Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Is A Famine Baked In For 2027?

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On May 4, 2026

20 Comments

Now let’s be clear, I don’t expect a famine in America, though I do expect a lot more people to die from hunger because food prices are going to be a lot higher.

Fertilizer in America:

Note that in addition to the war, this is a policy failure at the domestic level. Farmers should be subsidized and prices should be limited to whatever is actually reasonable based on increased non-domestic costs. The first thing you do is make sure your farmers can grow food, because without food, you’ve got nothing, and as Lenin said, every country is three missed meals away from revolution. (It’s actually more than that, but the rhetorical point remains.)

Most farmers use tractors. Most tractors use diesel, and those prices are rising too. They will continue to rise because the oil which is being restricted is the best oil for creating distillates like diesel, bunker fuel (ships) and jet fuel.

In Pakistan we have the following:

Growers have expressed serious concern over the worsening condition of the agriculture sector, stating that it is already on the brink of collapse due to low returns on crops, while continuous increases in diesel and fertilizer prices are delivering a severe blow.

They pointed out that despite urea being locally produced, its prices are rising every other day, which they termed beyond understanding. The growers criticized the government for increasing levies on petroleum products, particularly diesel, allegedly to cover tax shortfalls due to inefficiencies of the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR).

India continues to impress, not only do they have increasing diesel prices, but they’ve increased taxes on diesel to make the problem worse. (This sort of thing is why, no, India is not the next China. China has massive reserves, controls prices when necessary and disallows export when needed.)

Of course, if your country is already in trouble, you’re going to get in the neck:

The new report, From Hormuz to the Frontlines of Hunger, traces how disruption to the Strait of Hormuz and uncertainty around commercial shipping are affecting six crisis-affected countries: Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Myanmar, and Lebanon…

Key findings include:

  • Global urea prices, a key fertilizer benchmark, rose 85% between December 2025 and March 2026. 
  • In Somalia, fuel prices more than doubled, adding pressure on food, transport and water costs. 
  • In Myanmar, diesel prices rose 160% since the start of the war, affecting irrigation, milling and transport. 
  • In Sudan, gasoline costs in Khartoum rose 66% in a single week in early April, making moving food delivery to market commercially unviable. 

Pakistan is almost certain to have a famine as well. Australian farmers are completely screwed as the country only has two refineries (down from eight 20 years ago because it was cheaper to buy from China, y’know. Too bad China won’t sell to Australia when they’re shortages, which a five year old could have predicted, but hey, max profit is all we are allowed to take into account.)

So far what we’ve seen is mostly higher prices for fuel and fertilizer, though some countries already have shortages. This is the logistics overhang — tankers already full and on route, storage facilities already full, etc, etc… But that’s coming to an end right about NOW. And what will start happening is actual shortages. (Jet fuel is supposedly down to 14 days in the US, though that’s not important for agriculture.)

Rich countries will outbid poor countries, but high prices mean farmer simply can’t afford all the diesel and fertilizer they need. They can’t ship their animals to slaughterhouses, etc, etc.

The next year is going to be ugly. Even if the war ended today, which can only happen if the US declares victory and lets Iran, in fact, win, it’d be ugly. But if the closure of the Strait continues, multiple countries will have famines and almost everyone is going to have significantly increased food prices, which means a lot of poor people will go hungry and some will die. It’s great Congress has cut food stamps every few years for the past 30 odd years.

If the war does go kinetic again, Iran will destroy vast amounts of oil infrastructure, and the crisis will go on for years.

The only sane response is to end the war, but that would mean de-facto acknowledging Iran is a great power and the US is no longer a global hegemonic power. Oh, and Israel might be more restricted in its ability to mass murder civilians, with their extra special emphasis on children, doctors, nurses, paramedics and firefighters.

What good is life if Israel and America can’t commit war crimes with complete immunity? This would be a complete violation of American and Israeli values, and Trump and Congress just cannot abide the idea that they don’t get to rape, murder and/or torture anyone they want. (Which is why Trump keeps shoving Cuba around. If you can’t bully the big kid, find a small kid to beat the shit out of.)

