By contrast, when autocratic governance preceded capitalist development, strong states preoccupied with creating markets de novo had limited business and labor classes at the outset of modernization. To promote industrial growth, such states exerted more autonomy vis-à-vis private capital. Due to developmental imperatives requiring disciplined workforces, the state repressed labor, preventing it from becoming an independent political force. This pathway to authoritarian capitalism includes the post-war East Asian developmental states and reform-era China. These earlier pathways to authoritarian capitalism provide insight into contemporary cases of democratic backsliding in the U.S. and Europe where right-wing populism and anti-globalization sentiment have surged. (Chen, Li & Tsai, 2026).
Chen, Ling S and Li, Xiuyu and Tsai, Kellee S., Pathways to Authoritarian Capitalism (January 01, 2026).
The arrival of Chinese and Iranian naval vessels off the coast of South Africa, in preparation for a joint BRICS+ maritime exercise to be joined by Russia, is not a technical footnote in the calendar of international military cooperation. It is an event saturated with political meaning, produced by history and directed against history’s prevailing order. Beneath the official language of “securing maritime transport through joint action,” the exercise of peace will significantly signal the consolidation of a counter-logic to Atlantic power: one born not of ideology alone, but of accumulation, coercion, and resistance within the world economy. In 2026, it is no longer possible to treat such exercises as episodic or symbolic gestures. They form part of a structural shift in the organization of global power in which the monopoly once enjoyed by Western states over security, legality, and legitimacy is steadily eroded. What is unfolding off South Africa’s coast is not an alternative “security architecture” in the liberal sense, but a refusal to accept that security must forever be defined, enforced, and adjudicated by the same powers that dominate capital flows, sanctions regimes, and the instruments of international law.
This exercise seems to appear to be a straightforward approach. A dominant hegemon, as backed by an Atlantic coalition, faces the gradual emergence of balancing behavior. States exposed to sanctions, tariffs, diplomatic isolation, or strategic encirclement seek partners; those partners coordinate; signals are sent. Yet realism, in its classical or neorealist forms, remains curiously silent on the content of power on whose interests are embedded in “order,” whose trade routes are protected, and whose sovereignty is rendered conditional. It describes motion without explaining substance begins from the premise that naval power is inseparable from capital accumulation. Control of sea lanes is not a neutral concern of “global commerce,” but the historical foundation of imperial dominance, roughly 80 percent of world trade by volume and over 70 percent by value, continues to move by sea. Insurance, shipping finance, port ownership, and maritime law remain overwhelmingly shaped by institutions headquartered in, or aligned with, the Atlantic core. The language of “freedom of navigation” thus disguises a far more prosaic reality: the freedom of capital to circulate on terms set by the historically dominant powers.
It is precisely this arrangement that BRICS+ military coordination seeks, implicitly, cautiously to disrupt. What must be stressed is that disruption here does not take the form of frontal confrontation. There is no attempt to match the Atlantic alliance ship for ship, base for base, or expenditure for expenditure. The United States alone still accounts for roughly one-third of global military spending, a figure that dwarfs the combined naval budgets of most BRICS members. The significance of the South African exercise lies elsewhere: in the erosion of consent. Imperial power rests not only on coercion, but on the normalization of its presence. When naval patrols, sanctions, and legal rulings are accepted as the natural order of things, domination becomes invisible. What BRICS+ coordination threatens is not immediate supremacy, but ideological inevitability. South Africa’s role in this process is emblematic. As a state integrated into global capitalism yet historically positioned within the Global South, it embodies the contradictions of post-colonial sovereignty. Its economy remains dependent on mineral exports, foreign investment, and access to Western markets. European Union and the United States together still absorb close to a third of South African exports, while China remains its single largest trading partner. This dual dependence constrains policy autonomy, but it does not eliminate it. Rather, it produces a narrow and contested space within which political choices acquire disproportionate symbolic weight.
Washington’s reaction to Pretoria over the past several years reveals how little tolerance remains for deviation within that space. Diplomatic expulsions, punitive tariffs, and sustained rhetorical attacks on South Africa’s domestic and foreign policy are not expressions of concern for governance or human rights. They are instruments of discipline. The message is unmistakable: legal challenge will be punished, moral dissent will be reclassified as hostility, and sovereignty will be tolerated only insofar as it aligns with Atlantic priorities. Nowhere is this clearer than in the response to South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice concerning Israel’s conduct in Gaza. As a state, it should invoke international law, by applying procedures long championed by Western powers themselves, only to be met with economic retaliation and diplomatic isolation exposes the deeply conditional nature of the so-called rules-based order. Law, in this configuration, is not a constraint on power but a technique of it. When deployed by allies, it is sanctified; when invoked by challengers, it becomes provocation.
Against this backdrop, the hosting of a BRICS+ naval exercise cannot be dismissed as diplomatic ambiguity or hedging. It is an assertion, whether limited, cautious, but real of the right to choose partners without permission. That this assertion takes maritime form is historically appropriate. Naval power has always been central to imperial organization, from the British control of chokepoints, the Cape of Good Hope to the post-1945 American domination of global sea lanes. The oceans have never been neutral spaces; they are structured, policed, and monetized. The strategic geography of the seas has become even more critical. Energy flows, container traffic, undersea cables, and critical minerals all depend on maritime routes that pass through regions increasingly populated by states dissatisfied with Atlantic dominance. Sanctions have accelerated this dissatisfaction. Today, over 30 percent of the global economy operates under some form of unilateral or multilateral sanction regime imposed by Western powers. These measures are routinely justified as instruments of moral pressure, yet their material effects are stark: currency collapse, inflation, shortages, and the socialization of economic pain among populations with little influence over state policy.
Iran’s participation in the South African exercise must be understood in this light sense. Long subjected to financial exclusion and military threats, Iran represents not an anomaly but a prototype of sanctioned modernity. Its inclusion in BRICS+ military coordination signals that isolation is no longer total, that alternative circuits of cooperation, however limited, are emerging. Russia’s involvement reinforces this pattern. Since 2022, Moscow’s exclusion from Western markets has accelerated its economic reorientation toward Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, producing new dependencies and new alignments that further weaken Atlantic leverage. China’s role, however, remains decisive. As the world’s largest trading nation and the primary economic partner for much of the Global South, China has both the capacity and the incentive to support alternative frameworks of security. Its naval presence is inseparable from its economic position. China accounts for nearly one-fifth of global output in purchasing power terms, and its energy imports and export flows depend heavily on maritime stability. Yet unlike the United States, China frames its naval expansion in the language of collective security and non-interference, a discourse that resonates strongly among post-colonial states whose experience of Western “protection” has been one of intervention, regime change, and extraction.
This rhetorical contrast should not be mistaken for ideological purity. China, like all major powers, pursues its interests. But the form of pursuit matters. Where Atlantic power increasingly relies on coercion, sanctions, tariffs, diplomatic isolation as China emphasizes partnership, development, and shared infrastructure. This difference, however tactical, has profound political consequences. It reshapes the field of legitimacy. What is at stake here is not merely geopolitics, but the organization of global capitalism itself. The post–Cold War promise of integration has given way to fragmentation. Trade is weaponized, finance is politicized, and interdependence is no longer a guarantee of peace but a lever of discipline. In this context, BRICS+ cooperation emerges less as an ideological challenge than as a pragmatic response to systemic exclusion. It reflects the attempt of peripheral and semi-peripheral states to reclaim agency within a system increasingly hostile to autonomy.
Yet there are limits to this process, and they must be acknowledged. BRICS+ is not a revolutionary bloc. Its members are unequal, internally divided, and often competing. China’s economic weight dwarfs that of South Africa; Russia’s strategic imperatives differ sharply from those of Brazil or India; Iran’s isolation produces constraints unknown to commodity exporters integrated into Western markets. These contradictions ensure that BRICS+ remains a space of negotiation rather than unity. South Africa itself illustrates these limits with particular clarity. Endemic inequality, unemployment rates hovering near 30 percent, and persistent reliance on foreign capital constrain any attempt at radical realignment. Hosting naval exercises does not dissolve dependency. It does, however, signal the possibility of choice in a system structured to deny choice, symbolism acquires material force.
The Western response to these developments has been revealing in its poverty of imagination. Rather than addressing the structural grievances that drive Global South realignments, unequal trade, selective legality, coercive sanctions as Washington and its allies have doubled down on denunciation and punishment. This strategy not only deepens resentment but accelerates the very processes it seeks to contain. Every tariff imposed, every ambassador expelled, every legal challenge dismissed reinforces the perception that Atlantic power is less an order than a command. In this sense, the BRICS+ naval exercise off South Africa’s coast is best understood not as provocation but as a symptom. It reflects a world in which imperial authority can no longer rely on consent, in which legitimacy is contested, and in which the oceans themselves have become sites of ideological struggle. The question in 2026 is not whether multipolarity is emerging, but how unstable, unequal, and conflict-prone that transition will be. History offers little reassurance. Empires rarely concede decline gracefully. They resist, escalate, and punish. Yet history also teaches that coercion has limits. Naval power can enforce routes, but it cannot restore legitimacy. Sanctions can inflict suffering, but they cannot compel belief. What is taking shape in exercises like Peace Will is not a new order, but the slow unravelling of an old one—an order increasingly unable to explain itself to those it governs, and increasingly dependent on force to maintain what consent once secured.
South Africa at the Fault Line
South Africa’s role in this exercise is not incidental. It is, rather, diagnostic. As a middle power deeply integrated into global markets yet politically positioned within the Global South, Pretoria embodies with unusual clarity the contradictions of the post-apartheid order. It is neither marginal nor sovereign in any full sense. Its economy remains structurally dependent on commodity exports, foreign capital inflows, and access to Western-controlled markets and financial systems, even as its political discourse and diplomatic posture increasingly invoke autonomy, multipolarity, and South–South cooperation. The European Union and the United States together still account for roughly 25–30 percent of South Africa’s total exports by value, while China alone represents its largest single trading partner, absorbing approximately 12–14 percent. This pattern of dual dependence constrains policy space, but it does not eliminate agency. It produces instead a narrow and unstable corridor of maneuver in which every assertion of independence is read as provocation and every act of conformity as submission.
The structure of South Africa’s economy explains why this corridor is so narrow. More than three decades after the formal end of apartheid, the country remains locked into an extractive accumulation regime. Minerals and mineral-related products, platinum group metals, iron ore, coal, chromium, manganese continue to generate a disproportionate share of export earnings. Manufacturing, though still significant in absolute terms, has struggled to move up global value chains, remaining heavily dependent on imported intermediate goods and foreign-owned capital. Mining and energy-linked exports still account for roughly 60 percent of merchandise export revenue, while high-technology manufactures remain marginal. This pattern reproduces external vulnerability: commodity price fluctuations translate directly into fiscal stress, currency volatility, and social instability.
Foreign capital inflows play a decisive role in managing these vulnerabilities. South Africa remains heavily reliant on portfolio investment to finance its current account deficit and stabilize the rand. These flows are notoriously volatile. In periods of global tightening or geopolitical uncertainty, capital exits rapidly, depreciating the currency and raising the domestic cost of imports, debt servicing, and basic consumption. Subsequently, public debt remains above 70 percent of GDP, while interest payments consume a growing share of state revenue. The consequence is chronic fiscal constraint, limiting the state’s capacity to pursue redistributive or developmental policies without provoking market retaliation. The social consequences of this economic structure are stark. Official unemployment remains near 30 percent, with youth unemployment exceeding 45 percent. Income inequality remains among the highest in the world, with a Gini coefficient persistently above 0.6. Wealth is even more unevenly distributed: the top decile controls the overwhelming majority of financial and property assets, while millions remain dependent on social grants for basic survival. These figures are not peripheral to foreign policy; they are its material foundation. A state governing under such conditions is acutely sensitive to external shocks, trade disruptions, and financial punishment.
It is against this background that Washington’s response to South Africa over the past several years must be understood. The expulsion of South Africa’s ambassador to the United States, the imposition of 30 percent tariffs on selected South African exports remains the highest levied on any sub-Saharan African country and repeated public accusations regarding domestic governance and “strategic alignment” are not isolated acts or expressions of diplomatic irritation. They are instruments of discipline deployed within a hierarchical international system. Their function is not to correct specific policies but to delimit the boundaries of acceptable behavior for a state occupying South Africa’s position in the global order. Tariffs at this level are not symbolic. They strike directly at sectors already operating under intense cost pressure, including agriculture, automotive components, and processed minerals. In an economy with high unemployment and weak labor protections, the burden of such measures falls overwhelmingly on workers rather than on capital. Layoffs, wage suppression, and reduced investment follow. In this way, geopolitical conflict is translated into class discipline, external pressure into internal social pain. The message conveyed is unambiguous: political deviation carries material costs, and those costs will be paid domestically.
What renders this disciplinary strategy especially revealing is its selectivity. Comparable or more severe governance failures in formally aligned states provoke no such response. Human rights violations, electoral manipulation, or repression are tolerated so long as strategic alignment is maintained. The invocation of “values” thus functions not as principle but as instrument. It is mobilized to justify punishment when power is challenged and ignored when power is confirmed. This selectivity is not an aberration; it is constitutive of imperial order.
The reaction to South Africa’s legal action at the International Court of Justice, accusing Israel of genocidal conduct in Gaza, exposes this reality with particular clarity. Here, Pretoria did not violate any treaty, threaten any state, or employ coercive force. It invoked the formal mechanisms of international law, relying on conventions to which the relevant parties are signatories. Yet the response was not legal engagement or rebuttal, but economic retaliation and diplomatic hostility. That a state acting within the procedures of the international legal system should be punished for doing so reveals the ideological emptiness of the so-called rules-based international order. Rules, it turns out, apply only when they reinforce existing power relations. When they challenge them, they are recast as abuse, politicization, or bad faith.
This crunch illustrates a broader structural contradiction. International law presents itself as universal, but its application is hierarchical. In practice, legal universality is subordinated to geopolitical alignment. However, this contradiction is no longer obscured by rhetoric. It is openly acknowledged in policy circles and widely perceived across the Global South. The result is not merely cynicism but erosion of institutional legitimacy. Courts, treaties, and norms lose authority when they are seen as instruments rather than constraints of power. Against this backdrop, South Africa’s decision to host a BRICS+ naval exercise, having already done so in 2023 alongside China and Russia cannot be dismissed as diplomatic hedging or performative non-alignment. It represents an assertion, limited but real, of sovereign choice in a system increasingly intolerant of autonomy. The assertion is cautious precisely because the costs of defiance are well understood. But even caution acquires political significance when the prevailing order is structured to suppress deviation altogether.
South Africa’s geographic position amplifies this significance. Situated at the junction of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, it occupies a critical node in global maritime circulation, approximately 80 percent of world trade by volume and over 70 percent by value continues to move by sea. Energy shipments, bulk commodities, and containerized manufactured goods all pass through routes adjacent to South Africa’s coastline. Control over these routes has historically underpinned imperial power, from British dominance of the Cape sea route to contemporary U.S.-led naval supremacy. Maritime security has never been a neutral technical matter; it has always been a mechanism for structuring global exchange on favorable terms. The contemporary discourse of “freedom of navigation” obscures this history. It presents control as stewardship and dominance as neutrality. Yet in practice, maritime law, insurance, shipping finance, and port ownership remain overwhelmingly concentrated in Atlantic-centered institutions. To host naval exercises outside this architecture, in coordination with states positioned outside Western strategic command, is therefore to contest not only security arrangements but the authority to define security itself.
It is crucial to recognize what this contest is not. South Africa does not seek to rival the United States Navy, whose annual budget alone exceeds the combined military expenditures of most African states. Nor does BRICS+ coordination constitute an alternative global security system capable of immediate substitution. What is at stake is legitimacy rather than capacity. The challenge lies in rejecting the assumption that security must be guaranteed by Atlantic power or not at all. That rejection, modest in material terms, is corrosive in ideological ones. The broader BRICS+ context intensifies this corrosion. By 2026, BRICS countries collectively account for over 40 percent of the global population and roughly one-third of global GDP measured in purchasing power parity. They dominate production of key industrial inputs, control significant shares of global energy supply, and host critical manufacturing hubs. Yet they remain underrepresented in institutions governing trade finance, maritime insurance, and international law. This mismatch between material weight and institutional voice generates persistent tension within the world system.
South Africa’s alignment with BRICS+ must be understood within this structural imbalance. It is not a repudiation of Western markets, nor an immediate reorientation of economic dependency. It is an attempt to diversify external relations, to avoid absolute subordination to any single bloc. The intensity of Western reaction suggests that even this limited ambition is perceived as destabilizing. The Empire, historically, tolerates diversity only within carefully policed boundaries. Non-alignment is acceptable when symbolic; autonomy becomes intolerable when it acquires institutional expression. Yet South Africa’s autonomy remains constrained and contradictory. Its economy remains deeply embedded in Western-controlled financial circuits. Its domestic inequalities weaken social cohesion and limit political capacity. Its ruling coalition is fragmented, its bureaucracy overstretched. These conditions ensure that its foreign policy will remain cautious and uneven. But constraint does not negate significance. In a system characterized by structural rigidity, even limited deviations matter.
This trajectory appears unlikely to reverse. The weaponization of trade, finance, and law is becoming normalized. Sanctions regimes expand, tariffs proliferate, and legal institutions are increasingly politicized. For South Africa, the choice is not between alignment and independence, but between managed dependence and contested dependence. The costs of contestation are real, but so too are the costs of submission: permanent vulnerability, diminished sovereignty, and structural stagnation. South Africa’s experience thus resonates beyond its borders. It offers a case study in the contemporary limits of sovereignty and the mechanisms through which hierarchy is enforced. For other states occupying similar positions like Brazil, Indonesia, Egypt, Turkey yet the lesson is sobering. Deviation will be punished, but conformity offers no guarantee of protection or prosperity. Under such conditions, the incentive to diversify partnerships, however imperfectly, continues to grow. South Africa’s hosting of a BRICS+ naval exercise marks not a rupture but a symptom: a visible sign of an international order increasingly unable to accommodate the realities it helped create. The oceans off its coast, once unquestioningly patrolled in the name of empire, now carry a different historical weight. They do not herald a new order fully formed, but they are quiet, cautious, and constrained to accept that the old order is immutable.
Naval Power and Imperial Memory
Naval power has never been merely an instrument of war. It has been the organizing principle of imperial capitalism itself, the means by which distance was transformed into hierarchy and circulation into domination. From the consolidation of British control over the Cape of Good Hope to the post-1945 maritime supremacy of the United States, command of the oceans has functioned as the decisive condition under which global accumulation could proceed on asymmetrical terms. To rule the seas was to determine not simply who could trade, but on what conditions, under which laws, and subject to whose enforcement. The maritime realm, far from constituting a neutral commons, has always been a juridical and military construction, secured through violence and normalized through doctrine. The British Empire established the classical form. Control over strategic chokepoints, Gibraltar, Suez, the Cape allowed London to integrate colonial territories into a single commercial system, extracting raw materials at suppressed prices while exporting manufactures under monopoly protection. Naval dominance underwrote insurance markets, shipping finance, and maritime law, embedding British capital into the very grammar of international exchange. The Royal Navy did not merely defend commerce; it structured it. The claim that empire followed trade, rather than trade empire, was ideological inversion of the highest order. Free trade, as historians of imperial capitalism have long noted, emerged not as a spontaneous outcome of market rationality but as a political project enforced by gunboats.
The United States inherited this structure after 1945, but expanded it to a scale without historical precedent. The destruction of rival naval powers during the Second World War, coupled with the collapse of European colonial empires, enabled Washington to transform the oceans into an extension of American strategic space. By the early Cold War, maritime supremacy had been fused with a new architecture of accumulation: the Bretton Woods institutions, the dollar’s role as reserve currency, and the legal-institutional framework governing trade, finance, and shipping. Security and accumulation were no longer separable domains. The policing of sea lanes became inseparable from the policing of capital flows, legal norms, and political alignment. The quantitative markers of this dominance remain formidable. The United States still accounts for approximately 35–37 percent of global military expenditure, maintains eleven carrier strike groups, and operates a global network of naval bases and logistical hubs unmatched by any other power. Yet the persistence of these figures obscures a qualitative transformation. Maritime supremacy today functions less as an uncontested guarantee of order than as an increasingly costly mechanism for managing systemic instability. The problem confronting American naval power is not the absence of capability, but the erosion of compliance.
This erosion is inseparable from the growing reliance on coercive economic instruments. Sanctions regimes now encompass more than 30 percent of the global economy by population and output, targeting states that are not peripheral but structurally central to global production, energy supply, and logistics. Russia, Iran, China, and a widening circle of secondary targets have been subjected to varying degrees of financial exclusion, trade restriction, and legal pressure. The “weaponization of interdependence,” a term now widely used in international political economy, describes not a deviation from liberal order but its maturation under conditions of declining hegemony. Interdependence, once celebrated as a constraint on conflict, has been reconfigured as a vector of discipline. Yet discipline generates resistance. By converting integration into vulnerability, sanctions accelerate the search for alternatives. Payment systems, insurance markets, shipping registries, and port access once treated as technical domains become sites of strategic contestation. The BRICS+ naval exercise must be understood within this structural context. Its immediate military significance is limited. Its deeper meaning lies in its challenge to the presumption that maritime security must remain monopolized by Atlantic power, and that sanctioned states must accept isolation as a permanent condition.
The exercise does not announce a rival naval order. It does something more modest and more corrosive: it renders the existing order visibly contingent. Contingency, in an imperial system, is destabilizing. Hegemony rests not only on force but on the internalization of limits by subordinate actors. When those limits are tested, even cautiously the architecture of obedience begins to weaken. China’s participation illustrates this dynamic with particular clarity. As the largest trading nation in the world and the central manufacturing hub of global capitalism, China is acutely exposed to maritime vulnerability. Over 60 percent of its energy imports transit through chokepoints historically patrolled by the United States and its allies. In doing so, China’s naval expansion and participation in joint exercises represent rational responses to strategic exposure. But realism, once again, fails to grasp the political economy of the situation. China’s problem is not merely military vulnerability; it is institutional subordination within a system it increasingly sustains. China produces a disproportionate share of global industrial output, controls significant port infrastructure across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and anchors supply chains critical to global consumption. Yet the legal, financial, and security frameworks governing maritime trade remain overwhelmingly Atlantic in orientation. Insurance markets are concentrated in London. Maritime arbitration is dominated by Western jurisdictions. Naval policing is conducted under doctrines formulated by NATO powers. China’s participation in BRICS+ naval coordination signals an attempt, still cautious, still incomplete to align material centrality with institutional influence.
This attempt resonates across the Global South precisely because it does not present itself as a civilizational mission. Unlike Western naval doctrine, which cloaks dominance in the language of universal norms, China frames its maritime engagement through discourses of sovereignty, non-interference, and collective security. Whether this discourse will survive the pressures of power remains an open question. But its appeal is undeniable among states whose historical experience of Western naval power has been one of coercion rather than protection. Iran’s involvement sharpens the political edge of the exercise. Subjected for decades to sanctions, embargoes, and military threat, Iran occupies a structurally antagonistic position within the U.S.-led order. Its participation signals that BRICS+ cooperation is no longer confined to development finance or trade coordination, but extends into the security domain. For Tehran, maritime engagement offers both symbolic recognition and partial relief from isolation. For Washington, it represents a breach in the architecture of containment, a reminder that exclusion is never absolute.
Russia’s anticipated participation reinforces this impression. Since 2022, Russia has been subjected to one of the most extensive sanctions regimes in modern history. Yet it remains a major energy exporter and a central actor in Eurasian logistics. Its reorientation toward non-Western markets has been uneven and costly, but it has not produced collapse. Instead, it has revealed the limits of sanctions as a tool of systemic discipline when applied to large, resource-rich states. Naval cooperation within a BRICS+ framework underscores this lesson: coercion can disrupt, but it cannot reconstitute global hierarchies on its own. The scholarly debate on multipolarity has largely failed to register these dynamics, tend to frame multipolarity as a question of institutional reform and normative adjustment. Realists reduce it to shifts in relative capabilities. Both perspectives underestimate the extent to which global order is reproduced through mundane infrastructures of accumulation: shipping lanes, insurance contracts, port concessions, and legal jurisdictions. Multipolarity, in this sense, is not primarily a redistribution of power, but a reconfiguration of control over circulation itself.
