More than 500 garment factories in Bangladesh shut on 1 November as workers demanding a minimum monthly wage of 30,000 Bangladeshi taka took to the streets. The existing minimum is 12,500 Bangladeshi taka. The government constituted a wage board, police used tear gas and water cannons, and manufacturers warned that continued disruption could jeopardise export orders. Factories reopened the following day, only for renewed clashes to force hundreds to suspend operations again. The scale of the disruption reflects something larger than the wage dispute itself. Ready-made garments employ around four million people and generate more than 80 per cent of Bangladesh’s export earnings. A confrontation concentrated in a few industrial districts can therefore quickly become a national economic problem.

That concentration stems from one of South Asia’s most consequential economic transformations. Bangladesh entered the global garment industry in the late 1970s with little manufacturing capacity. Garment exports were worth around $1 billion in 1990; by FY2024–25, they had reached roughly $40 billion. Bangladesh is now the world’s second-largest garment exporter. The industry created employment on a scale few manufacturing sectors in the region have matched, drew millions of women into paid work and helped move the country away from the overwhelmingly agrarian economy it inherited at independence. Today, garments account for approximately 85 per cent of exports, according to the IMF. The current unrest does not show that Bangladesh chose the wrong development model. Garments worked. The more difficult question is what accumulated around that success.

Export-led growth matters for more than the foreign exchange earned when goods cross a border. Its larger promise is that producing competitively for international markets creates capabilities that spread through an economy. Firms learn new production methods, workers acquire skills, suppliers emerge, logistics improve, and governments acquire incentives to build infrastructure. One internationally competitive industry can then make it easier for another to emerge. Some of this happened in Bangladesh. The garment sector itself became considerably more sophisticated. Domestic textile and accessory industries developed around it; factories acquired the scale and organisational capacity necessary to supply major international buyers; and compliance with global production standards became increasingly important, particularly after the Rana Plaza disaster in 2013. Today’s industry bears little resemblance to the small export sector that emerged in the late 1970s.

The problem is therefore not that Bangladesh failed to accumulate capacity. It is that much of that accumulation remained concentrated around the industry already succeeding. The concentration of these capabilities around garments also reflects the particular conditions under which the industry grew. Bangladesh did not simply discover that it possessed cheap labour and begin exporting clothes. From the late 1970s onward, the sector developed through a combination of foreign partnerships, access to imported inputs and machinery, preferential trading arrangements and domestic policy choices that progressively made garment exporting easier. The early collaboration between South Korea’s Daewoo and Bangladesh’s Desh Garments is often treated as a foundational episode because Bangladeshi workers and managers were trained in Korean production techniques before carrying that knowledge into an expanding domestic industry. What began with a small number of firms subsequently generated its own ecosystem of factories, buying houses, textile producers, accessory manufacturers, logistics providers and experienced labour.

This history matters because it shows what successful industrial accumulation actually looks like. Once a critical mass had developed, entering garments became easier for the next Bangladeshi firm than creating an entirely new export industry. Entrepreneurs could hire managers who understood international buyers, draw workers from an existing industrial labour force, find suppliers familiar with production schedules and quality requirements, and operate within a policy environment already shaped by the sector’s needs. Success therefore became self-reinforcing. The capabilities generated by garments were real, but many were also industry-specific.

The same process helps explain why diversification cannot be treated as a simple decision to export something else. A pharmaceutical, engineering or leather producer does not inherit the garment industry’s international buyers, supplier relationships, testing facilities or regulatory expertise merely because both firms operate in Bangladesh. New industries have to build their own ecosystems before they can compete internationally. This is where the distinction between export earnings and productive transformation becomes important. The first can arrive much earlier than the second.

Bangladesh’s policy environment has also made that transition more difficult. The World Bank and Asian Development Bank have repeatedly pointed to high trade protection and the incentives it creates for firms outside garments to sell into the domestic market rather than bear the costs of becoming internationally competitive. Garments, by contrast, developed mechanisms that allowed exporters to obtain imported inputs at world prices and operate with fewer of these disadvantages. An economy can consequently possess a highly competitive export enclave alongside industries that remain protected from international competition. The problem is not simply that entrepreneurs failed to imitate garment manufacturers. They faced a different set of incentives. This makes Bangladesh’s experience more revealing than a straightforward story of excessive dependence on one commodity or industry. Garments created precisely the kinds of learning, investment and institutional adaptation that export-led development is supposed to generate. What proved harder was transmitting those gains across sectoral boundaries. The systemic risk lies in that gap. The more successful the established sector becomes, the easier it is for employment, finance, infrastructure, and government attention to keep flowing toward it; yet the economy becomes more dependent on the very industry whose success makes diversification seem less urgent.

Successive governments have identified leather and footwear, pharmaceuticals, agro-processing, light engineering, plastics and information technology as possible alternatives to garments. Several have grown, but none has approached RMG in terms of foreign exchange or industrial employment. The Asian Development Bank identifies obstacles that extend well beyond the performance of individual firms: high tariff protection, weak standards and compliance systems, the cost of doing business, and policy-induced biases that make production for the protected domestic market more attractive than exporting outside garments. This distinction is important when discussing underinvestment. Bangladesh has not simply suffered from an absence of investment. The harder problem is what investment has produced. An economy can maintain substantial capital formation while still failing to build the energy systems, transport links, financial institutions, workforce skills and firm capabilities required to create new internationally competitive sectors. The question is less how much investment occurs than whether it makes the next exporter easier to create.

Bangladesh’s present slowdown exposes several of these weaknesses at once. The World Bank expects growth of only 3.4 per cent in FY26 and FY27, with investment weakening and inflation continuing to raise household and business costs. Energy constraints remain significant. Financial-sector vulnerabilities have damaged credit intermediation and investor confidence; non-performing loans reached 33.2 per cent in June 2026. Government revenue amounted to only 8.3 per cent of GDP in FY26, leaving limited fiscal space for the public investment required to relieve some of these constraints. These problems reinforce one another. Weak banks make it harder for firms outside established industries to obtain capital. Energy shortages raise the cost of manufacturing. Low revenue limits what the state can spend on infrastructure and skills. Firms that might otherwise attempt to enter international markets therefore face costs that an established industry, with decades of accumulated networks and policy support behind it, is better positioned to absorb. Export concentration can consequently reproduce itself even when governments formally want diversification. The garment wage dispute reveals the consequences from the other end. Workers argue that 12,500 Bangladeshi taka no longer covers rising food, housing, transport and healthcare costs. Manufacturers operate in a sector where international buyers remain highly price-sensitive and warn that a large increase would squeeze margins and weaken competitiveness. Both pressures are real. But their collision becomes nationally consequential because Bangladesh has few alternative industries capable of absorbing labour or replacing garment earnings at anything approaching the same scale.

Diversification, in that sense, is not simply a matter of adding more products to an export basket. It changes the distribution of economic risk. If several industries could employ large numbers of workers, labour would have more alternatives. If foreign exchange came from a wider set of activities, disruption in one sector would have less immediate national consequence. If firms competed more intensely for workers with transferable skills, improvements in wages would depend less heavily on periodic confrontations over a statutory minimum. A broader productive economy creates room for adjustment that a concentrated one does not.

Bangladesh now has additional time to create that room. It had been scheduled to graduate from the UN’s least-developed-country category this month. On 29 October, however, the UN General Assembly extended the preparatory period until November 2029. The extension followed an assessment of persistent structural vulnerabilities and came with an expectation that the additional period would be used for significant domestic reforms.

The delay matters because the international environment in which the garment industry developed cannot be assumed to remain stable indefinitely. Preferential access has helped Bangladeshi exports enter important markets, although the effects of graduation will vary by trading partner and transition arrangements. Bangladesh’s competitiveness has never rested on wages alone. Scale, supplier networks, established relationships with buyers and accumulated manufacturing expertise all matter. But as trading conditions change, containing labour costs becomes an increasingly narrow way to protect competitiveness. Higher productivity, movement into higher-value production and the emergence of additional export sectors require investment before they generate returns.

There is evidence that such capability-building can work. A World Bank-supported export diversification programme focused on non-garment industries including leather goods, footwear, light engineering and plastics. It helped firms meet environmental, social and quality standards, integrate into global value chains and enter new markets. The programme reports nearly 180,000 jobs created and 570 firms receiving export-readiness grants. The numbers remain small beside garments, but that is precisely what makes the example useful. New exporters did not appear simply because Bangladesh had spent decades earning money from garments. Firms needed technology, standards, skills, finance, and market connections before they could compete outside the country.

Bangladesh is the sharpest version of a wider South Asian problem, not a template for every economy in the region. Their sources of external income differ considerably. Pakistan remains heavily dependent on textiles for merchandise exports; Sri Lanka combines apparel with services and tourism; Nepal relies heavily on workers abroad and remittances; India has a much larger and more diversified economy with globally competitive services. Collapsing these experiences into a single regional “export model” would conceal precisely the differences that matter.

What recurs is a more basic problem: external earnings do not automatically create a deeper domestic economy. A successful garment industry, tourism sector, services industry or flow of labour income can relieve the foreign-exchange constraint while it is performing well. It does not by itself create the firms, infrastructure and workers capable of replacing that income when conditions change. The regional constraint is therefore not best captured by investment rates alone. South Asia has repeatedly demonstrated an ability to mobilise capital around activities that already generate returns, whether export manufacturing, construction or urban services. The harder task has been sustained investment in the less immediately visible foundations of structural transformation: reliable energy, freight and logistics systems, technical education, urban infrastructure, research capacity and financial institutions capable of directing capital towards new productive firms. These investments often take years before they create an exporter or a large employer. Their absence is easier to tolerate while an established source of foreign exchange continues to perform. It becomes much harder to ignore once that source weakens.

This is also why domestic underinvestment and export dependence should not be treated as competing explanations for vulnerability. They reinforce one another. A narrow export base makes governments more dependent on preserving the competitiveness of existing earners; that dependence can encourage policy to remain organised around established sectors rather than the uncertain returns of new ones. The resulting lack of alternatives then makes disruption to the established sector more dangerous. What begins as concentration can, over time, become a constraint on the very investment required to escape it.

South Asia has little room to choose between exports and domestic development. It needs both. Around 280 million people will reach working age across the region over the next decade, while merchandise exports amounted to only around 12 per cent of regional GDP in 2024, roughly half the share in other emerging and developing economies. The region needs greater access to international markets, not retreat from them. But opening an economy and finding one successful export are only the beginning of the process.

The systemic risk appears when an external source of income becomes large enough to conceal how little has accumulated elsewhere. A strong sector continues to supply foreign exchange, employment and growth even when the productive base remains narrow. The weakness becomes visible only when conditions change: an energy shock, weaker overseas demand, the erosion of trade preferences, a collapse in tourism or a wage confrontation. A problem that begins inside one industry then moves through employment, household incomes, foreign-exchange availability and government finances.

Resilience is therefore not simply the capacity to preserve the sector that already succeeds. It is the capacity to produce alternatives. Infrastructure matters because new firms need to move goods reliably. Education and skills matter because workers need to move between industries. A functioning financial system matters because firms require capital before they have established buyers. Revenue mobilisation matters because governments cannot build these foundations while collecting too little from the economy they are trying to transform.

Bangladesh’s garment industry remains an extraordinary development achievement. The present unrest does not diminish it, and dependence on garments does not make the industry itself a liability. The risk lies in asking one successful sector to perform too many economic functions indefinitely: employ millions of workers, provide most export earnings, remain competitive in price-sensitive international markets and absorb rising domestic expectations over wages and living standards. The more useful measure of export-led development is therefore what gets built after the first export success. Bangladesh has spent four decades proving that a South Asian economy can create a globally competitive manufacturing industry. Its next challenge, shared in different forms across the region, is to make such success less exceptional. What accumulates during the good years determines how much room an economy has when conditions turn against the sector that produced them. Without that accretion, export success can continue for decades while systemic risk quietly grows underneath it.

The Fifth Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee opened in Beijing on 26 October and closed on 29 October. Xi Jinping delivered the Politburo’s work report and explained a draft decision on persevering with full and rigorous Party self-governance. Xinhua reports that the session adopted the decision, elected General Zhang Shengmin to the Politburo and set the 21st Party Congress for the second half of 2027. The communiqué confirmed the expulsion of 33 officials and the loss of Party posts for a 34th. NBC describes this as a post-Mao record and reports the highest rate of absences in that period. SCMP adds that 34 is a new high for recent plenums. Eighteen of the cases were senior civilians and sixteen were military figures, all of them full or alternate Central Committee members.

A fifth plenum in a Congress cycle normally turns to economic planning. Bloomberg had noted that this one was expected to focus on ideology and governance. The economic groundwork was finished a year earlier, when the fourth plenum adopted the recommendations for the 15th Five-Year Plan, and the communiqué gives the economy a closing paragraph of routine year-end guidance. That left the session free to take up a question the leadership treats as a precondition for everything else: can the Party’s own officials be made to carry out what the centre decides?

The preparation was long and unusually visible. On 30 July the Politburo set the agenda and conceded that Party self-governance, for all its progress since 2012, faced new circumstances and challenges. At its 21 September meeting it reported that an earlier draft had gone to Party members and non-Party figures for comment. A text drafted, consulted on and revised over months is meant to be programmatic and to outlast the session that adopts it.

There is a precedent. The last plenum devoted to this theme met in 2016, when, as Jamestown’s China Brief recalls, Xi accused a very small number of senior cadres of “political conspiratorial activities.” That session conferred the “core” title on Xi and institutionalised his discipline campaign. Yet the plenum documents also reiterated collective leadership and intra-Party democracy, which Lance Gore reads as a sign of resistance and compromise. The 2021 plenum later adopted a history resolution that elevated his doctrines. Plenums on Party discipline have a habit of doing more than disciplining.

Reading one: the hall as evidence

Plenums offer one of the few chances to audit the Central Committee from outside. The communiqué reports how many members and alternates attended, and the pattern of absences and promotions shows who remains in good standing.

The baseline was already stark. At the fourth plenum, 168 of 205 full members and 147 of 171 alternates attended. That is 315 of 376, or 83.8 per cent, the lowest relative turnout since 1976 according to the Egmont Institute. Brookings found that the same session purged ten full members and four alternates and promoted eleven alternates, skipping eight who had polled more votes at the 2022 Congress. The fifth plenum went lower. SCMP reports that 162 of the 205 full members attended, a turnout of 79 per cent against 82 per cent the year before. Alternate attendance fell from 147 to 117. SCMP calls it the lowest attendance in decades.

The purge was larger than the preceding months suggested. The plenum formally confirmed 34 cases, about nine per cent of the 376 members elected in 2022. Thirty-three people were expelled, and Li Yunze, head of the National Financial Regulatory Administration, lost his Party posts. Eighteen were civilians and sixteen were military. NBC lists among those removed the former Politburo members Ma Xingrui and Zhang Youxia and the former industry minister Jin Zhuanglong. Sixteen of 34 is roughly 47 per cent, a heavy share for the military. The earlier figures were already sharp: of the 44 uniformed officers elected as full members in 2022, only two appeared to have escaped purge or disappearance.

The communiqué also ended a long silence on Liu Jianchao. SCMP reports that Xinhua confirmed for the first time that he is under investigation and will be removed from the Central Committee. He has not been seen in public since August 2025, and Liu Haixing replaced him as head of the Party’s International Department the following month. Liu Jianchao had run that department since June 2022 and travelled widely to repair China’s image after the pandemic. On my reading, the purge now reaches the Party’s outward-facing channels as well as the military.

Promotions point the same way. Ten alternates moved up to full membership to fill the vacated seats. SCMP describes them as relatively young regional and economic officials, among them Shanxi governor Lu Dongliang (52), Zhejiang governor Liu Jie (56), Inner Mongolia chairman Bao Gang (57) and Jinan party chief Liu Qiang (55). Five alternates were passed over although promotion is supposed to follow ranking. Two of them are People’s Armed Police lieutenant generals: Fu Wenhua, a former Beijing garrison commander, and Zhu Wenxiang, a former commander of the PAP’s First Mobile Corps. The skipping of ranked alternates that Brookings recorded at the fourth plenum has happened again.

Two details go beyond atmospherics. The first is the wording of the 21 September expulsion notice for Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli. It charged them with forming cliques and being disloyal and dishonest to the Party, and it tied those charges to the sale of promotions. It left out “political ambition” and “conspiracy,” words that appeared in earlier charge sheets and in the 2016 speech, and it never said what their disloyalty consisted of. Jamestown reads that restraint as a signal that the leadership wants the case understood as clique-building inside the system, which carries no implication of a plot against Xi.

The second is a pair of tests that Takshashila’s Anushka Saxena proposed for judging whether the purge was nearing its end. One asked whether the alternates bypassed in 2025 would be passed over again. The other asked whether the language about Zhang would harden into “pernicious influence,” phrasing that preceded years of follow-on purges after Guo Boxiong and Xu Caihou. The first test has an answer: five ranked alternates were passed over again. The sources used here do not show whether the language on Zhang hardened.

Reading two: a system built to outlast the campaign

A second reading treats the meeting as construction more than purge. Ruby Osman of the Tony Blair Institute describes the aim as a disciplined system able to carry Xi’s priorities across leadership cycles. She cautions that record disciplinary numbers need not mean corruption is rebounding, since they can equally show the standard rising. The full text of the resolution had not been released when the communiqué appeared, so what follows rests on the communiqué alone. It supports the construction reading in three ways.

First, it supplies a diagnosis and a doctrine. It describes a Party whose leadership had at one time become weakened, hollowed out and diluted, with lax management and some shocking problems. It credits the Central Committee under Xi with fundamentally reversing this and eliminating serious risks “within the Party, the country and the military.” It names “Xi Jinping Thought on Party building” as a component of Xi Jinping Thought, and it claims that self-revolution and public supervision together answer the historical cycle of dynastic rise and fall. Manoj Kewalramani observes that the achievements paragraph credits the Central Committee collectively while the theoretical paragraph exalts Xi’s own contribution. What results is a codified doctrine of Party building that can outlive a campaign.

Second, it assigns responsibility downward. Th Party organisations at all levels are the principal entities of self-governance. This extends the line in Xi’s 31 August article, which places primary responsibility on Party organisations and their chief officials. The communiqué calls for a responsibility system in which each unit answers for its own area under unified coordination. It asks for better mechanisms to assess how responsibilities are discharged, and for accountability against those who govern the Party ineffectively. Xi had told the discipline inspectors in January to confine power in an institutional cage, and the institutional agenda follows that logic. It promises to make Party-committee supervision “substantive,” to refine the dual-leadership system for discipline inspection, to strengthen inspections, to improve intra-Party regulations and to break down unspoken rules. SCMP adds that it calls for constraints and oversight on the exercise of power and for ideological foundations to uphold integrity. The Asia Society paper had predicted assessments tailored to places and jobs. The communiqué points that way by tying the “correct view of political achievements” campaign to leadership transitions, with training for newly appointed leaders, especially “top leaders.” It gives no metrics.

Third, the machinery is already running at scale. A seventh round of central inspections this year sent fifteen teams into 36 central institutions. The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection’s 2025 work report records more than a million cases, 983,000 people punished and 47,000 placed in detention. In 2024 the figures were 877,000 cases, 889,000 punished and 38,000 detained, so detentions rose by roughly a quarter and punishments by about eleven per cent. Kewalramani notes that the CCDI and National Supervisory Commission opened some 800,000 cases between January and September 2026. SCMP reports that the communiqué calls for corruption to be fought to the end, so there will be no slackening. A campaign in its fourteenth year that is still accelerating has become a standing institution. Nobody is treating it as a clean-up.

What gets policed has also shifted. The 2025 report counts 150,000 cases of hedonism and extravagance and 141,000 of formalism and bureaucratism. Formalism means going through the motions: shirking, inaction, hollow performance of duty. Punishing it takes the campaign from taking money to not doing the job, and the second offence is much harder to define. Lianhe Zaobao anticipated this when the agenda was announced, observing that the scope could be broader than anti-corruption. The communiqué bears that out by pairing the work-style campaign with the anti-corruption campaign and calling for the eight-point regulation to be made routine and long-lasting.

Reading three: a loyalty system

The system being built is openly a loyalty system. State media published an article just before the plenum based on a January speech in which Xi attacked officials who seem to follow central orders while resisting inwardly. According to AP, he added that leadership transitions are the moment to elevate cadres who are reliable and consistent in word and deed, and never to let a two-faced person through. Mingda Qiu of Eurasia Group reads the signal plainly: officials are now tested for compliance and action as well as loyalty.

The communiqué gives this agenda a pedagogy. It names the cultivation of Party spirit the fundamental task of self-governance. It calls for education in loyalty to the Party and for stronger “discernment of Party spirit,” a phrase that implies officials can be sorted by it. It describes the ideal cadre as loyal, clean and responsible. SCMP’s rendering asks for a team that is “politically steadfast, highly competent, exemplary in conduct and strict in discipline,” and it ties strict management to education, selection, appointment and supervision. The same passage asks officials to take the initiative and deliver results.

Loyalty of this kind is hard to specify. Jamestown notes that the September notice did not say how Zhang and Liu were disloyal and cited none of the forms listed in the Party’s disciplinary regulations. Whether an act counts as disloyalty therefore rests largely on Xi’s own judgement. The communiqué added a vocabulary but no operational definition, and the full resolution may yet supply one. An official facing a test whose edges he cannot see has one rational response, which is to over-signal. This is the principal-agent problem that Daria Impiombato of MERICS identifies: a centre that sets ever more priorities must get distant officials, who control the information, to carry them out as intended. Heavier penalties for non-implementation may raise the price of honest reporting as much as the price of shirking. The Asia Society authors put the limit bluntly: commanding Zhongnanhai is easier than controlling 101 million Party members.

The communiqué also contains a tension that the loyalty reading tends to miss. It reaffirms centralised, unified leadership, but it also calls for stricter decision-making and deliberation rules for leadership teams and for regulating how “top leaders” exercise power. The centre wants more obedience from local chiefs and less discretion for them, and it treats the chief as both the guarantor of compliance and a risk to it. The 2016 plenum paired the “core” title with reaffirmations of collective leadership, and this text follows the same pattern of coupling personal elevation with procedural reassurance. That parallel is my reading, not a stated intention.

The 2027 Congress sharpens the problem. Neil Thomas of the Asia Society Policy Institute expects tougher scrutiny of officials competing to join Xi’s next leadership team, now that so many of those he promoted in 2022 have been removed.

What the empty chairs measure

The empty chairs record something the calm reading underweights: the circle of the exempt keeps shrinking. In October 2025 Brookings could still observe that Xi’s closest lieutenants, Zhang Youxia among them, had been spared, at least “so far.” In January the defence ministry announced an investigation into Zhang and Liu. In September the Party expelled both, and in October the plenum confirmed it. Ma Xingrui, expelled in July, left a Politburo that had 21 members. AFP counts three Politburo members purged, the most in any single term since 1980.

Who is being removed matters analytically. Many of them are people Xi himself promoted, so each purge counts as evidence against the vetting that came before it. The response is more vetting, more inspection and more tests of loyalty. A system that cannot trust its promotion decisions has to re-verify continuously, and continuous re-verification generates cases.

The promotion of Zhang Shengmin shows the loop in the military. SCMP reports that Zhang, made a Central Military Commission vice-chair a year ago, was the military’s anti-corruption chief from 2018 until July this year and is the top enforcer of the drive that cut into the PLA’s leadership. That drive left both of the Politburo’s military representatives disgraced, so the body had no military member after January, against a norm of two since 1997. Kewalramani counts 22 active Politburo members after the promotion, from 24 elected in 2022. The system restored to the top table the officer who had run its military discipline inspection, and no field commander. That suggests the Party values the enforcement function enough to give it a Politburo seat. It also leaves the PLA’s representation resting on one person, with the CMC reduced to Xi and Zhang. Whether a second general joins him at the 21st Congress remains open.

Why 2027 raises the stakes

Timing helps explain why the Party chose this theme now. The plenum was the last of its kind before the 21st Congress. The communiqué fixes the Congress for Beijing in the second half of 2027 and calls it a highly important meeting at a critical stage on the way to the second centenary goal. Kewalramani infers that no further plenum is likely before it. Neil Thomas and his colleagues expected the meeting to prepare the ground for a fourth term and to reinforce expectations of continuity in politics and policy. The Asia Society paper was more cautious about succession. It treated a move to signal an heir as possible but unlikely, and noted that Xi’s own elevation to Central Military Commission vice chairman came at the fifth plenum of 2010. The communiqué named no heir.

The usual way to read a fifth plenum is as a succession signal, and this one is better read as something close to the reverse. A leader who intends to stay has no need to designate a successor. He needs a cadre corps that will carry out his preferences for another five years without close supervision, and a Decision on self-governance is the instrument for producing one. The discipline agenda then works as succession policy by other means. It shapes the pool from which the 2027 Congress will draw and fixes the standard that pool will be judged against. That is my reading of the evidence, and the leadership has not stated it as an aim.

The plenum also qualified an earlier expectation. After the fourth plenum, Thomas had suggested that Xi would wait for the 21st Congress to vet new CMC and Politburo members. Zhang’s elevation breaks that pattern. SCMP notes that Politburo promotions normally happen at the five-yearly Congress and that the last mid-term one came in 1994. The waiting strategy holds for the Central Military Commission, which still has two members, but not for the Politburo.

The Asia Society authors also warn that tighter control offers no guarantee of better government. Officials who fear punishment for inaction may act without authority, and those who fear punishment for error may do nothing. The communiqué asks for both strict discipline and initiative and leaves the line between them undrawn. The Decision’s weight will fall on where that line is placed.

Where the readings leave us

The hall shows power on display, through attendance, expulsions, promotions and the wording of notices. The institutional record shows a discipline apparatus that the communiqué now writes down as doctrine and a responsibility system, built to last beyond one term. The loyalty agenda explains why that apparatus cannot rest: obedience that cannot be verified has to be tested again and again. The full resolution, once published, will show how much of this is written into the text.

On 13 October, the home ministers of seven countries stretching from the Himalayas to the Andaman Sea met in New Delhi. It was the first meeting of its kind in BIMSTEC’s nearly thirty-year history. The Delhi Declaration covered terrorism, organised crime, drug and human trafficking, cybercrime, money laundering, and information-sharing, adding another mechanism to an organisation that now has a permanent Secretariat, a Charter, seven sectoral pillars, and its first long-term vision. Yet the free trade area first agreed in principle in 2004 remains unfinished. The contrast is usually folded into a familiar judgement about BIMSTEC: institutions and declarations have accumulated faster than integration. But nearly three decades of survival make that judgement insufficient. An organisation that has failed to complete some of its foundational economic ambitions has not withered. Instead, it has gained more political attention, more formal machinery, and a wider range of activities. The question is therefore not simply why BIMSTEC has integrated so slowly, but what kind of regional institution has emerged from that experience.

BIMSTEC has gradually adapted to the absence of regional convergence by making cooperation less dependent upon it. Different sectors can move at different speeds, and participation in one does not require equivalent progress elsewhere. That flexibility helps explain the organisation’s durability, but it does not make its functional model politically neutral. Once cooperation moves from meetings and agreements into grids, roads, ports, trade concessions and security relationships, differences in geography, capacity and bargaining power return to determine what can actually be implemented. The history of BIMSTEC is therefore as much about where regional politics reappears as it is about finding ways to keep politics out.

From functional ambition to institutional adaptation

The organisation began with a deliberately practical agenda. The 1997 Bangkok Declaration brought Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka and Thailand together as BIST-EC; Myanmar joined later that year, while Nepal and Bhutan entered in 2004. Its early agenda concentrated on trade and investment, transport and communication, energy, technology, tourism and fisheries. The geography itself was unusual. Rather than reproduce South Asia as an established political region, the grouping connected states conventionally divided between South and Southeast Asia through the Bay of Bengal and a set of problems they might solve together.

There was an implicit logic to this arrangement. Practical cooperation could begin without agreeing on a political conception of the region, and connections in one sector could make cooperation elsewhere easier. Transport could facilitate trade; trade could create demand for simpler customs procedures and common rules; energy links could produce material interdependence. The 2004 Framework Agreement on the BIMSTEC Free Trade Area represented the most ambitious expression of this logic. It envisaged liberalisation not only of trade in goods, but also of services and investment, along with measures to facilitate economic cooperation.

What followed, however, was expansion without equivalent integration. Six priority areas eventually became fourteen, adding agriculture, public health, poverty alleviation, culture, environment and climate change, counterterrorism and transnational crime. The range of problems described as regional grew much faster than the machinery available to manage them. BIMSTEC’s own retrospective account acknowledges that its founding declaration created no formal working structure. Representatives in Bangkok largely coordinated meetings, while documentation and follow-up remained weak enough for the grouping to function more as a regional forum than an organisation.

That institutional thinness lasted remarkably long. The Permanent Secretariat in Dhaka was established only in 2014, seventeen years after the Bangkok Declaration. Until then, an organisation whose agenda had expanded across fourteen sectors had no permanent bureaucracy to sustain cooperation between meetings. The mismatch matters. BIMSTEC’s early problem was not simply insufficient political enthusiasm for regional integration. Its functional agenda expanded before the institution had the capacity to preserve decisions, coordinate implementation, or distinguish priorities from aspirations.

BIMSTEC nevertheless survived. That deserves more attention than the familiar observation that it moved slowly. Regional institutions do not automatically acquire greater political investment after failing to complete some of their foundational projects. BIMSTEC did. The question is therefore not only why integration lagged, but how the organisation adjusted to that experience.

The political context of the mid-2010s undoubtedly helped. The 2016 BIMSTEC Leaders’ Retreat in Goa coincided with the collapse of that year’s SAARC summit, and India’s decision to bring BIMSTEC leaders into its BRICS outreach gave the grouping considerably greater political visibility. The Goa outcome document renewed attention to trade, connectivity, energy, counterterrorism and institutional cooperation. But treating 2016 as the moment BIMSTEC became a substitute for SAARC obscures the longer trajectory. Its connection between South and Southeast Asia, and its organisation around the Bay of Bengal rather than South Asia’s political geography, had existed since 1997. Goa increased the strategic value attached to an existing institution; it did not invent its regional logic.

The more consequential response came through institutional reform. By the 2018 Kathmandu Summit, members acknowledged that the proliferation of sectors had become a problem. They called for the areas of cooperation to be reviewed, restructured and rationalised in pursuit of tangible results. The group eventually reorganised fourteen sectors into seven, each led by a different member. The BIMSTEC Charter, adopted at Colombo in 2022 and brought into force in May 2024, subsequently gave the organisation a formal legal foundation. The Sixth Summit in Bangkok in 2025 added formal rules of procedure and Bangkok Vision 2030, the first long-term vision document in BIMSTEC’s history.

This was not integration by another name. BIMSTEC had responded to the limitations of its first two decades by changing the machinery through which cooperation occurred. The organisation became more formal, but also more capable of allowing different parts of its agenda to proceed independently.

Cooperation without convergence

Under the newer architecture, progress in one field does not depend upon equivalent movement elsewhere. Security cooperation can acquire its own mechanisms while trade negotiations remain unfinished. Maritime transport can advance through a separate agreement without waiting for a regional motor vehicles agreement. Disaster management can develop through exercises, technical coordination and specialised institutions without the existence of a common market. The lead-country structure formalises some of this unevenness by distributing responsibility for different sectors among different governments rather than requiring the organisation to move uniformly.

The first BIMSTEC Home Ministers’ Meeting illustrates how this works. The Delhi Declaration called for stronger cooperation against terrorism, organised crime, trafficking, cybercrime, money laundering and terrorist financing, alongside better information-sharing, specialised training and implementation of existing legal instruments. A day earlier, senior officials had worked through proposed conventions and action plans covering trafficking, illicit financial flows, drug control and disaster management.

Yet even this apparently functional field shows why the distinction is not simply between areas in which BIMSTEC succeeds and those in which it fails. Members signed the BIMSTEC Convention on Cooperation in Combating International Terrorism, Transnational Organized Crime and Illicit Drug Trafficking in 2009. It entered into force only in March 2021 after ratification by all seven governments. Five years later, the Delhi Declaration still emphasises implementation of existing legal instruments alongside the conclusion of proposed ones. Functional cooperation does not remove friction. It lowers the threshold at which cooperation can begin.

That experience complicates the assumption that practical cooperation necessarily produces spillover, with integration in one area generating pressure for integration in another. BIMSTEC increasingly looks more modular. A government can participate in disaster management without making equivalent concessions on trade. Maritime cooperation can move forward without completion of the FTA. Security officials can exchange information even while other regional projects remain stalled. Difficulty in one field does not have to paralyse every other one.

This quality is not entirely accidental. BIMSTEC’s official principles of cooperation describe its activities as complementary to, rather than a substitute for, its members’ bilateral, subregional, regional, and multilateral relationships. The organisation therefore does not require its seven states to make the Bay of Bengal their exclusive, or even primary, regional framework. Thailand remains embedded in ASEAN; Nepal and Bhutan participate in other subregional arrangements; members retain bilateral relationships that often carry greater immediate economic or security weight. BIMSTEC can operate alongside these relationships rather than displacing them.

Seen this way, unevenness is not only a record of what BIMSTEC has failed to accomplish. It has become part of the way the institution functions. An unfinished trade agreement does not invalidate cooperation on disaster response. Political disagreement in one relationship need not formally suspend technical cooperation among all seven members. Several different depths of regionalism can coexist within the same institution.

There is a price to that flexibility. Cooperation becomes more politically demanding as it moves from creating mechanisms to producing material outcomes. A working group can agree that connectivity is desirable; a transport corridor must pass through particular territory and be financed by somebody. Governments can endorse regional energy cooperation; electricity must travel through an existing grid. Trade liberalisation reaches domestic producers, tariff revenues and regulators. Information-sharing depends not merely on creating an institutional channel but on governments trusting one another enough to use it. The further cooperation moves from coordination towards implementation, the harder it becomes to keep individual sectors insulated from the political relationships underneath them.

BIMSTEC’s institutional evolution has therefore not removed politics from regionalism. It has changed the point at which politics enters. Its functional architecture allows cooperation to begin without requiring the seven members to converge on a common economic or political project, and that flexibility helps explain why an organisation with so much unfinished business has nevertheless endured and acquired greater institutional density. But once agreements have to operate through actual territory, infrastructure and national institutions, institutional flexibility cannot determine who supplies the necessary capacity, who bears the costs, who sets the terms or which members retain alternatives when those terms become unattractive.

Regionalism around the Bay of Bengal asks little of its members’ politics, and that is usually offered as its main strength. Cooperation is cut into problems such as power trade, disaster response and transnational crime, each of which states have a reason to solve without first agreeing on what the region is. This claim is tested against the one variable it leaves out: imbalance. The functional model works because India is so much larger than its partners, and that the same asymmetry sets the limits of what the model can do. A hub can supply goods without when no one agrees on a political vision for the region. Goods supplied by a hub still arrive on the hub’s terms.

The size of the gap

In 2016, India accounted for 74 per cent of BIMSTEC’s combined GDP, against 13 per cent for Thailand and 7.3 per cent for Bangladesh. Nepal and Bhutan each held under one per cent. These figures are old. Trade among the members is thin by comparison. Intra-BIMSTEC trade was 6.7 per cent of members’ total trade in 2023, while ASEAN’s share is around 25 per cent. The free trade framework signed in 2004 is still unfinished in all six of its parts, and an op-ed in the Dhaka Tribune reports that officials are now weighing whether to finalise only the parts closest to agreement. Dependence runs one way. Members other than Thailand and Myanmar import over seventy per cent of their rice from India, so a disturbance in the Indian rice trade is felt in their markets.

Imbalance can be treated as four distinct things, since each explains a different failure. Material imbalance is the gap above. Geographic imbalance is India’s position as the land bridge and the grid for its neighbours. Institutional imbalance concerns who hosts, who chairs and who drafts. Alignment imbalance is the ability of smaller members to hedge, chiefly toward China.

The institutional dimension is visible in the first Home Ministers’ Meeting, held in New Delhi on 13 October, where the members adopted the Delhi Declaration. The text puts information sharing, mutual legal assistance and extradition first, and it condemns cross-border terrorism by name while affirming sovereign equality and non-interference. India hosted and chaired the meeting, and the disaster management centre it endorsed would sit in Jamnagar, Gujarat. Formal authority sits elsewhere. Bangladesh took over the chair at the Bangkok summit and the Secretariat is in Dhaka. The gap between formal roles and actual weight is what the wants to examine through three cases that end in different ways.

Electricity: supply without politics, on India’s terms

The best case for the functional model is power. In October 2024 Nepal, India and Bangladesh signed a tripartite agreement under which Nepal sells 40 MW to Bangladesh through Indian transmission lines, from mid-June to mid-November each year. It was the first time Nepal could sell electricity to a third country. None of the three governments needed to agree on a vision of South Asia. They needed to agree on wheeling charges.

The terms of the deal show the imbalance at work. Nepal must send India its list of power projects for approval before their output can go to Bangladesh. In 2019, when talks had stalled waiting for Delhi to convene a meeting, India proposed that Nepal and Bangladesh trade through an Indian commercial entity, and Nepal argued for paying regulated surcharges instead. The 2024 agreement was executed with India’s NTPC Vidyut Vyapar Nigam as the third party, and Bangladesh pays India a trading margin. India’s preferred arrangement outlasted five years of negotiation.

The trade itself is commercially real. One assessment from an Indian university puts Nepal’s sales to India at over 1,100 MW, up from 39 MW when India first approved cross-border trade in 2021. For the argument cooperation worked because India controlled the grid and was willing to share it. Nepal and Bangladesh trade as far as India permits, and every success of this kind makes the hub more central.

Bangladesh: what hedging looks like

Bangladesh shows what smaller members do with the room they have. During a visit to China in late March 2025, Muhammad Yunus described India’s Northeast as landlocked and Bangladesh as the region’s guardian of the ocean, and he invited Chinese economic expansion. In April, India ended the transshipment facility that had let Bangladeshi exports reach third countries through Indian ports and airports. The Ministry of External Affairs gave congestion as its reason, though Indian press reports tied the decision to Yunus’s remarks. ORF noted that Delhi left Dhaka’s transit rights to Nepal and Bhutan untouched, which points to a measured use of leverage.

The February 2026 election changed the tone more than the structure. A BNP government under Tarique Rahman took office on 17 February, and Delhi said it wanted to deepen ties. Still, Rahman, in his capacity as BIMSTEC chair, reportedly skipped the outreach session of the BRICS summit in New Delhi despite an invitation. Dhaka’s home minister was reported to be skipping the Home Ministers’ Meeting, with a senior bureaucrat leading the delegation. The member that chairs BIMSTEC and hosts its Secretariat was therefore represented one level below its minister at the first security ministerial. Extradition, a declared priority, is where the bilateral politics bite hardest. Sheikh Hasina has been in India since 2024, and an Indian explainer expects Dhaka’s new government to face pressure to seek her return.

Hedging is the smaller state’s instrument and access is India’s. Transshipment, transit and grid access all sit inside functional fields, which means a political quarrel can switch functional cooperation off. The narrow model asks less of regional politics only on paper.

Kaladan: when a member cannot deliver its territory

Kaladan shows a different limit. The US$484 million project, agreed with Myanmar in 2008, would link Sittwe port to Mizoram and give the Northeast an alternative outlet to the sea. It has missed deadlines in 2014 and 2020. The Arakan Army captured Paletwa in January 2024, and reporting in The Week suggests Indian officials concluded the project could not be finished without the group’s support. In March 2026 Mizoram’s government said the project area was now under Arakan Army administration and that it keeps good relations with the group, with completion slated for 2027.

The state India signed with no longer controls the ground the road crosses. India’s connectivity agenda in this corridor now depends on dealing directly with an armed group inside a fellow member. This is the geographic dimension at its most acute. A hub can supply what others need only if the route through a spoke is open, and a spoke in civil war cannot open it.

What the model gains and loses

The model gains durability, and some of that durability comes from subtraction as much as from functionalism. SAARC’s hardest dispute is outside the room. Pakistan vetoed a SAARC-wide motor vehicles agreement in 2014, and four members went ahead as BBIN. India boycotted the 2016 SAARC summit in Islamabad over cross-border terrorism, and BIMSTEC drew attention as an alternative. The Delhi Declaration carries SAARC’s grievance forward and drops its veto holder.

BBIN also shows how fragile such arrangements can be. Bhutan’s National Council rejected ratification by 13 votes to two, and the other three agreed to proceed through an exchange of letters. A hub’s agenda can be carried by a smaller coalition, but only where the states left out have no veto.

The losses fall into three groups. Agenda-setting follows India’s priorities, as the emphasis of the Delhi Declaration suggests. Cooperation lasts only while the interests of hub and spokes overlap, as Bangladesh shows. And none of the three cases offers evidence of spillover, meaning functional ties that produce political trust able to survive a quarrel. Extradition and intelligence sharing demand far more trust than electricity wheeling does, and they now sit at the centre of the agenda.

Projection for next 5 years

Over the next five years, BIMSTEC is therefore more likely to become denser than uniformly deeper. The institutional changes of the past decade make a return to its earlier dormancy less likely: a permanent Secretariat, regularised sectoral mechanisms, clearer responsibilities and a long-term agenda now allow cooperation to continue even when individual projects stall. But the same architecture also permits progress to remain uneven. By 2031, security, disaster management, energy or particular connectivity arrangements could deepen while trade liberalisation and wider economic integration continue to lag.

There are five things to be watched. The first is whether the FTA is finalised in parts. The second is whether Kaladan opens in 2027 as Mizoram expects. The third is whether the Jamnagar centre moves from proposal to operation. The fourth is the level at which Bangladesh attends BIMSTEC ministerials, together with the Hasina question. The fifth is whether power trade through India grows beyond the first 40 MW. If these move together, the narrow model is deepening. If security cooperation grows while the trade and connectivity indicators stall, fragmentation along bilateral and minilateral lines is the likelier path, and that is where the evidence points today.

The more important test is whether cooperation begins to travel across these boundaries. If energy links create demand for wider infrastructure, connectivity begins to facilitate substantially greater regional trade, or security mechanisms generate habits of cooperation that survive bilateral disputes, BIMSTEC will have begun moving from modular cooperation towards a more integrated regional order. If progress remains confined to separate sectors and smaller coalitions of willing members, then unevenness will have proved not a transitional weakness but BIMSTEC’s durable institutional form.

When more than 15,000 delegates arrive in Bangkok for the IMF and World Bank meetings, Thailand wants them to remember more than what was discussed. The food has been planned as carefully as the diplomacy. Tilapia will be aged with makrut lime, lemongrass and spices; local rice, coconuts and salt from Pattani will appear across the menus; Thai music and design will accompany the meetings. For a middle power, hosting finance ministers, central bankers and executives from 191 countries offers something difficult to manufacture through ordinary diplomacy: several days in which people who make consequential economic decisions are paying attention to Thailand.

The logic is persuasive. A delegate remembers the meal, becomes curious about the country, and perhaps returns as a tourist or looks more closely at Thailand as an investment destination, but a considerable distance separates each of those outcomes. If someone leaves Bangkok thinking more favourably about Thailand, the country has succeeded in generating attraction. Whether that attraction has given Thailand greater power is a harder question.

Joseph Nye’s original formulation of soft power made precisely this distinction. Culture, political values, and foreign policy can make a country attractive, but attraction matters politically because it can help produce preferred outcomes without coercion or payment. Over time, the first half of that proposition has become much easier to demonstrate than the second. Governments point to international students, cultural exports, tourism, cuisine and favourable perceptions as evidence of soft power, even when it remains unclear what another actor subsequently did differently because of them.

Soft power has not stopped working; its effectiveness depends on what it is asked to achieve. Attraction converts relatively easily into consumption, can accumulate into trust and access, but becomes much harder to isolate when the desired outcome is a costly economic or strategic choice.

From the restaurant to the negotiating table

Thailand’s own experience makes the distinction unusually visible because its use of food diplomacy is neither new nor unsuccessful. Its “Kitchen of the World” policy has long linked promoting Thai cuisine overseas with food exports, restaurants, tourism, entrepreneurs, and farmers. Thailand’s foreign ministry still describes the programme in explicitly commercial terms: popularising Thai food is intended not only to enhance the country’s image but to expand markets for Thai products and businesses.

Here the route from attraction to outcome is relatively clear. Someone who develops a taste for Thai food may buy Thai ingredients or seek out Thai restaurants. A diner who becomes curious about the country may eventually visit it. Culture changes behaviour because the desired behaviour is closely connected to the source of attraction itself. Thailand’s gastrodiplomacy therefore provides a strong case for soft power, but it also shows why the argument becomes harder as the desired outcome moves further from the original cultural encounter.

The IMF meetings bring Thailand into contact not simply with consumers but with people making decisions about capital and investment. Bangkok is using the gathering to present itself as an investment destination at a moment when the government is trying to raise growth through sectors including semiconductors, data centres, electric vehicles and renewable energy. Yet Thailand also faces the material constraints that shape those decisions: relatively weak investment, high household debt, slow growth, and uncertainty around external trade. The meetings may help get Thailand onto an investor’s radar; whether the investment follows will depend on a much less atmospheric calculation. This is where the value of attraction becomes conditional. If two investment destinations offer broadly comparable opportunities, familiarity and confidence may tip a decision. As the difference in returns, regulation or risk widens, a favourable impression has progressively more work to do. Soft power matters most where the underlying choice remains open enough for attraction to influence it.

What does trust buy?

Southeast Asia offers a harder version of the same problem because its relationships with major powers refuse to arrange themselves into a simple hierarchy of preference. The 2026 State of Southeast Asia Survey found Japan to be the region’s most trusted major power, with 65.6 per cent of respondents expressing confidence in it. Decades of Japanese investment, development assistance, and relatively consistent diplomacy have built a reservoir of trust that Tokyo can draw on. Yet Japan is not the partner Southeast Asians regard as most strategically relevant to ASEAN. China holds that position, followed by the United States and then Japan. China is also regarded as the region’s leading economic and political-strategic power, despite persistent anxiety about its regional behaviour.

The contrast is not evidence that trust is irrelevant. Japan’s reputation gives it strategic value. Japanese investment or security cooperation can enter regional politics carrying less suspicion than initiatives from a country whose intentions are more contested. Trust reduces the reassurance Tokyo must provide and gives Japanese diplomacy credibility before a negotiation even begins. However, it has not overturned the region’s material calculations. Southeast Asian governments can trust Japan while trading intensively with China and retaining security relationships with the United States. They do not have to translate affection for one partner into alignment with it.

There is a further complication. Japan’s reputation did not develop separately from its material presence in Southeast Asia. Decades of infrastructure financing, investment, and development cooperation helped create the trust now described as a Japanese soft-power asset, which may in turn make further cooperation easier. Cause and effect reinforce one another, which is precisely why it becomes difficult to claim that attraction alone produced the influence. The more useful conclusion is that attraction often changes the terms on which power is exercised rather than the underlying distribution of power itself. A trusted country can pursue its interests with less resistance. A distrusted one may remain indispensable but pay more for cooperation.

Attraction without alignment

The United States shows how far these elements can separate. The 2026 Global Soft Power Index still ranks it first globally, reflecting the extraordinary reach of American universities, entertainment, technology and brands. Yet the United States also recorded the sharpest decline of all 193 countries surveyed. Its overall score fell by 4.6 points and its reputation ranking dropped eleven places, while familiarity was the only broad metric on which it did not decline.

The divergence is more revealing than the ranking. Someone can want an American university education, watch American films and use American technology while becoming more critical of American governance or foreign policy. Cultural attraction can survive political disagreement because individuals and governments don’t need to encounter another country as a single package.

South Korea shows the same separation, but in the other direction. The Korean Wave has created enormous audiences for Korean music, television, film and consumer products, with clear economic consequences. Yet the difficulty of turning that popularity into political influence has long been recognised even by advocates of South Korean soft power. A Carnegie study noted that simply attaching celebrities to diplomatic events does not establish what foreign-policy purpose their popularity serves. Cultural appeal can draw an audience to diplomacy; it cannot guarantee that the audience will accept Seoul’s position once the subject becomes politically contentious.

An even sharper example appears in South Korea’s immediate neighbourhood. South Korean popular culture has penetrated North Korea deeply enough for Pyongyang to criminalise its consumption and impose severe punishments on young people caught watching or distributing it. Few cases demonstrate culture’s capacity to cross a hostile political boundary more vividly. Yet that attraction has not resolved the security relationship between the two Koreas or removed the strategic calculations sustaining it. Culture can alter how people imagine another society without immediately altering the state that governs them.

The contemporary international system makes this separation increasingly normal. Governments can seek Chinese markets, Japanese infrastructure, American security cooperation and Korean cultural products simultaneously. Attraction hasn’t disappeared; it’s become easier to compartmentalise.

Where attraction becomes power

It does not leave soft power with nothing to do. The cases above suggest something more precise about where it matters.

International decisions are not made through material calculation alone. Governments operate within relationships shaped by familiarity, legitimacy and accumulated trust. A country that is considered reliable may receive the benefit of the doubt during a crisis. An investment proposal associated with a familiar partner may face less domestic resistance. Universities and exchange programmes can create professional networks that endure long after individual participants return home. None of these effects is dramatic, but diplomacy often depends on precisely these differences at the margin.

Soft power becomes most consequential when it changes the cost of cooperation. Japan does not become Southeast Asia’s dominant strategic actor because it is trusted, but trust makes Japanese engagement easier to accept. Thailand cannot make an uneconomic investment attractive through cuisine, but familiarity may matter when an investor is choosing between otherwise comparable opportunities. Cultural attraction does not have to determine a decision to influence it. The limit appears when attraction is expected to compensate for a large material or political disadvantage. The higher the cost of the choice, the less likely favourable sentiment is to carry it alone. A positive national image can influence where someone holidays or studies. It may help determine between comparable commercial partners. It is much less likely to persuade a government to sacrifice an important market, accept a serious security risk or absorb a substantial domestic political cost.

Asking whether soft power still “works” therefore yields an incomplete answer unless we first specify what it is expected to do. Thailand and South Korea show that cultural attraction can readily translate into consumption, tourism, and commercial opportunity. Japan shows how reputation can build trust that makes subsequent cooperation easier. None proves that attraction can reliably move actors towards costly choices that their existing interests tell them to reject. This distinction brings the argument back to Bangkok. If delegates leave IMF meetings wanting to return to Thailand, seek Thai products, or pay closer attention to opportunities in the country, the exercise has achieved something tangible. If greater familiarity leads an investor to choose Thailand when economic fundamentals are otherwise close, attraction has influenced a consequential decision.

The problem begins when every stage of that process is described as power. Being known, being liked, being trusted, and being able to change another actor’s choices are related advantages, but not interchangeable. Contemporary international politics increasingly demonstrates how easily they can come apart. Nye’s original test remains useful precisely because it was harder. The question was never simply whether others found a country attractive. It was whether that attraction helped the country obtain outcomes it wanted. The Thai chef preparing this week’s menus offered a simpler measure. If just one delegate returns home saying the food was delicious, he will be satisfied. For hospitality, that is a perfectly reasonable standard. For power, it is where the question begins.

The talks between the federal government and Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) collapsed in the early hours of Sunday, 4 October 2026, and PTI’s long march left Lakki Marwat that afternoon. Most commentary calls this a failed negotiation. It reads better as the latest turn of a pattern. The government needs a deal it can justify to the military establishment. PTI needs one it can justify to its jailed founder and its street base. Since 2022, those two requirements have seldom overlapped. Three arguments can be made. The civil-military constraint under every PTI negotiation since 2022 limits what a civilian delegation can offer. The counter-militancy dispute that sank the October round rests on a real governance problem in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), which neither side is addressing. And cycles of delay-then-collapse now work as a stable way of managing confrontation, which is different from a path to resolving it. “Design” in the title means structure. Nothing here claims that any actor planned the outcome.

