Perched at the north-easternmost point of Lake Kivu, in Gisenyi, Rwanda, a few minutes’ walk from the border with the Congolese city of Goma and the entryway into North Kivu, is a beautiful hotel, known these days as the Kivu Sun. Any glamourous hotel in such a tumultuous location has countless stories to tell, of war and peace, drama and disease, wealth and power; the wood-paneled lobby, fancy restaurant and quiet conference rooms all hold their share and at times one can witness it in person; I have and more than once. But on one of my many visits, some years ago, another narrative revealed itself, a story unspoken yet in plain sight, which explains in large part the geopolitical dynamism of the region and why Africa’s Great War never really ended and likely never really will. In a separate companion essay, “The Perpetual Violence Machine,” I describe why this most beautiful corner of the world is perhaps its most dangerous. Here I will endeavor to explain the mechanics behind the crisis, the “how” which accompanies the earlier “why.”

Not so long ago, nearly every four or five star hotel had a bank of computers available for guest access to the internet; the Kivu Sun’s were located just off the lobby. When I sat down at the terminal, I saw that the prior user had failed to log off and had left an array of documents open on the screen. At a glance, I saw the entire story: two Indian passports, import and export documentation, certifications, a Dubai destination, and other paperwork for the transportation of a notable quantity of gold. Nothing was hidden, everything appeared to be legitimate, and that is the entire point of this essay – how Congolese stolen riches are laundered into legitimacy, how stolen ore is transformed via various bureaucratic processes into clean, certified, untraceable end products used all over the world, perhaps in your wedding ring, certainly in your cell phone.

Rwanda does produce gold, approximately three tons every year, although they export almost seven times that. The difference comes from men like those whose passports I saw on that shared hotel computer. They are some of the middlemen, not even the first, in a long supply chain which starts underground and ends in the shops, vaults, and armories of the world and involves not only gold, but coltan, cassiterite, wolframite and more. By value, gold takes the largest share of annual laundering; in March 2025 Rwanda’s Prime Minister detailed the prior year’s export figures: 19.4 metric tons of gold (1.5 billion USD); 2,384 metric tons of coltan (99 million USD), 4,861 metric tons of cassiterite (96 million USD) and 2,741 metric tons of wolframite (36 million USD). Notably, seven years earlier, Rwandan gold exports were only 2.4 metric tons (90 million USD). The eight-fold increase in volume was not explained by expanded extraction within Rwandan borders; the origin was not explained at all.

Gold is fungible, pocket-sized, simple to melt into anonymity, easy to move across borders, and almost impossible to track. Much easier to track is coltan and the certification machinery designed to do so is also designed to confer the legitimacy required by customers and the regulatory guardians of the world. The ore is abundant and readily available throughout the hills of eastern Congo; the legitimacy is the challenge. Just as conflict diamonds carry an international stigma, conflict minerals must become legitimate in order to smoothly enter the world market. Thus, our two Indian businessmen were not smugglers, in the traditional sense; they were launderers.

For indeed this is classic laundering, the three-stage process of “placement, layering, and integration,” used both for illicit funds and, in this case, goods, in which the action is not via wire transfers but in invoices, declarations, certificates, and perhaps most importantly, tags.

II. Out of the hill into the system

“Placement” is when something illicit enters the legitimate system but is not yet “clean.” In the case of coltan, the largest source in the region is a hill at Rubaya, in North Kivu, which is believed to supply approximately fifteen percent of the world’s production. It is completely legitimate while it is in the ground. It is taken out of the ground in a supremely unsophisticated manner, by hand, by thousands of men stripping the red earth of its soil by pick and shovel, filling plastic sacks with ore which they wash by hand. These men, and this entirely non-Western idea of a mine, are not run by the Congolese government, have no insurance or oversight, and answer to no inspectors. Since April 2024, the mine has been controlled, administered, taxed, and kept operational by the armed M23 rebel group, the same group which the United Nations once traded its neutrality to violently expel from the Congo; the same group with lengthy and comprehensive ties to the Rwandan government.

When M23 took control of the Rubaya deposits in April 2024, it did not loot the mine; it assumed management of it and immediately instituted a tax which it then made public. The going rate for a kilogram of coltan included a seven US dollar tax, four of which go to M23 and three to the Rwandan government. The United Nations estimates that as of May 2024, Rubaya produced USD 800,000 per month in these “taxes” and that since that time, over one hundred twenty metric tons of coltan per month have been transferred from the hill into Rwanda for further export.

M23 certifies nothing, rebel groups rarely do, but it does administer the Rubaya deposit and many others across eastern Congo with efficiency, collecting taxes, appointing political leaders, running a parallel court and legal system. While its raison d’être is ostensibly to maintain a buffer zone protecting Rwanda from raids by organized rebel groups descended from the original killers of the 1994 genocide, in practice it acts like a revenue authority with an armed wing, protecting not only the people of Rwanda, but their investments in the ground in the Congo.

The destination of the coltan once it leaves Rubaya changed after 2010 and the passage of the American Dodd-Frank Act. This legislation required the reporting of conflict minerals if they were in an American company’s supply chain. This pushed uncertifiable Congolese coltan out of the formal supply chain and opened an array of informal ones; the diggers kept digging and the hill kept producing, only the route from Rubaya to the market changed. As such, the legislation did not help those it was intended to protect; rather, it pushed their economy further underground and a world which chose to ignore the issue prior to 2010 opted to paper over it afterwards, and so the laundering began.

The Great Lakes region of central Africa, and the destinations of its ore. Gold moves to Dubai; the 3T minerals move east to smelters in China and Kazakhstan. Lines show the direction of trade, not shipping lanes.

III. Tag: you’re legit

“Layering” is the re-papering of the illicit good, obfuscating its origin and granting it artificial legitimacy. In the case of the Rubaya coltan, this involves a very specific “tag.” The tag is a requirement introduced to provide the documentation of origin required by the Dodd-Frank law. Without it, ores are untraceable and buyers, traders, smelters, and manufacturers cannot tell if they are tainted by conflict zones or not. The tag was devised to solve that problem. The trade body responsible for the tin industry, which includes the “3T minerals” cassiterite, coltan, and wolframite, (which refine into tin, tantalum, and tungsten, respectively), created a scheme called ITSCI, (the International Tin Research Institute Supply Chain Initiative), based on the same principle as baggage tags on a traveler’s checked luggage.

In theory, official inspectors at approved sites seal each bag of ore and affix a numbered tag with the weight and origin of the ore recorded separately along with the tag number. As the bag of ore transits the supply chain, it is traceable via that number by every person involved. Gold, by its nature, has no such scheme and is thus significantly harder to trace. Rwandan law requires that all bags of ore have these tags and thus until early 2025, every exported bag of coltan did; the tags filtered nothing, they certified everything. The salient point, however, is that the tags and the scheme are issued by a trade association, not a government, and the “International Tin Research Institute” (now the International Tin Association) has no enforcement mechanisms, no police force, and no way to ensure that its rules are followed. This is well known and winked at. The tag scheme appears to look like it is a guarantor of legitimacy, however in practice the real use of tags is to confer legitimacy, and the tags do the job. The tin trade association is equally aware of this issue and has publicly warned against “over-reliance” on its scheme or any other. But the tag does the trick.

M23 does not issue tags; coltan export companies do. Thus, as detailed by Global Witness in exposés published in 2022 and 2026, there is no forgery required. Rather, middlemen simply sell the ore to exporters, who provide as many tags as may be needed, usually declaring the origin to be an unusually productive mine. In this way, for example, ore from Masisi instantly becomes Rwandan. From that point forward, the ore is, legally, legitimate. It has been “layered.”

This abuse is in no way limited to Rwanda; it happens within Congo as well, where ore from conflict zones is relabeled in legitimate areas. And not all industries are willing to ignore misuse of the tag scheme. The “Responsible Minerals Initiative,” consisting of major companies such as Tesla, Apple, and Alphabet (Google), ceased recognition of the ITSCI scheme in 2022, requiring extra layers of due diligence. However, the mines have not slowed their production and exports of the 3T minerals have continued to climb. Obfuscating the situation further, in May 2024, one month after M23 took control of the Rubaya deposits, Rwanda’s central bank stopped publishing the country’s mineral export figures altogether. While hardly evidence of wrongdoing, this action removed the ability to cross-reference the delta between known domestic production and export.

IV. Fully legal

Bagged and tagged, the ore is now fully legal and enters the world market as such; this is the final stage of the laundering: “integration.” The bags of coltan usually travel east by truck through the Rusumo border crossing into Tanzania and onwards either to the port of Dar es Salaam, or further on to Mombasa, in Kenya. From there, they travel by sea to the smelters in China, Kazakhstan, and until the end of 2023, Thailand. The players are few (seven Rwandan companies are responsible for eighty-five percent of the coltan export) and the numbers continue to rise: in 2025 coltan exports had increased 150% from the levels in 2021.

From the hill at Rubaya to the port at Dar es Salaam. The ore is taxed in North Kivu, tagged in Rwanda, and shipped as Rwandan cargo. Territorial control is not shown: front lines are contested and shift.

Gold travels to Dubai, to be melted and refined into anonymous and untraceable bullion. Here is yet another difference between gold and the 3T minerals. The latter can, if allowed by their custodians, be subjected to German-developed geo-fingerprinting technology, tracing their origin (Rwanda systematically refuses to allow this); gold cannot.

Coltan is not melted into bullion, it is reduced and concentrated by the smelters into tantalum, milled to a fine powder and then pressed and sintered into anodes. These anodes are made into capacitors, the critical necessary components of nearly every high-density circuit board in the modern world’s electronic devices, allowing them to conduct a steady flow of energy. They are produced in the tens of billions annually and are ubiquitous in the modern world, in everything from a cell phone to a hearing aid to a cruise missile. There is no longer any tag or any identifying information to describe a tiny yet critical component of a completed good. Any evidence of a crime was melted, or smelted, away.

After entering the supply chain, the successful “integration,” the shippers, smelters, and buyers are all legally in the clear; the smelters were audited by the Responsible Minerals Initiative and found completely compliant. By 2018 the United States was already importing thirty-nine percent of its tantalum from Rwanda, much more so than from anywhere else, including the Congo. Six years later, the European Commission signed a raw materials agreement with Rwanda specifically noting tantalum production. M23 took Rubaya the same year.

V. Nothing to see here…

In the same vein as the misuse of the ITSCI tagging scheme is an even more recent example of misrepresenting reality. In February 2026 the Congolese government included the Rubaya mine in a list of strategic mineral assets to be jointly developed with the United States. Of course, the Congolese government has no control over the Rubaya mine and has not ever since M23 took control of it in April 2024. Thus, Kinshasa is offering the United States title to a hill it knows it does not control. Washington is considering the offer. No one is discussing the matter with M23, which continues to administer and operate the mine, control and pay its workers, tax its extracted ore, and fund its operations.

This mislabeling of a mine as a controlled strategic asset and the misuse of the tagging scheme are part of the same problem. The mine IS a strategic asset; but it is not controlled by the Democratic Republic of Congo. The tags DO accurately describe the contents of the bags of ore; although they mislead about their origins. Both are partially true and partially false and both are false about the same thing: the critical minerals in question are not legitimate, they are conflict minerals, and saying otherwise is the bureaucratic papering over of legitimacy and the beginning of the laundering process. This is what makes the issue so difficult to resolve. The minerals really are that important, really are that critical to the functioning of the modern world that it is significantly easier to continue production and access than it is to address the fact that a rebel group unofficially, but very tangibly, runs a deposit of at least fifteen percent of the world’s production of coltan.

All of the players know the reality of the situation and all of them pretend not to because the laundering works. Once the ore is laundered, there is no one left to charge and nothing to charge them with. The system is designed to continue the status quo, to ensure access to all, and to reduce what could have been a criminal conspiracy to a normalized and legal supply chain procedure.

This explains what I saw on the screen at the Kivu Sun and why the two Indian middlemen did not bother to hide it. Every document I saw was legitimate, the weights, the prices, the names. The only thing missing was the point of origin, the only fact which would point to a crime. The same concept holds true for the laptop I am using to write this essay and the device you are using to read it. A little piece of the Congo is in our hands, untraceable, irreplaceable, and almost certainly dug from the red earth of the Kivus by hardworking men, run by efficient rebels, delivered to us by the practiced supply chains of the most powerful corporations and governments of the world. Good luck finding that in the fine print.

Joseph Busby is the Founder and Director of Reality-Based Analysis Group (RBAG), an independent geopolitical analysis firm founded in Vienna in 2017 and affiliated with the Association for the Promotion of International Development and Stability (APIDS, apids.at).

RBAG advises governments, sovereign wealth funds, and development finance institutions, as well as commercial firms operating in complex environments, from extractives and commodities to travel operators and technology supply chains. The firm accepts a limited number of retainer clients each year. To commission analysis, request a conversation at rbag.at/contact or email info@rbag.at Subscribe at rbag.at.

© 2026 Joseph Busby / Reality-Based Analysis Group. Licensed under CC BY-ND 4.0. You may reproduce this work in full with attribution to Reality-Based Analysis Group and a link to rbag.at. Translation into any language is expressly permitted, provided the translation is complete and unaltered in substance, carries the same attribution and link, and identifies the translator. All enquiries to josephbusby@rbag.at.

Swimming in the northernmost point of Lake Kivu provides a glimpse of one of the most beautiful and idyllic places on earth, a massive sparkling lake whose soft sandy banks, studded with gently swaying palm trees, rise slowly into a city surrounded by a ring of brilliant green hills and mountains, dominated by a single, unmistakably active, cone volcano, Mount Nyiragongo. Here is where the Rwandan city of Gisenyi meets the subdued metropolis of Goma, and through which the border between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo runs, and it may be the most dangerous place in the world. Nowhere else is the combination of threats of danger both from man, and Mother Nature, so reliable. The lake is literally sparkling, and the act of walking into the deeper waters disturbs the sand, visibly releasing an unending stream of bubbles, methane gas, trapped in the depths of the lake, waiting for a sufficient geological disturbance to be freed. A closer look reveals lava flows stretching from the volcano all the way to the shore into, and indeed under, the lake itself. Residents of both countries enjoy the lake, swimming and fishing in the waters, resting on the lava and on the sand, well aware of the cycles of violence which have plagued their region for their entire lives. Here is the epicenter of Africa’s Great War. It is now entering its fourth decade and, for reasons laid out below, it is unlikely to end.

Goma sits on the Rwandan border, some 1,600 kilometers from Kinshasa, farther than Paris is from Moscow.

The gentle effervescence which surrounded me as a swimmer in the shadow of Nyiragongo volcano, was simultaneously a reminder of the ever-present geological danger as well as a metaphor for man-made violence. Both threaten to engulf the region at any moment with a devastation which civilians are powerless to prevent and have learned to endure. Lake Kivu is one of only three lakes on Earth known to hold vast quantities of dissolved gas in their depths, and the only one with a substantial mix of methane and carbon dioxide. It is also fifty times larger and twice as deep as the deepest of the other two. The vast weight and pressure of Kivu’s water holds and keeps the gas at the bottom of the lake, although it is precarious and a sufficient disturbance, such as an earthquake or volcanic eruption may be enough to upset the balance and release the estimated sixty cubic kilometers of methane and three hundred cubic kilometers of carbon dioxide into the air.

It is not without precedent: in 1986, in Cameroon, the far smaller Lake Nyos degassed one night releasing a cloud of carbon dioxide. Heavier than air, it displaced and pushed away the breathable oxygen and suffocated over seventeen hundred people and every earthbound animal as they slept. The population surrounding Lake Kivu is generally given as two million, although the figure has not been updated in a generation. Goma alone is currently estimated to have a population reaching that level. The city of Bukavu, at the southern tip of the lake holds almost 1.5 million, and coastal communities in both countries and the Congolese island of Idjwi add over two million more. The consensus risk counts two million souls; the reality is more than twice as many. The lake appears stable, there is no countdown to disaster. However, the danger lies in the trigger, and the lava stretching into the lake comes from the active Nyiragongo volcano. The smoking, glowing mountain top provides a daily picturesque reminder of the lingering threat. Significant eruptions appear on a roughly twenty-year basis and the latest was in May 2021 during which a series of earthquakes opened fissures in the ground which then filled with lava from below, destroying homes, businesses, and a part of the lakeshore. Lava entered the lake from below, visibly boiling the water, collapsing a sandbar, and threatening the stability of the deadly gases below. The eruption stopped, Kivu did not degas, and people rebuilt.

Lake Nyos, which killed more than 1,700 people when it degassed in 1986, holds about 0.15 km³ of water. Kivu holds some 550 km³.

This is the eternal threat and it cannot be mitigated against and it will never, ever, go away unless the worst case actually does take place, Kivu does degas, and survivors and others rebuild. The innocent civilians whom I saw swimming, fishing, working, playing and living in Gisenyi and Goma, however, have another threat ever-present in the context of their lives and that is man-made and significantly more complicated. It is the aftermath of a genocide interrupted and unavenged, a war entering its fourth decade, made unresolvable by what may be the planet’s richest and most dangerous underground mineral deposits; the second unique geological aspect to this most beautiful corner of the world.

Africa’s Great War has taken over five million lives and is the deadliest conflict since the Second World War. This essay is not a history of that war, nor of the genocide in Rwanda which precipitated it; it is an attempt to explain the root causes of the conflict, the reasons why the United Nations transformed, for the first and thus far only time, a peacekeeping mission into an offensive military force, and why the wealth under the earth guarantees that the cycle of man-made violence remains perpetual. The genocide of the Tutsi tribe which took place in Rwanda in 1994 was stopped in its tracks, not by an intervening third party as required by the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, signed in 1948 with 153 signatory states, but by an invading ragtag militia of displaced Tutsi soldiers, driven by a man of unusual military genius. This man, Paul Kagame, has led Rwanda in one form or fashion until this very day, and his rebel army stopped the genocide and drove the heavily supported and well-armed killers across the Gisenyi-Goma border into Congolese territory. There, finally, the world took notice and acted: their action was to feed, shelter, and support the newly displaced killers while the victims took stock in a country gutted like perhaps none before.

This injustice has never been fully addressed nor atoned, and understanding it sheds considerable light on the events of the past thirty years. It has been significantly complicated by what is buried beneath the hills of eastern Congo. Here lie some of the planet’s most valuable and strategic resources: gold, coltan, cassiterite, wolframite, drawing the attention and rivalry of the world’s great powers, complicating the motivations and actions of all the players, from Rwanda and the Congo to the United Nations, China, the United States, and beyond. Interrupted and contested vengeance for the worst crime possible, situated directly on top of the world’s most contested resources has created a perpetual violence machine, in which every party involved has a motivation to maintain the cycle of violence rather than resolve it.

II. Precursors to Genocide

The border dividing these lands is arbitrary, colonial, and permeable. In the verdant Virunga mountain jungles north of the cities, home to the famous mountain gorillas, the border becomes more theoretical than observable. The same people live on both sides, speaking the same language, Kinyarwanda, keeping the same long-horned Ankole cattle, and belonging to the same tribes, although sometimes with slightly different names. From 1916, Belgium administered both the Congo and Rwanda (having taken over from the Germans), and the border only solidified upon independence. It is crossed daily by countless locals at the two Gisenyi-Goma checkpoints, la Grande Barrière and la Petite Barrière, and en masse during times of danger.

Those locals, families, tradesmen, workers, belong overwhelmingly to two specific tribes, the Hutu and the Tutsi. While each group traditionally features specific racial characteristics, prior to the age of imperialism, membership was loose and could be altered by the acquisition, or loss, of cattle. The ethnic archetypes are real, notwithstanding President Kagame’s strictly enforced laws banning the mention of race, and he himself stands as what a Belgian colonial administrator would have considered the perfect example of the archetypal Tutsi: strikingly tall, lean, with a more narrow nose and face and a slightly lighter tint of skin than his Hutu countrymen. The Hutu archetype was shorter, darker, with a slightly wider nose and face. Yet these were the extremes and intermarriages and changes in fortune could elevate a member of the majority Hutu into the minority cattle-owning Tutsi. The population of Rwanda, then and now, was a seamless blend of people, crossing the spectrum so comprehensively that race and tribe were evident at a glance only in the most extreme cases.

Goma and Gisenyi form one continuous urban area, divided by the border and its two crossings, 1.7 kilometers apart.

The Twa, a third and historically marginalized forest people, are, and have been, a tiny minority in the region, representing approximately two percent of the population and they stand mostly outside this history, although they as a people are equally subject to the aftermath of the genocide. Rwandan tribal flexibility was incompatible with the European racial rigidity of the last century and Belgian administrators and their German predecessors seized upon the distinctions, made them into law, and into a label. Between 1933 and 1935 every Rwandan was issued an identity card, classifying them as irrevocably racially a Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa, as were their children. It was no longer a matter of tribal membership; it was race as identity. The Belgians favored the Tutsi elite, considering the taller, fairer cattle-herders as inherently superior and destined to rule over the darker, poorer Hutu. Six decades later, during the genocide of 1994, those identity cards would often determine who lived and who was killed.

Belgian colonial administration emphatically divided the country by initially providing only the Tutsi minority with education, opportunity, and social and political dominance. As independence drew near, the Belgians shifted their patronage, belatedly embracing democracy, disempowering the Tutsi and supporting the majority Hutu. In 1959, the Hutu revolted, sparking a revolution aided and abetted by the Belgians, which swept the Tutsi from power, abolishing the Tutsi monarchy, killing tens of thousands of Tutsi and driving hundreds of thousands more into exile in neighboring Uganda, Burundi, Tanzania, and the Congo. Among the refugees was a toddler, a boy of unusual drive and genius, who, when his people and country faced their greatest test, rose to the moment and never stepped aside. He is Paul Kagame, the face of modern Rwanda for the past thirty years, and a truly extraordinary man. When the genocide began in April 1994, he was thirty-six years old.

III. Genocide Interrupted

The Tutsi driven from Rwanda were barred from returning for thirty years, and for many this became a countdown with their lives defined by, and building up towards, that moment. The young Kagame joined Yoweri Museveni’s successful rebellion against Ugandan leader Milton Obote and eventually rose to become his Chief of Military Intelligence in 1986. But Kagame and his fellow Rwandan exiles in the Ugandan army were building their own organization, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), and after the thirty-year exile ended and Tutsi exiles were still not welcome into their homeland, the RPF invaded Rwanda in an effort to overthrow the Hutu leadership. Kagame was not involved in the invasion; he was in Kansas, at a training course run by the United States Army which he cut short and flew home after the commander of the ill-fated invasion was killed on only the second day of the operation. Kagame took command of the defeated troops, withdrew them into the mountains, and rebuilt them into a disciplined and efficient fighting force. A force which battled the ruling Hutu government to a standstill and ultimately, three years later, to the negotiating table.

The Arusha Accords of 1993 established a tenuous peace between both factions, but to the ruling Hutu Power government in Kigali, the return of the Tutsi played upon historical fears of prior domination and their response was to prepare for the worst. Dating from even before the signing of the Accords, the government led by President Juvénal Habyarimana purchased tens of thousands of machetes and began a vocal internal propaganda campaign of dehumanization and fearmongering, preaching to the Hutu population that the choices were either to kill or be enslaved. The pressure was nationwide, comprehensive, and saturating and on the evening of 6 April 1994 the tensions boiled over into action when a plane carrying President Habyarimana was shot down over Kigali, killing everyone onboard. No one has ever taken responsibility for the attack, but within hours, organized killings of Tutsi civilians began across the capital and across the country.

For one hundred days, the Hutu Power regime systematically organized and executed the killing of between 800,000 and one million people, the overwhelming majority of whom were Tutsi, mostly in close quarters, often by neighbors they knew, wielding the machetes provided by the government. People were killed in their homes and schools, and when they tried to flee, they were killed in the streets, at roadblocks, and in the churches. When killed by strangers, the determination of life or death, was the race indicated on the identity card. Few were spared and much of it was televised. The world watched from afar and the United Nations watched from within the country and neither intervened despite the clarity and obviousness of the crimes and the legal obligations of the nations of the world to prevent genocide. And all parties knew precisely that this was indeed a genocide; the UN commander on the ground in Kigali had written and warned for weeks of what was coming, only to have his force reduced and his mandate of nonintervention reinforced. The United States forbade its officials from using the word “genocide,” knowing that doing so triggered legal obligations to do something. No one did… except for Paul Kagame and his rebel army.

Kagame’s RPF stormed out of the mountains of northwest Rwanda and conquered the Hutu Power army and drove the killers to flight. This and this alone stopped the genocide. The genocidaires fled across the borders, overwhelmingly to the Congo, with between one and two million Hutu refugees flooding the areas just west of Lake Kivu. Among the civilians, many of whom participated in the killings, were the organizers, the defeated army and the Interahamwe militias responsible for the greatest number of murders. They settled into the camps, armed, organized, and with their command structures intact. As Kagame’s men took stock of a country which had been brutally ripped apart, they pleaded for assistance from the international community to rebuild. The international community, which had refused to lift a finger or spare a soldier (or a dollar) to stop the genocide did finally respond and they did so in force. Vast amounts of aid, money, food, medicine, shelter, and logistics support all arrived and all of it went to the refugee camps housing the killers.

The camps were situated on vast plains from old eruptions of Mount Nyiragongo, impossible to dig into and thus unsuited for sanitation as latrines could not be dug. The water supply was contaminated almost instantly and cholera swept through the camps. Approximately twelve thousand people died in the first month and international footage conflated the tragedies live on television: A genocide and civil war sparked a refugee crisis and health emergency, action was necessary. What was not on television was that the men administering the camps, controlling the aid, were the same killers who administered the genocide. The camps soon became among the best-supplied parts of central Africa, and the defeated genocidal army made no secret of its lack of repentance, while it taxed the rations, drilled its fighters, and recruited from the pool of camp-bound civilians. Many aid workers complained, but decisions were made to feed and help all in the camps rather than withdraw and allow the innocent among them to suffer.

As such, Rwanda watched as the killers rested, recovered, and regrouped, only a few kilometers from the border, protected by the human shields of the civilian refugees and western aid agencies. Kagame’s force had just stopped the genocide of its people with no help from the outside world and then watched as the outside world sprang into action to shelter and protect the killers at the gate. The United Nations, which watched the killing from inside Kigali itself, now protected the killers who continued to broadcast their genocidal propaganda announcing to one and all their intention to return and finish the job. The very nations who refused to utter the word genocide now lectured Rwanda on the sanctity of refugee camps and the necessity for restraint.

This unfinished reckoning of an interrupted genocide is the key to the man-made violence which has riven the region ever since. Inside Rwanda, Kagame instituted the highly effective Gacaca court system, a community-based system of justice and reconciliation designed to address the crimes committed, mete out appropriate justice, and reconcile the nation. It has been an overwhelming success. Outside Rwanda, however, the killers were never confronted, never disarmed, never reconciled and never faced justice. All of the violence in the region since springs from this reality.

IV. Unyielding

Paul Kagame is currently President of Rwanda and has led the nation in one office or another since the end of the genocide in 1994. It is an oversimplification to imply his sole responsibility for the trajectory of the nation since that time, but it is undeniable to note that he assumed control of a nation destroyed, whose treasury was empty, whose infrastructure was wrecked by war, and whose people were traumatized like few before. From that beginning, Rwanda has surged to become one of Africa’s most shining success stories, leveraging international assistance and centralized control to create a near corruption-free society, a bastion of safety and stability, with universal healthcare and education, and sustained economic growth. Criticized and even sanctioned by the West for being insufficiently “democratic,” Kagame’s Rwanda tolerates neither discussions of ethnicity nor political dissent and the government’s policy of tracking down and silencing Rwandan dissidents abroad has not negatively impacted Kagame’s re-election percentages, which are consistently in the high ninety percent range. Neither President Kagame nor the Rwandan public at large seems to be impacted by external criticism or sanctions, which can perhaps be understood when the man at whom the criticism is leveled is the same one who personally witnessed the same critics’ inaction during the genocide and their active assistance to its perpetrators afterwards. While Rwanda has been led by the same steady and decisive hand since the genocide, the Democratic Republic of the Congo has had a strikingly different experience in the same three decades: one of coups, invasions, corruption, and instability. This asymmetry is one of the many reasons tiny Rwanda has been able to continually prevail over its massive adversary and neighbor.

This is also the first reason why the war cannot and does not end. Every attempt to broker peace between Rwanda and the Congo ultimately includes the request which Kagame can never accept: that the perpetrators of the genocide be granted an amnesty and the right to live in perpetuity mere kilometers from the Rwandan border. He has never agreed, and will never agree, to disarm and withdraw his proxy forces on the pledge that the Congolese government or anyone else will be able to enforce the disarmament of the Hutu militias. Without that trust, without the ability of the Congolese government or the United Nations to enforce the terms, Kagame cannot and will not unilaterally disarm and withdraw. The United Nations forfeited its ability to play this role when it transformed, for the first and thus far only time in its history, a peacekeeping force into an offensive attacking one. The manner in which they did so reveals the second reason the war cannot end and all but guarantees that it never will. It shows why a conflict masquerading as a regional affair is actually a global geopolitical hotspot and explains why the United Nations and the great powers of the world have a stake in maintaining the status quo and why no one is coming to the rescue. The reason is the second extraordinary geological anomaly of the region, and it is buried in the ground throughout the Kivus.

V. The Riches

Some of the most coveted minerals on the planet are concentrated just under the surface and sprinkled throughout eastern Congo. Here lies tantalum, tungsten, tin, and gold. The minerals that power the world’s handheld phones, guide its most advanced weapons, and the precious metal which undergirds the world’s sovereign reserves. One mine alone, in Rubaya in North Kivu, provides a substantial percentage of the coltan which refines into tantalum and that mine is administered, taxed, and operated by a rebel movement, not a government or corporation. It continues to churn out the product the world demands, a bit of which is in the device being used to read this very essay. A separate companion essay, “The Laundering,” will discuss the mechanics of this trade, how it works and why, but here the key consideration is the understanding of what the presence of this wealth has done to the region and the conflict raging above it.

This wealth complicates the situation in multiple ways. First, it provides Rwanda with a rationale to unofficially administer portions of the Kivus in perpetuity, extracting and exporting the mineral wealth at scale. Paradoxically, the ultimate resolution of Rwanda’s security dilemma would simultaneously end a significant portion of its revenue stream, and while Kagame may or may not be willing to do so, he would never make that choice based on a promise the other side has shown itself unable to enforce. Second, Congo’s inability to enforce has become an asset in itself, as a strong and well-governed Congo would administer its own riches in the Kivus, set its own prices, and select its own customers. An ungoverned eastern Congo is a land of opportunity, run by militias and warlords, with minerals unaudited and sold at a discount to willing buyers and downstream purchasers around the world. For those powers, it is not only the discounted price which is the benefit, it is that the status quo protects access at all. This is the third and most consequential complication. The outsized importance of these resources makes them a matter of geostrategic competition rather than simply a line item on central African balance sheets or the internal ledgers of various rebel movements. Washington and Beijing, among others, vie for access to these minerals and neither is willing to risk an outcome of a strong Congo seizing control and choosing one partner over the other. Whereas Rwanda’s motivation in entering eastern Congo was to resolve the crimes of 1994, the great powers’ motivation is to ensure that the resolution is never complete, as it threatens the status quo and the status quo means guaranteed cheap access to the most strategic and sought-after minerals on Earth.

VI. The Task

The status quo has not been static for the past three decades. This author has visited Rwanda many times over the past decades, almost always including Lake Kivu, and has never seen a nation overtly at war. This is because Rwanda has fought the Congo for thirty years using proxies, and proxies, by their very nature, are never fully under their sponsor’s control. The first was the largest and the most successful. After two years of watching the world feed, shelter, and protect the genocidal forces camped in the outskirts of Goma, with no indications of anything other than stability, Rwanda acted. They chose a rebel leader, the Congolese Laurent Kabila, and sponsored his rebellion, which broke the camps by force and scattered the killers deep into the countryside. Armed by its patron, the rebels swept across the then-Zaire, taking Kinshasa by force in 1997 and ending the thirty-two-year dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko, driving him into exile. Kabila renamed the country the Democratic Republic of Congo and named himself its President.

Each proxy force has been replaced by the next. The génocidaires and the United Nations mission have been continuous throughout.

In less than a year, he turned on his former sponsors and ordered all Rwandan forces out of the country. Rwanda’s response established the pattern in place today: with the loss of control of one rebel group, they established control of another, in the same place, with the same responsibilities: maintain the buffer and continue the revenue. In 1998 Rwanda backed another rebellion, but unlike the first one, this did not topple the Congolese regime and instead drew in nine neighboring African states, and became Africa’s Great War, killing five million people. Kabila himself was a casualty, assassinated by his own bodyguards, and replaced by his own son Joseph, who ruled for the following eighteen years.

Formally, Africa’s Great War ended in 2003, with a peace agreement and the incorporation of Rwanda’s primary proxy, the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie, into the Congolese Army. In reality, this political agreement requested one rebel group to join forces with the side they had just battled to a standstill, and many declined. One of them was a Congolese Tutsi named Laurent Nkunda. Refusing the terms of the peace agreement, he withdrew his fighters and formed a new movement, the CNDP (the National Congress for the Defense of the People). The name was the mission: the protection of the ethnic Tutsi from the Hutu militias, still at large, still armed, and at times supplied by the Congolese state. Nkunda and the CNDP’s task was clear, and it has been the constant demand from Kigali: hold and control the Kivus; suppress the Hutu killers, destroy them if possible, but keep them far from the borders; keep the mineral wealth flowing; do not exceed the mandate and attempt to conquer the Congo. This tasking is specific and it is not typical for rebel groups. Nkunda’s assignment, and that of his successors, was neither liberation nor conquest, it was the maintenance of a status quo.

He exceeded his brief. An effective and charismatic leader, Nkunda expanded his area of control, routing the Congolese army, marching to the gates of Goma and speaking openly of repeating Laurent Kabila’s accomplishment of seizing the capital and the whole of the country. He became an internationally known figure, receiving journalists in his base camp in the Virunga volcanoes and speaking and acting like a slightly eccentric head of state and a warrior prince with his signature silver tipped cane; not like the proxy warlord Kigali required him to be. Kigali’s status quo required a carefully calibrated force which would not draw the scrutiny of the world, would not threaten a renewal of Africa’s Great War and the intervention of neighboring states. And thus, Nkunda was removed. In 2009, he was placed under house arrest in Rwanda, where he is believed to remain to this day, uncharged, untried, and unavailable for comment.

In that year, Kigali and Kinshasa reached an understanding in which Rwandan troops themselves would cross the border and engage directly with Hutu rebels, who promptly dissolved into the jungles. Nkunda’s group, the CNDP, was reluctantly absorbed into the Congolese army but again rebelled a few years later, regrouping as M23, the March 23 Movement, with the same mandate, same goals, and same limitations as their predecessors.

VII. Better Never Than Late

Throughout all of this the United Nations has been present, in Rwanda as UNAMIR/MINUAR with their blue helmets warning about, and then watching, the genocide, then administering the refugee camps, and finally deploying the largest and most expensive peacekeeping mission in its history, MONUC (later MONUSCO), in the Kivus. For almost twenty years, the United Nations claimed it did not have the ability to intervene, but in reality it had the ability, the power, and the opportunity. Then, a situation arose which proved that all that had been missing was the will, and the United Nations did once what it has not done before or since and transformed an avowedly neutral force into a lethal weapon of offensive warfare and unleashed it.

In November 2012, M23 forces seized the city of Goma, unchallenged by any of the 20,000 UN peacekeepers stationed in the country, whose mandate only permitted force to protect civilians in immediate danger. However, this time, Kigali was politically vulnerable in a way unlike ever before. The United Nations Security Council, well aware of the illegal and unregulated extraction of the conflict minerals of the Kivus, had created a Group of Experts to investigate and report on the situation. They uncovered and produced compelling evidence of the proxy relationship between Rwanda and M23 and the routine extraction and export of Congo’s mineral wealth. The United States, United Kingdom, European Union, and the African Development Bank, among others, suspended one hundred fifty million dollars of aid from Rwanda, roughly forty percent of its budget. The press turned against Kagame. On 28 March 2013, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 2098 which created within MONUSCO an unprecedented Force Intervention Brigade (FIB), three thousand soldiers from South Africa, Tanzania, and Malawi, armed and tasked with offensive operations, on its own initiative, to neutralize and disarm armed groups in the Kivus. The Security Council was uncomfortable enough about this precedent to deny in writing that it could even be considered one. In October and November of 2013, the United Nations abandoned its neutrality and the FIB joined forces with the Congolese Army and attacked and defeated M23, driving it from the Congo in a matter of six weeks.

Thus, the UN itself revealed that it required approximately a month and a half, three thousand men, and a few signatures to defeat a rebel group in the region. Far from an unavoidable tragedy, such as an eruption from Nyiragongo, or a degassing from Lake Kivu, the man-made violence could indeed be stopped. So why did the United Nations choose to abandon its neutrality not to stop a genocide or to mete out justice to its perpetrators, but instead to target the one group maintaining the status quo? In that autumn of 2013 there were more than just one “armed group” in the Kivus. One was M23 and it was driven from Goma and back into Rwanda. Another was the FDLR, the militia descended and evolved from the Hutu Power army and the Interahamwe militia who committed the genocide in 1994, the very group M23 was tasked with keeping at bay. The FIB showed its capacity to defeat armed groups but it targeted only M23, never once directing the same force against the FDLR. The one organization which had been witness to the entire history, yet claimed regretful impotence to counter the violence, opted to change their mandate and finally took military action against the one force still fighting the genocidaires. This was a political decision, one taken in the context of the growing great power interest in Kivu’s mineral wealth, and was made because overt Rwandan control of the Kivus carried the same risk that over Congolese control did: potential restricted access and greater cost to the tantalum, tin, tungsten, and gold below.

The FIB won that battle, although M23 has returned to the Kivus and controls Goma itself today. But the victory cost the United Nations something dear. The protected status of peacekeepers as noncombatants depends upon them not being a party to a conflict and the FIB made MONUSCO and the United Nations a party to this one. When M23 marched yet again into Goma in January of 2025 they refused the UN any role in negotiations, considering it a belligerent party rather than a neutral arbiter. The famous Blue Helmets came and traded their neutrality to win a battle, not to end a war, or stop a genocide, or provide justice delayed, but to destroy the one force holding the genocidaires at bay while leaving the killers untouched. The choice was a political one, in which the great powers preferred cheap and unaudited access to stolen mineral wealth guaranteed by instability and threatened by a strong Rwanda or Congo. Better, for the people of the Kivus, that they had never come at all.

VIII. Contagion

It is not only violence which is contagious and it is not only wealth which emerges from the fertile ground in the Kivus. The caves and mine shafts are home to the fruit bats which carry Marburg virus, an Ebola variant which kills, swiftly and horribly, the vast majority of those it infects. Often, those are the men forced underground in the informal mines of eastern Congo. In 1998, along with its ore, Marburg virus leached out of the Gorumbwa gold mine in northeastern Congo. It killed 128 of the 154 miners infected, ninety-four percent of whom had worked in the underground mines rather than open pits. Ongoing violence kept the outside world from investigating for six months and the outbreak ended because the mine flooded and the patients died. Twenty-six years later, Rwanda itself recorded a Marburg outbreak, traced to a young man exposed to bats in a mining cave and the cycle continued.

The great outbreak of 2018 swept across the Kivus and the greater region, and was used by the Congolese government to cancel elections, control the population, and limit freedom of movement. For a population accustomed to the ever-present threat of violence from man and nature, government overreach was a step too far and they revolted, attacking treatment centers and health workers. Foreign press, aghast and unable to comprehend that the significantly greater daily danger was malaria, reacted with condemnation, confusion, and hostility.

In the first months of this year, Ebola itself was again detected in the gold-mining town of Mongbwalu. It has expanded to become the second-largest Ebola outbreak yet recorded, of a strain as yet without treatment. Arguments have been made in the press that the great powers ought to intervene, not for humanitarian reasons per se, but in order to secure preferential access to the mineral wealth beneath the dead, the dying, and the at-risk. By the time of writing, over twenty-five hundred deaths have been reported, primarily in Ituri province with cases in six provinces in eastern Congo; the outbreak in Uganda has been contained as of the end of July according to the Ugandan government. The United Nations continues to cite regional insecurity as a reason for insufficient prevention or mitigation.

Principal mineral sites and filovirus outbreaks, 1998 to 2026: the wealth and the disease come out of the same ground.

Variants of the same brutal disease, in the same region, contested by variants of the same rebel groups, recurring over three decades, alongside the same volcanic threat and the same gigatons of methane and carbon dioxide lurking under the surface of the lake all target the same people. They are trapped in a cycle of violence both natural and man-made, guaranteed to continue not only by the heat of geologic patterns but by the cold calculus of the geopolitical chessboard. It is a perpetual violence machine.

IX. Three Solutions

There are three known ways this situation can be resolved and two of them have been actively and intentionally resisted. The third cannot. Perhaps the optimal solution is the least likely: a strong, well-governed, and organized Congolese state able to peacefully control and administer all of its own territory. This scenario is ostensibly the basis for every peace plan under consideration since the official end of Africa’s Great War and, in polite society, is the only one ever discussed. A strong Congo tolerates no rebel forces, has no Rwandan buffer zone, and manages the entirety of its natural resource wealth. Simultaneously described as both the objective and unrealistic, it has not and will not come to pass because the parties able to prevent it have concrete reasons to do so.

Thus we come to the beneficiaries of the status quo, from the local to the global. Kigali routinely exports substantially more gold and coltan than it produces within its own borders. Kinshasa habitually uses the insecurity in its east as a handy scapegoat for all manner of problems and leverages the situation to extract significant foreign aid. Even more locally, Congolese officers have been documented selling their ammunition and supplies to M23 for personal profit, and the rebels support themselves by the taxes they collect from the mines they are tasked with administering. The next step outward are the businessmen, purchasers, traders, smelters, refiners, and middlemen, in Dubai, in Thailand and throughout the East, all of whom obtain precious raw materials discounted precisely because they are stolen. These are the launderers who then sell the minerals so critical to the modern world to the highest bidder, the great powers. Those powers know that a strong and well-functioning Congo could and would institute chains of custody, set prices, and possibly choose favored or exclusive buyers. The importance of the minerals makes no power willing to risk the possibility of losing access to them; cheap and available access is only possible in the absence of a strong Congo and the very powers suggesting it in writing are subverting it in practice.

The second solution is the codification of Rwandan control of the Kivus, their official annexation. This is the status quo without the benefits to the great powers. As in the case of a strong Congo, an already efficient Rwanda officially controlling the minerals beneath the Kivus would automatically end the unofficial supply chain and might choose to whom to grant or restrict access. As such, this solution is also quietly rejected. The current border is indeed arbitrary and was indeed created by Europeans unconcerned about tribal or ethnic history or continuity, yet a real border it is and the inhabitants of the Kivus are Congolese, in addition to whatever tribal group they claim. Modern borders do change, either by negotiation, as in the case of the creation of South Sudan and Eritrea or by force, as shown by the steadily shrinking Ukraine. De jure Rwandan control is different from de facto rule, and without the consent of the inhabitants, Rwanda would inherit more than territory, they would inherit an occupation. An occupation is a war of a different sort and while not a solution, it would be an ending of sorts, if it were ever to be allowed.

Thus, the status quo reigns, and eastern Congo exists in a gray ill-defined zone that serves all parties other than the people who actually live there, in the shadow of the volcano, along the shores of the lake, on the fringes of the mines. Rwanda cannot officially take the Kivus and Congo cannot control them and the resulting instability is precisely the geopolitical outcome the great powers need to ensure their access to the most precious commodities the world can offer.

The third solution, and perhaps the final one, is Mother Nature’s and brings us back to where our story began, swimming in a bubbling lake gazing at lava fields leading up to a smoking volcano. At any moment, now or in a different century, Nyiragongo may erupt in such a way as to trigger the degassing of Kivu and release from its watery prison the gigatons of lethal gas, ending the lives of all in its way and the machinations of everyone else. A tragedy of that magnitude is unknown in human history and it would leave untouched the minerals below. Without doubt, a ruthless world would begin calculating instantly the recovery of their supply chain. But it would be a resetting of the scenario, with new parameters, new problems, and new solutions.

There is no mitigation strategy for the volcano and the lake. But perhaps the great powers, led by the United Nations, may for once consider the value of the lives of the people of the Great Lakes, create transparent solutions not only for the acquisition of mineral wealth, but for a justice long denied and deferred, and put a stop, once and for all, to the perpetual violence machine. Until that time, the innocent civilians will live as they always have, trapped in a cycle they did not create and are powerless to end.

* For simplicity, I have referred to the Belgian Congo, Zaire, and the Democratic Republic of Congo as simply “the Congo.” This is not meant to belittle or ignore the separate country the Republic of Congo, whose capital, Brazzaville, I was fortunate to visit years ago and whose hospitality I recall well and appreciate. It does not play a role in the above essay.

Joseph Busby is the Founder and Director of Reality-Based Analysis Group (RBAG), an independent geopolitical analysis firm founded in Vienna in 2017 and affiliated with the Association for the Promotion of International Development and Stability (APIDS, apids.at).

RBAG advises governments, sovereign wealth funds, and development finance institutions, as well as commercial firms operating in complex environments, from extractives and commodities to travel operators and technology supply chains. The firm accepts a limited number of retainer clients each year. To commission analysis, request a conversation at rbag.at/contact or email info@rbag.at Subscribe at rbag.at.

© 2026 Joseph Busby / Reality-Based Analysis Group. Licensed under CC BY-ND 4.0. You may reproduce this work in full with attribution to Reality-Based Analysis Group and a link to rbag.at. Translation into any language is expressly permitted, provided the translation is complete and unaltered in substance, carries the same attribution and link, and identifies the translator. All enquiries to josephbusby@rbag.at.

In mid-August 2026, as world headlines swirled around the expanding crises of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the partial closure of the Bab el-Mandeb strait in the Red Sea, a new maritime chokepoint was quietly opened, wholly owned and operated by the Russian Federation: the Northern Sea Route (NSR). Almost a century in the making, running along Russia’s Arctic coast, and cleared by a fleet of nuclear-powered icebreakers, the Northern Sea Route officially opened for business on 15 August, as the first international customer set sail from China en route to Britain. Rosatom, the Russian state-owned nuclear corporation, controls and administers the NSR, and it authorized eight initial voyages, all of them Chinese, for the first planned season of the route. Ships have made the route before, one at a time; what is new is that the route is now offered on a regular schedule, shifting it from ad hoc passage to a maritime chokepoint.

It is a consequential development. The shipping between China and Europe is the largest in the world, with China as Hamburg’s largest trading partner. In Rotterdam, Europe’s largest port, approximately 25% of the containers originate in China. These ports, as well as those in Gdansk, Poland, and Felixstowe in the UK, are the destinations for the initial eight Chinese voyages passing through the NSR. These are not symbolic trips; they are a test run on China’s most important trade route, and if sustainable, the NSR promises to revolutionize Chinese trade with Europe. Until this summer, the primary path was for a container ship to leave China from Ningbo or Shanghai, sail south through the South China Sea, west through the first chokepoint, the Strait of Malacca, across the Indian Ocean, north through the second chokepoint, the Bab el-Mandeb, into the Red Sea, through the third chokepoint, the Suez Canal, through the Mediterranean Sea and the Strait of Gibraltar, up the European coast into port. The journey typically took between thirty and forty days and involved three chokepoints, two of which are now contested. The insecurity in the Red Sea with the partial closure of the Bab el-Mandeb has already led to many shippers simply opting to take the long way around the African continent, sailing around the Cape of Good Hope, adding another ten to fourteen days to the journey, as well as three and a half thousand nautical miles and the fuel it takes to traverse it. The NSR avoids all of this, involves none of the contested chokepoints, and reduces the transit time from up to eight weeks down to twenty days.

The three routings between China and northern Europe. The Arctic passage avoids Malacca, the Bab el-Mandeb and Suez entirely.

And there is another change in the wind. Since the close of the Second World War, throughout the Cold War and the Unipolar Era, transit through maritime chokepoints was taken as a right with very few maritime chokepoints (primarily the canals) involving a price for passage. As we have demonstrated elsewhere (“The Monetization of Multipolarity”) one feature of the multipolar era is the monetization of geography, and the assertion of control of maritime chokepoints such as, inter alia, the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb. Access is now no longer necessarily a function of who can afford to pay; it has become a function of who a shipper is and whether or not they are allied or aligned with the chokepoint’s country. Access has become political. Ansar Allah (known in the West as “the Houthis”) has declared a blockade on all Israeli and Saudi ships as well as any that would come from either nation’s ports. Iran has declared that no Israeli or United States vessels shall cross the Strait of Hormuz. Chinese and Russian ships have been allowed to pass through the Strait, as have ships from other nations uninvolved in the conflict, such as India. There are dozens of reports of ships broadcasting to the Persian Gulf Strait Authority (PGSA), the official Iranian body administering the Strait of Hormuz, that they are Chinese, most notably ships with English names. Whether these vessels are interdicted by the “blockade” imposed by the United States is a separate matter, one of war and peace; it further emphasizes the uncertainty of transiting the region at all. The European Union has advised all ships of US, Israeli, or Saudi origin to stay out of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden altogether.

Russia currently makes no such demand for political allegiance for usage of the NSR. Indeed, at the June 2026 Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), Igor Sechin, the head of Russia’s state oil company, Rosneft, explicitly marketed the route as an open alternative to the crises in the Middle East. Shippers took note, especially in east Asia, where Japan and South Korea stand alongside China as among the most impacted by the chokepoint closures. The route sells itself: twenty days from China to Europe, no blockades, no wars, no war risk premiums creating underwriting uncertainty. Just a single passage with one owner and operator, one issuer of permits, and one unique nuclear-powered fleet of icebreakers to ensure passage remains open.

The timing is extraordinary. For over a century, Russia, and the Soviet Union before it, have worked on creating a sea passage across the roof of the world. Crossing through twenty-eight designated sections, over five thousand kilometers, the NSR has been explicitly designed for Chinese-Russian cooperation for a decade. In 2017, Chinese President Xi Jinping himself, while visiting Moscow, suggested naming the route the “Ice Silk Road,” one name it is marketed under today. One year later, China declared itself a “near-Arctic State,” raising the ire of the United States which, typically, responded to China’s foresight with mockery rather than action, with then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declaring in 2019 that there were only two types of states, “Arctic States and non-Arctic States,” and that claiming otherwise entitled China to “exactly nothing.” The Russians, on the other hand, took action, appointing Rosatom operator of the route in 2018, issuing the permit regime in 2020, inaugurating test runs between Murmansk and Kamchatka in 2022, almost tripling their ports along the route from four to eleven, and, critically, launching four new nuclear-powered icebreakers between 2020 and 2024. Less than a decade after the declaration of the Ice Silk Road, Chinese ships are transiting it under Russian escort.

The United States did more than mock China. It officially rejected Russian ownership of the passage, claiming that the Vilkitsky Strait and others are “international straits” not Russian territory. The Russian government disagrees, considering the NSR a single corridor through Russia’s own inland seas, territorial waters, and its exclusive economic zone, all governed under the same laws, same rules, and same Rosatom administration. This is the US position on all straits it wants open, irrespective of whether or not they are in territorial waters; it made the same objection against Canada regarding the Northwest Passage and against Iran in the Strait of Hormuz. In none of these have the Americans demonstrated an ability to change the fact that these straits are indeed effectively owned and operated by the countries that control the territories in which they lie.

II. The Fleet

Icebreaking is a unique challenge and the route Russia offers is routinely covered with up to three meters of solid ice. Breaking it requires a specific design delivering sustained force, over a significant period of time, and requires more power than diesel-powered ships can provide without refueling. The solution is nuclear and the Soviet Union built the first nuclear-powered surface ship in the world, the icebreaker Lenin, in 1959. From that beginning, Russia’s fleet has grown along with its technology, and today, alongside a fleet of thirty-four diesel-powered icebreakers, its nuclear fleet stands at eight, four of late Soviet design and four of the groundbreaking “Project 22220” class, the Arktika in 2020, Sibir in 2021, Ural in 2022, and Yakutia in 2024. These ships are unique in the world, with the ability to traverse both the deep sea and shallow coastal estuaries. This year is the first time all eight ships have been deployed on the same route simultaneously. Three more ships of the same class are under construction. This timing reveals another aspect of the multipolar world worth emphasizing: for almost a century Russia and the Soviet Union worked aspects of the Northern Sea Route with a fleet of ageing diesel ships and nuclear-powered ships whose hulls could not service both coastal and deep-sea water. Since President Xi Jinping’s 2017 Moscow declaration of the Ice Silk Road, Russian innovation and technology, which had led to the development, production, and deployment of the Project 22220 class nuclear icebreakers, changed passage through the NSR from a possibility to a product and created a viable maritime chokepoint where once there was merely the promise of one.

No other nation on Earth possesses a single nuclear icebreaker. The United States fields two non-nuclear icebreakers, one built a half-century ago and the other in 2000. It purchased a third, secondhand vessel last year and ordered three more ships, projected for delivery in 2030 at a cost of approximately five billion dollars. A common misconception is that only Russia can bend the steel in the way necessary to build these ships. President Putin himself clarified the record on Navy Day, 27 July 2026, when he described Russia’s competitive advantage as one of timing as well as capacity. He explained that other “high tech countries” could build nuclear icebreakers, but that it would take years, if not decades, to do so. His statement understates the challenge faced by the United States: the men who built the last heavy icebreaker in the United States did so fifty years ago and their experience and expertise left the workplace when they retired. Thus, in 2025, when the United States ordered its newest icebreaker, it turned to Finland, as does almost everyone else: eighty percent of the world’s icebreakers are built in Finland and none of them are nuclear.

Russian shipbuilding has not been immune to current events and the war in Ukraine has drastically slowed the pace of delivery from one ship a year to one every three years. Part of this is due to the destruction of critical factories and the increased costs of various components. The war has delayed the completion of the latest class of nuclear icebreaker, the Rossiya, until 2030. This ship, part of the planned expansion of the fleet to between fifteen and seventeen icebreakers, a seventy-thousand ton behemoth, is powered by two nuclear reactors, enabling it to break through up to four meters of solid ice, and wide enough to allow wider container ships to follow in its wake. This is the class of ships that will turn the now commercial seasonal route into a dependable year-round guaranteed passage. As President Putin stated, other nations may indeed build a similar fleet someday, but Russia’s is operating and expanding right now. No other nation can open a new maritime chokepoint; Russia just did.

III. The Ice Silk Road

The Chinese moniker “Ice Silk Road” applied to a uniquely Russian chokepoint is an example of the ever-deepening close relations between both superpowers. Including Russia’s NSR as part of their Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), even if only rhetorically, highlights the importance of connectivity corridors between the great powers and also emphasizes their non-Western nature. For here the United States is not relevant; payment is published in rubles, accepted in renminbi, and US dollars are uninvolved. It is yet another step in the steady dedollarization of the global economy; not by damaging the US Dollar, but by rendering it irrelevant. The route is not anti-Western, as Rosneft head Igor Sechin emphasized in Saint Petersburg; it is open to all customers, irrespective of alliance. South Korea noticed the advantages as well as everyone else, and purchased a ship in order to take advantage of it. South Korea’s first voyage on the NSR, along the Ice Silk Road, is with the newly renamed PanStar Acro; Rosatom granted its permit and it is due to depart Busan, South Korea, in late August, for several ports of call in northern Europe before heading back home.