Maritime trade statistics underscore the stakes. Approximately 80 percent of global trade by volume and over 70 percent by value still moves by sea. Container shipping remains dominated by a small number of firms, many headquartered in Europe. Maritime insurance continues to be concentrated in Atlantic financial centers. At the same time, port ownership and terminal operations have increasingly shifted toward Chinese firms, particularly through long-term concessions across the Global South. This hybrid structure, Western finance, Chinese infrastructure, Southern labor has no stable equilibrium. Naval power sits at the intersection of these contradictions, policing flows whose governance no longer corresponds to their material geography. The BRICS+ exercise does not resolve these contradictions. It exposes them. By coordinating naval activity outside NATO structures, participating states implicitly challenge the authority to define maritime security itself. This challenge does not require parity to be effective. Imperial systems are rarely undone by frontal confrontation. They erode through fragmentation, redundancy, and refusal. The British Empire did not lose maritime supremacy to a rival navy; it lost it to decolonization and economic exhaustion. Similarly, American maritime dominance will not be overturned by a single challenger, but diluted by the multiplication of arrangements that bypass its control.
Beyond 2026, this process is likely to intensify. Climate change is opening new maritime routes while destabilizing existing ones. Energy transitions are reshaping commodity flows and strategic chokepoints. Digitalization is altering logistics, surveillance, and risk management. Each transformation introduces new vulnerabilities and new arenas for contestation. States excluded from decision-making forums will seek influence not through compliance but through coordination. The response from the Atlantic core has thus far been defensive and punitive. Expanded naval patrols, proliferating sanctions, and increasingly moralized rhetoric about “rules” have substituted for structural reform. Yet such responses address symptoms rather than causes. They punish deviation without addressing the inequalities that produce it. They invoke law while practicing exceptions. They promise security while generating instability. The result is an order that relies ever more heavily on force while commanding ever less consent.
In this sense, the BRICS+ naval exercise is not a provocation but a diagnostic event. It reveals the growing gap between the material organization of global capitalism and the political architecture designed to govern it. The oceans off South Africa’s coast, long treated as an unproblematic domain of imperial policing, now register a different historical tension. They mark not the emergence of a coherent alternative order, but the weakening of an old one whose assumptions no longer hold. Naval power, once the unquestioned instrument of imperial command, now discloses its limits. It can delay transformation, but not arrest it. It can enforce compliance in the short term, but only at the cost of accelerating resistance in the long term in his analyses of imperial intervention, force is most effective when it is least visible. When it becomes overt, when it must be asserted rather than assumed, it signals not strength but anxiety.
The significance of the BRICS+ exercise lies precisely here. Not in the number of ships deployed, nor in the immediate tactical outcomes, but in the assumptions it unsettles. Maritime supremacy remains formidable, but it no longer appears inevitable. The coordination of sanctioned states and cautious middle powers reflects a recognition long suppressed: that security, like trade, is a social relation, and that relations enforced through coercion generate their own negation. In this recognition, still tentative and fragmented, lies the beginning of a world no longer organized around unquestioned command of the seas.
China, Iran, and the Politics of Participation
China’s leading role in the BRICS+ naval exercise is not an expression of sudden ambition, nor an improvisation prompted by short-term geopolitical friction. It follows from China’s position within the contemporary world economy and from the contradictions that position generates. China accounts for approximately 18–19 percent of global GDP measured in purchasing power parity, produces more than a quarter of the world’s manufactured goods, and remains the largest trading partner for over 120 countries. These figures are often cited to demonstrate China’s rise; they are more accurately read as indicators of exposure. China’s prosperity is not insulated from the world system but deeply embedded within it, and it is precisely this embeddedness that produces vulnerability. China’s dependence on maritime circulation is decisive. More than 90 percent of its trade by volume moves by sea. Over 60 percent of its crude oil imports transit the Indian Ocean, passing through chokepoints historically monitored by U.S. naval power and its allies. These routes are not merely commercial pathways; they are strategic arteries whose interruption would carry systemic consequences for China’s economy and social stability. Naval participation, in this sense, is not a luxury or an assertion of status. It is a material requirement imposed by the geography of global accumulation.
Yet China’s maritime posture differs markedly from that of the United States, not only in scale but in articulation. Where American naval doctrine presents itself as the custodian of a universal order, “freedom of navigation,” “rules-based security” as China frames its presence through the language of shared security, sovereignty, and non-interference. This rhetorical distinction is often dismissed in Western commentary as cosmetic or deceptive. Such dismissal misunderstands the role of discourse in imperial systems. Language does not merely describe power; it organizes consent and structures legitimacy. For China, whose rise has occurred within an order it did not design, legitimacy is not an accessory but a constraint. This is not altruism, nor does it imply ideological coherence. It reflects a strategic calculation shaped by historical memory. China’s modern state formation unfolded under conditions of imperial encirclement, unequal treaties, and maritime humiliation. Its leadership is acutely aware that naval power, when divorced from legitimacy, generates resistance rather than stability. Where Western power increasingly relies on coercion, namely sanctions, tariffs, legal threats as China seeks accommodation, or at minimum acquiescence. The difference is not moral; it is structural. A hegemon can afford to alienate. A challenger, particularly one whose economy remains interdependent with its rivals, cannot. The appeal of this posture across the Global South should not be underestimated. Many states have no illusions about power, Chinese or otherwise. But they are acutely aware of their historical experience with Western intervention: regime change, debt dependency, and selective enforcement of law. China’s emphasis on sovereignty and non-interference resonates not because it is believed unconditionally, but because it contrasts sharply with the punitive conditionality that increasingly characterizes Atlantic power. Consent, even partial and pragmatic, matters in a world where coercion has become overt.
China’s participation in BRICS+ naval coordination reveals the limits of purely economic integration. For decades, liberal theory assumed that trade would pacify power relations, that interdependence would render coercion irrational. The experience of sanctions, trade wars, and technological embargoes has dismantled this assumption. Interdependence has not dissolved conflict; it has reorganized it. The control of logistical nodes, ports, shipping lanes, insurance markets has become a central instrument of state power. China’s naval engagement reflects an acknowledgment that economic centrality without security capacity is untenable. Iran’s participation in the exercise introduces a different but complementary dimension. If China represents embedded power seeking institutional adjustment, Iran represents exclusion confronting endurance. Subject to decades of sanctions, financial isolation, and military threat, Iran exemplifies the punitive logic of the Atlantic system in its most explicit form. Its economy has been systematically constrained through restrictions on banking access, energy exports, and technological transfer. Yet Iran has not collapsed. Instead, it has adapted through diversification of trade partners, regional integration, and informal financial mechanisms. These adaptations are costly and uneven, but they demonstrate the limits of coercion when applied indefinitely.
