For decades, Equatorial Guinea mattered to Western powers largely because of its oil. But the small Central African country is no longer the oil producer it once was. After reaching peak production in 2007, its oil production entered a…
Page A13From§Eachthe coffee break edition — 31 August 2026
Putin, Modi and Xi unite for anti-US summit; America saw no oil, China saw an Atlantic fortress.
As it ran on the front
Here's what nobody wants to say plain: three countries that don't agree on much of anything — not religion, not economics, not who owns which mountain — agreed on one thing hard enough to hold a summit about it, and that thing was us. You don't get Putin and Modi and Xi in the same room smiling for the same camera unless the common enemy in the room is bigger than every argument they've got with each other. That's not a theory. That's just how alliances work; they're built out of who everybody's scared of together, and this week, that's America.
And then, same week, buried in the business pages where they put the stuff they don't want you connecting: America saw no more oil where it was looking, and China saw an Atlantic military fortress. Read that sentence twice, because it's doing a magic trick. It's saying two countries looked at the exact same piece of ground and one of them saw nothing worth having and the other one saw a base. That's not two different opinions about a rock. That's one country still doing extraction math from 1974 and the other one doing global positioning for the next fifty years.…
…(cont) I'm not saying these two stories are the same story. I'm saying they ran the same week, and the guy at the end of the bar doesn't need a briefing to notice that every week we're not looking, somebody else is building something. You spend forty years telling yourself the summit doesn't matter because they don't get along, and the fortress doesn't matter because it's just a rock, and one morning you wake up and the rock has a flag on it and the people who don't get along have a group photo.
The scary part isn't the summit. Summits are theater, everybody knows that. The scary part is the fortress, because a fortress isn't a photo op, a fortress is poured concrete, and poured concrete doesn't care what we were looking at instead. That's the whole story: not that they're against us, everybody already knew that. It's that while they were building, we were somewhere else, and 'somewhere else' is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
“Three of the biggest militaries on Earth just held a summit with one item on the agenda, and it's us. Meanwhile the outlet cheering our own oil boom quietly admits China walked off with the base. You don't lose a fortress by accident, you lose it while you're looking somewhere else.”
“This is an alliance of convenience, not a bloc, and comparing it to — look, the summit happened, I'm not disputing the summit happened, but calling it 'anti-US' is their framing, not — okay it's literally in the dateline. Fine. It's anti-us. Next question.”
The receipts
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization also includes countries like Iran and Pakistan.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.