Anyway, on a personal level, if you can, stock up on shelf-stable staples. Today is the cheapest they’re going to be for at least a couple years.

Everyone reads these article for free, but the site and Ian take money to run. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 03, 2026

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On May 3, 2026

3 Comments

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 03, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

 

War

War, El Niño, Pestilence, and Famine: The Coming Shock to Global Food Supplies

Craig Tindale [via Naked Capitalism 04-27-2025]

 

Why Iran’s Oil Infrastructure Is Not Exploding Like Trump Said It Would

Murtaza Hussain, May 01, 2026 [Drop Site News]

 

Why U.S. Oil Companies Are Not Plugging the World’s Energy Gap

[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 05-02-2025]

 

Trump not violating any law

‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’

Trump Stuns By Saying ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked Directly NBC’s Kristen Welker ‘Don’t You Need to Uphold the Constitution?’

Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025

 

Trump blames No Kings for assassination attempt

[Popular Information, via Naked Capitalism 04-29-2025]

 

Comey Indictment Shows Justice Dept. Got the Message From Bondi’s Firing

Glenn Thrush, April 30, 2026 [Washington Post]

In naming only an interim successor as acting attorney general, President Trump has established even greater incentives to execute his most extreme demands, current and former officials say.

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Open Thread

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On May 2, 2026

27 Comments

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

We Don’t Need Chinese Exceptionalism

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On April 30, 2026

36 Comments

Chinese and American flags flying together

Thirty years ago I knew that China would be the next “America”. The next “Britain.” The next industrial and technological hegemon.

I wrote about this back in the early 2000s, at BOPNews, the Agonist and FDL. When the Chinese were let into the WTO by Bill Clinton their rise and replacement of the US became inevitable.

At one time the British were the greatest in the world. They were exceptional: smarter and more powerful than anyone else.

Then we had a century of American exceptionalism. The American way was the best way. Americans were superior. They were more creative. Their government system was the ideal system, etc, etc…

American exceptionalism was and is ugly. The American system was not the best of all time (contra the idiotic “End of History” thesis) and neither was the British or, more generally, European “Liberal Democracy”.

Nor is the Chinese system the greatest of all time. Chinese culture is not the world’s greatest culture. The Chinese people are not innately superior to other people.

China industrialized the same way that almost everyone did. They had support from the current industrial hegemon, same as both America and Japan did. (Japan had British help during the Meiji period and American help after WWII.) They ran a protectionist mercantile export policy. Instead of tariffs they used currency manipulation.

British financiers built a ton of American industry, because profits were higher in America than in the more mature industrial state of Britain. Americans offshored and outsourced to China because profits were higher in China.

There’s no way to do mass offshoring to a country without also transferring technology, but more than that, wherever the manufacturing floor is, the technological lead follows. It takes twenty to thirty years to gain the tech lead once you’ve gained the manufacturing lead.

China also ran the rest of the Japanese playbook: get your population educated, starting with getting everyone primary education. Then get everyone secondary education. Only then do you go all out at the university level.

This is the way almost every nation (there are less than five exceptions) has industrialized. If you want the full explanation, read “Bad Samaritans.”

What makes China different is what made the US different from Britain: it’s a continental power with a much larger population than the previous hegemonic power. So it can scale better and once it takes the leads the previous power is cooked.

This is why Japan had to cut a deal with the US: why it could be forced to give up its tech and industrial lead: it’s an island nation with a smaller population than the US. That can’t be done to China, because it’s larger and because so much of what it needs now comes from uninterruptible continental supply chains. (Plus, very soon, they will be a greater naval power than America.)

We’re going to have a “Chinese Century” and we’re going to have to put up with tons of claims of Chinese exceptionalism. Their system is innately better, they have a superior culture, they’re more creative than everyone else and heck, as a race they’re superior.