Iran’s inclusion in a BRICS+ naval exercise signals a shift, however tentative, in the political meaning of the grouping. BRICS was long criticized as a cautious forum, heavy on rhetoric and light on commitment. Its expansion into security symbolism, even at a modest level marks a departure from purely technocratic coordination. It suggests that the costs of exclusion are increasingly shared, and that solidarity, even symbolic, carries strategic value. For Iran, participation offers recognition and partial normalization. For BRICS+, it represents a willingness to contest the moral geography imposed by Western sanction regimes. Russia’s involvement reinforces this trajectory. Since then, Russia has been subjected to one of the most comprehensive sanctions regimes in modern history, targeting finance, energy, technology, and logistics. Yet Russia remains a major exporter of hydrocarbons and a central actor in Eurasian trade. Its exclusion from Western markets has accelerated a reorientation toward Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, deepening ties with China, India, and regional partners. This reorientation is neither seamless nor cost-free, but it has undermined the assumption that exclusion equals collapse underscores a broader structural shift. Sanctions, once conceived as exceptional tools, have become routine instruments of governance within the Atlantic system. Their proliferation has eroded their deterrent effect while encouraging collective adaptation among targeted states. What emerges is not a unified counter-bloc but a loose ecology of coordination, substitution, and evasion. Naval exercises, in this context, function less as preparations for conflict than as signals of persistence: a declaration that exclusion will not be passively accepted.
The political significance of this participation lies precisely in its incompleteness. BRICS+ does not constitute a military alliance. Its members do not share a unified ideology, nor do they possess aligned strategic priorities. China’s caution, India’s ambivalence, Iran’s defiance, and Russia’s revisionism coexist uneasily. Yet imperial systems are not destabilized by coherent alternatives alone. They erode through partial alignments, overlapping interests, and the gradual normalization of deviation. Fragmentation, not unity, is often the more effective solvent of hegemony. The post–Cold War order promised integration, liberalization, and convergence. In practice, it delivered uneven development, financial volatility, and the consolidation of structural privilege. The Atlantic core retained control over legal norms, financial infrastructure, and security provision, even as production shifted elsewhere. This mismatch between productive centrality and institutional authority has become increasingly difficult to manage.
Maritime power sits at the heart of this mismatch. Control of sea lanes underwrites global trade, but the governance of those lanes remains anchored in institutions and doctrines formulated by a shrinking minority of states. In 2026, approximately 80 percent of global trade by volume and over 70 percent by value continues to move by sea. Yet the distribution of benefits from this trade remains profoundly unequal. Shipping finance, insurance, and arbitration are concentrated in Atlantic centers, while labor-intensive production and environmental costs are borne elsewhere. Naval power enforces this asymmetry by stabilizing circulation without redistributing authority. The BRICS+ exercise does not overturn this structure. It exposes its fragility. By coordinating naval activity outside NATO frameworks, participating states challenge the presumption that maritime security must be administered by a single bloc. This challenge is symbolic, but symbolism matters in systems sustained by habit and expectation. Once alternatives are imagined, even imperfectly, inevitability dissolves. Western responses to such developments have been revealing. Rather than addressing the structural grievances that animate Global South realignments as unequal trade terms, selective application of international law, and the weaponization of finance. Further, Atlantic powers have intensified moral denunciation and economic punishment. This approach reflects a declining capacity for reform. Where adjustment would require redistribution of authority, coercion offers a cheaper, if ultimately self-defeating, substitute.
The result is a paradoxical dynamic. The more coercive the system becomes, the more it incentivizes coordination among those it targets. Sanctions, tariffs, and legal threats generate not compliance but learning: learning how to trade around restrictions, how to insure cargo outside traditional markets, how to settle payments without the dollar. These processes are uneven and incomplete, but they accumulate over time. Naval cooperation, modest as it is, becomes one element in a broader repertoire of adaptation. Scarcely, there is little reason to expect this dynamic to reverse. Climate change will intensify competition over maritime routes and resources. Energy transitions will reshape trade flows and strategic chokepoints. Technological shifts will alter surveillance and logistics. Each transformation introduces new pressures on an already strained order. States that perceive themselves as permanently subordinate will continue to seek room for maneuver, even at significant cost. China, Iran, and Russia do not offer a coherent alternative vision of global order. What they offer, collectively and unevenly, is refusal: refusal to accept isolation as fate, refusal to concede that legitimacy flows exclusively from Atlantic institutions, refusal to internalize the assumption that security must be purchased through alignment. This refusal does not herald a new equilibrium. It signals a prolonged period of instability in which authority is contested but not yet reconstituted, matter more than the mechanics of the exercise itself. Who participates, under what terms, and with what implied recognition reveals the shifting boundaries of the permissible. Naval power, once the unquestioned instrument of imperial command, now operates in a more crowded and skeptical environment. It retains overwhelming force, but it no longer commands unquestioned consent.
The BRICS+ exercise thus stands as a small but telling episode in a larger historical transition. It reflects a world in which power is increasingly dispersed, legitimacy increasingly contested, and coercion increasingly visible. For China, participation is a means of managing exposure. For Iran, it is a gesture of endurance. For Russia, a signal of adaptation. For the Atlantic core, it is an unwelcome reminder that control, once lost, cannot be fully recovered through force alone.
Sanctions and the Political Economy of Coercion
Economic sanctions must be understood not as episodic policy instruments but as constitutive mechanisms of capitalist power exercised at the international level. They do not stand outside the normal functioning of the world economy; they are embedded within it. Sanctions are neither aberrations nor moral correctives. They are tools through which dominant states enforce hierarchy, discipline subordinate economies, and preserve asymmetries of power under conditions where overt military intervention has become politically costly or strategically risky. Historically, the use of economic coercion predates the contemporary liberal order. The British Empire’s naval blockades in the nineteenth century, from Napoleonic Europe to Qing China, were early demonstrations of how control over trade routes, finance, and insurance could be weaponised to compel compliance without formal annexation. The Opium Wars were not anomalies but prototypes: commerce enforced by coercion, legality subordinated to profitability. What distinguishes the modern sanctions regime is not its logic but its scale, institutionalisation, and ideological camouflage.
