Much of what we accept as global “progress” today rests on invisible systems of extraction, debt, and control. Beneath the surface of development promises lie patterns of engineered poverty, intentional designs masked as economic aid. I wanted to understand how entire nations rich in resources, like Congo, the Philippines, and many others across Africa and the Middle East, were left in ruin. How economies were engineered to starve.

Reading Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins gave language to what I had always sensed but couldn’t yet name. The book didn’t just explain what’s happening or why it happens—but showed how it works. How the trap is set. How countries are offered loans under the promise of development, and then, when the economy inevitably fails to meet those projections, the debt becomes a tool of leverage. A means of control.

This model of empire does not rely on visible occupation. Instead, it enlists economists, consultants, and development agencies to do the work of colonization. These actors, knowingly or not, maintain the illusion that what is being offered is progress. But the progress is selective. The wealth often stays in the hands of a small elite, while the rest of the population are left to deal with the consequences: famine, poverty, crumbling health care, and rising debt. These aren’t just economic outcomes. They shape people’s lives, bodies, and futures in deeply uneven ways.

We’ve seen this strategy unfold before. In Vietnam and Iraq, the pattern repeated. First come the economic hit men offering loans too large to repay, tied to development projects designed to benefit foreign companies. If leaders resist, the CIA-backed forces are sent in—coups, assassinations, destabilization. And if that fails, the military steps in under the banner of liberation and democracy. Iraq was never about weapons of mass destruction. It was about reshaping an entire economy: rewriting oil laws, enforcing sweeping privatization, and funneling reconstruction contracts to US corporations. None of it was accidental. The script is clear: seduce, threaten, invade. Always in the name of democracy, progress, or humanitarian concern, which, as Perkins notes, “is almost laughable given how these missions unfold in the most brutal, inhumane ways imaginable.”

In places like Sudan, the tools have shifted—less about development banks, more about proxy wars and resource deals. Gold is smuggled out while militias are armed by Gulf powers, and economic collapse becomes the backdrop for a new kind of control.

Think about Gaza. In 2023, while the world watched in horror, something else moved beneath the rubble. Gaza, long portrayed as poor and dependent, sits on rich offshore gas reserves. But Palestinians have never had real control over them. Deals were made—with British companies, with Israeli conditions, with foreign hands—but never with Gaza itself. And when economic pressure failed and resistance held, the narrative shifted: terror, security, retaliation. Then came the force. In a moment of global energy crisis, Gaza’s gas mattered again. This wasn’t just war. It was extraction—without consent, without sovereignty.

The book is not perfect. It is shaped by the personal guilt of the author, whose perspective as a former “economic hit man” is at times self-centered. Still, the structural pattern it reveals aligns with decades of postcolonial (“if we can even call it that while colonization is still ongoing”) and economic critique. It confirms what many in the Global South have long argued: that underdevelopment is not a natural condition, but the product of external manipulation.

As I read, I kept thinking about the systems I tried to understand, each time a new report on Al Jazeera News came talking about the refugee crisis, or the poor conditions of third-world countries. It came with every question I asked about how people could suffer so deeply simply for being born in the “wrong” place and time. And then I started seeing it more clearly: the geopolitics of extraction. The role of multinational corporations. The way development is explained through numbers that often hide more than they reveal. I thought about how hard it is to talk about all this with people who’ve only seen empire as something civilizing or good. How words like “growth” and “stability” are used to disguise control.

What I learned broke something open. The world isn’t broken. It was built this way. Intentionally. Precisely. Systematically.

The clarity I gained was not comfortable. It rarely is. But it did affirm something essential: that the chaos and inequality we witness are indeed not accidents but part of a broader logic, a system maintained by those who benefit from it, and enforced through institutions that present themselves as neutral.

Understanding this is not enough. But it is necessary. Because without it, we risk mistaking symptoms for causes. We risk believing the narrative that some countries simply failed, that some peoples are perpetually in crisis, that some lives are less valuable than others.

This is what I return to now. Not only the desire to know, but the responsibility that comes after. To look beyond the surface. To make visible what was always meant to remain hidden. Not for the sake of knowledge alone, but because clarity, real clarity, disrupts. And from the disruption, there may still come the possibility of justice. If this is the part they allowed us to know, what’s still hidden?