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[May 24th 2025]

The world this week

Leaders
Letters
By Invitation
Briefing
Asia
China
United States
The Americas
Middle East & Africa
Europe
Britain
International
Business
Finance & economics
Science & technology
Culture
Economic & financial indicators
Obituary

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The world this week

Politics
Business
The weekly cartoon

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The world this week

Politics
5月 22, 2025 03:18 上午

After an 11-week total blockade Israel announced that it would allow

a minimal amount of food into Gaza under pressure from America. A
small amount of aid has since entered the strip but the UN said it
was “a drop in the ocean”. Meanwhile Binyamin Netanyahu, the
Israeli prime minister, said the Israel Defence Forces would be
“taking control of all of Gaza”. Israel ordered residents of Khan
Younis to evacuate as it prepared to unleash an “unprecedented
attack”.

Britain suspended talks on a trade deal with Israel and imposed

new sanctions on Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank. Britain,
France and Canada told Israel they would take “concrete actions” if
it continues an “egregious” expansion of military operations.

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Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, said he was doubtful
that talks with America would lead to a nuclear deal and that
America had made “outrageous” demands about Iran’s uranium
enrichment.

Marco Rubio, the American secretary of state, warned that Syria

could be weeks away from “potential collapse and a full-scale civil
war of epic proportions”, and that its new leaders needed support.

Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa’s president, went to the White

House, where Donald Trump claimed falsely that white Afrikaner
farmers were being targeted in a genocide. In front of TV cameras,
Mr Trump forced Mr Ramaphosa and his entourage to watch a video
that included incendiary comments from opposition black nationalists
in South Africa. The scene was reminiscent of the treatment given to
Volodymyr Zelensky when he visited the Oval Office in February.

Ethiopia’s federal election board revoked the legal registration of

the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, the ruling party in the
troubled region of Tigray and once the country’s most powerful
political outfit. The board’s controversial decision follows months of
rising tensions between the TPLF, which is Ethiopia’s main opposition
party, and the federal government of the prime minister, Abiy
Ahmed.

A gunman shot dead two Israelis who worked at Israel’s embassy

in Washington as they left an event at a Jewish museum. The
suspect was taken into custody and shouted “Free, free Palestine”.
Israel’s ambassador said the victims, a man and a woman, were a
couple who were about to get engaged. The FBI is considering
whether to treat the killings as terrorism.

Donald Trump went to Capitol Hill to persuade Republicans to vote

for his One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a sweeping piece of tax-and-
spending legislation·. The bill would increase the federal deficit.
Citing a “decline in fiscal metrics”, Moody’s downgraded America’s

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credit rating from AAA to AA1, meaning that for the first time
America does not hold a top-notch score from any of the three big
credit-rating agencies. Amid worries about America’s growing debt,
the yield on 30-year government bonds jumped to over 5%, the
highest in 18 months. And stockmarkets and the dollar suffered, too.

America’s Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to end

protections against deportation for 350,000 Venezuelans who have
settled in the country under the Temporary Protected Status
programme. The court is still open to appeals against the
government in the matter.

Brexity things

Britain’s prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, achieved a reset in

relations with the European Union at the first UK-EU summit since
Brexit in 2020. The agreement highlighted defence, agri-food
products, the movement of younger people and use of e-gates at
airports. The deal was welcomed by many businesses and trade
groups as it will reduce some trade frictions. But its detractors,
notably the British fishing industry (worth less than 0.1% of British
GDP), claimed it was a sell-out. Public opinion has warmed to closer
ties with the EU since Brexit.

Britain’s net migration figure fell sharply in 2024 to 431,000, down

by half from the 860,000 recorded in the previous year. The official
numbers showed that immigration fell to 948,000, from 1.3m in
2023. The statisticians said the change was explained by a decrease
in immigration from outside the EU and an increase in emigration
from people who had arrived on study visas after the pandemic.

A phone call between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin that was
supposed to press the Russians into peace talks with Ukraine
amounted to no more than puffery. Mr Putin kept to the status quo,
repeating his insistence that Ukraine make concessions. Mr Trump
seemed to suggest he would not make any further effort to find

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peace and would leave Russia and Ukraine to it. The day before the
phone call Russia launched one of its biggest drone attacks of the
war, which mostly targeted Kyiv. Ukraine and Russia recently held
their first direct talks in three years. They lasted for just two hours.

Lithuania filed a lawsuit against Belarus at the International Court

of Justice in The Hague for facilitating and enabling the smuggling of
migrants across their border. The Baltic states and Poland have for
years alleged that Belarus and Russia are pushing migrants over
their borders to destabilise their countries. Lithuania contends that
this does serious harm to its “sovereignty, security and public order,
as well as to the rights and interests of the smuggled migrants
themselves.”

The first round of Poland’s presidential election saw Rafal

Trzaskowski, the liberal mayor of Warsaw, take 31% of the vote,
followed closely by Karol Nawrocki, the candidate of the hard right,
on 29.5%. Mr Trzaskowski is backed by Donald Tusk, the prime
minister. The closeness of the result was a surprise; Mr Trzaskowski
had a bigger lead in opinion polls. If he loses in a run-off on June 1st
it would complicate Mr Tusk’s efforts to pass reforming legislation.

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The current hard-right president, Andrzej Duda, has blocked some
two dozen bills.

In Romania a presidential election run-off was won by Nicusor Dan,

the centrist mayor of Bucharest, who defeated George Simion, the
hard-right nationalist candidate. In the first round Mr Simion had
secured twice as many votes as Mr Dan, but in its wake Mr Simion
scared voters away with his hostility to NATO and Ukraine. The
previous presidential election in December was cancelled amid
claims of Russian interference.

The centre-right government in Portugal was returned to power in

a general election, though it again fell short of a majority. The hard-
right Chega (“Enough”) party, which campaigned on a platform of
slashing illegal immigration, surged in the poll, coming only slightly
behind the Socialists in the tally of votes and equalling their seats in
parliament.

In Argentina· the libertarian party of President Javier Milei won the

mid-term election for the Buenos Aires city legislature. The leftist
Peronists came second and the centre-right PRO party came a
humiliating third in its traditional stronghold. Markets cheered. Mr
Milei now looks better positioned politically ahead of national mid-
terms in October.

El Salvador’s Congress passed a law that imposes a tax on foreign

donations to local NGOs. Nayib Bukele, the president, described it as
a “foreign agents” bill. That invited comparisons to autocratic
regimes such as Russia, Venezuela and notably Georgia that have
passed similar legislation amid crackdowns on journalists and pro-
democracy organisations.

The relationship is over

The conservative Liberal-National coalition in Australia split, ending

a pact that had lasted for decades. The coalition was last in

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government in 2022, suffering another defeat at a recent election.
The Liberals, who dominated the pact, take most of their support
from urban areas and will now be the sole party in opposition. The
smaller National Party gets most of its support from rural areas.

Japan’s government, which has seen its approval ratings sink to

record lows, was shaken by the resignation of the farming minister
for claiming he has never had to buy rice because his supporters
donate it to him. His comments sparked fury among voters who are
having to fork out record prices for the staple food.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/the-world-
this-week/2025/05/22/politics

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The world this week

Business
5月 22, 2025 03:17 上午

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Britain’s consumer prices soared by 1.2% in April, pushing the
annual rate of inflation to 3.5%. One factor behind the jump was a
more than 26% rise in water utility bills. Households also felt the
pinch from higher energy costs. Rachel Reeves, the chancellor of the
exchequer, described the figures as “clearly disappointing”. Traders
pared their bets on further interest-rate cuts from the Bank of
England.

America’s Senate moved a bill forward that would create the first
regulatory framework for stablecoins, digital currencies that are
tied to the value of an asset, usually the dollar. The Democrats had

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initially blocked the bill over concerns about consumer protections,
but in the end enough of them joined Republicans on a procedural
vote to advance the legislation to its final stage.

An outage of Bloomberg’s terminals affected markets for 90

minutes. The terminals are widely used in financial trading and carry
data on live pricing. Users pay around $28,000 a year for each
terminal.

Novo Nordisk announced that its chief executive was stepping

down. Investors have expressed concerns that the pharmaceutical
giant is losing its competitive edge in the weight-loss market to rivals
such as Eli Lilly. Novo Nordisk makes the Ozempic and Wegovy
drugs. Its share price has slimmed down by 30% this year.

CATL made a successful debut on the Hong Kong stock exchange,

with its share price rising by 16% on the first day of trading. The
Chinese maker of electric-car batteries raised $4.6bn, which could
rise to $5.3bn if the underwriting banks exercise their options. It is
the biggest stock offering in the world so far this year, and the
second listing for CATL, which first went public in Shenzhen in 2018.

In reverse

Honda became the latest carmaker to cut back its investment in

pure electric vehicles because of slowing demand. It also scrapped a
target to achieve 30% of its sales in EVs by 2030. The Japanese
company is instead ramping up its forecasts for sales of hybrid
vehicles.

The member countries of the World Health Organisation formally

adopted the first ever pandemic agreement, which sets out the
tools to combat a global outbreak of disease, including the sharing
of vaccines. Once an annex covering data-sharing is agreed on the
treaty will be sent to member states for ratification.

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In an announcement that could potentially undermine its partnership
with OpenAI, Microsoft said that it would add Grok’s artificial-
intelligence models to its Azure cloud-computing platform for
developers. Grok is a generative AI created by Elon Musk’s startup,
xAI, a potential rival to OpenAI. Microsoft is OpenAI’s biggest
investor and has integrated its models with Azure. But it wants to
add other models to the platform so that it eventually becomes the
dominant hub for developers.

OpenAI shrugged off the news from Microsoft by announcing it was

buying IO in a $6.5bn deal. IO is a startup founded by Sir Jony Ive,
best known for his work on designing Apple’s iPhone. OpenAI will
work with Sir Jony’s team to develop new devices built specifically
for AI technology. We can “completely reimagine what it means to
use a computer”, said Sam Altman, OpenAI’s boss.

In Spain the backlash against mass tourism continued apace, as the

government ordered Airbnb to take 66,000 rental listings off its
website for breaking various regulations, such as not identifying
whether the property is owned by a person or a company. A court in
Madrid agreed that 5,000 listings must be removed immediately.
Protests have been held across Spain claiming that holiday rentals
are making local housing unaffordable.

A recent cyber-attack on Marks & Spencer could cost the company

£300m ($400m) in profit, it said, and operations won’t return to
normal until July. The British retailer’s digital logistics system has
been crippled, forcing staff to use pen and paper to replenish its
shelves. M&S insists that it has not underinvested in its cyber-
security systems and that the incident was a result of human error.
It has not said whether it paid the attackers a ransom.

Shopping baskets

Home Depot bucked a trend among big American retailers and

pledged not to raise prices in response to higher tariffs. Around

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half the goods that the DIY chain sells are produced in America and
so it is less exposed to the duties than other companies. Target cut
its sales forecast but said that raising prices because of tariffs would
be a “last resort”. Donald Trump recently told Walmart to “EAT THE
TARIFFS” after it suggested it would have to increase prices. “I’ll be
watching,” he said ominously.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/the-world-
this-week/2025/05/22/business

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The world this week

The weekly cartoon

5月 22, 2025 04:25 上午

Dig deeper into the subject of this week’s cartoon

Israel says it is unleashing an “unprecedented attack”

Israel’s radical new course in Gaza
The war in Gaza must end

The editorial cartoon appears weekly in The Economist. You can see
last week’s here.

This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/the-world-

this-week/2025/05/22/the-weekly-cartoon

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Leaders
The man with a plan for Vietnam
Vietnam :: A Communist Party hard man has to rescue Asia’s great success story

MAGA’s assault on science is an act of

grievous self-harm
Exit, pursued by an elephant :: America will pay the price most of all

The Senate should vote down Donald

Trump’s reckless tax cuts
A big baleful bill :: If it does not, a collision with the bond markets awaits

The best part of the UK-EU deal is a system

for doing more deals
Ever closer negotiation :: Sir Keir Starmer’s “reset” is still a hard Brexit. It will need
softening

The plan to protect America by shooting

down missiles mid-air
Donald Trump’s Golden Dome :: It’s not as outlandish as it sounds

How Poland can keep its place at the heart

of Europe
Don’t throw it away :: If it turns inward, the country and continent will lose out

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Vietnam

The man with a plan for

Vietnam
A Communist Party hard man has to rescue Asia’s great success
story
5月 22, 2025 05:51 上午

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FIFTY YEARS ago the last Americans were evacuated from Saigon,
leaving behind a war-ravaged and impoverished country. Today
Saigon, renamed Ho Chi Minh City, is a metropolis of over 9m people
full of skyscrapers and flashy brands. You might think this is the
moment to celebrate Vietnam’s triumph: its elimination of severe
poverty; its ranking as one of the ten top exporters to America; its
role as a manufacturing hub for firms like Apple and Samsung. In

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fact Vietnam has trouble in store·. To avoid it—and show whether
emerging economies can still join the developed world—Vietnam will
need to pull off a second miracle. It must find new ways to get rich
despite the trade war, and the hard man in charge must turn himself
into a reformer.

Vietnam’s economy is booming, but its new leader is

worried·

That man, To Lam, isn’t exactly Margaret Thatcher. He emerged to

become the Communist Party boss from the security state last year
after a power struggle. He nonetheless recognises that his country’s
formula is about to stop working. It was concocted in the 1980s in
the doi moi reforms that opened up the economy to trade and
private firms. These changes, plus cheap labour and political
stability, turned Vietnam into an alternative to China. The country
has attracted $230bn of multinational investment and become an
electronics-assembly titan. Chinese, Japanese, South Korean and
Western firms all operate factories there. In the past decade
Vietnam has grown at a compound annual rate of 6%, faster than
India and China.

The immediate problem is the trade war. Vietnam is so good at

exporting that it now has the fifth-biggest trade surplus with
America. President Donald Trump’s threat of a 46% levy may be
negotiated down: Vietnam craftily offered the administration a grab-
bag of goodies to please the president and his allies, including a deal
for SpaceX and the purchase of Boeing aircraft. On May 21st Eric
Trump, the president’s son, broke ground at a Trump resort in
Vietnam which he said would “blow everyone away”.

But even a reduced tariff rate would be a nightmare for Vietnam. It

has already lost competitiveness as factory wages have risen above
those in India, Indonesia and Thailand. And if, as the price of a deal,
America presses Vietnam to purge its economy of Chinese
inputs, technology and capital, that will upset the delicate

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geopolitical balancing act it has performed so well. Like many Asian
countries it wants to hedge between an unreliable America and a
bullying China which, despite being a fellow communist state, has
long been a rival and now disputes Vietnam’s claim to coastal waters
and atolls. The trade and geopolitical crunch is happening as the
population is ageing and amid rising environmental harm, from
thinning topsoils in the Mekong Delta to coal-choked air.

Mr Lam made his name orchestrating a corruption purge called “the

blazing furnace”. Now he has to torch Vietnam’s old economic model.
He has set expectations sky-high by declaring an “era of national
rise” and targeting double-digit growth by 2030. He has made flashy
announcements, too, including quadrupling the science-and-
technology budget and setting a target to earn $100bn a year from
semiconductors by 2050. But to avoid stagnation, Mr Lam needs to
go further, confronting entrenched problems that other developing
countries also face as the strategy of exporting-to-get-rich becomes
trickier.

Vietnam’s growth miracle is concentrated around a few islands of

modernity. Big multinational companies run giant factories for export
that employ locals. But they mostly buy their inputs abroad and
create few spillovers for the rest of the economy. This is why
Vietnam has failed to increase the share of the value in its exports
that is added inside the country. A handful of politically connected
conglomerates dominate property and banking, among other
industries. None is yet globally competitive, including Vietnam’s loss-
making Tesla-wannabe, VinFast, which is part of the biggest
conglomerate, Vingroup. Meanwhile, clumsy state-owned enterprises
still run industries from energy to telecoms.

To spread prosperity, Mr Lam needs to level the playing field for

smaller firms and new entrants. That means hacking back a
bewildering licensing regime and allowing credit to flow to small
firms by shaking up a corruption-prone banking industry. Legislation
issued this month abolishes a tax on household firms and

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strengthens legal protection for entrepreneurs. That is a step in the
right direction, but Mr Lam also needs to free up universities so that
ideas flow more easily and innovations thrive.

This is where it gets risky. Vietnam’s people would without a doubt

benefit from a more liberal political system. But although that may
also help development, China has shown that it may not be essential
—at least not immediately. What is crucial is facing down powerful
vested interests that hog scarce resources. A good start would be
forcing the oligarchs to compete internationally or lose state support,
as South Korea did with its chaebols. Often they are protected by
cronies and pals within the state apparatus and the Communist
Party. Encouragingly, Mr Lam has already begun a high-stakes
streamlining of the state, including by laying off 100,000 civil
servants. He is also halving the number of provinces in a country
where regions have sponsored powerful factions within the party.
And he is abolishing several ministries. All this will modernise the
bureaucracy, but it is also a brilliant way of making enemies.

The autocrat’s dilemma

The danger is that, like Xi Jinping in China, Mr Lam centralises power

so as to renew the system—but in the process perpetuates a culture
of fear and deference that undermines his reforms. If Mr Lam fails,
Vietnam will muddle on as a low-value-added production centre that
missed its moment. But if he succeeds, a second doi moi would
propel 100m Vietnamese into the developed world, creating another
Asian growth engine and making it less likely that Vietnam will fall
into a Chinese sphere of influence. This is Vietnam’s last best chance
to become rich before it gets old. Its destiny rests with Mr Lam,
Asia’s least likely, but most consequential, reformer. ■

For subscribers only: to see how we design each week’s cover, sign
up to our weekly Cover Story newsletter.
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/05/22/the-man-with-a-plan-for-vietnam

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Exit, pursued by an elephant

MAGA’s assault on science is

an act of grievous self-harm
America will pay the price most of all
5月 22, 2025 09:07 上午

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Editor’s update (May 22nd): The Trump administration revoked
Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students.

THE ATTACKS have been fast and furious. In a matter of months the
Trump administration has cancelled thousands of research grants·
and withheld billions of dollars from scientists. Projects at Harvard
and Columbia, among the world’s best universities, have been

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abruptly cut off. A proposed budget measure would slash as much as
50% from America’s main research-funding bodies. Because
America’s technological and scientific prowess is world-beating, the
country has long been a magnet for talent. Now some of the world’s
brightest minds are anxiously looking for the exit.

Why is the administration undermining its own scientific

establishment? On May 19th Michael Kratsios, a scientific adviser to
President Donald Trump, laid out the logic. Science needs shaking
up, he said, because it has become inefficient and sclerotic, and its
practitioners have been captured by groupthink, especially on
diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). You might find that reasonable
enough. Look closely at what is happening, though, and the picture
is alarming. The assault on science is unfocused and disingenuous.
Far from unshackling scientific endeavour, the administration is doing
it grievous damage. The consequences will be bad for the world, but
America will pay the biggest price of all.

The MAGA revolution threatens America’s most innovative

place
America’s scientific prowess is a huge global subsidy·
Trump’s attack on science is growing fiercer and more
indiscriminate·
America is in danger of experiencing an academic brain
drain·
How cuts to science funding will hurt ordinary Americans·

One problem is that actions are less targeted than the administration
claims, as our special Science section this week explains. As Mr
Trump’s officials seek to stamp out DEI, punish universities for
incidents of antisemitism and cut overall government spending,
science has become collateral damage. A suspicion that scientists
are pushing “woke” thinking has led grant-makers to become allergic
to words like “trans” and “equity”. As a consequence, it is not only
inclusive education schemes that are being culled, but an array of
orthodox science. Funding has been nixed for studies that seek, say,

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to assess cancer risk factors by race, or the prevalence of sexually
transmitted diseases by sex.

The attack on elite universities takes this to an illogical extreme.

Because the White House sees colleges as bastions of wokeness and
antisemitism, it has withheld funding for research at Harvard and
Columbia, no matter in which subject. Overnight, projects on
everything from Alzheimer’s disease to quantum physics have been
stopped. When scientists warn of the harm this does, they risk being
seen as part of a scornful anti-MAGA elite that has been protected
for too long.

More fundamentally, the claim that Mr Trump will stop groupthink is

disingenuous. MAGA reserves a special hatred for public-health and
climate researchers, whom it regards as finger-wagging worrywarts
determined to suppress Americans’ liberties—as they did in
lockdowns and school closures during covid-19. The consequence is
that spending on vaccine and climate research will be gutted most
viciously of all. With the stroke of a pen, officials are trying to
impose new rules that tell scientists what areas of inquiry they may

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pursue and what is off-limits—a shocking step backwards for a
republic founded on the freethinking values of the Enlightenment.

Meanwhile, genuine problems with the way science works in America

are being neglected. Mr Kratsios is right that there is too much
bureaucracy. America’s best researchers say they spend two out of
five days on form-filling and other administrative tasks, instead of in
the lab. Research is becoming more incremental. New ways of
funding, such as lotteries, are worth trying. So far, however, the
White House has not set out plans to make science work better.
Indeed, when scientists are uncertain whether their work will still be
funded, or if they take to the courts to challenge arbitrary grant
terminations, American science becomes less efficient, not more so.

Congress and the courts may yet act to limit the scale and the scope
of these anti-science endeavours. Even so, the damage of the past
few months will soon be felt. Savage cuts to the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration mean worse weather-forecasting,
making it harder for farmers to know when to plant their crops, and
for local authorities to prepare for natural disasters. Those to the
Centres for Disease Control and Prevention will make it harder to
monitor, and thus curb, outbreaks of disease.

There will also be longer-term harm. Although Mr Trump hopes his

tariffs will lure businesses to invest in America, their research
spending is unlikely to fill the same gaps as publicly funded basic
work, much of which may not be commercialised for years, if ever.
As funding is frozen, the danger of a brain drain looms. In the first
three months of the year the number of applications for overseas
jobs from American scientists rose by a third compared with the
same period in 2024; foreign researchers applying to come to
America fell by a quarter. The country’s reputation for welcoming
talent will not be so easily regained. If the belief that academic
freedom is curtailed takes hold, the scientists who remain could self-
censor their lines of inquiry for years to come.

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The consequences will be felt around the world. America is the
planet’s biggest backer of public research; it is home to half of all
science Nobel laureates and four of the ten best scientific-research
universities. The knowledge uncovered by American scientists· and
resulting innovations such as the internet and mRNA vaccines have
been a boon to humanity. When America retreats, everyone is
robbed of the fruits of this ingenuity.

Exit, pursued by an elephant

It is America, however, that will feel the pain most of all. At the
beginning of the 20th century there was no branch of science in
which Uncle Sam led the world. At the century’s end there was none
where it did not. America’s triumphs—its economic prowess, and its
technological and military might—were interwoven with that
scientific success. As America pulls back, it will cede ground to
authoritarian China· as a scientific superpower, with all the benefits
that confers. MAGA’s assault on science is not just about DEI, nor is
it about universities. It is first and foremost an act of self-harm. ■

For subscribers only: to see how we design each week’s cover, sign
up to our weekly Cover Story newsletter.
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/05/22/magas-assault-on-science-is-an-act-of-
grievous-self-harm

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A big baleful bill

The Senate should vote down

Donald Trump’s reckless tax
cuts
If it does not, a collision with the bond markets awaits
5月 22, 2025 05:56 上午

COMPLACENT ABOUT being the world’s haven, America has been

budgeting without any sense of restraint. Over the past year the
federal government has borrowed a staggering $2trn, or 6.9% of
GDP, even though no crisis has drained its coffers. On May 16th
Moody’s, a rating agency, stripped the country of its last headline
triple-A credit score. Yet on May 22nd the House of Representatives
passed, by just one vote, President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful”

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budget bill, which cuts taxes and raises deficits. Reflecting the rising
fiscal risk, the yield on 30-year Treasuries has risen to 5.1%, the
highest since 2007, amid a sell-off

America has more fiscal leeway than other countries, but the
Republican Party seems determined to test its limits. Net federal
debts have grown to 100% of GDP, a near-trebling over two
decades, meaning that the Treasury will soon pay more than $1trn
per year in debt interest, almost as much as it spends on health care
for the old. Politicians who should be debating how to tighten their
belts are instead poised to raise borrowing still further. Unless they
think again, they risk stoking a crisis.

Trump will be unpleasantly surprised by America’s tariff

revenues·

Some Republicans pretend that their budgeting is sound, but they

are guilty of a sleight of hand. The bill’s main effect is to take the
temporary tax cuts from Mr Trump’s first term and make them
permanent. A continuation of the status quo, they argue, is not a
new expense. The bill also adds new tax cuts which, to keep down
costs, will supposedly expire in 2028. In other words, sunset clauses
for new tax cuts seem to count as a saving, but stopping scheduled
sunsets comes free. To this fantasy, the bill adds cuts to clean-
energy subsidies and Medicaid, health insurance mostly for the poor,
to produce a slight fiscal tightening.

In reality the bill makes it more likely that America will exhaust its
fiscal space. Today’s official forecasts, which suggest that net debt
interest could soon hit a record high as a share of GDP and then
keep rising, are bleak—and they assume that the 2017 tax cuts
expire and that deficits will narrow. The new law would ensure that
deficits stay around 6-7% of GDP, raising forecast debt in 2034 by
about $3trn. And if new temporary tax cuts become permanent, the
cost could exceed $4trn. These measures include tax exemptions for
tips and overtime pay that were promised by Mr Trump during his

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election campaign. Once enacted, they will be hard to get rid of,
whatever the law says.

Republicans hope that two things will fill this giant hole. One is tariff
revenues·. This may be partly true, but their estimated proceeds
range from $1.4trn-2.9trn over a decade. Moreover, the figures
include reciprocal duties that are on hold pending talks to reduce
them, after their announcement caused a mini-run on dollar assets.

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The other great Republican hope is economic growth. Yet today’s bill
is far less pro-growth than Mr Trump’s past tax reforms, which
included a big permanent corporate-tax cut. The tip and overtime
exemptions are gimmicks. The bill even includes a big increase in
the deduction that high earners can claim on account of their state
and local tax bills, which in effect subsidises lower levels of
government to raise the taxes they levy. When combined with Mr
Trump’s tariffs, the overall effect on growth will be negative.
Moreover, whereas in 2017 a deficit increase arguably provided a
helpful stimulus, there is less slack in the economy today, meaning
that more spending is likely to be offset by higher interest rates.

Junkie debt

The bill now passes to the Senate, which should vote against it. The
belief that deficits will never matter is dangerous, especially as
doubts mount over the country’s commitment to economic stability
and low inflation under Mr Trump. America needs lower spending
and higher taxes to bring down borrowing. When politicians do not
face up to reality, the bond market eventually forces reality upon
them—and that could prove sudden and painful. ■

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which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays
and reader correspondence.
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Ever closer negotiation

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The best part of the UK-EU
deal is a system for doing
more deals
Sir Keir Starmer’s “reset” is still a hard Brexit. It will need softening
5月 22, 2025 03:17 上午

FANS AND FOES of this week’s agreement between Britain and the
European Union have made hugely exaggerated claims about it. Sir
Keir Starmer heralded it as historic and the start of a new era. The
prime minister’s opponents accused him of betraying Brexit or of
killing it altogether. The truth is that the deal sensibly, if modestly,
reduces some of the worst trade frictions introduced after Britain’s
exit from the EU five years ago. And it adds a new pact to work
together on rebuilding Europe’s defences, an urgent task given

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Russian aggression and American equivocation. But this “reset” is
neither historic nor an act of betrayal. Brexit remains “hard”.

Alongside defence, the main agreement was for Britain to align with
EU food standards, thereby easing frictions that have hit exports
hard. Linking carbon-adjustment and electricity schemes will also
help trade. A planned youth-mobility programme should benefit both
sides, as will Britain’s promise to consider rejoining the Erasmus+
student-exchange scheme. The same goes for closer co-operation on
data exchange through the Europol policing agency. Sir Keir reckons
the overall package may boost Britain’s economy by about £9bn
($12bn) in 2040: that is only 0.3% of GDP, but for a sluggish
economy it is still welcome·.

This being a trade negotiation, both sides made concessions. Sir Keir
rolled over the EU’s access to British fishing waters for 12 extra
years, to 2038, outraging many fishermen. His alignment with EU
food regulations means accepting rules which Britain has very little
say in making, and some role for the European Court of Justice.
Against this, aligning with food rules simplifies trade between Great
Britain and Northern Ireland. And Britain retains the freedom to
strike trade deals with third countries, as it has just done with
America and India.

The claim by Kemi Badenoch, leader of the Conservatives, that this

is a sell-out is absurd. Sir Keir has stuck to all three red lines that
Labour put in its party manifesto last year: no single market, no
customs union and no free movement of people. Indeed, for most of
the period after 2016, when Britain voted to leave the EU, this
version of Brexit would have been deemed to be “hard” not “soft”.
Voters were sold a vision in which swashbuckling post-Brexit Britain
would be global and deregulated at the same time as it set its own
rules to control trade and immigration. Acknowledging that this
outcome was always a fantasy is not a betrayal, but the welcome
intrusion of reality.

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Ms Badenoch is also ignoring a shift in public opinion. Most voters
now think the vote to leave was a mistake. A majority, even in Nigel
Farage’s Reform UK, favour closer relations with Brussels. So do
most business groups.

EU leaders seem pleased not because they think they have won a
battle but because they want closer relations with an important
partner. This is clearest in defence, since building a credible
European system of security requires not just more money but also
the full participation of one of the continent’s military powers.
Warmer relations also increase the chances of further improvements
in the Brexit deal.

What next? This week’s agreement is really a road map to a deal:

years of negotiations now lie ahead. Perhaps its best feature was to
establish a system of annual summits, with working parties
implementing future deals. This framework could eventually even
lead to a re-examination of Sir Keir’s red lines. A future government
may have a mandate to trade off sovereignty against membership of
the customs union.

The direction of travel towards a closer relationship is now set. Other

countries in Europe that are not members of the EU are working
their way along a similar course. Norway is starting a new debate
about joining the club. The Swiss have spent over 30 years
negotiating every detail of their relationship. Post-Brexit Britain must
get used to that, too. ■

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which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays
and reader correspondence.
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Donald Trump’s Golden Dome

The plan to protect America

by shooting down missiles
mid-air
It’s not as outlandish as it sounds
5月 22, 2025 05:53 上午

IN THE 1980S scientists working on Ronald Reagan’s Strategic

Defence Initiative proposed what seemed like a madcap scheme to
defend America. Thousands of interceptor satellites would orbit
Earth and attack enemy missiles as they took off. The idea fizzled
out. It has been resuscitated by Donald Trump, who on May 20th
said that his Golden Dome missile-defence shield would cost $175bn

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in total, take two to three years to complete and offer “close to
100%” protection.

Mr Trump’s vision sounds just as fantastical as Reagan’s. “We call it

super technology,” he declared. “Nobody else has it.” But in essence,
the Golden Dome is not as outlandish as it might once have been. In
fact, done well, it could become a useful part of America’s defensive
arsenal.

Star wars returns·

In the 1980s putting sensors into space and building miniature

computers to sit inside thousands of interceptors was very
expensive. Now, thanks in part to Elon Musk and his company
SpaceX, launch costs have fallen dramatically. The Congressional
Budget Office (CBO), a non-partisan think-tank, estimates that the
cost of developing a constellation· that could defeat one to two
intercontinental-range ballistic missiles (ICBMs) has fallen by 30% to
40% compared with estimates in 2004 and 2012.

The Golden Dome idea also promises to be more useful—which is

why the Biden administration began work on the space-based
sensors that would track cruise missiles and the digital pipes that
pass tracking data from satellite to satellite. America’s adversaries
increasingly wield missiles that can take more circuitous routes to
the continental United States, circumventing the radars and
interceptors designed for attacks coming over the polar region. In
addition, the threat to America used to come solely from nuclear-
armed missiles. It now includes non-nuclear conventional missiles
that might target ports, air bases and other military infrastructure.

Inevitably, Mr Trump’s claims are exaggerated. No missile-defence

system will ever offer blanket protection. America would need
36,000 space-based interceptors to defeat just ten North Korean
ICBMs, allowing for 30 seconds of decision time, according to the
American Physical Society, a group of physicists. Countering larger

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salvoes from Russia and China, and covering every corner of
American soil, would cause those numbers to mushroom. So, too,
would the cost. Even a modest shield, designed to parry a couple of
ICBMs, could cost $161bn-542bn over 20 years. That is an enormous
sum at a time when the modernisation of nuclear forces is also
expected to demand $946bn by 2035.

In practice, Mr Trump should be more modest in his ambitions—and

not only because of the cost. In his executive order in January, he
demanded a system that could defend against any foreign aerial
attack. In his announcement this week, he promised that cruise,
ballistic and hypersonic missiles would all be destroyed. If so, it
would be destabilising. Fearing that their nuclear deterrent forces
might become ineffective, China and Russia would seek to expand
their arsenals—in China’s case even faster than today—or to build
weapons that would give American leaders even less warning time.

