An order from no one
Recently: What’s extreme heat do to you? Noah Diffenbaugh on the hidden costs of a warming world.
Today: In Pretoria, the government is both calling an ultimatum to deport foreigners illegal and expelling them itself. … Off the Venezuelan coast, two quakes struck a minute apart, the worst there in more than a century. … &c.
For members: Has Iran ended America’s dominance in economic warfare? Nicholas Mulder on why the Americans can still squeeze their allies but not their rivals. … & Could anything knock the U.S. dollar off its perch? Barry Eichengreen’s new book, Money Beyond Borders: Global Currencies from Croesus to Crypto.
+ New music from Peter Gabriel …
Out by Tuesday
In a field in Sherwood, on the edge of Durban, about 10,000 Malawians have camped for more than a week, waiting for buses to take them out of South Africa. Their own government is sending the buses; Nigeria, Ghana, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique are pulling their people out too. The trigger is a date. Small, well-drilled citizens’ groups have given every undocumented foreigner until June 30 to leave, and the crowds behind the ultimatum—through Johannesburg, Pretoria, and Cape Town—have looted shops, emptied homes and even left several dead. President Cyril Ramaphosa says the deadline has no standing in law and that the police will hold the line—but the buses keep leaving.
What’s going on?
The deadline has no legal force, but for a Malawian without papers that’s now beside the point: The men setting it are coming anyway, carrying big sticks. The migrants’ home governments aren’t waiting to find out what might happen: Malawi alone has flown or bused out more than 3,500 of its citizens. And South Africa is helping them on their way—for all the government’s insistence that the deadline is illegal, it’s also deporting the people in Sherwood as undocumented migrants, while building a second camp to keep up with the rush to leave before the thirtieth.
Meanwhile
- Out of the judges’ hands. The U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way on Thursday to deport some 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians, ending a protection that had let them live and work legally for years. By 6–3, the justices didn’t rule the deportations lawful—they ruled that no court may review the decision at all, leaving it with the Homeland Security secretary and no judge above him. This follows lower-court findings that officials never seriously weighed conditions in Haiti or Syria, as the law requires
- ‘Everything collapsed.’ Two earthquakes hit Venezuela’s Caribbean coast on Wednesday, a magnitude-7.2 and then a 7.5 less than a minute later—the strongest to strike the country since 1900. La Guaira, the port state just north of Caracas, took the worst of it, with buildings down and more than 200 still trapped. By the National Assembly’s count, at least 188 are dead, more than 1,500 hurt, and 157 missing. Delcy Rodríguez, the acting president, has declared a state of emergency.
- The Vikings’ production line. America’s Senate passed its first war-powers rebuke of a president, then unmade it the next night. … The Democratic Republic of Congo’s Ebola outbreak, with no vaccine, has killed close to 200. … Ultra-Orthodox Israelis blocked highways over the jailing of men who refuse the draft. … A Moscow court handed the opposition politician Maksim Kruglov seven years for his posts on the war in Ukraine. … & Near Aarhus, Denmark, archaeologists have unearthed a 1,000-year-old Viking textile works—80 workshops across 25 acres.
The AI insights every decision maker needs
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Feature
‘Shells within shells’
Has Iran ended America’s dominance in economic warfare? Nicholas Mulder on why the Americans can still squeeze their allies but not their rivals.
For years, the United States fought Iran with sanctions, not soldiers. In late February, that changed: U.S. and Israeli strikes hit Iran, and the long economic war became a shooting one.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—the elite arm of Iran’s military—hit back on both fronts. In early March, it declared the Strait of Hormuz “blockaded”—the channel that carries about a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil and a third of its fertilizer—and started making good on it, going after ships that tried to run the line.
Shipping through Hormuz plummeted.
The U.S. president’s answer, posted online: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.” Then Washington threw a blockade around Iran’s own ports, from mid-April to late May.
Who’s still afraid of an American sanction?
Nicholas Mulder is an assistant professor of history at Cornell University and the author of The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War, and the forthcoming The Age of Confiscation: Making and Taking Property in the Creation of the Modern World.
Mulder says Iran was built to take this. It can choke Hormuz, it can fight, and it’s been here before—driven to almost zero oil exports under the last “maximum pressure” campaign—and it’s conspicuously still standing. But what Iran did here isn’t even an outlier; it’s the pattern. The Russians learned to slip sanctions, the Chinese built weapons of their own, and one country after another has worked out how to live with the economic weapon—and has stopped flinching.
Russia and China barely look up now, Mulder says: Years of sanctions forced them to build their own way out. Washington’s friends never had to—Europe and Asia stayed plugged into American tech, American finance, American security. So they’re the last ones Washington can still strong-arm—an irony they’re just now starting to see …
Books
A beacon of stability
Could anything knock the U.S. dollar off its perch? Barry Eichengreen, Money Beyond Borders: Global Currencies from Croesus to Crypto.
As U.S. President Donald Trump entered office for the second time, he threatened nine countries—Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates: the “BRICS”—with 100 percent tariffs if they tried to create a currency of their own.
“We require a commitment from these countries that they will neither create a new Brics currency nor back any other currency to replace the mighty US dollar or they will face 100% tariffs and should expect to say goodbye to selling into the wonderful US economy,” Trump wrote.
There is no BRICS currency, or likelihood of there being one. But that doesn’t mean nothing threatens to unseat the U.S. dollar.
What could?
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New music
‘A Hard Lesson (Bright-Side Mix)’
Peter Gabriel may need no introduction, but even his admirers may be interested to learn: This single from o/i—his upcoming sequel to 2023’s i/o—has been four decades in the making, tracing, he says, to his first trip to Senegal, where he fell in love with African polyrhythms.