China’s massive Belt and Road Initiative, throughout its various incarnations, is fundamentally a project of connectivity, making Chinese goods, services, and influence present and compelling in all four corners of the world. As the multipolar era solidifies, so do relations between the poles, and China and Russia continue to strengthen their ties. Just as Russia used the Power of Siberia pipelines and turned to China as a purchaser of its energy after western sanctions and weapons eliminated the transit (via NordStream) or purchase of Russian energy, China is turning to Russia to make use of the NSR to counter the instability in transiting the chokepoints of west Asia. And only Russia can provide what China needs: reliable transport to maintain and expand their flow of commerce from mainland China to the European market. Without the customers, the route loses its purpose; without the route, the commerce is threatened by the geopolitical winds of the day, the chokepoint politics, and underwriting war-risk price shocks. Together, much as the Chinese name for the Russian route implies, the NSR is a synergistic example of multipolar partnership.

This partnership also defangs some of the economic weapons the West has wielded against Russia, specifically sanctions. Russia’s flagship Arctic energy project is the “Arctic LNG 2,” a massive liquid natural gas facility designed to cool and deliver twenty million tons of LNG onto tankers on the Ob Bay, in northwestern Siberia. Western sanctions caused delivery to halt completely for nearly two years. However, since August 2025, shipments have resumed, forty-one of them, all to the same port of Beihai in southern China. A second port, specifically designed for the NSR, is being finalized in the more northern city of Longkou, and is due to open this October. It only makes economic sense because of the NSR. The sanctions on Arctic LNG 2 have not gone away; Russian and Chinese cooperation along the NSR has rendered them irrelevant. Nothing about this route requires a US Dollar; it is conducted in either yuan (renminbi) or rubles and is cleared entirely through non-Western systems. Merely five years ago, in 2021, only one-quarter of Russian-Chinese trade was conducted in local currency; now it is approximately 99%. Western attempts to isolate Russia have backfired: two of the great poles in the multipolar world continue to gravitate towards one another, and the NSR, from its usage to its payment architecture, to its unofficial Chinese “Ice Silk Road” naming, all exemplify what may be perhaps the most powerful burgeoning partnership on the planet.

IV. Greenland

One of the most misunderstood aspects of US President Trump’s second term is his serious claim that Greenland should be controlled by, if not part of, the United States rather than remain part of Denmark (let alone pursue independence). The United States has expressed interest in Greenland for over 150 years, with attempts to purchase it in both 1867 and 1946. Trump himself has repeatedly brought up the topic since 2018. His justification, however, has changed over the years, evolving from a desire for more real estate, to access to critical minerals, to the Chinese and Russian use of the NSR. At the July 2026 NATO summit in Ankara, Türkiye, he stated that Greenland was “surrounded by Chinese and Russian ships,” implying a clear threat to US sovereignty if not safety.

The United States is already an Arctic State, as Pompeo pointed out, and the closest distance between the United States and Russia is in the Arctic, between the islands of Big and Little Diomede, separated by the International Date Line and less than four kilometers of ocean. They are in the middle of the Bering Strait, where the gap between Alaska and Asian Russia eventually widens to 82 kilometers. The NSR passes through the Bering Strait, uncontestable by any nation, and continues to Europe, using the North Sea, nowhere nearing Greenland at any point. So why is President Trump interested in Greenland and how does this involve the NSR?

The Northern Sea Route runs some 5,600 km from the Kara Strait to the Bering Strait, along a single country’s coast.

There are three reasons. First, the standard explanation for America’s interest has been to secure access to critically important strategic rare earth minerals, upon which the United States’ military arsenal depends, and its current territory does not sufficiently provide. Greenland has been proven to hold at least the eighth-largest reserves in the world, specifically of neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, terbium, plus yttrium and gadolinium. These are the elements required for the permanent magnets found in electric vehicle motors, wind turbine generators, guided missiles, jet engines and more. Greenland law strictly limits or prohibits their extraction; American jurisdiction would not. The United States is serious about these minerals, but its actions are the topic of a separate analysis.

The second reason is Greenland’s strategic location. One end of the “GIUK Gap,” the Greenland, Iceland, and United Kingdom dominated neighborhood where Russian submarines and warships enter and exit the North Atlantic, Greenland hosts part of the archipelago of United States military bases scattered across the world. One of the most important is the Pituffik radar installation, trained on the pole watching for missiles. This interest, too, will not dissipate.

The third is an Arctic passage, although it is not the Ice Silk Road. Climate scientists theorize that in coming years, should patterns continue, ice floes in the far north will shift and the retreating ice would open a passage between Svalbard in Norway to Greenland. Should this be the case, Greenland would be at one end of yet another Arctic maritime chokepoint corridor, completely avoiding the NSR. But this is a claim on an unproven theory which may take decades to come to fruition, if it ever does. Meanwhile, no American fleet of nuclear-powered icebreakers is even under consideration. It is significantly easier and faster to make a claim on a weaker ally’s territory than it is to usher an appropriate fleet into reality. One fits easily within an election cycle; projections for the other have never been made public, if they exist at all.

This is the same approach, for many of the same reasons, that President Trump has applied to Canada. There too, the Arctic coastline provides sovereign access to the passageway across the top of the world. What it does not do is provide nearly a century of development, expertise, a permitting regime, and a unique fleet able to break and clear three meters of solid sea ice with an escort of commercial container ships trailing in their wake. Reaching for Greenland and Canada is the wrong response to the Northern Sea Route, as the route is not an accident of geography easily replicated. It is the combination of geography, technology, initiative, and history, all of which is Russian.

V. The Precedent

The NSR, the Ice Silk Road, has launched, and its first scheduled and timetabled commercial season is underway. It is already gaining new nicknames, such as “The Arctic Express.” It is in the beta-testing stage, small by design, as kinks are worked out, problems are uncovered and resolved, systems fine-tuned. Its inaugural season could not have been timed better, with geopolitical developments hindering or preventing passage through Suez, Hormuz, the Bab el-Mandeb, all making even more timely and compelling the shortened passage time, and the single owner, permitter, operator, insurer. In the same season that the world witnessed Tehran close a strait and other nations contemplate monetizing, and therefore complicating, their own, Russia is the only nation which opened one. Russia’s Arctic route exists, it works, and with the arrival in the coming years of newer more powerful icebreakers, it will be functioning year-round, on schedule. Faster than the alternatives, and free from war risk premium pricing, the NSR’s commercial draw is already attracting attention and pulling allies such as South Korea gently away from the United States’ orbit and further into Russia’s. Russia has made it clear that unlike the Strait of Hormuz or the Bab el-Mandeb, this passage is open to one and all, irrespective of country of origin or political alignment… at least, for now.

Joseph Busby is the Founder and Director of Reality-Based Analysis Group (RBAG), an independent geopolitical analysis firm founded in Vienna in 2017 and affiliated with the Association for the Promotion of International Development and Stability (APIDS, apids.at).

Reality-Based Analysis Group advises governments, sovereign wealth funds, and development finance institutions, as well as commercial firms operating in complex environments, from extractives and commodities to travel operators and technology supply chains. The firm accepts a limited number of retainer clients each year. To commission analysis, request a conversation at rbag.at/contact or email info@rbag.at Subscribe at rbag.at.

© 2026 Joseph Busby / Reality-Based Analysis Group. Licensed under CC BY-ND 4.0. You may reproduce this work in full with attribution to Reality-Based Analysis Group and a link to rbag.at. Translation into any language is expressly permitted, provided the translation is complete and unaltered in substance, carries the same attribution and link, and identifies the translator. All enquiries to josephbusby@rbag.at.

I. The Lies that Frame the Narrative

For the past few years you have been asked to believe a narrative about nuclear nonproliferation which is not true. That’s not to say that those spreading the lies are aware that they are not speaking the truth; often they are simply repeating, or reporting, what they have been told, what they believe to be true. The most common claim is that Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in exchange for territorial security guarantees and after February 2022 the West is now obligated to defend “Ukrainian” territory. The second claim is that South Africa gave up its nuclear weapons and weapons program voluntarily in order to be welcomed back into collegial relations with the rest of the world. Neither story is true. Both are designed to reinforce the importance of the Western security umbrella, but from different angles.

Since the outbreak of open hostilities between Russia and Ukraine in February 2022, a mythical take on the 1994 Budapest Memorandum has been used by Ukraine and its supporters to demand military and other support. At the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, approximately 1,900 strategic nuclear warheads were located in what had suddenly become sovereign Ukrainian territory. The Budapest Memorandum, signed by the Russian Federation, Ukraine, the United States, and the United Kingdom, arranged for the return of those warheads in exchange for political assurances regarding Ukraine’s territorial integrity. The Memorandum is not and never was a binding treaty and at most it demanded political “assurances” (and in the Russian and Ukrainian version “guarantees”), not arms and armies. More critical, however, is the fact that the warheads were not Ukrainian and were never under Ukrainian command and control. Despite robust efforts to gain access to the launch codes and other authorities which would allow for use of the weapons, the Ukrainians never succeeded and the warheads were unusable. The weapons were Soviet and the launch authority and all of its complexities lay in the Russian Federation. While some scholars have argued that it may have been feasible for Ukraine to eventually hack into the system, the reality is that they tried and failed and then made a deal. Only after Ukrainian failure did they accept the Budapest Memorandum, returning to Russia what was never Ukrainian. A state does not exchange a functioning deterrent for a non-binding agreement, but it will give up custody of someone else’s weapons for one. Returning a weapon you cannot use is not the myth of sacrifice Ukraine and its supporters present. Thus, the Budapest Memorandum proves a different story: political assurances from great powers are nonbinding. Ukraine’s borders continue to shrink and there is nothing assured or guaranteed by the West regarding their return to pre-war boundaries.

The false version of the story, however, works very well for its purposes. For Ukraine it converts its sacrifice, the return of the nuclear weapons, into a debt owed to it by the West. After all, if Ukraine voluntarily gave up its weapons of mass destruction based on a promise that it would be protected from invasion, and then Russia broke the promise by invading, the West must follow through with support, both military and financial. For advocates of Ukrainian membership in NATO, the argument is extended further: if the obligations of the Budapest Memorandum can be ignored, then Ukraine must be admitted into NATO by treaty so that Article 5 can apply and make legal and official what the Memorandum failed to do. For those who advocate aggression against Russia, the story makes Western military and financial assistance in Ukraine’s fight a moral obligation and a debt to be repaid.

However, as Ukraine never controlled the weapons at all, the Budapest Memorandum was never a trade, it was a Russian promise of forbearance and a Western promise of assurance, both broken decades later. The false story is a simplistic tale which attempts to use the Budapest Memorandum to make a moral argument in lieu of NATO’s Article 5 requirement to defend a partner. Given that Ukraine is not a member of NATO, Russia did not need to fear a NATO response. The lie about Ukrainian nonproliferation is designed as an end-around in order to make a Western military response a moral requirement.

South African unilateral nuclear disarmament is often presented as a “feel good story” in which a rogue state saw reason, ended its program, along with its apartheid governance, and was welcomed into the community of nations. The timing and trajectory are correct, but the reasons behind the decision show a different moral to the story. As South African whites-only rule was drawing to a close in 1989, President F.W. de Klerk ordered the dismantling of its nuclear program, which at that time consisted of six completed nuclear weapons with a seventh under construction. In February 1990, the ban against the African National Congress (ANC) was lifted. The weapons and program were gone by 1991, although the official announcement of this was not public until March 1993, during negotiations regarding the official transfer of power to the ANC.

The official story was that the weapons were no longer needed given the end of the Cold War, the withdrawal of Cuban forces from Angola, and a long-delayed peace settlement ending South Africa’s conflict in Namibia. All of those details are true; however, the decision to disarm was not from external persuasion or events, it was from the uniquely South African transition from the apartheid era to majority black rule. The Afrikaner government never intended to hand a functioning nuclear arsenal to its former adversaries; they disarmed for the same racist reasons which underpinned their regime: they were not going to usher the ANC into the world’s smallest club, the nuclear powers.

This second misleading myth reinforces a completely different narrative. It tells the story of the only example of a nuclear armed state disarming out of conviction, the only case in which institutional norms, pressure, and inducement produced nuclear disarmament, and thus is the institutional justification for the pressures since applied to Iraq, Libya, Iran, and North Korea. The entire system of sanctions, inspections, and the carrot of admission into respectable company, are all based on the South African example. A true account of South Africa’s motives eliminates the one example and demonstrates that the track record of persuaded disarmament has no successes whatsoever.

Both anecdotes serve the greater narrative which is that a nation should accept the Western security umbrella, its nuclear shield, rather than its own. Unilateral disarmament brings a nation under that umbrella. Disarmament without that protection invites invasion. Should a nation try to create its own nuclear deterrent, it will be punished, sanctioned, and even attacked, as demonstrated in the public justification for the US and Israeli attacks on Iran in 2025 and 2026.

Once both anecdotes are correctly interpreted a very different message is revealed: the sole example of a state surrendering functioning nuclear weapons under its control was when the ruling regime would lose control of them anyway. Critically, no state on Earth is in this position. There is no government for which abandonment of a functioning nuclear deterrent is preferable to the “guarantees” and “assurances” of someone else’s security umbrella.

II. An Eroding Deterrence

Credible nuclear deterrence is often thought to be ironclad (the example of North Korea springs immediately to mind), and from the early days of the Cold War, no state with nuclear weapons was invaded and none were overthrown. Deterrence worked. That is, until the end of 2022. In December 2022 the conflict in Ukraine took a significant and unprecedented escalation with a strike against the Engels strategic bomber base, deep inside Russia. This is one third of Russia’s “nuclear triad”: the air, land, and sea-based strategic nuclear deterrent. It would prove to be anything but an isolated incident.

It was followed by the May 2024 attacks on Russian over-the-horizon radar installations at Armavir and Orsk. These are critical components of Russia’s early warning system designed to provide Moscow early warning of incoming American (or other) missile launches and to provide Russian leadership time to consider the launching of a counterstrike. Elimination of those installations reduces the time available to assess the situation and increases the likelihood of a false-positive and thus a mistaken second-strike. These radars are not used in any way in the Ukraine war. Blinding them was a massive escalation and risk, for Moscow had published in 2020 the conditions in which a nuclear retaliation would be justified, and destroying these radars was among them. Then came Operation Spiderweb, the audacious 1 June 2025 attack on multiple Russian airfields across the country. Ukraine publicly took credit for the operation in which specially modified trucks simultaneously released hordes of drones which targeted and destroyed a number of Tu-95 strategic bombers. While the degree of success is hotly debated, it is indisputable that Ukraine, with clear Western assistance, carried out an attack against Russia’s nuclear bombers, taking advantage of Russian compliance with their New START treaty obligations to house them in open air. Ten months earlier, Ukrainian forces, with significant assistance from their Western military sponsors, invaded sovereign Russian territory in Kursk, an action unthinkable during the Cold War. None of these attacks touched Russia’s land-based or submarine-based nuclear capabilities and Russia’s second-strike capabilities were barely impacted. In none of these examples was Ukraine or its partners deterred by Russian possession of the world’s greatest nuclear arsenal. Why not?

The answer is uncomfortable and it carries the implication that nuclear weapons are more likely to be used than not. Russian deterrence failed, and these attacks have led to escalation, which many have argued was precisely the objective. Every attack above, as well as many more, was met with a firm and at times overwhelming conventional response, including new and innovative weapons systems such as the jet-powered Geran-4 drones (based on the original Iranian Shaheds) and the still somewhat mysterious Oreshnik. However, possession of the world’s greatest nuclear arsenal did not prevent these attacks and did not produce a nuclear response. This leads to the inescapable conclusion that a nuclear deterrent deters regime change operations but nothing more, and even here deterrence has failed. Strategic weapons have become too powerful and mutually assured destruction has set the stakes too high, thus if everyone knows that a country is unlikely to end life as we know it, the weapons fail to deter anything but the end of the world. Unless, of course, smaller, tactical nuclear weapons are brought into the equation and normalized for use. Which is exactly what is happening now.

III. A New Threshold

Moscow was the first to publicly address the problem that if strategic nuclear weapons deter only attempts to destroy the state, lower levels of deterrence required the threat of a weapon its adversaries not only feared, but feared would be used. The first step was to officially lower the threshold required for a nuclear response, published in November 2024. This was accompanied by a greater dispersal of nuclear weapons, including across Belarus, which had begun the year before. November 2024 also featured the operational debut of the new and unique Oreshnik weapon, fired first into the city of Dnipro (also known as Dnepr), demonstrating its extraordinary kinetic power even when used without any warhead at all. Considered unstoppable, the Oreshnik vividly demonstrated Russia’s ability to deliver a nuclear warhead which adversaries could not interdict.

States rarely move swiftly and the change was a long time coming. Publicly, it originated with Dr. Sergei Karaganov, professor and honorary chairman of Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defence Policy, and his June 2023 article “A Difficult but Necessary Decision.” In this Karaganov explained that the existential fear of nuclear weapons had dissipated since the end of the Cold War and that the decades following the dissolution of the Soviet Union had resulted in a steady strategic carelessness which, to Karaganov, proved that nuclear weapons were no longer deterring the behavior they were designed to deter. His reasoning was compelling but his conclusion was swiftly rejected, with President Putin publicly distancing himself, and thus the State, from Karaganov’s suggestion: in order to restore deterrence, Russia should lower its threshold for nuclear weapons usage and demonstrate clear willingness to use tactical nuclear weapons against European and NATO targets. The distance between President Putin’s 2023 public stance and Russia’s current policy has been shrinking steadily ever since Karaganov’s paper, in large part due to the abovementioned steady escalation of Ukrainian/NATO strikes against Russian territory and strategic targets.

In early August 2026, the United States moved publicly in the same direction. Remorselessly coinciding with the 81^st anniversary of the US atomic attack on civilian Hiroshima, Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s “Under Secretary of War for Policy,” revealed a new potential strategy for nuclear weapons, shifting the emphasis to shorter-range, regional use rather than large-scale strategic launches. While refraining from using the word “tactical,” the logic was explained that deterrence required an adversary to believe that nuclear weapons could and would be used, which is not the case with the larger “strategic” arsenal and doctrine. Basically, if a country’s use of nuclear weapons ensures the destruction of that country’s cities, an adversary knows that they will not be used for anything other than a truly existential threat. Thus, strategic nuclear weapons (those which destroy a city) are not a deterrent in regional conflicts, however serious. Lower-yield weapons (tactical weapons) which can obliterate an airport, a military base, or a neighborhood, on the other hand, are very easy for an adversary to envisage being used. As such, tactical nuclear weapons are a threat an enemy can believe in and thus wish to avoid. Hence, their possible use renews the nuclear deterrent. It also makes their usage much more likely, irrespective of the human cost or the Law of War. Thirty years ago, in 1996, the International Court of Justice found that the threat or use of nuclear weapons was contrary to the Law of War, with one possible exception on which it declined to rule: the case of extreme self-defense in which “the very survival of a State would be at stake.” Tactical nuclear weapons, normalized for regional conflict, obviate this legal finding and undo at a stroke the legal limitations put in place since the Second World War.

China, the other nuclear-armed superpower, responded immediately, pointing out the obvious risk in both countries’ policy shifts. Lowering the yield of nuclear weapons and normalizing their use significantly lowers the threshold for their usage. Chinese commentators warned that there is no precedent for a nuclear exchange ending without further escalation and reminded the United States specifically that any use of nuclear weapons, however small, would trigger “catastrophic consequences.” They noted that lowering the nuclear threshold and normalizing the use of smaller yield nuclear weapons would “fuel a new arms race” and “undermine global nuclear stability, increase the risk of global nuclear conflict and threaten world peace and security.” Unfortunately, given the failure of the original nuclear deterrent, these Chinese warnings are better understood as predictions and a clear glimpse of what is to come. After all, it must always be understood that, in the West at least, decisions such as these come with a price tag and a profit margin, and a shift in doctrine emphasizing a new type of nuclear weapon is a tantalizing prospect for those whose business model is war.

IV. The Double Standard

The third pillar upon which the Western nonproliferation myth is perched is the double standard. Here too the goal is coerced acceptance of the Western nuclear security umbrella. Vividly shown in the headlines, in the same month of July 2026, US President Trump simultaneously declared that Iran can “never” have a nuclear weapon yet offered the pathway for one to Saudi Arabia. Iran agreed in 2015 to the “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action” (JCPOA), capped enrichment at 3.67 percent, reduced its stockpile of low-enriched uranium by 97 percent, dismantled two-thirds of its installed centrifuges, rendered the Fordow facility incapable of enriching uranium and the Arak reactor incapable of producing weapons-grade plutonium, and submitted to continuous IAEA monitoring. No state has ever agreed to such significant concessions and Iran remained in compliance with all of them until the same President Trump unilaterally withdrew from the agreement in 2018. He bombed the facilities eight years later in the conflict both nations are embroiled in now.

Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1988 but never renounced enrichment or reprocessing and resisted inspections entirely until 2024. Yet, on 22 July 2026, the United States and Saudi Arabia signed the “123 Agreement” specifically authorizing the transfer of nuclear material from the United States to Saudi Arabia. The previous conditions were dropped, and “inspections” are now being arranged by the two states themselves. Here we see that the state which accepted the most stringent and intrusive inspections regime in history was punished and bombed; the state which resisted for decades is being sold the component parts of a nuclear program.

And then there is Israel where the double standard ceases to be a matter of principle and becomes a matter of policy. Regarding Iranian possession of nuclear weapons, the United States hubristically declares “never!” whereas regarding Israeli possession, it squeaks “no comment.” Officials of the United States government routinely avoid comment or confirmation of Israel’s very tangible and well-known arsenal of approximately ninety nuclear warheads. Israel has never signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, accepted inspections or safeguards, or even acknowledged the existence of a nuclear weapons program, let alone the weapons. Since the 1969 “understanding” reached between US President Nixon and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, the United States stopped commenting.

This is the system. India and Pakistan built their nuclear weapons programs outside the NPT, and once armed, they were embraced. Israel built theirs and is protected. Saudi Arabia houses US bases, provides a foothold and profit-center, and it is welcomed into the club. Iran complied with the JCPOA and was declared a pariah state, vilified, and was bombed. With the Saudi example, other US allies are requesting the same provisions, South Korea foremost among them, but with the UAE, Turkey, and Egypt not far behind.

Thus, here too, the double standard has made nuclear weapons use more likely than before, as “friends” of the United States are being “allowed” the pathway to a nuclear program; indeed, they are being sold it. This, coupled with the visible example of American attempts to “punish” Iran after its compliance, inevitably leads to more proliferation, not less, and more weapons programs, more weapons, and more opportunities to use them.

V. Lessons Learned

Throughout all of this, the nations of the world watched, took note, and learned the pattern. In 2003, Libya surrendered its nascent nuclear program, which consisted mainly of centrifuges purchased from the A.Q. Khan network, and rather than ensuring support for his rule, Muammar Gaddafi was famously and publicly murdered in 2011 after his state was destroyed; it remains ruined to this day. Iraq had no nuclear program in 2003; it was invaded twice and its leader too executed on television. Iran signed the NPT, complied with the JCPOA, and has been attacked twice. North Korea, armed to the teeth, remains intact, its leadership unchallenged.

While these are similar patterns, they are not the same lesson. Libya in particular provides two very different takeaways to different audiences. The most obvious is the same as Ukraine’s Budapest Memorandum: paper assurances and guarantees are not defense alliances and are ignored at will for political convenience. The operation which ultimately deposed Gaddafi, however, supplies perhaps the greater and more dangerous one. That operation, ostensibly designed to protect civilians, was authorized by United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973, and passed in March 2011 only due to abstentions by China and Russia. Russia’s abstention became the defining moment in then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s political career, initially portraying him as weak. However, far from damaging his career, Medvedev learned his lesson too, that the West was not to be trusted, and has transformed himself into the most hardened and steadfast hawk in President Putin’s inner circle. A brilliant man, bad cop to Putin’s good, this implacable opponent of the Western unipolar order was in large part made into who he now is due to the perfidy of Western exploitation of the international system.

Thus, the nations of the world note that the systems are applied unevenly, double standards are embraced without comment, and the mechanisms of power are used and abused according to the political desires of those with the nuclear arsenals to get their way. Smaller nations see the power, protection, and impunity of Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea; the price paid by Libya and Iran; the deals made by Saudi Arabia and possibly South Korea; they see the same thing Medvedev saw, and they draw their own conclusions.

VI. The Wild Card

The doctrinal shifts, too, are not happening in a vacuum. They are happening while the legal architecture of nonproliferation and nuclear limits is being systematically dismantled. The New START treaty, the reason those Russian nuclear bombers were parked in open air and vulnerable to Ukrainian attack, expired on 5 February 2026. Russia unilaterally offered to abide by it for another year; after an initially positive informal response from President Trump, the agreement was allowed to quietly lapse with no action taken. There is no successor agreement currently under negotiation and for the first time in over a half century there is no agreed-upon limit or verification mechanism for any superpower’s most deadly weapons. Three months after the expiry of the New START treaty, in May 2026, the Eleventh Review Conference of the Non-Proliferation Treaty ended without agreement. The delegates were irreconcilably divided over the bombing of Iran.

Further, the smaller yield tactical weapons were never covered by New START to begin with. These have never been capped, never been counted, never been declared or inspected. Thus, the very category which now is publicly under consideration by both the United States and Russia for regional deployment and use, the one whose deterrent appeal is that it can and will be used, is a complete wild card. The nuclear weapons now being normalized for use have never been internationally controlled at all and the current political trajectory implies that they will not be.

VII. The Danger Zone

All of this has made the world a much more dangerous place. Nuclear threats have become almost routine since Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky threatened to obtain nuclear weapons, mere days before, and possibly precipitating, Russia’s invasion of his country. Few believe that strategic nuclear weapons will be used in that conflict, regardless of provocation, which illustrates Karaganov’s dilemma and Colby’s suggestion perhaps better than anything else. The best example came in December 2025, when a swarm of 91 Ukrainian drones targeted President Putin’s residence at Dolgiye Borody on Lake Valdai, all of which were intercepted. Russia interpreted the attack as an attempted assassination, the regime decapitation the West has been shown to favor in Venezuela and Iran, and it qualified for the most radical of responses. Yet Russia’s response was not reciprocal, not nuclear, and left all of Ukraine’s leadership alive and well. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov condemned the attack, Russian negotiators revised and hardened their positions, and conventional retaliation was dialed up a degree. No one feared a nuclear response and Russia’s vast nuclear deterrent did not deter the assassination attempt, if indeed that is what Ukraine attempted.

In the aftermath of the attack, rather than increase the deterrent, Russia hardened the target, blurring it on satellite imagery, covering parts of it with anti-drone netting, peppering it with Pantsir air-defense system towers. That is the anticipation of an attack and the preparation for defense, not deterrence.

It is the doctrinal shift, taking place simultaneously in both Russia and the United States, which is the new deterrence. It is the opening of the nuclear marketplace to Saudi Arabia which signals that nuclear programs are available for the right partners at the right price. It is the legal opening in which tactical low-yield nuclear weapons are unbounded and unrestricted. It is the exposure of the double standard and the shattering of the Western security umbrella revealed by the Iranian destruction of the US military bases throughout the Persian Gulf. This is the reality of nuclear proliferation at the dawn of the multipolar era. Expect more members of the nuclear club and soon, first in the Middle East and then swiftly elsewhere. Do not be surprised when normalized tactical nuclear weapons are used on the battlefield, perhaps as Karaganov’s warning, perhaps in lieu of US ground troops in Iran. And remember, the use of any weapon of war will be justified by those who use it or profit from it; tactical nuclear weapons will be no different.

Joseph Busby is the Founder and Director of Reality-Based Analysis Group (RBAG), an independent geopolitical analysis firm based in Vienna, Austria. RBAG is affiliated with the Association for the Promotion of International Development and Stability (APIDS, apids.at). Subscribe at rbag.at.