In reality, some Russian and Chinese nuclear-armed ICBMs would

always get through. However, that does not mean homeland missile
defence is pointless. In recent years, Israel, Ukraine and India have
all shown how blocking even a modest share of incoming projectiles
can limit the damage and buy some decision-making time for
political leaders— who might otherwise feel compelled to fire back at
once. ■

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which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays
and reader correspondence.
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Don’t throw it away

How Poland can keep its place

at the heart of Europe
If it turns inward, the country and continent will lose out
5月 22, 2025 05:38 上午

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TWICE IT VANISHED from the map, swallowed up by its rapacious
neighbours. After it emerged from the second world war as a Soviet
satellite, it endured decades of oppression. Today, Poland has
transformed itself into Europe’s most overlooked military and
economic power—with a bigger army than Britain, France or
Germany and living standards, adjusted for purchasing power, that

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are about to eclipse Japan’s. Yet, just when Poland should stand
proud and tall once more, is it about to throw away its influence?

That is the question Poles face in the decisive run-off vote· to elect
their president on June 1st. One vision, from the candidate of the
Law and Justice (PiS) party, is a brand of right-wing nationalism that
feeds off conflict with Poland’s neighbours and the European Union.
The other, from the centre, is that, in a dangerous world, Poland
needs Europe to magnify its strengths, just as Europe needs Poland
as a source of security and economic dynamism. Unfortunately, at
the moment the right may have the upper hand.

Poland’s election will cement or ruin its standing in Europe·

The ignored stockmarket superstar
Why so much is riding on Poland’s presidential elections

For the past three decades, Poland has shown how much a country
can achieve by European integration and good economic policy.
Since 1995 income per person has more than trebled. Since it joined
the EU in 2004 Poland has never known recession apart from briefly
at the height of the covid-19 shutdown. During those two decades,
its average annual growth has been almost 4%.

The fruits of that growth are on display across the country. Warsaw,
the capital, boasts Europe’s tallest building outside Russia, the Varso
tower; and below it bustles with designer shops and cafés, IT
startups and fashion houses. Out in the once-neglected countryside
fine roads, often built with EU money, criss-cross vistas of well-
tended fields, farms and new houses.

Poles used to flock abroad to find work, but for some years now
home has been a stronger draw. Manufacturing is booming, thanks
to Poland’s proximity to Germany, continuing to do well even as its
western neighbour, like much of Europe, has stagnated. When
Germany, under its new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, starts a planned

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new burst of infrastructure and defence spending, Poland is likely to
be a beneficiary.

Long attuned to the threat from Russia, Poland has used its wealth
to enhance its security. It now musters the largest army in Europe
after Russia, Ukraine and Turkey, and the third-largest in NATO. It
spends well over 4% of its GDP each year on defence, far above the
2% that has been the NATO target since 2014, and plans to raise
that to over 5% next year.

This has translated into influence. These days the group that counts
in European security is sometimes dubbed the four musketeers: the
young addition to Britain, France and Germany is Poland, like the
superlative swordsman d’Artagnan. Tellingly, its prime minister,
Donald Tusk, travelled to Kyiv earlier this month with his three
counterparts to stress that Europe is ready to stand by Ukraine even
as America’s commitment has weakened. Poland’s stance is in sharp
distinction to the rest of the “Visegrad Four”. Hungary under Viktor
Orban and Slovakia under Robert Fico have both taken the side of
Russia rather than Ukraine; and the Czech Republic is expected to
tilt in that direction after elections in October.

Given Poland’s record, much of it achieved during the total of ten

years in which PiS has been in power, you might conclude that it
could continue its renaissance with either candidate in June’s run-off
election—especially as the role of president in Poland is less powerful
than that of prime minister. However, that would be a mistake.

Under the constitution, the president’s veto can be overridden only

by a three-fifths majority in the Sejm, the lower house, which Mr
Tusk does not command. The current president, Andrzej Duda, is a
former PiS politician who has blocked or delayed many of the new
government’s reforms and is now termed out. PiS wants his
successor to be Karol Nawrocki, a fierce ideologue who would be
even less accommodating than Mr Duda. Mr Nawrocki is almost
certain to use his powers to block Mr Tusk’s agenda, so as to pave

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the way for a PiS victory in the next parliamentary elections. To win
the presidency, he would depend on support from far-right parties
that exploit growing anti-Ukrainian feelings; one is openly
antisemitic.

This matters because Mr Tusk is trying to unravel PiS’s capture of the

state while it was most recently in office, from 2015 to 2023. In that
time, while pursuing mostly sensible economic and security policies,
PiS systematically took over independent institutions, including the
judiciary, the media, the civil service, the central bank and the
banking system. PiS’s fights with Brussels over the rule of law
caused Poland to be temporarily shut out of some of the EU’s aid
programmes.

By contrast, Mr Tusk is a committed European—he previously served

as the president of the European Council in Brussels. Under him
Poland has co-operated with other European countries on security,
diplomacy and defence to the benefit of all. Were Poles to use the
presidential election to vote in Rafal Trzaskowski, a Tusk ally who is
Warsaw’s mayor, EU co-operation would be easier and Poland’s
influence would grow further.

The world has changed since Mr Tusk took over. With another
Donald back in the White House, the task of building up Europe’s
strategic autonomy is not just a luxury but an urgent necessity.
Poland could not only set an example in security, but also serve as a
powerful voice for supporting Ukraine and deterring Russia.
Economically, Poland is an example to central and eastern European
countries; and Mr Tusk could be a proponent of the economic
reforms the EU desperately needs.

Don’t throw it away

Next week’s election is finely balanced. In the first round the

candidates of the hard right took around 52% of the vote. Were Mr
Nawrocki to win the second round, both Poland and Europe would

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suffer. Europe would lose a source of dynamism, and Poland would
risk losing the place at the heart of Europe it has worked so hard to
claim. ■

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up to our weekly Cover Story newsletter.
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Letters
Poland and the threat from Russia
A selection of correspondence :: Also this week, the Church of England, adventures in
Sudan, Canada, IT projects, clean air

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A selection of correspondence

Poland and the threat from

Russia
Also this week, the Church of England, adventures in Sudan,
Canada, IT projects, clean air
5月 22, 2025 03:18 上午

Letters are welcome via e-mail to letters@economist.com

Find out more about how we process your letter

On the front line

You underscored the urgency of European resolve in the face of the

threat from Russia (“What Putin wants”, May 10th). Yet you mistook

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realism for extremism when criticising Poland and the Baltic states
for taking the Russian threat “to the other extreme”. It is not Poland
that lends weight to Vladimir Putin’s propaganda, rather it is
appeasement, dressed up as nuance. In 2022, when Russia invaded
Ukraine, European leaders said they should have listened to the
Poles. We would rather not have that same bitter satisfaction twice.
History has taught us not to confuse a dictator’s age with his
appetite, nor to build detente on the ruins of other countries’
sovereignty.

If Mr Putin’s war is ideological, as you admit, then so too must be

Europe’s defence. It should not be rooted in wishful thinking, but in
moral clarity and strategic spine. Poland does not fear shadows, it
recognises patterns.

Piotr Wilczek
Ambassador of Poland
London

The perspective of the Baltic states has been shaped by history,

geography and experience, and has a clear understanding of
authoritarian ambitions. If we are to be labelled extremists, let it be
for recognising early the true nature of the Kremlin’s intentions and
for taking the necessary steps to defend our people, our values and
our democratic way of life.

It is not the principled position of the Baltic states that has hardened
NATO’s posture. It is Russia’s consistent destructive behaviour.

Events over the past decade have shown that the real failure has not
been excessive vigilance, but the lack of it. Were more countries as
“extreme” in their assessments and actions, perhaps neither Ukraine
nor the rest of Europe would be facing the threats we see today.

Lina Zigmantaite
Chargée d’affaires

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Embassy of Lithuania
London

The Church of England

I am happy to say that your vivid picture of the apparent decline of

the Church of England is not borne out by the facts (“Churchgoing,
going …gone?”, May 10th).

Although there is always real sadness when a church closes, it is a

tribute to the dedication of clergy and an army of passionate
volunteers that we can maintain our commitment to being a
Christian presence in every community. In fact, closure is relatively
rare in the Church of England. In the past 11 years 197 consecrated
places of worship closed. This is out of 16,000 church buildings. And
this takes no account of new congregations launched or once-closed
churches that have reopened.

In my own diocese I think of The Well church in north Swindon, a

new congregation which had been meeting in a school hall but has
just moved into a new building. And on the former airfield at Filton
in Bristol where supersonic jets were developed, we have
established a new church for the new population, Concord church.

In fact across the country, the numbers in the pews have grown for
each of the past four years and the number of people who are part
of a local Church of England congregation stands at over a million
once again. Far from the gloomy picture portrayed, I see a much
more hopeful one.

Rt Revd Vivienne Faull

Lead bishop for Church of England buildings and Bishop of Bristol

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A great Sudanese adventure

Your article on the old White Nile ferry rekindled memories of my trip
from Juba to Kosti in 1971 (“Sunken and rusting”, May 3rd). The
ferry consisted of a classic river steamer with houseboats lashed all
round to maximise the number of passengers. This made for a bulky
journey, especially near Juba where the river was narrower. We
crashed from bank to bank, mostly as a clumsy means of making a
bend. After a couple of days we entered the Sudd, considered to be
Earth’s largest swamp, which Sir Samuel Baker, an explorer, called “a
veritable Styx”. Yet our experienced captain could pilot us downriver
at night with just a searchlight to remind him of the main channel.

On the upper deck I observed crocodiles and spectacular sky-filling

displays of lightning.

CHASE UNTERMEYER
Houston

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Liberal spending plans

You noted Mark Carney’s plans to jump start Canada’s economy by

lowering taxes, slashing red tape and investing in infrastructure (“To
govern in econometrics”, May 3rd). What goes unmentioned is that
the new prime minister also intends to run substantial budget
deficits that over the next three years are projected to be higher
than under Justin Trudeau.

Mr Carney proposes an “operating” budget for ongoing costs and a

“capital” budget for so-called investments. But these investments will
be financed by borrowing, adding to the debt burden that younger
Canadians like myself and my infant son will bear for decades.
Deficits also risk fuelling inflation at a time when restraint is needed,
not stimulus.

Mr Carney likes to say “elbows up”, a term he has borrowed from ice
hockey. Canadians might prefer he kept his elbows down, and his
spending too.

Sahil Chhabra
Tecumseh, Canada

Search for the guilty

Bartleby is right that IT projects would do better if they were less

bespoke (May 10th). But he is wrong to think they would also
improve if more time was spent on planning. When people think
they should have spent more time planning their IT project what
they really mean is: “I wish I knew then what I know now”. It won’t
fix the problem. People mean different things when they discuss this.
And a multi-year plan simply can’t predict how tech will evolve
during the lifetime of your project. In Mike Tyson’s phrase, everyone
has a plan until they get punched in the face.

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The broader tech industry has worked out that the best way to
manage IT projects is to have a plan, to accept that the plan is likely
to be wrong and therefore work to get your tech out in front of
selected users quickly. Then take the punch in the face that your
customers will inevitably give you with good grace and use what you
learned to adapt the plan.

Large IT projects with extensive planning phases are doomed to

underperform their more agile alternatives. A more iterative
approach stands a greater chance of success.

Alan Buxton
Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire

When an architect designs a skyscraper she knows in advance where

she’d like to put the elevators and the heating and ventilation. The
whole building can be shown on a sheet of paper and built
accordingly.

Software application designers enjoy no such luxury. Managers and

end users really have no idea what they’re actually going to want a
new application to do until they start seeing it do something new or
differently. And then come the four most expensive words in project
management: “While you’re at it…”

Tom Short
San Rafael, California

The terminology in IT is revealing. The customer is a “user”. But the

users really do not know what they want nor do they have the ability
or skills to lay out their specifications clearly. No one fully
understands the existing systems or the ramifications of any
changes, let alone all of the business rules being implemented. Of
course, the new head of IT always knows best and that the previous
head was useless.

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And then there is the wonder of estimating timelines. Many, many
times I was asked to come up with a quick “no binding” estimate. I
would always pause and think out aloud, “Hmmm, let me see, how
long will it take me to do something I have never done before.”

Douglas Mustaine
Paarl, South Africa

Asking a software expert to estimate the cost of a project is akin to

asking Shakespeare how long it will take to write “Romeo and Juliet”.
There is no answer until it’s done.

Tim Morris
Hutton Magna, Durham

Bartleby associated the success or failure of IT projects with British

football teams (Spurs equalled disappointment, for example). The
column should have been delayed to include a reference to projects
that exceed expectations. After their FA Cup Final win on May 17th,
Crystal Palace would have been the perfect example.

David Meader
Sydney

It’s all relative

“How dirty are electric vehicles?”, you asked (April 19th). I am

reminded of the quote from Lee Iacocca when he was at Ford: “How
much clean air do we need?”

James Wooster
Lake Tapps, Washington
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By Invitation
An influential voice from the right laments
Trump’s attack on universities
Die, DEI :: One version of thought control is being replaced with another that is
worse, argues Richard Hanania

Europe can’t defend itself properly without

projecting soft power, argues Jerzy
Pomianowski
Empires of the mind :: Investment in supporting democracy in its neighbourhood and
beyond is not charity. It serves strategic interests

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Die, DEI

An influential voice from the

right laments Trump’s attack
on universities
One version of thought control is being replaced with another that is
worse, argues Richard Hanania
5月 22, 2025 10:05 上午

Editor’s update (May 22nd): The Trump administration revoked

Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students.

ON HIS SECOND day in office, President Donald Trump issued an

executive order ending affirmative action in government contracting.
I took it as a sign that my work over the years advocating against

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DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) programmes and broad
interpretations of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had made a difference,
particularly my 2023 book, “The Origins of Woke”, and my
participation in Project 2025, the presidential-transition project for
Trump 2.0.

Unfortunately, it is now clear that, rather than sticking to the

principles of colour blindness, merit and individual liberty that I
believe in, the Trump administration seeks to implement its own
version of thought control and federal-government overreach.

This can be seen most clearly in the letter of demands the

administration sent to Harvard on April 11th and its announcement
that it was cutting off research funds to the university. The letter
stated that Harvard must cease all DEI and affirmative-action
policies in hiring, promotions and admissions.

So far, so good. It was the Civil Rights Act and later Title IX that
were used to force race- and sex-conscious policies onto universities
and private business in the first place. Beginning under Richard
Nixon, the attitude was that if higher-education institutions wanted
federal funding, they had to play by the government’s rules. In an
Orwellian twist, the Civil Rights Act’s prohibition on discrimination
was read as a charter to all-but-mandate race and sex preferences in
hiring and admissions. By trying to undo some of the damage, the
Trump administration is acting in accordance with the 14th
Amendment of the constitution, the Civil Rights Act and Supreme
Court precedent.

Yet on top of sensible proposals, the administration made a series of

radical and unprecedented demands. It called for the audit of entire
fields of study, in part on the grounds that they “reflect ideological
capture”. Even more far-reaching is a requirement that steps be
taken to achieve viewpoint diversity across academic fields and
departments. The administration cites no law here. While the Civil
Rights Act banned discrimination based on certain protected

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characteristics, political ideology is not one of them. Harvard, as a
private university, is therefore free to be as liberal and anti-Trump as
it wants.

It gets worse. At the same time as the administration accuses

Harvard of being ideologically captured, it demands new ideological
screening of foreign students, so as not to admit antisemites,
supporters of terrorism or “students hostile to the American values
and institutions inscribed in the US Constitution and Declaration of
Independence”. Given how much Americans debate their values and
constitutional principles, there is no way such a requirement can be
anything but an ideological litmus test for who gets to study at
Harvard.

Even if the law did allow such steps, there is a direct contradiction
between the goal of viewpoint diversity and the principle of merit,
which the administration is claiming to defend. We all have an
interest in our top institutions selecting students and faculty based
on intelligence, competence and their fit within a programme.
Having ideological litmus tests for professors and scientists would do
more damage to the principle of merit than race and sex preferences
ever have, given how few individuals with advanced degrees identify
as conservatives. A study in 2022 showed that among donations by
scientists to the two major political parties in federal elections, less
than 10% went to Republicans. Are we to give the small minority of
Trump supporters in science something approaching half the
available jobs in the name of equity? It is hard to imagine a DEI
programme that is more radical than that.

It is understandable where the concern with ideological diversity

comes from. Conservatives have been discriminated against by
universities through practices like diversity statements, which screen
for the acceptance of certain left-wing ideas. That said, the theory
that one needs present discrimination to overcome past
discrimination is the precise logic of DEI. Conservatives in that case
understand that the cure can be worse than the disease, as forcing

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factors unrelated to merit into the processes of hiring and
admissions ends up creating more unfairness and resentment.
Moreover, certain fields have nothing to do with politics at all. There
are few reasons to worry about a left-wing bias in mathematics. The
position that there is no such thing as politically neutral scholarship
is another terrible idea from the left that conservatives would be
better off not borrowing.

Harvard is now suing, and is likely to win, if only because the

administration did not follow proper procedures to cut off funding.
Yet the damage to American institutions is likely to be long-lasting.
The careers of young scientists have been thrown off track, as
research into topics as important as curing cancer and reversing
ageing has been frozen. American science will be in a perilous state
as long as this administration sees universities as enemies that need
to be destroyed, rather than institutions that can be reformed within
the confines of existing law.

Conservatives have been correct to criticise and fight against DEI

programmes and other perversions of civil-rights law. They have
been winning this battle politically, in front of judges, and in the
court of public opinion, and I am proud to have played a part in the
process. It is now time to reject the nihilistic approach that seeks to
dismantle institutions via demands that are both illegal and
unworkable. Harvard may never be an institution where MAGA has a
large constituency. Accepting that is necessary for being at peace
with the idea of America as a pluralistic society.■

Richard Hanania is the founder and president of the Centre for the
Study of Partisanship and Ideology.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/by-
invitation/2025/05/13/an-influential-voice-from-the-right-laments-trumps-attack-on-
universities

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Empires of the mind

Europe can’t defend itself

properly without projecting
soft power, argues Jerzy
Pomianowski
Investment in supporting democracy in its neighbourhood and
beyond is not charity. It serves strategic interests
5月 22, 2025 03:18 上午

IN 1941 WINSTON CHURCHILL established the Political Warfare

Executive, a clandestine organisation dedicated to waging
psychological warfare against the Axis powers. This unit produced
and disseminated propaganda aimed at damaging enemy morale

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and bolstering resistance throughout occupied Europe and within
Nazi Germany. Churchill understood what we risk forgetting today:
“The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.”

More than eight decades later, European leaders have agreed to

defend European values, freedom and democracy by rearming the
continent. Rightly so. Deterrence proved effective during the cold
war. Democracy and strength do not contradict each other. Yet, as
the continent builds its military capacity, some fundamental
questions remain about the role of soft power in a comprehensive
security and defence strategy.

Is the projection of soft power vital to European defence? In other

words, can Europe defend its values and way of life without winning
the hearts and minds of those subjected to aggressive toxic
narratives from autocratic leaders like Vladimir Putin? Can it manage
migration when corrupt neighbouring regimes weaponise refugee
flows? Can it ensure sustainable economic prosperity when it works
in partnership with countries that lack judicial independence and rule
of law?

Support for democracy is a founding value of the European Union,

but it is also necessary for Europe’s long-term stability, prosperity
and global influence. As it faces mounting threats to democracy at
home and abroad the EU must champion democratic values
worldwide and integrate them into all of its policies.

The wake-up call is clear. The transatlantic alliance is fraying. Europe

can no longer count on America to guarantee its security, even as
the world experiences a daunting wave of authoritarianism: the V-
Dem Institute, a research outfit, estimates that today 72% of the
world’s population live in autocracies, up from 48% ten years ago.

Europe and America have long worked together to provide foreign

assistance that promotes democratic values, respect for human
rights and the rule of law, through programmes that build trust

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through people-to-people relations. Now, though, sharp cuts to
foreign-aid budgets across Europe and the collapse of American
foreign-assistance funding are undermining Western democracies’
collective ability to project soft power.

Foreign aid lays the groundwork for a strong security architecture by

building both deep understanding of local contexts and trust with
like-minded individuals, including those living in autocratic states.
Reducing defence strategy to tanks and bunkers is strategic myopia.

Support for democracy has traditionally constituted a very small

portion of foreign-assistance budgets, yet it engages far more closely
with local actors than other initiatives. Slashing budgets for things
like promoting independent media, increasing government
transparency and reforming law enforcement risks creating a
vacuum which anti-democratic voices can fill. It also undermines
trust in the values promoted by the West.

Today, not only autocrats but also democratically elected leaders in

Africa and Asia are questioning whether they need to embrace what
the autocrats refer to as “Western values” to drive economic
development. Many are, for instance, unwilling to vote against China
at the UN Human Rights Council because they count on Chinese
investment. This is not new, of course. What is new is that they now
see a collective West that is withdrawing its support.

As Churchill recognised from ancient military principles, it is better to

fight on enemy territory than at home. The battle of winning the
hearts and minds of those living in Russia, China, Iran and other
authoritarian states must remain an integral part of our defence
strategy. The evidence shows that supporting democracy works: the
broadly democratic transitions of former communist countries,
including my native Poland, stand as testament.

Today’s iron curtain is built from social-media algorithms used by

“troll armies” and new kinds of propaganda that exploit basic human

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emotions. Yet despite the tech revolution and the shifting of the
global economy’s tectonic plates, autocracies still operate in familiar
ways. Just like during the cold war, they seek to control citizens and
isolate populations by limiting the flow of information and ideas,
forcing individuals to rely solely on the state and stymieing civil
society.

The delivery of foreign assistance is by its nature multi-layered and

highly contextual. In Moldova, for instance, guaranteeing access to
reliable information and electoral integrity are more urgent than they
might be elsewhere, as the country faces intense pressure from
Russia ahead of elections in September. The potential closure of
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty owing to a withdrawal of funding by
the Trump administration is another pressing concern. It would leave
millions across Eastern Europe, Central Asia and many other parts of
the world without access to independent information and debate. Is
it acceptable that China, Russia and Iran fill this void?

Any ground lost today will be far more difficult to recover in the
future. Although Europe cannot fill the immense hole left by
America’s retreat, it can fill strategic gaps, by focusing on
neighbouring countries and those that are candidates to join the EU.
Not doing so would make Europe more vulnerable to external
threats.

More dictators abroad will inevitably lead to deteriorating regional

economies, increased migration, more serious security challenges
and less stable democracies at home. Foreign assistance is too often
mischaracterised as charity when, at its base, it serves the strategic
interests of those who provide it. Though perhaps an unpopular
sentiment, the reality is clear: there is a self-interest inherent in
foreign assistance. By helping others, Europe is helping itself. ■

Jerzy Pomianowski is executive director of the European Endowment

for Democracy and a former deputy foreign minister of Poland.

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This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/by-
invitation/2025/05/19/europe-cant-defend-itself-properly-without-projecting-soft-
power-argues-jerzy-pomianowski

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Briefing
Vietnam’s economy is booming, but its new
leader is worried
Dawn or dusk? :: Export-led growth may soon run out of steam

Vietnam, squeezed between America and

China, looks for new friends
Wooing the world :: It might even try to invigorate ASEAN

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Dawn or dusk?

Vietnam’s economy is
booming, but its new leader is
worried
Export-led growth may soon run out of steam
5月 22, 2025 05:52 上午 | Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City

IT IS A contrarian argument from an improbable contrarian.

Vietnam’s economy may be the envy of South-East Asia, having
averaged 6% annual growth over the past 15 years, but it is in
urgent need of radical reform. So, at any rate, asserts To Lam, who
spent eight years running Vietnam’s ruthless security services before
becoming general secretary of the Vietnamese Communist Party last
year. He is busy sacking civil servants and amending economic laws

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in pursuit of a “revolution” to “liberate all productive forces”. “Time
does not wait for us,” he warned his comrades soon after taking
charge.

Vietnam’s economy has come a long way since the Vietnam war
ended 50 years ago, leaving an already poor country in ruins. At first
the victorious communist regime tried to “liquidate” the private
sector. Shortages, rationing and hunger followed. In the 1980s the
Soviet Union’s economic troubles meant less aid for Vietnam,
exacerbating the malaise. Annual inflation reached 454% and half of
Vietnamese were living in poverty. The death of one of Mr Lam’s
predecessors in 1986 paved the way for a new general secretary to
legalise private enterprise and embrace market forces.

The man with a plan for Vietnam·

Renewing the renewal

Doi moi or “renovation” has been an astonishing success. Over the

past 40 years GDP per person has increased 18-fold and poverty has
plummeted. Foreign investors, attracted by Vietnam’s cheap labour,
political stability (it is a single-party, authoritarian state), proximity to
Asian suppliers and generous incentives for manufacturing, have
built lots of factories assembling consumer goods for export. A trade
deal with America, accession to the World Trade Organisation and,
more recently, multinationals’ desire to diversify away from China
have provided further reasons to invest.

Yet the forces that have propelled Vietnam’s boom are slowing or
reversing. The pool of cheap workers is dwindling and wages are
rising. Instead of largely free trade with America, Donald Trump is
threatening tariffs of 46%. It is getting harder to maintain good
relations· with both America and China, Vietnam’s second-biggest
trading partner. And there has been relatively little spillover from the
foreign-owned factories to the rest of the economy. Vietnam risks
becoming stuck as an assembly hub, adding little value to

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components manufactured elsewhere. Shifting onto a more
promising developmental path will not be easy—and Mr Lam is
staking his tenure on it.

Foreign factories are the linchpins of Vietnam’s recent prosperity.

Annual foreign direct investment (FDI) reached $19bn in 2023.
Foreign enterprises accounted for a fifth of GDP that year, up from
6% in 1995. The biggest is Samsung, whose complex in Pho Yen, a
factory town near Hanoi, employs some 160,000 workers, who
assemble the bulk of Samsung’s smartphones. The FDI boom, in
turn, has produced a surge in exports, which have risen eight-fold
since 2007, to $385bn a year. Foreign firms account for just 10% of
employment and 16% of investment, but 72% of exports. Samsung
alone accounts for 14%.

Yet Vietnamese workers are simply assembling parts made, by and

large, in China or South Korea. Even as export volumes have
ballooned, the average unit value has stagnated (see chart 1).
Vietnam adds less value to its exports than do nearby Malaysia and
Thailand. Because final assembly is labour-intensive, productivity is
low. Vietnam’s output per hour worked is 37% below the average for
upper-middle-income countries in Asia. Over 90% of jobs in
manufacturing require few or no skills.

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Local firms struggle to meet the standards necessary to take part in
global supply chains. Multinationals in Vietnam source the lowest
share of local inputs of any country in East and South-East Asia.
Despite Samsung Electronics’ huge presence in Vietnam, none of its
core suppliers is a homegrown Vietnamese firm, noted a recent
article in Guancha, a Chinese news outlet, that was widely read
among the Vietnamese elite. The small number of Vietnamese firms
that do supply global manufacturers mainly provide simpler
materials, such as cardboard and plastics.

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Meanwhile, Vietnam has reached the “Lewis turning point”, at which
developing economies exhaust their rural labour surpluses and
wages begin to rise swiftly. Between 2014 and 2021, over 1m
agricultural jobs disappeared each year despite a growing labour
force; in 2022-23 the pace decelerated to 200,000. Labour costs in
manufacturing are already higher than in India or Thailand and are
set to climb by a further 48% by 2029, according to the Economist
Intelligence Unit, our sister company. Vietnam could soon end up too
expensive for labour-intensive manufacturing yet too technologically
unsophisticated to do much else—a classic middle-income trap.

Other obstacles to growth loom. It is not just unproductive rural

workers that Vietnam is running short of: the total workforce aged
15-64 will peak around 2030, according to Vu Thanh Tu Anh and
Dwight Perkins, two economists. Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, which
together generate over a quarter of Vietnamese output, are among
the most flood-prone cities in the world. The rich farmland of the
Mekong Delta, Vietnam’s breadbasket, is shrinking by 500 hectares a
year. Most threatening of all are Mr Trump’s tariffs: Michael Kokalari
of VinaCapital, an investment firm in Ho Chi Minh City, estimates that
they would reduce long-run growth by 2.5 percentage points a year.

Mr Lam evinces a keen understanding of these challenges. “Do not

let Vietnam become an assembly-processing base… while domestic
enterprises learn nothing,” he urged in January. He wants to make
local firms more innovative and productive. Earlier this month the
Politburo approved a big tax break for spending on research and
development. It also adopted special incentives for local firms
working with foreign investors. The private sector, Mr Lam says, is
“the most important driving force of the national economy”. He
wants to lift its share of output to 70%, from around 50% today.

Life is not easy for Vietnam’s private sector, doi moi notwithstanding.
Regulations are complex, enforcement is opaque and the state
dominates banking and so controls access to credit, too. All this
tends to benefit big, politically connected businesses. Rigged bids for

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public procurement, sweetheart land deals and cut-price loans are
rife. Successful businessmen, in turn, are expected to contribute to
society. Moving capital outside Vietnam is frowned upon. In 2021
Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao, the billionaire founder of Vietjet, a private
airline, promised Linacre College at Oxford University £155m ($215m
at the time) to rename itself Thao College. The donation never
materialised, presumably because the government blocked it.

Pham Nhat Vuong, Vietnam’s richest man, made his first fortune
hawking instant noodles in Ukraine in the 1990s. He sold his
restaurant business to Nestlé and invested the proceeds in Vietnam’s
luxury property market. His company, Vingroup, soon became the
country’s biggest developer. It then parlayed that business into a
sprawling conglomerate, which does everything from designing
smartphones to setting up schools. A subsidiary called VinFast is
South-East Asia’s biggest homegrown electric-vehicle maker. It sold
nearly 100,000 EVs in 2024.

Vietnam’s politicians admire South Korea’s chaebols and would like

local conglomerates to evolve in a similar manner. But though the
state showered chaebols with largesse, its support was time-bound
and tied to success in export markets. In 1999 politicians allowed
Daewoo Group, then the third-biggest chaebol, to collapse.

None of Vietnam’s conglomerates, in contrast, is globally

competitive, in part because the state holds rivals at bay. Vietnam’s
EV charging network is compatible only with VinFast’s cars. Yet
VinFast has lost $9bn since 2021 producing EVs, many of which are
sold to other businesses owned by Vingroup. The government is
considering shoring up Vingroup by giving another subsidiary,
VinSpeed, a $60bn contract to build a high-speed railway.

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As well as exposing conglomerates to more competition, Mr Lam will
have to find ways to invigorate Vietnam’s smaller firms. Lacking the
political clout of state-owned enterprises, conglomerates and foreign
investors, they have trouble getting access to land, credit and
permits. Banks tend to insist on property or durable-goods inventory
as collateral for loans, says Chad Ovel of Mekong Capital, a private-
equity firm in Ho Chi Minh City. Few are willing to lend against
projected future cashflows.

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Small businesses also face a shortage of talent. Partly this is because
the state hoovers it up: over half of state employees have tertiary
degrees, versus around 15% at foreign-invested firms and 5% at
domestic firms. But the bigger reason is the education system.
Attainment lags behind other countries in Asia (see chart 2). Unlike
China, Singapore or South Korea, Vietnam has no world-class
universities, and its best institutions rank below their counterparts in
India or Malaysia. Most Vietnamese universities are state-run and
the curriculum is watched closely by communist apparatchiks. Even
engineering students must spend as much as a quarter of their time
taking mandatory classes on Marxism-Leninism and Ho Chi Minh
thought, complains a Vietnamese academic.

It can’t carry the whole economy

Despite ambitions to build a semiconductor industry, Vietnam has

only 5,000 or so chip engineers. By 2030 it will need 15,000 chip
designers and 10,000 assembly engineers, according to a recent
forecast. There are also too few linkages between universities and
industry, such as internship programmes, says Thomas Vallely, the
founder of Fulbright University Vietnam.

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Improving life for small businesses will also require a leaner, more
capable state. This is where Mr Lam has been boldest. He has
abolished five ministries and eliminated an entire layer of the
bureaucracy, at the level of Vietnam’s 705 districts. He is reducing
the number of provinces from 63 to 34. All this is eliminating
100,000 jobs from the civil service. He has decreed that there should
be a 30% reduction in red tape.

At the same time Mr Lam wants to build administrative capacity. He

has called for higher pay for capable civil servants. Some of his
changes seek to reverse the legacy of “blazing furnace”, an anti-
corruption campaign initiated by his predecessor. Over 330,000 party
members were prosecuted or punished and tens of thousands
resigned. The effect was to make bureaucrats drastically risk-averse.
Mr Lam has instead sought to engender an atmosphere of tolerance
of mistakes.