They aren’t. They don’t even have as good a claim as Britain did: they weren’t the first. They just did what a ton of other countries did, including the US, Japan, South Korean and Taiwan.

This doesn’t mean they don’t deserve admiration and credit for becoming the hegemonic power. They still had to do a lot of things right, including taking advantage of a foolish and stupid financializing elite in America, just as the Americans took advantage of a foolish and stupid financializing elite in Britain. They worked hard. They worked smart. They deserve their century in the sun, and if they’re smart and capable, maybe they’ll get two centuries if climate change doesn’t take them down.

But they aren’t innately superior. They’re following a well worn playbook, taking advantage of the usual cycle of ideological change within hegemonic powers.

The screams of America exceptionalism were bullshit. Claims of Chinese exceptionalism are also bullshit except in the sense that they are currently on top. Over time they will be corrupted from within, because this is a universal pattern which always happens and someone else will take the lead. They will remain a great power if

1) they avoid collapse into warlordism, however, because they are a continental power who will retain a large population even after the onrushing demographic collapse; and,

2) There isn’t another true revolution in production and technology like the industrial revolution, which happens somewhere other than China.

America exceptionalism was ugly and tiresome. So is Chinese exceptionalism.

Everyone reads these article for free, but the site and Ian take money to run. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

 

Can Trump’s “Blockade of the Blockade” Force Iran To Submit?

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On April 29, 2026

25 Comments

After the Iran/US truce, Trump put a blockade on vessels going to Iran for oil. This resulted in Iran not opening the Strait of Hormuz as they had originally intended.

At first the blockade was not very effective, but it appears to have tightened and is now stopping most oil export from Iran. It appears that it will take over 2 months for oil storage to fill up.

There are two suppositions here, on the US part:

1) Iran needs the money;

2) Iran can’t shut down oil production without harming its oil fields in the long run.

Iran does, of course, need the money, but it isn’t completely reliant on shipping oil for income and it seems likely it can get enough to keep the key parts of the government and the military running.

As for the second, a detailed analysis shows that Iran’s fields mostly aren’t type that are damaged by shut downs. Key graph from a long analytical piece.

This analysis suggests that the U.S. blockade of Iran’s oil exports will not cause catastrophic, or even very serious, damage to its upstream oil industry. If and when the blockade is relaxed, Iran will probably be able to resume production promptly at about 70 percent and regain most of its pre-war capacity within a few months.

It’s also worth noting that Iran does have a military option. While the US blockade is widespread, for it to be effective some ships have to be in range of Iran’s missiles and drones. It wouldn’t be all that hard to deplete the on-ship stocks of missile interceptors and force a withdrawal, and it’s quite possible Iran could sink some ships if they attacked with enough drones and missiles to overwhelm defenses.

Iran has, historically, been unwilling to start hostilities. It has always absorbed the first hit. Will it continue to do so? Is it willing to end the cease-fire? The new leader is far more hawkish than the old one, and while Iran still has “moderates” in some positions of power, hard liners are far more powerful than they were under the previous supreme leader.

What we have is an endurance race. Can the US withstand high priced oil longer than Iran can survive without significant oil exports?

If Iran breaks first, the question is whether it will offer the US a better peace deal, or if it will go back to the military option.

Under the old leadership the smart bet would have been concessions. Under the new leadership? I don’t know. If it were my decision, I’d go kinetic. There’s no deal Trump is willing to give while he thinks he’s winning that will not cripple Iran in the long run.

For Iran to win, Trump has to believe America has lost. And right now he thinks America is winning.

Everyone reads these article for free, but the site and Ian take money to run. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

Distributing Resources Based On Jobs Is Outdated And Stupid

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On April 28, 2026

22 Comments

I want to spend more time writing about the baseline assumptions of our political economy.

One of the worst is that people have to work to get resources. “If you don’t work, you don’t eat”.

This made sense at one time, when famines were common, food and resources were scarce and predatory nobles and priests took most of the surplus. There wasn’t a lot of space for people who didn’t work.