© 2026 Joseph Busby / Reality-Based Analysis Group. Licensed under CC BY-ND 4.0. You may reproduce this work in full with attribution to Reality-Based Analysis Group and a link to rbag.at. Translation into any language is expressly permitted, provided the translation is complete and unaltered in substance, carries the same attribution and link, and identifies the translator. Enquiries to josephbusby@rbag.at.

The six maritime chokepoints examined in this analysis.

All conflicts are temporary; almost all government bureaucracies are permanent. Whenever the dust settles in the conflict between the United States, Israel and Iran, there will be no return to the status quo ante of free passage through the Strait of Hormuz. On 5 May 2026 the Islamic Republic of Iran announced the creation of the Persian Gulf Strait Authority (PGSA), a new government organization with its own staffing, logo, contact and payment protocols and permit system for ships desiring to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. The PGSA is a bureaucracy, not a military organization, and once established, government bureaucracies almost always endure. This shift from temporary physical kinetic coercion and threats of “opening” or “closing” the Straits to a bureaucratic administration, not unlike a canal, is one of the most consequential developments in international maritime law since the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) in 1982.

Iran is a signatory to UNCLOS which ostensibly guarantees the right of transit passage through international straits to all nations. Yet the Islamic Republic has established the PGSA and thereby claimed permanent sovereign administrative authority over the Strait. Whether the Strait of Hormuz qualifies as such under Article 38, given that its narrowest point falls entirely and undisputedly within Iranian and Omani territorial waters, is precisely the legal question the PGSA has placed on the international agenda. The PGSA is a physical and obvious announcement of a new reality in international maritime law and is one of the most vivid rebuttals of the so-called “unipolar moment” as the question of who administers one of the most important energy corridors in the world has now been answered by Iran.

This is not an isolated case. Rather it is the most dramatic expression of the structural reorganization occurring simultaneously across six of the world’s most critical maritime chokepoints: the Black Sea, Hormuz, Malacca, Bab el-Mandeb, and the Suez and Panama Canals. In each situation the pattern is familiar, though not identical: an actor, often operating outside the Western-established “rules-based order,” has identified and is exploiting specific vulnerabilities in the legal and military architecture originally designed to guarantee freedom of navigation. The result is neither chaos nor piracy but rather the emergence of a new architecture of maritime governance, one that is multipolar, contested, and permanent. Geography is being repriced in a multitude of ways and the rules are being rewritten by those who control the terrain in question, and on their terms. The world prior to the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz no longer exists and the reality of multipolarity is being swiftly and irreversibly monetized.

I. THE BLACK SEA: WHERE THE PRECEDENT WAS SET

The Strait of Hormuz crisis is not the first major challenge to UNCLOS in the post-unipolar era. The precedent was set and the template was created elsewhere, earlier, and the lessons, especially that the enforcement mechanisms of the “rules-based international order” were found lacking, were carefully observed by not only the Islamic Republic of Iran, but by many others.

Russia’s disruption of Black Sea grain shipping in 2022 was the first large-scale demonstration in the modern era that a power could weaponize chokepoint leverage as a deliberate geopolitical instrument. The “grain corridor” negotiated in the Black Sea Grain Initiative (BSGI) under Turkish and United Nations mediation in July 2022, was the international community’s attempt to contain that leverage and reverse Russia’s unilateral renegotiation of the rules on the ground. However, the collapse of the BSGI in July 2023 when Russia withdrew from the arrangement citing the West’s failure to honor commitments on Russian agricultural exports (as well as abuse of the corridor by Ukrainian and allied forces for military purposes) demonstrated that the response of the international community was structurally inadequate. The lack of effective enforcement mechanisms to counter chokepoint coercion proved that UNCLOS provisions alone were insufficient when the coercing power was willing to absorb the associated reputational costs. The geography of the Black Sea, and Russia’s tactical and strategic needs with respect to the conflict in Ukraine, coupled with their ability to control the territory, took clear and demonstrable preference to adherence to UNCLOS agreements of a prior era.

The Black Sea grain corridor, 2022–2023.

This episode established three critical precedents which matter for everything which has followed. First, that a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and one of the world’s superpowers could effectively weaponize a maritime corridor against civilian food supply chains and face no enforceable consequences, legal or otherwise. Second, that the humanitarian cost of chokepoint disruption fell disproportionately on parties with no stake or involvement in the underlying conflict. In this case, African and Middle Eastern food-importing nations bore the brunt of the cost of a maritime action in a European war. Third, the institution created to manage the disruption, the BSGI, did not resolve the underlying question of governance and control. That question remains today, more vivid than ever as traffic in Ukraine’s Black Sea corridor ended altogether in July 2026, for the first time since 2023.

Russia’s actions in the Black Sea were described by Europe and the United States as illegal “aggression” against the rules-based order and were accompanied with intentionally inflammatory predictions of imminent famine and death across Africa and Asia, propaganda designed to shame Russia into changing its policy. Others blamed the West and its inability to enforce compliance with the BSGI, or to prevent its abuse for military purposes, for the food security crisis which was thrust upon sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The reality was more complex than this framing, as Russia obviated the charges by simultaneously shipping Russian grain directly to African nations either for free or at preferential rates, creating new bilateral agreements bypassing the BSGI and the West entirely. This strategic positioning via humanitarian relief effectively established Russia as a direct food security partner to precisely the countries the West had failed to protect. Yet while famine did not ensue, increased costs for food imports, urea, and fertilizer supply chains all cascaded through various agricultural economies that had no voice either in the conflict which precipitated the crisis or in the BSGI which failed to resolve the issue. It is the neutral countries, those who bear the brunt of the costs of disruptions and their adjustments to structural changes, which represent the multipolar aspect of these crises. An adversarial challenge to the “unipolar rules-based order” by Russia does not in itself change the status quo; the creation of new systems and relationships designed for a multipolar reality does.

Russia’s precedent in the Black Sea was closely watched in Tehran and the absorbed lessons were clear: chokepoint leverage works, legal consequences are manageable, and the international community’s responses will be varied, divided, and insufficient to force a reversal. What Iran has done in the Strait of Hormuz is apply those lessons in a chokepoint of far greater global consequence. Unlike Russia in the Black Sea however, Iran has imposed its own solution by creating the PGSA which has transformed the situation from one of military strategy to one of administrative governance. The Black Sea precedent and Strait of Hormuz development are not separate stories; they are the first two examples of the same story reaching across the world, the story of a multipolar restructuring of maritime commerce and transportation corridors.

II. THE PGSA: ADMINISTRATION AS SOVEREIGNTY

The shift from coercion to administration

On 28 February 2026, immediately after the United States and Israel launched a large-scale missile assault on their country, Iran played its most obvious and valuable card by seizing military control of the Strait of Hormuz. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) began naval operations in the Strait and the greater Persian Gulf itself, laying mines, attacking and boarding vessels and establishing full physical control of passage of any and all ships through the Strait of Hormuz. This was military coercion designed to influence the outcome of the conflict. Unambiguously a violation of UNCLOS, it was expensive to sustain and in principle reversible the moment military needs no longer required it to be maintained. The PGSA represents something categorically different. The Authority formalizes and institutionalizes what had initially been an informal vetting arrangement concluded through IRGC-controlled shipping lanes along the Strait’s northern waters. The rules and protocols for passage through the Strait were opaque, and war risk insurance premiums spiked to levels that rendered most voyages commercially unviable regardless of whether physical passage was technically permitted or not. The PGSA transforms passage through the Strait into a routinized bureaucratic procedure, complete with specific rules, prices, accepted currencies, and deliberately chosen and controlled routing, all with an explicit claim to permanent legal authority. Iran is no longer threatening to close the Strait at all; it is declaring that the Strait is open for business, on Iran’s terms and conditions. These protocols are the architecture of sovereignty, and sovereignty, once claimed and operationalized, is far harder to reverse than military coercion.

The Strait of Hormuz. The entire strait falls within Iranian and Omani territorial waters.

The sequence of events is significant. On Persian Gulf Day, 30 April, Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, in his first official written statement, announced the “new management” of the Strait of Hormuz and declared Iran “will be the vanguard of the new regional and global order.” On the following day, the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) issued a sanctions advisory warning that payments to Iran for passage exposed both US and non-US persons to sanctions risk regardless of payment method. The PGSA launched formally four days later, on 5 May, accompanied by an IRGC announcement defining a maritime control area extending west and east of the Strait into the Gulf of Oman, less than a week before US and Iranian negotiators met in Oman for a fourth round of high-level talks. Then, on 12 May, the IRGC again redefined the geographic boundaries of its control of the Strait, declaring its sovereign control over a nearly ten-fold increase in claimed jurisdiction. The IRGC symbolically described the territory as a “crescent” stretching from Jask in the east to Siri Island in the west, a span of approximately 340 kilometers, and from Qeshm Island in the north to just east of Fujairah on the United Arab Emirates’ Gulf of Oman coast, encompassing not merely the Strait but its approaches from the open ocean. The strategic logic was deliberate: Fujairah port has served as the UAE’s principal mechanism for bypassing Hormuz entirely, connected to Abu Dhabi by the Habshan-Fujairah pipeline which carries approximately 1.5 million barrels per day of Abu Dhabi crude directly to Gulf of Oman export terminals. By extending its claimed jurisdiction to Fujairah, Iran has served notice that the UAE’s bypass infrastructure is not beyond its reach and that the geography of circumvention is as contested as the Strait itself. Iran is not merely administering a waterway, it is redrawing the map. Tehran did not build this institution despite the negotiations. It built it around them. The PGSA is the administrative architecture which Iran intends negotiators to inherit as it negotiates the borders of its administration rather than the fact of its administration.

The maritime control zone declared by Iran’s PGSA, spanning the full width of the strait between the Iranian and UAE coasts.

The legal gap Iran is exploiting

While UNCLOS Article 38 explicitly allows the unimpeded “right of transit passage” through straits including the Strait of Hormuz, it does not clarify who controls, guarantees, or administers that passage. This silence was intentional and was the price the United States extracted in 1982 for participation in the conference drafting UNCLOS III; the United States’ concern was to preserve the uncontested ability of its nuclear-armed submarines to transit international straits while submerged. In exchange for the Article 38 “right of transit passage” the United States accepted the extension of territorial seas from 3 to 12 nautical miles, a change which brought parts of the Strait of Hormuz entirely into Iranian and Omani territorial waters, as the Strait at its narrowest is a mere 21 nautical miles wide. The Soviet Union did not object to this arrangement as the framework also served their interests, which were substantively similar. Now, however, Iran’s legal team has pinpointed this silence in Article 38 and is inserting the PGSA into that void. Iran claims that the PGSA does not violate UNCLOS Article 38 at all but rather facilitates and administers passage through the Strait. Iran asserts that as the primary coastal state, it has sovereign authority to regulate passage through its adjacent waters. This claim is without clear legal precedent; it is also without clear legal refutation. This gap between what UNCLOS guarantees and what the unipolar world can enforce is the space in which PGSA currently operates. The reality of a multipolar world is what gives the PGSA the space to breathe, grow, and solidify into a potentially permanent fixture.

The compliance trap

The situation facing shipowners is a modern Catch-22 which demonstrates how completely the old order has broken down in the Strait of Hormuz. Shipowners may choose to engage with the PGSA through its official communications protocols, pay the designated fee, and obtain passage through the Strait. However, doing so will expose them to secondary sanctions from the United States because the US has designated the IRGC a “foreign terrorist organization” and the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has explicitly warned that payments to Iran for transit will expose even non-US-persons to sanctions risk regardless of payment method. Yet refusal to engage officially with the PGSA results in the vessel loitering indefinitely, stranded in the Gulf alongside approximately 1,500 others (as of May 2026). There is currently no clear option for non-penalized compliance. This compliance impossibility is not resolved by a ceasefire. It is resolved only when the question of who legally administers passage through the Strait is settled. A ceasefire may reopen the Strait to traffic but it will not restore free passage, nor will it erase Iran’s claims to sovereignty over the Strait, and it certainly will not amend Article 38 of UNCLOS.

Iran has been unambiguous about its intentions regarding the future administration of the Strait. The PGSA was created as a permanent institution, not a bargaining chip, and even if it is ultimately traded away, what it has established is that passage through the Strait now carries a price. In its formal counter-proposal submitted to Pakistani mediators, Tehran explicitly demanded international recognition of Iranian sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz as a condition of any ceasefire agreement. Iran envisages the post-war international order as recognizing this authority. The “difficult yet constructive” fourth round of US-Iran talks, on 11 May 2026, produced no breakthroughs or agreements – other than to continue to meet. On the following day the United States imposed new sanctions on Iranian nuclear research and Iran continued to operate the PGSA.

The United States is clearly deeply disturbed by the potentially “permanent” problem of Iranian sovereignty and administration of the Strait of Hormuz. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, after a meeting with the G7, described the PGSA not as a current “military problem” but as a future structural issue: “one of the immediate challenges we are going to face.” Rubio warned of “a precedent that could be repeated in multiple other places around the world.” Iran’s new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei reinforced this point in the very first public statement attributed to him in which he stated that Iranian control of the Strait “must continue to be used.” Rubio’s statements indicate that the United States is less worried about the short-term tactical conflict with Iran but rather the long-term restructuring of maritime commerce and transit corridors around a new multipolar world. It is exactly what Washington should be worried about although the Secretary of State gets the tense incorrect: the multipolar shift in chokepoint coercion is taking place in real time across the world and worrying about it in the future does not change the present trajectories. The Persian Gulf Strait Authority is not tomorrow’s problem, it’s today’s solution.

The fee revenue logic

At a reported fee of $2 million per tanker (currently payable in Iranian Rial or Chinese Yuan) the PGSA fee system would generate approximately $20 million each day from oil tankers alone, totaling approximately $600 million per month, increasing to over $800 million monthly to include Liquid Natural Gas shipments. This is analogous to Egypt’s pre-crisis Suez Canal revenues of $700-$800 million per month. Iran is attempting to generate comparable revenue from an international strait it is unilaterally declaring administrative ownership over. This economic logic is a rational response to the discovery that geography Iran has always controlled is worth significantly more than Iran had previously extracted from its use. In the decline of the unipolar era, the emergence of the PGSA is a business model for the multipolar world and represents the new era of the monetization of multipolarity.

III. PROJECT FREEDOM AND THE LIMITS OF ENFORCEMENT

The unipolar enforcement model

Compliance with the “rules-based order” often depended upon respect for the threat of the use of force by the United States or forces under its control such as NATO. During the unipolar moment this threat alone was often sufficient to coerce the course of action demanded by the United States. The short-lived “Project Freedom” operation by the United States Navy was not the first time Washington deployed naval force to keep Hormuz and its approaches open and the contrast with previous deployments is the most precise measure of how completely the enforcement model has been degraded. In 1987, as the Iran-Iraq War extended into the Persian Gulf and both sides attacked shipping linked to their adversary’s war economy, the United States launched Operation “Earnest Will”. This was the largest naval convoy operation since the Second World War and involved thirty warships escorting tankers through the Persian Gulf. The deterrence model worked and Iran ceased its attacks. Six years earlier, Libya claimed the Gulf of Sidra as sovereign territorial waters; the US Navy entered the Gulf, shot down the Libyan aircraft which challenged their passage and Libya backed down. This coercive model was so reliable that it had become part of the invisible enforcement mechanism undergirding the “rules-based order”: the knowledge of coastal States that maritime claims would be met by a threat of force by the US Navy was usually sufficient to prevent claims from even being made.

The model begins to fail

This model began to fail in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait in 2016 when Ansar Allah (the movement commonly referred to in Western media as the “Houthis”) began targeting vessels it identified as supporting the Saudi-led coalition conducting military operations against Yemen. The United States deployed three warships, including the USS Mason, which Ansar Allah promptly attacked, using Iranian-supplied Chinese C-802 anti-ship cruise missiles, three times in the period of one week, before and after US Tomahawk missile strikes against Ansar Allah radar sites on the Yemeni coast. Ansar Allah learned that the United States would not hesitate to employ force but that the force used would be insufficient to suppress their activities or capabilities to interdict maritime traffic in the Red Sea. In November 2023, Ansar Allah applied the lesson at a much greater scale in a campaign explicitly framed as economic pressure on Israel and its commercial partners in response to the Gaza conflict. Their strategic logic was clear: a non-state actor with no air force and no navy had identified the one instrument available to it that could impose meaningful costs on actors it could not otherwise reach and employed it.

Ansar Allah disrupted Red Sea shipping so comprehensively that global container shipping rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope despite the deployment of a multinational naval coalition named “Operation Prosperity Guardian” specifically designed to restore deterrence. This twenty-nation coalition launched in December 2023 and led by US naval warships successfully interdicted drones and missiles and carried out multiple strikes in Yemen and sustained their operation for months. When the Trump administration came to power, its response was military escalation, specifically “Operation Rough Rider” which launched on 15 March 2025 and superseded the Biden administration’s “Poseidon Archer” strikes (the designated offensive strike component of Prosperity Guardian, which had ended when the Gaza ceasefire came into effect on 19 January 2025). Rough Rider was a far more intensive unilateral American offensive featuring sustained airstrikes against Ansar Allah command infrastructure, weapons production and launch sites across Yemen, combined with continued naval operations in the Red Sea. In the fifty-three days of its existence it conducted more strikes than Poseidon Archer had in a full year and resulted in a demonstrable reduction in Ansar Allah’s rate of attacks. However, as the operation continued, the scope of the mission contracted from the original objective of sustaining freedom of commercial navigation to simply force protection of American vessels. The ceasefire brokered by Oman on 6 May 2025 formalized this outcome, stating only that Ansar Allah had agreed to halt attacks on US-flagged ships, completely omitting all others. When two non-US-flagged ships were later sunk by Ansar Allah in July 2025, the United States did not respond.

Regardless of Western efforts to “open” the Bab el-Mandeb strait, insurance markets had already repriced Red Sea transit risk at levels which made rerouting more economically advantageous. Prosperity Guardian defended its own ships but was unable to restore “freedom of navigation”. Those are different objectives and Prosperity Guardian ended in May 2025 without ever definitively reopening the strait. What partially restored Red Sea transit was not the military operation but a diplomatic agreement brokered by Oman, under which Ansar Allah agreed to pause attacks on non-Israeli commercial shipping in exchange for the cessation of US strikes on Yemen, a pause that Ansar Allah explicitly reserved the right to end if the Gaza ceasefire collapsed, or later, if the 2026 Iran war escalated. As of this writing, major shipping lines have not returned to the Red Sea in full; following the July 2026 outbreak of hostilities between Saudi Arabia and Ansar Allah, during which Ansar Allah has explicitly declared closed the Red Sea to Saudi shipping, the situation is more tenuous than ever. The Suez Canal’s revenue remains below pre-crisis levels. The strait that Operations Prosperity Guardian, Poseidon Archer, and Rough Rider were designed to reopen is still, by commercial measurement, not yet fully open. The lesson was available to anyone who wished to read it: a determined non-state actor with asymmetric capabilities, operating from contested territory, with a coherent political objective and Iranian material support, had effectively held a major international strait against a multinational naval coalition for eighteen months and had been moved not by force but by negotiation.

Project Freedom: the blueprint collapses

The latest attempt at replicating the unipolar coercion blueprint by force lasted significantly less than its predecessors and was paused after only 48 hours. Per US CENTCOM, “Project Freedom” launched on 4 May 2026 with over 15,000 US service members, over 100 aircraft and the guided missile destroyers USS Truxtun and USS Mason. US officials described their transit of the Strait of Hormuz as conducted under a sustained Iranian barrage of small boats, cruise missiles, and drones and reported that both destroyers came through unscathed and that between six and seven Iranian fast-attack craft were destroyed. Iranian state media, specifically Fars News Agency, reported that two missiles struck a US Navy vessel near Jask Island. The truth remains obscured by the conflicting reports as the fog of war is further thickened by opportunistic propaganda. Undisputed however is that on 4 May, Maersk’s Alliance Fairfax was the first publicly named commercial vessel to transit under US escort. Diplomatically, on this very same day when the two destroyers were transiting the Strait under Iranian fire, US forces were completing the transfer to Pakistan for onward repatriation of 22 Iranian crew members of the MV Touska, an Iranian vessel seized by the United States. Pakistan, primary diplomatic interlocutor between the US and Iran, was simultaneously receiving Iranian sailors while hosting the diplomatic channel through which both sides were still talking. The following day, a French container ship attempted to transit without PGSA clearance and was struck by Iranian forces, its crew injured, and its hull damaged. Hours later US President Trump announced a “pause” of Project Freedom, citing progress in negotiations. The operation had lasted approximately twenty-four hours of active escort operations. One commercial vessel definitively transited; approximately 1,500 remained stranded. Iran launched the PGSA the following day. “Project Freedom” did not fail because the US Navy lacked the will to fight. It failed because Iranian anti-ship missile capability, mines, and drone systems made close escort too dangerous to sustain. Despite the public description of the Operation as a convoy escort, the published record clarified that the Navy would provide information on mine-free corridors and remain “in the vicinity.” The gap between US propaganda and reality was exactly as big as Iran’s anti-ship weapons range.

Asymmetry, accommodation and the multipolar alternatives

Neither side can achieve its stated objectives through force alone, but those objectives are not symmetrical and that asymmetry matters enormously for understanding what a resolution may actually look like. The United States cannot reopen the strait without Iranian cooperation as the military cost is prohibitive and Project Freedom demonstrated that political will to risk the loss of American ships simply does not exist. Iran’s strategic position is much more resilient than Western framing indicates. Since the 1979 creation of the Islamic Republic, Tehran has demonstrated that it can absorb economic costs Western experts routinely describe as unsustainable. More importantly, Iran is not dependent upon any settlement with the United States to achieve its core objectives. Since the PGSA has become operational, Iran-approved vessels, primarily petroleum tankers bound for China and India, have continued to transit the Strait with IRGC escort; the PGSA has selectively opened the waterway for those whose cooperation it needs and kept it closed to those linked to the West. PGSA fee revenue from China and India-bound tankers already is beginning to offset other costs the conflict has imposed on Iranian trade. Iran needs some form of diplomatic resolution in the form of international recognition of its administrative sovereignty over the strait and this does not require the West at all. Iran is not attempting to open the Strait of Hormuz universally; it is building and monetizing a sovereign control mechanism in territorial waters open to its partners, closed to its adversaries, and administered by the PGSA. Bilateral deals with China, India and other members of the Global South which recognize, even implicitly, PGSA administrative authority would achieve Iran’s core objective without need for any agreement from Washington at all.

The contrast with India’s approach to the crisis is striking. The Indian Navy launched Operation “Urja Suraksha” on 23 March 2026, six weeks before Project Freedom. It operated on a fundamentally different premise: not to challenge Iranian administrative control of the Strait but to navigate within that existing reality. Indian National Security Advisor Ajit Doval conducted back-channel negotiations with Tehran, obtaining an informal agreement to enable Indian-flagged commercial ships to transit providing they had Indian naval escort and no association with the Western “coalition”. India’s government maintained publicly that no Iranian permission was specifically required under UNCLOS and that no fees had been paid: Indian vessels exited the Strait “with Iran’s approval”. The legal position and operational reality again diverged and the gap between them is where the PGSA takes center stage: the PGSA does not require formal acknowledgment or declared payment, only operational acknowledgment. The compliance trap paralyzing Western actors does not constrain those who are open to renegotiating a separate relationship with Tehran; indeed that is the model. While Project Freedom moved one commercial vessel in forty-eight hours, Urja Suraksha had already been escorting India’s energy cargo through the same waters for weeks.

The mediator in this confrontation is Pakistan, a nuclear power, Shanghai Cooperation Organization member, and a country firmly positioned within the emerging multipolar order. The United States cannot resolve its most important geopolitical confrontation of 2026 without the active involvement of a country that not only sits entirely outside its alliance system but is Beijing’s strategic partner. The era of unipolar superpower dictation of terms to resolve or manage international crises has shifted to require the participation of powers who are themselves part of the multipolar transition, with their own agendas and interests which may or may not align with those of “the West”.

The clearest illustration yet of this structural shift occurred during the 14-15 May 2026 summit meeting in Beijing between US President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping. While the White House readout stated that both leaders agreed the Strait of Hormuz “must remain open to support the free flow of energy” and that Xi “made clear China’s opposition to the militarization of the Strait and any effort to charge a toll for its use” and that Xi expressed interest in purchasing more American oil to reduce China’s dependence on the Strait, China’s readout was strikingly different. China made no mention of Iran, the Strait of Hormuz, or any tolls whatsoever, referring only to discussions of “the Middle East situation” alongside other regions such as the Korean Peninsula and Ukraine. Meanwhile during the summit itself, shipping tracking data confirmed at least four China-linked vessels transiting the Strait through Iran’s designated corridor, including a COSCO supertanker carrying Iraqi crude. Iranian state media reported approximately thirty vessels had passed, all “with Iran’s permission.” Trump stated the US had “allowed” three Chinese tankers to transit. Each government claimed credit for the same ships passing through the same water under the same institutional framework, the PGSA corridor, whose existence the White House readout claimed Xi had just opposed.

The summit produced no agreements to reopen the Strait and oil prices rose after its conclusion. While Washington claimed a diplomatic victory, which China declined to confirm, Chinese tankers continued to transit the Strait of Hormuz under Iranian PGSA administration. This structural shift in which the Strait of Hormuz is selectively open to Iranian allies and closed to adversaries, actively administered by the same PGSA which the United States claimed Xi had opposed, was the most vivid and visible reality on the water during those two days in Beijing. It is a more eloquent readout of the facts on the ground and the reality of multipolar power than any aspirational press release.

IV. THE NUMBERS BEHIND THE PERMANENCE

The scale of the disruption is not limited to energy markets, although that is where the impact is most visible. The Strait of Hormuz is the transit point for approximately twenty percent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas. It is also the chokepoint for fertilizer and urea which support South Asian and African agriculture; petrochemicals which supply global manufacturing chains; containers bound for Jebel Ali, the largest port in the Middle East, and liquefied petroleum gas upon which hundreds of millions of households across South Asia and East Africa depend for cooking and heating. While each of these cargo categories simultaneously ceased transiting the strait, the downstream consequences of that constriction show up differently in each industry. Energy markets reprice within hours; insurance markets within days. Fertilizer supply chains ultimately translate into harvest shortfalls which are not measurable for months. The indicator which lags the most is the impact on food scarcity for agricultural communities in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, the same populations who bore the brunt of the Black Sea Grain corridor collapse and who once again have no voice or vote in a conflict which may have dire impact upon their food security.

The mine-clearing dimension compounds this disruption further, if indeed it is determined that the Strait has been mined. Even under a full ceasefire scenario, mine-clearing operations are forecast to require a minimum of six months to complete. This translates into six months of restricted traffic, elevated risk premiums and insurance uncertainty, regardless of the outcome of the diplomacy.

The logic of the fee revenue charged by the IRGC via the PGSA is not a coercion mechanism. It is the implemented monetization of Iran’s geographical reality. Viewing the PGSA as a business model rather than a crisis measure is critical in understanding why freedom of navigation is no longer free.

The pertinent question for reinsurance underwriters is what it would take for war risk premiums to return to pre-crisis levels and even with a full and immediate ceasefire the answer is unclear. The PGSA has introduced a new layer of governmental administration and associated uncertainty which is difficult to price into the market. This uncertainty does not resolve with a ceasefire. It requires clarity on the administration of the strait. Ships transiting while the Strait of Hormuz is simultaneously administered by the PGSA and contested by the United States Navy face a categorically different risk profile than they did prior to Iran’s assertion of administrative control of the Strait on 28 February 2026. The compliance trap described above in Section II is not a legal abstraction; it is a gap in existing treaties that will need to be addressed and for which no established market framework currently exists.