Stepping back to get ahead

Deeper political questions remain unanswered. For Vietnam to grow

quickly, the state must become not just more efficient, but also less
controlling. Take the digital economy, one of Mr Lam’s highest
priorities. Despite a shortage of software engineers, Vietnam has a
surprisingly peppy startup scene. Yet the government censors the
internet and keeps tech firms on a tight leash. The state-owned firm
that dominates power generation struggles to supply reliable
electricity. Construction began in April on Vietnam’s first “hyperscale”
data centre. But it is not being built by a giant of the industry like
Amazon or Alibaba. Instead Viettel, another state firm, is in charge.
A new R&D centre for AI and semiconductors in Danang has been
set up by FPT, a conglomerate that will soon be majority-owned by
Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security, which Mr Lam used to lead. It
is hard to imagine Vietnam becoming a digital powerhouse with the
government so firmly in control of so much of the digital economy.

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For now, Mr Lam’s position seems secure. He has elevated allies to
important posts and is pushing through sweeping reforms with little
discernible resistance. A party conference in January, at which he
will seek to extend his tenure, may give dissenters a chance to
weaken his position, however. Mr Lam has shown he understands
the task ahead of him. He has yet to prove he is capable of
completing it. ■
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2025/05/22/vietnams-economy-is-booming-but-its-
new-leader-is-worried

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Wooing the world

Vietnam, squeezed between

America and China, looks for
new friends
It might even try to invigorate ASEAN
5月 22, 2025 03:17 上午

THE FIRST Asian leader to reach Donald Trump by phone after he

announced “reciprocal” tariffs in the Rose Garden on April 2nd was
To Lam, the general secretary of Vietnam’s Communist Party. He
offered to eliminate all tariffs on American goods. Mr Trump praised
Mr Lam in a subsequent post on social media. Mr Trump’s tone
changed a few days later, however, when Mr Lam welcomed Xi
Jinping, China’s leader, to Hanoi for his second state visit in three

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years. Mr Trump declared that the pair were meeting to work out,
“How do we screw the United States of America?”

Few countries are as caught up in the geopolitics of the moment as

Vietnam. It lies between America and China in many supply chains.
The two countries are its two biggest trading partners. It is a
communist dictatorship like China, but also spars with China over
fishing and mineral rights in the South China Sea.

Under Mr Lam’s predecessor, Nguyen Phu Trong, who died last year,
Vietnam pursued “bamboo diplomacy”—bending, but not breaking
when bigger powers huff and puff. Other non-aligned countries have
struggled, but Vietnam has emerged mostly unscathed. Though it
has refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for example, it
gets none of the opprobrium reserved for the likes of India and
South Africa.

How has Vietnam been able to do it? “They’re a bit of a special case,
because they have enormous moral capital,” says Andrew
Goledzinowski, until recently Australia’s ambassador in Hanoi. Mr
Lam has also energetically pursued new trade, defence and
diplomatic relationships, visiting 13 countries since becoming general
secretary in August.

What does Mr Lam hope to achieve by all this globe-trotting? The

priority seems to be to reduce Vietnam’s reliance on America and
China. Closer economic co-operation with the European Union, with
which it already has a free-trade agreement, would help offset
reduced exports to America. Russia could help it develop cheap
nuclear plants. South Korea, already a big investor, could also
provide affordable weapons.

Mr Lam is looking to other middling powers, too, whether fellow

free-traders in the Trans-Pacific Partnership or to a less open
economic bloc, ASEAN. Vietnam has been a fairly passive member of
the group, says Nguyen Khac Giang of the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak

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Institute, a think-tank in Singapore. But could Mr Lam try to
liberalise ASEAN, which set up a free-trade area in the late 1990s
but has done little to dismantle the non-tariff barriers that
undermine it?■
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2025/05/22/vietnam-squeezed-between-america-and-
china-looks-for-new-friends

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Asia
How to fix India’s sclerotic justice system
Do it with conviction :: There are plenty of ideas but not enough action

America’s new ship-killer missiles come to

the Philippines
Deterring China :: US Marines are training to defend Taiwan in a new way

Vietnam’s diaspora is shaping the country

their parents fled
Meet the Viet Kieu :: As well as sending remittances, many are returning to their
homeland

On its own terms, ASEAN is surprisingly

effective
Banyan :: The group has helped keep countries from each others’ throats

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Do it with conviction

How to fix India’s sclerotic

justice system
There are plenty of ideas but not enough action
5月 22, 2025 05:39 上午 | Delhi

IN MOST FAITHS judgment is delivered in the afterlife. India’s

judiciary seems to have adopted a similar approach. Earlier this year
in the central city of Bhopal, a newspaper revealed that a case filed
in 1959 was still winding its way through a local court—despite the
accused and witness having died many years ago. For Bhushan
Gavai, the Supreme Court judge who was appointed as India’s chief
justice on May 14th, this is a familiar problem that has vexed all his
predecessors.

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India’s judicial system is painfully slow. Across the country more
than 50m cases are awaiting a verdict. Of those, nearly a third have
been pending for more than five years (see chart), while around half
have been delayed by at least three years. Outside a district court in
Saket, a suburb of Delhi, Seema Chauhan, a 34-year-old, arrives for
a hearing in a domestic-violence case, only to find out that there has
been an adjournment from the judge for a later date. But for Ms
Chauhan, that is not news: her case started in 2016.

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All this has meant India has consistently fared worse on composite
measures of justice than several of its peers, including Indonesia,
China and Vietnam, according to the World Justice Project, a
research outfit. On a specific indicator of judicial speed, India ranked
131st out of 142 countries, below Pakistan and Sudan. According to
the India Justice Report, a non-profit, the courts’ backlog is expected
to increase by at least 15% by 2030. India’s judiciary is not in a
“mere state of stasis but a downward spiral”, says Gautam Patel, a
former judge of the Bombay High Court.

Several factors explain the judiciary’s malaise, but they all are rooted
in weak management. At every level, judges are hindered by archaic
rules. Mr Gavai, the new chief justice, will only have six months in
his role before mandatory retirement rules force him out. His
successor will only enjoy the post for less than three months. Mr
Patel, the former high court judge, complains that he has had to
assess district judges on their punctuality and courteousness,
despite never seeing them in court.

The judiciary is also overworked and understaffed. Nearly a third of

judge positions and a quarter of support staff roles in high courts are
vacant. But filling vacancies alone is not enough. Even at full
strength, the caseload would never be cleared because of new cases
constantly being filed. In 2024 the lower courts disposed of 23m
cases, even as 25m were added. Our calculations suggest clearing
the backlog would also require a 40% productivity increase,
sustained over five years.

The consequences of this malaise are vast. Around 75% of India’s

prisoners are awaiting trial, the sixth-highest share in the world.
Judicial delays also have enormous economic impact. In addition to
legal expenses, people like Ms Chauhan face the opportunity cost of
forgone wages. These alone amount up to at least 0.5% of GDP in a
year, according to work by DAKSH, an Indian legal think-tank.

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Firms are even bigger economic victims. Many are dragged into long
disputes, often over basic contracting issues. In 2019 the World
Bank estimated that enforcing a contract in India can take roughly
1,500 days (a little less than four years), compared with less than
500 in the rich world and China. India’s courts are no longer an
instrument for resolving disputes between parties, but one for
buying time, says Arghya Sengupta, founder of the Vidhi Centre for
Legal Policy, another think-tank.

Clogged-up courts could lead to corruption. In March, officials

responding to a fire at the house of Justice Yashwant Varma, a judge
in Delhi’s High Court, discovered among the burnt items currency
notes worth 150m rupees ($1.8m). Mr Varma is under investigation
by the Supreme Court for possible corruption, but denies any
impropriety. Critics, however, think that graft thrives in dysfunctional
systems.

One solution is to outsource the court’s administrative work away

from judges to management specialists. Other countries with similar
common-law systems, such as Australia, Britain and Canada, have
used agencies to improve judicial performance. In Kenya, reforms
introduced in 2011—which instructed judges to organise more pre-
trial conferences and set case deadlines—have reduced the country’s
backlog. Crucially, such reforms do not require constitutional
changes, nor do they compromise the judiciary’s independence.

Another solution, which has been implemented, is specialised courts.

But these too are already burdened with the same problems. For
instance, more than 200,000 cases, involving claims of at least 18trn
rupees, are piled up in various debt-recovery tribunals across the
country. Meanwhile alternative dispute mechanisms, such as
arbitration and mediation, that let parties settle matters between
themselves outside court, are still under-developed.

Defining independence

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Little has changed because judicial delays are not a big political
issue, according to Dr Sengupta. “We’ve long assumed courts will
manage themselves,” he says. In 2014 the ruling Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP) tried to involve the government in judicial appointments,
which are controlled entirely by the courts and long considered
opaque. The BJP’s proposal triggered a backlash from judges and
was eventually struck down by the Supreme Court on the ground
that it undermined the judiciary’s independence. But independence,
Dr Sengupta points out, should not mean “insulation”.

And although the judiciary has resisted government intervention in

judicial appointments, critics argue it is hardly insulated from political
influence. Lately, several decisions have seemingly favoured the
government. In a recent interview, Prashant Bhushan, a Supreme
Court lawyer and anti-corruption activist, claimed that “post-
retirement jobs awarded to judges by the government” severely
undermined judicial independence by creating perverse incentives
for sitting judges.

Still, there are reasons to be optimistic. For all its faults, Indians are
more confident in their courts than Americans, Britons and
Japanese, according to Gallup, a pollster. And there is some evidence
to suggest that, on the whole, the judiciary is fair. In a recent study,
a team of economists from the Development Data Lab in Washington
found no evidence that judges in India exhibit bias towards groups
from their own communities, based on an analysis of more than 5m
Indian criminal cases between 2010 and 2018.

Some courts have also shown they can improve their performance.
Southern India dominates a national ranking of judicial performance
put together by the India Justice Report. As in other domains, this
superiority is thanks to better governance. Southern judiciaries use
budgets more efficiently, invest more in court infrastructure and
maintain better staff-to-case ratios than their northern counterparts.

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They have also used technology, which perhaps offers the biggest
opportunity for improving the judiciary. The High Court of Kerala, for
example, has pioneered machine-learning examination of filings to
speed up judges’ work and a case-management system that tightens
schedules. If AI can help sort out this very human problem, then
India stands to benefit. ■

Stay on top of our India coverage by signing up to Essential India,

our free weekly newsletter.
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Deterring China

America’s new ship-killer

missiles come to the
Philippines
US Marines are training to defend Taiwan in a new way
5月 22, 2025 05:57 上午 | Basco

Island hopping

ON APRIL 22ND a Chinese aircraft-carrier strike group sailed within

three nautical miles of the Philippines’ northernmost islands. It was
an unusual show of force. China’s reason for sabre-rattling was
clear: in late April, America flew a new short-range missile system to
Basco, in the Batanes island chain, for the first time.

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The system’s deployment was the most important addition to annual
military exercises held by America and the Philippines. The director
of the exercise, Brigadier General Michael Logico of the Philippine
army, was on hand as the missile system was deployed. “I always
see this as a positive, when China reacts to us. It only means that
we have probably done something worthy of their attention,” he
says.

The airfield at Basco is a short, gently sloping runway on a

mountainous postage stamp of an island. But the Batanes are key
terrain, the closest that America can get to Taiwan on the territory of
an ally. And it is here that the United States Marine Corps is
rehearsing for the first time a new way of defending Taiwan, in the
hope that it will deter China from ever attempting to seize the self-
governing island by force.

At the centre of the new strategy is the Navy Marine Expeditionary

Ship Interdiction System (NMESIS). The missile system is not the
hardest-hitting weapon in America’s arsenal. But it is small, light,
easy to move and hard to find. Mounted on the back of a modified
and remote-controlled version of the Humvee, it can hide in the
steep emerald hills of the Batanes.

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In last month’s exercise America spread its marines throughout the
Batanes, as it might do if it feared a Chinese attack on Taiwan. In
that scenario, marines would be in place to fire NMESIS at Chinese
vessels in waters south of Taiwan, or even those landing on its

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southern beaches. In doing so, they could block Chinese ships from
breaking out beyond what strategists call the first island chain, the
long archipelago extending from Japan to Taiwan to the Philippines
to Borneo. Such an approach would limit China’s options in an
invasion or blockade, and allow America to surge forces into the
Western Pacific without having to fight its way in.

The marines in the Batanes know that they will be vulnerable to

China’s own missiles. That is why a big part of their mission is to
remain undetected before firing. Even if China were to take out
some of the batteries on the islands, it could not be confident that it
had got all of them. “Chinese military planners do not like
uncertainty,” says T.X. Hammes, a retired colonel at the National
Defence University in Washington. Small units like these “create
uncertainty because they are mobile”.

To deter an attack on Taiwan, American war-planners are focusing

on creating uncertainty throughout the Western Pacific. Each of
America’s armed services is studying how they can spread their
forces out so as to survive an onslaught. For each service, it is a big
shift, requiring an overhaul of their doctrine and equipment.

The strategy is not without its challenges. First, there are questions
about whether China could detect signals from the marines’
electronics, allowing it to take them out before they get a shot off.
“Our electromagnetic signature is very low,” says Colonel John
Lehane, the commander of the 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment, which
brought NMESIS to the Batanes. Keeping it that way will require
constant updates.

Mobility is another work in progress. The marines’ strategy sees

them moving from island to island, dodging missiles, in a smaller
and faster new vessel called the light amphibious warship. But
shipbuilding delays in America mean that none has yet been built.
For now, moving NMESIS around requires hitching a ride on older,

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larger amphibious ships or C-130 aircraft based at vulnerable
airfields.

Colonel Hammes questions whether the Batanes are where the

marines should be. The islands are closer to Taiwan than Luzon, the
Philippines’ biggest island. But they are small, which might make it
easier for China to find marines on them. Better, he says, to stay on
Luzon, with more places to hide. That would require longer-range
missiles. The marines are working on firing Tomahawk cruise
missiles from the same chassis as NMESIS, which would increase its
range from 185km to over 1,600km.
https://t.me/+NA8muckncd4yNDUx

Then there’s the question of politics. The marines’ strategy relies

upon access to the territory of allies such as Japan and the
Philippines. It also assumes that their supply lines would be cut early
in a conflict, and that they might need to rely on the support of the
local community. America remains popular in the Philippines, its
former colony. But many local officials in the northern Philippines are
unhappy about the American military presence, fearing that they will
get caught in the crossfire.

The pro-American president, Ferdinand Marcos junior, is term-

limited, so he cannot run in the next presidential election in 2028.
His vice-president, Sara Duterte, is the frontrunner. Mr Marcos and
Ms Duterte fell out shortly after taking office, and he had been
seeking to oust her in a trial in the nation’s Senate. But in midterm
elections on May 12th, voters denied Mr Marcos the two-thirds
majority required to remove her.

Ms Duterte is the daughter of Rodrigo Duterte, who as president

from 2016 to 2022 limited the Philippines’ military co-operation with
America and cosied up to China. Her father is now awaiting trial at
The Hague on charges of crimes against humanity committed in a
brutal drug war during his presidency. But if Ms Duterte wins the

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same office, she could reorient the Philippines’ foreign policy yet
again.

There remain doubts, too, about Donald Trump’s willingness to

defend Taiwan and allies like the Philippines. But the marines are
focused on honing their craft, not politics. “The more we do it, the
better we get at it,” says Lieutenant General Michael Cederholm,
who heads the marines’ largest combat formation, while flying back
from observing the deployment of NMESIS in the Batanes. “And
today we got a little better and a little stronger.” ■
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Meet the Viet Kieu

Vietnam’s diaspora is shaping

the country their parents fled
As well as sending remittances, many are returning to their
homeland
5月 22, 2025 03:18 上午 | HO CHI MINH CITY

FIFTY YEARS ago Thinh Nguyen left his homeland aboard an

American navy ship. Some of his compatriots escaped in helicopters.
Tens of thousands fled in makeshift boats. Many more, including Mr
Nguyen’s father and brother, were left behind as troops from North
Vietnam stormed into Saigon, then the capital of American-backed
South Vietnam. The chaotic evacuation marked the end of the
Vietnam war, badly damaged American credibility and left Vietnam in

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Communist hands. It also helped create one of the world’s biggest
diasporas.

Today, the Vietnamese diaspora is a force of around 5m people,

living and working everywhere from America to eastern Europe.
They also do a lot for Vietnam. They send back roughly $16bn of
remittances a year, one of the highest hauls in Asia and greater than
the diasporas of Indonesia or Thailand. But far more than their
money, the people themselves are transforming the home country.
Half a decade on, Vietnamese emigrants and their children are
coming back, bringing with them not just wealth but also the skills
and education they have picked up abroad. Hundreds of thousands
of overseas Vietnamese, who are known as “Viet Kieu”, visit their
homeland every year. Official data on how many stay permanently
are scarce, but many do.

The flow began slowly in the 1990s, when memories of war were
still fresh. The government started to encourage Viet Kieu to return,
describing them as “an inseparable part of the Vietnamese nation”.
Some came back to start businesses after the Communists opened
up the economy through market reforms called doi moi. Mr Nguyen,
who had worked in Silicon Valley, returned in 2002 to found a
software company. Vietnam was “the new El Dorado” and “startup
heaven”, he says, because costs were low. His return coincided with
a thaw in relations with America, which helped Vietnam develop its
successful, export-oriented economic model.

In the years since Mr Nguyen arrived, Vietnam’s economy has

boomed·. Last year it grew by 7%, faster than any other country in
Asia. Companies such as Samsung and Apple have set up in
Vietnam, which is now a crucial cog in global supply chains,
exporting everything from smartphones to trainers. The diaspora is
returning to take up opportunities in these bustling tech and
manufacturing industries, as well as many others. They can use their
upbringing abroad to their advantage: some American-Vietnamese
work for Intel, which assembles chips in Vietnam.

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Viet Kieu also come to connect with their roots. Having grown up
abroad, they want to see what their homeland is like and improve
their language skills. It is not always an easy transition. John Vu, a
33-year-old who grew up in America, moved to Saigon—known
today as Ho Chi Minh City—in 2019 and organises meet-ups for Viet
Kieu. He says some complain that “they stand out like a sore thumb”
and that locals speak English to them even when they try to speak
Vietnamese. Younger returnees also face resistance from their
parents, who knew a different Vietnam.

Celebrations for the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam war
—which the government calls “Reunification Day”—were complicated
for some Viet Kieu. On April 30th tens of thousands of Vietnamese
gawped at fireworks and fighter jets soaring above tanks and troops
in Ho Chi Minh City. Mr Nguyen stayed at home. To him, having lived
through the fall of Saigon, “it is not a cause for celebration.” But
younger Viet Kieu, as well as many local Vietnamese, do not have
the same painful memories. Mimi Vu (no relation), who moved from
America several years ago, was among those who felt “happy the
country is united”. Some, though, were just happy to get a few days
off work. ■
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their-parents-fled

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Banyan

On its own terms, ASEAN is

surprisingly effective
The group has helped keep countries from each others’ throats
5月 22, 2025 05:51 上午

IT HAS AT times been hard for Banyan to be a fan of the Association

of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN). The Economist is plain-
spoken; the ten-country club has an irritating habit of talking around
the big issues. We are not the only ones who have been frustrated
by the bloc’s reserve. Activists decry its refusal to condemn the
human-rights records of its more abusive members. China hawks
bristle at its reluctance to call out by name its pushy neighbour to
the north. It is not much of an economic bloc. When ASEAN
convenes in Kuala Lumpur this week for its twice-annual summit,

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Banyan may sympathise with those complaining that it isn’t doing
what they want it to do—or appearing to do very much at all.

For all that, ASEAN gets too little credit. Judged not by the yardsticks
of others but rather according to the interests of its own members, it
is often quietly effective. On flashpoints, such as the South China
Sea and the civil war in Myanmar, members have diverse views. Yet
membership of the bloc at least keeps them from actively working
against each other’s interests. ASEAN’s grey, consensus-based
incrementalism is never going to shake the world. Without it,
though, the region would be more divided or exploited by bigger
powers.

What do critics get wrong about ASEAN? One common claim is that
its positions are invariably reduced to the views of the most timid or
the most stubborn member. That is not quite right. Increasingly, the
bloc tends to coalesce around the median stance of its members.
Take the contest over the South China Sea. The Philippines has
sought to get the organisation to object strongly to China’s bullying
of its vessels. But other members do a lot of business with China
and care much less about distant maritime disputes. Landlocked
Laos, in thrall to China, seeks to get the group to blame America for
tensions.

ASEAN hasn’t backed the Philippines’ view—but it hasn’t adopted the

position of Laos, either. It criticises aggression in the South China
Sea. Even though it is mealy-mouthed about naming China as the
aggressor, there is no mystery about the culprit’s identity. Requests
by Laos and other China dependants to blame “outside powers” (ie,
America) for the tensions are routinely rejected.

Another common criticism is of the bloc’s principle of “non-

interference”: the idea that member countries will not get involved in
each other’s domestic affairs, however brutally managed they may
be. Yet this view is out of date. After Myanmar’s army seized power
in 2021 and started massacring civilian protesters, some ASEAN

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members, among them Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, were
outspoken in their objections to the coup. They helped persuade
fellow members to ban the junta chief, General Min Aung Hlaing,
from the group’s summits, while calling firmly for an end to the
violence. ASEAN will not formally expel the junta—or seat its pro-
democratic opponents, for that matter. Myanmar’s lower-ranking
officials still attend some meetings. The junta has not been
suspended. But it can no longer veto decisions and its views carry
little weight.

One reason the club is willing to freeze Myanmar out is because it

helps keep bigger countries outside ASEAN constructively engaged
with the region. The club has become an unrivalled convener in Asia
of bigger powers. America, China, India and Russia all send top
leaders to the annual East Asia Summit, hosted by whichever
country happens to be holding ASEAN’s rotating chair. ASEAN shapes
the summit agenda, as well as the language used to address big
regional problems. This is a crucial aspect of its soft power.

Two other points are often missed, but are key. First, in a region rife
with family political networks, familiar ties among leaders count.
Family political dynasties nearly always bode ill for governance at
home. But, like it or not, the fact that six of the nine leaders coming
to Kuala Lumpur are the children of former leaders who once made
deals over golf means there is a degree of ease in the new
generation’s dealings with each other.

Second—and try not to yawn—but a crucial and rarely acknowledged

corps of regional diplomats keeps the ASEAN show on the road.
Unseen, they lend ASEAN vital ballast and, not least, deepen
familiarity among neighbours who once had remarkably little to do
with each other. If ASEAN has kept its relevance, it is to them that
much of the credit goes.■
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China
How China became cool
Soft power :: Western livestreamers and Chinese video games have burnished the
country’s image

A sex scandal in China sparks a nationwide

debate
Medical affairs :: The affair has morphed into a discussion about privilege and
fairness

China’s universities are wooing Western

scientists
Brain drain :: And they are reaching beyond academics with Chinese heritage

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Soft power

How China became cool

Western livestreamers and Chinese video games have burnished the
country’s image
5月 22, 2025 04:56 上午 | BEIJING

THE LEADERS of the Communist Party might be surprised to find

they are indebted to a bouncy 20-year-old livestreamer from Ohio
called Darren Watkins junior. He goes by the screen name
“IShowSpeed” and has in one visit done more for China’s image
abroad than any amount of turgid party propaganda. On a two-week
trip in March and April he showed his 38m followers the country’s
rich history (with a backflip on the Great Wall), friendly people (he
joked with China’s finest Donald Trump impersonator) and advanced
technology (he danced with a humanoid robot, had a KFC meal
delivered by drone, and tried a flying taxi). As he drove into a lake in

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Shenzhen, safe within an amphibious James-Bond-style electric SUV,
Mr Watkins was agog. “Oh my God, this car is not sinking…China got
it, these Chinese cars got it!” Or, as he says frequently throughout
his visit, “China’s different, bro.”

It is the kind of enthusiasm that leaders have long wanted to inspire

in foreigners. The party has tried to cultivate “soft power” that gets
a country what it wants without using “hard” coercion or military
force, and has long criticised the “anti-China” narrative in Western
media. In 2013 the Politburo said soft power was essential to the
“Chinese dream of national rejuvenation”. This was no easy task.
China’s propaganda falls flat overseas, where many are wary of its
authoritarian past (and present).

Increasingly, though, more people, especially the young, seem

willing to look past China’s ugly side. That is not mainly thanks to
party spin doctors. Mr Watkins is one of a parade of foreign vloggers
posting on their trips since China reopened after covid. Chinese firms
have bleeding-edge technology and cultural exports. And the
country’s image has been helped by a slump in America’s popularity,
courtesy of President Trump. On May 15th there was a sense that
the People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party, could
not quite believe it was publishing an article entitled “How did China
become cool?”

A decade ago China was spending $10bn a year attempting to boost

its image overseas, according to one American scholar. The sum may
now be higher. Officials have set up 500 “Confucius Institutes” in
foreign colleges that offer Mandarin tuition and cultural programmes.
State-run media churn out positive stories on Western social media.
Hundreds of foreign journalists are invited to China each year and
shown highlights such as the impressive high-speed rail network.

But these top-down efforts have been eclipsed by bottom-up

innovations. DeepSeek, an artificial-intelligence star, made headlines
in December when it announced models that were much cheaper to

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train and nearly as effective as Western ones. Chinese electric
vehicles are being snapped up by overseas buyers, and Chinese
consumer drones have been world-leading for years. Now cultural
products are gaining fans overseas. China watched with envy as
South Korean K-pop took off round the world in the 2010s. Chinese
music and television remain niche interests outside the Mandarin-
speaking world, but the country is becoming a big hitter in gaming.
Four of the ten highest-grossing mobile games of 2024 were made
in China. One such is Genshin Impact, a role-playing adventure
which rakes in over $1bn a year. Last year a Chinese firm released
Black Myth Wukong, the country’s first blockbuster video game.
Featuring the mischievous Monkey King, it is steeped in Chinese
folklore. Some 30% of its 25m players are said to be outside the
country.

The media the world consumes are increasingly shaped by China,

too. TikTok, a short-video app owned by Bytedance, a Chinese firm,
is downloaded more than any other social-media app worldwide.
Viewers in countries such as Mexico and Indonesia have also
embraced Chinese “micro-dramas”, minute-long episodes designed
to be watched on mobile phones.

Emerging from lockdown

Several polls suggest China’s popularity hit a low point during the
pandemic but then turned a corner. Every year Brand Finance, a
consultancy, asks 100,000 respondents worldwide what they think of
different countries and their influence. The results put China’s
“brand” at eighth in the world in 2021 and second this year, behind
America. Polls by the Alliance of Democracies Foundation, an NGO in
Denmark, show a steady improvement in global attitudes towards
China since 2022, with its “net perception rating” rising from -4%
that year to +14% in the latest survey, published this month.
America’s has dropped from +22% to -5% just in the past year. A
recent poll by Pew, a pollster, showed that even in America, where

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China is widely disliked, opinions have warmed recently. Young
people, in particular, are softer on China.

Asian neighbours tend to be more sceptical. Many have territorial

disputes with China and worry about its military spending. In
Europe, there are “hard limits” to how popular China can become
because of its lack of democracy and poor human-rights record,
reckons Andrew Chubb of Lancaster University in Britain. Plenty of
critics of Communist Party policies towards the Uyghurs in Xinjiang,
for instance, say the current enthusiasm whitewashes the party’s
authoritarianism. Others say the party is just shrewder now. They
believe it is quietly but actively facilitating visitors like Mr Watkins.

Still, China’s government seems confident that, if people pay a visit,

they will like it, wherever they are from. Officials are scrambling to
get tourists back after numbers slumped during the pandemic. Last
year China scrapped visa restrictions for citizens from 38 (mainly
European) countries to visit for up to a month. Some 30m foreign

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tourists visited China in 2024, nearly 80% more than the year
before, though still fewer than the pre-covid peak.

The trickiest task for China’s propagandists is to let the country’s

appealing side speak for itself, says Shaoyu Yuan of Rutgers
University in New Jersey. That is “uncomfortable for a system that’s
built on message discipline and control”, he says. Last year a group
of 70 students from Duke University in North Carolina visited China
on a study trip. They were pestered by state-run media pressing
them to say nice things about China, according to an online account
by one disgruntled student. A camera crew, she recalled, “taught me
to recite a poem in Mandarin that included the line ‘I love China’”. As
any teenager will tell you, China would be much cooler if it did not
try so hard. ■

Subscribers can sign up to Drum Tower, our new weekly newsletter,

to understand what the world makes of China—and what China
makes of the world.
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Medical affairs

A sex scandal in China sparks

a nationwide debate
The affair has morphed into a discussion about privilege and fairness
5月 22, 2025 03:18 上午

THOUGH THE trade war has been a hot topic of debate on Chinese
social media over the past month, the Chinese public appears to
have been just as exercised about an old-fashioned sex scandal at
one of the country’s most elite hospitals. The scandal has morphed
into a full-blown debate about privilege, ethics and (the lack of)
fairness in Chinese society.

The story broke in mid-April and revolves around a senior surgeon

called Xiao Fei at the China-Japan Friendship Hospital in Beijing. The

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first the public knew of Mr Xiao was when his estranged wife posted
a letter online, alleging that he had been having affairs with work
colleagues, including a junior doctor called Dong Xiying. The letter
also accused Mr Xiao and Ms Dong of walking out of a surgical
theatre where he was preparing for an operation, and leaving the
anaesthetised patient unattended by a doctor for 40 minutes.

The hospital announced on April 27th that it had investigated the

allegations and found they were “basically true”. It said Mr Xiao had
been sacked and expelled from the Communist Party. (He told state
media that he had not violated medical ethics, that he had left the
patient for 10-20 minutes in the care of anaesthetists, and the
reason for doing so was to defuse a dispute with a nurse.)

That was not enough to satisfy some members of the public, who
suspected there was more to the story and had already started
sniffing around. Top hospitals are redoubts of a health-care system
that many citizens view as deeply unfair. Seeing specialists requires
hours or even days of queuing. Treatment can be costly, often
prohibitively so for the poor or migrants from the countryside. So if
there was dirt, there were plenty of ordinary people willing to dig it
up.

Back-door admissions

What they revealed was that Ms Dong had got her start in medicine
on an experimental programme known as the “4+4” at Peking Union
Medical College, one of the nation’s most prestigious. The scheme
offers outstanding students with an undergraduate degree in
another discipline an accelerated path to qualification as a doctor
after four years, rather than the usual pathway which takes more
than a decade. Ms Dong had studied economics at Barnard College
in New York. Netizens asked why an American economics degree
meant she needed only four years of medical school, and whether
the 4+4 programme was simply a back door for the well-connected

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into a profession where people’s health and indeed lives were on the
line.

In late April and early May the topic became one of the hottest
online. On Weibo, a microblog platform, posts with the hashtag
“Xiao Fei has been dismissed, when will Dong Xiying’s issues be
investigated?” attracted more than 200m views. Some of China’s
tabloid media joined the fray. “Frankly, this farce has evolved into an
issue of social fairness,” Jimu News, an online service, posted to its
Weibo account. It referred to reports that Ms Dong’s papers had
suddenly disappeared from an academic database. “Could there be
some hidden secrets that cannot see the light of day, prompting a
hasty cover-up?”

Difficult operations

The scandal has put the authorities on the spot. Though they can
sometimes suppress news completely, once a scandal gathers steam
it can become more dangerous to try to squash it. So they try to
manage it. State media have covered the main developments, but
censors have struggled to keep online debate in check. It has veered
into withering criticism of official corruption in hospitals and
academia; of callous self-centredness among the well-connected;
and, above all, of the way that plum jobs get taken by the high-
born. As the economy falters and work becomes harder to find, the
Communist Party is even less keen than usual to encourage
discussion about such matters.

On May 15th the health ministry announced that Mr Xiao and Ms

Dong had been stripped of their licences to work as physicians. The
government will be hoping that those punishments—and the
ministry’s promise to conduct a “comprehensive assessment” of the
kind of fast-track scheme that Ms Dong joined—will put the whole
affair to rest. By sacrificing the protagonists, it may be able to avoid
making any further serious changes. Not surprisingly, the story has
been pulled from Weibo’s list of “hot searches”.

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Though the scandal has left a bitter taste, the public seems not to
have lost its ability to laugh. One joke online has a patient admitting
that he pulled strings to be treated at that particular hospital,
whereupon the surgeon confesses that he, too, used contacts to get
his job. The assistant surgeon admits the same. Finally the virus
asks, “Am I the only one who got here on his own merits?” ■

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to understand what the world makes of China—and what China
makes of the world.
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Brain drain

China’s universities are

wooing Western scientists
And they are reaching beyond academics with Chinese heritage
5月 22, 2025 05:49 上午

CHARLES LIEBER had few options. On April 28th the renowned

former Harvard chemist took up a new post at Tsinghua University’s
Shenzhen campus. Mr Lieber had been looking for a perch after he
was convicted in America in 2021 for hiding ties to Chinese research
funding. He is one of a handful of senior Western scholars who have
recently taken up posts in China. Others have done so more from a
position of choice.