Sanctions have become one of the principal modes of governance within the global capitalist system. More than one-third of all states are subject to some form of unilateral or multilateral sanctions, while approximately 30–35 percent of global GDP is directly affected by trade restrictions, financial prohibitions, or secondary sanctions. The United States alone administers over 9,000 active sanctions measures, compared to fewer than 2,000 at the turn of the century. The European Union, once rhetorically committed to multilateral legality, has constructed a parallel sanctions architecture that increasingly mirrors Washington’s extraterritorial reach. This proliferation is not accidental. It reflects a structural transformation in imperial strategy. Where the post-1945 order initially relied on integration—through Bretton Woods institutions, trade liberalisation, and developmental conditionality—the contemporary order increasingly relies on exclusion. Access to markets, finance, insurance, and legal recognition is no longer presumed; it is conditional. Compliance is rewarded with inclusion; deviation is punished through isolation.
The ideological justification for sanctions rests on the claim that they are “targeted” and “smart,” designed to pressure political elites while sparing civilian populations. Decades of empirical research render this claim untenable. Comparative studies across sanctioned economies from Iraq in the 1990s to Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Syria, and Russia demonstrate a consistent pattern of social harm. As peer-reviewed meta-analyses show that sanctions reduce GDP per capita by an average of 7–12 percent within the first three years of imposition. Inflation accelerates, currencies depreciate, and access to essential imports deteriorates. Public health indicators worsen: infant mortality rises, life expectancy stagnates, and preventable diseases resurface. Crucially, sanctions do not operate as neutral shocks. Their effects are class-differentiated. Elites adapt. They gain privileged access to foreign exchange, exploit arbitrage opportunities, and consolidate control over smuggling networks and state rents. Meanwhile, workers absorb the costs through wage erosion, unemployment, and declining public services. In sanctioned economies, income inequality tends to rise sharply, while labour’s share of national income contracts. Sanctions thus function not merely as instruments of foreign policy but as mechanisms of internal class restructuring.
This outcome is not an unintended side effect; it is integral to how sanctions work. By weakening organised labour, fragmenting civil society, and exhausting popular capacities for mobilisation, sanctions often stabilise rather than destabilise ruling coalitions. Regime collapse is rare. Policy capitulation is rarer still. What sanctions reliably produce is constraint: a narrowing of developmental horizons and a permanent state of economic emergency. At the systemic level, sanctions perform a signalling function. They announce the boundaries of permissible autonomy within the world economy. States are disciplined not primarily for specific actions but for asserting forms of sovereignty that threaten established hierarchies whether through independent energy policy, alternative financial arrangements, legal dissent, or strategic non-alignment. Sanctions communicate a clear lesson to third parties: participation in global capitalism is reversible, contingent, and politically policed.
This logic has intensified since the mid-2010s. The weaponisation of finance through asset freezes, payment-system exclusions, and secondary sanctions marks a qualitative shift. Financial infrastructure once presented as neutral has become overtly political. Over US$600 billion in sovereign assets have been frozen globally, establishing a precedent that undermines the credibility of reserve currencies and international law alike. Property rights, long considered sacrosanct under liberal capitalism, are revealed to be conditional on geopolitical alignment. The consequences of this shift extend far beyond sanctioned states. Trust erodes across the system. Contracts lose credibility. Legal universality collapses into selective enforcement. The world market, once imagined as an arena of exchange governed by rules, increasingly resembles a terrain of coercion governed by power. From a Marxist perspective, this reflects a deeper contradiction: capitalism depends on circulation, yet sanctions disrupt circulation. When coercion becomes routine rather than exceptional, it undermines the very integration upon which accumulation depends. It is within this contradictory context that BRICS+ cooperation must be situated. BRICS+ does not represent an ideological alternative to capitalism, nor a coherent counter-hegemonic bloc. It is better understood as a defensive formation arising from systemic exclusion. Its initiatives as local-currency settlement, development financing, logistics coordination, and limited security cooperation are responses to a world in which reliance on Western-controlled systems has become a liability.
BRICS+ countries account for over 45 percent of the global population and roughly 32–35 percent of global GDP (PPP). More importantly, they encompass a growing share of global commodity production, manufacturing capacity, and energy reserves. Yet their integration into the world economy has been mediated through institutions and infrastructures over which they exercise little control. Sanctions exposure has forced a reassessment. Diversification is no longer optional; it is existential. BRICS+ initiatives remain uneven and contradictory. Internal asymmetries persist. Political cohesion is limited. But their significance lies less in their immediate effectiveness than in their cumulative impact on incentives. Each alternative payment mechanism, each bilateral currency agreement, each non-Western insurance or logistics arrangement marginally reduces the credibility of sanctions threats. Together, they introduce friction into a system previously designed for seamless coercion. Sanctions, in their overuse, generate counter-movements. This is their paradox. Designed to enforce obedience, they instead accelerate fragmentation. States hedge, diversify, and seek redundancy. The Global South, once urged to liberalise unconditionally, now confronts a harsher reality: openness without power is vulnerability. Development strategies premised on export dependence are exposed to external veto. In response, economic policy becomes re-politicised. Sovereignty, once derided as obsolete, re-emerges as a practical concern.
For the working classes of sanctioned states, the costs are immediate and brutal. For the global system, the costs are slower but profound. Sanctions corrode legitimacy. They replace consent with compulsion. Malcolm Caldwell warned decades ago that imperial systems relying increasingly on coercion reveal not their strength but their decay. This warning appears prescient. Sanctions are no longer instruments of last resort; they are default tools of governance. BRICS+ does not yet offer a new order. But it signals the erosion of the old one. In a world where coercion has become routine, resistance ceases to be ideological and becomes structural. The political economy of sanctions thus reveals the deeper crisis of contemporary capitalism: an order unable to reproduce itself through integration alone, increasingly dependent on punishment, and thereby hastening the transformations it seeks to prevent.
