Chinese aid to Iran and Pakistan is of more immediate regional and geopolitical significance to China, but that also does not provide the point of departure for a serious quest for global power status. An “anti-hegemonic” coalition could become a last-resort option if China came to feel that its national or regional aspirations were being blocked by the United States (with Japan's support). But it would be a coalition of the poor, who would then be likely to remain collectively poor for quite some time—Zbigniew Brzezinski in The Grand Chessboard.

Wars are no longer merely failures of diplomacy. They have become revenue systems. That is the uncomfortable truth behind the expanding arc of conflict stretching from Gaza to Lebanon, from Iran to the Gulf, and from South Asia to the western Pacific.

In an earlier age, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and initiatives like détente spoke the language of disarmament, peaceful coexistence and negotiated settlement. Today, that language survives mostly in archives and ceremonial communiqués, while the real grammar of world politics is written in procurement contracts, emergency appropriations, debt issuance, sanctions evasion networks and strategic weapons pipelines.

The numbers alone reveal the scale of the transformation. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) estimates that world military expenditure reached a record US$2.718 trillion in 2024, the highest ever recorded, with the steepest annual rise since at least the end of the Cold War.

SIPRI further reported that the combined arms revenues of the world’s 100 largest arms-producing and military services companies climbed to US$679 billion in 2024, also a record. This is not a normal policy environment. It is a political economy in which insecurity is not simply managed; it is monetised.

Israel is the clearest current example of how a war state finances prolonged combat. A single benefactor or secret financial reservoir does not fund its wars. They are financed through the ordinary machinery of the state, enlarged by extraordinary geopolitical privilege. SIPRI says Israel’s military expenditure jumped to US$46.5 billion in 2024, equal to 8.8% of its GDP.

Sanctions do not end the war economy; they often reroute it into opaque channels where military and commercial finance fuse even more tightly

Sanctions........

© The Friday Times