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The websites of Peking University and Tsinghua University,
respectively, recently confirmed that Gérard Mourou, a French Nobel-
prizewinning physicist, and Kenji Fukaya, a decorated Japanese
mathematician, were joining their faculties. This month Alex Lamb,
an AI researcher, confirmed he was leaving a lab at Microsoft in New
York for Tsinghua’s new AI college. “I think that Tsinghua is a very
good university,” Mr Lamb wrote in an email. “The quality of the
undergraduate students is extremely strong and Tsinghua’s ability to
recruit strong graduate students is rapidly improving.”

The MAGA revolution threatens America’s most innovative

place
America’s scientific prowess is a huge global subsidy·
MAGA’s assault on science is an act of grievous self-harm

The scholars join a dozen leading scientists of Chinese heritage who

have recently left Western colleges for China. They include Sun
Song, a star mathematician at the University of California Berkeley,
who moved to Zhejiang University, home of DeepSeek, an AI firm.

“‘Talent’ is becoming as important a core goal of central planning to

Beijing as ‘workers’ were under Mao,” wrote Jeroen Groenewegen
and Antonia Hmaidi for MERICS, a European think-tank. In 2021, Xi
Jinping set a goal to make China attract global talent by 2030 and be
the top destination for the brightest by 2035.

Recruiting from the West focuses on two groups: a small number of

senior researchers like Mr Mourou, and a greater number of early-
career bright sparks, like Mr Lamb. At a big Communist Party
meeting in 2024, China’s leadership said it would refocus its efforts
to attract foreign scholars, including by making it easier for skilled
workers to move there. Universities have been more active in
promoting national scholarship funds established in 2021 to woo
foreigners.

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President Donald Trump’s re-election has caused a growing number
of Western scholars to look east, says Yu Xie of Princeton University.
More than half of the post-doctoral students in America are foreign,
many of them Chinese. During Mr Trump’s first term, America’s
justice department investigated many researchers with links to
China, including Mr Lieber. Many of the cases failed in court, but had
a chilling effect. More than half of Chinese and Chinese-American
researchers thought about leaving America, says Mr Yu, and it is
likely a few hundred did so.

This time Mr Trump casts a broader shadow. He is reportedly

planning $23bn in cuts over the next fiscal year to government-
funded science. That is on top of a campaign against higher
education, challenging the academic independence of institutions
such as Harvard by holding their federal grants hostage. China’s
state media recently crowed that uncertainty in America “is causing
a broader community of scientists to lose confidence in building their
careers there”.

Funding cuts are forcing difficult trade-offs on scientists looking to

continue their work. Though the gap between America and China in
innovation has shrunk, China’s research ecosystem is still
bureaucratic and hierarchical, and lacks true intellectual freedom.
And disaffected boffins in America do have other choices. The
European Union said on May 5th that it will spend €500m ($566m)
courting them.■

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to understand what the world makes of China—and what China
makes of the world.
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United States
What happens if the Inflation Reduction
Act goes away?
Reduction Redux :: Evaluating the effects of scrapping green subsidies in Washington

California has got really good at building

giant batteries
Of volts and jolts :: At peak times they provide 30% of the state’s electricity

How much worse could America’s measles

outbreak get?
Rash decisions :: Our charts show how falling vaccination rates could lead to a surge
in cases

A court resurrects the United States

Institute of Peace
DeDOGEd :: Elon Musk’s protégés may win by losing

The MAGA revolution threatens America’s

most innovative place
More than a feeling :: Cuts to funding risk hobbling Boston’s science establishment

Joe Biden did not decline alone

Lexington :: His party and the press lost altitude along with him

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Reduction Redux

What happens if the Inflation

Reduction Act goes away?
Evaluating the effects of scrapping green subsidies in Washington
5月 22, 2025 10:45 上午 | NEW YORK

“IT’LL BE somewhere between a scalpel and a sledgehammer,” was

how Mike Johnson, speaker of the House, described the emerging
Republican approach to the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Joe
Biden’s signature climate law. Pressure from companies and
congressmen with clean-energy projects benefiting from its subsidies
in their districts (most are found in Republican counties) suggested
surgical precision would prevail. But relentless pressure to abolish
the IRA from the president, who is a fan of drilling, baby, drilling and
denounced the law as the “Green New Scam”, pointed instead to

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brute force. The president reinforced this by dropping in on a private
party caucus on May 20th to strong-arm waverers and threaten
dissenters with a MAGA primary challenge. “They won’t be
Republicans much longer…they’d be knocked out so fast,” he
declared.

The House has already approved a draft law that, when it comes to
the IRA, looks more like a sledgehammer. Next the Senate will get to
work on its proposal. The two versions will then be reconciled by
committee. The White House wants the compromise deal ready by
July 4th, though August seems more realistic (a collapse of the
whole effort remains possible, too). All this sausage-making raises
two questions for energy policy. Is the IRA dead? And if it is, will
that end America’s clean-energy boom and herald a sooty
recarbonisation of the economy?

At first glance the bill seems more scalpel-like. The House proposal
phases out renewable subsidies between 2029 and 2032, in line with
the IRA’s original timeline. It includes seemingly innocuous rules on
which institutions are eligible for tax credits and keeping China out
of the energy supply chain.

The original law aimed to make clean energy politically popular in

America by subsidising domestic manufacturing of solar panels, wind
turbines and other components. Voters might not prioritise reducing
carbon emissions, the theory went, but they do like domestic
manufacturing. There ought to be some overlap with the new
orthodoxy on economics.

Because the cost of tax credits depends on private investment plans,

estimates of the bill’s effect come in a range rather than a dollar
amount. The American Action Forum, a conservative think-tank,
reckons the bill would trim about 60% of the IRA’s tax credits,
saving $515bn by 2034. The Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank
which previously warned that the IRA’s uncapped provisions could
cost $4.7trn by 2050, has called the Republican effort too timid. That

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makes it sound as if it falls short of the president’s aim to kill the
IRA.

Look closer, though, and the proposal brims with rules designed to
stifle clean energy. “It is a sledgehammer masquerading as a
scalpel,” says Abigail Ross Hopper, head of the Solar Energy
Industries Association, a lobby group. Wood Mackenzie, an energy
consultancy, argues that the details will undermine the business case
for “the vast majority of clean energy projects in the United States”.

Three provisions in particular stand out. First, the bill kills

“transferability”. The IRA incentivised companies with a wide range
of tax liabilities to invest in clean energy. The new bill eliminates this
sweetener, even for technologies like nuclear power and carbon
capture that are generally favoured by Republicans.

Second, provisions regarding “foreign entities of concern” (read:

China) are written with calculated vagueness. While Biden-era rules
narrowly restricted imports of Chinese battery cells, the new
legislation is at once sweeping and impenetrable. Credits appear
denied if “any component, subcomponent, or applicable critical
mineral” is “extracted, processed, recycled, manufactured, or
assembled” with forbidden foreign connections. Various such
provisions guarantee years of regulatory confusion. Higher tariffs on
Chinese-made components would come on top of that.

The third change is the timing of payments. Currently, projects

qualify for tax credits from when construction begins but earn them
only when operational. The new proposal awards credits only after
operations begin. Given the vagaries of permit-granting, it can take
years to start generating power. That will make it harder for new
projects to earn credits.

Together, these provisions make the House proposal “unworkable”,

says Rich Powell, head of the Clean Energy Buyers’ Association
(CEBA), a trade group representing large electricity users (which

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include America’s big tech companies). Studies commissioned by
CEBA predict that the repeal effort will lead to sharp increases in
electricity prices, by roughly 10% in 2026 for industrial and
commercial customers. Mr Powell warns that it “will make it harder
to stand-up US manufacturing in clean energy,” which ought to
bother a president obsessed with factory jobs.

If the outlook for the IRA seems bleak, what does that mean for
energy and carbon emissions in America? Analysis by the Rhodium
Group, a research firm, suggests that, under the IRA, America was
on track to slash its greenhouse gases by 40% from their 2005 level
by 2035. With a de facto repeal it will slow down, but may still
manage a reduction of nearly 30% below the same benchmark (see
chart 1). Even taking account of oil-friendly provisions in the current
budget bill, such as the end of credits for purchasing electric vehicles
and a repeal of more stringent fuel-economy standards for petrol
vehicles introduced by the Biden administration, America will
continue to decarbonise. Clean energy supply will continue to grow,
but at a slower pace than it would have with the IRA.

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The reason, explains Kevin Book of ClearView Energy Partners, a
research firm, is that tax credits are only one factor. State-level
regulations· like “renewable portfolio standards” play an important
role. Not only will these not be abandoned with the IRA, they may
be strengthened in Democratic states. Such a “rollback rebound”
took place in response to the first Trump administration’s attempted
assault on green energy.

Price helps, too. The International Energy Agency, an official body,

estimates that unsubsidised renewables already compete with, or
beat, new fossil-fuel plants in many parts of America. Rhodium
projects 342GW of renewable capacity will still be added by 2035,
producing as much electricity (after accounting for intermittency) as
roughly 100 nuclear plants.

John Ketchum, the CEO of NextEra Energy, a big utility, recently

offered investors this dose of what he called energy pragmatism.
“Renewables are here today. You can build a wind project in 12
months, a storage facility in 15, and a solar project in 18 months.”

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Gas turbines, by contrast, require four years or more to build, obtain
permits and connect to the grid.

Last year, 90% of new power capacity in America came from carbon-
free sources. Fresh data from the early days of Mr Trump’s second
term confirm that over half of all electricity in March came from non-
fossil sources for the first month on record. These may be dark days
for green energy on Capitol Hill. Slowing the rate of decarbonisation
is bad news. But sunlit uplands do still beckon. ■

Editor’s note: This story was updated after the House passed
Republicans’ draft budget bill.

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newsletter with fast analysis of the most important political news,
and Checks and Balance, a weekly note from our Lexington
columnist that examines the state of American democracy and the
issues that matter to voters.
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Of volts and jolts

California has got really good

at building giant batteries
At peak times they provide 30% of the state’s electricity
5月 22, 2025 03:18 上午 | MOJAVE

Listen for the rattle

A RENEWABLE ENERGY corridor is rising in eastern Kern County,

California—where the Mojave Desert meets the Sierra Nevada
mountains. Among the wind turbines, solar panels and Joshua Trees
are giant batteries that look like shipping containers. Tesla workers
tinker with the ones at the Eland solar and storage project,
developed by Arevon Energy. They wear sun hats and boots and
warn your correspondent to watch out for rattlesnakes.

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The amount of battery power in California rose from 500 megawatts
(MW) in 2018 to nearly 16,000 in 2025. Nearly a quarter of
America’s battery capacity is in California alone, according to
BloombergNEF, a research firm. Texas is not far behind. The battery
boom tells a story of solar power’s supremacy. In the middle of the
day, when the sun is strongest, as much as three-quarters of the
state’s electricity can come from solar. Batteries charge in the
afternoon when solar power is cheap, and release energy in the
evenings when Californians get home and crank up their air
conditioners. At their daily peak, around 8pm, batteries can provide
as much as 30% of the state’s electricity.

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California and Texas supercharged their battery power in ways that
exemplify the states’ different approaches to energy markets. As per
usual, the Golden State relied on regulation. In 2013 the California
Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) ordered the state’s three big

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investor-owned utilities to procure 1,325 MW of energy storage by
2020 to help meet renewable targets and stabilise the grid. That
goal was easily met. “Our system is much better positioned now,
particularly to deal with extreme weather events”, says Elliot Mainzer,
chief executive of the California Independent System Operator, which
manages electricity across the state’s grid.

In Texas, developers spied an opportunity for energy arbitrage.

Operators could profit by buying cheap solar power and selling it at
a higher cost later in the day. In 2024 Texas surpassed California to
become the fastest-growing storage market.

The sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow.
Batteries help plug the gap. Mark Jacobson, an engineering
professor at Stanford University, found that most days this year
contained periods when solar, hydropower and wind, helped by
batteries, met 100% of California’s demand—even though just 54%
of the state’s electricity generation comes from renewables. Because
most lithium-ion batteries provide just four hours of power, they
cannot yet replace baseload generation from gas, nuclear or
geothermal.

The battery bonanza may slow down. Donald Trump’s tariffs on

China, where the battery supply chain is concentrated, and the
gutting of the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean-energy tax credits·
would be a double whammy). These changes will hurt renewables’
ability to meet demand as power-hungry data centres come online,
argues Kevin Smith, the boss of Arevon. Additionally, a recent fire at
a battery facility in Moss Landing, on California’s coast, has spooked
communities. One Monterey County supervisor called it “a Three Mile
Island event”. Such incidents are relatively rare, but the CPUC has
set new safety standards to try to assuage fears. After a few heady
years, the battery industry may soon need a jolt. ■

Stay on top of American politics with The US in brief, our daily

newsletter with fast analysis of the most important political news,

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and Checks and Balance, a weekly note from our Lexington
columnist that examines the state of American democracy and the
issues that matter to voters.
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Rash decisions

How much worse could

America’s measles outbreak
get?
Our charts show how falling vaccination rates could lead to a surge
in cases
5月 14, 2025 11:12 上午

AMERICA’S MEASLES outbreak is alarming for several reasons. What

began as a handful of cases in Texas in January has now surpassed
800 across several states, with many more cases probably going
unreported. It is the worst outbreak in 30 years and has already
killed three people. Other smaller outbreaks bring the total number
of cases recorded in 2025 so far to over 1,000. But above all, public-
health experts worry that the situation now is a sign of worse to
come. Falling vaccination rates and cuts to public-health services
could make such outbreaks more frequent and impossible to curb,
eventually making measles endemic in the country again.

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Currently, measles is considered “eliminated” in America, meaning
that outbreaks start from imported cases and end within 12 months

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(to be endemic a disease must be present in a country year-round).
Typically, imported cases lead to just a few new infections because
vaccination rates in most places are high enough to prevent further
spread. Occasionally, though, imported cases will hit a pocket—such
as a neighbourhood or county—where too few people are jabbed. If
that is an area with many children per family, a crowded
neighbourhood and lots of social mingling (at church for example)
an outbreak can grow very big very fast. The largest outbreaks of
the past twenty years have all been in such places: close-knit
religious communities, such as Amish or orthodox Jewish ones,
where misinformed fears about vaccine safety had taken hold.

The hotspot of the current outbreak is a Mennonite community in

Gaines County, Texas. More than 400 cases have been reported in
the county so far. Its source (or “patient zero”) has not been
identified but measles cases linked to that outbreak have turned up
in nearby counties and in several other states. Cases in Gaines
County exploded because only 81% of children starting school there
have had the MMR vaccine (which protects against measles, mumps
and rubella). With a disease as contagious as measles, 95% vaccine
coverage is needed to stop it from spreading.

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Few places have vaccination rates as low as in Gaines, but the
number of counties where too few children have had the MMR jab is
growing. In February researchers from Johns Hopkins University
published an analysis of MMR rates in kindergarten-aged children in
the 37 states that make county-level data available. They found that
in the 2022-24 school years two-thirds of counties had MMR rates
lower than 95%. Worryingly, the data show a widespread decline in
vaccination: around a third of the counties that are now below the
threshold had been above it in the 2017-2020 school years; the
median county vaccination rate has fallen in most states. One of the
largest drops is in Wisconsin—no county there has an MMR
vaccination rate above 85%. It is among the most permissive states
for vaccine exceptions in schools, allowing opt-out for personal-
conviction reasons (along with medical and religious exemptions,
which most states have); parents only have to submit a written note.

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What will be the outcome of falling vaccination rates? A study
published in JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association,
in April estimated that, if current childhood vaccination rates remain
unchanged, after two decades measles will probably become
endemic in America again. Under these circumstances, there will be
an estimated 850,000 measles cases in the next 25 years, and
around 850 deaths. If, however, the MMR rate in each state falls by
10%, endemicity will arrive earlier and there could be 11m measles
cases in the 25-year period. In that scenario there would be around
11,000 deaths to the disease, each of which could have been
avoided.
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DeDOGEd

A court resurrects the United

States Institute of Peace
Elon Musk’s protégés may win by losing
5月 22, 2025 03:18 上午 | WASHINGTON, DC

Peace on the Potomac

THE NIGHT the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) was taken
over, March 17th, staffers from Elon Musk’s Department of
Government Efficiency (DOGE) walked round its headquarters
smoking cigars and drinking beers while they dismantled the signage
and disabled the computer systems. The takeover of the USIP
building in Washington, DC, earlier that afternoon was one of the
more notable moments of President Donald Trump’s revolution in the
capital, because the think-tank is not actually part of the executive

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branch. The Institute’s board and president, George Moose, a
veteran diplomat, were summarily fired. He and other senior staff
were ultimately forced out of the building at the behest of three
different police agencies. Then a DOGE staffer handed over the keys
to the building to the federal government.

All this was illegal, according to Judge Beryl Howell, of the

Washington, DC district court, in a ruling on May 19th. Judge Howell
declared that the dissolution of USIP was “effectuated by
illegitimately-installed leaders who lacked legal authority to take
these actions”, and so was “null and void”. The result implies that Mr
Moose is once again the president, and the board reinstated. The
building, which was paid for partly with private money, must be
returned. So too must the Institute’s $25m endowment (of which
around $15m was donated privately). USIP staffers, almost all of
whom were fired in late March, must decide if they want their jobs
back. George Foote, USIP’s lawyer, says he expects the government
to appeal. A White House spokeswoman called the ruling the result
of a “rogue judge”, and said it “will not be the last say on the
matter”.

USIP was created in 1984 by a bipartisan group of members of

Congress, including two war veterans, as a research organisation
devoted to peacebuilding. Its board is appointed by the president,
on the advice of the Senate, but according to the law establishing it,
USIP is an “independent, nonprofit, national institute”. According to
Mr Foote, “it was important to the founders that they not have an
organisation tucked into the State Department or built into the White
House”. This status, Mr Foote argues, gives its staffers a degree of
freedom in their research and advice that officials in the State
Department would not have. Since its foundation, its work has
extended beyond research into matters like negotiating local peace
deals in Iraq or Nigeria. Much of its $55m budget was spent on
grants to charities.

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The fact that USIP might become a target of the Trump
administration was foreseeable. Last September the Heritage
Foundation, a Republican-aligned think-tank with close links to Mr
Trump’s team, criticised the organisation. USIP’s staff, Heritage said,
mostly donated to Democrats; the institute’s work, Heritage argued,
had expanded beyond what was mandated by law—defence-
adjacent research—into international development. Yet Heritage
called on Congress to restrict its funding and hold hearings to look at
its bias. It did not suggest the president could just shut it down.

In her judgment, Judge Howell argued that the government chose

“blunt force, backed up by law enforcement officers” to impose its
legal view that the president has almost unlimited power over almost
anything the government funds. In reality, she concluded, not
everything funded by Congress is part of the “executive branch”, and
so the government’s sweeping assertion of absolute power is
unjustified. In effect she ruled that the legislature retains the right to
restrict the president’s power over certain institutions. This, Mr Foote
argues, has implications that go beyond USIP. It is a “victory for the
rule of law”, he says.

Goodwill toward men

What will happen now? Before March, it seemed unlikely that

Congress would have agreed to shut down USIP. The organisation
had Republican supporters, and indeed, under the continuing
resolution passed that month, it is fully funded until September.
Assuming a higher court does not overrule Ms Howell, USIP will be
revived. Now that the organisation has become such a partisan
cause, however, Republicans in Congress may feel the need to close
it by legal means. In the budget bill they are preparing, Congress
could fairly easily cut the institute’s funding to the bone. It could also
allow Mr Trump to appoint new board members and complete the
closure that way.

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Still, for now, USIP is back. On a rainy afternoon on May 21st, a
small group of its staffers walked back into their headquarters. There
was no serious physical damage, they said, but it will take time to
discover which of the computer systems remain intact and restart
work. For now, “we intend now to resume our stewardship and
custodianship of the building”, said Mr Moose. “It’s a very meaningful
place.” ■

Stay on top of American politics with The US in brief, our daily

newsletter with fast analysis of the most important political news,
and Checks and Balance, a weekly note from our Lexington
columnist that examines the state of American democracy and the
issues that matter to voters.
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More than a feeling

The MAGA revolution

threatens America’s most
innovative place
Cuts to funding risk hobbling Boston’s science establishment
5月 22, 2025 05:48 上午 | BOSTON

SCIENCE SOMETIMES advances not by design but by happenstance.

Thirty years ago a graduate student in chemical engineering at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was describing a
bottleneck in his work over drinks at a bar in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. A Harvard student heard and suggested a solution
using microchip manufacturing technology that his lab had recently
developed. The casual exchange led to a collaboration under the

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guidance of Donald Ingber, a Harvard cell biologist, that eventually
helped pioneer organ-chip technology—lab-grown models of human
organs on tiny chips. Dr Ingber would go on to found a biotech firm
in Boston that commercialised the technology.

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The story’s arc is very Boston: federally funded academic research
and serendipitous encounters among brainiacs spawning innovation
and biotech firms. If science has a centre of gravity it is along the

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Charles river, which snakes between Boston and Cambridge, where
MIT, Harvard, world-class hospitals and venture-capital firms all
share a riverbank. Yet that same concentration of science makes the
area vulnerable to politics. President Donald Trump’s policies on
universities and his administration’s proposed cuts to science funding
threaten not only Massachusetts’s sprawling research and biotech
ecosystem, but also the country’s competitive edge in innovation.

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For 17 of the past 19 years universities and hospitals in Boston have
received more funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)
than those anywhere else (see chart). Roughly one in eight of
America’s top 40 research universities call the Boston area home. Of

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all these institutions no place has drawn Mr Trump’s ire quite like
Harvard. Just hours after Harvard’s president refused to comply with
federal demands to restructure the university, Dr Ingber was among
the first of its scientists to receive a stop-work order on his grants.
Then on May 5th Linda McMahon, the education secretary, sent a
rambling letter to Harvard with an extraordinary threat: the
university will no longer receive any new federal research grants.

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Social Media Pakistan 0342-4938217
Like a keystone species, Harvard supports research and development
far beyond its campus; unsettle Harvard, and the effects will be felt
widely. Its federal grants often depend on collaborations among
universities and hospitals across the region. Among the economies
of America’s 20 largest metro areas, none has a greater share
dedicated to the sciences and related industries (see chart). This
patch of land is home to more biotech firms than anywhere else in
the world.

MAGA’s assault on science is an act of grievous self-harm

America’s scientific prowess is a huge global subsidy·
China’s universities are wooing Western scientists·

The University of Massachusetts (UMass) medical centre, 40 miles

west of Cambridge, is a juggernaut in RNA research, a field that
underpins some of the most promising therapeutic advances. UMass
has already paused PhD admissions and laid off employees at its
biomedical-sciences institute. “What science has in common with
business is that we don’t do well with uncertainty in our external
environment,” says Phillip Zamore, a biologist who heads the
university’s RNA Therapeutics Institute. “We can handle uncertainty
in an explanation for nature, but it’s terrifying to think ‘how am I
going to pay my postdoc?’” he adds. Most of his graduate students
go into biotech.

Some consequences will be harder to measure. Biotech and

pharmaceutical firms rely on a stream of discoveries from federally
funded university labs doing open-ended research. Much of this
research initially has no obvious commercial use. But the more
federal money flows into university labs, the greater the chance that
scientists will stumble upon discoveries that industry can turn into
the next life-saving drug. Sekar Kathiresan, the head of the Boston-
based biotech firm Verve Therapeutics, expects to spend $2bn
developing a drug that could treat heart disease, which is the
leading cause of death in the world. “The technology we’re using to
turn off a cholesterol-raising gene in the liver to lead to lifelong

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cholesterol-lowering”, he says, was made possible by scientists at
the Broad Institute in Cambridge who invented base editing in 2016.
“Generous federal funding for science is critical for the next
generation of ideas and cures,” he adds.

With the fight raging most fiercely inside Massachusetts, the state
has in many ways led the resistance to Mr Trump’s funding cuts and
woo-woo approach to science. Since February the state’s attorney-
general has filed two lawsuits against cuts to NIH funding. Others
have joined both suits. Harvard, too, is pushing back in court. As one
of the most progressive places in the country, Massachusetts is
anathema to Trumpism, notes Michael Goldman, a longtime
Democratic operative in the state. “But the British couldn’t break
Boston, the New York Yankees couldn’t break Boston and neither can
Trump,” he says. It is not just Bostonians who should hope he’s
right. ■

Stay on top of American politics with The US in brief, our daily

newsletter with fast analysis of the most important political news,
and Checks and Balance, a weekly note from our Lexington
columnist that examines the state of American democracy and the
issues that matter to voters.
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Lexington

Joe Biden did not decline

alone
His party and the press lost altitude along with him
5月 22, 2025 03:18 上午

ACCEPT, FOR a moment, Joe Biden’s contention that he is mentally

as sharp as ever. Then try to explain some revelations of the books
beginning to appear about his presidency: that he never held a
formal meeting to discuss whether to run for a second term; that he
never heard directly from his own pollsters about his dismal public
standing, or anything else; that by 2024 most of his own cabinet
secretaries had no contact with him; that, when he was in
Washington, he would often eat dinner at 4.30pm and vanish into
his private quarters by 5.15; that when he travelled, he often

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skipped briefings while keeping a morning appointment with a
makeup artist to cover his wrinkles and liver spots. You might think
that Mr Biden—that anyone—would welcome as a rationale that he
had lost a step or two. It is a kinder explanation than the
alternatives: vanity, hubris, incompetence.

In fact, by March 2023, there were times, behind the scenes, when
Mr Biden seemed “completely out of it, spent, exhausted, almost
gone”, according to “Original Sin”, by Jake Tapper, of CNN, and Alex
Thompson, a reporter for Axios. In one encounter in December
2022, he did not remember the name of his national security adviser
or communications director. “You know George,” an aide prodded Mr
Biden in June 2024, coaxing him to recognise George Clooney, who
was starring at a fundraiser for him.

Mr Biden’s aides tried to compensate by walking beside him to his

helicopter, to disguise his gait and catch him if he stumbled, and by
using two cameras for remarks to be shown on video so they could
camouflage incoherence with jump cuts. Jonathan Allen, a reporter
for NBC, and Amie Parnes, a reporter for the Hill, describe in “Fight”
how aides would tack down fluorescent tape to guide the president
to the lectern at fund-raisers. Once the most loquacious of
politicians, Mr Biden ended up clinging to brief texts on
teleprompters for even casual political remarks.

Such in-plain-sight accommodations point to what is slightly

ridiculous about the present exercise of exposing Mr Biden’s decline.
It was obvious to many people: to donors, to some Democratic
politicians on the rare occasions they met him and, most important,
to Americans, who saw through his pretence long before June 2024,
when he fell apart in debate with Donald Trump. In April 2023, only
a third of voters told Pew Research that they thought Mr Biden was
“mentally sharp”.

For that reason, focusing on Mr Biden’s health is useful now less to

tell a cautionary tale about his own decline, made even more

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melancholy by his cancer diagnosis, than one about the decline of
his party and the press. “Fight” details how, after Mr Biden failed in
debate, party leaders struggled to prevent the electoral catastrophe
they foresaw. Even the most influential of Democrats, Barack
Obama, who is portrayed as lacking confidence in both Mr Biden and
Vice-President Kamala Harris, emerges in this account as ineffectual
as he belatedly seeks some sort of “mini-primary”.

The parties have become so weak that whoever becomes their

nominee can dominate them. Mr Biden’s vanity, and that of his
family and closest aides, overrode common sense about whether he
should seek a second term. Few Democrats spoke up about his
infirmity while he was in office. With few exceptions, journalists from
left-leaning news organisations, quick to deplore Mr Trump’s
behaviour, competed to expose Mr Biden’s frailty only once
Democrats were pushing him out. Journalists from right-leaning
news organisations are still pounding away at Mr Biden’s mental or
ethical lapses; they show less interest in Mr Trump’s.

“We got so screwed by Biden as a party,” David Plouffe, the rare

Democrat in either book willing to attach his name to such criticism,
told the authors of “Original Sin”. Mr Plouffe helped run Ms Harris’s
campaign for president after she replaced Mr Biden. Mr Plouffe
describes as “one of the great lessons from 2024” something that
only a condescending, insular political organisation could possibly
need to learn: “never again can we as a party suggest to people that
what they’re seeing is not true”. (Regular readers may recall that
Lexington, and The Economist, urged Mr Biden not to run again back
when he was riding high, after the Democrats overperformed in the
midterms of 2022.)

Many Democrats who condemn Republican congressmen for lacking

the courage to oppose Mr Trump and call out his lies might instead
pause to consider their own weakness, calculation or inattention.
Even after that shocking debate, Democratic leaders who insisted Mr
Biden was fit for a second term included not just Ms Harris but

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Governor Gavin Newsom of California, Governor J.B. Pritzker of
Illinois and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, all
possible presidential candidates. Have they since absorbed Mr
Plouffe’s lesson?

A bridge, abridged

It’s the easy one. The party will probably not nominate an oldster
again any time soon. Neither book shows that Mr Biden’s age led to
policy failures by degrading his decision-making, as opposed to his
communication skills (as essential as breath to a president).
Regardless, nominating a young candidate won’t resolve the party’s
confusion. The hard questions for Democrats are not about Mr
Biden’s age but about how they should face the other challenges he
struggled with, including immigration, the deficit and the
implementation of his own infrastructure plan.

Revisionist historians may someday emphasise Mr Biden’s legislative

achievements. But those cannot compensate for his hubris. Having
once declared himself a bridge to a new generation, he became,
instead, just a bridge “from one Trump term to the next”, the
authors of “Fight” conclude. This may not be merely a story of the
decline of a man, his party and the media. It may turn out to be
about the decline of American democracy itself. ■

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which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays
and reader correspondence.
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The Americas
Mexico battles the MAGA movement over
organised crime
Mexico’s resilient gangs :: To keep America at bay Claudia Sheinbaum takes on
Mexico’s gangsters

Wildfires devastated the Amazon basin in

2024
A losing battle :: They wiped away all progress governments had made to curb
deforestation in recent years

An election win boosts Javier Milei’s reform

project
Argentina economic reform :: Lower inflation brings popularity. Popularity brings
power, which helps with lowering inflation

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Mexico’s resilient gangs

Mexico battles the MAGA

movement over organised
crime
To keep America at bay Claudia Sheinbaum takes on Mexico’s
gangsters
5月 22, 2025 04:56 上午 | Tijuana

CLAUDIA SHEINBAUM came to power in October promising to tackle

Mexico’s entrenched, murderous gangs. Her record was convincing.
As mayor of Mexico City she curbed violence by using data and
improving policing. She has started applying similar methods on a
national scale.

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Crime-weary Mexicans welcomed the intelligence-led crackdown. Ms
Sheinbaum has enjoyed high approval ratings. But her assault on the
gangs has always had a second audience: America’s President
Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans who see Mexico as a source of
their country’s problems. Ms Sheinbaum is bent on convincing Mr
Trump that she has the gangs in hand. Officials in Washington have
been considering drone strikes on Mexican drug labs and cross-
border raids by special forces without consulting Mexican officials.
That would sorely diminish Ms Sheinbaum at home.

Short of military action, Mr Trump has not been holding back. Citing
the need to stem flows of migrants and fentanyl into the United
States, his government in February designated Mexican gangs as
foreign terrorist organisations and slapped tariffs on Mexican
exports.

More recently, American attention has intensified. The Trump

administration appears to be making plea deals with members of the
Sinaloa Cartel, Mexico’s largest gang, without the knowledge of
Mexico’s government. Details are not public. On May 11th the
governor of Baja California, a Mexican border state, announced that
her American visa had been revoked, as had her husband’s. (She
says the decision is administrative and implies no misconduct.) A list
of other Mexican officials reportedly facing similar treatment is
circulating. Authorities in the United States have not explained, but
the revocations are thought to result from American suspicions that
Mexican officials are colluding with gangsters.

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The change of gear has jolted Mexico. Officials worry that it will not
be possible to squash the gangs fast enough to keep MAGA at bay,
despite dramatic changes in the past six months. Ms Sheinbaum has
abandoned the security policy identified with her predecessor,
Andrés Manuel López Obrador, of “hugs not bullets”. His approach
assumed that poverty was the root cause of crime, and that the best
way to curb it would be through government-led social schemes. In
practice, Mr López Obrador mostly let the gangsters prevail.

Ms Sheinbaum has instead pushed intelligence gathering and co-

ordination between different branches of Mexico’s security
apparatus. She has also started to negate some of Mr López
Obrador’s militarisation of the police, which critics say led to brutality
and shoddier detective work. Her security secretary, Omar García
Harfuch, is hiring investigators for a new police agency which, along
with a new special-forces branch, should eventually bring 15,000
officers under his command.