V. MALACCA: THE MDCP, THE INDONESIA TENSION, AND THE CONTAGION OF PRECEDENT

The US pivot: from Hormuz failure to Malacca presence

On 13 April 2026, the day after the collapse of the Islamabad talks, the first and only serious attempt at substantive diplomatic resolution between the United States and Iran since the Hormuz closure, Washington moved on two fronts simultaneously. While announcing a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, the United States hosted Indonesian Defense Minister Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin at the Pentagon to sign a Major Defense Cooperation Partnership (MDCP) with Jakarta. The simultaneity was the point; Washington was not reacting to failure at one chokepoint by compensating at another, but applying the same strategic logic in two theaters at once: coercive force against Tehran to contest the PGSA, and diplomatic presence with Jakarta to ensure Malacca would not follow the same trajectory. That the MDCP was signed three weeks before Project Freedom launched is the most analytically significant detail: Washington had already concluded, before testing its military option at Hormuz, that force alone would be insufficient to keep the world’s critical straits open.

Indonesia’s internal three-way tension

Indonesia’s strategic dilemma regarding the Strait of Malacca is representative of the new multipolar framework in which what the United States now requests, rather than commands, is balanced both by internal constitutional requirements of non-alignment as well as the now-evident commercial logic of monetized chokepoint administration. The MDCP negotiations include a US request for blanket overflight rights for American military aircraft in Indonesian airspace without prior approval. Indonesia’s own Foreign Ministry warned explicitly that this provision risked pulling Jakarta into South China Sea tensions against China. The Indonesian Ministry of Defense confirmed that overflight rights were still not finalized in the MDCP, meaning that the most strategically significant element of the agreement remained unresolved.

This internal tension within the Indonesian government is the most important aspect of the MDCP as three internal forces simultaneously are pulling in incompatible directions. The Ministry of Defense is actively negotiating access rights that would provide the US military unfettered access above the world’s most strategically located archipelago. Yet Indonesia is a deliberately non-aligned sovereign state with a constitutional commitment to a “free and active” foreign policy (known as “bebas aktif”) explicitly barring the country from joining or participating in foreign blocs or alliances and the Foreign Ministry is resisting the proposed overflight rights as they would effectively transform Indonesia from a neutral actor into a potential forward base in any US-China military confrontation. The Ministry of Finance, meanwhile, openly contemplated whether the PGSA model in the Strait of Hormuz could be replicated in Malacca. Thus, the same government within the same fortnight, signed a US defense partnership, resisted overflight access as detailed in the partnership, and contemplated a pay for passage model for Malacca. This three-way contradiction is not confusion, it is the visible navigation of multipolar reality by the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation and the state that controls the southern approach to one of the world’s most strategically important straits. This makes Indonesia’s response to the Hormuz crisis one of the most significant geopolitical developments of 2026.

The Finance Minister’s toll proposal: precedent travelling faster than diplomacy

Indonesia’s most notable and significant response to the Hormuz crisis is not the MDCP but the public contemplation of the potential monetization of the Strait of Malacca, citing the PGSA as a conceptual precedent. While Indonesia’s Finance Minister rapidly walked back his statements regarding a potential toll after sharp international pushback, the fact of his statements are a significant indicator of the pervasiveness of the contagion precedent. His statements were not intended or presented as serious policy, but they demonstrated that the PGSA model was already being contemplated as potential policy, even simultaneous with the signing of a military partnership with the United States. The PGSA precedent, much like the Indonesian constitution, does not respect alliance boundaries. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio was correct in his warning that the Hormuz model “could be repeated in other places around the world.” As the Indonesian Finance Minister proved, it is already being contemplated, and not by a US adversary, but by a US defense partner.

Thailand’s Land Bridge and Kra Canal: institutionalized alternative routing

In Thailand, the government is doing explicitly what Iran has done implicitly: taking steps to permanently and administratively monetize geography under their control in response to chokepoint pressures. The Thai Deputy Prime Minister stated directly “The Middle East conflict has demonstrated the advantage of controlling a transport route. Thailand will have a great advantage by operating the link between the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean.” This route is the $31 billion Land Bridge, a 90 kilometer road, rail, and pipeline corridor across the Kra Isthmus between the deep-sea ports of Ranong and Chumphon. The Thai response to the Hormuz conflict has been to accelerate, legislatively and administratively, the planning of an alternative to a different chokepoint altogether: the Strait of Malacca. The Southern Economic Corridor Act has passed in the Thai House of Representatives, a Cabinet directive launched a fresh feasibility review in April 2026, and international infrastructure capital, including from China, the UAE, Singapore, and Japan, is being actively courted. While no foreign capital has yet been formally committed, the strategic logic of the land bridge has been enshrined in Thai law. The Land Bridge is Thailand converting the PGSA lesson into a long-term strategic and financial advantage using chokepoint administration as a permanent bureaucracy and geography as a monetary and strategic asset.

The Strait of Malacca and the Kra Isthmus alternative, with the Land Bridge shown in detail.

Beyond the Land Bridge is the long-simmering ambition of the creation of a canal across the Kra Isthmus, a genuine alternative maritime passage between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea bypassing altogether the Strait of Malacca. The Kra Canal, which would allow vessels to transit directly and not require the offloading and reloading inherent in the Land Bridge, has been debated for over a century and has repeatedly failed to advance due to cost, internal Thai politics, and fierce opposition from Singapore and Malaysia whose port revenues are dependent upon Malacca transshipment. The Hormuz crisis has changed the strategic urgency of control of maritime chokepoints and the MDCP has demonstrated that the United States is actively attempting to influence events in Malacca. While construction is neither imminent nor likely given the current Thai focus on the Land Bridge, the Hormuz crisis has returned the Kra Canal to serious strategic consideration in a way it has not been for decades. Iran has shown how swiftly the rules can change in a multipolar reality and the contagion precedent makes Thai action more credible than at any point previously.

Singapore, Taiwan and the “dry run”

Singapore currently has the most to lose from the ongoing developments in Indonesia and Thailand as its maritime sector contributes approximately 7% of GDP and employs approximately 170,000 people. In 2024, 85% of the record 41.12 million TEUs (standard shipping containers) handled by its port was transshipment cargo, meaning goods that originate and terminate elsewhere and pass through Singapore only because of its position at the southern mouth of the Strait of Malacca. Further, Singapore is the world’s largest bunkering hub, selling almost 55 million tonnes of ship fuel in 2024 alone. Its port business model is directly threatened by every vessel that bypasses Malacca, every choice to move via a future Thai Land Bridge or Kra Canal. Long-term, the strategic threat is even more acute as Singapore is currently constructing the Tuas mega-port, projected to be the world’s largest container terminal upon scheduled completion in 2040. This multi-decade infrastructure commitment of tens of billions of dollars is predicated entirely on Malacca traffic volumes holding or increasing through 2040 and beyond. The Land Bridge, the Kra Canal, the MDCP, and Indonesia’s Malacca toll musings, all directly threaten the assumptions upon which that investment rests. The Land Bridge threatens transshipment volumes; the MDCP threatens Malacca’s neutrality. The Kra Canal, a maritime transit bypassing Singapore entirely, would devastate bunkering revenues in a way the Land Bridge would not, as overland transfers do not replace direct shipping routes in the same way, and is thus more of an existential threat than anything else. A toll model for Malacca would increase the probability of both the Kra Canal and the Land Bridge.

Singapore, a city-state that invests over 3% of its GDP on defense, describes itself as “obsessed” with keeping sea lanes open, and has flatly refused to negotiate any toll arrangements for the Strait of Malacca, has not commented publicly on the MDCP. Choosing to maintain silence about a major defense partnership with the primary coastal state controlling its own most vital waterway is a strategic choice because it allows Singapore maximum strategic flexibility. The MDCP would improve the capabilities of the Indonesian military, thus improving security in the Strait but would risk transforming Malacca into a US-China flashpoint. Singapore’s Foreign Minister described the situation as “the weaponization of interdependence” which is another way of saying that the emerging multipolar reality risks exposing assumptions made in the unipolar era as no longer necessarily valid. This is a startling reality for the country that has more to lose from the multipolar repricing of maritime commerce than almost any other state.

The Foreign Minister, on 21 April 2026, went on to describe the Hormuz disruption as a “dry run” for a potential US-China conflict involving Taiwan. A disruption to the Taiwan Strait would dwarf everything the Hormuz crisis has thus far produced. Hormuz demonstrated that US naval power cannot guarantee chokepoint access against a determined regional actor, that compliance impossibilities and contagion precedents emerge faster than diplomatic solutions, and that economic impacts cascade across industries and compound over months. These lessons are already being absorbed in corporate supply chain models, insurance pricing, and institutional investment decisions in ways which are permanent irrespective of how the Hormuz crisis is ultimately resolved.

China’s Malacca Dilemma: from theoretical to operational

China has been well aware of the strategic vulnerability, or what President Hu Jintao referred to as the “Malacca dilemma”, for decades, as China’s rising industrial power depends in part upon import of fuel through a narrow passage it does not control. The Strait of Malacca carries approximately 23.2 million barrels of oil per day, over two million more bpd than the pre-conflict Strait of Hormuz and 7.9 million of them are destined for China, approximately 80% of China’s oil imports. Its overland alternatives, the pipelines streaming across Myanmar, Kazakhstan and Russia, currently carry a combined capacity of approximately 1.5 million barrels per day. The potential shortfall is stark and clear.

China’s dependence on the Strait of Malacca and its overland alternatives.

After the announcement of the formalized defense partnership between nonaligned Indonesia, the controlling state for Malacca’s southern approaches, and the United States, especially the potential maritime and airspace rights sought but not yet granted, the MDCP transformed the “Malacca Dilemma” from theory into active strategic threat with a specific US footprint. This US response to the Hormuz crisis acutely and urgently influenced Chinese calculations for investment in the full range of Malacca alternatives from the Thai Land Bridge and Kra Canal to Belt and Road Initiative corridors through Central Asia and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), connecting China’s landlocked western province of Xinjiang to Gwadar port on the Arabian Sea. This shift has acquired new strategic urgency as insurance against both Malacca and Hormuz disruption, especially the threat of simultaneous closure.

China was well prepared for the current crisis in the Strait of Hormuz, having spent two decades preparing for precisely this scenario and its strategic petroleum reserve of approximately 1.4 billion barrels (equivalent to more than seven months of Middle Eastern imports) provided an immediate buffer. When the crisis struck, Russia immediately moved to position itself as the continental energy fallback with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov explicitly offering to compensate for any shortfalls due to restrictions in the Strait. In 2024 Russia and China had already brought to full capacity the Power of Siberia 1 natural gas pipeline and long-term infrastructure damage to Qatari LNG delivery capacity due to the Hormuz crisis immediately placed discussions of the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline at the top of the agenda for Presidents Putin and Xi. Both leaders met in Beijing on 20 May 2026 and specifically advanced planning for the 50 billion cubic meter annual gas pipeline from Russia’s Yamal fields to China; it remains under discussion.

Overland options to replace maritime delivery of oil and gas are accelerating in parallel. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and Gwadar port remain the long-term structural response to the Malacca dilemma, but they remain constrained by security and infrastructure challenges that are not resolvable at the speed of the crisis. China’s response to the MDCP is therefore not one specific move but rather the intensified focus on an array of countermeasures already in progress: enhanced alliances, new suppliers, overland corridors, existing reserves, and growing infrastructure no longer optional in a multipolar world.

China’s accommodation of the PGSA in Hormuz and resistance to the MDCP in Malacca are not contradictory positions. From China’s perspective, they are the same position: the protection of Chinese energy and trade and the accommodation of any framework which keeps its energy needs flowing and opposition to any which does not.

VI. FROM THE RED SEA TO PANAMA: THE PATTERN CONFIRMED

The operational model was proven in the Red Sea, where Ansar Allah held a major international strait against a multinational Western naval coalition for eighteen months and was moved not by force but by negotiation. The pattern did not stop at the Red Sea and chokepoints are not confined to straits. Suez and Panama confirm it across two further theaters, each with a different actor, a different instrument, and the same underlying logic: monetizing geography in the multipolar era.

Suez: the vulnerability that infrastructure cannot eliminate

The Suez Canal demonstrates something the other chokepoints in this analysis do not: that vulnerability does not depend upon a geopolitical actor with a strategic objective. The six-day blockage of the Suez Canal when the Ever Given ran aground in high winds during a sandstorm resulted in a loss of between $9 and $12 billion in daily trade and showed that even one of the world’s most highly engineered maritime passages could be closed suddenly and accidentally. The Ever Given, a 400-meter container ship carrying over 20,000 standard containers was transiting the canal, without a tugboat escort, five knots faster than the recommended speed, when high tailwinds and a sandstorm caused it to run aground, lodging horizontally across a part of the canal only 265 meters wide. Freeing the ship and opening the canal, involved dredging, towing, and the removal of cargo in an unprecedented salvage operation which took six days to complete. The ship itself, registered in Panama, operated by a Taiwanese company and owned by a Japanese shipbuilder, is a snapshot of the globalized nature of the shipping industry. During the six-day closure, at least 430 ships queued at the canal’s two entrances while dozens rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope, adding at least a week to their voyages. In addition to the daily trade losses, the Suez Canal Authority estimated total damages to the Canal itself at over $1 billion.

Even after the Ever Given was freed and the canal reopened, analysts warned that even a short-term closure would produce months-long economic effects. Ansar Allah validated this warning at far greater scale and duration when they demonstrated that Suez traffic can be disrupted from the Bab el-Mandeb without ever touching Egyptian territory. Ansar Allah shut the Bab el-Mandeb due to Israeli activities in Gaza. Canal revenues collapsed from an historic high of $10.25 billion in 2023 to just under $4 billion in 2024, a 60% decline and monetary loss of $7 billion in a single year, due explicitly to shipping companies rerouting around the Cape of Good Hope to avoid the Bab el-Mandeb. Unlike Ansar Allah in Yemen, Egypt shares a border with Gaza at Rafah and has made its own sovereign choices about how to manage that proximity and has opted not to become involved in that conflict. That choice did not protect Egypt from the economic choices of those who did. Historically, the Suez Canal generates approximately 10% of Egypt’s current account income and this was reduced by $800 million per month due to someone else’s war, the same pattern established in the Black Sea, in which African and West Asian food-importing nations bore the cost of a conflict in which they had little stake and less influence. The Suez Canal is a double chokepoint and access to it is determined not only by Egyptian sovereign territory, but by geography and actors it does not and cannot control.

The Bab el-Mandeb and Suez route, and the reroute around the Cape of Good Hope.

Panama: where great power competition and retaliatory coercion converge

The Panama Canal is the chokepoint which most clearly demonstrates the shift from unipolarity to multipolarity. Panama also confirms that the monetization of chokepoint leverage is not limited to rising smaller powers and non-state actors but is the rational response of any actor, in this case China, the world’s largest trading nation, when the geography it depends upon is placed under pressure by a rival, in this case by the United States.

The low-water crisis of 2023-2024 in Panama introduced climate disruption as a chokepoint vulnerability and reduced daily transits by over a third, showing that physical infrastructure can fail even if no geopolitical actor takes action. However, by 2026, as the environmental crisis eased, a geopolitical crisis emerged. US President Trump engaged in a pressure campaign to remove Chinese-linked port operators from the canal, specifically targeting CK Hutchison Holdings, the Hong Kong conglomerate whose subsidiary Panama Ports Company had operated the Atlantic Cristobal and Pacific Balboa terminals since a 1997 concession. Washington’s ostensible concern was that CK Hutchison was potentially subject to PRC national security laws. CK Hutchison attempted to resolve the situation by selling all 43 of its global ports, including both at the Panama Canal, to a BlackRock-led American consortium for $22.8 billion. Beijing blocked the deal demanding a controlling stake for Chinese state carrier COSCO. However, the sale was rendered moot with the 23 February 2026 publishing of a ruling by the Panama Supreme Court which voided the original 1997 concession as unconstitutional. The Panamanian government then assigned temporary operations at Balboa port to APM Terminals, part of Danish shipping company Maersk, and MSC Terminal Investment Limited, an Italian firm headquartered in Switzerland (and partially owned by BlackRock) at Cristobal.

The Panama Canal and its two ocean terminals.

CK Hutchison launched international arbitration proceedings describing the takeover as unlawful and seeking $2 billion in damages; China warned Panama would pay “a heavy price.” COSCO Shipping Lines on 10 March informed clients that all arrivals and departures at Balboa would cease immediately. Further, China’s Transport Ministry summoned executives from Maersk and MSC for meetings regarding the takeover of control of contracts China still considered to be legally binding for CK Hutchison. By March 2026, China had converted a routine regulatory instrument, port state control inspections, into a targeted political weapon against Panama. Port state control is the internationally recognized right of coastal states to inspect foreign vessels for safety and compliance. Usually a matter of routine, the proportion of ships detained in Chinese ports flying Panama’s flag leapt from a historical norm of 21-41% to approximately 70% in March 2026, according to Tokyo MOU data. In response to Panama’s actions against Chinese interests, viewed as due to coercion from the United States, China deployed regulatory authority as its own counter-coercion against Panama. The situation remains unresolved and Panama is an example of a small state torn between two great powers, part of the messiness of the reorganization of power in a multipolar world.

Port state control inspections, international arbitration, and political pressure are different mechanisms than the PGSA but the structural logic is identical: administrative and regulatory power weaponized as geopolitical leverage. The contesting of transit rights and authority at the Panama Canal is a genuinely multipolar phenomenon and demonstrates not merely that great powers have coercion options; they always have. What is new is that multiple powers are deploying those options simultaneously, at multiple chokepoints, using administrative and regulatory instruments rather than military force, in the same months of 2026. The Hormuz crisis, Strait of Malacca MDCP developments, and the Panama Canal port disputes are not three separate unrelated stories. They are three expressions of the same structural reorganization, accelerating simultaneously in different corners of the world.

VII. THE STRUCTURAL ARGUMENT: PERMANENCE AS CONCLUSION

The convergence that reveals the pattern

Six chokepoints in six separate theaters with a mix of state and non-state actors, superpowers and regional powers, deliberate coercion and counter-coercion, as well as pure accident, each confirms the same underlying vulnerability in the “rules-based order” and highlights the emergence of a multipolar reality. There is no evidence of any coordination linking these six chokepoints but their near simultaneity reveals an underlying structural shift. In each case actors pursuing rational objectives have moved to use the tools at hand to exploit the hard reality of geography. The vulnerability of the pre-existing system is laid bare: the enforcement mechanism of presumed US naval superiority is no longer sufficient to deter determined resistance at the chokepoints that matter most and the legal framework associated with these chokepoints was predicated on that presumption which is no longer in effect. What is emerging is not chaos but rather a new multipolar maritime reality, shifting, adjusting, and slowly coming into focus.

The Monetization thesis

Each of these six chokepoints is being monetized and converted from a passage whose neutrality was assumed and enforced by a unipolar order into a lever of state power, economic leverage, or institutional governance. The PGSA is the most explicit form: a fee system with an Iranian government email address, permit issuance and an explicit claim to sovereign administration over an internationally recognized strait. But Thailand’s Land Bridge, China’s Belt and Road Initiative overland alternatives to the Malacca Strait, Russia’s weaponization of Black Sea grain access, Ansar Allah’s leverage over Red Sea insurance pricing, US and Chinese pressure on Panamanian port administration and ownership, and Egypt’s canal revenues now subject to conflicts it has chosen to avoid, all are variations of the same structural reordering. The clearest proof that this reordering is already operational was not an intangible announcement or communications, it was the very tangible Indian Navy operation “Urja Suraksha” described in Section III, running continuously through the corridor the PGSA administers through the Strait of Hormuz. Geography is being repriced and the actors doing the repricing are those who control, directly or indirectly, the terrain itself. New realities entail new prices and the neutrality guaranteed by the old order was a hidden opportunity cost the multipolar players are no longer willing to pay.

The counter-response confirmation

Adherents to the unipolar model contend that the monetization of multipolarity will be reversed by the counter-responses already underway. The evidence suggests the opposite. Six weeks after Iran seized control of the Strait of Hormuz, Washington signed the MDCP with Indonesia having already concluded that military enforcement alone would be insufficient to keep the world’s critical straits open, which Project Freedom vividly confirmed only three weeks later, lasting just forty-eight hours before being paused. The failure of a viable military option in the Strait of Hormuz did not produce the pivot to Malacca. It validated a pivot Washington had already made.

In the Red Sea, Operation Prosperity Guardian failed to restore sea traffic but permanently repriced routing via the Cape of Good Hope as a viable alternative to the Suez Canal. The counter-response to Ansar Allah’s closure of the Bab el-Mandeb has permanently altered global shipping routes in ways which benefit African coastal states but damage Suez-dependent infrastructure, including Egypt which played no role in the conflict which produced the outcome. A counter-response that permanently restructures global shipping institutionalizes the multipolar model.

The US-prompted eviction of Chinese-linked port operators from the Panama Canal appeared to consolidate unipolar order, and in narrow operational terms it did achieve its objective. However, it triggered China’s retaliatory COSCO withdrawal and port state control campaign against Panamanian flagged vessels, converting a previously neutral chokepoint into a live geopolitical battlefield. This does not reverse multipolarity, it reveals new pages in the multipolar coercion playbook.

Counter-responses involving infrastructure, including the Thailand Land Bridge, renewed discussions of the Kra Canal, and the renewed strategic urgency of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor are the most significant of all, precisely because they address the underlying vulnerability made explicit by the specific threat. None of the above infrastructure projects restores the status quo ante. Rather, they change the options completely by leveraging geography to permanently reduce reliance on the contested chokepoint. A counter-response which renders chokepoints less relevant is the ultimate expression of the monetization of geography.

In this multipolar world, states are no longer waiting for a restoration of the old order, they are creating a new one. By building new and profitable infrastructure that bypasses contested chokepoints or claiming administrative sovereignty that converts an existing one into a valuable asset, each actor that succeeds emboldens the next to apply the same logic. As the Indonesian Finance Minister demonstrated, the contagion of initiative in monetizing chokepoints can be inspired even by the threat of action in another theatre altogether and every counter-response thus far has accelerated rather than reversed the monetization it was designed to stop.

The UNCLOS question as the legal expression of permanent change

The 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea was designed by and for a world in which the major maritime powers, specifically the United States and the USSR, had ample capacity to enforce “freedom of navigation” and regional powers, such as Libya, learned at their peril not to test those limits. The PGSA is the most direct challenge to “freedom of navigation” in the history of the treaty, not because it violates the letter of the law, but because it exposes a gap between what the treaty promises and what enforcement can deliver. That gap will not close when the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz ends. It will widen as the multipolar transition continues.

Iran’s explicit demand for international recognition of sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz has transformed the UNCLOS legal question from a theoretical concern to an existing precedent, one whose contagion, as Indonesia’s Finance Ministry demonstrated within days of the MDCP signing, is already spreading. This issue, formally submitted by Iran through Pakistani mediators, is the core dispute at the heart of the diplomatic attempts to resolve the crisis. Even a comprehensive US-Iran agreement ending the conflict will not erase the precedent of the Persian Gulf Strait Authority. Iranian establishment of the PGSA is the opening institutional move in the ongoing renegotiation of international maritime law. The agreement that ends this current crisis will not be the conclusion of chokepoint coercion in the Strait of Hormuz; it will be the formal beginning of its multipolar monetization.

CLOSING

The Strait of Hormuz will reopen. Free passage through the Strait will not return. Whether a fee is collected by the PGSA, or incorporated into a series of bilateral agreements, or traded in exchange for sanctions relief, Iran has established that passage through the Strait of Hormuz carries a price and that price will be paid. The question of who governs the passages upon which the global economy relies will not be answered by any agreement settling the current conflict. It will be answered, slowly, painfully and inexorably, by the multipolar transition which has been made significantly more visible by the Hormuz crisis. Six chokepoints are being contested simultaneously in multiple theaters across the globe, not because the world has become a more dangerous place, but because the multipolar era has begun and multipolarity, unlike unipolarity, has no hegemonic enforcer.

The United States understands this. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s warning that the Hormuz precedent “could be repeated in multiple other places around the world” is not a prediction, it is a description of the current trajectory of global chokepoint politics. In Malacca, where a US defense partner contemplated a PGSA-style fee within days of signing a defense agreement with Washington; in Panama, where China deployed port state control detentions as retaliatory coercion against a state responding to US pressure; in the Red Sea, where asymmetric disruption proved easier and cheaper to sustain than to reverse; in the Black Sea, where diplomatic institutions failed and the underlying governance question remains unresolved; and across Eurasia, where the CPEC and Thai Land Bridge are building the overland infrastructure that reduces maritime chokepoint dependence. None of these are happening in a vacuum and they are all advancing because the lesson of Hormuz has been learned.

The monetization of multipolarity is not coming. It is here.

Joseph Busby is the Founder and Director of Reality-Based Analysis Group (RBAG), an independent geopolitical analysis firm based in Vienna, Austria. RBAG is affiliated with the Association for the Promotion of International Development and Stability (APIDS — apids.at). Subscribe at rbag.at.

© 2026 Joseph Busby / Reality-Based Analysis Group. Licensed under CC BY-ND 4.0. You may reproduce this work in full with attribution to Reality-Based Analysis Group and a link to rbag.at.

Iran entered the war of 2026 confident of victory and the progression of the conflict thus far has not only validated its strategy, but has also left Iran more deeply integrated into the multipolar order than ever before; and it may have made diplomatic solutions with the West impossible.

Confident of Victory

Prior to the February 2026 joint Israeli-US attacks on Iran, both sides were confident their side would emerge victorious. In part, this was due to the starkly different concepts of victory held by each combatant. Israel and the United States, in their hubris, defined victory as complete regime change and the removal of Iran as a strategic threat to Israel and Western interests in the Gulf. Iran defined victory as the survival of the regime and the maintenance of territorial integrity. Given the geography of Iran, its ability to close the Strait of Hormuz, its vast array of highly protected advanced intermediate-range ballistic missiles, and the “mosaic” strategy of diffused autonomy in the event of presumed assassinations of its political and military leadership, Iran entered the conflict supremely confident of emerging intact. Further, bolstered by the results of the 12-day missile war against Israel in June 2025, in which Iranian missiles proved highly effective in piercing both US and Israeli defensive shields, Iran was confident that it could wreak significant devastation on US military bases and, barring Western use of nuclear weaponry, control escalation dominance. These are rational, measurable assessments by Iran of its pre-February 2026 situation, and far from being a surprise, they were publicly announced by the Islamic Republic in an attempt to warn the United States and Israel against attacking. Iran stated explicitly what would happen in the event of US and Israeli aggression and its warnings were not heeded. When the war proceeded, Iran absorbed the military blows, executed its mosaic diffusion of power when its Supreme Leader and senior military officials were assassinated, and systematically followed through with each and every one of the consequences it promised in the event of war.

Through the June pause in fighting, the Iranian government not only remained intact, it emerged from the conflict stronger than ever before. Israel has been severely chastened and damage to United States bases in the region is so significant that some may be abandoned rather than rebuilt. The renewed fighting has thus far reinforced rather than reversed this situation.

This essay attempts to explain Iranian strategic logic on its own terms. It will explain why Iran was confident of victory, why Iran can be said to be winning the war and why it will emerge from it in a stronger strategic position than ever before. It will address how Western attempts to destroy this BRICS member have instead forged greater and stronger multipolar bonds, and why diplomatic efforts between the West and Iran, as well as others in the multipolar world, are likely damaged beyond repair for at least a generation.

The Underlying Logic

Iran’s defensive geography and the Gulf’s high-value targets within reach.

Iranian strategy is based on three basic pillars: geography, history, and ideology. Iran, much like the United States, benefits significantly from geography. Iran is a high plateau, ringed by the Zagros and Elburz mountains, and sits astride the northern shore of the Strait of Hormuz, including its narrowest point, allowing near de facto control of the Strait should it wish to seize it. A glance at the map reveals the near impossibility of successful invasion, and a glance at any history book shows the futility of all previous attempts. A civilization lasting over two and a half millennia, in no small part due to its geography, thus inhabits terrain both unusually defensible and unusually able to impose significant economic costs on others. This is the first and perhaps most important factor in the Iranian strategic position. It is also extremely obvious.