But it doesn’t make sense now. Buckminster Fuller most famously said it:

The fact is that we have more than enough of everything basic, or could easily make it. Food, housing (there are less homeless people in the western world than empty homes), basic electronics, health care, etc, etc…

We waste vast amounts of resources, and we make people work at jobs that either produce nothing or are actually a negative.

Most of those administrators spend their time denying care, not providing it. About a third should become technicians, nurses, orderlies and doctors, the rest aren’t needed at all. The same chart exists for schools:

And while not quite as bad, for universities:

The vast majority of all of this is sheer waste, but it’s also a waste of human lives. These people aren’t doing anything necessary, but they are forced to spend their lives doing meaningless “work”.

At least much of this administrative bloat is just wasteful. People working shadow banking, Private Equity and Wall Street make their money buy rolling up companies, loading them up with debt, laying people off, raising prices and then causing bankruptcy of firms which were actually profitable, who provided real work and products at reasonable prices.

They are actively damaging. It would be more than worth it to forbid such people from working at all and pay then low six figures to stop hurting other people.

Same thing goes with most prison guards and police, who do not reduce crime, but do increase incarceration.

The truth is that at least half of jobs shouldn’t exist. They either aren’t necessary, or they’re actively harmful. It would be better just give people money.

None of this is to deny that there is work which needs to be done. But a vast switch from administration and financial industries and dochebags selling internet ads into actual productive enterprises would produce a far better economy. Even so, all our advances in production mean that we genuinely do or can produce far more than we need. So just give people enough money to live a good life, reduce the standard work week to three days, and let people who want to contribute work at jobs which make the world better, not worse, and which aren’t makework.

We can’t even imagine a world where we don’t force people to spend their entire lives doing things they wouldn’t do if they weren’t scared of starvation and homelessness. We can’t conceive of a world where we don’t create goods designed to wear out, and instead create long lasting appliances and computers and roads and cars and high speed rail and so on: goods designed to last. We need profit, so we produce vast amounts of crap we only need because of of that “need” for profit.

This insanity has caused global warming, mass extinctions and vast amounts of needless unhappiness, bad health and lives wasted doing meaningless or harmful work.

We need a better way, and the first step is to end the idea that if you don’t work you shouldn’t have a home, food and a decent life.

More on this in the future.

The Abuse of Language By Media and Government

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On April 27, 2026

26 Comments

I stumbled across this, completely typical word usage today:

The Somali government officially announced that it was starting a blockade. Same as the US blockade. Same as the Iranian blockade.

So either it’s all piracy, or it’s all “boarding.”

We have seen a constant refusal to call Palestinian children, children. The words “Israel killed” are never used in the Western press. And then there’s the constant use of the words terrorist and terrorism, the two most meaningless words in the English language.

Britannica says:

terrorism, the calculated use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective

Cambridge:

violent action or threats designed to cause fear among ordinary people, in order to achieve political aims.

By either of these definitions, the world’s greatest users of terrorism are America and Israel. No one else comes close, not even the Russians.

The word terrorist always describes non-state actors with limited reach, or state actors like Iran. Yet Iran’s strikes were not intended to cause fear among the civilian population: they were intended to hurt the economies and militaries of the West and the Gulf Arab states which allow attacks on Iran. Schools and hospitals were not targeted.

Iran has gone out of its way to not kill civilians. In the Ukraine war the death rate for children is under 1%. In Palestine it’s somewhere around 32%. In Iran it was about 16%.

The US and Israel have repeatedly said that one goal is to cause the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow the Iranian state. The method of doing this is attacking civilian targets. Indeed the latest war on Iran began with an attack on a children’s school. Hospitals are systematically targeted, as are paramedics and firefighters.

Hezbollah, likewise, tends to stick to military targets. Even Hamas mostly hits military targets.

Yet somehow the nations who are primarily committing terrorism: the US and Israel, are never described as terrorists. Russia, Iran, Hezbolla and Hamas: they’re always terrorists, even when they attack military targets.

In Britain terrorist designations have been used against protesters who have never harmed civilians. The same is true in Germany.

The word means nothing, and Western media outlets are nothing but propagandists. Most aren’t even allowed to say the word “genocide”. It’s publisher policy. (Publishers always make these decisions. Editors are downstream and are routinely over-ridden by publishers, though most American journalists seem to be OK with being propagandists. Those who aren’t tend to be fired, or eventually leave in disgust.)

Terrorism means “violence by people who are our enemies” and nothing else. Genocide is never done by us, only by our enemies. If half a million children die due to sanctions, it’s “worth it”, in the immortal word of Secretary of State Madeline Albright.

None of this will come as a shock to my readers, I know. But I think it’s worth emphasizing just how worthless our media has become. They lie, they propagandize, they refuse to state the obvious: indeed their job is to lie, to pretend the sun is purple with silver polka-dots and that the sky isn’t blue. There’s no genocide in Palestine. No sir. But there is one China, oh yes. And our enemies are terrorists, but we, who actively target schools and hospitals and bomb weddings and funerals, we’re the good guys.

It was always bad, to be sure. But I’ve lived a long time now and it keeps getting worse. In the old days some columnist would be allowed to tell the truth. Articles would have misleading headlines but the actual facts were in the article, albeit sometimes near the end.

You can still, with very careful reading, get some truth from the legacy media. Some. But if you want unfettered news and not to have to work like a dog, you have to go to alternative media and read foreign sources directly.

This isn’t trivial, because most people don’t do the extra work, which means that even if suspicious of official narratives, they live in a soup of lies and their understanding of the world is wrong. I still regularly run across people who think the US can open the Strait of Hormuz with direct military naval action, which is deranged. It’s not possible.

But there is something good about completely out-to-lunch propaganda. Over time people see thru it. They stop trusting. They stop believing anything they’re told.

But that’s also a bad thing: there is no consensus world view left, just a series of tribes with their own echo chambers. Without a shared understanding of the world that is not completely unhinged from reality, there’s no basis for social action which works. China has the buy-in of most of their population because they believe in what China does, and trust the government. (Research on this is very clear. Chinese citizens do trust the CPC.) In the US there can be no concerted action because their is no trust left. Hell, Trump contradicts himself regularly. He’ll say the sky is green in the morning and announce it’s magenta at supper.

No society riven like this and basing its decisions on delusion rather than truth can act effectively. America can’t fix anything, can’t win wars, can’t reindustrialize and much of this is because Americans live in a world of fantasy.

The first step in fixing anything; in running any sort of society worth living in, is facing at least some of the facts: of living in the real world. It’s been a long time since the West acknowledged reality, and our delusions are just getting worse.

Everyone reads these article for free, but the site and Ian take money to run. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

 

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 26, 2026

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On April 26, 2026

14 Comments

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 26, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

 

War

How Iran has been studying lessons from the war in Ukraine

[FT Alphaville, via The Big Picture, April 20, 2026]

Military journals provide tantalising glimpses into what Tehran’s military thinks and its priorities, including drones. Tehran’s military journals reveal how closely it’s been watching drone and missile warfare.

 

How Iran war has triggered soaring cost of medicines 

[Aljazeera, via Naked Capitalism 04-25-2025]

 

To A Conclusion. 

Aurelien [via Naked Capitalism 04-23-2025]

…But we have become so used to the Liberal internationalist way of thinking, where all problems have a reasonable solution and compromise is only a negotiation away, that we cannot recognise and understand a situation where a negotiated solution cannot actually address the fundamental issues that divide parties from each other. But that is the case here. The obsession of the US and Israel with the destruction of Iran, and the Iranian desire to preserve itself and to come to dominate the region, can simply never be reconciled, even by the most brilliant negotiators in history. This one, I’m afraid, will have to be fought out to a conclusion, whatever that might be.

 

GOP senators ponder giving Trump official blessing for Iran war 

[Responsible Statecraft, via Naked Capitalism 04-22-2025]

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