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The government says it has made 20,000 arrests for serious
offences since October, seized 154 tonnes of illegal drugs and
confiscated over 10,000 firearms. This far outstrips the rate of
seizures and arrests under Mr López Obrador. Recovery of stolen
fuel, a black-market business worth hundreds of millions of dollars,
has also increased. Quotidian co-ordination with the United States
has improved. In February both countries agreed that border patrols
would meet more often and share more information. The number of
migrants nabbed crossing the border illegally has plummeted since

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Mr Trump’s election, as has the amount of fentanyl being seized by
US Customs and Border Protection.

Tijuana, just south of the border with California, is a good place to

see Ms Sheinbaum’s new model in action. General Gilberto Landeros,
security minister of Mexico’s Baja California state, says local, state
and federal security teams meet daily to co-ordinate operations.
Better data are helping, he says. After it became clear that more
murders were happening during officers’ meal breaks, schedules
were adjusted to provide constant cover. Vetting of municipal police
is under way: around a third of officers have been reviewed so far,
with 35-40% failing to meet standards. They will be asked to leave
the force.

In Sinaloa province, Mexican troops have largely contained an

ongoing war between two factions of the Sinaloa Cartel. The border
is less porous, says someone involved in the fentanyl trade there. It
has been challenging to make “arrangements” with officials, he says.

It is too soon to see the impact of Ms Sheinbaum’s policies in the

crime statistics. The official murder rate has been falling since 2018,

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when it peaked at 30 per 100,000 people; last year it was 19 per
100,000. Some of this fall is probably illusory; there has been a
sharp rise in disappearances, mostly murders without a body. And on
nearly every other measure, from extortion to robbery, crime has
risen. On May 20th two government officials were shot dead in
Mexico City, a highly unusual crime in the capital. Although the
amount of fentanyl seized at the border has gone down, drug
seizures in general doubled between February and April, suggesting
the gangs may be turning to other products to offset the fentanyl
crackdown.

Security, fast and slow

Tackling these problems involves much more than fighting crime: it

would appear to entail restructuring Mexican society. The gangs no
longer simply run drugs and smuggle migrants into the United
States. They also control or take a cut of legitimate businesses, such
as avocado-growing, fishing or stalls selling tortillas. This merger of
crime with the legal economy goes hand in hand with deep
corruption. Mr Trump’s claim of an “intolerable alliance” between
Mexico’s federal officials and its gangs is an exaggeration. But Crisis
Group, a think-tank based in Brussels, has documented local-
government officials’ collusion with gangsters. So far Ms Sheinbaum
seems either unwilling or unable to pursue crooked officials.

As the slow work of excising organised crime from society continues,

the administration in Washington is stepping up the pressure. Once
made in private, calls by hawks in the MAGA camp for military
intervention have grown louder. The Pentagon has tripled the
number of active-duty troops on the border and has deployed
drones, spy-planes and armoured cars. “If you take [Trump] at his
word—as we do—it’s a real threat,” says a Mexican official.

Mr Trump may be losing patience. In April Ms Sheinbaum refused his

offer to send troops into Mexico. In response he said: “She is so
afraid of the cartels that she can’t even think straight.” Military action

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by the United States would be expensive, and not necessarily
effective. If some big gangs were clobbered by American strikes,
those left unscathed would probably expand, triggering more brutal
turf wars. “Anyone who understands the details knows how unviable
[intervention] is,” says another Mexican official.

Ms Sheinbaum’s plan could certainly be improved, for instance

through a greater focus on dismantling the financial networks behind
the gangsters, says Francisco Rivas of the National Citizen
Observatory, a Mexican think-tank. A shortage of money is another
problem. Mexico’s spending on security was already the lowest
relative to GDP of any country in the OECD, a group of mainly rich
countries, when Ms Sheinbaum cut it by 36%. An economy shaken
by Mr Trump’s trade attacks and a political system that favours
handouts and nationalistic projects will make it hard to find more
cash. Her plan may keep Mr Trump’s drones at bay. Eliminating
Mexico’s gangsters will be harder. ■

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A losing battle

Wildfires devastated the

Amazon basin in 2024
They wiped away all progress governments had made to curb
deforestation in recent years
5月 22, 2025 07:22 上午 | Bogotá

SMOKE CHOKED Earth’s lungs last year. Of the 51,000 square

kilometres (an area the size of Costa Rica) of mature tropical forest
destroyed in Latin America in 2024, wildfires accounted for 60%, a
record high. The area destroyed was 142% larger than in 2023,
wiping out progress that Brazilian and Colombian governments had
made in curbing deforestation.

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These sobering data were published on May 21st by Global Forest
Watch (GFW), a monitoring service run by an NGO called the World
Resources Institute which uses satellite data to measure tree loss.
Climate change is raising temperatures and drying the air, turning
the rainforest into a tinderbox. Last year was the hottest on record,
with the effects of warming compounded across the Amazon
rainforest basin by the El Niño weather phenomenon. When farmers
set fires to clear space for growing soyabeans or grazing cattle, the
blazes often spiralled out of control. GFW calculates that fires
released 1.15 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere,
more than all of South America generated by burning fossil fuels in
2023.

Brazil, where most of the Amazon sits, lost more tropical forest than
any other country, around 28,200 square kilometres. That was also
the most Brazil had lost since 2016. The numbers are a blow to the
environmentalist president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula.
Although critics point to contradictions in his green agenda, his
efforts to protect the Amazon had been working. Deforestation had
dropped by a third between 2022 and 2023.

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But Lula’s policies proved to be less potent than climate change.
Brazilians had been excited by recently published data suggesting
that deforestation fell again in 2024, but those data do not account
for fires as GFW data do. Last year Brazil suffered the deepest
drought since records began. Wildfires were particularly ferocious
and difficult to fight. They caused 60% of the deforestation in the
Brazilian Amazon. Such conditions are likely to worsen in future.

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Brazil’s search for economic growth is adding to the Amazon’s woes.
States bordering the Brazilian Amazon have been rolling back
protections in order to boost agricultural output. In October
legislators in Mato Grosso removed tax breaks for companies that
commit to trade soya without deforestation. Last month, lawmakers
in neighbouring Rôndonia passed an “amnesty law” to forgive past
deforestation. The message for ranchers is that land can be grabbed
with impunity, all but encouraging slash-and-burn expansion.

To see what an unencumbered boom in beef and soya production

looks like, Brazilian policymakers should look across their south-
western border at Bolivia. Bolivia’s leaders have spurred industrial
farming on deforested land for years through loan programmes and
tax breaks. In 2019 the government lifted a ban on beef exports and
approved legislation encouraging farmers to expand the agricultural
frontier with fire. Beef exports and forest destruction surged in
tandem. Deforestation in Bolivia has increased more than five-fold
since 2019, according to GFW. Cattle-ranching was responsible for
57% of all deforestation in the country between 2010 and 2022,
according to a recent study. Punishment is rare. Of the 136 cases
authorities opened on illegal land-clearing in 2024, just six ended in
a sentence.

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As a result, Bolivia lost 14,800 square kilometres of forest in 2024,
the second-most of any country, up 200% from 2023. It lost more
than the Democratic Republic of Congo did, despite having just 40%
of its forested area. Fires drove nearly two-thirds of the damage,
according to GFW.

Bolivia’s leaders were not the only group who gave in to the lure of
turning rainforest into cash. Peru’s government amended its forestry
law in 2024 with a view to expanding agriculture, in effect offering
amnesty to those who had cleared land illegally. Tropical forest loss
in the country rose by 25% in 2024, partly as a result. In Colombia,
rebel groups are cashing in on record-high gold prices by mining ore
from beneath cleared forest. They are also expanding coca
plantations. Loss of primary forest rose by 49% last year. The high
level of deforestation is a consequence of deteriorating security.

Even the most pristine parts of the Amazon are threatened. Guyana,
which has lots of untouched forest, wants the world to pay to keep
its biodiverse, carbon-rich rainforests standing. Yet deforestation
there rose by 275% in 2024 (albeit from a low base) owing to

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wildfires and illegal gold mining. Against climate change, even the
best intentions can be easily dashed. ■

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Argentina economic reform

An election win boosts Javier

Milei’s reform project
Lower inflation brings popularity. Popularity brings power, which
helps with lowering inflation
5月 22, 2025 03:17 上午 | MONTEVIDEO

Shouting in the city

IN MOST OF the world mid-term elections for half of the seats in a

city hall would be ignored by presidents and markets alike. Not so in
Argentina. Javier Milei, the libertarian president, made his
spokesperson his party’s leading candidate in elections held on May
18th in Buenos Aires. He cast the capital’s ballot as a referendum on
his government. His party won 30% of the vote, compared with
27% for the leftist Peronists and 16% for the centre-right PRO, the

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party of a former president, Mauricio Macri. Argentine shares soared
in response and sovereign bonds rose. Having beaten Mr Macri in his
stronghold, Mr Milei intends to sideline him entirely, trying to
subsume the PRO ahead of national mid-terms in October.

Argentine politics have been in flux since Mr Milei won the

presidential race in late 2023 running as an angry outsider. He has
slashed spending and brought raging inflation sharply down. In April
he partially floated the peso. Yet Argentina has a history of woeful
economic policy, and Mr Milei’s steps are not enough. A reformer
also has to show repeatedly that he can keep the Peronists out. A
struggling government and resurgent Peronists, even in minor
elections, can spook markets and send the economy spiralling. This
week’s win is a boost, though despite compulsory voting, turnout
was at a historic low of 53%.

Two conclusions emerge. One is that politics will probably get

angrier and dirtier. Mr Milei’s style is to rage against perceived
enemies; the press is now a prime target. “People don’t hate
journalists enough,” is his new catchphrase. Mr Milei also made his
spokesperson the lead candidate while keeping him in post and
giving him juicy announcements close to the election. More worrying
was a fake video, generated using artificial intelligence, purporting to
show Mr Macri urging people to vote for Mr Milei’s party in order to
block the Peronists. It was shared on election eve by social-media
accounts close to the president, including one widely reported to
belong to his powerful spin doctor.

The second is that the government will continue to think that

bringing inflation down is the path to electoral success—and will bet
everything to that end. That is why after allowing the peso to float
within a band, prompted in part by the IMF, the government has
done all it can to keep the peso strong, avoiding a depreciation that
would push inflation up. Interest rates remain high, while the
government has tweaked rules to encourage foreigners to convert
dollars into pesos in order to profit from a form of carry trade. A

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temporary tax break is pushing soyabean exporters to sell their
harvest fast, also boosting the peso. The central bank has declared it
will not buy dollars to rebuild its reserves until the peso touches its
limit of 1,000 to the dollar, and has allegedly fiddled in the futures
market to strengthen it. To the same end the government is
expected to announce a loosening of rules on tax evasion,
encouraging Argentines to bring an estimated $270bn hidden in
mattresses back into the formal economy.

The approach is working, for now. Post-float depreciation was

modest. Monthly inflation fell to 2.8% in April. Mr Milei may benefit
from a flywheel effect whereby markets cheer his victory, which in
turn boosts sovereign bonds and confidence in the peso, further
staving off an inflationary depreciation. If inflation keeps falling he
could win handsomely in October.

But flywheels can break down. The peso remains very strong, and so
vulnerable to a depreciation, especially once the harvest ends in July.
(Mr Milei surely hopes to delay any reckoning until after the mid-
terms.) Boosting the peso makes exports less competitive. The
central bank’s refusal to buy dollars to rebuild net reserves comes as
it needs $5bn-odd by mid-June to meet the demands of the IMF’s
new programme. It is preparing to borrow to do so, but that only
delays the problem. The other risk is that the Peronists, who
increased their seat share in Buenos Aires, do well in the mid-terms.
That could spook people into dumping the peso, thus prompting
inflation. For now such worries have not punctured Mr Milei’s
euphoria. ■

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Middle East & Africa

Meet Africa’s ascendant right
Culture wars :: They are devout, well-connected and have a MAGA wind in their sail

A bitter race to elect the head of Africa’s

pivotal bank
A bank that divides Africa :: America has lost interest, but the rest of the world
should not

Cyril Ramaphosa keeps his cool with

Donald Trump
Putting the white in White House :: The episode underlined Donald Trump’s warped
views of South Africa

Israel says it is unleashing an

“unprecedented attack”
Gaza on the brink again :: More war beckons, as Donald Trump freezes out Binyamin
Netanyahu

The world’s worst conference

Things fall apart, again :: Hell on earth in Dubai-on-the-Med

One happy Damascus

Donald Trump’s sanctions gift to Syria :: But the technicalities of easing sanctions will
prove tricky

Many of Syria’s diaspora are not yet ready

to go home
We’re out of there :: But they are encouraged by the lifting of sanctions

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Culture wars

Meet Africa’s ascendant right

They are devout, well-connected and have a MAGA wind in their sail
5月 22, 2025 04:56 上午 | NAIROBI

THE AFRICAN family is under threat. That, at least, was the

message of the “Pan-African Conference on Family Values” held in
Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, this month. Delegates from across Africa as
well as several from Western countries described a continent on the
cusp of social collapse. Attendees were told that “foreign ideologies”
were producing an epidemic of abortion, homosexuality and “gender
confusion”. One of the Kenyan organisers blamed incest on sex
education. Everyone agreed their liberal opponents were on the
march. “The people on the other side who are pushing this agenda
are relentless,” declared David Oginde, chair of Kenya’s Ethics and
Anti-Corruption Commission.

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Africa’s Christian right sees itself as a plucky, righteous David
struggling against a godless, liberal Goliath. This has never been
quite right; today it is wildly misleading. Their ties to right-wingers in
America mean Christian conservatives in Africa now wield great
clout. Donald Trump’s re-election has given “all the anti-rights
groups new energy, new power,” says Emmanuel Lee Mutwiri, a
Kenyan activist. And the wrecking of the United States Agency for
International Development (USAID) and cuts to the sexual-health
and advocacy programmes it supported offers a singular chance to
undo liberal gains.

More conferences devoted to “family values” are planned in Africa.

They are sponsored by powerful conservative Christian groups from
the West, including Family Watch International (FWI) and the
Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which helped overturn Roe v
Wade, the ruling that enshrined the right to abortion in America. By
nudging African policymakers in ever more illiberal directions on
sexuality and gender, such groups have already had a big impact on
African politics. In recent years lawmakers in Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria
and elsewhere have demanded sweeping anti-LGBTQ measures. In
2023 Uganda passed one of the world’s harshest anti-homosexuality
laws, including the death penalty for some same-sex acts. Bills
targeting trans people and abortion are next, warns Pius Kennedy, a
local activist.

Links between Christian conservatives in Africa and the West are not
new, but two key developments help explain the strength of their
alliance today. First, the AIDS epidemic in the early 2000s drew the
attention of American evangelicals who opposed gay rights.
American church groups brought a new militancy to the continent’s
gay-rights debate, says Kapya John Kaoma, a Zambian priest at
Boston University who studies anti-LGBTQ politics.

The second was the election of Barack Obama, which convinced

some Christian conservatives in America that the ground they had
lost to liberals there might be irreversible. As the global culture wars

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heated up, Africa was heralded as “the last man standing” in defence
of biblical values.

Outsiders have flung money at African conservative causes. A study

of financial filings by the Institute for Journalism and Social Change,
a global media initiative, found that 17 American Christian groups
together spent at least $16.5m in Africa in the four years to 2022;
the total spend in 2022 was about 50% more than in 2019. This was
probably only a fraction of the total disbursed by foreign religious
groups over this period, notes Claire Provost, one of the authors.
American churches do not have to disclose their overseas spending.

Africa’s Christian conservatives have grown more effective. In 2014

Uganda’s constitutional court struck down an anti-gay law on
procedural grounds. Ten years later the court upheld a more
draconian version. The breadth of today’s anti-liberal coalition has
helped. According to the Wall Street Journal, FWI helped organise
the “family values” conference in 2023 in Uganda; the Russian
embassy paid for it. The anti-gay bill soon became law. Copycat bills
popped up in Kenya and Ghana.

A bit less fire and brimstone

The tactics used have grown more sophisticated, too. Africa’s

Christian right once argued against abortion and homosexuality in
“demonic” terms; now “they couch their arguments in the language
of rights itself”, says Ayo Sogunro, a Nigerian human-rights scholar.
Conference speakers in Nairobi stressed the rights of parents to
protect their children from early sexualisation. “Folks are being
prepped and primed in a different way,” says Ramatu Bangaru, a
pro-choice activist in Sierra Leone.

The movement is also homing in on multilateral institutions. Sharon

Slater, FWI’s founder, hosts annual “training sessions” for African
politicians hoping to advance these causes at the UN. In Nairobi she
warned that the World Health Organisation’s new pandemic-

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preparedness agreement poses “a threat to the African family”
because it includes provisions for sexual and reproductive health
care. ADF has applied (so far unsuccessfully) for observer status at
the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights to lobby its
officials. FWI has set up shop in Ethiopia’s capital, which hosts the
African Union.

But perhaps most important, today’s Christian right has allies in the
upper echelons of power. Several of Africa’s most influential leaders,
including President William Ruto of Kenya and Abiy Ahmed,
Ethiopia’s prime minister, are born-again Christians. Many of those in
their inner circles are too. In recent years several African first ladies,
notably Janet Museveni of Uganda, have been courted by
conservative Christian groups and have then promoted socially
traditional policies.

Such policies are often also politically expedient. Africans rarely

resent people from other countries, ethnicities and faiths, but
homophobia is still widespread, according to Afrobarometer, a
pollster. In countries with recent polling data, large majorities also
strongly oppose abortion. Unpopular governments may be tempted
to exploit these sentiments. Since taking office in 2022, Mr Ruto—
who last year faced mass protests against his rule—has spoken out
forcefully against gay rights. Neighbouring Ethiopia is grappling with
a protracted civil conflict. Though it has a relatively liberal abortion
law, an aggressive anti-abortion movement has suddenly taken root,
about which the government has been strikingly silent.

The Trump administration has further boosted Africa’s ascendant

right. In the past, governments seeking good relations with America,
such as Mr Ruto’s, tended to avoid legislation as brazenly illiberal as
Uganda’s 2023 bill. Today “what we are going to see the Kenyan
government promoting is what aligns with the Trump
administration,” predicts Martin Onyango of Kenya’s Centre for
Reproductive Rights. Controversial anti-LGBTQ laws and efforts to
limit abortion rights in Kenya may well be looked at more favourably.

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Christian conservatives also stand to benefit from the closure of
USAID. Charles Kanjama of the Kenyan Christian Professionals
Forum says that aid money should come “without strings attached
and without shoving the LGBT agenda down our throats”. “How did
we get to the point where America is sending taxpayer dollars all
over the world to NGOs that undermine religious freedom?” agreed
J.D. Vance, America’s vice-president, in February. Some in the
administration’s orbit say that PEPFAR, America’s scheme for fighting
AIDS which was frozen in January, should be restored—if the money
goes to anti-abortion Christian NGOs.

Liberals have long complained about the way Western religious

conservatives have fanned intolerance in Africa. But their African
counterparts may not need much outside support. Even “things we
can all agree are bad, such as female genital cutting, are now up for
debate again”, notes Gillian Kane of Ipas, an American group that
campaigns for safe abortion and contraception. Big shifts, such as
the growth of evangelical Christianity, particularly among young
Africans, herald a more socially conservative future. Like right-
wingers elsewhere, Africa’s Christian right relies on a sense of peril
to drum up support. But today it is their liberal rivals who have
reason to worry. ■

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A bank that divides Africa

A bitter race to elect the head

of Africa’s pivotal bank
America has lost interest, but the rest of the world should not
5月 22, 2025 03:18 上午 | ABIDJAN

Samuel Maimbo: results-driven team player

COMBINE THE secrecy of a papal conclave with the national rivalries

of the Eurovision Song Contest and you have a sense of what will
happen on May 29th during the election of the next president of the
African Development Bank (AfDB).

This 60-year-old development finance institution, and who runs it,

matter more than ever. Cuts in aid will hit Africa especially hard. It is
likely to lose at least 30% of the total grant funding coming from

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abroad, much of which is essential for government operations.
President Donald Trump says he is cutting America’s sizeable
contribution to the AfDB. Private capital is still not filling
infrastructure gaps.

Moreover, as the African Union is becoming increasingly ineffective,

Africa needs a strong pan-African institution with legitimacy, a clear
orientation, and money to unite the region. The African Continental
Free Trade Area and other slow-moving initiatives to beef up Africa
in global negotiations need champions. The AfDB has billions of
dollars to deploy: for African states that is a lot to fight for. But as
the bank’s presidential race heats up, the institution that should
transcend national rivalries is exposing them.

The main job of the bank’s president is to set out the continent’s
most pressing development needs and oversee the projects to tackle
them. It is also to inspire the confidence that encourages partners to
contribute more capital, which the bank then borrows against on the
market. The outgoing president, Akinwumi Adesina, helped raise the
bank’s profile, but not enough money to cushion against current
shocks.

In 2023 the bank disbursed $6.1bn, less than half the sum raised by
the Inter-American Development Bank for a region less than half as
populous. Africa remains the only region where the World Bank is
still a bigger project backer than the regional development bank
designed primarily for that purpose. Currently too little capital is
spread too thinly across many projects that the bank is forced to
pick up because African governments often neglect them.

On priorities, little separates the five candidates. All call for job
creation, interconnected infrastructure and intra-Africa trade. They
all big up their connections and expertise. Zambia’s Samuel Maimbo,
coming from the World Bank, stands out for his global experience
and has bold plans for tackling the continent’s stubborn trade
obstacles. He is also determined to woo back the Americans by

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proving Africa’s worth. Mauritania’s Sidi Ould Tah has the bonus of
coming from the Arab Bank, given the growing appetite for new
partners, especially in the Middle East.

They may all claim to want more intra-Africa collaboration but the
divisiveness of the race, even within subregions, shows how hard it
is to build a continental consensus. South Africa, with one of the
biggest vote shares has its own runner, Swazi Tshabalala, instead of
joining the rest of the southern bloc to back Mr Maimbo. Ms
Tshabalala is the only woman on the ballot and has served as the
bank’s vice-president. France appears to be backing Mr Tah from
Mauritania. This means that Senegal, whose relationship with France
is fractious, has put forward its own candidate, a former economic
minister, Amadou Hott. He is backed by Nigeria, which has the
largest vote share in Africa, at 9%. A former finance minister of
Chad is running too.

Non-African donors to the bank wield special importance and a

combined 41% vote share, complicating the politics even more. Rich
non-African economies are key to maintaining the bank’s AAA rating.
Despite Mr Trump’s announcement, that still includes America, which
was pivotal in lobbying for Mr Adesina’s Rwandan predecessor in
2005. Within the region, votes are proportional to each country’s
capital contributions. The winning candidate needs at least half of
the total vote and also half of the African vote.

Ultimately the race is about politics, not policy. Key states like Egypt
and Nigeria are banking on whom they will get the most cash out of
(and who will demand the least in return). The bid for the job will be
over soon. The bid for more funds will be a longer, harder fight.■

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Putting the white in White House

Cyril Ramaphosa keeps his

cool with Donald Trump
The episode underlined Donald Trump’s warped views of South
Africa
5月 22, 2025 03:17 上午

CYRIL RAMAPHOSA, the South African president, went to the Oval

Office to salvage his country’s economic ties with America. But he
was ambushed by his host, who dimmed the lights to show videos
about what he has falsely called a “genocide” against white farmers.
Mr Ramaphosa kept his cool. But the episode underlined Donald
Trump’s warped views of South Africa—and how hard it will be to
change them. The Trump administration has cut aid to Africa’s
largest economy and seems set to cancel the preferential trade

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terms enjoyed by South Africa (and many other countries in the
continent). It has also offered asylum to white South Africans; 59
have so far been granted refugee status.■

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Gaza on the brink again

Israel says it is unleashing an

“unprecedented attack”
More war beckons, as Donald Trump freezes out Binyamin
Netanyahu
5月 22, 2025 04:56 上午 | JERUSALEM

IN A CAREER of many crises Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime

minister, faces a defining moment. The path he chooses may alter
Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians and America, its closest
ally. One route involves reinvading Gaza to try to eradicate Hamas,
which the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) are poised to do. That would
cause more casualties, and further damage Mr Netanyahu’s relations
with America and the Gulf states. The other path would involve a
truce that could topple Mr Netanyahu’s government but repair

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Israel’s influence in the White House at a time when Mr Trump is
reinventing American policy towards the Gulf, Syria and Iran. The
implications of that shift could last decades.

The odds of the first path, reinvasion, are now dangerously high. On
May 19th Mr Netanyahu said the IDF would be “taking control of all
of Gaza”. His finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, a leader of one of
the coalition’s far-right parties, went even further. “We are
destroying what is still left of the strip, simply because everything
there is one big city of terror,” he said.

Read all our coverage of the war in the Middle East

The IDF has warned Gazans to leave Khan Younis, a key city, ahead
of an “unprecedented attack”. Israel hopes a final surge will
eradicate what remains of Hamas. On May 13th a strike may have
killed Muhammad Sinwar, one of its last senior commanders. The
humanitarian cost is likely to be staggering. Since the collapse of a
ceasefire on March 18th, perhaps 5,000 Gazans have been killed,
taking the total to over 50,000, including combatants. Hunger is
widespread. In preparation for a ground attack the IDF has been
conducting over 100 strikes a day.

The Trump administration appears to have granted Israel licence to

act, but Mr Netanyahu himself appears not to have its support. Steve
Witkoff, Mr Trump’s envoy, is said to have privately urged Mr
Netanyahu to return to a deal. J.D. Vance, the American vice-
president, was planning to go to Israel this week but has cancelled
his visit, apparently because he did not want to appear to endorse
Israel’s latest military expansion. Mr Trump and those close to him
are refraining from openly criticising Israel’s government. The
president has repeatedly said he would like to see the war end, for
the hostages to be freed and for food to be let into Gaza. In public
he has put the onus on Hamas. But the new distance between
America and Israel may be widened still more if Israel reinvades
Gaza.

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Mr Netanyahu was blindsided by America’s decision to embark on
talks with Iran on a nuclear deal. Likewise Mr Trump’s
announcement that America had agreed to end its bombing
campaign of the Houthis in Yemen, despite their continuing missile
attacks on Israel, caught the prime minister unawares. Israel was
conspicuously absent from the president’s itinerary during his Middle
East tour. Saudi Arabia was meant to be the next Arab country to
sign Mr Trump’s Abraham accords by normalising its ties with Israel,
but Mr Trump has accepted that this will not happen until the war in
Gaza is over. Mr Trump met Syria’s new president, Ahmed al-Sharaa,
and announced that he was lifting American sanctions on Syria, a
step Israel had argued against. For Israel, having a free rein in Gaza
seems to have come with a striking loss of influence.

Is the other path, a new truce, still possible? “Our operation in Gaza
is staged so at any moment we can pull back if there’s a ceasefire,”
says an Israeli general. Diplomacy may not be dead. American and
Qatari diplomats are pressing Israel’s and Hamas’s teams in Doha to
reach a new deal. Hamas has freed an American-Israeli soldier. Israel
has allowed in a trickle of supplies to be distributed by aid groups,
despite its claims they let Hamas steal them.

The probable death of Mr Sinwar may also help bring a ceasefire.

With another hardliner out of the way, Hamas’s more pragmatic
political leaders, who are based outside Gaza, may have more
leeway. Still, the main obstacles to peace remain. Israel will
countenance only a temporary truce, during which more of the
hostages would be freed and more aid allowed in. But Hamas has
ruled out any deal unless it permanently ends the war and is balking
at Israel’s demand that it disarm and send its surviving Gazan
leaders into exile.

Pressure is increasing on both sides. A majority of members of the

European Union want the chance to re-examine Israel’s free-trade
agreement with Europe, its main trading partner. Britain has
suspended talks on a new trade deal. A majority of Israelis favour

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ending the war. Yair Golan, the leader of the opposition Democrats
party, warned Israel could become a pariah state: “a sane country
does not wage war against civilians, does not kill babies as a
pastime, and does not engage in mass population displacement.”
And Hamas is under pressure, too, as its people starve. In polls,
around half of Gazans say they would leave given the chances.

Perhaps there will be a last-minute compromise. Without it, the

future looks bleak. Mr Netanyahu says he will end the war only once
he has won “total victory”. The total devastation of Gaza and
isolation for Israel look more likely. ■

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Things fall apart, again

The world’s worst conference

Hell on earth in Dubai-on-the-Med
5月 22, 2025 03:17 上午

“LIBYA BUILD” was billed as the largest construction expo ever to

have been held in north Africa. It lured businessmen from China,
Turkey and Malta. But as they arrived on May 12th, mortars began
falling. Gunmen in trucks fitted with heavy machineguns opened fire,
seizing control of half of the capital, Tripoli. Burnt-out cars littered
the streets. Schools, markets and banks shut their gates. Militiamen
broke into the central bank. And someone stole the gazelles from
Tripoli’s zoo. Britain quietly reversed its travel advice, eased a month
earlier, and cautioned against all trips to Tripoli. Ships in the port
have hurried away. Turkey, a key government ally, has airlifted its
citizens to safety.

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Efforts in Tripoli to reset the country after the overthrow of
Muammar Qaddafi in the Arab spring of 2011 are faltering again.
The stalemate between the internationally recognised government in
the west, led by Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh, and Khalifa Haftar, a
strongman who with his sons rules the east, has been broken. A
conflict that most assumed was dormant has erupted into its worst
violence for five years. Despite his international recognition, Mr
Dbeibeh was always the weakest of the two. Unlike the Haftars, he
was a construction tycoon, not a warlord. His hold on power
depends on an edgy coalition of militias. When they grew restive, he
challenged them. After some initial success, he has failed.

The immediate cause of the strife is money. Mr Dbeibeh and his

family have emptied the coffers of what should be Africa’s oil-richest
state. Falling oil prices mean they have not been replenished. As Mr
Dbeibeh’s pay-offs shrank, the militias grew rebellious and looked for
alternative revenue streams, such as holding hostage the bosses of
utility companies. Fearing his rule was under threat, Mr Dbeibeh’s
guards invited Abdul Ghani al-Kikli, perhaps the most notorious
militia leader, for a meeting on May 12th and killed him. They then
turned on the capital’s biggest gang, the Special Deterrence Force
(Rada), a Salafist force that controls Tripoli’s prime airport and its
most populous neighbourhood. But Rada fought back until it held
half the city.

Most Tripolitanians are fed up. They are tired of a leader whose
greed has punctured the promise of Dubai-on-the-Med. They are
exhausted by the wait for elections, promised for 10 months after
the UN appointed him caretaker prime minister in February 2021.
Many see Mr Dbeibah as one of the fulul, or remnants of the Qaddafi
regime. After a ceasefire welcomed by the UN on May 14th,
thousands of protesters poured into the streets, echoing the same
demands that they often made against the Qaddafis in 2011: an end
to the regime, elections and a reunification of east and west.

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The Haftars are weighing their chances of exploiting discontent in
the west. They already control the parliament in the east, most
oilfields and some 80% of the country (see map). Their bloody siege
of the capital failed in 2020, but they have since wooed allies in the
hope of a comeback. Their supporters in Zawiya and Zintan are said
to be on the move. And there are reports of a mobilisation at Sirte in

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the centre and Ghadames on the Algerian border, perhaps to distract
armed groups who hitherto sided with Mr Dbeibeh. At a session of
parliament on May 19th in Benghazi, Libya’s second city and the
Haftars’ stronghold, representatives declared Mr Dbeibeh
“illegitimate” and proposed replacements. Fearful that a reckoning
looms, some of Mr Dbeibeh’s ministers have resigned.

The Libyan prime minister is said to have sent his family to London,
but he is clinging to office. Desperate to appear in control, he has
summoned henchmen from his hometown of Misrata to secure the
streets. They are said to have shot protesters. With the capital’s
main airport still under Rada’s control, he has reopened Tripoli’s
mothballed international airport for the first time in years. He vows
to turn Mr Kikli’s Tripoli barracks into a park and rid the capital of its
remaining militias, or, as he calls them, “blackmailers, criminals” and
“sharks”. But without them, his hold could grow even more fragile.
Libyans and foreign diplomats have begun to speak of his rule in the
past tense. At least with the airport reopened he has a way to
escape. ■

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Donald Trump’s sanctions gift to Syria

One happy Damascus

But the technicalities of easing sanctions will prove tricky
5月 22, 2025 03:17 上午 | DAMASCUS AND DUBAI

EVEN THE loudest advocates for Syria were shocked when President
Donald Trump announced he would lift sanctions on Syria earlier this
month. Ahmed al-Sharaa, Syria’s jihadist-turned-president, was a
“good young attractive guy” with a “very strong past”, Mr Trump told
reporters on Air Force One. A policy shift that some in Syria feared
would take ages—if it took place at all—happened overnight.

The unexpected news lit up Damascus, the capital. Syrians have

long struggled under one of the harshest sanctions regimes ever put
in place. The euphoria that followed the ousting of the dictator,
Bashar al-Assad, in December had ebbed months ago. Now

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optimism is back. Western banking apps began to flicker to life
within hours of the announcement. DP World, an Emirati operator,
unveiled an $800m deal to run the port of Tartus. “My phone rang
continuously for 48 hours,” says a prominent Syrian banker.

Many are keen to do business in Syria. Yet lifting sanctions may be

neither swift nor smooth. Mr Trump seems untroubled by the nitty-
gritty of doing so. “I think the announcement took quite a few
people by surprise in the administration…It’s still a work in progress,”
says a congressional aide in Washington, DC. The Caesar Act is a
key part of the sanctions edifice, a pile of punitive measures against
the Assad regime. Mr Trump has pledged 180-day suspensions for
provisions in the act. State-backed Gulf firms and private capital in
the region may take heart, but it will not reassure Western
institutions, which are inclined to be more cautious.

The president could scrap at least nine sanctions-related executive

orders. So far, he has not. Meanwhile, a dysfunctional Congress will
struggle to repeal Caesar provisions before next year—probably as a
footnote in a must-pass bill, such as the defence budget. Marco
Rubio, the secretary of state, has urged Congress to act, warning
that waivers alone “are not going to be enough to attract foreign
investment”. Meanwhile, hawks in Mr Trump’s administration who
remain unconvinced by Mr Sharaa’s Damascene conversion from
extremism may try to frustrate relief moves, some in Washington
predict.

Reconstruction and trade will almost certainly be led by the Middle

East. Commercial heavyweights in the Gulf are revving up for a
return after nearly 14 years of war. Spinneys, a regional supermarket
chain, is scouting sites; Zain, a Kuwaiti telecoms giant, has come in;
and Saudi private capital is eyeing Syria’s derelict cement plants. “An
economic boom is inevitable,” says a big car importer. Only weeks
ago few would have dared such optimism. The telecoms minister is
pushing for 5G. Plans are afoot to build a metro in Damascus and

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overhaul water and power infrastructure. The new Syria is not short
on ambition.

Much hinges on money. Syria’s readmission to SWIFT, the world’s

financial messaging network, is deemed crucial. Among finance
types in Damascus, the consensus is that connectivity will resume
within weeks, easing transfers and allowing Syrians around the world
to send billions of dollars in remittances home. But without greater
clarity, and further guidance from their governments, Western
institutions will remain wary. “Syria’s financial system is a black box
that nobody understands,” says Stephen Fallon, a banking and
sanctions expert. “If I run a Western bank and I accidentally receive
funds from terrorists, it’s me the American regulators will come
after.” ■

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We’re out of there

Many of Syria’s diaspora are

not yet ready to go home
But they are encouraged by the lifting of sanctions
5月 22, 2025 11:30 上午

Take me home to the place I belong

“I WILL SELL all of this gold and move back to Syria by the spring,”
Ousama Sabbagh enthused in his jewellery shop in a majority-Syrian
district in the Turkish city of Bursa, south of Istanbul. That was five
months ago. Today his shop looks little different than it did then. Mr
Sabbagh now wants to move in September, cheered by President
Donald Trump’s recent pledge to lift America’s sanctions against
Syria. That decision has given new hope to Syrians abroad, says Dr
Haytham Alhamwi of the Syrian British Consortium, a lobby. Business

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folk in the diaspora think sanctions relief and international aid are
vital for rebuilding the country and making it safe.

More than 6m Syrians were living abroad when Bashar al-Assad was
toppled in December. Since then, over half a million have moved
back, says the UN. Four-fifths of the rest say they want to return
one day. But many know that after almost 14 years of devastating
civil war the move home will not be easy.

For one thing, essentials like housing, clean water and electricity are
patchy; according to a UN poll of refugees in the diaspora, 81% of
homeowners who fled abroad say their houses are no longer
habitable. Many schools and hospitals are in ruins. This puts off
families with children or the elderly.

Another deterrent is a shortage of jobs. At least a quarter of Syrians

back home lack work. Doctors, teachers and academics doubt they
will find employment. Announcements about sanctions relief have
been encouraging but a favourable climate for investment is still
some way off.

Meanwhile, reports of theft and intimidation by armed groups,

especially in Aleppo, once Syria’s commercial hub, are scaring off the
diaspora. Until a modicum of law enforcement and justice is
established, non-Sunni minorities, especially the Alawites, who were
favoured by the Assad ruling family, fear retribution if they return.

Wealthier individuals with foreign passports have been going to and

fro to rebuild homes or set up businesses. Lifting sanctions may
prompt bigger flows of remittances. But although some Gulf firms
might be ready to sweep in, for some Syrians abroad returning is an
all-or-nothing decision. By going to Syria they may risk losing their
right to stay as refugees in countries such as Britain.■

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Europe
Poland’s election will cement or ruin its
standing in Europe
Populists at the gates :: Can Donald Tusk and Rafal Trzaskowski hold back the hard
right?

MAGA misses the mark in Romania

European elections :: A liberal wins the presidential race

Donald Trump dashes any hope that he will

get tough with Russia
After the call :: He has nothing but kind words for Vladimir Putin

American threats push Greenland closer to

Denmark
Independence on pause :: The fear of invasion is undermining the anti-colonial
movement

Europe’s mayors are islands of liberalism in

a sea of populists
Charlemagne :: City bosses are the functioning bits of increasingly dysfunctional
polities

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Populists at the gates

Poland’s election will cement

or ruin its standing in Europe
Can Donald Tusk and Rafal Trzaskowski hold back the hard right?
5月 22, 2025 05:40 上午 | WARSAW

THE CHEERS at Rafal Trzaskowski’s election party on May 18th

sounded unconvincing. So was his margin of victory. The liberal
mayor of Warsaw came away with 31.4% of the vote in the first
round of Poland’s presidential election, compared with 29.5% for his
main rival, Karol Nawrocki, the candidate of the nationalist Law and
Justice (PiS) party. Mr Trzaskowski, backed by Poland’s prime
minister, Donald Tusk, and his centrist Civic Coalition (KO), had long
been the front-runner. Ahead of the run-off, scheduled for June 1st,
the tables have turned.

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The reason is the strong showing by not just Mr Nawrocki but the
entire hard right. Slawomir Mentzen of Konfederacja, a MAGA-ish
libertarian party, took 14.8% of the vote. Grzegorz Braun, an open
antisemite, got a scary 6.3%. Polish liberals are worried. Mr Tusk
needs Mr Trzaskowski to win to continue rolling back the state
takeover that PiS undertook while in power from 2015-23. But rather
than breaking Europe’s populist wave, Mr Trzaskowski may end up
being swallowed by it.

How Poland can keep its place at the heart of Europe·

The ignored stockmarket superstar
Why so much is riding on Poland’s presidential elections

The election comes as Poland is stepping into the international

limelight. The war in Ukraine has shifted the continent’s centre of
gravity to the east. Poland is the region’s heavyweight, an
economically thriving country of 37m. Its position in Europe is at its
strongest in centuries, says Adam Szlapka, the country’s minister for
the European Union. The question is whether it can take advantage
of it.

Poland’s new confidence starts with its economy. Real GDP per
person has risen almost uninterruptedly for over three decades.
Adjusted for purchasing power, it was 3.1 times as high in 2024 as in
1995, compared with 1.5 for the EU as a whole. Unemployment is
under 3%, according to Eurostat’s seasonally-adjusted figures.
Poland boasts the EU’s tallest building (and its fastest-rising housing
prices). Hundreds of billions of euros in EU aid have helped bring
roads, agriculture and health care up to European standards. Its
infrastructure contrasts with the deterioration in its western
neighbour: Polish trains are now more punctual than German ones.

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Prosperity has brought fast-rising tax revenues. Where other
European governments are fiscally constrained, Poland’s has
freedom to act. A decade-old universal child-benefit programme
pays 800 zlotys ($212) per month per child. Defence spending leapt
from 2% of GDP in 2019 to 4.7% this year, and will exceed 5% in
2026. Some strains are showing: the budget deficit hit 6.6% of GDP
last year, but public debt is a manageable 55% of GDP, though
growing.

Until recently, Poland punched below its weight diplomatically. That

worsened under PiS-led governments. PiS’s leaders picked fights
with Germany and aligned Poland with Viktor Orban, Hungary’s
autocratic leader. They also imitated Mr Orban’s takeover of the
public media and the courts, thus clashing with the EU, whose aid
was blocked for years.

Things began to shift with the war in Ukraine. Within Europe, Poland
enjoyed an “I told you so” moment, having long warned complacent
Westerners about Russia. Meanwhile, its role as the main logistical
partner for American military aid to Ukraine strengthened the
transatlantic relationship. The return to power in 2023 of Mr Tusk, a
former president of the European Council, patched up relations with
the EU. A trip to Kyiv this month by Mr Tusk and the leaders of
Britain, France and Germany showcased Poland’s central role.

It’s not over

The stumbling block remains politics at home. The outgoing

president, Andrzej Duda, is aligned with PiS, and has used his veto
to stymie Mr Tusk’s agenda—especially over restoring the rule of law.
On taking power in 2015, PiS packed the constitutional court and
seized control of the body that appoints judges. European courts say
judges appointed under PiS are therefore illegitimate. Mr Tusk’s
government promised the EU it would fix the problem as a condition
for restoring aid. But Mr Duda blocked a bill to vet the new judges.

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Where Polish liberals see an effort to restore the rule of law, backers
of PiS see tit-for-tat state capture. Under Mr Tusk “democracy can be
openly violated for supposedly pro-democratic goals,” says Piotr
Glinski, a former deputy prime minister under PiS. Some such claims
have merit. The government stretched constitutional bounds to fire
PiS’s propaganda chiefs at the state broadcaster. It now leans the
other way, though less blatantly. But most of the complaints seem
unfounded and political. The head of the PiS-aligned constitutional
court is investigating what he calls a “coup d’état”, despite lacking
any authority to launch investigations. As for the judges, Adam
Bodnar, the justice minister, says he is duty-bound to restore EU
standards. He rattles off a list of prosecutions of former PiS officials
for self-enrichment and abuse of office: “Should we forget about
those cases?”

Polls show frustration. A victory by Mr Trzaskowski would let Mr Tusk

push ahead. But on some issues his problem is division in his own
coalition, which includes the progressive New Left, the centrist
Poland 2050 and the conservative agrarian Polish People’s Party
(PSL). Liberals want the new government to relax PiS’s draconian
anti-abortion laws, but face opposition, mostly from PSL. Ukraine
policy, too, has become hostage to electoral concerns. Mr Tusk has
opposed sending peacekeepers in the event of a truce, and has
conditioned Ukraine’s EU membership on its handling of historical
disputes over massacres of Poles by Ukrainian partisans during the
second world war. Mr Trzaskowski has pledged to restrict benefits for
some Ukrainian refugees. “They’ve become more PiS than PiS,”
snipes Jacek Czaputowicz, a former foreign minister under PiS. A
victory by Mr Trzaskowski would give Mr Tusk room for manoeuvre,
says Piotr Buras of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

The two contenders both back Ukraine against Russia and the
beefing up of Poland’s defences. But Mr Trzaskowski is much closer
to Brussels than to MAGA-world. Mr Nawrocki has positioned himself
as a Trump whisperer. This paid off in early May, when the American
president hosted him at the White House. If Mr Nawrocki wins, Mr

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Trump will probably do business with him rather than with Mr Tusk,
widening the chasm between the government and the presidency.

But the stakes are highest at home. As president, Mr Nawrocki

would seek to undermine the coalition at every step, so as to
position PiS for parliamentary elections scheduled for 2027—or to
bring down the government even earlier. Some of Mr Tusk’s
conservative allies might defect. A new hard-right government would
mean a ruthless round of score-settling.

On June 1st much will depend on Mr Mentzen’s mostly young

electorate. Mr Nawrocki will not get all of them. They like free
markets; PiS is statist. Mr Trzaskowski’s supporters hope leftists and
centrists will be galvanised by the threat of PiS’s return. But the
Warsaw mayor is getting contradictory advice: some urge him to be
true to himself and show independence from Mr Tusk, while others
want him to pander to conservatives.

Messrs Trzaskowski and Nawrocki are now battling for voters, more
than half the electorate, who backed neither of them. The two big-
party candidates’ cumulative share of the vote in the first round was
lower than in any presidential election since the 1990s. The rise of
Konfederacja and Mr Braun may augur the end of an era that has
characterised Polish politics for 20 years, though not in the way
some had hoped. “We thought the end of our duopoly would yield a
really nice centre,” says a senior government official. Instead, it has
yielded a far right poised to play kingmaker. ■

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European elections

MAGA misses the mark in

Romania
A liberal wins the presidential race
5月 22, 2025 03:17 上午

NICUSOR DAN’S victory in Romania’s presidential election on May

18th afforded the country’s liberals a rare moment of joy. Mr Dan,
the mayor of Bucharest, is a French-trained mathematician known
for fighting corruption. His rival, George Simion, a MAGA-friendly
nationalist, had been favoured to win after taking 41% of the vote in
the election’s first round to Mr Dan’s 21%. Mr Simion had cosied up
to Hungary’s Viktor Orban; denounced Ursula von der Leyen,
president of the European Commission; and pledged to end aid to

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Ukraine. Romania seemed poised to join the club of countries that
are driving a populist wedge into the European Union.

Yet in the two weeks between the first and second rounds, the
Bucharest mayor ran the better campaign. He was widely agreed to
have won the sole head-to-head debate, demanding that Mr Simion,
who had vaguely promised to cut half a million state employees,
explain whom he would fire. Mr Simion unwisely skipped several
other debates. Romania’s diaspora of over 4m citizens (compared
with 19m inside the country), which overwhelmingly backed Mr
Simion in the first round, split more evenly in the second. Overall
turnout hit a record for a presidential election. The second round’s
new voters favoured Mr Dan, who won by a solid 54% to 46%.

That will make a huge difference. Since the previous prime minister
resigned after Mr Simion’s first-round victory, the new president gets
to choose a new one. Had Mr Simion won, his hard-right Alliance for
the Union of Romanians (AUR) would have formed a government.
Instead, whoever Mr Dan picks will form a coalition including the
Save Romania Union (USR), an anti-corruption party he once
headed, and the centre-right National Liberals (PNL), one of two
main parties of power. The other, the centre-left Social Democrats
(PSD), could join too.

The presence in government of one or both of the big parties will

complicate one of Mr Dan’s tasks: convincing Romanians that he
does not represent more of the same. Both Mr Simion and Mr Dan
were seen as anti-system candidates, appealing to citizens
exhausted by corruption. In the 2010s Romania carried out one of
Europe’s most aggressive anti-corruption campaigns, jailing
thousands of officials. But by the time of the pandemic the
momentum had run out; investigations were weaponised to
undermine political opponents. Since 2021 the PNL and PSD have
run the country in grand coalitions that were seen as denying voters
a choice.

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That no presidential candidate from either party made it into the
second round showed how deep the disaffection runs. Indeed, that
was clear after Romania’s initial attempt to choose a president last
November. The country’s constitutional court annulled that election
after it was unexpectedly won by Calin Georgescu, an eccentric far-
right conspiracy theorist. Mr Georgescu had implausibly declared
zero campaign expenditures, and there was evidence of social-media
manipulation; some alleged Russia was involved.

The cancellation undermined many Romanians’ trust in the electoral

system. Mr Simion has now undermined it further. After first
accepting Mr Dan’s win, he reversed himself on May 20th, alleging
interference by France and Moldova. Mr Simion has long campaigned
for Romania to absorb Moldova, where most citizens speak
Romanian, and is banned from that country as a result, but its
alleged interference was vague. As for the other charge, Pavel
Durov, the founder of Telegram, a social-media app, stated that a
French intelligence official had asked him to suppress some
messaging that favoured Mr Simion. He said he had refused, which
seemed to render interference on that platform moot. Romania’s
electoral authority quickly waved off Mr Simion’s challenge.

The new government will face a harsh economic picture. Romania’s

budget deficit was the highest in the EU last year, at 9% of GDP.
Inflation is at 5.1%, driven up by the previous government, which
raised pensions and state salaries in failed efforts to court popularity.
The country’s credit rating is BBB-, just above junk status. To keep it
from falling further the government will need to cut spending and
raise taxes.

Liberals across Europe are now looking to Romania for lessons on

how to beat populists. But Mr Simion made gratuitous errors. His
courting of Mr Orban, aimed at winning over ethnic Hungarians, was
quixotic: he has a firm reputation as an anti-Hungarian chauvinist.
Mr Orban’s endorsement prompted a denunciation from Romania’s
ethnic-Hungarian party, and probably did more harm than good.

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Mr Dan’s powers as president are limited. He is already trying to
broker a deal to cut the budget deficit, and will do what he can to
reinvigorate the fight against corruption. “He is extremely
competent,” says Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, a corruption expert at Luiss
University in Rome who has worked with him. But he will have his
work cut out for him. ■

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After the call

Donald Trump dashes any

hope that he will get tough
with Russia
He has nothing but kind words for Vladimir Putin
5月 22, 2025 05:56 上午 | KYIV, VASYLKIV AND WASHINGTON, DC

IN THE HOURS before Donald Trump picked up the phone on May

19th to speak to Vladimir Putin, European diplomats believed that
they were inching closer to alignment with the Americans on
Ukraine. The American president had advertised the call as “turkey
time”, a last-chance call for the Kremlin to end the war or face pain
in the form of tough new sanctions. By the time the two-hour call
ended, and European leaders joined a debrief with Mr Trump, it

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became clear that no threat had been issued to the Russian leader.
Mr Trump hinted he would instead simply walk away from the
negotiating process if he could not get the two sides to agree
quickly, which in the absence of new pressure now appears likely. “I
think something’s going to happen,” Mr Trump told reporters, though
without providing a shred of justification for this optimism. “And if it
doesn’t, I’ll just back away and they’re going to have to keep going.”

Many close to Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, have

long believed that Mr Trump would be difficult to win over. But ever
since the disastrous first February meeting in the Oval office, they
have adopted a strategy of placating Mr Trump, while moving strictly
in lockstep with European advisers. They have made several
concessions in pursuing the goal of a ceasefire followed by
meaningful negotiations. This includes dropping their demands for
security guarantees before talks could start; imposing no conditions
on a suggested ceasefire; signing a minerals and economic
partnership deal; and flying to Turkey for talks that were less talks
than a Russian declaration of a “forever war”.

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine war

The call appeared to vindicate the most sceptical in Mr Zelensky’s

team. Despite promises to act tough, Mr Trump smothered Mr Putin
with flattery and affection. “No one wanted to put down the receiver
first,” is how one Kremlin adviser, Yury Ushakov, described an
exchange that was light on detail and heavy on pledges of future
economic co-operation. Mr Trump insisted that his call had achieved
a new Russian agreement to work on a “memorandum” for peace,
and on “immediate” talks. There was also the promise of new
mediation by the Vatican. “Maybe that will be helpful. There’s lots of
bitterness,” said Mr Trump. But a source close to Mr Zelensky says
that Mr Trump sounded more as though he was crafting an exit
strategy after understanding that he would struggle to achieve a
breakthrough.

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The Vatican has already confirmed that it is ready to host any new
negotiation. A working group has been established with the
Ukrainians, and there is an offer to do the same with the Russians.
Mr Putin may well be attracted by the opportunity to validate himself

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by talking peace in Europe even while charges of war crimes hang
over him. But he must surely know there is a downside to presenting
heavily belligerent policies in such a holy setting. At the time of
printing, the Russians had not agreed to the venue, or to anything
as straightforward as a date or a format.

Describing Mr Trump’s U-turn on sanctions as a “bump in a very bad

road”, one Western diplomat insisted that Mr Trump had yet to come
to a final decision about his future involvement. What an exit could
mean in practice is also hard to say: temporary or permanent; a
partial exit or a full betrayal? Many other demands make calls upon
Mr Trump’s time: the various crises in the Middle East, his “big
beautiful” tax-cuts bill and his continuing tariff battles with much of
the world. Prioritising these things does not necessarily mean he will
cut off the flow of intelligence to Ukraine, or halt the supply of
military equipment that is scheduled to keep flowing until at least
the summer.

Ukraine’s backers hope Mr Trump may once again defy expectations.

Perhaps in “withdrawing” from the process, he will allow Congress to
vote through a sanctions package that would target Russian energy
exports by hitting those who buy them with tariffs of up to 500%.
Insiders say that the package already has enough signatures in the
Senate to be passed; but it would still require Mr Trump’s approval.
It is not impossible. But it is also hard to imagine it from a man who,
whenever faced with Russian intransigence, has so far responded by
tightening the screws on Ukraine. ■

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Independence on pause

American threats push

Greenland closer to Denmark
The fear of invasion is undermining the anti-colonial movement
5月 22, 2025 05:57 上午

AMERICAN SPOOKS boast formidable intelligence-gathering tools.

On any given day they might be hoovering up the phone records of
suspected terrorists or tracking Russian troops in Ukraine. These
days, however, spies can be found snooping on a target much closer
to home: Greenland. According to a recent report in the Wall Street
Journal, the Trump administration directed its intelligence agencies,
including the CIA and National Security Agency, to step up
surveillance of Greenland’s independence movement and identify
locals sympathetic to American designs on the Arctic island.

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It is the latest twist in President Donald Trump’s stated desire to buy
or conquer the self-governing territory of 56,000 people, which is
part of the kingdom of Denmark. A visit in March by the vice-
president, J.D. Vance, in which he claimed Denmark had “not done a
good job by the people of Greenland”, had already upped the ante.
But allegations of spying have sparked widespread outrage among
Greenlanders and Danes. “Espionage against an ally and partner [is]
completely unacceptable” thundered Jens-Frederik Nielsen,
Greenland’s prime minister. The Danish government swiftly
summoned America’s ambassador for a dressing-down. Lawmakers
are considering closing the American consulate in Nuuk, the capital.

Mr Trump’s initial interest in Greenland, and the ensuing media

frenzy, helped rekindle Greenland’s independence debate. But his
continued predations now seem to be having the opposite effect:
Greenland and Denmark are closing ranks. Elections to Greenland’s
31-member parliament in March handed the opposition Democrats,
who have favoured closer ties with Denmark and a slower path to
independence, a plurality. The new governing coalition stated it
would “tread carefully” with regards to independence (read: not any
time soon).

Relations between Greenland and Denmark are growing noticeably

warmer. On a visit to Copenhagen in late April, Mr Nielsen agreed
with Mette Frederiksen, Denmark’s prime minister, to band together
amidst “disrespectful” American threats. Mr Nielsen flew back to
Greenland alongside the Danish king, Frederik X, for a visit designed
to project solidarity. Donning a warm coat emblazoned with the
Danish and Greenlandic flags, the king met hundreds of locals over
coffee at Nuuk’s cultural centre. The Danish government has agreed
to boost its puny spending on Arctic defence. Pipaluk Lynge, the
head of the Greenland parliament’s foreign-affairs committee,
welcomed co-operation with Denmark to head off American threats.
“We can’t get through this without them.”

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Backers of independence sense a loss of momentum. Kuno Fencker,
a fire-brand MP, bemoans the dwindling enthusiasm. “Greenlanders
have become very scared about an American invasion,” he sighs,
blaming the Danish and international press for whipping up
paranoia. The island’s usually sedate politics have grown more
venomous, too. Mr Fencker, who travelled to Mr Trump’s
inauguration in January, filed a defamation suit against Aaja
Chemnitz, a fellow Greenlander in the Danish parliament, after she
labelled his jaunt to Washington a threat to the national interest.

For now, Mr Trump’s repeated threats have papered over some

Greenlanders’ frustrations with the legacy of Danish colonial rule.
But old wounds run deep. One neuralgic issue remains the 4,500
Inuit girls and women who were forcibly fitted with contraceptive
coils by Danish doctors during the 1960s and 1970s. Many
Greenlanders argue it constituted a form of genocide. The Danish
government is yet to issue an official apology. Results of a joint
investigation are due in September, which could yet engender
another surge in support for independence. “We lost a battle,”
concedes Mr Fencker. “But the war is not over.” ■

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Charlemagne

Europe’s mayors are islands

of liberalism in a sea of
populists
City bosses are the functioning bits of increasingly dysfunctional
polities
5月 22, 2025 03:17 上午

EVERY ELECTION in Europe these days seems to pit a moderate

politician advocating mostly sensible ideas against a rabble-rousing
populist with a bombastic dislike of migrants, gays and the European
Union. The centrist usually wins, but the margins are dwindling. Is
Europe thus destined to drift into reactionary dysfunction, one
electoral setback at a time? Not so fast. Powerful as they may seem,

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Europe’s firebrand nationalists—even when they seize high office—
are merely the meat in a liberal sandwich. Above them are EU
wallahs, always on hand to police budget deficits and adhesion to
the rule of law. Below the populists is a layer of pragmatic politicos
who keep the day-to-day machinery of government on the road (and
the roads free of potholes). Europe’s mayors, particularly those of
big cities, are the unsung moderating force of the continent’s
politics. Free of patriotic bombast and focused on getting buses
running on time, they are the bulwark of moderate governance in a
continent that needs it badly.

This quiet layer of mayoral technocracy has seen rapid promotions of

late. On May 18th Nicusor Dan, the centrist mayor of Bucharest,
unexpectedly trounced George Simion to win the presidency of
Romania. The campaign highlighted their different approaches to
government. The hard-right Mr Simion pontificated on foreign policy,
boasted of being “almost perfectly aligned ideologically with the
MAGA movement” and spent part of the final week of his campaign
in Brussels, a place not actually in Romania. In contrast Mr Dan once
admitted that what really kept him up at night was the traffic in the
capital. Voters plumped for the traffic guy. Another centrist mayor
may be propelled to higher office on June 1st when Rafal
Trzaskowski, the centrist Warsaw mayor who narrowly won the first
round last week, faces off against a candidate backed by the illiberal
Law and Justice party.

At confabs in Brussels Mr Dan will meet fellow EU leaders familiar

with cycle lanes, waste-water treatment and other unglamorous bits
of the state. Bart De Wever, Belgium’s newish prime minister, was
himself once perceived as a hard-right firebrand (his cause is the
independence of Dutch-speaking Flanders), so much so that political
rivals refused to include his party in ruling coalitions. A 12-year stint
as mayor of Antwerp from 2013 was just the thing to show the
electorate he was capable of more than soundbites. Giorgia Meloni
once ran for mayor of Rome before settling for the Italian
premiership; Ulf Kristersson, prime minister of Sweden, is an

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erstwhile vice-mayor of Stockholm. Meetings of EU leaders are
chaired by António Costa, the president of the European Council who
ran Lisbon for eight years before becoming Portugal’s prime minister.

Across Europe mayors are often cut from a different political cloth to
the rest of the governing class. Lefties do notably well locally even
when their parties are out of favour nationally—perhaps
unsurprisingly, given the cosmopolitan types who choose to make
cities their home. Parties of the hard right, which lack the
organisational nous to put up candidates for dull city jobs, are
notably absent. The municipal discourse thus has a gentler feel to it
(at least until the building of cycle lanes is discussed). Amsterdam’s
mayor, Femke Halsema, who is appointed by central government
rather than elected, is a progressive woman in a Dutch political
system dominated by progressive-bashing men. Socialists and their
left-leaning allies have been routed in France, losing out on all the
top jobs at national level—but they still run Paris, Marseille and most
other big French cities. Ms Meloni and her right-wing acolytes
dominate Italian politics, but the mayors of Rome and Milan come
from the moribund left. (The same is true in America, where most
big cities are run by Democrats.)

In central Europe, the spiritual home of continental illiberalism, local

pols stand proudly as open-minded counterweights to majoritarian
regimes. Fed up with the region being associated with the likes of
Viktor Orban, the limelight-hogging Hungarian prime minister, the
mayors of Prague, Bratislava, Warsaw and Budapest in 2019 set up a
“Pact of Free Cities” where dynamic, hipsterish mayors showed
another way was possible. The quartet travelled to Kyiv together to
support Ukraine when some of their national leaders refused to do
so. Another member of the club might have been Istanbul, whose
mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu, proved such a threat to Turkey’s president,
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, that he was simply put in prison. The Pact
now includes 32 European cities focused on “protecting democracy
and open society”, not to mention sharing tips on handling thorny
zoning issues.

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From city council to European Council

Town halls are obvious places to find capable managers.

Demagogues rise by making promises; mayors stay in power by
keeping them. Not all politicians who have thrived as mayor do well
on the national stage. Olaf Scholz will be remembered more fondly
for his seven years as mayor of Hamburg than for his three as
German chancellor. Anne Hidalgo, now in her second decade as
mayor of Paris, managed a risible 1.8% of the vote in her bid for the
French presidency in 2022, behind no fewer than nine other
candidates.

Cities may seem easy to manage in comparison to countries. Often

capitals are the richest part of the nation. Delivering public services
is easier in densely populated places with a fat tax-base. But
shortcomings are also easier to spot. Managerial ineptitude that
exposes the shortcomings of populist national leaders can take years
to emerge: underfunded public services degrade only slowly, and
few voters follow the intricacies of foreign policy. In contrast,
everyone swiftly notices when potholes go unfilled and buses run
late. Blowhard politicians often talk about taking back control. Voters
should pay more attention to those with a good record of taking care
of the rubbish bins. ■

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Britain
The UK-EU deal is just a start
Keir Starmer’s EU reset :: The process of rejigging the relationship will be a long one

Britain has sacrificed its fishermen again

Fishing rights :: How wise

The improbable rise of chessboxing

Queen’s gambit, plus a punch :: A contest of mind and body

Does Britain need migrant workers?

Taking back control :: Employers think so

An eccentric set of one-offs has knocked

inflation up in Britain
Deflated hopes :: Troublingly, the public no longer thinks inflation will keep falling

London has become a cycling city

Two wheels good :: It shows how dockless-electric bikes could transform cities

Bring back Boris

Bagehot :: A return of Boris Johnson would provide something for everyone to enjoy

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Keir Starmer’s EU reset

The UK-EU deal is just a start

The process of rejigging the relationship will be a long one
5月 22, 2025 04:56 上午 | Berlin and London

SIR KEIR STARMER chose the gilt-edged splendour of Lancaster

House in central London to stage the first post-Brexit EU-UK summit
on May 19th. He, Ursula von der Leyen (the European Commission’s
president) and António Costa (the European Council’s president) duly
talked up a historic “reset” of relations. In fact what was agreed
were some relatively small changes to eliminate the worst trade
frictions, plus a new defence deal. But this may presage the start of
longer negotiations that in time may bring the two sides significantly
closer together.

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The defence-and-security agreement matters most, given the
background of Russia’s war in Ukraine and Donald Trump’s demand
that Europe must spend more on its own defence. Britain will now
be able to take part in the EU’s planned €150bn ($169bn) defence
fund (though it will have to pay its own fair share). Both sides have
recognised that rebooting European defence without one of its
strongest powers would not be sensible. The efforts by some
countries to restrict such spending to EU members alone were seen
off.

On trade, the main agreement was for Britain to align with most EU
food standards. That will facilitate trade in food and fish products,
exports of which have suffered since Brexit. It will also reduce
border checks between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which
was already subject to EU standards under the 2023 Windsor
Framework negotiated by Rishi Sunak. As part of the deal, Sir Keir
agreed to extend the current fisheries agreement for 12 years, to
2038. And the two sides are to link their carbon-adjustment
mechanisms and aim for a joint electricity market.

The third component of the deal was to work towards a youth-

mobility (or “youth-experience”) agreement. This should make it
easier for young people to move, study and work across borders.
Britain is to explore how and when it might rejoin the Erasmus+
student-exchange programme. An agreement is to be made to co-
operate in fighting organised crime through data-sharing and
working through Europol, the EU’s police agency. And in a gesture to
please grumpy tourists, Britons are to be allowed to use border e-
gates at most EU airports, reducing annoying queues at passport
control. Like other parts of the deal, the details will take some
months to negotiate: use of e-gates may not happen before the
summer.

Critics from the Conservative Party and Reform UK, amplified by

outrage in parts of the press, were quick to denounce the entire deal
as a betrayal. The Daily Telegraph headlined its report “Kiss goodbye

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to Brexit”. The biggest grumbles were about the fisheries deal, which
was said to mean handing over Britain’s fishing waters to French and
other fishermen for more than a decade. There were also complaints
about Britain choosing to align with EU rules when it has no say in
how they are drawn up, thereby submitting itself to the jurisdiction
of the European Court of Justice. And the youth-experience
agreement was attacked as merely presaging more immigration. The
Tories vowed to reverse all these changes once back in power.

Yet this narrative of Brexit betrayal is absurd. Sir Keir has stuck
firmly to his red lines of not joining the single market or customs
union and not accepting free movement of people. Even after his
“reset”, this is what was once termed a hard (not a soft) Brexit. It is,
for instance, harder than the Brexit deal that Theresa May tried
vainly to get through Parliament in 2019. The betrayal story is also
increasingly out of line with shifting public opinion. A clear majority
of voters now say that Brexit was a mistake, and an even bigger
majority wants closer relations with the EU (this is true even of those
who voted Reform in the last general election).

It is true that Sir Keir has conceded more than he may have wished
on fisheries, prompting the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation to talk of
a “horror show”. Yet there was never much chance of taking back
full control of British waters, not least because British fishermen
export most of what they catch to the EU. As for being a rule-taker
subject to the European Court of Justice, that is the price that any
country wishing to sell into the much larger EU market inevitably has
to pay. After all, the EU takes over 40% of British exports, twice as
much as America and 20 times as much as India (the two other
countries with which Sir Keir has recently struck deals). And a limited
youth-experience deal is a long way from the old system of free
movement of people across Europe.

The agreement has hugely improved the mood music between the
two sides. Bigger EU members have responded not by crowing over
their negotiating triumphs (though France is pleased with the

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extension of fishing rights), but by welcoming the UK back to the
table as a grown-up. The new German government under Friedrich
Merz seems particularly pleased to have Britain back as a partner.
This is clearest in defence and security, in which Britain is now set to
play a significant role. But the food-standards and youth-mobility
agreements are also seen as drawing the UK some way back into the
European club, even as it continues to stand aside from the single
market, the customs union and free movement of people.

In all, given the constraints of his red lines and the EU’s own
principles, Sir Keir has got about as good a deal as he could have
done. It may not have a large economic impact (Sir Keir talks of it
boosting GDP in 2040 by around £9bn, or 0.3%), but it will remove
some of the worst irritations created by Brexit. The EU has remained
determined not to give a country that is outside its single market a
similar degree of access as a full member. The two sides will now
initiate a process of continuous negotiation, overseen by annual
summits with working parties set up to implement any agreements.

Indeed, this recognition that the reset is not a single event but the
start of a process may be what is most significant about the entire
deal. It took almost four years of negotiation before Boris Johnson
was able to sign the trade and co-operation agreement in December
2020. More than four years on, Sir Keir has managed to soften some
of its more egregious features. He is now setting a course for further
lengthy negotiations in future. That is what living alongside the EU
elephant as a smaller party entails. Switzerland has been negotiating
deals with the EU almost continuously for 30 years—and it recently
agreed on yet another treaty that has still to be ratified.■

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Fishing rights

Britain has sacrificed its

fishermen again
How wise
5月 22, 2025 03:17 上午

A tide in the affairs of fishermen

THE DEAL reached by Britain and the European Union on May 19th
says nothing about the manufacture of locks and hinges. Nor does it
say anything about the condiments-and-seasonings industry, or
about carpets and rugs. But it does deal with an industry that, with a
turnover in 2023 of £892m ($1.13bn) according to the Office for
National Statistics, is smaller than those: fishing.

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EU fishing boats will be allowed to operate in British waters until
2038. Catch quotas will be frozen, so British and continental crews
will divide the seas’ bounty roughly as they do at present. To British
fishermen, this looks like a victory for the EU. They wanted Britain to
insist on annual negotiations over access and quotas—something
that would have turned continental fishermen into perpetual
supplicants, since they catch much more fish in British waters than
Britons catch in EU waters.

“Surrender”, spluttered Harriet Cross, a Conservative MP. “Utter

betrayal”, said the Scottish White Fish Association. But Britain’s
fishing industry is so tiny that no responsible government would
privilege its interests over the goal of freer trade overall. Like other
industries, fishing will benefit from the scrapping of checks and other
non-tariff barriers—perhaps even more so, since fish go off while
forms are being filled in. About 70% of British fish exports go to the
EU.

Annual negotiations over fishing rights would probably have been

fraught, especially since the British industry also desires to change
the way that quotas are allocated. Instead of following history and

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precedent, as they do at the moment, Britain and the EU would
consider “zonal attachment”, meaning where the fish live. Good luck
working that out for dozens of species every year. “Fish are difficult
to count. They move around,” says Bryce Stewart of the Marine
Biological Association.

If negotiations between Britain and the EU had ever broken down,

all fishermen would have suffered in the long run. With no
agreement on how many fish ought to be caught, countries would
have been incentivised to haul in far too many, as a tragedy of the
commons unfolded. Something like that has happened to mackerel
in the north-east Atlantic. A once-plentiful (and very tasty) fish is
being over-exploited because of a dispute involving Britain, the EU,
the Faroe Islands, Norway, Iceland and Greenland. Better a stable,
shoddy deal than a fish war. ■

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Queen’s gambit, plus a punch

The improbable rise of

chessboxing
A contest of mind and body
5月 22, 2025 03:17 上午 | Islington

Knockout or checkmate?

IT’S 9PM ON a sweaty May evening at London’s Scala nightclub and

Hamza Buhari must knock out his opponent in the next three
minutes or lose his king. The 28-year-old pharmacist from London is
taking on Lithuania’s Tadas Ceponis at chessboxing, a mash-up of
two sports, in which competitors win by checkmate on the board or
knockout in the ring. The bell ends the third round and Mr Buhari is
just a few moves from defeat, forcing him to go for broke with his

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fists. As Mr Ceponis takes a rain of blows, the referee stops the fight,
awarding victory to Mr Buhari.

“He’s a much better boxer, I felt that today,” Mr Ceponis tells the
baying crowd of around 500 as he embraces his opponent. “He’s a
much better chess player,” replies an equally sporting Mr
Buhari. Regulars in the crowd say they find watching chessboxing
(between men or women) much more fun than either sport alone.

The first chessboxing bout took place in Berlin in 2003, organised by

a Dutch performance artist, Iepe Rubingh. Five years later a
breakaway British faction got going. Chessboxing’s popularity has
steadily risen despite this split, helped by a surge in online chess
during the covid-19 pandemic and a hit TV show, “The Queen’s
Gambit”.

Britain has hosted the most bouts and is home to some 200 regular
chessboxers, estimates Gavin Paterson, a promoter. Britain was also
first to introduce a grading system, similar to the belts awarded in
judo or karate. “British chessboxing has been much more successful
[than its contintenal counterpart] because it took lessons from
boxing and wrestling in the way it presents the sport,” says Mr
Paterson.

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On the Saturday morning before the Scala fight a dozen chessboxers
gather at Islington Boxing Club, the British home of chessboxing, to
exert both their minds and bodies. Four boards are set up beside a
boxing ring. Training consists of rounds of chess alternating with
intense exercise or sparring. The challenge comes from attempting a
cerebral activity while fighting for breath. A pounding heart, let alone
a few punches to the head, can leave you disoriented. The training
session features tips like ensuring you take your turn in chess just as
the next boxing round begins, so your opponent’s clock is running
when you return to the board, where some 80% of matches are
decided. “The boxing impacts the chess and vice versa,” Mr Paterson
says.

This seems to attract those who want to be seen as Renaissance

Men, and to help nerdy types gain confidence. Samy Shoker, an
Egyptian grandmaster ranked in the world’s top 1,000 active chess
players, beat Germany’s André Glenzer at the Scala to take the
WCBA European middleweight title. Preparing for his chessboxing
debut improved his physical condition, says Mr Shoker, a lean 37-
year-old who entered the ring wearing a pharaoh headdress.

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The fighters risking their big brains in the ring are not doing it for
the money. None was on offer at the Scala, in contrast to the
€500,000 ($565,000) purse at the FIDE World Rapid and Blitz Team
Championships, a chess contest due to take place weeks later a few
miles away. As one of the volunteers at the Scala event puts it,
chessboxing runs on “pride and idiocy”. ■

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Taking back control

Does Britain need migrant

workers?
Employers think so
5月 22, 2025 03:18 上午

SINCE 2020 BRITAIN’S non-EU foreign workforce has grown to 3.2m

—more than double its pre-pandemic size. That has fuelled anti-
immigrant sentiment. The upside is a more productive and richer
economy. More than one in five working-age Britons are neither
employed nor seeking work; foreigners have filled the gaps. In 2022
the average migrant on a skilled-worker visa contributed a net
£16,300 ($20,150) to the public purse, compared with £800 for the
average Brit. The Centre for Economics and Business Research, a

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consultancy, reckons zero net migration that year would have
resulted in a 0.94% drop in GDP in 2025.

More than half of all skilled-worker visas issued since 2021 have
gone to medical professionals, nurses and care staff. It follows the
introduction by the Conservative government in 2020 of a fast-track
visa for health and social-care workers. Around 9% of visas went to
those in scientific and technical jobs; financial services and IT
professionals accounted for 6% each; for hospitality workers it was
4%.

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Now the experiment is over. The government is, in the words of Sir
Keir Starmer, “shutting down the lab”. The prime minister has
announced plans to tighten access to work visas; care workers will
no longer be eligible. The duration of graduate visas will be reduced
from two years to 18 months. Rather than “importing cheap labour”,
employers will be required to prioritise training home-grown
workers. With a few exceptions migrants will face a longer wait—ten
years instead of five—for permanent settlement and citizenship.

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Employers are sounding the alarm. Scientific groups such as the
Institute of Physics, the Royal Society and Cancer Research UK
(CRUK) fear the changes will undermine Britain’s global
competitiveness. The sector has relied heavily on international
talent. Just under two-thirds of the scientific staff at the Francis Crick
Institute, one of Europe’s biggest biomedical labs, are from
overseas.

Tech firms are apprehensive, too. Some occupations that were

previously eligible for a skilled-worker visa—particularly those in data
centres—will now fall below the threshold. One large tech firm plans
to close its graduate scheme to international applicants as a result of
proposals to shorten graduate visas, according to Nimmi Patel of
techUK, a trade body. The firm says recruits will struggle to meet
higher salary thresholds within the reduced time frame.

Businesses also face higher visa fees. The charge employers pay to
sponsor skilled workers will rise by a third to £1,320 for the largest
employers. Britain’s immigration system was already one of the
priciest globally. CRUK says its institutes spent nearly £690,000 on
recruiting international researchers last year, over two-thirds of what
it spent on cervical-cancer research.

Skills gaps won’t be plugged overnight. The Construction Industry

Training Board estimates it will need more than 250,000 new
workers by 2028 to build homes, fix the grid or construct roads and
bridges. “We simply do not have enough UK workers to achieve
that,” says Richard Beresford, chief executive of the National
Federation of Builders.

The effects of tighter immigration rules are already evident in

hospitality, where more than half of all visas go to chefs. Higher
salary thresholds for skilled-worker visas introduced by the previous
government in April 2024 have put pressure on employers. Overseas
workers now make up less than 15% of the hospitality workforce,
down from 25% before covid. But vacancies have soared to 84,000.

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In manufacturing, where companies were already struggling to fill
more than 50,000 vacancies for welders, toolmakers and other
trades, higher thresholds will make it “practically impossible” to
recruit overseas, says Jamie Cater of Make UK, a trade body.

Rather than training workers, many firms are turning to automation.

From robot-run warehouses to AI store monitors, retailers such as
Next and Primark have been investing in automation in anticipation
of rising labour costs. But in the state-funded health and social-care
sectors, where foreigners make up around a third of doctors and
care workers in England, robots will have limited use. Unison,
Britain’s largest union, is calling for higher wages to attract domestic
workers, a cost that would be passed on to taxpayers. Taking back
control may bring nasty shocks. ■

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Deflated hopes

An eccentric set of one-offs

has knocked inflation up in
Britain
Troublingly, the public no longer thinks inflation will keep falling
5月 22, 2025 03:17 上午

A CERTAIN WHITE-KNUCKLE angst accompanied Britain’s early-

morning inflation releases in 2022 and 2023, when prices were rising
at a pace not seen in decades. Lately, the mood has been calmer.
But new figures for April, published on May 21st, brought
unwelcome flashbacks to the economists, traders and mandarins
watching the data.

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Annual headline inflation rose from 2.6% in March to 3.5%, blowing
past forecasters’ expectations of a 3.3% rise. Core inflation, which
strips out food and energy, rose to 3.8%. Rather than reflecting a
broad surge, though, these increases had a more prosaic cause:
changes to a few regulated prices, which reset at the start of the
financial year in April.

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Water and energy bills, as well as vehicle-excise duty, a car tax,
explain nearly all of the increase. Water bills rose 26% in April after
Ofwat, the regulator, allowed firms to charge more to fund
investment. Previously announced rises in national insurance (a
payroll tax) and the minimum wage both bit as well, and may have
pushed up prices in shops. Air fares were lifted by the holidays.

Strip out regulated prices (water bills and the like), and a sunnier
picture emerges. The Economist calculates that annual core inflation
excluding regulated prices was 2.7%, about the same as in March
(see chart 1). That remains higher than the Bank of England’s 2%
target, but not by much.

Still, Britain cannot afford to relax entirely. However easy it is to slice

misbehaving prices out of charts, ordinary Britons still notice when
their bills keep rising. And, four years on from the initial surge,
surveys suggest that households don’t expect inflation to fall much
at all over the next year or so.

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More troublingly, many Britons now also believe it will stay above
2% for several more years, and possibly indefinitely (see chart 2).
That belief, if it sticks and spreads, could seriously dent the
credibility of Britain’s inflation target. One reason why inflation has
declined by so much in Britain and across the rich world over the
past two years is that households expected it to fall—and so didn’t
push for the sorts of wage increases that could have set off a self-
reinforcing spiral of higher prices. That faith has now been shaken.

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As a result, some rate-setters at the Bank of England, including the
chief economist, Huw Pill, are now fretting publicly about a possible
regime shift in price-setting. For decades, Britons were able to
blithely ignore inflation. Now that households and businesses are
paying attention, so the theory goes, they are less willing to simply
trust that any inflationary shocks will soon pass. Too many more
months like April, then, even if the causes are genuine one-offs,
could add up to a real problem.

Across the Atlantic, April also marked Donald Trump’s escalation in

tariffs. Worries about moderately above-target inflation may well
look quaint, if American protectionism begins to choke global
growth. A cruel month for central bankers—and consumers.■

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Two wheels good

London has become a cycling

city
It shows how dockless-electric bikes could transform cities
5月 22, 2025 03:17 上午

A green revolution

FOR THE PAST quarter of a century the City of London Corporation,

a local authority, has conducted a giant traffic survey. Stationed
around central London, more than a hundred observers stand and
count what goes by. The latest exercise, conducted last autumn and
published in April, contained the most remarkable result yet.
Compared with the previous one two years before, the number of
cyclists was up by 57%.

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London has become a cycling city. For years that dream—of
Amsterdam- or Copenhagen-on-Thames—seemed unattainable,
owing to long commutes, dangerous roads and a cycling culture
dominated by macho MAMILs (middle-aged men in lycra) that
would-be riders seemed to find, curiously, unappealing. Even as the
city’s mayors installed hundreds of miles of cycleways, particularly
since 2016, there was only a slow conversion from seat to saddle.

Until now. In central London, the survey shows, bikes have

overtaken cars to become the most common vehicle. On current
trends, they will outnumber all motor vehicles—cars, buses,
motorbikes, vans and lorries—within two years (see chart). Will
Norman, the cycling commissioner, reckons the city has reached a
tipping-point, with much of the surge coming from people who had
not previously been persuaded to pedal.

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What changed? Most riders still use personal bikes, which account
for 60% of the increase since 2022 (helped by all those cycle lanes).
But in the past two years the use of rental-electric bikes has
increased four-fold. So ubiquitous are a whizzy white-and-green
variety that the fruit they are named after has become a verb: “Shall
we Lime?” Londoners ask. The Californian company behind them has
more than 200,000 bikes in 280 cities, from Paris to San Francisco.
But London’s is by far its most extensive service, with some 30,000

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bikes across 480 square kilometres and 17 boroughs. (Forest, a
British company and Lime’s main competitor, operates in 14.)

London’s bike boom offers several lessons. The first is that while
many people enjoy the thrill and convenience of cycling, some dislike
the effort. London introduced docked bikes in 2010. It has had
electric bikes for hire since 2011. But usage took off with the
introduction of Lime’s powerful Gen4 bike in 2022. All rental-electric
bikes have a top speed of 25kph. But Limes have rapid acceleration,
enabling riders to zip around with little exertion.

If one secret is making the bikes really electric, the other seems to
be making them really dockless. Previously, bike-hire schemes
offered a patchy service: it was often hard to find a bike and it could
take ages to find a designated parking space. Today, London’s
operators have more bikes. But critically they have negotiated
relaxed parking rules, including on residential streets, meaning their
fleets fan out widely. Lime claims that 97% of Londoners in its
service area live within a two-minute walk of one of their bikes. As
with Uber, it thinks users open the app if they know convenience is
only a few minutes away.

There have been teething problems. It is hard to ensure that riders

park considerately, not in the middle of the pavement. In the city
centre, there are now tightly enforced parking zones, though this
can lead to bikes clustered like a shoal. In the rest of the city,
operators try to enforce good behaviour by making riders take
photos. With more investment in cycle parking, cities should be able
to solve this (around ten bikes fit into each car space).

A second concern is safety. With large electric motors and a sturdy

vandal-proof design, Limes are around four times the weight of an
average bike. That makes them easy to tip over. Electric-bike riders
tend not to wear helmets and seem especially likely to run traffic
lights, perhaps because they are paying by the minute. London’s

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orthopaedic surgeons complain about a spurt of broken bones. Some
critics are calling for tighter regulation.

Still, moving people from cars onto bikes helps make cities more
liveable. And a truly city-spanning bike-hire scheme—of which
London is now perhaps the leading example—offers extra benefits. It
is a highly efficient way of filling gaps in an urban-transport system,
connecting areas poorly served by buses and trains. City
administrators lose some fare revenue, but they benefit from less
pressure at peak times, and they can charge bike operators a service
fee for their licence.

In commuting hours, Lime’s data show that many riders use the
bikes for first- or last-mile trips: getting to the nearest Tube or from
a railway station to the office. For many, this shaves a third or more
off their commute. Not only does that give people time back, it
expands the pool of workers a company might be able to hire.
Economists have not yet properly studied these benefits, but they
could well be large. Previous research found that installing docking
points raised rents in nearby houses.

Regulation will have to make sure there are sensible parking rules
and bikes are well maintained. Cities will also want to foster
competition. At around £7 ($6.40) an hour Liming is quite pricey.
This month Voi, a Swedish operator, launched a lower-priced scheme
in west London. Regulators will need to get the balance right. With a
higher usage rate, operators can invest in maintaining their fleet and
moving bikes around. Three or four city-wide operators might be
ideal; too many would probably result in piles of bikes in the city
centre.

Lime, which aims to float on the New York Stock Exchange this year,
is talking up its success in London—and its plans to invest in a safety
campaign and more parking spaces. Operators are keen to grow
elsewhere in Britain, and beyond. As long as they can keep
regulators on side, riders—and cities—will feel the benefits. ■

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Bagehot

Bring back Boris

A return of Boris Johnson would provide something for everyone to
enjoy
5月 22, 2025 03:17 上午

PEOPLE TURN to animals when describing Boris Johnson. To his

aides, the former prime minister was “Big Dog”. One commentator
labelled him a “giant toad”, squatting over British politics. Another
said he was a “bulletproof Gunnersaurus”, after Arsenal’s dinosaur
mascot. When rumour emerged that Mr Johnson was considering a
return to front-line politics, the menagerie expanded. “The big,
blond-maned cat is stalking the leader of the Tory party,” said one
commentator, panting.

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Something is afoot. Mr Johnson once sniped at his Tory successors.
Now he offers Kemi Badenoch something far more damaging:
sympathy. Parties can recover from lousy polling, he simpers. The
subtext is clear; the Tories have not been in such a rut since the
summer of 2019, when they were polling in the teens and assailed
by Nigel Farage. The party went on to win a big majority just six
months later. Who led it out of that hole? Me? Cripes!

Big Dog left office in 2022 a wildly unpopular leader, after a tenure
marked by incompetence, cronyism and a contempt for the norms
and rules of British government. His return would be insane. Yet the
strangest bit is that every part of the political spectrum would
welcome it.

Sheer desperation explains why Conservatives outside the court of

the Giant Toad mull the idea. After the Tories were walloped in local
elections at the start of the month, a poll by More In Common
suggested that, among the likely leadership candidates, only Mr
Johnson would trump Mr Farage’s Reform UK. Would it guarantee
victory? Far from it. For a party staring at death, even a hung
parliament would be a triumph.

British politics happens at pace and nostalgia comes quickly. Failings

become lovable foibles. “At least you knew what you’d got with
Boris,” said one voter from Doncaster, revelation falling from her lips,
during a focus group. “You got a blooming idiot who just said it how
he saw it.” Remember Boris? The people’s buffoon.

Chutzpah explains why Bulletproof Gunnersaurus thinks he could do

it. Errors of Mr Johnson’s era can be blamed on others. High taxes?
Blame Rishi Sunak, his former chancellor, who brought down Mr
Johnson and eventually succeeded him. High immigration? Blame Mr
Sunak for that too. On Treasury spreadsheets, immigrants go in one
end and GDP comes out the other.

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A dark, unspoken cynicism lurks beneath such a strategy. Support
for a nativist, right-wing party emerged only when the Conservative
Party was led by a brown man. That same party has embedded itself
in British politics while the right is led by Ms Badenoch, a black
woman. Untangling correlation and causation is tricky. That Reform
has a vanguard of online supporters who are if nothing else honest
about their racism makes it less so. Reform’s political seed capital
came from a nasty place. Thinking all of its voters are racist would
be wrong; thinking none is would be naive.

If a corner of the Conservative Party is enthusiastic about the return

of the big, blond-maned cat, the rest of the political spectrum is
ecstatic. Liberal Democrats cackle at the thought. It was Mr
Johnson’s ineptitude as much as Brexit that turned prosperous
southern England towards the Lib Dems. At one dinner with the
former prime minister, a freshly minted Liberal Democrat MP charged
towards Mr Johnson, exclaiming, “I wanted to thank you for all the
help.”

Labour, meanwhile, is happy to remind voters that the country was a

mess when Mr Johnson ran it. For all Sir Keir’s blunders in office, it is
still preferable to that period. Reformers, who believe immigration is
the be-all of British politics, think voters will snarl at the man whose
policy allowed 1.3m people into the country in a single year. They
call it the Boriswave (as do some Labour staffers). Having the man
himself return would only help.

Is he popular? No. Is he competent? Also no. Nevertheless…

The best argument for Big Dog’s return, however, is catharsis. René
Girard, a French philosopher in vogue, argued that society relies on
scapegoats in order to rub along. A fight of all-against-all becomes a
battle of all-against-one; someone who can personify all their woes
and be removed, whether a teenager dragged to the top of an Aztec
pyramid or Jesus Christ hung on a cross.

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In British politics, only Mr Johnson fits the bill. Once almost
worshipped, he became reviled. A wannabe good-time king presided
over a bad time. Britain’s departure from the EU was a miserable
divorce rather than joyful liberation. Lockdown was two years of
pain, exacerbated by Mr Johnson and his team breaking the rules
they themselves set. His exit from Parliament in 2023 was meant to
be a moment of release.

Except the scapegoat process went awry. What should have been an
electoral bloodletting became a bureaucratic one. When Mr
Johnson’s lies over lockdown came to light, a parliamentary
committee suspended him for 90 days. This meant a recall petition
in his constituency and a by-election. Rather than face angry voters,
the former prime minister scarpered. Mr Johnson was not led to the
top of an Aztec pyramid; the cross was bare. A metaphorical lynch
mob assembled in Uxbridge, the London suburb represented by the
former prime minister, but Mr Johnson was nowhere to be found.

And so Britain could not move on. Mr Johnson’s shadow looms over
both his party and the country. British politics is stuck in a world he
built, enduring the same arguments about immigration and Europe.
Backlogs from lockdown still jam Britain’s hospitals; the costs of this
shutdown weigh heavily on the state’s finances. Mr Johnson was
elevated by the British public, but they never had the chance to
destroy him themselves. Come back, Mr Johnson. Perhaps Britain
will herald you again. Or perhaps it will rip you limb-from-limb and
British politics can, finally, start anew. ■

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International
Star wars returns
Astropolitics :: Donald Trump’s quest for orbital dominance

Can China jam your GPS?

Lost signals :: Its huge investment in the rival BeiDou system may give it an edge

How to fight the next pandemic, without

America
The Telegram :: The world scrambles to save global health policy from Donald Trump

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Astropolitics

Star wars returns

Donald Trump’s quest for orbital dominance
5月 22, 2025 05:57 上午

“RONALD REAGAN wanted it many years ago,” declared Donald

Trump, “but they didn’t have the technology.” Now, he said, America
could finally build a “cutting-edge missile-defence shield”. Mr Trump’s
Golden Dome—an allusion to Israel’s more modest Iron Dome—is
intended to protect America from attack using, among other things,
hundreds or thousands of satellites that can both track and attack
enemy missiles as they take off.

Mr Trump had promised such a shield on the campaign trail. On May

20th he said his “big, beautiful” tax bill, which has not yet been
approved by Congress, included $25bn in initial funding and that the

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project would cost $175bn in total. In practice, Golden Dome will
probably cost far more—the Congressional Budget Office reckons the
bill could run to more than $500bn over 20 years—and take far
longer than Mr Trump’s wildly optimistic timeline of “two and a half
to three years”.

The plan to protect America by shooting down missiles mid-

air·

Similarly suspect is Mr Trump’s claim that the system will offer “close
to 100% protection”. The success rate is likely to depend on the
scope of the shield. A recent report by the American Physical Society,
a group of physicists, suggested that 16,000 space-based missiles
would be needed to be sure of intercepting a salvo of just ten North
Korean Hwasong-18 missiles. But if American leaders wanted 30
seconds of decision time before acting, they would need 36,000
interceptors. And “many more interceptors” than that would be
required if America was also defending very northerly cities, Alaska
or the Midwest.

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Golden Dome is in part a response to the Pentagon’s concern that
America’s adversaries are building huge numbers of new and more
diverse missiles. American radars and defences have historically
focused on missiles travelling over the North Pole. But long-range
hypersonic missiles, which are more manoeuvrable, and “fractional
orbital” systems, which can partly encircle Earth, can take more
unpredictable routes. A recent report by the Defence Intelligence
Agency shows arrows plunging into America from all

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directions. Canada, which already has a joint aerospace defence
command with America, is in talks about joining Golden Dome.

The defensive shield also highlights how Earth orbit is becoming a

front line in the new struggle between Russia, China and America. It
is being waged by the likes of Cosmos 2553, a Russian satellite that
America believes is an unarmed prototype of a particularly lurid
space weapon: a nuclear weapon capable of wiping out satellites
across large swathes of low-Earth orbit—such as those that would be
part of Golden Dome. China is also building a range of counter-space
weapons. “They’re moving at jaw-dropping speed,” said General
Stephen Whiting, the head of America’s Space Command, of China’s
expanding anti-satellite arsenal.

Such weapons put far more than just defence infrastructure at risk.
They also threaten the spacecraft that provide communications and,
perhaps more important, the positioning, navigation and timing data
that are essential for modern economies. The vulnerability of
satellite navigation systems has been exposed by a huge increase in
the jamming and spoofing· (counterfeiting) of their signals .

Russia and China have been developing satellites with “advanced

manoeuvring capabilities” that would allow them to interfere with or
destroy American satellites. In May 2024, for instance, Cosmos
2576, another Russian satellite, entered a “coplanar” orbit with USA
314, an American spy satellite, in a manner that “could signal the
positioning of a counterspace weapon”, according to a new report by
the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a think-
tank in Washington. France has become so alarmed that it has
talked about developing “bodyguard” systems for satellites, which
could allow satellites to detect threats and then defend themselves
using a robot or laser.

Other sorts of celestial sparring are also under way. At one point last
year, TJS-4, a Chinese suspected signals-intelligence spacecraft,
manoeuvred to get between an American surveillance satellite and

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the Sun. That, says CSIS, would have created shadows preventing
the Americans from taking good photos of the Chinese craft. General
Michael Guetlein, the new head of Golden Dome, earlier this year
accused China of practising “dogfighting in space”.

Yet America is hardly a shrinking violet in this area. Last month USA
324, one of General Whiting’s surveillance satellites, sidled up to
TJS-16 and TJS-17, a Chinese pair of suspected electronic-
intelligence satellites. It passed within 17km of the former and 12km
of the latter, according to COMSPOC, a firm that tracks objects in
space. This was far closer than Cosmos 2576 came to USA 314. This
“buzzing” of the Chinese satellites was, notes Jonathan McDowell of
the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, “the sort of thing
that causes DoD officials to issue outraged comments when China
does it to ours”. ■

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Lost signals

Can China jam your GPS?

Its huge investment in the rival BeiDou system may give it an edge
5月 22, 2025 03:18 上午

IN MARCH, WHEN President Donald Trump briefly withheld

intelligence support from Ukraine, the shock waves buffeted
America’s allies, who worried they could no longer take for granted
access to the superpower’s vast space-based resources. This
uncertainty extends beyond defence to equally crucial tools, such as
the Global Positioning System (GPS).

The navigation system has long been an unshakable pillar of

American power, hard and soft. First developed by the Department
of Defence, President Bill Clinton fully opened GPS to civilian use in
2000, transforming it into a free global utility that is now deeply

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embedded across industries, from air transport, shipping and
trucking to global finance, where its signals provide the accurate
timestamps needed to synchronise banks and exchanges. If these
navigation signals were to be cut off for 24 hours, the costs to the
British economy alone would come to about £1.4bn ($1.9bn),
according to a government report published in 2023.

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Worryingly, years of under-investment have left GPS vulnerable. The
large-scale jamming (blocking the signal) and spoofing (feeding in
false information) of GPS in or near war zones, including Ukraine and
the Middle East, have exposed its fragility (see chart). Kevin
Pollpeter, the head of research at the China Aerospace Studies
Institute, a think-tank, warns that such disruptions will grow more
common, as Russia and China invest in technologies capable of
jamming GPS on a massive scale.

China’s BeiDou has emerged as a formidable alternative to GPS. The

Chinese system is provided by 56 satellites, which is nearly double
the number providing GPS, and is supported by 120 ground stations,
which command the constellation, versus just 11 for GPS. This
resilience is BeiDou’s greatest strength, says Dana Goward, the
president of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, a non-
profit. Unlike GPS, which relies solely on satellites in medium-Earth
orbit, BeiDou operates across three orbital layers, giving it wider and
more stable coverage.

Beyond its satellite network, China has also built nearly 300 ground-
based backups, fibre-optic networks to transmit accurate timing
information, and an eLoran system, a ground-based alternative to
satellite-based navigation. These ensure that if satellite signals are
lost, essential navigation and timing services can continue. Unlike
satellite signals, which are weak and easily jammed by the time they
reach Earth, eLoran uses powerful transmissions that are more
difficult to interfere with.

This redundancy could give China a strategic edge. In a conflict over

Taiwan, for instance, it could jam or spoof GPS signals across the
Taiwan Strait, disabling navigation for American and Taiwanese
forces, says Mr Pollpeter. Meanwhile, China’s alternative systems
would remain largely unaffected because such powerful signals
would be needed to jam eLoran that in doing so America might
disrupt its own systems, says Sean Gorman, founder of Zephr, a
navigation-resilience firm.

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Moreover, China’s ability to spoof GPS signals is growing. Because
BeiDou is designed to be compatible with GPS, owing to an
interoperability agreement signed in 2017, China can easily mimic its
signals. Russia and China are also developing anti-satellite and other
space-based devices· that can destroy or interfere with Western
satellites.

America’s communications regulator said on March 27th that it would

explore alternatives to GPS to strengthen resilience. However, efforts
to modernise America’s ageing GPS satellites have stalled. An
upgrade meant to replace 1990s-era technology offered only modest
improvements in accuracy, leaving GPS lagging far behind BeiDou
and Galileo, a European alternative. In a damning report in 2024 the
Government Accountability Office, a congressional watchdog, noted
that America has taken more than 20 years to deploy M-code, a jam-
resistant military signal that is still not fully operational.

Frustrated by the shortcomings of GPS, some countries are

developing their own navigation systems. Britain briefly flirted with
the idea of launching a satellite system after Brexit reduced its
access to Galileo, but it soon balked at the cost. Instead it is building
a cheaper backup using atomic clocks, fibre-optic cables and eLoran
transmitters and is testing quantum sensors. South Korea and Japan
are continuing to develop their own solutions. Yet since few
countries can afford to create global navigation system, most rely on
GPS, BeiDou, Galileo or Russia’s GLONASS.

Of these BeiDou is making great strides. It is being embedded in

Chinese-built infrastructure, such as phone networks, power grids,
ports and railways built under China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are using it to replace GPS in some
defence applications. Because some devices are locked into using
only BeiDou, that creates new vulnerabilities. “BeiDou gives China an
on-off switch for countries that rely on it,” says Mr Goward. “That’s a
powerful tool for economic and political coercion.” ■

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The Telegram

How to fight the next

pandemic, without America
The world scrambles to save global health policy from Donald Trump
5月 22, 2025 03:35 上午

HEARTFELT APPLAUSE greeted the adoption on May 20th of the

World Health Organisation (WHO) Pandemic Agreement, a treaty
that commits governments to be more responsible and less selfish
when future pandemics emerge. There was doubtless an edge of
relief to the clapping. After three years of fierce argument, an
overwhelming majority of health ministers and officials from over
130 countries—but not America, which is leaving the WHO and
boycotting the treaty—voted to approve the text.

