The world was built on trade — by the West
The West created the current global system based on:
Capitalism
Free-market economics
Export-driven growth
Access to global finance and trade routes
This was the same model forced on colonized countries under terms like "open markets" or "economic modernization" — but it’s now being used as a weapon.
Sanctions are an economic war declaration
When the West sanctions China, blocks semiconductors, kicks Huawei out, blacklists drone and chip firms — it’s a message:
“You don’t get to grow in our system unless you play our game.”
But China's response isn’t to back down — it’s to build a parallel world:
The BRICS+ expansion
Yuan-based oil trade
The Belt and Road Initiative
Alt-fintech and alt-banking
Arms, chips, drones, and surveillance tech for non-aligned nations
The unintended consequence: arming the outcasts
Who gets China's military-grade drone upgrades, AI-guided tech, and reverse-engineered weaponry?
Iran
North Korea
Venezuela
Syria
Militias in Africa
Rebel groups across the Middle East
Even non-state actors like the Wagner successor groups or Houthis
Not because China wants chaos — but because chaos becomes profitable when you're shut out of the “civilized world’s” markets.
The West’s logic is eating itself:
What the fuck are we doing?
Because the current approach assumes economic punishment creates compliance, ignores the human pattern of turning to anyone who will trade with you when starved, and pushes China into becoming the merchant of forbidden tech — not out of malice, but necessity.
It's isolationism creating proliferation. Not containment. Not deterrence. Spread.
I’m not afraid of Chinese drones in Chinese hands.
I’m afraid of a Chinese tech-export pipeline becoming the new black market for global conflict, fueled not by ideology, but by Western miscalculations.
And if policymakers are listening, you’d do better to study this than dismiss it as fringe or fatalistic.
I’ll shed some light on the historical context in my next article.
Stay tuned.