Plain-language explainers on the forces shaping the world.
ASEAN is often described as Southeast Asia's answer to the EU. It is not. It is a consensus club that exists precisely because its members do not want supranational authority.
The ASEAN Way is a consensus rule. A consensus rule means any single member can prevent any collective action it dislikes.
ASEAN members: 10. Combined GDP: ~$3.6 trillion (2023)
Reserve currency status survives long after the issuer's economic share has fallen. The reason is liquidity and habit, not strength.
Central banks hold dollars because other central banks hold dollars. Coordination problems do not unwind quickly.
USD share of global FX reserves: ~59% (IMF COFER, Q4 2023)
The USGS annual Mineral Commodity Summaries is the boring reference document that organises Western critical-minerals policy. For rare earths, lithium, cobalt, and graphite the concentration patterns are real — and more complicated than the 'China dominance' headline suggests.
Mining concentration and refining concentration are different problems. Most of the policy is about refining. Most of the press is about mining.
Refined rare-earth output: China 87%, Malaysia 5%, Estonia 1%, US 1% (USGS MCS 2024 estimates).
Three shipping alliances — 2M, Ocean Alliance, THE Alliance — controlled over 80% of east-west container capacity through 2024. Lars Jensen at Vespucci Maritime has tracked the 2025 reshuffle after MSC announced its exit from 2M. The post-2025 structure is less concentrated by alliance, more by carrier.
MSC's exit from 2M is not deregulation. It is one carrier deciding it no longer needs a partner to operate at scale.
Top-3 carrier market share on Asia-Europe trade lane: 47% in 2018, 53% in 2024 (Drewry Maritime Research).
AfCFTA entered force on 1 January 2021. The 2026 five-year mark is a useful checkpoint. The trade-flow data shows what has moved (payment infrastructure, customs harmonisation), what hasn't (services, labour mobility), and where the structural constraints really sit.
AfCFTA's biggest achievements are infrastructure, not tariff lines. That is also its biggest problem.
Intra-African trade: 14.4% of total African trade in 2021, 17.2% in 2025 (UNECA).
Chris Miller's 2022 history argued that semiconductor supply chains are not commodities but a layered industrial system — design, EDA tools, fabs, lithography, materials. Each layer has chokepoints, and the policy response since 2022 has been shaped by that map.
The chip industry is not one supply chain. It is six, each with its own monopolist, and the US controls or co-controls every one.
ASML EUV machines shipped to date: ~250 units worldwide; none to mainland China since 2019 (SEMI / ASML annual reports).
Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan have spent thirty-five years building a foreign policy posture that simultaneously serves Russian, Chinese, Turkish, Iranian, US, and EU interests. The C5+1 formats (with the US since 2015 and with the EU and Turkey since 2022) test how durable the multiple alignment is.
Central Asia is not a region. It is five sovereign states with diverging trajectories that share a colonial inheritance and a current need to balance four-plus major external powers.
Kazakhstan-China bilateral trade (2024): $43.7B — exceeded Kazakhstan-Russia trade for the first time.
Roughly 12% of seaborne trade moves through the Red Sea. Houthi missile attacks beginning in late 2023 cut that volume by more than half within weeks, forcing Asia-Europe shipping around the Cape of Good Hope and adding 10–14 days to delivery times.
A non-state actor with anti-ship missiles can move global container rates more than a Federal Reserve decision.
Suez Canal transits fell ~60% between Nov 2023 and Feb 2024 (PortWatch data)
Mark Sobel, the former US Treasury deputy assistant secretary and now US chair of OMFIF, plus Brookings's Homi Kharas, have produced the most policy-grounded analysis of the IMF's August 2021 special-drawing-rights allocation. The headline $650B number conceals a sharply skewed distribution.
An SDR allocation is a non-disbursable reserve asset. For most rich countries that means a balance-sheet line item. For most poor countries it means a real if modest budget-financing boost. The political fight is about transfer between the two.
2021 SDR allocation: SDR 456B ($650B at then-exchange rates). Share allocated to G7 economies: about 63%. Share to low-income countries: about 3% (IMF, OMFIF analysis).
Hussein Ibish at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington has spent a decade arguing that the Gulf monarchies' simultaneous engagement with Washington, Beijing, Moscow, and regional rivals is not opportunism but doctrine. The doctrine is now mature enough to read on its own terms.
Riyadh and Abu Dhabi are not picking sides between Washington and Beijing. They are running parallel positions on every major file and asking each capital to compete for what the Gulf actually wants.
UAE-China bilateral trade: $99B in 2023, up from $46B in 2018. UAE-US bilateral trade: $35B in 2023 (UAE Federal Competitiveness and Statistics Centre, US Census Bureau).
Stefan Avdjiev and Patrick McGuire at the Bank for International Settlements have spent two decades mapping the offshore dollar system — bank balance sheets denominated in US dollars but booked outside US borders. The headline finding is that this system dwarfs the Federal Reserve's own balance sheet.
The dollar is not a currency the Fed prints. It is a unit of account that foreign banks create through credit, and the Fed is the only backstop when the credit unwinds.
Non-US banks' US-dollar liabilities: about $13 trillion in 2024 (BIS Quarterly Review, Avdjiev and McGuire tracking).
Since December 2019 the WTO's Appellate Body has been non-functional after the US blocked all new appointments. Gregory Shaffer at UC Irvine has tracked the institutional consequences. The question is no longer whether the system can be restored, but what it is being replaced with.
When a panel ruling can be appealed into nothing, the ruling becomes optional. The optionality is corrosive in slow ways.
WTO disputes filed 2020-2024: 47; appealed into the void: 32 (WTO Dispute Settlement Data, 2024).
Bobo Lo, formerly of Chatham House and the Lowy Institute, has written the most rigorous accounts of the Russia-China relationship for two decades. His reading of the 2022 'no limits' framing emphasises what the partnership cannot and will not do.
The 'no limits' phrase was Chinese diplomatic flourish. The limits are imposed by China, on Chinese terms, and Moscow has accepted them because the alternatives are worse.
China's share of Russian exports, 2021: 14%, 2024: 31% (Russian Federal Customs Service / Chinese General Administration of Customs).
Steven Gruzd, head of the African Governance and Diplomacy Programme at the South African Institute of International Affairs, has tracked South Africa's BRICS engagement since its 2010 entry. The 2023 BRICS+ enlargement raised harder questions for Pretoria than the original membership did.
South Africa is the smallest BRICS member by every metric. Pretoria's value to the group is symbolic — an African anchor — but the symbolism gets diluted with every new member that adds size.
South Africa's share of total BRICS+ GDP (2024 expanded membership): about 1.6%. Share of total BRICS+ population: about 1.4% (World Bank data; SAIIA analysis).
Suzanne Maloney at Brookings has tracked the Abraham Accords since the September 2020 signing. The October 2023 war and its aftermath did not break the agreements but substantially changed the political ceiling on Saudi accession.
The Accords were sold as a regional transformation. They turned out to be a Gulf-Israel commercial channel with a thin political layer that the war did not destroy but did expose.
UAE-Israel bilateral trade: $1.06B (2021), $3.18B (2023), $2.96B (2024) (Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics).