The Economic Battlefield. Middle Nation Podcast (E:21)

This is Shahid Bolson. Welcome everyone to the Middle Nation podcast. This is episode number 21. The transfer of power and control from the public sector to the private sector, as I have discussed many times and written about for years, is most likely an irreversible phenomenon. And it's not necessarily something bad or unjust, and in fact, I think it can be something very positive.

Because the fact of the matter is that the rich and powerful will always wield disproportionate influence in society. They always have and they always will. And when you have a facade of government authority that is supposedly impartial and not subject to this influence, it obscures the degree of control that the rich and powerful actually have. This is particularly true when it is a democratic government. So the blatant transfer of power to the private sector really just removes that facade and allows you to see the dynamics of power as they actually are.

So, no, I am not necessarily opposed to this. In many ways, I think it could actually be something liberating, a liberating understanding for any social movement that's been banging its head against the wall for years with misdirected activism. We just have to understand that today, the private sector is the appropriate arena for political activism. Government follows business. Where business leads, governments follow.

Policies follow. Legislation follows. So when I talk about the development of a union of Muslim states, I'm not relying on governments or political leaders in the Muslim world to achieve this. This is something that can be developed through the private sector by Muslim companies, Muslim business people, Muslim investors, Muslim executives, and Muslim entrepreneurs. We can build connections and cultivate relationships strategically to strengthen the ties between Muslim countries and create economic common interests between the private sectors across the Muslim world.

And we can shift the balance of economic power to the Muslim world and to the global South through business partnerships and cooperation while also uplifting our countries economically. If you look at a country like Ghana, for instance, you'll see that it is one of the fastest growing economies in Africa. They also have a leader there who appears to value his country's independence and sovereignty. Ghana is the second biggest producer of cocoa in the world. And last year, they announced that they would stop exporting cocoa to Switzerland, and instead, they were gonna work on developing the domestic industry for making chocolate.

Now, a move like that is a great opportunity for Muslim countries in multiple ways. Muslims can invest in factories for producing chocolate in Ghana, for example, to help them build capacity, but also Muslim countries could become cocoa importers from Ghana and then export the raw product to Switzerland. We could potentially position ourselves as middlemen between Africa and Europe, become broker nations, reducing the existence of direct trade between Africa and the West so that any raw materials Europe wants to import, they have to import them from us after we have imported them from their origin countries. Now the origin countries will still, at the end of the day, be exporting the raw materials to the West, but indirectly through Muslim countries so that the economic benefit of that trade gets shared across the global South and across the Muslim world. In the top 10 trading partners of Ghana, there's only one Muslim country, The UAE.

But none or almost none of what The UAE imports from Ghana is re exported, but instead they use it domestically. Now there's nothing wrong with that, but The UAE could potentially build up a more strategic partnership with Ghana as a broker nation, importing goods and materials that they do not need or use, but which other countries need and use. And when I say The UAE could do this, of course, what I mean is that Muslim business people in the private sector could do this. Muslim companies position themselves as conduits for raw materials like cocoa, copper, and what have you from Ghana to the rest of the world. And obviously, Ghana is just an example.

The same idea applies across Africa and indeed beyond Africa. Ideally, you could add value to the goods or materials before re exporting them to make your position in the supply chain more vital and profitable, refining, assembling, converting the materials, and so on into more valuable products. But even if the materials just remain exactly as they are, if you are importing them, they will not be available for Europe to import them, so they will have to buy it from the Muslims. Now granted, this is a simplified and somewhat shallow presentation of the idea. I'm not a businessman, but the concept is sound.

We have to begin seriously analyzing trade patterns and relationships around the world to pinpoint opportunities for tilting the balance of power. This also means studying the dynamics of the trading relationships because there can be variables of power associated with the role as an importer or as an exporter. Each type of economy has its own dynamics. An export led economy is a dependent economy with a weak domestic consumer base. They depend on outside buyers for whatever they can produce in terms of goods or services or raw materials, which means that they are dependent on those outside buyers for their economic stability.

Now if it is an import led economy, it means that they have a consumer base, but they're weak in terms of resources and manufacturing capability, and they rely on outside providers to meet domestic demand. So we have to think and operate strategically in order to navigate these dynamics to our advantage. Did you know that The UAE, as an importer, has the same percentage of exports from India as America? To India, The UAE is on equal footing with The United States as an importer of Indian products. Now India has a lot going for it geopolitically.

They have a young growing population, and this is a country that has the potential of disrupting the rise of Muslim economic power. If we want to address this threat, it's gonna have to be through private sector strategies for gaining leverage. There are three Muslim countries among India's top 10 trading partners, The UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Malaysia, with India mostly importing from these countries. That gives those countries a degree of leverage, but at the same time, it gives India leverage because it provides those countries with a vital market for their products. Here, there could be an opportunity again to build up a role as a broker nation.

See what products India imports that we do not need, and then buy those products from who they buy it from, and then sell it to India to increase our leverage. And conversely, look at what India exports and to whom, and start importing it from India with the objective of exporting it on to those who currently are buying it directly from India. So The US, for example, is a country that imports more from India than they export to India. So is there a way for us to position ourselves as the middlemen in that trade relationship? Is there a way for us to form a buffer between India and the countries of the West who import from India so that they have to buy Indian products through us?

These are the types of things that we need to study and the strategies that we need to develop. You can stop talking about military confrontation. You can stop thinking about Muslims willing themselves to power through armed struggle. You can stop pursuing the advancement of the ummah through politics. That's not the way the world works in the era we live in, and those are not the arenas in which we have any worthwhile advantages.

But what we can do is business. What we can do is trade. What we can do is investment. We have to familiarize ourselves with the terrain of the economic battlefield. That is where we have to strategize.

That is where we have to fight, and that is where we can feasibly gain victory over the coming decades. As I have explained many times, we are living in an age of imperial capital. The colonialism, the imperialism, the crusades of our era are economic in nature, and our resistance, our opposition, and our confrontation has to be economic as well. Any anti colonialist, anti imperialist, anti crusader movement in the Muslim world and across the broader global South is going to have to be pursued in the private sector. This is where power is wielded today.

So this is where we have to grow our power. Now you notice that I keep mentioning The UAE. I have a deep bias against The Emirates given my own history, but I have to acknowledge what they're doing. You'd be surprised at how many countries have The UAE among their top trading partners. The Emirates is the only Gulf country that is so active in international trade and investment, and they are buying significant political leverage with this approach.

They have huge sovereign wealth funds, and they are not just playing with that money. I don't care if you don't like The UAE, if you don't like Mohammed bin Zayed, if you think that they are corrupt, that they're criminals, that they're bad Muslims, and so on. I don't like them either, but they are achieving something, and they are focusing on the long game. Do you realize that The UAE has almost single handedly neutralized European influence in the Khalid? They have bought so much influence in The UK that Boris Johnson has to go there pleading, not ordering, not commanding, not demanding, and they don't even have to pick up the phone when the president of The United States calls them.

That's power, and it's creating a groundwork for Muslim private sector players to build upon. Did you know that the Lebanese play a dominant role in industry in Ghana, or that the largest population of Arabs outside The Middle East is in Latin America. We have so many potentially scalable opportunities for the development of partnerships and cooperation for the Muslim private sector across the global South that we urgently need to make this our area of focus. This is how we will rise, and this is how we can develop over the next several decades a union of Muslim states that can become a collective economic global superpower.