The pattern starts with Imran Khan’s ouster in April 2022. After Khan was jailed on 5 August 2023, Dawn reported, his party’s relations with the government and the establishment turned deeply hostile. AP says all but one of his convictions have since been suspended or overturned on appeal, and he is still in prison. PTI alleged rigging in the February 2024 election. The 26th Amendment of October 2024 changed how the chief justice is selected and created constitutional benches. PTI’s November 2024 Islamabad protest ended in a crackdown in which the state acknowledged the deaths of Rangers and a policeman; PTI says at least 12 of its supporters were killed, which the authorities deny. ACLED notes that the 27th Amendment of November 2025 entrenched military supremacy over civilian leadership. This year the Supreme Court ruled in August that Khan should be moved to a civilian hospital, but authorities returned him to prison after a short stay, and the September arrests of his three sisters raised tensions again. PTI’s march, first set for 27 September, was pushed to 4 October to leave room for talks. Each step cut into the space for a civilian settlement.

That history explains why neither delegation had much room to move. Each had to bargain across the table and also satisfy a constituency outside it that could refuse to ratify the result, and in both cases that constituency was not in the room. For the government, it is the establishment, which has already taken a side in the counter-militancy dispute: the ISPR director-general has said the provincial government is responsible for rising terrorism, and PTI denies any non-cooperation. On the questions PTI cares about most, the judicial status of its founder, the inquiries into 9 May 2023 and 26 November 2024, and the release of detained workers, no civilian team looks free to decide. That is an inference from the charter, since both inquiries would have examined the conduct of security forces, and neither side has said it in so many words. The government’s coalition adds a second limit. PPP Senator Sherry Rehman, a member of the government team, said her party wanted the march ended, not merely suspended.

For PTI, the limit is Khan, and in practice Chief Minister Sohail Afridi as well. Opposition leader Mahmood Khan Achakzai held that any decision to cancel the march needed approval from both. The party is not united on this. Shaukat Yousafzai urged postponement and wider consultation, warned the march could turn bloody, and said that replacing Afridi was for Khan alone to decide. A team that cannot bind its own principal gives the government little to ratify, and the government has little it is free to give.

The October round shows both limits at work. Two rounds were held, on Friday and on Saturday afternoon into the night. PTI wanted a jail meeting with its founder before calling off the protest; the government wanted the march cancelled first. Each side blamed the other. Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi said the draft was changed four times once Afridi became involved, and Rehman said PTI repeatedly accepted terms and then backed away. PTI Secretary General Salman Akram Raja gave a different cause: the federal demand that KP own anti-terrorism actions Islamabad had launched unilaterally. Minister of State for Interior Tallal Chaudhry said the talks failed because the KP government could not assure whether they would cooperate in the fight against terrorism.

The gap looked small. Naqvi put agreement at 99 percent, a figure that is his own, and Fawad Chaudhry called agreement on over 90 percent of issues a major achievement. A near-complete draft that still collapses fits the argument here. What remained, access to Khan and ownership of the counter-terrorism commitments, runs into the establishment’s interests on one side and the founder’s veto on the other.

January 2025 set the precedent. PTI’s written charter, presented on 16 January, asked for two commissions of inquiry under the Commission of Inquiry Act 2017, one on May 9 and one on November 26, plus state support for bail and sentence suspensions for political prisoners. It framed these as a “prerequisite to wider negotiations with respect to the restoration of the Constitution”. Both inquiries would have examined the military’s own conduct, including the legality of Khan’s arrest and the break-in at the Islamabad High Court. PTI wanted the commissions within seven days; the government promised a reply within seven working days. Khan called off the talks on 23 January, and the government declared them over on 31 January, saying PTI had left before the reply was due and that a parliamentary committee, not a judicial commission, was the right forum. October 2026 repeats the logic on a smaller scale. Sequencing becomes the weapon, because whoever concedes first gives up the mobilisation that made them a negotiating partner.

Under the sequencing fight sat the stated cause of the collapse: counter-militancy cooperation. It deserves attention, though not in the form the federal government gives it. The emergency is real. ACLED found that militant violence in 2025 surpassed 2024, itself one of the most violent years in over a decade, and counted around 700 attacks by the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) on security forces, or clashes with them, in the first eleven months. Most of that activity was in KP, and security forces have run Operation 11 Garaj across the province for months. Information Minister Attaullah Tarar said on 4 October that PTI must decide whether it stands with Pakistan or Afghanistan, and on 28 September he called the party the B-team of the banned TTP.

The provincial record complicates that framing. In July 2026 KP added 4,306 constables, and Afridi told them action against terrorism should be their highest priority. In the first half of 2026, KP police report, the Counter Terrorism Department ran 2,004 intelligence-based operations, arrested 504 suspects including 14 high-value commanders, and killed 182. A province that runs two thousand operations in six months is not refusing to fight militancy. It fights with provincial instruments and resists a federal military operation that Islamabad has hinted at. That resistance has local roots. ACLED reports that locals remain hostile to a sustained military presence, and that air and drone strikes causing civilian casualties in KP have prompted backlash.

The deeper failure is institutional. The funding argument has no shared baseline. Federal ministers have cited security funding for KP of Rs150 billion, Rs700 billion and Rs800 billion, while Afridi says constitutionally due funds are being withheld. The consultation mechanism is contested too. PTI says Islamabad wanted KP to accept a counter-terrorism framework without adequate provincial consultation, and Tarar asks why the provincial government does not convene its Provincial Apex Committee. Both sides point to the same body, and neither has used it to settle the question. A dispute that could be argued as policy is argued as loyalty, and the only province the opposition governs is the one being delegitimised.

Set beside the 2025 precedent, the cycles of December 2024 to February 2025 and September to October 2026 suggest that delay-then-collapse is a stable equilibrium and no longer a failed route to settlement. In a competitive authoritarian regime, where formal democratic competition persists under unequal conditions, incumbents gain from opposition mobilisation that comes in bursts and stays contained. Negotiation windows do that work. They cool things at peak mobilisation, divide the opposition between street and table, and reset the game with nothing conceded. PTI feeds the cycle itself: each march announcement is its main tool for forcing talks, and each cancellation or collapse drains the mobilisation it must then rebuild. Each side’s pressure also justifies the other’s. A march announcement brings containers and warnings of force, and those give PTI its case for the next march. The arrangement holds while PTI’s mobilisation costs less than concession, while state coercion stays containable, and while KP’s security crisis does not force a rupture. The costs fall unevenly. Negotiators on both sides pay little for a collapsed round. Residents of KP, who live with the militancy and with the political fight over how to meet it, pay more.

If the pattern is stable, the question is what would break it. An exit would need four things, and the record shows each is at least partly available. The first is a sequencing formula that removes the first-mover penalty. Government sources said at one point that Barrister Gohar would be allowed to meet Khan, and Rehman said the government had offered assurances on his medical treatment. A meeting and a suspension of the march, announced together, would show whether sequencing is the real obstacle. The second is to move counter-terrorism onto an institutional track. Afridi’s released draft sought regular federal-provincial consultations on security, and Rana Sanaullah has said Islamabad stays open to talks if PTI and the KP administration cooperate on counterterrorism. The Provincial Apex Committee is the obvious venue. The third is a mechanism on 9 May and 26 November that the establishment can tolerate. The government prefers a parliamentary committee and PTI a judicial commission, and a parliamentary committee with judicial participation is one possible bridge, though it still meets the same obstacle. The fourth is a guarantor, which is the hardest. The Speaker, the PPP and others can broker, but none of them can bind the military.

The alternatives are less benign. Tarar called talk of governor’s rule or an emergency in KP premature, which confirms that it is being discussed. The government has warned the march will not be allowed into Islamabad, and Naqvi has said Afridi will be held responsible for any deaths. As of 8 October, Afridi was due to announce the march’s next phase at Khairabad. Four things would show whether the cycle is breaking: access for Khan’s lawyers and doctors, a formally constituted inquiry, a meeting of the Provincial Apex Committee, and whether the march meets lethal force.

The October 2026 collapse is best read as the system working as built. The civil-military settlement of 2022 produced a configuration in which the principal opposition party can be negotiated with but never settled with, and a province can be drafted rhetorically into a security narrative while its governance crisis goes unaddressed. Delay and collapse have become a method of living inside the crisis, and the method is stable only while neither side’s alternative to it costs more. The next cycle will test whether it can hold when the question it manages, the state’s accountability for its own political conduct, is one it was designed never to answer.

Sheikh Hasina has been out of power for more than two years, but she remains one of the most difficult questions in India-Bangladesh relations.

Dhaka wants her extradited from India. New Delhi says the request is moving through a legal process. Bangladesh has responded that law alone is insufficient: returning Hasina also requires Indian “political will.” Yet the same government says Prime Minister Tarique Rahman has not ruled out visiting India and that bilateral engagement must continue. The contradiction is useful. India and Bangladesh are trying to rebuild relations while disagreeing over the political figure around whom much of their previous relationship was organised.

Between 2009 and 2024, the two countries built security arrangements, reopened transport links, expanded energy trade and finally settled their land boundary. Much of that infrastructure has survived Hasina. What has not survived is the political alignment that made its construction comparatively easy. The question after Hasina is therefore not whether India has “lost Bangladesh.” It is whether a relationship built under unusually favourable political conditions can function when New Delhi must negotiate its interests through a more contested Bangladeshi politics.

India and Bangladesh began in 1971 with an intimacy unusual between neighbouring states. India had supported Bangladesh’s liberation, and the 1972 Treaty of Friendship located the relationship in the shared experience of the liberation struggle. But 1971 never produced a permanent Bangladeshi consensus about India.

After Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s assassination in 1975, successive governments sought greater distance from New Delhi. Under Ziaur Rahman, “Bangladeshi nationalism” distinguished the state’s identity from the Bengali nationalism associated with the Awami League while expanding relationships with China, Pakistan and the Islamic world. Attitudes towards India consequently became entangled with domestic arguments about sovereignty, national identity and the political meaning of 1971. The Awami League and BNP inherited different parts of that history. For the former, the liberation struggle made India easier to accommodate within its political imagination. The BNP was more willing to treat distance from New Delhi as an assertion of sovereignty. Hasina’s return in 2009 therefore did more than improve bilateral diplomacy. It produced an unusual convergence between the political preferences of the government in Dhaka and India’s strategic interests.

Hasina’s government acted against insurgent networks operating against India from Bangladeshi territory and expanded security cooperation. Rail connections reopened, inland waterways revived, and Indian access to Chattogram and Mongla ports offered the Northeast shorter routes towards the Bay of Bengal. The 2015 Land Boundary Agreement finally settled enclaves and other anomalies whose origins stretched back through Partition and 1971. Electricity and fuel networks further thickened the relationship.

These were substantial institutional gains. A settled boundary is difficult to unsettle; a railway, pipeline or transmission line creates constituencies interested in keeping it operational. However, physical integration did not settle the political argument over reciprocity.

Teesta is the clearest example. India and Bangladesh came close to a water-sharing agreement in 2011 before opposition from West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee prevented its conclusion. The failure exposed an asymmetry that persisted through the Hasina years. Dhaka could deliver on matters central to Indian national security and connectivity, while New Delhi could not always overcome its own domestic politics on issues carrying comparable weight in Bangladesh. Hasina nevertheless continued expanding cooperation. That was politically consequential; border killings remained contentious, and trade was heavily imbalanced. Teesta remained unresolved, and as Hasina’s rule grew increasingly authoritarian, India’s close relationship with her government let opponents argue that New Delhi valued a predictable partner more than political competition in Bangladesh.

India therefore acquired something more specific than influence during the Hasina period. It had a government willing to absorb much of the domestic political cost of cooperating with India. It made Indian interests comparatively inexpensive to pursue. Its disappearance after 2024 did not remove the infrastructure. It removed the favourable political conditions surrounding its use. The difference becomes visible in the subsequent relationship. Bangladesh still relies heavily on Indian food, fuel, electricity and industrial inputs. India, meanwhile, benefits from Bangladeshi territory as an alternative route into its Northeast. Its own Inland Waterways Authority describes the Bangladesh protocol routes as an alternative to the Siliguri Corridor. Neither country can easily remove the other from its geography. But dependence does not automatically produce influence.

In April 2025, India withdrew a facility allowing Bangladeshi exports to third countries to transit through Indian territory, officially citing congestion and costs for Indian exporters. New Delhi later restricted several Bangladeshi products from entering through land ports. The policy could also narrow access created through integration.

Dhaka has simultaneously widened its relationships with China, Pakistan and other partners. China matters here less as a replacement for India than as an additional option. Chinese capital, infrastructure and defence ties can improve Bangladesh’s bargaining position; they cannot replace a 4,096-kilometre border, shared rivers or proximity to Indian markets. Nor can India assume that geographic indispensability produces political deference. This is what interdependence looks like without alignment: the connections remain, but their terms become negotiable.

The BNP consequently matters more than a simple change of government would suggest. Historically, it could criticise the Awami League for excessive proximity to India. In office, Tarique Rahman’s government must manage the same geography. It needs cooperation on water, trade, border management and energy while demonstrating that engagement with New Delhi does not reproduce the perceived asymmetries of the Hasina years. Its insistence this week that Bangladesh wants “strategic autonomy,” while simultaneously affirming the need for direct bilateral engagement with India, captures that tension. India faces the mirror image. A durable Bangladesh policy can no longer assume that close relations with the Awami League and close relations with Bangladesh are effectively the same thing.

For Dhaka, Hasina’s continued presence in India reinforces the suspicion that New Delhi’s relationship was not merely with the Bangladeshi state but with a particular political order. For India, returning a former partner who delivered on major Indian security interests carries its own legal and political implications.

Each government consequently wants the other to compartmentalise. Dhaka wants India to separate its historical relationship with Hasina from its relationship with Bangladesh. New Delhi wants Bangladesh to prevent Hasina from determining cooperation on water, connectivity, trade and security. The approaching expiry of the Ganges Water Sharing Treaty makes this problem concrete. The treaty expires in December without an automatic renewal provision. Bangladesh has prepared for negotiations and is awaiting India’s response. Unlike Hasina’s extradition, water cannot indefinitely remain an irritant around which the rest of the relationship works. The negotiation will also test reciprocity in a different way than Teesta. Bangladesh and India share 54 rivers but have only one water-sharing treaty. A relationship that has become considerably denser in trade, energy and connectivity will now have to demonstrate whether that institutional depth can produce a politically acceptable bargain when the governments are no longer closely aligned.

Under Hasina, India had an unusual convergence between its strategic interests and the political preferences of the government in Dhaka. The infrastructure built during those years now helps prevent political estrangement from becoming strategic separation. But infrastructure cannot reproduce the favourable political terms under which it was created. The shift after Hasina is therefore not from friendship to hostility. It is from political alignment to political bargaining.

This may be the harder test of what the previous fifteen years achieved. If security cooperation, connectivity and water negotiations can survive under a government that does not share the Awami League’s historical relationship with India, then India and Bangladesh will have built something more durable than the Hasina partnership. If they cannot, New Delhi will discover that it institutionalised cooperation without fully institutionalising the relationship.

When Xi Jinping visited the White House in late September 2026, the Chinese readout recorded his central demand: that Washington stay on what Beijing calls the correct position of opposing Taiwan independence and handle the Taiwan question with prudence. The White House statement and fact sheet did not mention Taiwan. Behind that silence sat a roughly $14 billion arms package that Congress approved in January and that the administration has declined to notify for more than four months. This piece asks whether such a pause can function as a bargaining strategy, who bears its costs, and what it reveals about the American security role in Asia as American standing among allied publics falls. It argues that the pause operates as a concession in effect, that the public evidence for this is thinner than commonly assumed, and that its weight depends on what the guarantee rests on.

The package was approved by lawmakers in January and cannot advance without formal notification. After the May summit in Beijing, Trump promised a determination within a fairly short period, held the package in abeyance, and told Fox News the sale was “a very good negotiating chip”. The administration’s official explanation differs. Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao told the Senate that sales were on a pause so the military would retain the munitions needed for the war against Iran, and Taipei says it was never formally notified. Secretary of State Marco Rubio later told senators the sale was not on a pause but under review. The package stayed stalled through a second summit, which followed an extension of the trade truce and at which the two sides agreed to seek better tariff treatment for about $30 billion of non-sensitive goods each way.

The two explanations predict different things. Scarcity should freeze items short in American stocks and spare the rest; diplomacy should freeze the whole package and follow the summit calendar. The public record does not itemize the package, so the test cannot yet be run from outside. What is observable is a president who described the sale in the language of bargaining, a freeze that survived two summits, and a trade deal that advanced while the arms question did not. These facts fit linkage without establishing it. No source shows Beijing surrendering anything specific in return, and Xi’s readout asks for prudence, not a freeze by name. “Concession” is an inference, strengthened by the president’s own framing. The pause is public; what stays unannounced is its price, and the concession lies there.

Whether a guarantee survives private bargaining depends on how the bargaining is structured. Taiwan policy has never been free of dealings with Beijing. In the August 1982 communiqué, Washington told Beijing it intended gradually to reduce arms sales; Reagan paired that with the Six Assurances, conveyed to Taipei, one of which holds that the United States would not consult Beijing on arms sales. The settlement therefore combined a concession to the adversary with a counter-commitment to the protégé, and it distinguished two kinds of ambiguity. Washington stayed vague about what it would do in a crisis but explicit about peacetime process: arms would move under the Taiwan Relations Act, which obligates the United States to provide defensive arms, with no Chinese say. The present pause reverses this. The crisis question remains vague, and the peacetime process has become vague too. Trump has confirmed discussing arms sales with Xi and dismissed an agreement signed in 1982 as a reason not to; analysts say such consultation may breach the assurances. Officials insist policy has not changed, which may be true of the written policy and still miss the point, since a guarantee is sustained by the practice that executes it.

A guarantee has three audiences. The adversary must expect the guarantor to act, the protégé must expect it enough to invest in its own defense, and the guarantor’s institutions must hold after one leader’s attention shifts. Private bargaining damages the first two once discovered, and the third limits the harm. At present, the third is intact: Congress shows bipartisan consensus behind the sales, and Taiwan’s legislature passed a special defense budget of NT$780 billion, roughly $25 billion, in May. The arrangement survives this pause. A repetition is another matter, because each one teaches Beijing that the price list is open.

Beijing rejects the term “sphere of influence” and prefers Xi’s 2014 formulation that Asian security should be managed by Asians. In analytic usage, the term denotes a zone in which states adjust their security choices to avoid one power’s displeasure and outside powers accept that adjustment as legitimate. The second element is where the pause matters. Beijing treats Taiwan as a domestic question, so it seeks the disappearance of the question. A president who weighs an arms sale against Beijing’s reaction, and treats a limit on consultation as dispensable, concedes that Beijing holds a legitimate interest in the decision. Influence shifts from pressure around the island to consultation in Washington, which costs China less and is harder to resist because the other party chooses to attend. Little else has changed: American forces, the alliances with Japan and the Philippines, and Taiwan’s budget remain. A sphere also requires third states to defer, and the evidence is thin. A CSIS analyst argues that economic pressure on India while Washington seeks stability with China risks persuading New Delhi that independent leverage protects better than alignment. Pew’s 2026 survey found the United States ahead of China in favorability in only six of 36 countries, among them India, Japan, the Philippines and South Korea, which suggests proximity to Chinese power breeds wariness before deference.

The fall in American reputation raises the question of whether the umbrella itself changes. The umbrella divides into capability, credibility, and consent. Opinion does not touch capability, which consists of forces, bases, and munitions stocks. Credibility is partly a matter of belief. Consent, meaning basing access, joint planning, defense budgets, and the willingness of local politicians to stand beside Washington, depends most on public tolerance, and tolerance is falling. Pew found China viewed more favorably than the United States in 27 of 36 countries, and confidence in the United States as a reliable partner fell from 83 to 35 percent in Canada and from 79 to 37 percent in Australia between 2022 and 2026. The effect is bounded by threat, however. In South Korea, 55 percent now view the United States unfavorably, yet more than eight in ten still name it the most important ally. Alliances rest on fear of a neighbor more than affection for a patron, so for states facing direct threat the umbrella holds in the near term while its terms change: protégés hedge, diversify suppliers, build their own capacity and seek written guarantees.

Taiwan shows the pattern with a complication. Academia Sinica’s January 2026 survey found trust in the United States as a credible country down from 45 percent in 2021 to about 34 percent, yet 58.7 percent would resist invasion at all costs even without American intervention. About half of respondents also worried that Washington and Beijing could eventually reach a deal that harms Taiwan’s interests, and the survey’s lead researcher writes that in this climate arms sales do not automatically reassure. If so, the pause costs Taipei less in perception than in hardware. The guarantor’s electorate matters equally: a Chicago Council survey released in September 2026 found support for sending US troops to defend Taiwan down to 38 percent from a 2021 peak of 52 percent.

Taipei’s conduct shows where the umbrella now stands. It has chosen persuasion over protest toward Washington and reserved sharper language for Beijing, whose account of the summit its foreign ministry called a distortion. Deputy Foreign Minister François Wu argued that Taiwan’s self-defense serves American interests, citing semiconductors. The likeliest reading is that public recrimination would harden the transactional logic Taipei wants to escape, at the cost of arguing for its defense as an American interest rather than an obligation. An interest can be priced. Deterrence rests on Beijing’s beliefs, and Beijing reads Washington’s conduct more closely than allied polls. The reputational slide is slow, and the pause is fast, and the second feeds the first: Pew’s reliable-partner question measures the belief that commitments are not for sale, which a quiet pause erodes.

Four observations would convert inference into evidence: whether the freeze covers the whole package or only items in short supply; whether other Taiwan sales proceed on schedule; whether Beijing gives anything visible beyond the tariff relief and coal purchases already announced in September, such as further purchases or reduced military pressure around the island; and whether Congress moves to force notification. The harder outcome to read is a quiet release. If the freeze lifts after the next summit with no visible Chinese concession, the price will have been paid in precedent rather than goods. Beijing will have shown that summit pressure can move a sale Congress-approved, and every ally will have watched. A notification can be issued in a day; a reputation for keeping commitments takes far longer to rebuild.

India’s purchase of Russian oil has often been presented as evidence of strategic autonomy. The more interesting question is how New Delhi made an apparent contradiction sustainable for as long as it did. Since 2022, India has expanded Russian energy ties while deepening trade, technology and security cooperation with the United States. This did not require the two relationships to become compatible. It required keeping their disagreements contained. India could treat Russian crude as an energy-security decision without determining its relationship with Washington, while closer US ties did not require it to disengage from Moscow. This arrangement is usually described as compartmentalisation. But New Delhi cannot create those compartments on its own. They also depend on what its partners need from India, how easily India can replace what they provide, and whether either side is willing to make cooperation in one area conditional on Indian behaviour in another.

The latest American pressure on Russian energy matters because Washington is doing precisely that. The Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026 allows tariffs of up to 100 per cent on goods from the largest buyers of Russian energy. For India, this connects a refinery’s decision to buy Russian crude with the conditions under which Indian goods enter the American market. The question is therefore not simply whether India can replace Russian oil. It is whether the economic relationships that let New Delhi keep Moscow and Washington separate still leave enough room to do so.

Russian oil fitted unusually well into India’s foreign-policy model after 2022 because dependence ran in both directions. Western sanctions sharply reduced Russia’s European market just as Indian refiners gained access to discounted crude. From December 2022 through April 2026, China purchased 49 per cent of Russia’s crude exports and India another 37 per cent, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. Moscow had become heavily reliant on two Asian buyers.

An analysis of official trade data estimates that Russian discounts saved Indian refiners at least $12.6 billion between April 2022 and June 2025. This gave the relationship a useful asymmetry. Russia needed Indian buyers, while Indian refiners retained access to other suppliers. New Delhi could therefore defend Russian purchases as commercial decisions rather than political alignment with Moscow. Washington objected, but its expanding interests with India in defence, technology, and the Indo-Pacific also gave it reasons not to let oil alone define the bilateral relationship. The separation was therefore sustained by more than Indian diplomacy. All three sides had reasons to tolerate it. Those incentives are becoming less favourable. The effective Russian price advantage over non-Russian crude fell from 13.6 per cent in 2022-23 to 2.8 per cent in 2024-25. By September, S&P Global assessed Urals delivered to India’s west coast at a premium to forward-dated Brent. Stronger Chinese demand is also competing with India for tighter Russian supply.

Yet Russian crude has not become irrelevant. India imports around 88 per cent of its crude requirement, while instability in West Asia has made excessive dependence on Gulf supply routes risky. Russian oil has become less profitable without becoming strategically useless. India nevertheless has more flexibility in oil than the headline dependence suggests.

Its refineries can process crude from a wide range of suppliers. As Russian availability has tightened, refiners have increased purchases of UAE Murban, Iraqi Basrah and Angolan crude. Russian arrivals fell from around 2.1 million barrels per day in August to roughly 1.75 million in September. (Reuters) That decline cannot simply be read as India yielding to Washington. Russian exports have tightened, Chinese demand has increased, discounts have narrowed, and shipping risks have changed alongside the threat of American penalties.

Nor do all Indian refiners face the same calculation. Reliance has had contractual commitments for Russian crude, while Nayara, partly owned by Rosneft, is considerably more exposed to Russian supply. State refiners have stronger reasons to diversify when sanctions or supply risks rise. This matters because India’s room for manoeuvre at the diplomatic level comes from adjustments further down the chain. Some refiners can reduce Russian exposure; others retain it when commercial conditions justify it. India can change the composition of its crude basket without converting every adjustment into a geopolitical choice.

Diversification therefore does more than reduce dependence on Russia. It preserves India’s ability to decide when Russian oil remains worth the political and commercial risk.

The harder problem lies in the US relationship. The American market accounted for about a fifth of India’s exports in 2025, but dependence is concentrated in particular industries. A NITI Aayog assessment found that the US took 38 per cent of India’s pharmaceutical exports, 31.3 per cent of electrical machinery exports and 31.1 per cent of gems and jewellery exports in 2024. Several textile categories were even more exposed. This gives Washington a different kind of leverage. It does not need to provide India with an alternative to Russian crude. Instead, it can make Russian crude more expensive by imposing costs on industries that have nothing to do with oil.

The 2025-26 tariff episode showed how this can work. Washington imposed an additional 25 per cent tariff on Indian goods over Russian oil purchases. In February 2026, the White House removed the duty, stating that India had committed to stop importing Russian oil. More importantly, the settlement did not remain confined to oil. The accompanying US-India trade framework covered tariffs and market access alongside Indian purchases of American energy and other products, while the White House also linked the wider relationship to defence cooperation. Washington was already negotiating across categories that New Delhi had benefited from keeping separate.

The September legislation extends that logic. A refinery’s sourcing decision can now potentially affect an exporter selling pharmaceuticals, jewellery or textiles into the United States. Pressure no longer has to remain within the relationship where the disagreement originated.

This, however, does not mean Washington can dictate India’s oil policy. The United States also has interests in Indian market access, supply chains, technology and security cooperation. Excessive pressure carries costs for the bilateral relationship, just as abandoning Indian buyers would carry costs for Russia. Nor can either dependency be reduced to a national trade number. Replacing Russian crude is easier for some refiners than others. Losing American demand would be more disruptive for some exporters than others. Both the ability to substitute and the time required to do so matter.

India’s room for manoeuvre therefore depends on three practical questions: how quickly it can replace what a partner provides, who inside India bears the cost, and whether the other side is willing to keep disagreements contained.

That is why the present dispute is not yet evidence that India must choose between Moscow and Washington. It instead reveals how India has avoided that choice. New Delhi has benefited from relationships in which dependencies were spread across partners, alternatives remained available, and disagreements did not determine cooperation elsewhere. Washington’s attempt to connect Russian oil with American market access makes that balance harder to maintain. India can respond by shifting crude suppliers, negotiating exemptions, or reducing its exposure to individual export markets, but each response shifts the cost elsewhere.

India has not lost the ability to deal with Russia and the United States simultaneously. But 2026 has clarified what sustains that ability. Cheap Russian crude helped when Moscow needed Indian buyers; refinery flexibility helps when those barrels become costly; access to alternative markets matters when Washington uses trade as leverage. None of these advantages is permanent. The limit of India’s approach will therefore not arrive when New Delhi is formally asked to choose between Moscow and Washington. It will arrive when avoiding that choice becomes more expensive than making it.

On the evening of 15 September 2026, the Saudi-led coalition reports that its air defences destroyed a Houthi drone south of Mecca before it reached the holy city’s prohibited airspace. The next day, the Houthi military spokesman, Yahya Saree, announced that his forces had shot down a Saudi F-15 over Marib with a locally made surface-to-air missile. Neither claim has been settled. The Houthis reject the Mecca account, and as of 24 September Riyadh has confirmed nothing about the jet or its two-person crew. The prevailing interpretation treats the pair as bait, an effort to draw Saudi Arabia into a wider war. This article argues that the evidence supports a different reading: a calibrated demonstration, in which one probe was designed to be intercepted, and one trophy was designed to be seen, addressed simultaneously to Riyadh, Tehran and Washington.

The evidentiary base is thinner than the volume of coverage suggests. The Mecca claim rests on a single official source, the statement of the coalition spokesman, Major General Turki al-Maliki, which describes the drone as the second attempt on the city after a ballistic missile on 27 July 2017. Sareereplied that Houthi targets were oil facilities and military bases, well away from the holy sites. No independent party has published material on the drone’s launch point or route. The accounts of the two sides therefore cannot presently be adjudicated.

The jet is better documented but no less incomplete. CNN geolocated the wreckage to Marib and noted that the Houthi footage said nothing of the two aircrew. TWZ read the tailfin as number 5539 of the 55th Squadron and identified the airframe as an F-15SR, one of 68 older F-15S jets rebuilt in Saudi Arabia, and not one of the 84 new-build F-15SAs. Early descriptions of the loss as that of the kingdom’s most advanced fighter were therefore overstated. The imagery establishes that a Saudi F-15 was destroyed and that Ansar Allah claims credit, and it does not establish the cause. Precedent sharpens the significance of Saudi silence. When the Houthis said in February 2020 that they had downed a Saudi Tornado, the coalition confirmed the loss through the Saudi Press Agency the following day. A prolonged absence of comment departs from that pattern, although the explanation could be operational security, the unresolved fate of the crew, or both.

Against that record, the Mecca episode reads as the manipulation of a threshold and not as an attempt to cross it. By the coalition’s own count, two attempts in nine years is a low tempo for a war of this length. The Houthis are Zaydis who also revere Mecca, so a genuine strike on the city would forfeit the religious legitimacy on which they draw at home, and Tehran has little reason to be associated with an assault on Islam’s holiest site. A drone stopped short of the city and followed by a denial is consistent with a pattern in which proximity is itself the message. The coalition’s “red line” rhetoric performs a parallel function. It fixes a public threshold, attracts diplomatic sympathy, and leaves the actual military response free to operate beneath it. This is an inference from pattern and cannot be demonstrated from the available record.

The F-15 claim carries a different payload. Saree named neither the missile nor the time of the engagement, yet asserted that Houthi batteries turned back two formations sent to search for the wreckage and that Saudi aircraft flew more than 450 strikes in a single week. None of this is verified, and each detail serves the narrative under construction. The underlying hardware is nonetheless credible. TWZ describes a Houthi air-defence architecture built from mobile launchers, repurposed R-73 and R-27 air-to-air missiles, and passive infrared sensors that give a pilot no radar warning of being tracked. It also counts around a dozen Saudi helicopters, five jets and as many as 30 drones lost between 2015 and 2022. Aircraft losses are thus a familiar feature of this war. What distinguishes the present claim is the type of airframe, its timing within a broad offensive, and the deliberate publicity attached to it.

The description “locally manufactured” addresses a further audience. G7 leaders on 22 September called on Iran to end its arming of the Houthis, and the United Kingdom told the Security Council that Iranian support continues to enable the attacks. Both statements treat supply as the lever through which the Houthi arsenal can be constrained. A domestic missile, whether real or merely asserted, contests that premise at negligible cost to Tehran, which benefits from a partner able to test Saudi defences at a distance.

If the bait thesis were correct, the Houthis would be expected to welcome a large Saudi response, and their circumstances make that improbable. They have just taken Mokha and, according to the G7 statement, the whole of Yemen’s Red Sea coast, gains that a major Saudi escalation would place at risk. Washington’s conduct also counts against the thesis. Reuters reported that US embassy staff met Houthi representatives in Muscat on 13 September, where the Houthis said they did not intend to attack American ships and remained bound by the 2025 ceasefire, and the State Department declined to comment on that specific meeting. President Trump said the Houthis had asked Washington to stay out, Vice President Vance confirmed direct contact, and the administration has rebuffed Saudi requests for direct intervention. Yet Washington has not left the field. The US embassy for Yemen affirmed solidarity with the Yemeni government, and CENTCOM cited a longstanding military relationship with Saudi partners. “Conditional distance” describes this posture more accurately than indifference, and the Houthi wager appears to rest on precisely that ambiguity.

The demonstration reading also explains the asymmetry between the two claims. The Mecca drone arrived with deniability built in. The F-15 arrived with video, a tailfin, and a crew status left deliberately unstated. In terms of Schelling’s account of coercion (Arms and Influence, 1966), both operate on the adversary’s perception of risk and impose no direct cost. They show what could be done and leave the other side to price it. For Riyadh, the signal is that air superiority over Yemen can no longer be assumed. For Tehran, it is that its partner retains escalation options at low cost. For Washington, it is that disengagement does not make Yemen cheap.

The strongest counter-evidence is the attack on Riyadh on 19 September. The coalition stated that it had destroyed a ballistic missile aimed at the capital, yet an AFP journalist observed an Aramco-marked fuel tank burning near King Khalid airport, and the State Department warned that the conflict had the potential to escalate rapidly. The Security Council’s statement of 18 September demanded that the Houthis halt their escalation and affirmed Saudi Arabia’s right to self-defence, which furnishes Riyadh with diplomatic cover for retaliation. Both episodes complicate a purely symbolic reading, since a strike that reaches the capital’s infrastructure imposes real costs, whatever its intended audience.

The two interpretations nonetheless generate different predictions. If strikes near Mecca recur with evident intent, or if Riyadh confirms the crew’s fate and commits to a sustained campaign, the provocation reading gains ground. If the Houthis continue to strike energy and airbase targets while avoiding the holy cities, and the Muscat channel remains open, the demonstration reading holds. The jet may never be verified beyond its wreckage. Saudi planners must nonetheless proceed as though the next one could fall the same way.

Watch what Pakistan has done, not what it has said, because the two are pulling in opposite directions and the gap between them is the relay that the Pakistani state has been participating in.

What it has said is loud. On 9 September, Defence Minister Khawaja Asif warned that Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia could activate the Makkah pact. Turkish media reported Islamabad was weighing airstrikes against the Houthis. The ISPR said Pakistan “stands with Saudi Arabia.” Sharif condemned the attacks. Saudi Arabia formally requested military support. The words are the words of an ally about to fight.

What it has done is nothing. On 10 September, one day after Asif’s warning, Pakistan said there were no talks on military action, and that it would act “when the time comes.” That phrase is worth bearing in mind because it is not a commitment. It is the sound a state makes when it wants credit for a promise it does not intend to keep. The time, one suspects, is always coming and never quite here.

Understand the position Pakistan is actually in, and the hedge stops looking like weakness and starts looking like the most disciplined play on the board. Islamabad shares a long border with Iran. It has a large Shia population it cannot afford to inflame. It fought the Iran war of this year not as a combatant but as a mediator, the one actor who hosted the ceasefire talks and came out with its standing improved. And it signed, first in September 2025 and then in expanded form at Mecca in August 2026, a mutual-defence agreement that treats an attack on Saudi Arabia as an attack on itself. Pakistan has promised to defend a kingdom against an axis that operates on Pakistan’s own doorstep, and it has no intention of doing the defending if it can possibly avoid it.

The guarantee is an asset. Firing it would be spending the asset. Pakistan would rather hold it forever.

This is not hypocrisy. It is arbitrage. Pakistan has worked out that the value of a defence guarantee lies almost entirely in its being believed, and hardly at all in its being used. So it collects the returns of the promise, the Saudi money, the strategic prestige of being the Muslim world’s nuclear guarantor, the 13,000 troops stationed in the Kingdom since the spring drawing Saudi gratitude and Saudi funds, while paying none of the costs, which would be a war against the Houthis that it cannot win, cannot end, and cannot survive politically at home.

The nuclear point

The nuclear question is where this reaches its finest point, and it is worth being precise, because the ambiguity is not accidental. Asif said Pakistan’s capabilities “will be made available” to Saudi Arabia under the pact. Days later he said nuclear weapons were “not on the radar.” Read together, the two statements cancel out, and the cancellation is the product. Chatham House called it a precedent for extended deterrence by a nuclear-armed state outside the treaty. But an explicit umbrella would be a catastrophe for Pakistan. It would force Islamabad to own, in writing, a commitment to risk nuclear war for Riyadh, and it would set off the proliferation cascade across the Gulf that everyone has feared for a generation. So Pakistan says the umbrella exists and does not exist in the same breath, and Iran is left to guess, and the guessing is worth more than any signed clause, because it deters without ever obliging Pakistan to act.

Reading the map

The whole structure works only as long as no one forces the question. That is the tightrope. Saudi Arabia built this alliance to deter exactly the attacks it is now absorbing, and the attacks arrived before the deterrent could set, which means the pact is being tested in its infancy, before anyone wants to find out what it is worth. The Israeli press has already called the strikes near Mecca an exposure of the pact’s limits. If the Houthis land a blow catastrophic enough, a mass-casualty strike on a Saudi city, a hit on Mecca itself, Pakistan’s ambiguity collapses into a choice, and every choice is bad. Fight, and it is in a war it dreaded. Refuse, and the guarantee it has traded on is revealed as paper, and the asset is worth nothing the moment it is seen not to work.

So the war, from Pakistan’s vantage, unfolds along the one path Islamabad will do everything to hold open: the middle. Condemn the attacks, stand in solidarity, station the troops, invoke the pact rhetorically, and never once send a jet against the Houthis. Deter by ambiguity. Profit by restraint. Keep the promise unspent. It is the cleverest position in the region and also the most fragile, because it depends on an adversary choosing never to call the bluff, and adversaries, in the end, are not in the business of leaving bluffs uncalled.

Pakistan has spent a year turning proximity to a war into a source of profit, first as the mediator who ended the fighting, now as the guarantor who need not fight. It is a remarkable trick. The question is not whether it is clever. It is how long a state can be paid for a promise it is arranging, with great skill, never to honour, and what happens on the morning someone finally presents the bill.

There is a Dovlatov story we keep coming back to, it ran in the New Yorker in 1986 and it is called “The Colonel Says I Love You”, and the plot, if you can call it a plot, is that a man wakes up after a party and there is a woman asleep on his couch. Lena. She has breakfast, she says she will be back around six, she comes back that evening and she never leaves. That’s the courtship. They marry, they have a daughter, and through all of it she is completely calm and completely unreadable and he never quite works out why she is there. Nobody says I love you. Not once, as far as we can tell.

Then Lena decides to emigrate, takes the daughter, goes. He stays, because he is a writer and he is stubborn and the Soviet Union won’t publish him anyway. And here is the bit that gives the story its title. He gets called in, and a KGB colonel at the immigration office tells him, very politely, that he should think about leaving too. He says but we’re divorced. And the colonel says no no, divorce would be a mistake, we would like to see your family reunited.

So the secret policeman is the one who makes the speech about the marriage. The only person in the whole story who argues for love is the man from the KGB, and he is arguing for it because he wants a nuisance out of the country.

(Dovlatov, by the way, had a rule that no two words in a sentence could start with the same letter. Imagine doing that in Russian, or in anything. Brodsky said he was the only Russian writer people would read all the way through, which is probably unfair to a few others but you see what he meant.)

Anyway. We thought of the colonel this week because China has put Jane Eyre on the mandatory reading list for 14-year-olds, and Beijing Daily has explained that this is so children learn about real love and not the looks-and-money version they get from social media, right at the age when they start having feelings. Which is sweet, sort of. And it is also the colonel. Because why does the party suddenly care about true love? Marriages fell by a fifth in 2024, lowest on record, and no marriages means no babies, and so here comes the state with a Victorian novel saying we would like to see your family formed.

What are they up against though? Micro-dramas, those vertical phone serials, a few minutes an episode, which went from under a billion yuan in 2020 to a hundred billion in 2025. And it’s all flaunted wealth and wronged lovers and brooding billionaires and mistresses plotting revenge. The regulator went after them in June, a list of eight banned things, wealth-flaunting and revenge and distorted views of marriage among them. But you can’t really ban taste, can you, you ban the billionaire CEO and you get the billionaire general, people want what they want.

So the textbook. The one place where nobody can swipe away.

And this is the thing we can’t get over. Have they read Jane Eyre? Poor plain orphan, rich brooding employer, secret wife in the attic, wedding stopped at the altar, she runs, she inherits money, she comes back and the house has burned down and he’s blind and sorry. That is a micro-drama. That is every micro-drama. They banned the genre and then assigned the original.

The difference I think is that Brontë gives you five hundred pages inside Jane’s head and the whole point is she says no when the terms are wrong. The ninety-second version keeps the mansion and the fire and loses the no. Maybe that’s what Beijing is after. Maybe.

But books don’t do what they’re told. A mother wrote on Xiaohongshu that her son couldn’t understand why Jane marries a blind man, he thought it was a bad deal, and honestly that boy has already been educated, just not by the school. And a sociologist at Tsinghua is worried about the opposite, that kids will take in the madwoman in the attic and all the colonial stuff without questioning any of it. And then there are the girls. Chinese readers have always read Jane as the one who won’t be pushed around, and she’s arriving in classrooms right when feminist talk is getting squeezed. “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me.” You set that for an exam and you don’t get to choose which line they underline.

The colonel did get his way, Dovlatov left, ended up in Queens, the family was reunited. At the end of the story Lena calls from abroad and says we’ll see each other if you love us. And he says what’s love got to do with it, love is for the young, this is fate. Which is not something a colonel can issue. Or a textbook, probably. We’ll see.

The New Delhi summit tested a problem created by BRICS’s own expansion. The grouping now includes eleven states with different security relationships, competing regional interests and highly unequal economic weight. Iran and the UAE disagree over the regional security order; India and China continue to manage a disputed border alongside a large trade imbalance; several members maintain close security or economic relationships with the United States.

The relevant measure of the summit, therefore, is not whether BRICS acted as a unified geopolitical bloc. It is whether the expanded grouping produced agreements in areas where its members’ interests overlap despite these differences. Four developments in Delhi help answer that question.

Key Announcements from the Joint Statement

The New Delhi Declaration retained familiar BRICS positions on reforming the UN and international financial institutions, increasing developing-country representation and opposing unilateral tariffs and coercive economic measures. More useful for assessing the grouping are the mechanisms members agreed on.

Cross-border payments were one. BRICS did not announce a common currency. Instead, the declaration continued work on interoperability between national payment and financial messaging systems, greater settlement of trade and investment in local currencies, and increased local-currency financing through the New Development Bank. It also supported phased development of a New Investment Platform. The BRICS Payment Task Force acknowledged that there is “no one-size-fits-all approach”.

This places an important limit on claims about de-dollarisation. BRICS is not constructing a monetary union. Its members are developing additional channels through which some transactions can occur without requiring dollar settlement. These mechanisms can lower transaction costs and, for countries vulnerable to sanctions, reduce exposure to disruptions in existing payment systems. Their current scale, however, is nowhere near enough to replace the dollar-centred financial system.

The declaration therefore points towards redundancy rather than replacement: maintaining access to existing institutions while developing additional mechanisms where dependence has become a source of economic risk.

UAE – Iran Meeting

The meeting between Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed was the highest-level UAE-Iran contact since the 2026 war. The discussion covered bilateral relations, de-escalation and regional stability. No settlement of their security disagreements or new regional arrangement was announced.

The meeting’s significance is clearer when compared with what happened earlier in the year. BRICS foreign ministers failed to produce a joint statement in May partly because Iran and the UAE could not agree on language concerning West Asia. In Delhi, the eleven members did agree. Reporting by the Indian Express indicates that reaching the compromise required extensive negotiations involving India, Iran, the UAE, as well as China, Russia, Brazil and Egypt. The final language did not resolve the underlying dispute. It emphasised sovereignty, civilian protection, restraint and continued energy and trade flows in terms broad enough for both countries to accept.

It is a limited but identifiable institutional outcome. Between May and September, BRICS moved from being unable to produce common language on the conflict to containing the disagreement sufficiently to adopt a declaration and host bilateral contact between the two sides. Whether that contact leads to sustained de-escalation remains unknown. Delhi demonstrated that membership can provide an additional channel for managing a dispute, even when BRICS lacks the authority or common position required to resolve it.

Structural Dialogues across Poly-ruled states

The economic discussions expose a different limitation. Greater trade between BRICS countries is frequently presented as evidence of growing South-South economic integration. India’s experience shows why the composition of that trade matters as much as its volume.

The clearest case is China. India’s bilateral trade deficit reached approximately $112.16 billion in FY26. Indian exports remain concentrated in commodities and relatively low-value products, while imports from China include machinery, electronics, integrated circuits, batteries, fertilisers and industrial inputs. India consequently depends on Chinese goods in sectors that are themselves important to expanding domestic manufacturing.

The Modi-Xi meeting in Delhi explicitly addressed this problem. The two sides agreed to discuss the structural trade imbalance, supply-chain concerns and more predictable market access for Indian businesses. This followed a gradual stabilisation of bilateral relations after the 2020 border confrontation, including resumed flights, visa easing and renewed diplomatic engagement, while the boundary dispute itself remains unresolved.

This distinction matters for evaluating BRICS economic cooperation. Moving trade away from Western markets does not necessarily reduce economic dependence if it increases concentration elsewhere. China’s manufacturing capacity gives it a structural advantage within BRICS that institutional declarations cannot remove.

For India, the question is consequently not simply how to increase intra-BRICS trade, but how to alter its composition. Market access, domestic manufacturing capacity and supply-chain diversification matter more to reducing the deficit than political agreement at BRICS. Diplomacy can create the negotiating channel; it cannot by itself correct the productive asymmetry that generates the deficit.

Possible alternative to American Shield?

BRICS has made some progress where alternatives can be created transaction by transaction. Local-currency settlement can reduce the need for dollars in particular trades. New Development Bank lending provides another source of development finance. Payment-system interoperability could eventually provide additional routes for cross-border transactions. None requires members to agree on a common adversary or foreign policy.

The American role in the Gulf rests on military capabilities and long-standing bilateral arrangements: bases, intelligence, logistics, air and naval forces, missile defence and the capacity to reinforce partners during crises. BRICS has no equivalent collective capability. It has no mutual-defence commitment, integrated military command or common definition of the threats against which members would be protected. Its membership makes such convergence particularly difficult. Iran seeks a reduced American military presence in the Gulf. The UAE still depends substantially on American security cooperation. India works closely with the United States while maintaining its relationship with Russia and managing competition with China. India and China themselves have not resolved their border dispute.

BRICS can therefore supplement existing arrangements more readily than it can replace them. Payments, development finance and diplomatic consultation allow selective cooperation because they do not require members to identify the same security threats. A collective security system would.

Delhi consequently provides a more limited measure of BRICS’s development. Its members can increasingly separate areas in which cooperation is possible from disputes they cannot resolve. That worked sufficiently to produce a declaration despite Iran-UAE differences, to keep India-China economic negotiations open despite continuing strategic competition, and to advance payment cooperation without monetary integration.

It does not yet amount to an alternative security order. For now, BRICS’s institutional capacity lies in managing specific disagreements and creating supplementary economic mechanisms, rather than replacing the political, financial and security structures within which its members continue to operate.

A useful test of any government is what it does when it isn’t performing for an audience. The last two weeks of August and the first of September gave China’s local wire services occasion to report both ends of that test at once: a punishing run of climate disasters across five provinces, and a quieter, province-by-province effort to keep household welfare intact underneath them. The national desk tends to smooth the two into separate stories. Read side by side, they describe the same governing instinct.

On 26 August, a mudslide struck the border port at Gyirong County, in the Xizang Autonomous Region, on the crossing with Nepal. Early reporting from Global Times and Xinhua put the toll at three dead and 265 missing. The political response moved faster than the recovery: Xi Jinping is reported to have chaired a Party meeting on relief within the disaster’s first days, a level of direct involvement that signals the event cleared whatever internal threshold triggers top-tier attention. Notably, the same reporting places the first rescue teams reaching the core disaster area only on the Friday afternoon following the slide, a gap between political mobilization and physical access that is worth sitting with, since it suggests the terrain itself, not bureaucratic delay, set the pace of the response. One detail is worth flagging for anyone tracking this story across outlets: Global Times describes the activated response as Level I, China’s highest tier, where the ministries’ own announcements carried in Xinhua’s English service elsewhere describe a Level II activation. The two are not reconcilable from the material at hand, and the discrepancy is itself a small data point about how disaster classifications get reported differently depending on which desk is doing the reporting.

Gyirong was not an isolated shock. The same window produced a landslide in Pengshui County, Chongqing, that killed 11 and left 50 missing; Typhoon Narra, the season’s nineteenth named storm, making multiple landfalls in Guangdong; a flash flood in Weiyuan County, Gansu; and a forest fire on Yuping Mountain in Hongya County, Sichuan, that was brought under control without casualties. Taken as a set tracked by ecns.cn’s society desk and the Global Times society index, this is not a cluster of unrelated weather events so much as a season in which nearly every major disaster-response category in the state’s toolkit was exercised within a matter of weeks: landslide, typhoon, flash flood, wildfire. A system tested this many times, this close together, either reveals its weaknesses or demonstrates that the weaknesses have already been priced in.

Running underneath the disaster coverage, and almost never sharing a headline with it, was a second track of governance concerned with keeping households solvent. Qinghai’s civil affairs department distributed 1.391 billion yuan, roughly $193.7 million, in relief and subsidy funds during the first half of the year. Nationally, tax and fee cuts tied to elderly care, health, education, and employment rose 11.8 percent year on year over the same period, according to State Taxation Administration data. These are not disaster-response figures; they describe an entirely separate administrative rhythm, one that accrues in aggregate over a fiscal half-year rather than announcing itself in a press conference. That the same government agencies capable of activating four-tiered emergency responses within hours are also running slow, cumulative subsidy programs at provincial scale is not a contradiction. It is closer to a division of labor between the acute and the chronic.

China Daily’s columnists made an argument this week that belongs in the same frame: that the country’s life-expectancy targets are, in practical terms, a rural problem before they are anything else, and that the community canteens now spreading through Chinese cities function as a kind of intergenerational welfare infrastructure, feeding both elderly residents who no longer wish to cook and workers who cannot afford to eat out. Whether or not one accepts the columnists’ framing, the underlying claim is consistent with the Qinghai and tax-cut figures: welfare provision in China is increasingly delivered through mechanisms, canteens, tax relief, direct subsidies, that don’t require a crisis to justify their existence, and that operate on a timeline measured in years rather than news cycles.

Not every story this fortnight arrived through official channels. Drone footage published by SCMP on 7 September showed barges discharging an unidentified black substance into the Yangtze near Tianxingzhou islet, in Wuhan, a detail that reached the public because someone happened to be filming, not because an agency disclosed it. It is a minor story set against a mudslide with hundreds missing, but it is the one item in the week’s record that arrived through observation rather than announcement, which makes it worth noting on its own methodological terms.

The week’s other register was more familiar: the arrow of construction that Chinese state media reaches for regardless of what else is happening. The Hangzhou Bay Cross-Sea Railway Bridge topped out its three main towers, and a trial train ran on the new Hangzhou–Deqing intercity line on 1 September. The National Development and Reform Commission, meanwhile, issued a seawater desalination action plan targeting 4.5 million tonnes of daily capacity by 2030. That a decade-scale infrastructure target was announced during an active, high-casualty rescue operation says something about how insulated the planning apparatus is from the emergency apiuparatus: neither one appears to disrupt the other’s calendar.

Set next to each other, the mudslide at Gyirong and the subsidy flow through Qinghai’s civil affairs department measure the same capacity from opposite directions. One is the state’s ability to move thousands of personnel and equipment into hazardous terrain within hours of catastrophic failure. The other is its ability to sustain, quarter after quarter, the transfers that keep households solvent when nothing has gone wrong at all. Neither is more revealing than the other on its own. Together, they describe a government organized around absorbing shocks geological, meteorological, or economic, before they reach the level of the household, and doing so whether or not anyone outside the local wire is paying attention.

South Asia does not need to be convinced that climate change is dangerous. It needs to recognise what kind of danger it has become. The climate-security debate is often framed too narrowly. The question is not whether a flood will cause a war or whether drought will automatically produce violence. Climate change rarely works through such direct chains of causation. Its security significance lies elsewhere: it is changing the physical conditions in which states defend territory, exercise authority, and maintain the systems on which national power depends.

That distinction matters particularly in South Asia, where some of the region’s most strategically sensitive spaces are also among its most climate-vulnerable. India and Pakistan remain locked in a nuclear rivalry. India and China contest a heavily militarised Himalayan frontier. The Himalayas contain not only glaciers and river systems but military deployments, roads, tunnels, hydropower projects and critical border infrastructure.

Climate change is not replacing these security challenges. It is altering the environment in which they have to be managed. The Himalayas make this especially clear. According to ICIMOD’s 2026 assessment, glacier ice loss across the Hindu Kush Himalaya has doubled since 2000. Rapid cryospheric change is making mountain terrain and river systems less predictable while increasing the risks of floods, landslides and glacial hazards. In a heavily militarised and strategically contested region, this is not simply an environmental problem. It threatens the infrastructure through which states maintain territorial presence and connectivity.

The recent disaster in Nepal illustrates the point. A massive mountain collapse and flood devastated infrastructure in the Nepal-China border region, demonstrating how cascading Himalayan hazards can destroy roads, bridges and energy infrastructure within hours. The significance of the event was not that it triggered military conflict. It was that a climate-related hazard could abruptly disrupt movement, connectivity and state capacity in a sensitive borderland.

Climate change also threatens the economic and resource foundations on which security rests. Extreme heat is already reducing people’s capacity to work across agriculture, construction, and the informal economy. A recent World Bank assessment estimates that extreme heat is costing South Asia the equivalent of nearly 31 million full-time jobs annually and could reduce the region’s economy by almost 7 per cent by 2050.

Those losses matter beyond individual livelihoods. States cannot indefinitely sustain strategic autonomy, military capability or political stability if climate shocks steadily weaken economic growth and strain public finances. Climate risk enters national security long before it reaches a border or requires military deployment.

Water adds another layer of pressure. The Hindu Kush Himalaya feeds the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra systems that underpin food, energy and livelihoods across the region. Glacier loss and increasingly erratic rainfall are making those systems harder to predict. Climate change will not automatically turn water disputes into wars, but it raises the stakes of managing shared resources in a region already marked by mistrust.

This is South Asia’s central climate-security contradiction: its climate systems are regional, but its security thinking remains overwhelmingly national and adversarial. Rivers and hazards cross borders. The institutions required to manage them often do not. Yet South Asia’s security establishments remain primarily organised around protecting states from hostile neighbours rather than managing risks that demand cooperation with them.

Environment ministries can formulate adaptation plans, and disaster agencies can respond when catastrophe strikes. But neither controls the strategic resources required to protect critical infrastructure, incorporate climate vulnerability into national planning or manage transboundary risks. Those decisions sit with finance ministries, foreign-policy establishments, defence bureaucracies and national security institutions.

A climate-security constituency would not mean militarising climate policy. Nor would it mean treating climate migrants as threats. It would mean recognising that climate risk now affects the material foundations of conventional security and must therefore enter the institutions that make strategic decisions. A state can have a powerful military and still become less secure if its border infrastructure repeatedly collapses, its energy systems become unreliable, its workforce becomes less productive, and its civilian institutions are overwhelmed by recurring disasters.

South Asia’s security establishments have spent decades preparing for threats that cross borders with hostile intent. The harder challenge is preparing for one that crosses borders without intent at all, but can still reshape a state’s ability to defend territory and maintain critical systems.

The People’s Bank of China published its five-year plan on the tenth of August. Five task areas, nine action plans attached. Most of it reads the way these documents always read. One small thing in it is worth stopping on, and it is not a phrase. It is an order.

The second task area is about serving the real economy. Inside it, the bank lists its instruments in a line. Technology finance. A bond-market technology board. Green finance. Inclusive finance. Pension finance. Digital finance. Then, at the end, boosting consumption.

Consumption is last. That is the piece worth writing about.

China does not have a supply problem. It makes more than the world can absorb. It has a demand problem. The apartments do not sell. The savings sit in the bank. Retail spending crawls. Households expect their own incomes to fall, and they are spending like people who expect that. Every serious read of the economy lands in the same place. The engine is demand, and demand is broken.

A plan built to fix that would put consumption first. This one puts it sixth, one clause after pension finance. Not by accident. The bank knows how to build the six things ahead of consumption. It does not know how to build consumption.

Look at what those six things share. A technology-finance system is something you construct. You set up the lending vehicles, name the eligible sectors, direct the credit, and it exists. A bond-market technology board is something you construct. Write the listing rules, open the board, done. Green finance, pension finance, digital finance (the whole list above the last line) are architecture. The state designs them and commands them into being. China is very good at this. Better, probably, than any state has been.

Consumption is not architecture. There is no vehicle you can set up that makes a man spend. No board you can open that gives him back his confidence in next year. You cannot point credit at his fear the way you point it at a chip plant. Consumption is a mood held by a billion people at once. You do not build it. You earn it, slowly, by giving people reasons to think the years ahead beat the years behind. That belief is what the property boom ran on and the property bust burned down. No action plan brings it back, because it was never the kind of thing an action plan makes.

So the order is not a ranking of what matters. It is an admission of what the bank can do. The things it knows how to build come first. The one thing it cannot build comes last. A man reaches first for what is in his hand. Technology finance is in the bank’s hand. The Chinese consumer’s confidence is not.

This is the part the West gets backwards about Beijing. The usual complaint is that the state controls too much, plans what should be left alone. The real trouble runs the other way. Some problems planning cannot reach. Demand is one of them. And the Chinese state has spent so long winning at the problems planning can reach that it now brings the same method to a problem built to defeat it. It is treating a crisis of confidence with a construction manual. It funds the supply of things into an economy short of the will to buy them, because supply is what it knows how to fund.

The whole plan holds up under this one lens. The technology board, the innovation finance, the digital-yuan rails, the opening of the markets. All of it the state building, straight and fast, at what it is good at. And underneath it, the saver in Chengdu who will not spend. He appears in the document once, at the end of a list, because the people who wrote it do not know what to say to him. They have built him a superb financial system. They cannot make him believe in it.

A five-year plan that can construct everything except the thing the construction is for is not a plan for recovery. It is a very good way of doing what you already know how to do, and hoping the rest sorts itself out. It will not sort itself out. That is the part no list can reorder.

As ten heads of government gather in Bishkek for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation’s twenty-fifth anniversary, the organisation looks more consequential than it has ever been. China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran and the four Central Asian republics now sit inside the same institution, alongside Belarus. Together, its members account for more than three billion people and roughly a quarter of global GDP. Yet size has not made the SCO particularly capable of resolving the disputes between them. India and Pakistan remain adversaries; India and China still manage a contested border; Russia and China cooperate closely without sharing identical interests in Central Asia. The SCO is good for something more limited: it keeps security bureaucracies cooperating, gives Central Asian states a forum containing both Russia and China, and allows governments that do not trust one another to remain in regular contact without requiring political alignment.

That sounds modest because the organisation began with a modest problem. The SCO’s predecessor, the Shanghai Five, emerged after the Soviet collapse left China facing newly independent states along what had been a heavily militarised Sino-Soviet frontier. China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan signed agreements in 1996 and 1997 to build military confidence and reduce armed forces along their common borders. Uzbekistan joined when the SCO was created in 2001, by which time terrorism, separatism and extremism had become its principal security concerns. The organisation did not begin as an alternative world order. It began because neighbouring governments had practical security problems that were easier to manage together.

Some of that machinery still works. The SCO created the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure in Tashkent to connect member states’ security agencies, and cooperation has gradually spread into organised crime, narcotics and border security. In December 2025, representatives of SCO states participated in the Sahand-Antiterror exercise in Iran. This May, their anti-narcotics agencies met in Bishkek and agreed on draft programmes through 2030 on synthetic drugs, information exchange and coordinated operations. None of this resembles collective defence. It is bureaucratic cooperation: officials sharing information and procedures in areas where governments with otherwise divergent foreign policies still have overlapping interests.

The limits appear as soon as that cooperation becomes politically contentious. Counterterrorism is supposedly the SCO’s foundational issue, yet at the organisation’s defence ministers’ meeting in June 2025, the members could not even adopt a joint statement. India demanded language reflecting its concerns after the Pahalgam attack; consensus collapsed amid disagreement over terrorism and Pakistan. Reuters reported that the meeting ended without a declaration. The episode captured the SCO neatly. Security agencies can exercise together, but the organisation cannot make India and Pakistan agree on what terrorism means when the question touches their bilateral conflict.

That gap between technical cooperation and political consensus has widened as the SCO has expanded. India and Pakistan joined in 2017, Iran in 2023 and Belarus in 2024. Enlargement made the organisation geographically and symbolically larger while importing more disagreements into a system that operates by consensus. The SCO now represents around 25 per cent of global GDP and more than 3.4 billion people, but those figures tell us more about the size of its membership than its capacity to act collectively.

Why, then, keep joining?

India is perhaps the clearest answer. New Delhi participates in the SCO while also belonging to the Quad with the United States, Japan and Australia. It competes strategically with China, maintains an exceptionally close defence relationship with Russia and has a hostile relationship with Pakistan. SCO membership does not force India to reconcile any of these positions. It simply gives India another institutional space in which to manage all of those relationships.

Russia and China use the same room differently. Both have increasingly presented the SCO as evidence of a more multipolar international system and of institutions that do not depend on Western leadership. India is far less interested in making the SCO an anti-Western bloc. Yet the organisation can accommodate both positions because its members are not required to adopt a common grand strategy. The original SCO declaration explicitly described it as an organisation that was not an alliance directed against other states or regions. What once distinguished it from military blocs has become central to its durability.

Central Asia benefits particularly from that looseness. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan live with Russian security influence and rapidly expanding Chinese economic power, but none has an obvious interest in allowing either relationship to become exclusive. The SCO places both larger powers inside a multilateral institution in which the Central Asian republics are formally equal participants. It does not remove the enormous power asymmetry between them. It gives smaller states another arena to manage that asymmetry.

This is also why describing the SCO simply as a China-Russia vehicle misses something. Beijing and Moscow are indispensable to it, but an organisation designed only to transmit their preferences would be less useful to India or the Central Asian states. Kazakhstan can work with China through the SCO while expanding ties with Europe and the Gulf. India can sit beside China in Bishkek while strengthening Indo-Pacific partnerships elsewhere. Membership becomes an additional relationship rather than an exclusive geopolitical choice.

The Bishkek summit demonstrates the other practical benefit of such an institution: convening. The 31 August–1 September summit gives presidents and prime ministers a ready-made setting for bilateral meetings that might otherwise require their own diplomatic choreography. Rivals can share a summit without suggesting that their bilateral disputes have been resolved. For governments navigating several competing relationships at once, the availability of such spaces matters.

There is a price for all this flexibility. The SCO talks frequently about trade, connectivity and economic cooperation but has never created anything comparable to a common market or a meaningful economic union. It cannot guarantee collective defence. It cannot resolve the India-Pakistan conflict or the India-China border. Its expansion makes consensus still harder, while the increasingly ambitious language surrounding a new Eurasian or multipolar order regularly exceeds what its institutions can deliver.

But those failures become less puzzling once the SCO is judged against the job it can actually perform. It is strongest where states can separate a practical problem from their larger geopolitical disagreements: intelligence exchanges, anti-narcotics work, border contacts, meetings between officials. It becomes weakest precisely where cooperation requires members to agree on whose interpretation of a political conflict is correct.

Twenty-five years after the Shanghai Five began negotiating troops along a border, the SCO has therefore changed from a relatively focused security arrangement into something broader and looser. It cannot make India and Pakistan cooperate politically, reconcile India and China or turn Eurasia into a coherent economic bloc. It can keep their officials exchanging information, their leaders returning to the same summit and the Central Asian states from having to organise their regional diplomacy around one exclusive great-power patron.

That is considerably less than the architecture of a new world order. But it is also more useful than a talking shop. The SCO works because it asks its members to cooperate where they can and permits them to remain adversaries where they cannot.

By late summer 2026, the fight between Yemen’s Houthi movement and Saudi Arabia had stopped looking like a sideline to the bigger regional war. On 13 July, Saudi jets bombed the runway at Sanaa’s airport, apparently to keep an Iranian flight from landing there, and within a week the Houthis answered with a naval blockade of the kingdom and a run of strikes on its oil infrastructure. Between 13 July and 14 August they carried out sixteen attacks on Saudi targets, seven of them oil facilities and six of them tankers, hitting Abqaiq, the world’s largest crude-stabilization plant, and forcing Aramco to halt operations at Jizan. The campaign killed dozens of Saudi-backed Yemeni troops in Marib and Hadramout, and on 11 August it killed four crew members of a cargo ship transiting the Bab al-Mandab strait. By late August, the Houthis were still hitting Saudi-linked tankers off Yanbu, and their military spokesman had already declared the de-escalation phase of Yemen’s war over. Riyadh answered with a fourteen-country maritime coalition and its own strikes on Houthi positions, and a separate attack in early August left eleven Saudi civilians wounded. None of this came out of nowhere. It followed almost four years of quiet de-escalation that had held since the UN truce lapsed in October 2022, and it broke down precisely as Tehran found itself fighting a much bigger war with the United States and Israel. The obvious question is who is actually running this war. The honest answer takes you further than the battlefield, from Revolutionary Guard officers stationed in Yemen down to a financial holding company in Tehran that Reuters first mapped out thirteen years ago.

The immediate answer is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Officers from the IRGC and from Hezbollah have been present in Yemen, helping direct Houthi attacks on shipping and supplying the targeting data that decides which vessels get hit. The Quds Force, through its deputy commander Abdul Reza Shahlai, oversees the flow of drones and cruise and ballistic missiles that turned the Houthis into a force capable of threatening the whole region, and reporting from inside Iran in 2025 claimed that Khamenei personally signs off on Houthi political and military decisions. By August 2026,Western and Gulf intelligence services were warning that the Houthis and Iraqi militias, working under IRGC coordination, might launch coordinated strikes on Saudi energy sites, ports, and airports at the same time. This is the Axis of Resistance doing what it was built to do: a set of armed groups managed by the Guard, answerable only to the Supreme Leader, used to project force that Iran cannot project on its own. Iran remains the Houthis’ main patron, supplying weapons, training, and intelligence, and the arrangement is close to a textbook case of what scholars call delegated deterrence: using non-state fighters as instruments of coercion so the costs of confrontation never land on Tehran directly. Yemen analysts increasingly rate the Houthis as a more useful partner for Iran than a battered Hezbollah, since they pair Iranian anti-ship missiles and long-range drones with a position straddling the Red Sea. The coordination is real but far from seamless. Since the war with Israel began, Tehran has tried to time missile launches from Iran, Lebanon, and Yemen together to overwhelm air defenses, even as Israeli intelligence penetration has repeatedly forced it to change how it does that.

But there is a second, financial answer to who controls this war, and it runs through the same man. The Supreme Leader who signs off on Houthi operations also controls a business empire that Reuters exposed in November 2013 in a series called “Assets of the Ayatollah.” The organization is Setad, short for the Execution of Imam Khomeini’s Order, founded in 1989 to manage property confiscated after the revolution, in theory for the benefit of the poor. Setad still describes itself that way, but the Reuters investigation found that under Khamenei it kept most of what it collected rather than passing it on. By 2013, Reuters put its holdings at roughly $95 billion: about $52 billion in real estate and $43 billion in corporate stakes, a sum around 40 percent larger than Iran’s entire oil exports that year and in the same range as the fortune of the Shah, who was overthrown in 1979. That empire was built by seizing thousands of properties belonging to religious minorities, including Baha’is, along with businesspeople and Iranians living abroad, often on the legal claim that the properties had simply been abandoned. Setad held a court-sanctioned monopoly on seizing property in the Supreme Leader’s name, and at one point auctioned off close to three hundred properties in a single month.

Setad’s relevance to the war in Yemen is indirect but decisive. Reuters found no evidence that Khamenei personally pockets money from the conglomerate, but through it he controls resources large enough to bypass parliament and the national budget entirely, which insulates him from factional politics and from rival branches of the Iranian state. The US Treasury sanctioned Setad in 2013, describing it as a sprawling network of front companies concealing assets on behalf of Iran’s leadership. Its revenues help fund the Leader’s compound and its staff, and just as important, they hand the IRGC a patron whose money does not depend on the state’s say-so. This is the material base underneath the proxy system: a leader with an independent war chest does not need permission from the government to arm the Houthis, and the IRGC, which reports to him rather than to any ministry, does the arming. The financial structure Reuters documented in 2013 is what makes the military structure visible in Yemen in 2026 possible in the first place.

Even so, the word proxy flattens what is actually happening, and the flattening matters if the goal is figuring out who is in control. The Houthis are closer to an informal partner of Iran than a puppet of it. They share Tehran’s ideology and its hostility to the regional order built by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, but they run their own leadership, hold their own territory, and pursue their own agenda. When the Houthis seized Sanaa in 2014, they inherited the conventional army of what had been North Yemen and now control territory holding roughly 80 percent of Yemen’s population, a combination of state institutions and geography that no other Iranian-aligned group can match. Iran’s approach across the Axis of Resistance gives each affiliate real latitude to chase local goals, which is why the relationship reads more like a strategic partnership than a chain of command running straight from Tehran. The Houthis themselves reject the label of proxy, and there is something to that: the blockade of Saudi Arabia serves grievances that are Sanaa’s own as much as it serves any Iranian strategy. A UN panel of experts has concluded that the Houthis could not build the weapons they now field without outside help, but that dependence has not translated into Iranian command over when and how they use them. Years of Hezbollah training have left the Houthis capable enough that they are now reportedly training allied fighters of their own, from Sudan to Iraq, a sign of how far the relationship has drifted from simple dependence. The collapse of the political track explains the timing: after more than four years of a de facto truce, negotiations with Riyadh stalled out, and Houthi leadership apparently concluded that military pressure on Saudi Arabia would get them further than talking would.

