Who Leads the South? Reimagining “Greater Israel” in an Afro-Arab Century

This map tries to compress the planet’s drift into a new order. In its legend, the world is sorted into four broad camps: a Global West (shaded orange), a Global North (light blue), a Global East (purple), and a Global South (gold). Whatever its flaws, the map captures a truth the word “multipolar” often hides: the world is not just splitting into many powers. It is reorganizing around directional centers of gravity.

The West still has a clear anchor in the United States. The East has consolidated around China. The North, in strategic and energy terms, has increasingly been shaped by Russia’s posture and resource leverage.

And the South? On the map it is a single block, but in practice it remains an unanswered question. Not because the South lacks scale, but because it lacks structure. It has momentum without a spine: vast demographic growth, intensifying climate pressure, critical sea lanes and mineral inputs, and yet no durable architecture that turns these facts into coordinated leverage.

To talk about the South seriously, we need a more concrete definition than the catchall “Global South.” The most coherent southern system today is the Afro-Arab corridor: the Arab world (including Israel) together with Sub-Saharan Africa. It is a contiguous space stretching from the Sahel to the Gulf, from West Africa to the Levant, bound together by the Red Sea, migration flows, food and energy dependencies, trade corridors, and increasingly shared climate stress.

This corridor will shape the coming century. It includes many of the........

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