a fraction of the empire’s territory, but much of its strategic real estate.

It increasingly appears that Erdoğan has concluded that Turkey is worth more when nobody is entirely certain which way it will lean. That distinction explains much of what might otherwise appear to be a contradictory Turkish policy.

One particularly telling signal came in March, when Turkey’s reported holdings of US Treasuries collapsed from roughly $16 billion to just $1.8 billion in a single month. There are mundane explanations for such a move. Turkey has spent years defending a weakening lira, rebuilding foreign-exchange reserves, and fighting inflation above 30%. Treasuries are liquid assets, and liquid assets exist partly to be sold during periods of financial stress.

 

 

That is the first-order explanation. The second-order question is what Turkey’s resulting position tells us, because the Treasury move does not exist in isolation.

At the same time Ankara reduced one form of financial exposure to the United States, it is deepening a completely different relationship with Russia in the sector where strategic dependency becomes physical: Energy.

Russia’s state-owned Rosatom is constructing the Akkuyu nuclear power plant on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. The plant consists of four reactors that once fully operational, are expected to provide roughly 10% of Turkey’s electricity. Akkuyu is not a normal export project. Under its build-own-operate structure, Rosatom is not merely selling reactors to Turkey and leaving. The Russian company owns the project and will remain deeply embedded in its financing, fuel supply, technical operation, and infrastructure for decades. Moscow recently committed billions more to completing it, with $4-5 billion allocated in 2026 alone.

 

 

Viewed through the old Cold War map, the arrangement is quite bizarre. Turkey, a NATO member controlling Russia’s access to the Mediterranean, is voluntarily allowing a Russian state-owned company to build and own infrastructure that supplies a significant share of its electricity.

Viewed through Erdoğan’s map, it makes more sense. Turkey is not moving from Washington toward Moscow. It is building leverage between them. That is an important distinction. A country seeking a new patron changes camps, but a country seeking autonomy makes itself useful to several camps simultaneously. Few countries embody this strategy more clearly than Turkey.

To put this in perspective: Turkey sells drones to Ukraine while buying Russian energy. It closes the Bosphorus to Russian warships (under the Montreux Convention), while refusing to join the Western sanctions regime against Moscow. It competes with Russia in Syria, Libya, and the Caucasus, while allowing Russian capital, tourists, and trade to flow through its economy. It remains a NATO member while purchasing Russian S-400 air defence systems, strongly enough opposed by Washington to get Turkey removed from the F-35 program.

None of these choices align with a conventional East vs. West framework. The reason may be that Ankara largely discarded that framework years ago

Its strategy is more in line with the Ottoman approach: make yourself necessary to competing systems, and prevent any single system from becoming powerful enough to dictate your choices. For Erdoğan, the disorder spreading across the Middle East may therefore represent less of a threat than an opening.

For decades, Iran has been one of the principal constraints on Turkish influence to the south and east. Tehran built an arc of influence stretching through Iraq and Syria into Lebanon, using proxy networks and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to project power across the region. Turkey built a competing network. Ankara backed different factions in Syria, expanded military operations across northern Iraq, cultivated Azerbaijan, deepened ties with Qatar, and uses its Ottoman history to promote itself as a political centre of the Sunni world. The two powers did not need to fight directly; geography ensured competition. If Iranian influence weakens, the consequences do not end with Iran.

 

 

Power in international politics is relative. If one power falls faster than another, the other becomes stronger even if nothing about it has changed. This is where Washington and Jerusalem may be creating a problem they have not fully priced in. For Israel, weakening Iran removes the most organised regional network built explicitly against it. For Washington, reducing Iranian power potentially lowers the military burden of managing the Middle East.

Again, first-order thinking suggests that this creates a more favourable regional balance. Second-order thinking asks a different question. Who occupies the void Iran leaves behind? One obvious answer sits directly to its northwest: Turkey.

Syria offers the clearest example. For much of the Syrian civil war, Turkey, Russia, and Iran were forced into an extraordinary triangular relationship. All three wanted influence over Syria, all three supported competing actors, and none could fully impose its preferred outcome without confronting the others. The weakening of Iranian influence changes that equation, and so does Russia’s preoccupation with Ukraine. Every unit of political and military attention Moscow or Tehran can no longer devote to Syria increases the relative value of the actor already sitting across Syria’s northern border with a large army, established supply routes, and years of operational experience.

Ankara does not need to conquer the region to benefit from its fragmentation. It only needs the other regional powers to become weaker. This helps to explain why relations with Israel increasingly matter.

Ironically, Turkey was the first Muslim-majority country to recognise Israel, doing so in 1949. By the 1990s, the relationship had developed into military cooperation, intelligence links, and defence trade. Israel gained a strategically valuable relationship with a large Muslim NATO state, while Turkey gained technology, Western access, and a useful regional partner.

That equilibrium has been eroding for years, and Gaza accelerated its destruction. Palestina and Turkey have a deep-rooted shared history and maintain strong cultural and social connections. Those ties have repeatedly translated into material support. Ankara has provided humanitarian and development assistance to Palestinians in Gaza through successive periods of conflict.

 

In recent years, Erdoğan has emerged as one of Israel’s fiercest critics. Speaking before the 79th United Nations General Assembly in New York, he made little effort to temper his language:

“Just as Hitler was stopped by the alliance of humanity 70 years ago, Netanyahu and his murder network must also be stopped by the alliance of humanity.”

