Analysis

MSC's exit from 2M is not deregulation. It is one carrier deciding it no longer needs a partner to operate at scale.

AfCFTA's biggest achievements are infrastructure, not tariff lines. That is also its biggest problem.

When a panel ruling can be appealed into nothing, the ruling becomes optional. The optionality is corrosive in slow ways.

The Belt and Road Western analysts argue about today is mostly the project portfolio of 2013-2018. The current program is smaller, greener, and far more cautious.

Industrial policy is back. The interesting question is no longer whether, but on what theory — and most of the post-2020 measures are operating without a clear theory at all.

Removing tariffs is the easy part. Building the customs, transport, and payment plumbing that makes a tariff cut operational is the next twenty years of African economic diplomacy.

Germany cannot decouple from China at the speed Washington would like, because German industry isn't built that way.

Chinese debt has become a smaller and more contested share of African external obligations, not the larger one Western commentary keeps assuming.

Each country's export ban is rational for that country. The aggregate of rational national choices is a global price spike.

USMCA was negotiated for one political coalition. It is being reviewed by a different one. The review clause was designed to either confirm the agreement or kill it. Confirmation requires consent.

The Act did not buy leading-edge sovereignty. It bought a much deeper domestic mature-node base, which may matter more for industrial resilience than the headline suggested.