Limits of the Multipolar Moment
The emergence of BRICS+ cooperation, whether economic, diplomatic, or military, it has generated a growing literature that oscillates between triumphalism and alarmism. Both tendencies obscure more than they illuminate. BRICS+ is neither the embryo of a new world system nor a mere irritant to Atlantic power. It is, rather, a contradictory formation produced by the uneven development of global capitalism itself. Its significance lies precisely in its incompleteness. At the most elementary level, BRICS+ is not a revolutionary bloc. Its member states do not share a coherent ideological project, nor do they exhibit the degree of internal solidarity historically required for systemic rupture. China’s economic scale alone introduces asymmetry on a structural level. China’s GDP (PPP) exceeds that of the other BRICS members combined, while its industrial output, export capacity, and technological upgrading place it in a category apart. This imbalance inevitably shapes the terms of cooperation. Even where Beijing deploys the language of partnership and South–South solidarity, material dependence cannot be wished away.
Russia’s position is distinct again. Since 2022, its forced disengagement from Western capital markets has accelerated its pivot toward Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Yet this pivot is conditioned less by shared developmental agendas than by the exigencies of sanctions survival. Russia exports energy, arms, and raw materials; it seeks markets and diplomatic insulation rather than institutional integration. India, by contrast, remains deeply embedded in Western financial and technological ecosystems, even as it participates in BRICS forums. Brazil oscillates between developmentalist ambition and agribusiness dependence. Iran operates under a sanctions regime so severe that its priorities are shaped by economic endurance rather than coalition-building. These divergences are not secondary. They define the outer limits of what BRICS+ can become. Coordination is necessarily selective, issue-specific, and reversible. Military exercises, development banks, currency swap lines, and diplomatic alignments coexist with competitive trade practices, geopolitical rivalries, and domestic political volatility. BRICS+ is therefore best understood not as a unified actor but as a negotiating space in which states seek to widen their margins of manoeuvre within an increasingly coercive world economy.
South Africa exemplifies this condition with particular clarity. As the smallest economy within BRICS, yet one of its most symbolically significant members, South Africa occupies a liminal position. Its post-apartheid political identity situated it firmly within the Global South, while its economic structure remains deeply enmeshed in global capitalism. An unemployment fluctuates around 30 percent by the official measure and exceeds 40 percent under expanded definitions. Income inequality remains among the highest in the world, with a Gini coefficient consistently above 0.60. Capital ownership is highly concentrated, and the economy remains reliant on mineral exports, foreign portfolio inflows, and external demand. Western markets continue to matter. The European Union and the United States together absorb roughly a quarter of South Africa’s exports, particularly in higher value-added sectors. Foreign direct investment remains volatile, while domestic accumulation is constrained by infrastructural decay, energy shortages, and fiscal pressure. These material realities impose sharp limits on foreign policy autonomy. Any suggestion that hosting naval exercises or deepening BRICS ties could dissolve dependency misunderstands the nature of dependency itself. Structural subordination is not undone by symbolic assertion.
Yet to reduce such actions to empty gestures would be equally mistaken. Sovereignty, under contemporary capitalism, does not operate as an absolute condition but as a spectrum. States expand or contract their room for manoeuvre through incremental acts that accumulate over time. Hosting a BRICS+ naval exercise does not constitute a break with the Atlantic order as a refusal to accept that security cooperation must be monopolised by NATO, refusal to treat Western approval as a prerequisite for legitimacy. This refusal acquires significance precisely because it occurs under conditions of discipline. Over the past decade, South Africa has been subjected to escalating forms of diplomatic and economic pressure. Tariff threats, trade reviews, ambassadorial expulsions, and public denunciations have accompanied its foreign policy choices, particularly its legal action at the International Court of Justice concerning Gaza. The message has been unmistakable: legal dissent will be punished economically. That such punishment is imposed not through multilateral adjudication but through unilateral measures exposes the gap between the rhetoric and reality of the “rules-based international order.”
Here, history matters. The current sanctions-heavy regime did not emerge fully formed. It represents the culmination of a long shift in imperial governance from consent to coercion. During the Cold War, alignment was often secured through development aid, market access, and security guarantees. In the post–Cold War era, these instruments were supplemented and increasingly replaced by sanctions, asset freezes, and financial exclusion. Sanctions affect over one-third of humanity directly or indirectly. Their normalisation signals not confidence but fragility: an order unable to secure compliance through attraction alone. The maritime dimension of this shift is critical. Naval power has always been central to imperial capitalism, not merely as an instrument of war but as a guarantor of circulation. Control over sea lanes underwrites trade, finance, and resource extraction. From the British domination of the Cape route to the U.S. Navy’s post-1945 global presence, maritime supremacy has functioned as a material foundation of hegemony. The language of “freedom of navigation” has historically masked a far more particular freedom: the freedom of capital to move without challenge.
United States still accounts for roughly 35–37 percent of global military expenditure, maintains hundreds of overseas bases, and commands the world’s most extensive naval infrastructure. Yet this dominance is increasingly contested, not militarily in the narrow sense, but politically and economically. Sanctions have transformed maritime space into a site of contestation, where shipping insurance, port access, and payment systems are weaponised. States whose trade depends on the sea now confront a strategic dilemma: reliance on Western-controlled maritime systems exposes them to coercion, while alternatives remain underdeveloped. BRICS+ naval cooperation must be read against this backdrop. Its immediate operational impact is limited. It does not alter the balance of naval power. But it intervenes at the level of imagination. It asserts that maritime security can be discussed, coordinated, and symbolised outside Atlantic oversight. It challenges the assumption that the oceans are naturally governed by Western norms. In doing so, it contributes, incrementally to the erosion of monopoly. None of this guarantees a benign outcome. Multipolarity is not synonymous with justice. History offers ample evidence that periods of hegemonic transition are marked by instability, conflict, and intensified competition. The decline of British naval supremacy did not produce a peaceful handover but two world wars. The erosion of U.S. dominance may follow a similarly turbulent path. The expansion of coercive tools. sanctions, tariffs, extraterritorial law suggests a system preparing not for accommodation but for escalation.
The central question, therefore, is not whether Atlantic authority is waning, it is but how that waning will be managed. Will declining powers adjust to a more plural distribution of influence, or will they seek to enforce obedience through ever more punitive means? The evidence to date is not encouraging. As sanctions proliferate, so too do countermeasures. As coercion intensifies, legitimacy erodes. Resistance emerges not as ideology but as necessity.
The writer is a graduate student from USM’s School of Social Science, interested in Comparative Politics, Historical Political Economy, and Chinese Politics. Prior to pursuing his undergraduate studies, he worked as a contributing researcher at political institutes and obtained a Bachelor Of Social Science (Hons) in Political Science and Philosophy from University Science Malaysia.