This dynamic works vice versa, as Israeli politicians increasingly describe Turkey not as an irritating partner, but as a strategic threat. Israeli Minister Miki Zohar has argued that Israel should begin treating Turkey as an “enemy state”, and former prime minister Naftali Bennett has warned of a Turkish threat emerging alongside the Iranian one.

The real issue isn't whether Turkey and Israel are headed for war, most likely they are not. The question is why Israel now speaks of Turkey using the same strategic language once reserved exclusively for Iran. Part of the answer may be that the regional balance has already shifted. A weakened Iran does not leave Israel alone at the top. It exposes the next layer of competition, and Turkey is a very different competitor.

Iran’s influence was built largely through proxies and asymmetric warfare. Turkey possesses something broader: a significant industrial economy, a domestic defence industry, NATO’s second-largest military, control of the Bosphorus, access to the Black Sea, influence in the Caucasus, troops across northern Syria and Iraq, and deep economic connections to Europe.

 

 

It also possesses something Iran never had: formal membership of the Western security architecture. That makes Turkey difficult to contain without damaging the system containing it.

Which brings us back to Trump and Erdoğan in Ankara. Trump sees Turkey as an asset: a large military, influence in Syria, leverage over Russia, and the ability to shoulder a regional burden Washington would rather leave behind. But therein lies the paradox. Almost everything making Turkey more valuable to Washington is also making it less dependent on Washington. A weaker Iran expands Turkish influence to the south, a distracted Russia increases Ankara’s leverage to the north, while an anxious Europe and the Black Sea conflict make Turkey increasingly indispensable to NATO.

For now, Trump’s desire for stronger regional partners and Erdoğan’s pursuit of greater autonomy overlap. But they may not forever. Erdoğan is not rebuilding the Ottoman Empire. He is rediscovering its strategic logic: sit between Europe, Russia, Asia and the Middle East, become indispensable to competing powers, and dependent on none.

Trump calls Erdoğan a friend, Moscow a partner, Europe indispensable, and Israel increasingly a threat. Erdoğan may prefer it exactly that way.

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 Korybko To Timofeev: The US Is Waging A Hybrid World War Against Russia, China, & Iran

Andrew Korybko 

 

 

Awareness of this fact could improve Russian policy formulation going forward.

Ivan Timofeev, one of the Valdai Club’s programme directors and the Director General of the Russian International Affairs Council, published a thought-provoking piece in late June titled “Contemporary International Politics: Anarchy or World War?” He argues that the growing trend of conflicts across the globe, including significant ones like the Ukrainian Conflict and the Third Gulf War, is more a sign of worsening anarchy in the international system per the Realist school of thought than a World War.

As Timofeev sees it, “Armed conflicts in various parts of the world hardly share a unified logic of struggle among specific centres of power that underpinned the world wars of the past. The crisis in the Persian Gulf is only loosely connected to the Conflict in Ukraine. Both could be presented as part of the United States’ effort to preserve its hegemony. The difficulty, however, is that Washington lacks a consolidated adversary…Accordingly, there are presently no clear global coalitions of opposing sides.”

In actuality, the US’ abovementioned campaign to preserve its hegemony simultaneously targets Russia, China, and Iran in accordance with the late Zbigniew Brzezinski’s precept of preventing them – especially the Sino-Russo Entente – from consolidating the supercontinent and then expelling the US from it. None of those three are allied with one another, but that’s irrelevant to the unified logic of the Ukrainian Conflict, the NATO-like AUKUS+ encircling China, and the Third Gulf War.

Moving along, Timofeev elaborated, “Is the current conflict between the West and Russia part of a world war? No—because there is no world war. Rather, it represents a prolonged consequence of the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR. In this extended confrontation, the West has sought to consolidate the outcome in its favour by advancing its military infrastructure eastwards and drawing post-Soviet states into its orbit. Ukraine has been a central objective in this process”.

Be that as it may, last August’s “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity” (TRIPP) serves the dual purpose of a NATO military logistics corridor into Central Asia, thus simultaneously threatening Russia, China, and Iran while unprecedentedly optimizing the US’ plans to divide-and-rule them. Moreover, it’s only part of the “cordon sanitaire” that’s taken shape around Russia in the Arctic-Baltic via UK-led efforts, Central Europe via Polish-led efforts, and Northeast Asia via Japanese-led efforts.

As this containment noose tightens, Russia, China, and Iran will find themselves in more difficult geostrategic positions, which raises the odds of them cutting lopsided deals with the US for some mild pressure relief at the cost of preserving – and possibly even strengthening – US hegemony. Russia and China are nuclear powers, however, so the US’ coercion of them will remain within the realm of Hybrid Warfare as opposed to a direct conventional war against them like the Third Gulf War against Iran was.

Therefore, contemporary international politics are already arguably characterized by an undeclared World War, albeit a hybrid one. Timofeev is correct in describing other conflicts like spring 2025’s Indo-Pak clashes and the Continuation War in Karabakh as sparked in part by the international system’s worsening anarchy, but that doesn’t detract from the US’ Eurasian-wide campaign against Russia, China, and Iran being a de facto World War. Russian policymakers should therefore plan accordingly.