What makes this moment dangerous is that control and autonomy are running side by side, and each side is using the other. Iran reportedly asked its Houthi allies to act in its interest at the right moment, and an Iranian source has said that moment is now, with Tehran fighting the United States and Israel on a much larger front. With Hezbollah weakened and Hamas degraded, the Houthis have become Iran’s most capable remaining partner, and an Iranian ambassador along with a Quds Force representative have reportedly returned to Houthi territory to manage the relationship directly. But the Houthis are also riding Iran’s war to chase goals of their own, running what their spokesman calls a siege for a siege, meant to force Riyadh to lift its blockade of Yemen and negotiate on terms Sanaa can live with. Part of the strategy is clearly about establishing the Houthis as a regional actor in their own right, one capable of shaping events well beyond Yemen, not simply about supporting Iran. The group’s leadership has denied being anyone’s proxy and framed the campaign as a matter of Yemeni sovereignty, even while accepting Iranian weapons and coordination on the ground.

The war is directed but not owned. The IRGC supplies the weapons and the coordination, Setad supplies the money that keeps the whole system independent of the Iranian state, and the Houthis supply the will and the geography to fight. Each layer can push further than the layer above it would prefer. Saudi Arabia has responded with a maritime coalition and its own strikes, but neither has stopped the attacks, and the blockade has already forced Aramco to plan alternative export routes. The 2013 investigation into Setad was read at the time mostly as a story about one man’s wealth. It was really a story about how Iranian power is built. The Houthi war against Saudi Arabia is the same story, told this time in missiles rather than balance sheets, and it leaves an uncomfortable question hanging over the region: not whether Iran controls this war, but how much control anyone really has over a conflict where the commander, the banker, and the fighter each answer to a different master.

In the villages around Dawei, Myanmar’s latest development push has begun with soldiers. Since July, hundreds of troops have advanced through the area surrounding the long-stalled special economic zone on the Andaman coast, supported by air and naval units. Resistance fighters and local activists have reported burned villages, displacement and restrictions around the proposed industrial zone. Their accounts are difficult to verify independently amid active fighting, but the military’s priorities are clearer: shortly before the operation intensified, its deputy commander instructed forces in southern Myanmar to protect strategic projects. On 21 August, Reuters linked the offensive directly to efforts to revive the Russia-backed Dawei project, which includes plans for a deep-sea port and power station.

Dawei is an odd place to look for the next stage of Myanmar’s civil war, as the project predates the conflict by more than a decade. Myanmar and Thailand began pursuing a deep-sea port there in 2008. The plan was to combine a port, industrial estates and an overland connection to Thailand, giving Bangkok’s manufacturing economy a western outlet to the Indian Ocean and potentially reducing dependence on routes through the Strait of Malacca. The Myanmar Port Authority records the original 2008 agreement and the Thai developer’s subsequent failure to secure sufficient financing. Development plans were repeatedly revived, including through Thai and Japanese participation, but the port remained more convincing on maps than on the ground.

Finance was only one obstacle. Dawei also tested the political opening that began under President Thein Sein. Residents faced land loss, relocation and uncertainty over compensation, while local organisations complained that communities had little reliable information about a project expected to transform agriculture, fishing and village life. Research by EarthRights International documented disputes over consent, compensation, housing and livelihoods across affected villages. The politics surrounding a proposed 4,000-megawatt coal plant became particularly significant. Local campaigners distributed information, used the expanding media space and organised opposition; in January 2012, the government cancelled the plant, citing environmental concerns. A Cambridge study of advocacy around Myanmar’s special economic zones treats that campaign as evidence that organised communities had acquired some ability to alter large development projects.

The earlier Dawei struggle was hardly a story of communities controlling development. Land was still taken, compensation remained uneven, and residents rarely set the terms of the project. What they did possess was some capacity to contest those terms before they hardened into fact. Campaigns could delay construction, force environmental questions into public debate, and, in the case of the coal plant, alter what developers could build. In 2026, that space has narrowed further. The argument is no longer only about what kind of development Dawei should bring, but about who controls the territory on which any such argument can take place.

The February 2021 coup altered Dawei’s political context by reshaping Myanmar’s territorial character. Armed resistance spread well beyond the ethnic borderlands where insurgency had historically been concentrated. Ethnic armed organisations and newer resistance forces captured towns, roads and administrative space, while parallel forms of taxation and governance developed in areas outside effective military control. The humanitarian consequences remain enormous: the UN’s 2026 planning documents project more than four million internally displaced people and 16.2 million people requiring humanitarian assistance. The military’s election at the end of 2025 did not restore the lost territorial unity. According to International IDEA, voting was held in only 236 of Myanmar’s 330 townships, overwhelmingly in areas where the military could administer the process. The military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party dominated the resulting parliament, which elected Min Aung Hlaing president in April. His opponents widely rejected the exercise, but its utility did not depend entirely on persuading them. It created a parliament, ministries operating under a formally civilian constitutional order, and a president whom foreign governments could receive as a head of state.

The election therefore offers a useful lens for understanding Dawei. The military did not need to restore uncontested sovereignty across all 330 townships before reconstructing some state institutions. Dawei applies a similar logic to economic geography. The government does not need to restore effective control across all of Myanmar before Dawei can function. It needs something more geographically limited: secure control over the port, its connecting roads and energy infrastructure, and the surrounding territory through which workers, goods and investment must move. A state that remains territorially fragmented can therefore still create economically viable corridors in the areas it can hold. These are corridors of governability rather than the recovery of uniform national control.

Russia has become a prospective partner in constructing one of them. Its post-coup importance to Myanmar began with arms, diplomatic protection and military cooperation, but the relationship has steadily widened. In February 2025, Myanmar and Russia signed an investment memorandum covering Dawei and surrounding areas. In June this year, Russian company Inter RAO and a Myanmar partner signed an MOU for a power station at the Dawei deep-sea port. A month later, Myanmar’s Commerce Ministry said procedures were under way to revive the SEZ and explicitly described Dawei as strategically important for the Thailand–Indian Ocean trade route. Those agreements should not be confused with a fully financed Russian takeover of Dawei. The project has disappointed too many previous promoters for another memorandum to be treated as a construction project. At this stage, Moscow is better understood as a prospective investor within an increasingly dense strategic relationship. When Vladimir Putin met Min Aung Hlaing on 18 August, discussions ranged from hydrocarbons and offshore exploration to a possible oil refinery and LNG supplies. Russia now offers Myanmar not only diplomatic backing but also the possibility of energy and infrastructure relationships that extend beyond the immediate requirements of war.

Naypyidaw has strong reasons to seek them. Myanmar’s economy remains far from recovery. The World Bank’s June economic monitor estimated that real GDP contracted by 2 per cent in FY2025/26 and that inflation reached 24.6 per cent in April. Electricity shortages, weak demand, rising costs and uneven implementation of government rules continue to constrain firms; many businesses remain focused on survival rather than expansion. Even the World Bank’s projected 2 per cent growth for the current fiscal year represents tentative stabilisation after a deep rupture rather than a restoration of the pre-coup economy.

A functioning port or industrial estate cannot reverse those conditions nationally. Its political value lies partly in its narrower scope. Dawei could create a visible enclave of investment, electricity, transport and foreign cooperation even while much of Myanmar remains economically damaged or militarily contested. The regime does not have to demonstrate that the national economy has recovered if it can point to places where long-term projects are restarting. The distinction between national recovery and investible enclaves matters because war itself changes the value of infrastructure. A village on a contested road is one kind of military problem. The same village beside a proposed port corridor becomes part of an asset whose security affects foreign investors, customs revenue and bilateral relationships. Territorial control becomes more valuable because capital is expected to follow it.

That does not make every operation around Dawei merely an infrastructure-clearing exercise. Tanintharyi has been an active theatre of armed resistance, and the military has independent reasons to regain routes and territory there. But the Dawei offensive shows counterinsurgency and economic planning beginning to converge on the same geography. Approximately 700 troops were involved in the recent push, according to Reuters, while the project’s revival was already under discussion with Russian partners and Thai officials. Investment is no longer imagined only after control is restored. The prospect of investment helps determine which spaces the state has particular reason to reassert control over.

Thailand makes Dawei more than a bilateral Myanmar–Russia story. Bangkok’s engagement with Naypyidaw follows from concrete economic dependencies that existed before the coup and survived it. Myanmar has been an important source of natural gas to Thailand for almost forty years; gas from the Yadana and Zawtika fields once supplied 15–20 per cent of Thailand’s total natural-gas demand, according to the Thai government. The two governments are now discussing extensions to gas contracts, new petroleum blocks and electricity-grid interconnection. For Thailand, relations with Myanmar therefore touch on electricity prices, industrial costs, and energy security at home.

Dawei would add another layer to that dependence. Its original economic logic was as much Thai as Myanmar: connect the Andaman coast to Kanchanaburi and onward to Bangkok’s industrial system. When Min Aung Hlaing arrived in Thailand for an official visit on 6 August, the relationship was no longer presented simply as crisis management at a difficult border. Thailand formally welcomed him as president, discussed trade, investment, energy and connectivity, and said it was ready to support Myanmar’s fuller participation in ASEAN.

It would be too simple to interpret that engagement as Thailand deciding that the coup no longer matters. Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul has instead called for “calibrated re-engagement” with Myanmar. Bangkok has also been involved in efforts to create space for talks as battlefield conditions shift. Earlier this month, Reuters reported tentative movement towards what might become talks about talks, with opposition actors signalling willingness to explore a political process even while the military had not recognised them as negotiating counterparts. Engagement may therefore serve mediation as well as commerce. But re-engagement also alters the sequence ASEAN originally envisaged after the coup. The bloc’s Five-Point Consensus presumed that reduced violence and political dialogue would pave the way for normal diplomatic participation. Myanmar’s government is now trying to reverse that order. Having held elections and installed Min Aung Hlaing as president, it has argued that ASEAN’s special envoy is no longer necessary, even though fighting continues and Aung San Suu Kyi remains detained.

The argument, then, is not simply that neighbours are abandoning democracy for business. Thailand cannot choose whether Myanmar exists on its border, supplies its energy or sends conflict and migration across it. Nor does speaking to Naypyidaw necessarily foreclose speaking to resistance actors. The more consequential possibility is that economic and diplomatic normality can accumulate before political normality does.

Dawei gives that accumulation a physical form. A port concession identifies the ministry authorised to sign it. A road identifies the authority expected to protect traffic. A power station creates an asset whose continued operation depends on specific security arrangements. A foreign investor begins planning on the assumption that those arrangements will persist. Infrastructure therefore does more than follow political order. When built during a civil war, it can embed one version of that order in land, contracts and cross-border relationships before a peace agreement determines how authority ought to be distributed. That is particularly important in Myanmar because the eventual political dispute is likely to be about federalism, not merely who occupies Naypyidaw. Ethnic armed organisations and newer resistance administrations have spent the post-coup years building their own institutions. International IDEA describes a country in which governance has become fragmented alongside military control. A future settlement would therefore have to negotiate not only elections but the distribution of fiscal power, natural resources, security authority and administration among multiple centres. Large infrastructure projects can pre-empt parts of that negotiation. A concession signed today can determine land use for decades. A gas or power arrangement can shape which level of government receives revenue. A corridor protected and taxed by one authority becomes harder to redistribute politically later. None of this means contracts signed by the present government will necessarily survive a settlement. It means the economic terrain over which federalism will eventually be negotiated is already shifting.

Dawei’s older history makes this especially clear. Communities around the project were never simply anti-development. EarthRights’ research on local views recorded demands for information, proper compensation, livelihood protection and meaningful participation. Residents could want roads and jobs while opposing the terms on which land was taken. The political question was not port or no port; it was who possessed bargaining power over the transformation that the port would bring. That bargaining space has shifted. During the reform period, even an unequal political system sometimes allowed communities to impose costs on developers and alter projects. In the present conflict, the question around Dawei is increasingly about who will control the land and guarantee access to it: which armed authority will do so? Once development becomes attached to a military corridor, a farmer resisting relocation, a resistance force contesting territory and a company seeking secure investment can all encounter the same landscape while asking entirely different questions of it.

Myanmar is therefore not moving through a conventional sequence from war to peace and then reconstruction. Elements of all three are now occurring together. The state is holding elections in territory it controls, seeking foreign investment in strategic corridors and rebuilding diplomatic relationships while fighting continues elsewhere. Resistance authorities are consolidating their own forms of governance. Regional states are experimenting with re-engagement even as formal peace mechanisms remain unsettled. The danger in describing this merely as “legitimising the junta” is that the phrase makes normalisation sound like a single diplomatic gift. What is happening is more gradual and material. Normality can be assembled through institutions and infrastructure: a presidential title, a bilateral energy agreement, an ASEAN meeting, a functioning road, a port concession. None of those acts ends the war. Together, however, they change the state that will eventually emerge from it.

Dawei matters because it shows how. The military-backed government is trying to make a contested territory investable before the country is politically settled. Russia offers a prospective partner; Thailand supplies an economic hinterland and an enduring energy relationship; the state supplies military control where it can. If the project advances, the port will not simply be evidence that Myanmar has begun rebuilding. It will become part of the institutional and territorial structure through which the government enters whatever political negotiation follows.

A port can be built before peace. The question is what happens when, by the time peace is finally negotiated, its roads, contracts, energy links and security perimeter are already shaping the country. Dawei once tested whether Myanmar’s political opening would allow communities to renegotiate development. Its revival now raises the reverse problem: whether development undertaken during civil war can begin to determine the political settlement that is supposed to come after it.

The remark wasn’t about Taiwan; that’s what makes it useful to Beijing

Anwar Ibrahim spent his Thursday (20th August) defending a position on Chinese reunification at a press conference after a TikTok Shop retail summit in Kuching. The Prime Minister launched the convention, presumably took questions on live commerce and small business onboarding, and then had to explain, again, why he told Al Jazeera in an interview with Sreenivasan Jain four days earlier that he’d use force to stop a Malaysian province from breaking away, and that Beijing was entitled to do exactly the same thing to Taiwan.

Sreenivasan Jain asks him, would he condemn China for reserving the right to use force on Taiwan. Anwar doesn’t think twice. He reaches for Malaysia itself as an example, a province deciding to break away, and says he’d do exactly what Beijing says it would do. Pressed on whether that means force, he doesn’t dodge it either. “Because otherwise they’ll be fragmented,” he says, which is about as close as a sitting head of government gets to saying that war might not be the last resort but the first choice.

Most countries that recognise Beijing over Taipei do it through the standard formula: acknowledge, note, respect, a whole vocabulary engineered to avoid saying anything with actual teeth in it. Anwar went straight to the premises underneath it. Not just that Beijing has the right, but that using it would be obviously correct, the same thing any government would do in the same situation.

China loved it, predictably. Lin Jian, at Wednesday’s briefing, said Beijing was pleased, grateful even, for what Anwar had said, then ran through the usual lines, inalienable territory, unstoppable historical trend. Global Times had an academic from Xiamen on by Wednesday evening, making the case that Anwar’s remarks prove the international consensus is already settled, and that any government with its own separatist headache should probably draw the same conclusion he did.

Taiwan’s foreign ministry took the opposite read, called it a threat to regional stability, and said it could cost Malaysia investment from Taiwanese businesses. The DPP called it false. None of it moved Anwar. By Thursday, he was standing by every word, pointing to the United States of America’s own history of refusing to let states secede, no country just lets a piece of itself walk out, and suggesting the whole thing was really about how Al Jazeera had framed the question rather than anything he’d actually said.

Which, technically, is true. Malaysia’s one China position isn’t new; it goes back to 1974, the joint communique under Tun Abdul Razak, Malaysia recognising the PRC as the sole legal government and Taiwan as part of its territory. Every government since has repeated some version of it. So Anwar’s defense holds up fine on the facts. What actually changed wasn’t the position. It was the volume.

And that’s the part worth sitting with, because the Taiwan line wasn’t really the point he was making. Go back to the interview itself. It comes up inside a longer answer about what Anwar calls Western hypocrisy, double standards on Gaza, and international law applied depending on who’s the one breaking it. Taiwan was the analogy he reached for to make a completely different argument, about consistency, about who gets to invoke territorial integrity and who doesn’t. He wasn’t working out a considered position on cross-strait sovereignty. He was making an analogy about the broken international order.

Which is, if we’re honest, roughly how China picks up most of its endorsements on this question. Nobody sits down and independently derives that Taiwan is a province of China. What happens instead looks a lot like this week: a leader mid-argument about something else reaches for an analogy, and the analogy happens to do Beijing’s work for it. Do that enough times, across enough interviews, across enough years, and you get what Lin Jian calls an unstoppable historical trend, which on closer look is really just an accumulation of exactly this kind of borrowed logic, tidied up afterward into something that sounds like consensus.

Anwar gets something out of the exchange too. China is Malaysia’s largest trading partner, and with this statement, an ever-grateful Chinese state might consider bolstering trade relations. It costs him nothing domestically, Malaysia doesn’t have a live secession movement worth the name, so the analogy was free to make and useful to have made. Whether that was calculated going in or just where his own rhetoric happened to land him, it’s hard to say from the outside. Probably doesn’t matter much to Beijing either way. They have got a new endorsement in the bank.