Lodric Atkinson

Here is the arithmetic that the phrase "Global South" obscures: Africa: 1.6 billion people. Asia: 4.9 billion people. Latin America and the Caribbean: 670 million people. Together: roughly 7.2 billion people out of 8.3 billion on earth. The "Global South" is not a minority asking to be included. It is the majority that has been structured out of power. The entire architecture of the post-war international order, the Security Council veto, the IMF voting weights, the WTO rules, the dollar as a reserve currency, was built to ensure that 7.2 billion people would not have proportional influence over the decisions that shape their lives. That architecture is not natural law. It is a set of choices made by the winners of a particular moment in history, encoded as permanent, and maintained by the threat of consequences for those who question it. Questioning it is not radical. It is arithmetic.

The sanctions on Iran have lasted decades. Iran developed domestic production capacity it would never have built if it could have simply imported. The sanctions on Russia accelerated the development of Russian alternatives to Western financial infrastructure. The sanctions on North Korea isolated its economy for generations. They did not prevent the country from developing its own nuclear deterrent. The sanctions on Cuba failed to produce regime change. Cuba nevertheless built one of the most extensive public healthcare systems in the world, alongside a domestic pharmaceutical and biotechnology sector. There is a pattern here that Washington seems constitutionally incapable of learning: Economic pressure forces adaptation. Adaptation builds capacity. Capacity reduces dependence. Reduced dependence undermines the next round of pressure. Every sanction regime that fails to produce submission produces, instead, a more self-sufficient adversary with less exposure to the next sanction. The weaponization of the dollar is the most powerful sanction tool available. It is also accelerating, faster than any other single factor, the construction of alternatives to the dollar. The weapon is sharpening the shield.