Less obvious to the West is Iran’s lived memory, not of ancient invasions repulsed, but of the war launched by Iraq and its Western backers in 1980, fought for eight years, often with Western-supplied weapons, including chemical weapons. Iran paid an extraordinary price: the war killed or wounded approximately a million Iranians, gassed up to a hundred thousand, displaced millions, and directly touched, through service or loss, an enormous share of an entire generation, and the consciousness of them all. Few came to Iran’s aid during the eight-year conflict and Iran took several lessons from the war. First was that no one would intervene on its behalf and that if it were to defend itself in the future, it would be its own responsibility. Second was that in conflicts initiated by the West, International Law and International Humanitarian Law were not viewed by the West as applicable in conflicts in which they held an interest. Iran recognized that successful self-defense required flexibility, independence, and self-reliance.

Completely ignored by the West is the Iranian doctrine of self-reliance developed over this period, exemplified by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s two famous slogans “Neither East nor West” and “Neither Oppress nor Accept Oppression.” The former emphasizes Iran’s view of itself as a civilization independent from external political orientation or alliance. The second represents the Islamic Republic’s view of power itself and is rooted in its religious tradition, equally misunderstood, when considered at all, by the West. As argued by Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett in their masterwork Going to Tehran, Iran is a rational actor on the world stage and a state supremely committed to an independence fundamentally at odds with any and all attempts by foreign powers to dominate or subjugate it. Their book argues that Washington should engage with Iran in much the same way it did and does with China. Instead, Washington opted for attempted hegemony and domination and failed completely. Perhaps the most important reason why is a specific Western blindness to a motivating force driving Iranian behavior: a culture of honor.

Karbala and the Fight Against Empire

Iranian honor is a strategic concept unfactored into Western military planning, in part due to its incompatibility with Western modes of thinking. Iranian understandings of honor are rooted in the opposing concepts of “ezzat” and “zillat,” the first being dignity, glory, and strength and the second representing humiliation and abasement. Striving towards the former and avoiding the latter are foundational parts of Iranian national identity. Prior to his assassination in the opening salvos of the Israeli-US attacks, Supreme Leader of Iran Ayatollah Khamenei organized Iran’s foreign policy around the concepts of “dignity, wisdom, and expediency,” explicitly in that order, with dignity in the forefront. Thus, inherently, Iran is incapable of agreements, including one to end the current conflict, incompatible with its dignity, those it views as capitulation rather than compromise.

This understanding, vivid in the mindset of the Islamic Republic, stretches back almost 1,400 years and involves Karbala, nearly invisible to Western strategic thinkers. In the year 680, Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Mohammed himself, refused to pledge allegiance to Yazid, the Umayyad caliph, whom he considered to be a usurper and a tyrant. As a result, Hussein and several dozen of his followers were killed at Karbala on the day remembered as “Ashura.” This event became the moral core of Shia Islam in which the deliberate choice of death over the dishonor of submission to an illegitimate power became a story of the primacy of honor over life and victory by refusing dishonorable compromise. Viewing Iranian strategy through the lens of Ashura and Karbala reveals a motivation organized around the concept of justice and injustice rather than one based on likelihood of success. Further, in this framing, every confrontation with an overwhelming power is cast in terms of Hussein’s resistance and the moral center of the Islamic Republic’s Shia identity.

Here there is clarity in what Iran means when it discusses a fight against “Imperialism.” In Ayatollah Khomeini’s worldview, humanity was divided between the oppressed and downtrodden, the “mostazafin,” and the “mostakberin,” those who arrogantly dominate them. In the current conflict, the United States is the modern Yazid, a hegemon brazenly exercising power in a foreign land, imposing crippling sanctions, propping up client regimes, favoring a hostile Israel, surrounding the country with military bases. Iran naturally casts itself as fulfilling the mandate of Hussein, refusing a domination it considers tyrannical from a power usurping control in an area not its own. This understanding of foreign policy is not a negotiating point up for debate and consideration, it is the moral and religious core of society and the state itself.

Mohammad Marandi, Professor of English Literature and Orientalism at the University of Tehran, stated it plainly, “Iran cannot be bombed into surrender.” Marandi, a soft-spoken intellectual whose fluency and dignity begin to fill the communications void left in the absence of assassinated Iranian official Ali Larijani, provides a window to Iranian culture. Having volunteered himself in the Iran-Iraq war, surviving two chemical weapons attacks, he remains extremely close to the ruling elite, yet speaks for his generation as well when he notes that Western bombing is finite and Iranian will is not. A state which considers the dignity, glory, and strength of “ezzat” as more important than tactical victories or diplomatic compromises is not one who can be brought to the negotiating table by overwhelming force. This, even more than geography and experience, is why Iran was and remains confident in inevitable victory. Iran has no need to destroy its enemies. However, short of the overwhelming utilization of nuclear weapons, those enemies cannot force a capitulation that is fundamentally contrary to Iranian identity itself.

The Twelve-Day War and Iran’s Red Lines

All of this was knowable to the West, especially after the experiences of June 2025. That conflict was instigated by Israel with a decapitation strike, months in the making, which killed a large number of Iran’s senior military officers. The United States bombed multiple sites associated with Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. Iran’s response was significant: over the course of what would become known as the Twelve-Day War, Iran launched over five hundred ballistic missiles, with a strategy of firing ever more advanced weapons as older models systematically depleted Israeli and US missile defenses. These missiles struck strategic targets throughout Israel, including military headquarters, oil refineries, military facilities, and precision strikes against “secret” military and intelligence facilities hidden in densely populated areas. The strategy was successful and drew down the United States’ highly prized (and difficult to replace) THAAD interceptor stocks by at least a quarter. Iran’s response to the bombing of its nuclear facilities was a pinpoint accurate strike on the American Al Udeid air base in Qatar. Hostilities ceased at the request of the Israeli state, a controversial decision in Iran.

The strategic message was clear and the red lines were explicit. Iran stated publicly that in the event of an Israeli or US strike, Iran would retaliate against US bases in the Gulf and that it would close the Strait of Hormuz. The West had every reason to know that advanced Iranian missiles had the ability to pierce Israeli and American defensive shields and destroy with unprecedented accuracy a clearly defined target list. Further, Iran briefly closed part of the Strait both as a warning and a threat. For a moment it appeared that war hawks in Washington and Tel Aviv listened, but instead of calling off hostilities, they pivoted to other means.

Economic Hit Men and the Failed Color Revolution

The failure of the Twelve-Day War to break Iran kinetically prompted Washington and Tel Aviv to opt for the equally well-trodden ground of covert regime change. They turned to the economic hit men, those whose efforts are designed to destroy adversary powers by destroying the economies and the economic lives of their people, weakening regimes and priming them for toppling in a “color revolution” painted as indigenous yet infiltrated and exploited by covert Western actors.

In this case, as proudly announced by US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on multiple occasions, the United States exerted “maximum pressure” on the Iranian economy with the explicit goal of creating domestic discontent, and thus protests, in order to set the stage for regime change. Bessent engineered the devaluation of the Iranian currency, the rial, via an intentional dollar shortage which resulted in the failure of a major bank. This caused a plummet in the rial and explosive inflation, intentionally destroying in one swoop the economic lives of a significant proportion of the population with the specific and publicly stated intent to bring them into the streets in protest.

Bessent called it “economic statecraft with no shots fired,” an inaccurate moral side-step papering over the fact that the protests, initially consisting of innocent civilians damaged by US economic policies, were openly infiltrated, manipulated, and injected with steadily increasing violence by both Israeli and US intelligence operatives. Mossad “assured” Iranians that they were “with them in the field” and none other than former Secretary of State and CIA Director Mike Pompeo himself publicly saluted every Mossad agent “walking beside” the protesters. They did more than walk: they smuggled and prepositioned thousands of Starlink terminals across the country and steadily increased violence against the state and its officials. The public claims of accountability were noted by Iran.

Tehran responded forcefully, cutting the internet throughout the entire country and exposing the Starlink terminals with sophisticated electronic warfare, tracking down and arresting their operators. The crackdown against the violent protesters, once marching beside the mostly innocent civilians who had gone home at the first sign of violence, was unsparing. Specific casualty figures are difficult to confirm but number in the thousands.

The strategic situation was clear: the United States and Israel, having failed to break Iran in the Twelve-Day War, had taken public credit for an attack on Iran’s economy, with specific intent to cause a series of protests that people associated with both countries’ intelligence services explicitly stated were infiltrated by intelligence operatives designed to bring about the downfall of the government. This is classic covert regime change, missing only the “successful” overthrow. Western framing of the event as homegrown was belied by the boasting of Bessent and Pompeo, and Iran listened, learned, and understood that while the battle had been won, the war was unlikely to be over. It was correct.

Shattering the Ceasefire

The sequence from the Twelve-Day War to the collapse of the June 2026 Memorandum of Understanding.

The results of the Twelve-Day War and the failed attempt at covert regime change were clear and Iran’s warnings were heard by the West, if not heeded. Indeed, General Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Pentagon, advised that a war with Iran would severely deplete defensive missile stockpiles and pointed out the “enormous difficulty” the US would have in attempting to reopen the Strait of Hormuz if Iran opted to close it. Vice President JD Vance called the idea of war a “disaster,” Secretary of State Rubio was against it, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe had already labeled the idea of attempting regime change as “farcical.” Trump, however, following an in-person briefing delivered in the Situation Room of the White House on 11 February 2026 by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, joined virtually by Mossad head David Barnea, was convinced that the Iranian regime was fragile and would collapse and capitulate if attacked by both the United States and Israel. He dismissed the warnings of his most senior advisors, stating that even if the Iranians closed the Strait of Hormuz, the US Navy would simply reopen it. He ordered the attack.

Despite their robust abilities, neither Israel nor the United States is known for their deep understanding of the cultures of their adversaries and Barnea, Netanyahu, and Trump do not appear to have considered the role played by honor in Iran’s strategy, let alone understood that capitulation was unthinkable to the Iranians. On 28 February, Israel and the United States shattered the June 2025 ceasefire and the war began with the unprecedented assassination of the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei and members of his family, along with a significant number of Iran’s most senior military and political leaders. Iran absorbed the decapitation strikes and the ferocious initial barrage of missile attacks and, far from collapsing, followed through with each and every one of its pre-war promises. It closed the Strait of Hormuz immediately and it unleashed a sustained barrage of missiles against US bases in Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and especially Bahrain. Washington and Tel Aviv responded with shock, echoing Western media reporting of Iranian retaliation as “unprovoked.” This shock was real and was the result of substituting hubris for analysis. The failure to assess Iran on its own terms led to a willful ignoring not only of Iranian warnings, but of all the data indicating that Iran could and would back up its threats with action. That data stretches far earlier than the Twelve-Day War and it reveals a long-term multi-pronged Iranian strategy that explains its success.

Missiles, Missile Cities, and Escalation Dominance

Iran’s declared 2,000 km reach against the US and allied base network.

How did Iran develop such effective missiles? Simply put, Iran saw an opportunity in the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty signed between the United States and the USSR. Whereas the treaty bound the US and USSR (and later Russia) to eliminate all ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with a range between 500 and 5,500 kilometers, Iran was not a party to the treaty. Thus, between 1987 and 2019 (when the United States withdrew from the treaty) while Russia and the US destroyed their intermediate-range missile capability, Iran filled the gap by focusing on developing, improving, and mass producing the heart of its missile arsenal, advanced, indigenously produced solid-fuel missiles that reach all four corners of its region and, potentially, well beyond. Iran’s most advanced missiles, the Fattah-class missiles, apparently hypersonic with unprecedented maneuverable reentry warheads, are allegedly impossible to intercept in terminal phases; neither Israel nor the United States currently possesses any deployed hypersonic weapons.

The precise range of Iranian missiles is unknown. Tehran publicly declared a limit of 2,000 kilometers, more than sufficient for reaching its nearby adversaries. However, on 20 March 2026 two missiles were reportedly fired at the US-leased British military base of Diego Garcia, a distance twice as far as the presumed Iranian range. While Iran declared the attack to be one more false flag among many, American and British officials publicly accused Iran of launching the missiles, neither of which made it to their target (one falling short and the other intercepted). Thus, the true range and capacity of Iran’s missile arsenal remain unknown and this ambiguity benefits Iran strategically, as the United States and Israel cannot operate with complete confidence that they are outside Iranian missile range, even at double the distance previously believed.

One of the many lessons of the war of the 1980s was the need to protect its arsenal from heavy aerial bombardment. Iranian strategic planners opted for concealment and survivability and constructed the naturally fortified “missile cities,” hardened military bases carved out within mountains, housing the production facilities, storage, and firing line of Iran’s missile arsenal. Dispersed across the country, these literal mountains can withstand sustained heavy bombing without the bases below being put out of action; they remained able not only to continue firing, but to continue firing at the speed and pace of Iran’s choosing. One example is the missile complex outside Yazd, reported to be protected by over 1,500 feet of granite mountain, and producing hundreds of missiles every month. Less protected, however, were the more exposed mobile missile launchers, and the IRGC was estimated to have approximately 480 mobile transporter-erector-launchers at the start of the war. A primary target for US and Israeli strikes, Western estimates suggest that 80% of the inventory was destroyed during the first phase of the war, which matches a concomitant reduction in Iran’s missile launch rate. However, the US/Israeli objective of the war was not the degradation of Iranian mobile missile launchers; it was Iranian capitulation and regime change, and as the dust cleared from a Western barrage of over thirteen thousand strikes, Iran’s missile cities were still producing missiles and still firing them.

Its missile arsenal, its protected missile cities, and its favorable geography were the basis behind Iran’s confidence that it, rather than the United States or Israel, possessed escalation dominance (at least below the threshold of nuclear weapons). The United States assumed that it and Israel were the ones who could methodically increase or decrease the level of pain inflicted upon its adversary until it capitulated or collapsed. Iran was confident that it was the opposite, and it demonstrated this swiftly, warning and then striking at the vast array of targets across the Persian Gulf. Hitting American bases, Kuwaiti desalination plants, Qatari liquefied natural gas facilities, hotels in Dubai housing Western military and intelligence officers, each successful Iranian strike served to reinforce Iran’s dominant position. Iran went further, broadcasting in advance expanded potential target lists, informing the United States and Israel that it would reciprocate against strikes on Iranian infrastructure, including universities, high-tech companies, and financial centers, by striking a specific named list of equivalent targets in surrounding nations, allied to the United States. Further, the most obvious and perhaps greatest escalatory tool is the Iranian ability to open and close the Strait of Hormuz. As noted, Iran had threatened to close the Strait if attacked, and it followed through, with the economic results still echoing across the globe. Iran has stated that there shall never be a return to the status quo ante of “free passage through the Strait,” but declares that it is permanently under Iranian administration via the newly created Persian Gulf Strait Authority (PGSA). “Opening” the Strait has become the diplomatic concession, rather than abandoning it, with the recent Memorandum of Understanding laying out that passage shall not be monetized “for 60 days.” This is perhaps the most vivid example of Iran’s escalation dominance, in that unlike its precision strike abilities, which are limited to the range of its missiles, Iran’s ability to open or close the Strait of Hormuz at will impacts the entire world. The creation of the PGSA and Iran’s move to monetize passage (both before and after the 60 days stipulated in the MOU) represent not only escalation dominance in combat operations, but a wholesale shift in the power structure of the Gulf and stand to become a major revenue source for the Islamic Republic. This bid for a power shift and revenue source is being contested by force.

The Mosaic Defense

In addition to the misreading of who possessed escalation dominance, the United States and Israel both fundamentally misunderstood the very structure of power throughout the Iranian military and political systems. They failed to understand that decapitation strikes would not collapse or confuse the regime because the systems were built with the understanding that the technique of assassination was likely to be used against them. Militarily, the doctrine of “defa’e mozaiki,” or “mosaic defense,” was implemented throughout the IRGC in 2008. After witnessing the US removal by force of heads of state ranging from Libya to Afghanistan to Iraq and noting the US and Israeli technique of targeted assassinations, the IRGC was reorganized to withstand such attacks. In the event of an assassination, command is automatically diffused throughout the country, with hierarchies of command pre-designated and pre-authorized to engage militarily with their attackers, including the authority to launch missiles internationally.

A diffused system of command cannot be decapitated. Yet the political leadership did not collapse either; indeed within days, Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the murdered Ayatollah, was installed as the new Supreme Leader, and throughout, Iranian missiles kept flying and drones kept launching. One downside of the diffusion of authority is that escalation becomes more likely and de-escalation more difficult as multiple groups are operating simultaneously but not synchronously. One result of this was a missile strike on Oman, specifically attributed by Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi to this effect of the mosaic defense.

Politically, the West appears to have believed that the assumptions underlying their earlier attempt at covert regime change, namely that the population would naturally rise up against their ruling class, viewing them as oppressors, would hold true if the leadership of the country was simply killed. Instead, perhaps in part motivated by the simultaneous tragedy of the killing of 168 innocents, mostly children, at the Minab school on the opening day of the war, the Iranian population rallied around its government. When Mojtaba Khamenei was selected as Supreme Leader by the Assembly of Experts, in accordance with Article 111 of the Iranian Constitution, the people indeed rose and filled the streets and squares, but, to Western chagrin, they did so in support of their country and its leadership, not to bring it down.

Unintended Integration

The Islamic Republic’s resoundingly independent founding doctrine of “Neither East nor West” had long evolved into “negah be sharq,” the “Look East” policy, as geopolitical reality shifted from a Cold War paradigm through the unipolar moment and into the emergence of multipolarity. Iran had become a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in 2023 and joined BRICS officially in the following year. Iran held SCO military exercises with both China and Russia, on Iranian territory, yet it did not enter into any military alliances or defense obligations with either country, and it was emphasized by Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi that the “Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Agreement between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Russian Federation,” signed in January 2025, “includes cooperation in the area of security and defense but doesn’t set a goal of establishing a military alliance.” Russian President Putin himself confirmed publicly that the agreement did not include “military help” and in June 2025, he confirmed that, indeed, Iran had not asked Russia for any.

These decisions preserved Iranian military independence, but at a cost, as Iranian capabilities lagged significantly behind both China and Russia in the critical trio of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), particularly space-based imagery. Iran had already shifted, beginning in 2024, away from the American Global Positioning System (GPS) into the Chinese encrypted BeiDou-3 military technology, and as the conflict with the United States expanded, the ability to track American warships or access precise targeting data appeared to be significantly improved. Western accounts alleged Russian and Chinese support including precision targeting and post-strike assessment imagery from military satellites; both Russia and China deny this charge, although President Putin did state, speaking with Araghchi in Saint Petersburg in April 2026, that Russia “would do everything that serves [Iranian] interests.” One thing that served Iranian interests was a Russian advanced electronic-warfare system, the Krasukha, a truck-mounted military broadband jammer designed to interrupt an enemy’s ISR platforms. Another is the Murmansk-BN, a similar, longer-range system. Neither Russia nor Iran confirmed the transfers, and reports of their systems rely heavily on Western reporting and OSINT imagery. It is feasible that Iran has successfully made indigenous copies of the Russian technology, much as Russia has done with the Iranian Shahed drones, now the Russian Geran drones, used in the conflict in Ukraine. China, too, denied sharing geospatial intelligence with Iran but the United States issued a set of sanctions against Chinese satellite firms specifically on the allegation that they were sharing targeting data with Tehran. When confronted, Araghchi commented only that “military coordination” with Russia and China “continued.”

The pattern is clear: as Western threats to Iran become more acute, Iran’s response is further integration with its allies rather than further isolation. American withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2018 and increased Western sanctions led to Iran “Looking East,” joining the SCO and BRICS, and deepening regional ties with Pakistan, developing the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC) and tying in with the burgeoning China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). US and Israeli wars against Iran in 2025 and 2026, designed to destroy Iran and ensure American and Israeli dominance in the Gulf, instead are resulting in a deepening of ties between Iran, Russia, and China, an enrichment of Russia due to increased energy costs resulting from the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, and the potential emergence of a regionally dominant Iran, no longer surrounded by a ring of hostile American bases, flush with consistent revenue via PGSA administration of fee-for-passage transit rights through the Strait of Hormuz. Yet again, unipolar overreach is resulting in the advance of multipolarity.

The Poisoned Well

Notwithstanding the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding, the war is far from over. The symbolism of the American President signing it in Versailles was appropriate to the terms overwhelmingly favorable to Iran, which were then violated immediately by the United States and Israel. The June and July pauses in active conflict, punctuated by constrained attacks and counterattacks, were marked by a flurry of activity in the background. Each side rearms and prepares for the next round, while the region is thrust into ever-increasing chaos. Israel continues military activities not only in the Palestinian territories, but in ever greater parts of Lebanon. The United States is attempting to involve the Kurds; Baghdad is riven by violence and rumors of military coup attempts amid a major and violent “crackdown,” and the United States has openly threatened to “blow up” Oman if it cooperates with Iranian plans to co-administer the Strait of Hormuz. The way forward from such deepening crises is usually either diplomacy or a wider conflict. Here, alas, the well of diplomacy has been poisoned.

In January 2023, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made famous the Russian term недоговороспособный (nedogovorosposobny), describing the United States as “not-agreement-capable,” meaning that it was not possible to even negotiate an agreement with the United States as there is no faith that it will be honored or that there was ever any intention for it to be honored. Iran, too, listened and learned: from German Chancellor Merkel’s admission of the perfidious Western manipulation of the Minsk agreements to buy time for Ukraine to rearm and later fight Russia; from Israel’s attempted assassination of Hamas negotiators in Qatar during peace talks; from the United States pushing for peace in Ukraine while flooding the country with weapons and intelligence support. The decapitation strikes which started the current conflict took place in the middle of peace negotiations between Iran and the United States, negotiations which were so promising that Omani mediators reportedly had already purchased the pens for the signing ceremony scheduled to take place in Vienna the following week. The assassination of Iranian senior official Ali Larijani, critical in the peace talks, and continued threats by the United States President to “end Iranian civilization” and murder the Iranian diplomatic negotiators if they fail to accept American “terms,” reinforce Lavrov’s assessment. Perhaps worse, they make a mockery of any potential peace agreement short of abject Iranian capitulation. This does not take place in a vacuum, and the lessons taught in Iran are learned in Russia, in China, in Cuba, in every country that knows that it too may find itself on the wrong end of American attention. The Iranians have been explicit: Foreign Minister Araghchi himself has flatly declared that Iran “cannot trust the Americans at all.”

This may be the greatest long-term American strategic failure of this war. A conflict justified to the world as necessary to prevent Iranian acquisition of nuclear technology reveals itself to be potentially unresolvable diplomatically as the only offered terms are surrender. A conflict that can only be won by the West by the use of nuclear weapons, and one in which Iranian possession of those very same weapons may have been the only way to prevent the attack, reveals the inescapable logic of proliferation. By murdering Iran’s leadership during negotiations, immediately breaking and then misrepresenting the published terms of the MOU, threatening the annihilation of a country and the genocide of its people, and the lives of the Iranian negotiators should they fail to accept dictated American “terms,” the United States has poisoned the well of diplomacy not only in this conflict, but globally. This is our verdict on this war; expect de facto solutions after further conflict, not finely wrought and carefully followed peace agreements. Barring Israeli or United States use of nuclear weapons, Iran will emerge from this conflict tangibly strengthened politically, with a significant and sustained new revenue stream from its control and administration of the Strait of Hormuz, and with deeper integration into the multipolar order than ever before. Iran entered the war on its own terms and according to those terms, it will win it.

Postscript: The interval between the writing of the above essay and its publication saw the collapse of the Memorandum of Understanding, the failure of a subsequent Islamabad-brokered ceasefire, and nearly two weeks of the most intense fighting of the war, with American strikes on almost one hundred locations in a dozen Iranian cities and Iranian fire on Bahrain, Kuwait, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Iran has again declared the Strait of Hormuz closed until further notice. Hostilities between Saudi Arabia and Ansar Allah in Yemen have restarted with reciprocal attacks and a partial closure of the Bab el-Mandab Strait. As of publication, both sides have paused strikes amid disputed reports of a resumption of diplomatic negotiations, claimed by the United States, denied by Iran.

Joseph Busby is the Founder and Director of Reality-Based Analysis Group (RBAG), an independent geopolitical analysis firm based in Vienna, Austria. RBAG is affiliated with the Association for the Promotion of International Development and Stability (APIDS — apids.at). Subscribe at rbag.at.

© 2026 Joseph Busby / Reality-Based Analysis Group. Licensed under CC BY-ND 4.0. You may reproduce this work in full with attribution to Reality-Based Analysis Group and a link to rbag.at.

Allegiance not alliance

The Allied victory in the Second World War removed from the menu the option for nations (outside of the Iberian peninsula) to choose fascism and its nationalist autarkic economic path. The Cold War clarified the available development models to two, each inextricably linked to allegiance to either the United States or the Soviet Union. This choice was a total commitment to a worldview which dictated the economic system: Bretton Woods dollar superiority, aid and debt service on one side; Soviet central planning on the other. Whether agrarian or industrial, large or small, each country received the same package depending on the bloc to which it adhered. The coercion was significant, and states attempting to go their own way risked external destabilization: coups in Iran in 1953 and Chile in 1973, and proxy wars from Indonesia to Indochina.

Given that the models for development were superimposed by a reigning superpower and not specifically designed to fit each country, development was anything but sustainable. The prevailing systems reinforced, often intentionally, dependency on patronage and this defined life across most of the developing post-colonial world for much of the seventy-five years following the end of the Second World War. Some states attempted a third path, intentionally setting themselves apart from the binary ruling order and joined the aptly named “Non-Aligned Movement.” The 1955 Asian-African Conference of twenty-nine African and Asian states, most of which had only just emerged from colonial rule, attempted to set these newly independent nations intentionally apart from the Cold War divide. Focusing on sovereignty, peaceful co-existence, and non-interference, the Non-Aligned Movement was formalized in Belgrade in 1961 and represented a true third way. Its ideas and ideals were never defeated, but a lack of capital, mature markets, or security prevented the Non-Aligned Movement from fully coming into its own until decades after the end of the Cold War. That moment, with the collapse of one of the two ruling superpowers, shut the door for central planning patronage; but instead of widening opportunities for the “third way,” the hegemonic unipolar moment shrank the options to one.

The Non-Aligned Movement at its founding: Bandung in 1955, Belgrade in 1961. Shown on modern boundaries.

Gradually then suddenly

What changed and how? Borrowing from Ernest Hemingway, the circumstances changed gradually and then suddenly. The gradual change was the slow and steady growth of a non-Western material base, specifically the combination of Chinese capital, non-Western development banks, the emergence of new export markets and a growing willingness to create and use mechanisms to settle trade without using the US dollar. Institutions such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the New Development Bank, and a vastly enlarged BRICS, coupled with significant momentum in dedollarization, are the factors which the Non-Aligned Movement never had. These are not coherent blocs, and they often house significant rivals, (BRICS itself contains both warring Iran and the UAE as well as sometime rivals India and China), but they are new power structures and hedges against the existing unipolar one.

The “suddenly” was in 2022 after the West weaponized the financial system to freeze two hundred billion euros of Russia’s central bank reserves, after doing the same thing to Afghanistan the year before. The realization that access to a country’s central bank reserves, if held by the West, was contingent on Western political approval rippled across the world. The surgical removal of the head of state of Venezuela by US forces in January 2026 sharpened the lesson, as US political rhetoric focused nearly exclusively upon Western extraction and profit from what most Venezuelans consider their own natural resources. Both examples are updated versions of the coercion of earlier years and have forced nations to take a hard look at their options; and now, unlike any time since the Second World War, the “third way” has the capital, infrastructure, and institutions to make non-alignment a viable option.

The Movement today, at 120 members, with the institutions that now underwrite it. Russia, China and Brazil are not members.

What third way?

