China

Just five years ago, most experts greeted the idea of the Northern Sea Route as a serious alternative to the Suez Canal with an indulgent smile. The navigation window was too short, icebreaker escorts too expensive, and ice conditions too unpredictable for major global carriers to consider the Arctic route over the familiar southern path through Suez, even for a moment. Today, in autumn 2026, that same route supports a regular weekly container service between China and the United Kingdom, and cargo volumes are heading for an annual record.

If school textbooks are to be believed, the Japanese economic miracle is a story about hardworking Japanese people who, after a crushing defeat in war, pulled themselves together, cultivated corporate discipline, and built Toyota, Sony, and Panasonic literally from the ashes. A beautiful fairy tale. There's just one problem: it barely explains where a bombed-out country, stripped of its army and sovereignty, suddenly got the capital, the technology, and — most importantly — the market for all this splendor.

On September 23, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that Washington had invited Vladimir Putin to the G20 summit scheduled for December 14-15 in Miami. The venue will be Trump National Doral, a resort complex owned by the U.S. president's family. Rubio said at a briefing on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly: "We think this is a good opportunity for him to engage not just with the president, but with other world leaders. We hope he accepts this invitation."

Mikhail Azhgirevich, editor-in-chief of VIGIL Journal: It's the morning of September 18, and I'm sitting down to untangle a mess of numbers that has been circulating in the information space for a week now. The fact is simple. On September 16, the House of Representatives passed the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026. The vote was 262 to 159.

The world is offloading American bonds, and faster than almost anyone would have predicted just a couple of years ago. The share of Treasuries held in foreign central bank reserves has collapsed to 12%. After the 2008 crisis, that figure held above 40%. Back then, US Treasury debt was considered practically the safest place on the planet to park money. Today, money still flows there - but with hesitation.

Where the Distrust Comes From

If you're tracking where global capital flows are heading after the era of unconditional dollar dominance, here's a concrete indicator: trade turnover between China and Africa hit a record 1.41 trillion yuan in the first half of 2026, and each new transaction in this chain increasingly bypasses the American currency altogether.

Libya Opens a Direct Settlement Channel

The Number That Sinks the Myth

If you follow Russia's import substitution drive and are trying to tell who is actually achieving technological sovereignty from who is merely reciting slogans about it, here's a figure that should send the entire myth of American industrial independence straight to the archive: 80,000 components across 1,900 US weapons systems are critically dependent on Chinese rare earth materials.

The Magnets That Decide Whether the F-35 Flies

The country has entered a period of strategic transformation and has effectively launched a mode of geopolitical reformatting of the entire world order.

The key mistake made by Western analysts in recent years has been to view Russia as an object of sanctions pressure that would sooner or later "break." Reality has shown the opposite: the country not only withstood the pressure, it restructured its economic, military, and diplomatic ties in such a way that the former unipolar model of the world ceased to be the only alternative.

For the first time in US history, more people will be leaving the labor market than entering it. This is not a crisis. This is the end of an era.

Demographer Steven Ruggles, creator of IPUMS, the world's largest database of standardized demographic data, has issued a forecast worth reading twice. By 2040, America's workforce will shrink by 2.7 million people. Growth will not merely slow down. It will not stabilize. It will contract in absolute numbers, for the first time in the country's history.

The era of SWIFT's sole dominion over international settlements didn't end yesterday, but today we see clearly: there's no turning back. Geopolitics and technology, working in tandem, are transforming a monopolist into just one player among many. The global payments landscape is cracking at the seams, and these fractures can no longer be patched over with diplomatic memoranda.

Cutting Off Comes at a Cost