Thus, the new opportunity: the ability to choose which economic model is best suited for each nation’s circumstances. The “third way” is neither an alignment nor an allegiance, but rather an attempt to ascertain what each nation can and should attempt to do, given its own unique circumstances. It is not the freedom to become whatever it wills; it is the freedom to design and attempt to implement a strategy suited to its situation, and all nations’ situations are not created equal. Each country has its own specific geography, population, resources, level of development, and geopolitical neighborhood. Ukraine may wish to become many things but its geography predestines it, even by name, as a borderland buffer state. Singapore’s favorable location at the heart of global shipping routes cannot be replicated by a landlocked nation and Singapore, in turn, cannot rival the manufacturing of a giant such as China. And those nations not blessed with the hydrocarbon resources under the Gulf States must make fundamentally different decisions than those endowed with similar natural resources. The economic freedom of choice which has emerged is not to become whatever a nation wishes, but to choose how best to play the hand it has been dealt.

Rather than the choice of an allegiance dictating patron and economic model, states now have a two-track decision. The patron has been replaced by a portfolio of options for capital, markets, security, and technology. The model is now situation-specific. Vietnam, for example, allies with whom it will, pledges allegiance to none but itself, and runs its own version of East Asian Tiger development. It demonstrates the new freedom in practice.

Why isn’t everyone copying China… or are they?

Some Asian states escaped the binary allegiance problem, rapidly developing with their own models while benefiting from the Western security and market umbrella. South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and British Hong Kong specifically shone. But it was China that scaled the model to a near-continental size and appeared to “crack the code” of successful economic development, at least in how to modernize and rise from poverty to superpower. Its tale is not yet complete as the transition from rising force to sustained stability is ongoing and China battles a shrinking workforce and deflationary pressures. But if the Chinese model really has shown the way, why aren’t developing nations simply emulating it?

The reason is that states are not copying what China IS; they are copying what China DID: building the strategy of development which suits their own situations. To copy China’s results requires copying China’s situation and few nations have the combination of a continental-sized market irresistible to foreign business interests, a mature administrative state, a near-homogeneous population, a capital-rich diaspora, and a civilizational identity whose thousands of years of tradition impart unmistakable cultural confidence. This confidence is reflected in its patient foreign policy, trading military adventurism for diplomatic and economic planning via the Belt and Road Initiative and decades of tangible material investment in foreign powers. The Chinese model, like that of Singapore, requires single-party political management and control which many other states are unable or unwilling to contemplate let alone institute.

Debt service is not unique to Western development, and China has been a creditor for decades; its investments worldwide are not charitable. Whereas some have projected their power via invasion and extraction, China has done so by investment and infrastructure. Chinese lending and building across Africa and South Asia come with strings attached as well, and benefit China at least as much as the host nations and have not always ended well. Thus, the lesson is not necessarily for a nation to simply exchange China for the United States in terms of from whom to borrow; it is that there are options on the table and opportunities to hedge, opportunities taken by countries such as Indonesia and the Gulf States.

Playing the hand you are dealt

If a state is unable or unwilling to adopt China’s path but wants similar results, what strategy does it choose to pursue? Professor Jeffrey Sachs, perhaps the world’s foremost development economist, considers the East Asian path from cheap export manufacturing to ever more sophisticated industry to be the proven route out of poverty. This requires several prerequisites, namely a population sufficiently large to industrialize and a competent governing bureaucracy willing and able to engage in sustained direction and discipline of the export economy for decades. Sachs’ “proven path out of poverty” is open to many but the second requirement necessitates a continuity of state control which has proven elusive or impossible for the majority of states that may consider the path.

The examples of Malaysia and Kenya show the issue. In 1963, both former British colonies had recently embarked on independent development, and both depended upon commodity export: Malaysia with rubber and tin; Kenya with coffee and tea. With a six-year head start on independence, Malaysia was approximately twice as wealthy although the two remained in the same broad class. Six decades later, Malaysia is an upper-middle-income industrialized power and Kenya remains a low-income, primarily agrarian economy. The gap widened to roughly ten to one by 2000 and has narrowed to under six since, in the same years Kenya began to diversify its patrons. The reason is clear: Malaysia followed the path later identified by Jeffrey Sachs and climbed from commodities to electronics and semiconductors. Its growth was self-directed, cumulative, and not attached to a superpower patron. Kenya, by contrast, imported its development model from its Western patron rather than building its own, and remained a commodity exporter. Only in the past two decades has it opened to China, a hedge visible in gleaming new infrastructure ranging from highways to airports to stadiums. Other examples show different strategies suited to individual situations: the Gulf States leverage hydrocarbon resources for sovereign wealth funds; states able to administer maritime chokepoints or geographic corridors monetize their specific geography; some, cut off from Western markets, reorient and refocus, as Russia and Iran have done in pivoting trade toward Asia; others, such as Eritrea and ultimately North Korea, choose genuine self-sufficient autarky; and Milei’s Argentina has chosen an experimental libertarian economic model. None of these is the American, Soviet, or Chinese model – all of them are situation-specific choices.

Malaysia and Kenya, 1960 to 2023. GDP per capita in current US dollars. Source: World Bank.

Credit coercion

None of these choices have ever been made in a vacuum; all of them have been made within the then-current context of the geopolitical order of the day, an order which made different strategies more or less affordable based on factors outside the state’s control. The reigning Western model, as described by economist Michael Hudson, rewards owning over producing. This puts lenders/creditors at the top of the food chain, meaning that the banks are paid before the people are fed. This model has evolved from the original Bretton Woods order immediately following the Second World War. At that time exchange rates were fixed and client states had room to maneuver. By the 1990s “market pricing” had supplanted the prior model and flexibility was gone. This does not mean that the Western order was an obstacle to growth; debtor nations inside the Western umbrella such as South Korea, Taiwan, and Malaysia clearly grew. However, the model rewards best those countries that are able to provide the goods the buyer wants and semiconductors provide a better return on investment than coffee beans. Given that the Western creditors are also the buyers, the same party sets the price of the goods and the price of the loans, and sets them both to its advantage.

This hits hardest in the poorest countries as the model which works best for a country’s development is the one lenders like least. Investment in industry, with slow and steady growth protected and cultivated by a consistent and involved government, delays the immediate returns demanded by lenders, who in turn raise the cost of borrowing. Countries in need of cash agree to the system which provides it, and lenders want investments with safe returns; thus, it is cheaper and easier for all parties if the borrowing country simply continues exporting what it already has or grows. This was Kenya’s path. It needed dollars to develop but also needed to earn dollars to pay back the debt. Selling tea and coffee earns those dollars, developing the nation and feeding its people does not. As such, the pressure of the Western model is maintaining the status quo of exporting goods in demand by Western customers rather than investing in schools, hospitals, infrastructure and the manufacturing capacity which raises the standard of living of each generation. The investment in the future is sacrificed in order to pay the debts owed in the present. This is not a new insight, and the point that developing nations have been forced to grow luxury crops for export at the price of a hungry population has been argued for decades. Keeping nations in poverty is not the goal and the system was not designed either to create or alleviate hunger; it was designed to extract profit. Hunger, however, is what happens when the structural mechanism gives primacy to the lender over the development of the country itself. “Aid” has become a profitable industry and the system is designed and run by profit-seekers, not by those seeking to develop.

Ethiopia is a telling example. For twenty years it was the darling of the developmental world, lifting millions out of poverty while building sparkling new infrastructure, railways, industrial parks, skyscrapers and a massive dam on the Blue Nile. The growth was visible, explosive, tangible, as well as expensive and debt-financed. Ethiopia’s debt grew alongside its infrastructure, and a civil war in Tigray that began in 2020 scared off foreign investment and wrought havoc on the nation’s finances. Ethiopia defaulted on its debt in 2024. The restructuring of Ethiopia’s debt is based on the Western private sector model. Yet, this is also Ethiopia’s choice, although the options available to it were determined by what lenders were willing to offer, not by what Ethiopia might have preferred. It had borrowed in dollars against infrastructure projects whose returns would only materialize decades later and in local currency. It then fought a war which cost the money earmarked to pay the debt. Neither the debt itself nor Ethiopia’s lenders caused the war, but the bill remained due. Had Ethiopia had the depth of reserves of China or a currency in demand outside its borders, its story might have had a different trajectory. The restructuring is based on creditor primacy because after default, it was the only option still available for a state seeking to borrow. Building infrastructure is a long-term return on investment in a currency not controlled by the lender. This is inherently a higher-risk and longer-term investment than the tried-and-true Western developmental “aid” model. The objection is not to Ethiopia’s growth, or that of any country; the objection is to the shift in the lending dynamic which gives power to the borrower rather than the lender. It is the developmental model’s version of the old saying: “If you owe the bank 100 euros, it’s your problem; if you owe the bank 100 million euros, it’s the bank’s problem.” Lenders understand this better than most and banks don’t like problems. Development takes states towards the second number; lenders prefer to keep it closer to the first. The coercion that once arrived as a coup now arrives as a credit rating.

No other nation is China

The emergence of the multipolar era has ushered in unprecedented global opportunities for developing nations to seize control of their own development trajectories. But economic freedom of choice does not mean the ability to choose success over failure or stagnation. It means the ability for states to match their given situations, their resources, population, geography, institutions and bureaucracies to the developmental model which fits them best and then attempt to execute it over time. The freedom is the choice of model rather than of patron; but it is no guarantee of success. India demonstrates the risk. Like China, it has a near-continental market, a vast population, a capital-rich diaspora, and a civilizational identity stretching back thousands of years. But it is not industrializing in the same way China and the “Tigers” have. What it lacks is the ability to dictate and control over time the development across the country; in China, Beijing orders and the provinces execute. In India, New Delhi declares and twenty-eight states bargain, debate, and compromise, in a dozen different languages with the pressures of the electoral cycle. Thus, India’s growth, while tangible, has not resulted in a shift from agriculture to industry, but instead concentrated primarily among the existing elite. Rather than lifting all out of poverty, India’s wealth is widening the disparity gap. The multipolar era returned to India the freedom to choose its own path, but it did not guarantee results. No other nation is China, but the return of economic freedom of choice gives each country a chance to develop on its own terms.

As each nation selects and implements its own developmental strategies, we shall continue to see a divergence of many plans rather than an adherence to only a few. Some are succeeding, some are failing, all are works in progress. What has returned to the world stage is the opportunity for this process, the reframing of the question faced by nations seeking to develop from “what must we do?” to “what should we attempt to do given who, what and where we are?” After nearly three-quarters of a century during which developing nations were forced to choose allegiance in order to have a chance to advance, this newfound freedom marks an historical turning point and an opportunity for each country to seize the day and take charge of its own economic destiny. The American model is still on the menu, and for some states it may be the right one. What has changed is that there is a menu at all and that the choice has shifted from allegiance to agency.

The opening salvo in the United States and Israeli attack on Iran on 28 February 2026 featured strikes on over 1000 targets, including a three-Tomahawk cruise missile strike shortly after 10:23 am on the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, southern Iran. At least 168 innocent civilians were killed, the overwhelming majority of them children, over one hundred of whom were under the age of twelve.

Despite official denials, evidence soon confirmed that the strike originated from the USS Spruance and that the school was on the target list. How? While it was located fewer than 100 meters from an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) installation, the Shajareh Tayyebeh school had been open for years. Until some time between 2013 and 2016, when a wall was constructed clearly separating the two, the school had been part of the compound itself. Satellite imagery shows the separation clearly for at least a decade. The school was not a secret facility and had an online and social media presence. Its civilian status was clear, obvious, and readily available to any analyst able to classify it as a civilian object ineligible for military targeting and entitled to protection. No analyst made this determination and that was no accident.

Operation “Epic Fury” was planned with the integrated use of the Maven Smart System, a Palantir platform designed to be more efficient than human targeting analysts. Maven can generate over one thousand “target packages” each hour and the United States relied upon it for over 5000 separate targets during the first ten days of the war. Within the data Maven relied upon to designate the building housing the elementary school in Minab, was information which still classified the building as an IRGC military facility and thus a valid target under International Humanitarian Law (IHL, the Law of Armed Conflict - LOAC). Despite the fact that Maven’s information was at least a decade out of date, no human being reviewed it, updated it, or checked on its accuracy. The system worked precisely as designed and Maven’s information led to kinetic force being used on a civilian target before any human being could intervene to correct it because the system in place is designed for speed and efficiency, not for human oversight and review, and certainly not for personal accountability. Therein lies the greatest problem of all.

It is very convenient, politically and commercially, to brush this attack aside as an AI atrocity in which the machine made a mistake and no one is to blame. However, the decision to feed old data into Maven was a human choice. The choice to outsource the selection in ten days of at least 5000 targets to an AI system was also human; and the choice not to have a human system of oversight and review to ensure IHL compliance and the protection of the innocent was also human. A real decision to attack Minab was made and it was not by AI. It was made in multiple phases, each shielding the decider from accountability: by whoever decided updating the targeting database was unnecessary; by whoever determined that Maven’s unverified database would be treated as sufficiently vetted to enable killing force; by whoever decided that US warfighting required a targeting tempo so extreme that human oversight was impossible. By the time the three Tomahawks irrevocably began their deadly arcs to Minab the decision to kill had been diluted to the point at which no one could be held directly accountable for the 168 humans about to die.

The machine does not decide on its own

Fears of the use of artificial intelligence in war traditionally revolve around robot soldiers, a vision which is seeing fruition in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, with AI-enhanced drones empowered to destroy vehicles they independently identify as unambiguously military in nature, and in Gaza with AI-powered drones alleged to have significantly wider targeting latitude. Behind these examples though lies an entire infrastructure of technology and a corrosive detachment of accountability from the ultimate decision to kill. The above examples are machines empowered to kill; but the decision to loose them into the world in order to kill is fully human.

The attack at Minab was not decided by Maven or any other machine. It was the end result of many human decisions all routed through a system designed for speed and scale but with the result of removing human accountability. The danger is not only the existence of machines capable of deciding to kill someone and then doing it. The more pervasive danger is that we are using machines to remove accountability for the acts of war.

For decades, commentators such as Robert Sparrow have been warning of the “responsibility gap” of autonomous weaponry and the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions Christof Heyns warned in 2013 that delegating these decisions to machines threatened both the “right to life and human dignity.” Human dignity is another way of acknowledging the human soul and the differentiation of individuals from objects, animals, or other “units”. It is the undergirding principle for International Humanitarian Law. Enforcement of IHL, and thus the protection of human life, depends on accountability. Outsourcing violence to unaccountable machines creates a scenario the law has not been written to address: death and destruction without a clearly accountable actor. Scapegoats can and will always be found, but this is an evasion as the system itself dilutes accountability where it matters most: the protection of the innocent in times of conflict.

The cog and the code

Perhaps the most famous demonstration that diluted accountability is no defense against charges of murder came from the Jerusalem trial of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann in 1961. Eichmann played a critical role in facilitating the deportation of European Jews to concentration and death camps across Europe. Eichmann was a bureaucrat, a functionary, and his disturbing apparent lack of exceptionalism inspired Hannah Arendt’s unforgettable description of “the banality of evil.” Arendt did not mean that evil was ordinary or that ordinary men were bound to commit it. Eichmann’s evil lay in his thoughtlessness and his failure to do something out of the ordinary: to question his orders or fail to follow them, to think critically about the greater moral implications of his work, to recognize that being a cog in a machine of evil was indeed being accountable for the evil of the machine.

Nothing about the attack in Minab is comparable to the scale or deliberate genocidal purpose of the crimes of the Second World War. However, the structure of Eichmann’s position within the great criminal enterprise of the Holocaust is analogous to the division of labor involved in the Minab strike. In Eichmann’s case, each man handled only a discrete and clearly defined set of responsibilities in the greater murderous project, thus (with few exceptions) no individual experienced himself as accountable as a killer. With Maven and Minab the structure is similar: the database, pipeline, tempo, target packages, strike orders, each is discrete, none are individually accountable. The difference between these two examples is the subject of this essay and is profoundly troubling.

The bureaucracy of National Socialism was populated by individuals any one of whom could have, at any point, considered or reconsidered what their actions were a part of, and thus done something either to mitigate, thwart, or remove themselves from it. In fact, some did. AI, on the other hand, removes the individual from parts of the equation. Palantir and others are building streamlined automated platforms in which no moment for reflection is available. It is a new banality of evil, one in which the very opportunity for thought and second-thoughts has been engineered away. However, just because the program was designed in a way that dilutes accountability does not mean that those who design it and those who use it are not accountable.

A commander who knows the system will bear the responsibility for targeting errors and collateral damage experiences the illusion of a lower moral cost at the moment he authorizes lethal force. The diffusion and dilution of blame inherent in AI targeting such as Maven is not only a defense ready to be employed after lethal force is used, it is a moral anesthetic applied in advance. AI targeting platforms lower the threshold at which individuals are willing to administer death and they do so precisely by falsely promising that if the wrong person is killed, the mistake is the fault of the machine, not the commander. As AI targeting becomes increasingly pervasive, this moral evasion cannot be dismissed as simply the cost of doing business.

Abdication all the way down

Recognizing the primary issue as a built-in abdication of moral responsibility, rather than simply the transfer of accountability to an automated system, reveals that the problem is visible at multiple levels: a structure of shifted accountability hiding human choices behind the veneer of a computer program.

The topmost layer is the decision-making operator, the individual who ratifies the output of the machine without exercising independent human oversight and judgment. Israeli reporting on indigenous AI systems in Gaza, specifically Lavender, the Gospel, and Where’s Daddy?, describes the rote approval of massive numbers of AI-generated targets with little to no scrutiny. Maven had the same feature, approval at “AI speed” of insufficiently vetted targets. Target approval has shifted from review and oversight to blind trust in the system and the software. This is a built-in shift away from human accountability.

The next layer is those who provide the AI system with the dataset from which it obtains targets. When this data is unverified, or as in the case of Minab, inaccurate and so old as to be unreliable, there are humans who determined that the information was trustworthy. Here we find a scapegoat, a false answer to the accountability question. Systems will always find a scapegoat when necessary. Yet dependence upon an AI program such as Palantir’s Maven, which generates targets at a speed impossible for a human to review, reveals the scapegoat to be the wrong party to hold accountable. Those who fed in the bad data, and those who determined that the speed of targeting would be faster than human oversight, are the accountable parties.

The third layer is at the state level. In December 2025 the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 80/57 on autonomous weapons by 164 votes to 6, with 7 abstentions. The resolution was sponsored by Austria with 30 co-sponsors. China abstained; Russia, Israel, and the United States voted against it. In other words, the leading powers in military usage of AI opted against constraining themselves in the rapidly advancing military application of artificial intelligence. The UN Secretary General and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) are working towards a legally binding treaty by the end of 2026, with meetings scheduled for November. However, abdication of even the legal framework of responsibility by the very states most active in the development and military application of artificial intelligence represents an attempt to sidestep legal accountability at the moment of its creation.

The final layer of accountability is society. When any nation’s population accepts the explanation that atrocities are a “software error” or that the killing of well over one hundred children in Minab is the cost of doing business, when the business is AI-enhanced military targeting, that society is accountable in part as well. This level may be the most important as this is where a people determine if they are to accept systems above them which treat atrocities as unaccountable events or maintain the centuries-long moral and legal belief that human dignity requires accountability when innocent life is wrongly and prematurely ended.

Atrocities old and new

Three months after the Minab strikes, on 22 May 2026, the world witnessed another attack on a school filled with innocents, this time in Starobilsk, in Luhansk Oblast, recently annexed by the Russian Federation and still contested by the government of Ukraine. This point is relevant beyond the politics of optics. From the perspective of the Russian Federation, the attack was on Russian youth; from the perspective of the Ukrainian government, it was on young Ukrainians in occupied territory, although the Ukrainian government claimed the attack was on a “drone-pilot training centre”.

The attack began at 2200 hours and featured 16 drone strikes directed on Starobilsk College, part of Luhansk State Pedagogical University, a teacher-training institution. It resulted in the partial collapse of a five-story dormitory, trapping at least 86 students in the building, injuring 42 and killing at least 21, almost all of whom were young women, students training to become teachers.

Russian commentators quickly attributed the attack to Western use of AI targeting, exactly replicating the case in Minab. There is no public basis for that claim although it was politically convenient to make as it served to implicitly implicate the United States as accountable. It is overwhelmingly more likely that AI was not involved in the selection of the dormitory as a target and that it is a more recent example of a traditional atrocity: a war crime with a distinctly identifiable accountable party. In the Starobilsk strike, individuals did choose the target, they did validate the strike package, they did send 16 one-way attack drones and they did kill at least 21 young students. This is a situation for which the traditional and currently in-force laws of armed conflict were written, one in which when the worst things are done by people, those things and people are named, and individuals can be held to account.

That is the difference between the atrocity in Starobilsk and the atrocity in Minab. Both are strikes on civilian students. The attack on Starobilsk is one which the international system is prepared to address and to provide justice. The attack on Minab, however, is a war crime without an easily identified legal perpetrator. The diffusion of accountability built into AI targeting is an assault on the very foundation of International Humanitarian Law and on the human dignity that foundation was built to protect. A killing without a nameable killer leaves a legal hole where a defendant should stand, and a body of law built to replace vengeance with accountability cannot function when there is no one identifiable to hold to account. With the possibility of legal justice removed, what is left is retaliation, and retaliation always threatens escalation.

What the law was built to protect

International Humanitarian Law was built to protect human life and dignity, to allow resolution of conflicts and provide justice off the battlefield. To reduce civilian life to potential collateral damage determined by a computer program is to weigh the human soul as an object to be measured and processed at AI speed in terms of acceptable losses. The philosophy undergirding IHL demands that innocent life be judged and respected as the ultimate and most important thing to protect. Binding international law written throughout the 20th Century was drafted precisely because the world had seen the result of the devaluation of civilian life across two World Wars and its language is explicit in its demands.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) opens by affirming that all human beings are “born free and equal in dignity and rights.” The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (in force since 1976) states that “every human being has the inherent right to life” which shall not be arbitrarily deprived; this is the specific argument used in addressing autonomous weaponry. Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions (1949) itself prohibits “outrages upon personal dignity,” demonstrating that the law of war treats human dignity as something to protect.

Most explicit is the 1899 Martens Clause restated in the 1977 Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions, which states that even where no other treaty is in place “civilians and combatants remain under the protection and authority of the principles of international law derived from established custom, from the principles of humanity and from the dictates of public conscience.” A new treaty, to which the leading practitioners of militarized AI may or may not choose to bind themselves, is not necessary to determine that the killing of innocent civilians by military means demands accountability. AI systems whose speed and scale diffuse that accountability so comprehensively that individuals are impossible to hold responsible render useless the legal guidance governing the conduct of war.

International Humanitarian Law imposes three primary duties in any military attack: distinction, proportionality, and precaution. Minab was preeminently a failure of precaution as precaution is the obligation to take constant care to do everything feasible to verify that a target is a valid military objective. Palantir’s Maven AI system is built for speed and efficiency and demands a tempo in which there is no time to double-check, no time to independently verify. Distinction failed in Minab as well, but as a side-effect, because no one took the opportunity to verify the school’s validity as a target in the first place. Proportionality is a different sort of failure, a weighing and balancing, and there is nothing to balance when a fully civilian school is filled with children in class.

When the four layers of abdication of accountability inherent in AI targeting are measured against the corpus of IHL, the problem becomes clear. The operator skips over the verification step required by precaution as the speed of the AI system delivers the target ready to strike, completely removing from the equation those who input the data initially. The State abdicates responsibility required by IHL to protect human dignity. Finally, society, should it accept atrocities committed in the course of using AI targeting as “the cost of doing business”, will have abdicated the “dictates of public conscience” protecting human dignity as stated in the Martens Clause. These abdications are not a side-effect of AI technology: they are the systemic dismantling of the international legal infrastructure which ensures human life is treated with the dignity it requires, rather than as units to measure, weigh, and destroy.

Whither accountability?

The stark aftermath of the strikes on Minab shows at the very least that death was delivered to innocents and that accountability for the killings is difficult to assign. The diffusion and dilution of accountability is not easily fixable by updating Palantir’s source code or expanding AI capabilities. The trajectory of AI development is towards more speed, more autonomy, more capacity. This removes the role of the human and eclipses the human judgment needed by law.

The laws of 1899, 1948, 1949, and 1977 were written and adopted by those who understood that the death of innocents demanded accountability. To adopt systems of killing which remove or dilute human accountability to meaninglessness quietly rejects the concept that the protection of human dignity is the highest responsibility. The machine did not make a mistake in Minab, people did. People built and used a system to ensure that no one would stand accountable when “mistakes were made” and when 168 innocents were killed, no one did.

Joseph Busby is the Founder and Director of Reality-Based Analysis Group (RBAG), an independent geopolitical analysis firm based in Vienna, Austria. RBAG is affiliated with the Association for the Promotion of International Development and Stability (APIDS — apids.at). Subscribe at rbag.at.

© 2026 Joseph Busby / Reality-Based Analysis Group. Licensed under CC BY-ND 4.0. You may reproduce this work in full with attribution to Reality-Based Analysis Group and a link to rbag.at.

The Road not Taken

The multipolar world is neither an accident nor a surprise. It is the inevitable and foreseen result of a road refused at the end of the Cold War, and the two agreements signed in Beijing this May are not only a status report on a project three decades long; they are also a window into how that world will be governed.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union marked the decisive end of the Cold War and the entire post-World War II bipolar global order. Between November 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the July 1991 dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the end of the Soviet Union itself that December, decisions were made by both sides which revealed a fundamental disconnect between visions of the world order to come. Much like Imperial Germany in 1918 prior to the signing of the Armistice ending World War I, the Soviets anticipated treatment as equals; however, again like Imperial Germany, the victorious West imposed a strategy of destruction. This time there was no obviously punitive Treaty of Versailles; there were disingenuous gentlemen’s agreements, strategies of economic exploitation, and most importantly, a refusal to demilitarize and dissolve NATO, even though its raison d’être no longer existed. The West chose domination rather than seizing the opportunity to transform hostilities into shared security interests and a partnership stretching not only from Lisbon to Vladivostok, but into an alliance spanning the globe.

This concept was not outlandish; it was Gorbachev himself who laid out a vision, hearkening back to de Gaulle, of a common European home stretching all the way to the Pacific. He recognized that the end of the war did not necessitate subjugation, but offered opportunity, that the fall of the Wall could mean the end of the East/West divide rather than simply the renegotiation of where that divide lay. The possibility and opportunity were real and the decision of the victorious West to discard this vision and instead pursue a policy of domination and contempt represents perhaps the most revelatory and short-sighted mistake since the Versailles Treaty itself.

Rather than an embrace of equals, NATO reinforced and within a decade began to expand. The divide between East and West did not dissolve, it began to migrate eastward, slowly absorbing the former Warsaw Pact states and inexorably encroaching upon the Russian border itself.

Denied by the West for a generation, yet clearly documented in declassified releases, the Soviet Union agreed to withdraw its troops from East Germany only after securing the promise from US Secretary of State James Baker that NATO would not move, in the famous phrase, “one inch eastward.” A closed-door promise from a recent adversary is not a binding treaty, and Moscow relied on a gentleman’s agreement that the West considered less than legally binding. This difference, in which the Soviets moved forward trusting a common vision the West did not hold, is a pattern Russia would follow repeatedly in its negotiations with the West over the next three decades.

The West, faced with a former adversary defeated yet unconquered, which retained the size, resources, nuclear capabilities and self-image of a great power, was unable to neutralize Russia and the newly born Commonwealth of Independent States, and instead of choosing a path of integration, it opted for a strategy of gradual degradation. This decision was the fork in the road not taken, a path away from Western-oriented multipolarity, in a bid for what would be a short-lived unipolar order. That choice did not prevent a multipolar world; rather, it ensured the shift of the center of gravity of multipolarity would move from Europe to Eurasia. Russia responded to what it viewed as the perfidy of the West not by restarting the Cold War, but by drafting a blueprint for multipolarity and drawing a roadmap with China which much of the world has been following for almost three decades.

Two Different Types of Harvard Men

The West’s bid for global hegemony was not immediately obvious to Russia, and Western attitudes regarding Russia’s place in the post-Cold War era were perhaps revealed first through economics. After the collapse of the Soviet model, Russian economic life required wholesale restructuring and this involved two very different approaches. The first approach was to help and to provide immediate and direct proactive assistance. Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs, fresh from designing Poland’s successful transition from a managed to a market economy, and benefiting from having a seat at the table of Russia’s ultimate decision-makers, prescribed for Russia precisely what had already succeeded in Poland: large-scale Western financial support, long-term debt-relief, a pause on debt-servicing, and a fund to stabilize the ruble, just as had been done for the Polish zloty. The G7, United States government, and the IMF had provided all of these to Poland and, per Sachs, Washington and Europe flatly refused to do the same for Russia.

One month prior to the ultimate dissolution of the USSR, Yegor Gaidar, then-Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Policy and Minister of Economy and Finance for the Russian Republic (the RSFSR), requested from the G7 a pause on debt servicing. He was not only refused but threatened, reportedly told that emergency food aid would be halted, literally turned around and sent home, should Russia fail to pay what it owed when it was due. Sachs pressed his case, ultimately resigning in protest after determining that the West did not truly consider the Cold War to be over and was pressing for economic hegemony by deliberately withholding from Russia the help freely extended to Poland. Sachs reveals this to have been a choice, a strategy, and not an accidental blunder. The economic catastrophe which befell Russia in the 1990s was not the inevitable result of the “shock therapy” reorientation to a market economy; it was the result of being denied the tools to manage the transition which left the Russian economy prey to another sort of intervention, also from Harvard.

The infamous “Harvard Boys” came next and their objective was more acquisition than assistance. Named by scholar Janine Wedel and kept famous by analyst Alastair Crooke, this group of advisers, many of whom were associated with Harvard’s Institute for International Development, controlled the passage of tens of millions of dollars of American aid, and they focused on the privatization of Russian state assets. Through a system of rapid sales, of which loans-for-shares was the most notorious episode, the Harvard Boys created an oligarchy rather than a property-owning democracy. Through their actions, the industrial base of the Soviet economy was transferred, at a fraction of its value, to a small handful of well-placed men. Some of the very advisers entrusted with building Russia’s new economy enriched themselves through the access it afforded, self-dealing that would end with the Harvard Boys in an American courtroom. In Russia, the oligarchs took center stage.

For countless millions of ordinary Russians this resulted in personal catastrophe. Hyperinflation erased savings, production halved, life expectancy collapsed, and premature deaths numbered in the millions. By the end of the decade, Russia had defaulted. Western economic assistance had turned out to be a strategy to ensure weakness and division with no regard whatsoever for the Russian people or for Russia’s historic place in the world. Russia absorbed the blow and the lesson, which was reinforced by the West’s political actions on the Russian periphery.

More Than an Inch…

Economic exploitation did not take place in a vacuum; it was accompanied by consistent Western resistance to Russian overtures, and eventually, to Russian warnings. As verified by former Secretary General of NATO George Robertson, on multiple occasions Russian President Vladimir Putin raised the possibility of Russia joining NATO itself. Putin stated publicly, in 2000, that he considered Russian membership in NATO to be “conceivable” and he recalled mentioning the possibility in a conversation with US President Bill Clinton, who did not object, although the discomfort of the US President’s entourage was evident. Russia never directly applied and was never directly rejected but the idea was floated repeatedly and greeted with a discomfort wholly appropriate to an organization designed to counter Russian power.

The Russians were not blind to this attitude nor were they too weak to protest officially at every hint that the West was turning its back on the promise not to expand NATO eastward. In late 1994, as the short-lived “Partnership for Peace” morphed into what Jeffrey Sachs calls a “neoconservative” project for NATO expansion into Central Europe, Boris Yeltsin directly confronted Clinton and other Western leaders at the Budapest Summit warning that moving NATO eastward threatened to push the continent into a “cold peace.” He was ignored. In spring 1999, NATO welcomed Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic into its ranks and within less than two weeks began a bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, against strenuous objection from Russia and without United Nations Security Council authorization, driving Yugoslavian forces from Kosovo, which would declare independence years later and host one of NATO’s largest military bases. It was a revelatory moment, in which NATO showed that it was willing and able to attack a Russian ally, a country which had not attacked any NATO member, and to do so without UN backing and expressly against Russian opposition.

Despite this, Russia again extended its hand to the United States, specifically after the attacks of September 2001, offering expanded partnership and cooperation in the newly declared “Global War on Terror.” Yet, a mere three years later, in 2004, NATO expanded again, this time to Russia’s borders in the Baltics. By 2007, Russian President Putin took more direct action in what may be his most famous international speech, given at the Munich Security Conference. Putin declared that a unipolar world was unacceptable and impossible and the very concept was destructive. His pointed question of “against whom, precisely, was NATO enlargement directed?” referenced the broken promises made not to expand NATO. His speech was accompanied by distinct Russian policy changes in Europe and it also marked the anniversary of the beginning of a new partnership with China, quietly signed a decade before.

Putin’s position regarding NATO expansion was not uniquely Russian; it was held by famed diplomat George Kennan, future Central Intelligence Agency Chief William Burns, and Clinton Defense Secretary William Perry. Kennan, the architect of the victorious Cold War strategy of “containment,” called NATO expansion the most fateful error of American post-Cold War policy and accurately predicted that it would poison relations between the two countries. Burns, then-US Ambassador to Russia, penned the famous “Nyet means nyet” cable highlighting the very real Russian red line of NATO expansion to Ukraine and Georgia. Perry considered resignation. Yet in 2008, at the NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania, both countries were publicly named as future members. Russia’s response went beyond rhetoric and a five-day war in Georgia, instigated by Tbilisi, swiftly showed the consequences of breaching its red lines. The West, notwithstanding its promises to Georgia of NATO membership, did not intervene.

NATO’s eastward enlargement, 1999–2024, with Ukraine and Georgia named as future members at Bucharest in 2008.

The patterns were clear and the behavior consistent; from finance to politics to war in the Balkans, the West noted Russian objections and then pushed past them, in each instance weakening Russia’s interests, whether economic, political, or strategic.

The Inevitable

Throughout this time, Russian strategic thinking recognized that the unipolar moment was inherently temporary and that multiple centers of power across the world were a reality not only of history but of inevitability. American-style unipolarity revealed itself from its earliest moments to be overambitious and significantly beyond capacity; Russia, understanding itself as what would later be called a “civilization-state,” had every expectation that it would eventually rise again and resume what it considered to be its rightful place in the world order. Russia also knew that the decades of diplomatic, economic, and military assistance and development invested by the Soviet Union across the world had left constituencies across Africa, Asia and Latin America not only sympathetic to Russia’s worldview, but more eager to participate in a multipolar world order as equals than to be managed, as junior partners at best, in what would later be known as the Western-led “rules-based order.” From Russia’s perspective, even in the earliest years of rebuilding the multipolar world, featuring civilization-states such as Russia and China as its anchors was a more natural development than a world run by a central power and organized through the architecture of colonialism.

Russia recognized China as a fellow “civilization-state,” defined not only as a country with its own history, language and culture, but as an irreducible cardinal member of the community of nations. A civilization-state can be nothing less than a pole, and a world with multiple civilization-states must inevitably be organized as multipolar. Russian perception of consistent contemptuous treatment by the West, and a failure to be recognized for who it recognized itself to be, led inevitably to the coming together of the two great powers dominating Eurasia. In a world in which the “Global South” was predisposed to multipolarity and the two great civilization-states straddled the Eurasian “World Island” and shared one of the world’s longest borders, overtures between Russia and China were not only obvious, they were inevitable. It began, officially, in the spring of 1997. Western hubris, basking in its unipolar moment, paid it little to no attention.

The Initial Roadmap

The Soviet Union had dissolved only a half-decade before and Russia remained deep in the beginning of its long rebuilding process when Chinese President Jiang Zemin and Russian President Boris Yeltsin signed a declaration in Moscow on 23 April 1997. Civilization-states are not known for impetuosity and the “Russian-Chinese Joint Declaration on a Multipolar World and the Establishment of a New International Order” stands as a remarkable forecast for the world to come, especially from the vantage point of the late 1990s when the unipolar world was at the pinnacle of its power. The Declaration is the initial roadmap to a multipolar world and Russia and China have been steadily advancing along it, joined by an ever-growing caravan of nations. Although the West dismissed or ignored it, Russia and China circulated the document officially to the United Nations General Assembly and Security Council. The covering letter was signed by the then little-known permanent representative to the United Nations, Sergei Lavrov, the now towering figure in Russian diplomacy signing the descendants of this document today.

The Declaration was not a work of prescience predicting the world to be; it was a prescription, a formula and it laid down in clear prose the vocabulary which both governments continue to use, at times verbatim, almost thirty years later. The 1997 document demands mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, non-interference, and peaceful coexistence. It emphasizes that no country should pursue hegemony or demand unilateral management of international affairs. It names a new universally applicable concept of security and rejects the Cold War mentality of dividing the world. The Declaration warns against bloc politics and the enlargement of military alliances. Detailing the architecture of multipolarity, it names the developing world and Non-Aligned Movement as the forces inevitably leading toward multipolarization and it recognizes the United Nations and the Security Council as paramount in its governance.

Read alongside the two documents signed in Beijing in May 2026, the continuity is not only obvious, it is nearly verbatim. 1997’s “new and universally applicable” concept of security has become 2026’s “indivisible and equal security.” The injunction against monopolizing international affairs is now the principle of “democratization of international relations.” Even the title of one of the two 2026 documents, the “Joint Declaration of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on the Establishment of a Multipolar World and a New Type of International Relations,” had its genesis in the 1997 description of the Russian-Chinese partnership as a “new type of long-term inter-state relations…not directed against third countries.”

The 1997 blueprint for multipolarity was an architecture for both partnerships and institutions. It referenced the agreements then underway between Russia, China and the “new” Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan then called the “Shanghai Five,” the precursor to today’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Yet importantly, as Yeltsin himself explained, the declarations create no defensive obligations, no alliances, no blocs, but rather bonds of friendship and cooperation. This language recurs in 2021 when China and Russia clarified their relationship as an interaction “exceeding” traditional military or political alliances, repeated yet again in 2026. In a world in which a unipolar power can be counted upon to resist the inexorable multipolar drive, violence is expected and the choice to avoid binding military alliances was a critical and purposeful decision, preventing the expansion of conflicts, such as that in Ukraine, from regional to global conflagrations.

Yet perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the two documents is that the primary difference between the 1997 and 2026 documents is not the content, it is the tense. The 1997 Declaration put a stake in the ground and provided a roadmap for the upcoming “new” “multipolar era,” upon whose “threshold” they stood. By 2026, the Joint Declaration abandoned the future tense and embraced the present, describing a “long-term state of polycentricity.” The roadmap to multipolarity was written in 1997; by 2026 Russia and China declared that they had followed it to its destination.

From Blueprint to Building

The first and the latest documents do much more than repeat shared concepts and language and they do not stand alone. They bookend a series of official statements, each a signpost, each marking distinct developments and mapping out new objectives. Each is both a status report and an invitation; and each delivers a new version of the multipolar blueprint, one in which ideas have turned into organizations, and plans have become partnerships.

The two parallel document tracks of the Russia–China multipolar project, 1996–2026.

One set of documents lays out the doctrine and details the multipolar world Russia and China intended to bring to fruition. After the 1997 Declaration came the July 2005 “Joint Declaration on the International Order in the Twenty-First Century,” the “Joint Statement on the World Situation” of July 2017, and the February 2022 “Joint Statement on International Relations Entering a New Era.” This document, signed in Beijing, with full knowledge of the likelihood of imminent conflict in Ukraine, announced a “friendship with no limits” between China and Russia. Each of these documents is cited by name in the preamble of the May 2026 Joint Declaration. The string of documents represents consistent progress toward shared objectives; it is the roadmap we are still following.

The second, parallel, set of documents contains the blueprints. Here the architecture of the multipolar world is declared and then built. It began even earlier, in 1996, with the Sino-Russian Joint Statement of “strategic partnership, equality and mutual trust.” Five years later, the July 2001 “Treaty of Good-Neighbourliness, Friendship, and Cooperation” provided the legal framework of the partnership, updated in 2021 and again on its 25th anniversary in the spring of 2026. In between were multiple bilateral agreements, each advancing elements of the shared vision, such as global strategic stability and the authority of international law.

The institutions managing the multipolar transition became tangible. The Shanghai Five grew to become the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and now counts India, Pakistan, and Iran among its members, thus representing the vast majority of the Eurasian population. The BRICS nations, once an economist’s shorthand reference, became a tangible and growing formal membership organization of its own, spanning the globe and expanding well beyond its acronym. While BRICS is by no means a unified bloc, it has sufficient coherence for global economists to take seriously BRICS discussions on de-dollarization via a potential new currency. Already Moscow and Beijing settle the vast majority of their trade together in their own currencies, insulated by design to protect against Western sanctions and punitive economic policies. Bilateral trade grew from a footnote in 1997 to over two hundred billion dollars per year by the end of 2025. The Power of Siberia pipeline of 2019 is being followed up with a second and much larger sibling (The Power of Siberia II) fast-tracked after the destruction of the Nord Stream Pipeline and the US-Israeli attacks on Iran in early 2026. Once unfathomable, Russian-Chinese joint military exercises have been routine for decades.

The parallel progression detailed by these documents, each announced, celebrated, and often circulated at the United Nations, demonstrates a patient public reordering of the world, one whose momentum was both tangible and undeniable. They detailed, publicly and explicitly, a program in which goals and intentions were stated clearly, followed up on, achieved, and then new objectives were laid out; all in inexorable pursuit of a multipolar world order the prime movers considered inevitable. Visible to all who would see it, the West chose blindness until February 2022, the month marked both by the announcement of the Russian-Chinese “friendship with no limits” and the outbreak of open hostilities between Russia and Ukraine. Only then did Western policymakers take seriously the partnership. Misreading the February 2022 “Joint Statement” as a reactive statement on current affairs rather than the deliberately timed culmination of a decades-long partnership in progress, the West unsuccessfully sought to drive a wedge between the two countries. It failed completely, and to Western consternation, their attempts to destroy the Russian economy after the 24 February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, and especially after the successful Western sabotage of the promising Istanbul Peace talks of March 2022, resulted in the acceleration of Russian integration into the very institutions they had been building with China over the prior decades. The critical decision, made in 1997 and reiterated throughout the decades, that the partnership was not a military alliance and that the multipolar project was not a military one proved its wisdom and prevented the conflict in Ukraine from escalating unnecessarily into one involving China.

By the time Vladimir Putin signed the two documents in Beijing with Xi Jinping, the exercise was not one of forecasting a multipolar world to come. The parallel documents continued, but they now describe the management of the world that is, rather than one that would be.

The Latest Status Report

The two documents signed in May 2026 in Beijing again reinforce the doctrine of multipolarity and update its tangible architecture. The shorter of the two documents, the “Joint Declaration on the Establishment of a Multipolar World and a New Type of International Relations,” reiterates and updates the current status of the multipolar world order as having indeed arrived*. The longer, more comprehensive 47-page document is the “Joint Statement on Further Strengthening Comprehensive Partnership and Strategic Interaction and Deepening Relations of Good- Neighbourliness, Friendship and Cooperation,” and it is a catalogue of the instruments through which China and Russia envision how that world is to be governed.

The shorter document, a manifesto of sorts, confidently states four cardinal principles as nonnegotiable. Better put, it presents these principles yet again, as each of them is a more confident and declarative restatement of the same four ideas presented in 1997. First is the importance of inclusive and mutually beneficial cooperation among nations; the insistence on equality of states and a recognition that there shall be no permitted hegemons or countries considered superior to others. Second is the evolution of the 1997 idea of the “new concept of security” now updated as “indivisible and equal security.” This includes an objection to proxy wars and expanding alliances, NATO foremost among them, though never named. Third is the democratization of international relations, directly addressing 1997’s prohibition on monopolizing world affairs and aiming squarely at the once unipolar hegemon. The fourth is an explicit recognition of civilizational and value differences among peoples and nations, and the rejection of any one culture’s claim to universal moral norms. In 1997, these statements were aspirations; in 2026 they are affirmations of the status quo. No longer are Russia and China arguing for the need for multipolarity; they are describing the world as it actually is. Notably, the vocabulary used in the description, though signed by Russia, is primarily Chinese. This subtle linguistic aspect of the documents hints that the center of gravity of multipolarity continues migrating eastward and that the World Island puts its emphasis on the second syllable of Eurasia.

The 47-page Joint Statement on Further Strengthening Comprehensive Partnership and Strategic Interaction is a strikingly different document from the shorter manifesto. It lays out in clear and explicit detail four different broad topics germane to global interaction and the mechanisms proposed to address them. The first topic is financial. The Statement implicitly advances global de-dollarization and refers to the settlement of international trade in national currencies as something to continue rather than something to achieve. It explicitly condemns any freezing or seizing of sovereign reserves as unlawful and asserts the right of reciprocation in cases in which this takes place. This is clearly a reference to the serial Western seizures of the sovereign reserves of Venezuela, Iran, and particularly Russia, among others. These provisions speak to the creation and maintenance of an alternative global financial system, independent of the dollar and buffered against financial measures and punishments imposed by the West.

The second topic is security. The Statement commits the Chinese Global Security Initiative and Russian initiative for a Eurasian Security Architecture to explore a potential merger. This is perhaps the most explicit signal in the entire document of the direction of the Russian-Chinese partnership. It is still committed to not being a military or defensive alliance, with all the commitments and concomitant risks that entails. Rather, it is a signal of a unified Eurasian security space, designed to be clear of the archipelago of foreign military bases dotting the rest of the world.

The third topic details the institutions of governance. A ten-year strategy for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is laid out and overlaps with the financial topic by including consultations for an SCO bank of its own. The chairmanship of the ever-expanding BRICS is noted to be passing from India to China next year. A new “Greater Eurasian Partnership” is revealed to be the alignment of the Eurasian Economic Union with China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Further, it pledges support for the Union State, currently composed of Russia and Belarus, and its development with respect to promoting peace, stability and prosperity in the region.

The fourth topic is explicitly doctrinal. The Statement condemns in clear and precise language the assassination, abduction, or forced trials of heads of state and the concept of “regime change.” It lays out clear positions on limitations of the military application of artificial intelligence and it warns of American missile-defense programs. These declarations position the multipolar project squarely within the norms of International Law and International Humanitarian Law (the Law of War) and draw a stark differentiation between themselves and the unipolar rules-based order they purport to have obviated.

Together, the parallel documents signed in May 2026 give an update not only of where Russia and China view themselves and the world to be, a status report of sorts; they also lay out in detail how they view themselves and others actually governing in the world today and tomorrow. As such, they allow a glimpse into what both powers anticipate for the future.

Where the Road Leads

Carrying the credibility of their predecessor documents with them, the Statement and the Declaration signed in Beijing in 2026 point the direction Russia and China anticipate the multipolar world to take prior to their next installment of documents on the record. The documents themselves are a sort of prospectus, which allows reliable forecasting and extrapolation as to where the road forward is likely to lead. None of this should be surprising to any careful observer, or anyone who has noted the steady progress of the multipolar project, often documented at the United Nations, and reinforced by real-world developments.

First, expect accelerated de-dollarization in Eurasian trade. Expect a steady increase in non-dollar-denominated business exchanges and the increased use of non-SWIFT transactions and other financial mechanisms designed explicitly to obviate the tools of Western economic coercion. Expect firm pushback against unilaterally imposed Western sanctions. Expect a slow and steady approach, typified by Russia’s proposed BRICS grain and commodity trading platform. Do not expect abrupt ruptures but instead a steadily growing alternative financial system.

Second, expect the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to expand its role and reach, not only as a political entity, but as an economic mover. The ten-year strategic plan and consultations on creating an SCO development bank signal the eventual emergence of a new economic center of gravity in the Global South.

Third, expect a robust diplomatic and legal campaign surrounding the issue of seized sovereign assets. Russia has laid the groundwork not only for a lengthy effort to recover its frozen funds, but to use the issue politically to advance de-dollarization in general.

Fourth, expect unified pushback against uses of force in violation of the UN Charter, with specific focus on the protections of civilians as well as heads of state. Expect condemnations of the crime of “aggression” and unilateral attempts to dictate local or regional policy by States outside the region.

Fifth, expect further progress in efforts to unify Russian and Chinese security initiatives in Eurasia. Do not expect a military alliance, for the same reasons stated clearly for 29 years, but expect a solidifying security posture which allows no space for Western military adventurism or control.

Sixth, expect that upon the conclusion of the conflict in Ukraine, the settlement that is ultimately reached will echo the themes present in this decades-long roadmap: root causes, indivisible security, friendship, good-neighbourliness, cooperation; not simply territory.

Seventh and last, expect that opposition to American missile defense policies and the militarization of artificial intelligence will continue to grow, although in what way remains unclear.

The documents are a roadmap, but they do not provide a timeline. The forecast from the original documents starting almost 30 years ago was for the multipolar world itself. The above forecast from the 2026 documents is a fine-tuning exercise on the administration of a multipolar global order. The road from the unipolar moment to today and the three decades of institution building and the consolidation of the Global South around two great civilization-states began with refusal and rejection. Western hubris prompted Russia to create with China a road not taken by the West and that has made all the difference. The same hubris allows them to deny that the world is multipolar at all and to dismiss or ignore the documents signed this May in Beijing. Ultimately, as the center of gravity of world power and influence steadily shifts eastward, the West and its supplicants will be the only ones surprised when they too realize they have arrived at the destination: the multipolar world.

*_{I am indebted to Geoffrey Roberts’ translation published by Pascal Lottaz at his Neutrality Studies Substack: https://pascallottaz.substack.com/p/russia-and-china-issue-declaration}

Joseph Busby is the Founder and Director of Reality-Based Analysis Group (RBAG), an independent geopolitical analysis firm based in Vienna, Austria. RBAG is affiliated with the Association for the Promotion of International Development and Stability (APIDS — apids.at). Subscribe at rbag.at.

© 2026 Joseph Busby / Reality-Based Analysis Group. Licensed under CC BY-ND 4.0. You may reproduce this work in full with attribution to Reality-Based Analysis Group and a link to rbag.at.

The idea which brought to life this firm began in the aftermath of the genocide and civil war in Rwanda, among survivors, among orphans, among people rebuilding their lives and their society from the wreckage left by the complete and catastrophic failure of the international system. That experience, and decades of fieldwork since, is the foundation of everything Reality-Based Analysis Group does and everything it stands for.

The genocide in Rwanda and its catastrophic aftermath were foreseeable. The warnings were clear and the evidence was compelling. The analysis, where it was done honestly, pointed unmistakably at what was coming. Yet it was ignored or deliberately set aside because acting on inconvenient information was politically costly. What followed was paid for in human lives lost, as well as the damaged lives of survivors, the complicit, and their descendants. That is where reality-based analysis begins: not as an academic concept, but as a moral obligation.

The same pattern appeared in South Sudan, where post-conflict stabilization was built on optimistic assumptions rather than honest assessments of the political and ethnic fault lines that violence had only temporarily suppressed. The violence returned, as it always does when the analysis that should have shaped the response is tailored to the narratives that donors and governments find more convenient. These are not isolated failures; they are a pattern. The pattern has a common thread: analysis subordinated to political convenience, institutional independence compromised by dependence on the actors being analyzed, and the resulting cost paid by people who had no voice in any of it. This firm exists because that pattern is not inevitable.

Our name requires a word of explanation. In physics, the Observer Effect describes how the act of observation alters the very nature of what is being observed, how the observer literally shapes the reality they perceive. In geopolitical analysis, something analogous operates: every analyst observes from a position, within an institutional framework, with interests and assumptions that shape what they see and what they conclude. We acknowledge this condition and are rigorously committed to pursuing the actual state of affairs, the actual distribution of power, the actual causes of events, regardless of opinions or predispositions.

Reality-based analysis means exactly what it says: analysis that begins with the world as it is, not as any government, ideology, or institutional consensus wishes it to be. It means following evidence where it leads, regardless of whether the destination is comfortable. It means applying the same analytical standards to all actors: great powers, regional players, non-state actors, without exempting any state from scrutiny or reducing any actor to caricature.

We are not neutral; we are independent, non-aligned, and straightforward. We claim independence of judgment, consistency of standards, and a willingness to revise conclusions when the evidence changes. That is a different and more demanding commitment than neutrality, and in the current moment it is a radical departure from most firms.

For over two decades, long before this platform existed, we have sponsored the training of military officers from across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe in the Law of Armed Conflict, working with the world’s foremost institution in the field, the International Institute of Humanitarian Law in Sanremo, Italy. Those officers have carried those principles back into their militaries, their ministries, and their operational environments. That investment was not made for visibility. It was made because the slow, patient work of building IHL/LOAC compliance into military institutions is one of the few tools that actually reduces the cost of conflict at the margins where it can be reduced, and one of the few methods to protect the innocent in times of war.

That work continues. What has changed is our conclusion that it can no longer remain invisible. It is no longer sufficient to work quietly in institutional corridors while the public analytical environment that shapes the political decisions those officers ultimately serve, degrades into ideology, narrative management, and the systematic subordination of honest assessment to political need. The moment demands that a portion of it must now become public.

We are based in Vienna intentionally. Vienna is the diplomatic center of gravity where great powers have come to be understood for over two centuries. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 produced the last durable architecture of multipolar order, an arrangement that kept Europe from a general war for nearly a century by taking seriously the legitimate interests of all major actors rather than imposing the preferences of the strongest. Vienna hosted the negotiations that kept communication open between East and West at the height of the Cold War. It hosts today the diplomacy on nuclear questions, on energy, on regional conflicts, that require neutral ground precisely because the parties cannot meet anywhere else.

The analytical work we do requires the same quality that Vienna’s diplomatic tradition has always demanded: the ability to understand all parties on their own terms, without prior commitment to any of their conclusions, and without answering to any of their interests.

Reality-Based Analysis Group is not a partisan platform or a public-relations operation. It is not a Global South advocacy platform, though we take the perspectives of the Global South seriously as both an analytical and a principled matter given that the Global South represents the majority of the world’s states and population. It is not anti-Western, though we apply the same critical standards to Western policy that we necessarily apply to every other actor in the international system.

We follow the evidence, state our conclusions, show our reasoning, and answer to no government, no donor, no ideology, and no consensus, including the consensus that determines which questions may not be asked and which answers may not be given.

Decades of fieldwork and institutional experience have reinforced our belief that accurate analysis, honestly conducted and made available, is one of the few genuinely constructive contributions that can be made to effect positive change in any given moment. This is not because analysis itself changes anything, but because decisions made on accurate information produce better outcomes than decisions made on the basis of smoothly delivered convenient fictions or on someone else’s preferred narratives. For those who act on our analysis, and for the people ultimately affected by those decisions, the difference is not abstract. It is the difference between outcomes that reduce human suffering and outcomes that compound it.

We answer to reality. This is the public face of that commitment. For those whose needs go further, we are here.

Welcome to the Reality-Based Analysis Group.

Reality-Based Analysis Group — Vienna, Austria — www.rbag.at

Joseph Busby is the Founder and Director of Reality-Based Analysis Group (RBAG), an independent geopolitical analysis firm based in Vienna, Austria, and a Full Member of the International Institute of Humanitarian Law in Sanremo, Italy. RBAG is affiliated with the Association for the Promotion of International Development and Stability (APIDS — apids.at). Subscribe at rbag.at.

© 2026 Joseph Busby / Reality-Based Analysis Group. Licensed under CC BY-ND 4.0. You may reproduce this work in full with attribution to Reality-Based Analysis Group and a link to rbag.at.