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To cheerleaders, this was hopeful applause. The WHO boss, Tedros
Adhanom Ghebreyesus, congratulated governments on a “victory for
public health, science and multilateral action”. Opponents of the new
pandemic agreement, who include the Trump administration but also
populist politicians in Europe and elsewhere, might call those
clapping sinister.

An executive order issued on President Donald Trump’s first day in

office announced America’s withdrawal from the WHO and from
negotiations to craft the new pandemic treaty. The order added that
America would not be bound by amendments to international health
regulations agreed on in 2024. Those changes, which tighten virus-
surveillance and reporting obligations on governments, were
demanded by American negotiators during the Biden administration.
Mr Trump accuses the WHO of mismanaging the covid-19 pandemic
under China’s influence, and of demanding too much money from
America.

The pandemic treaty has sparked wild if vague claims in several

countries. In 2024 a fringe candidate for America’s presidency called
the pandemic agreement a power-grab by “international bureaucrats
and their bosses at the billionaire boys’ club in Davos” that tramples
Americans’ constitutional rights. Alas for the WHO, that long-shot
candidate, Robert F. Kennedy junior, is now Mr Trump’s health
secretary. In Britain, a right-wing political leader, Nigel Farage, falsely
charges that the pandemic treaty will allow the WHO to impose
lockdowns “over the heads of our elected national governments”. In
fact, the treaty explicitly reaffirms the sovereign authority of national
governments.

Was the applause in Geneva naive? Several times talks nearly

collapsed, as bold promises made by world leaders during the covid-
19 pandemic ran into long-standing divisions between high- and low-
income countries. A year or two of hard wrangling still lies ahead, as
governments hammer out the details of a political, scientific and
commercial bargain at the heart of the treaty, known as the

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Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing system (PABS). That compact
must balance the interests of very different places: on the one hand,
the developing countries where many new viruses emerge; on the
other, the wealthier nations where advanced vaccines and
treatments are typically discovered.

Success is not a given. For PABS to save lives, some poor or

struggling governments will need to step up surveillance of remote
rural regions where people live among domestic and wild animals,
and which create conditions that favour the spread of viruses into
human hosts. They must report troubling discoveries swiftly and
share pathogen samples with foreign scientists, even at the risk of
suffering travel bans that bring trade and tourism to a halt. In return
for free and rapid access to those same pathogens, some of the
world’s most powerful governments and drug firms must commit to
hand to the WHO, in real time, 20% of the vaccines, therapies and
diagnostic tests they produce.

The politics of inequality nearly derailed the process. With reason,

delegates from the global south accused rich countries of taking
pathogens found among their populations, using them to create life-
saving vaccines and drugs, then hoarding those same miracle cures
for rich-world customers. Some developing countries called for cash
payments for genetic data, following the model of an international
agreement, the Nagoya Protocol, that allows countries to demand
fees from drug and food companies or other entities that profit from
their genetic heritage. Adopting PABS would make the sharing of
pandemic-causing pathogens a public good, keeping Nagoya
Protocol payments at bay.

Other emerging economies, notably those with fast-growing

pharmaceutical industries, called for intellectual-property (IP) rights
to be weakened or suspended during pandemics, and for technology
transfers so that Africans and Asians can make their own vaccines.
European governments said that defending IP was a red line,
arguing that companies need to recoup research costs, or innovation

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will suffer. Rich-world pharmaceutical firms called the expansion of
advanced vaccine-manufacture a noble but long-term goal. In the
meantime, they argued, haggling with governments over fees for
pathogens can slow down vital cures, for example, during a Zika-
virus outbreak in Latin America in 2016.

Sometimes, avoiding failure is the big win

China was “very comfortable with the polarised debate” in Geneva,

says an expert on the talks. “They had no interest in eroding IP
protection, they have lots of IP. But they liked seeing a geopolitical
fight between north and south.”

Mr Trump saved the treaty, argues Lawrence Gostin, a professor of

global-health law at Georgetown University: governments
compromised to save the multilateral order from America.

Aalisha Sahukhan heads the Centre for Disease Control on the Pacific
island-state of Fiji and led her country’s delegation in Geneva. There
is no guarantee that governments will keep treaty commitments, she
concedes. Still, the mere act of agreeing on shared principles
reassures small countries like hers. “A standard is set: this is how we
should be behaving.” Much could still go wrong. But if nothing else,
rational self-interest was tested and survived. That is surely worth a
cheer. ■

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which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays
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Business
Welcome to the AI trough of
disillusionment
An uphill struggle :: Tech giants are spending big, but many other companies are
growing frustrated

China’s battery giant eyes world

domination
Supercharger :: CATL’s blockbuster listing will power its expansion

Universal wants to steal Disney’s theme-

park magic
Rollercoaster rivals :: It should brace for a bumpy ride

American companies have a new image

problem
Tarnished :: Donald Trump is hurting brands from Coca-Cola to Jack Daniel’s

The secrets of public speaking

Bartleby :: Lessons from actors on how to give a good presentation

Big box v brands: the battle for consumers’

dollars
Schumpeter :: American retailers are slugging it out with their suppliers

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An uphill struggle

Welcome to the AI trough of

disillusionment
Tech giants are spending big, but many other companies are
growing frustrated
5月 22, 2025 04:56 上午 | SAN FRANCISCO

WHEN THE chief executive of a large tech firm based in San

Francisco shares a drink with the bosses of his Fortune 500 clients,
he often hears a similar message. “They’re frustrated and
disappointed. They say: ‘I don’t know why it’s taking so long. I’ve
spent money on this. It’s not happening’”.

For many companies, excitement over the promise of generative

artificial intelligence (AI) has given way to vexation over the difficulty

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of making productive use of the technology. According to S&P
Global, a data provider, the share of companies abandoning most of
their generative-AI pilot projects has risen to 42%, up from 17% last
year. The boss of Klarna, a Swedish buy-now, pay-later provider,
recently admitted that he went too far in using the technology to
slash customer-service jobs, and is now rehiring humans for the
roles.

Consumers, for their part, continue to enthusiastically embrace

generative AI. Sam Altman·, the boss of OpenAI, recently said that
its ChatGPT bot was being used by some 800m people a week, twice
as many as in February. Some already regularly turn to the
technology at work. Yet generative AI’s transformative potential will
be realised only if a broad swathe of companies systematically
embed it into their products and operations. Faced with sluggish
progress, many bosses are sliding into the “trough of
disillusionment”, says John Lovelock of Gartner, referring to the stage
in the consultancy’s famed “hype cycle” that comes after the
euphoria generated by a new technology.

This poses a problem for the so-called hyperscalers—Alphabet,

Amazon, Microsoft and Meta—that are still pouring vast sums into
building the infrastructure underpinning AI. According to Pierre
Ferragu of New Street Research, their combined capital expenditures
are on course to rise from 12% of revenues a decade ago to 28%
this year. Will they be able to generate healthy enough returns to
justify the splurge?

Companies are struggling to make use of generative AI for many

reasons. Their data troves are often siloed and trapped in archaic IT
systems. Many experience difficulties hiring the technical talent
needed. And however much potential they see in the technology,
bosses know they have brands to protect, which means minimising
the risk that a bot will make a damaging mistake or expose them to
privacy violations or data breaches.

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Meanwhile, the tech giants continue to preach AI’s potential. Their
evangelism was on full display this week during the annual
developer conferences of Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google. Satya
Nadella and Sundar Pichai, their respective bosses, talked excitedly
about a “platform shift” and the emergence of an “agentic web”
populated by semi-autonomous AI agents interacting with one
another on behalf of their human masters.

The two tech bosses highlighted how AI models are getting better,
faster, cheaper and more widely available. At one point Elon Musk
announced to Microsoft’s crowd via video link that xAI, his AI lab,
would be making its Grok models available on the tech giant’s Azure
cloud service (shortly after Mr Altman, his nemesis, used the same
medium to tout the benefits of OpenAI’s deep relationship with
Microsoft). Messrs Nadella and Pichai both talked up a new measure
—the number of tokens processed in generative-AI models—to
demonstrate booming usage.

Fuddy-duddy measures of business success, such as sales or profit,

were not in focus. For now, the meagre cloud revenues Alphabet,
Amazon and Microsoft are making from AI, relative to the magnitude
of their investments, come mostly from AI labs and startups, some
of which are bankrolled by the giants themselves.

Still, as Mr Lovelock of Gartner argues, much of the benefit of the

technology for the hyperscalers will come from applying it to their
own products and operations. At its event, Google announced that it
will launch a more conversational “AI mode” for its search engine,
powered by its Gemini models. It says that the AI summaries that
now appear alongside its search results are already used by more
than 1.5bn people each month. Google has also introduced
generative AI into its ad business, to help companies create content
and manage their campaigns. Meta, which does not sell cloud
computing, has weaved the technology into its ad business using its
open-source Llama models. Microsoft has embedded AI into its suite
of workplace apps and its coding platform, Github. Amazon has

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applied the technology in its e-commerce business to improve
product recommendations and optimise logistics. AI may also allow
the tech giants to cut programming jobs. This month Microsoft laid
off 6,000 workers, many of whom were reportedly software
engineers.

These efforts, if successful, may even encourage other companies to

keep experimenting with the technology until they, too, can make it
work. Troughs, after all, have two sides; next in Gartner’s cycle
comes the “slope of enlightenment”, which sounds much more
enjoyable. At that point, companies that have underinvested in AI
may come to regret it. The cost of falling behind is already clear at
Apple, which was slower than its fellow tech giants to embrace
generative AI. It has flubbed the introduction of a souped-up version
of its voice assistant Siri, rebuilt around the technology. The new bot
is so bug-ridden its rollout has been postponed.

Mr Lovelock’s bet is that the trough will last until the end of next
year. In the meantime, the hyperscalers have work to do. Kevin
Scott, Microsoft’s chief technology officer, said this week that for AI
agents to live up to their promise, serious work needs to be done on
memory, so that they can recall past interactions. The web also
needs new protocols to help agents gain access to various data
streams. Microsoft has now signed up to an open-source one called
Model Context Protocol, launched in November by Anthropic,
another AI lab, joining Amazon, Google and OpenAI.

Many companies say that what they need most is not cleverer AI
models, but more ways to make the technology useful. Mr Scott calls
this the “capability overhang.” He and Anthropic’s co-founder Dario
Amodei used the Microsoft conference to urge users to think big and
keep the faith. “Don’t look away,” said Mr Amodei. “Don’t blink.” ■

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Supercharger

China’s battery giant eyes

world domination
CATL’s blockbuster listing will power its expansion
5月 22, 2025 03:36 上午

Tower of power

SET AMID a backdrop of lush rolling hills and marshy lakes, Ningde
is an unassuming town on the south-eastern coast of China, lined
with low-rise buildings and apartment blocks. One structure stands
out: a gleaming rectangular tower with a gently curving glass
façade, which bears an uncanny resemblance to a giant lithium-ion
battery pack.

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This is the headquarters of the planet’s largest battery-maker, CATL.
Its products power a third of the world’s electric vehicles (EVs) and a
similar share of energy-storage systems for grids. The meteoric rise
of the company, founded in 2011, has lifted the economic output of
Ningde, the hometown of its boss, Robin Zeng, above that of Estonia
or Uganda.

On May 20th CATL raised almost $5bn in a secondary listing in Hong

Kong, making it the largest share offering so far this year. Investors
raced to get their hands on the stock, sending its price up by 16%.
The sum is a small fraction of the $160bn market capitalisation of
the firm, which first listed its shares in Shenzhen in 2018. But the
Hong Kong offering is a clear statement of intent: not satisfied with
dominance at home, China’s battery behemoth plans to spread
across the globe.

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CATL is already by far the largest firm in its industry. Its production
volume is more than double that of BYD, its closest competitor,
which has the advantage of being the world’s biggest maker of EVs
(see chart 1). CATL’s 11 manufacturing sites across China cover
nearly 20m square metres between them. The company, which
employs over 100,000 people, also owns lithium mines and an
offshore wind farm.

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Its scale and vertical integration have driven down costs and lowered
prices. Although revenue fell by 10% last year, to 362bn yuan
($50bn), net profit rose by 16%, to 52bn yuan, delivering a healthy
margin of 14% (see chart 2). Rivals have struggled to keep up. LG
Energy Solution of South Korea, CATL’s biggest competitor outside
China, made a net loss last year.

Now the battery giant is hoping to strengthen its position abroad.

Exclude China, and LG Energy Solution was narrowly ahead last year
on sales volumes, according to UBS, a bank. But CATL is fast
catching up: last year it generated 30% of its revenue abroad, up
from less than 4% in 2018. Its carmaking customers include BMW,
Toyota and Volkswagen. It also powers grid-storage systems in
Nevada and Texas, and recently announced the world’s biggest
energy-storage project in the United Arab Emirates.

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In order to be closer to its customers, CATL is expanding its
manufacturing footprint. At present, its production capacity is almost
entirely in China, which makes around 85% of the world’s batteries.
In 2023 CATL opened its first overseas factory, in Germany. About
90% of the proceeds from its Hong Kong listing will be used to fund
the construction of its next plant, in Hungary, which is due to start
production this year. In December it also announced a joint venture
with Stellantis, another carmaker, to build a battery factory in Spain,
which aims to start production by the end of next year. (Exor, the
largest shareholder in Stellantis, owns a stake in The Economist’s
parent company.)

At the same time, CATL is continuing to push the boundaries of

battery technology. It spent $2.6bn on research and development
last year, more than triple the amount invested by LG Energy
Solution. In April it unveiled a battery that can provide 520km (323
miles) of driving with five minutes of charging, stealing the thunder
of BYD, which a month before announced it had developed one that
can do 400km on the same charge-time.

“The PhDs”, as CATL’s research unit is referred to internally, work

across the business. Some focus on fundamental battery chemistry.
Others concentrate on improving the manufacturing process, much
of which is performed by robots, or collaborate with suppliers and
customers to develop new products. The company has more than
40,000 granted or pending patents.

What could short-circuit CATL’s global ambitions? One risk is China-

bashing politicians in America, who have been less welcoming than
their counterparts in Europe. The country accounted for less than
6% of CATL’s sales last year, and represents an important growth
opportunity. In January the company was placed on a blacklist by
America’s defence department over alleged ties to China’s armed
forces, which CATL has described as “a mistake”. Although the
designation has had few immediate consequences for the company,
it may make it harder to lure American customers. Last year CATL

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batteries used by Duke Energy, an American utility, to help power a
military base in North Carolina were decommissioned under pressure
from lawmakers. In April American politicians asked banks including
JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America to halt their work on CATL’s
Hong Kong listing. (They ignored the request.)

A second risk is decelerating demand for EVs in the West. Sales

continue to power ahead in China, but are slowing in America and
have stalled in Europe because of weakening consumer sentiment
and a reduction in subsidies.

Still, CATL has plenty of room to grow. It is licensing its technology

to others, including Ford in America. Amid uncertainty in the EV
market, it is expanding its higher-margin energy-storage business.
This accounted for 16% of revenue last year, up from less than 1%
in 2018. Sales volumes have risen with global renewable-energy
capacity. This month it announced a giant battery system designed
for artificial-intelligence data centres; it stacks vertically, to minimise
the space required. CATL is also branching into batteries for trucks
and ships: “We want to electrify whatever can be electrified,” says an
executive. China’s battery giant shows no sign of losing power. ■

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Rollercoaster rivals

Universal wants to steal

Disney’s theme-park magic
It should brace for a bumpy ride
5月 22, 2025 03:17 上午 | Orlando

Hold on tight

IN THE SWAMPY Florida heat, a gaggle of enthusiasts, influencers

and journalists gathered this week for the opening of Epic Universe,
a new theme park in Orlando. The sprawling site, made up of five
themed “worlds”, took Comcast, owner of Universal Pictures, $7bn
and more than five years to build. Only a 20-minute drive from Walt
Disney World, it is a bold bet that the company behind film
franchises including Harry Potter and Super Mario can offer
something just as magical.

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Universal opened its first Orlando theme park, Universal Studios
Florida, in 1990, expanding the resort with a second one, Universal
Islands of Adventure, in 1999, and a water park, Volcano Bay, in
2017. By adding Epic Universe, it will be hoping that it can keep its
guests entertained—and away from the Magic Kingdom—for the
duration of their trip.

The new site certainly has plenty to enchant visitors. An animatronic

dragon depicting Toothless, from the film “How to Train Your
Dragon”, purrs convincingly when guests stroke the top of its head.
One boy was so determined to win an augmented-reality Mario Kart
race that he sternly instructed your correspondent not to get in his
way.

Epic Universe is Comcast’s biggest such investment so far, but it is

not the only new site in the works. In August it will open a horror
attraction in Las Vegas. A children’s resort will follow in Texas a year
from now. Last month the company said it would build a big new
theme park in Britain, too, expected to open in 2031. Not to be
outdone, Disney a few weeks later unveiled plans for its first new
park in a decade, in Abu Dhabi.

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Theme parks are a lucrative business. Disney’s experiences division
(which includes parks as well as cruises and hotels), generated
$34bn in revenue for the company in its most recent fiscal year,
around a third of its total, and more than twice the profit of its
entertainment division (which houses movies, TV and streaming).
Comcast’s theme-parks business, which brought in less than $9bn in
revenue last year, understandably wants more of the action. It is
already finding ways to squeeze extra from captive visitors: one food
stall at Epic Universe sells buckets of popcorn for $40.

Stealing Disney’s magic will not be easy, though. Epic Universe isn’t
flawless. Some rides are short and disappointing. As paying
customers flood in for the first time, snags may emerge; Universal’s
first site in Orlando was beset by technical glitches when it first
opened.

An even bigger problem is that Universal does not have Disney’s

breadth of intellectual property, which covers everything from Star
Wars and the Marvel universe to Frozen and Mickey Mouse. Guests
are often attracted to visit theme parks by the characters and worlds
they already love, rather than the latest in rollercoaster technology.

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When your correspondent asked a boy who was set to visit both
Universal’s and Disney’s Orlando resorts which he was most looking
forward to, the verdict was simply “whichever one has the Hulk”.
JPMorgan Chase, a bank, reckons that the new Universal park will
reduce footfall at Walt Disney World by just 1% in its current fiscal
year, which ends in September.

Comcast’s timing may also not be fortuitous. The theme-parks

business is highly cyclical. An economic slowdown in America could
thus spell trouble ahead for the industry, points out Laurent Yoon of
Bernstein, a broker. Domestic travellers make up most of the guests
at America’s theme parks. Even those that still buy a ticket may be
less inclined to spend $40 on popcorn during a downturn. Declining
numbers of international visitors, thanks in part to Donald Trump’s
damage to his country’s image abroad, will make matters worse.
Fewer foreign consumers visit than domestic ones, but they spend
more on average.

For now, the industry is all smiles. Analysts have been briefed that
summer booking numbers look healthy. So far, the opening of Epic
Universe has gone off without a hitch. Comcast will be hoping that
the smooth ride continues. ■

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Tarnished

American companies have a

new image problem
Donald Trump is hurting brands from Coca-Cola to Jack Daniel’s
5月 22, 2025 03:17 上午

FOR DECADES America’s soft power put the wind in the sails of its
companies as they ventured abroad. When the Berlin Wall fell, Coca-
Cola sent lorries emblazoned with its logo into East Berlin to hand
out free drinks. Sales soared as consumers in the former communist
state chugged enthusiastically on the sugary icon of American
capitalism.

Peddling Americana abroad, however, is getting trickier. Last month

Carlsberg, a Danish brewer that bottles Coca-Cola in its home

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country, noted that consumers there were boycotting the fizzy drink,
opting for local alternatives instead. Coca-Cola can thank Donald
Trump, who has exasperated Danes—and many others—with his talk
of territorial expansion and his trade war. How worried should
America Inc be about its new image problem?

Mr Trump’s damage to America’s reputation is clear to see. In a

survey across 100 countries carried out last month by Nira Data, a
research firm, for the Alliance of Democracies, a Danish non-profit,

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the share of respondents with an unfavourable view of America
exceeded those with a favourable opinion by five percentage points,
a sharp deterioration from previous years, and enough to place
America behind China in global esteem (see chart).

The president’s actions are already weighing on American

companies’ sales abroad. The backlash has been strongest in
Canada, whose citizens have railed against the suggestion that their
country should become America’s 51st state, and Denmark, thanks
to Mr Trump’s threats to pinch Greenland. Last month 61% of
Canadians told YouGov, a pollster, that they were boycotting
American products. Earlier this year Ontario and Quebec, Canada’s
two largest provinces, pulled American-made alcohol from the
shelves of government-run liquor stores. Kraft Heinz, an American
food giant, has been reminding Canadians that much of what it sells
in the country is made there from local ingredients. In Denmark, the
country’s largest retailer, Sailing Group, has been labelling European-
owned brands in its shops to make it easier to avoid American
products.

The souring towards American brands has been on display

elsewhere in Europe, too. Tesla, Elon Musk’s carmaker, is the most
prominent example: new registrations of its vehicles in Europe fell by
more than 40% year on year in the first quarter. But it is not the
only one at risk. In a survey conducted in March, the European
Central Bank asked consumers how likely they would be to
substitute away from American goods in a hypothetical scenario in
which the country imposed a blanket tariff that the EU then
matched, where 100 indicated a strong willingness to switch. The
median answer was 80. Tellingly, Europeans were more likely to cite
preference, rather than price, as their main reason for switching.

All this will worry American firms, which make more than $8trn in
foreign sales each year. Not all will be equally harmed, though.
Morning Consult, another pollster, has examined the correlation
between consumers’ views of America and their opinion of the

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country’s brands. The relationship is strongest for technology
companies, carmakers and food-and-beverage firms, and weakest
for hospitality companies, logistics providers and health-care firms.
Foreign consumers are more likely to forgo a bag of Cheetos in
protest than they are a cancer treatment from Pfizer. A lack of
alternatives may also make it harder for them to abandon services
such as Google or Instagram. Even so, many American firms will
have to grapple with the fact that their nationality may no longer be
an asset—but a liability. ■

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Bartleby

The secrets of public speaking

Lessons from actors on how to give a good presentation
5月 22, 2025 03:18 上午

PEOPLE WHO enjoy public speaking are luckier than they realise. A
much-publicised survey from the 1970s claimed that Americans
feared it more than death. In 2012 Karen Dwyer and Marlina
Davidson of the University of Nebraska Omaha published a paper
that tried to replicate the result. They found that things were less
dramatic than that—but not by much.

Among the American students they surveyed, speaking in front of a

group was indeed the most common fear, beating out financial
problems, loneliness and death. When respondents were asked to
rank their phobias, death pipped public speaking to the top spot. But

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this triumph for perspective ought not to be exaggerated. The grim
reaper most scared one-fifth of students; but almost as many, 18%,
picked having to stand up and talk in public as their principal fear. In
sum, this staple office activity causes very many people to feel
deeply anxious.

There is plenty of homespun advice out there for glossophobes. Just

be yourself (which ignores the fact that the “real you” would rather
be dead than give a presentation). Imagine that your audience is in
their underwear (for reasons that are totally unclear). Speak on
things you properly understand (when getting ahead in many jobs
requires precisely the opposite).

A better source of advice comes from a profession that really knows

how to pretend and perform: acting. Drama schools routinely offer
communication coaching (if you like listening to journalists being
humiliated, you can hear your columnist’s experience at RADA
Business, an offshoot of the famous acting college in London, in the
latest episode of our Boss Class podcast). “Don’t Say Um”, a recent
book by Michael Chad Hoeppner, offers presenting tips from an
actor-turned-coach.

The advice of professional performers can be condensed into three

main messages. First, presenting is a deeply physical activity. Kate
Walker Miles, one of the RADA Business coaches, warns against
standing with legs locked straight; a slight bend in the knees makes
for greater stability. She emphasises the importance of vowel sounds
in communicating emotion, which means opening the jaw more
widely than you might naturally tend to. Her warm-up exercises
include some fairly ferocious massaging of the masseter muscles—
think Edvard Munch and you get the idea—and some theatrical
yawning. To achieve a relaxed posture, she asks clients to imagine
being held up by a “golden thread” of infinite length which rises
from the crown of their heads.

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Second, it helps to slow down the pace of delivery—to allow for
pauses, to not rush to fill silences with “ers”, “ums” and other verbal
detritus. Mr Hoeppner recommends a useful technique called finger-
walking, whereby you walk your index and middle fingers across the
table as you speak, and only take a “step” when you know what the
next word or point is going to be. Even doing it once is an
interesting exercise: by forcing you to take time choosing your
words, those filler noises start to disappear and language becomes
more precise.

Third, don’t focus on yourself (or, in Ms Walker Miles’s phrase, turn

“selfie view off”). Too often speakers concentrate on how they are
doing—how many minutes to go? have I gone bright red?—and not
on the experience of their audience. To help evoke the right
emotion, actors have a technique called “actioning”, in which they
assign a transitive verb (“pacify”, “bait”, “entice”, “repel”) to their
lines in order to clarify a character’s goal. The emotional range of a
quarterly update may not match “King Lear”, but executives should
still work out what they want an audience to feel.

Some of these techniques can feel alien. Imagining that a golden

thread is holding you up at the same time that you soften your
knees, elongate your jaw and finger-walk your words is definitely
something to try out at home first. But the value in them is also
clear. Unusual professions often have less to teach managers than
they claim (what does free diving have to teach you about
budgeting? Answer: absolutely nothing). Acting really does have
something to teach about how to communicate. ■

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which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays
and reader correspondence.
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Schumpeter

Big box v brands: the battle

for consumers’ dollars
American retailers are slugging it out with their suppliers
5月 22, 2025 04:56 上午

DURING WALMART’S latest earnings call on May 15th, Doug

McMillon stated the obvious. “The higher tariffs will result in higher
prices,” the big-box behemoth’s chief executive told analysts,
referring to Donald Trump’s levies on imports of just about anything
from just about anywhere. Who’d have thought? Two days later the
president weighed in with an alternative idea. Walmart (and China,
where many of those imports come from) should “EAT THE
TARIFFS”, he posted on social media. Mr McMillon did not respond

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publicly to the suggestion. But it is likely to be a polite, lower-case
“Thanks, but no thanks.”

Walmart is not the only large American retailer that can afford to
turn down the unhappy meal. Earlier this month Amazon hinted that
prices of goods in its e-emporium could edge up as the levies bite.
Costco, a lean membership-only bulk discounter which reports its
quarterly earnings on May 29th, will probably not be taking up Mr
Trump’s offer, either. This week Home Depot, America’s fourth-most-
valuable retailer behind those three, said that while it was not
planning to raise prices just yet, it expects to maintain its current
operating margin. This implies its suppliers will absorb much of the
cost of tariffs.

Not even the artificial-intelligence revolution seems to whet

investors’ appetite as much as the ability to preserve profits in times
of economic uncertainty. The giant retailers’ shares trade at multiples
of future earnings that put big tech to shame. Home Depot’s is on a
par with Meta’s. Walmart’s beats both Microsoft’s and Nvidia’s.
Costco’s is nearly twice that of Apple. Amazon, with fingers in both
pies, is just behind Walmart. Tasty.

Despite Walmart’s warning about everyday not-so-low prices, it is

not shoppers who bear the brunt of its pricing power. It is, as in
Home Depot’s case, suppliers. Retail firms can increasingly dictate
terms not just to nameless providers of nuts-and-bolts products
(including, at the home-improvement store, actual nuts and bolts)
but also to once-mighty brands, from Nike to Nestlé. Do not be
fooled by their single-digit operating margins, just over half those of
their typical vendor. Their slice of the profits from the $5trn-plus that
American consumers splurge annually on physical products is
growing.

Estimating the retailers’ profit pool is straightforward. Start with the

Census Bureau’s tally of American retail spending (excluding cars
and petrol). This is, by definition, the money that ends up in shop

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tills. Multiply it by the industry’s overall operating margin, which can
be approximated by looking at the revenue-weighted average of all
listed retailers. Last year the figures were $5trn and 7.2%, giving
$360bn in retail profits. Calculating vendors’ revenues requires a few
more assumptions, such as that 90% of retailers’ cost of goods sold
ends up with consumer-goods firms. This implies perhaps $3.2trn in
sales and, given the average consumer-goods operating margin of
12.6% last year, a profit pool that is a shade over $400bn.

On this rough reckoning, then, manufacturers grab a little over half

of the two groups’ combined profits. But this is down from three-
fifths in the late 2010s. A narrower but more sophisticated analysis
by Zhihan Ma of Bernstein, a broker, which focuses on food, hygiene
and household products but excludes durable goods, yields a
directionally similar result: over the past 15 years retailers’ profit
share has risen from 34% to 38%. Having lagged behind consumer-
goods stocks between 2000 and 2015, their shares have since
handily outperformed them, too.

The main reason for retailers’ growing clout is competition. For

established brands this is fiercer than ever. On one side they are
squeezed by upstart labels, which can easily outsource production to
contract manufacturers and market their wares on TikTok: think hip
Warby Parker spectacles or hideous Allbirds trainers. When the
economy looked healthy and money was cheap, brand owners could
counteract some of this by snapping up the challengers. With
interest rates, uncertainty and the risk of recession all up,
dealmaking is the last thing on CEOs’ minds.

On the other side brands feel the pinch from retailers’ own private
labels. These are no longer slapped just on low-margin goods like
toilet paper. Best Buy, an electronics retailer, sells fancy own-brand
refrigerators for $1,699. Wayfair flogs $7,800 sofas. Sam’s Club,
Walmart’s Costco-like membership arm, even offers a five-carat
diamond engagement ring for a bargain $144,999.

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Even as shoppers enjoy ever more choice of what to buy, their
options of where to buy it are becoming more limited. Although
America’s retail industry remains fragmented compared with the
cosy oligopolies found in many rich countries, it is consolidating fast.
Between 1990 and 2020 the share of food sales claimed by the four
biggest retailers more than doubled, to some 35%.

Food fight

A federal court’s decision last year to block the $25bn merger of

Kroger and Albertsons, two big supermarkets, is scant comfort to
vendors. They remain beholden to big retailers, especially Walmart,
which accounts for a quarter of Americans’ grocery spending.
Suppliers including Nestlé, PepsiCo and Unilever have set up offices
next door to its headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. Walmart has
no similar outposts in that trio’s hometowns of Vevey, Switzerland,
Purchase, New York, and London.

During the last price shock, amid the covid-19 pandemic in 2021,
consumer-goods firms could at least console themselves that stuck-
at-home shoppers flush with stimulus cheques were willing to spend
a bit more on branded goods. Their margins duly edged up that
year. Now Mr Trump’s tariffs are about to hit just as consumer
confidence is depressed. If they seek any retail therapy at all, it will
be from Amazon, Costco and Walmart. ■

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Finance & economics

Will Jamie Dimon build the first trillion-
dollar bank?
American titan :: We interview JPMorgan Chase’s boss, and his lieutenants

Wall Street and Main Street are split on

Trump’s chaos
How to gauge fear :: The president prompted a similar divide last time round

Trump will be unpleasantly surprised by

America’s tariff revenues
Bonanza denied :: He should expect billions, not trillions

What the failure of a superstar student

reveals about economics
Sine laude :: Aidan Toner-Rodgers was enjoying a meteoric rise at MIT. Then
questions started to be asked about his work

Hong Kong says goodbye to a capitalist

crusader
Buttonwood :: David Webb was an exemplary shareholder

America’s scientific prowess is a huge

global subsidy
Free exchange :: And it is now under threat

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American titan

Will Jamie Dimon build the

first trillion-dollar bank?
We interview JPMorgan Chase’s boss, and his lieutenants
5月 22, 2025 08:11 上午 | New York

“SERENA WILLIAMS, Tom Brady, Stephen Curry.” When it comes to

making sure the world’s biggest bank is a lean operation, Jamie
Dimon takes athletic inspiration. “Look how they train, what they do
to be that good,” says the boss of JPMorgan Chase. “Very often,
senior leadership teams, they lose that. Companies become very
inward-looking, dominated by staff, which is a form of bureaucracy.”

During Mr Dimon’s tenure, JPMorgan has become to banking what

Ms Williams was to tennis. In most of the markets in which it

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competes, it ranks as America’s leading institution, or a close runner-
up. It boasts a market capitalisation of $730bn, or 30% of the total
among America’s big banks, up from 12% when Mr Dimon took
charge at the start of 2006 (see chart 1). The gap with competitors
has grown larger still since the covid-19 pandemic. JPMorgan has
317,233 staff, nearly twice as many as in 2005. Its share of
American deposits has doubled to 12%.

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America has never had a bank of such size. Even when John
Pierpont Morgan, one of Mr Dimon’s predecessors, bailed out the
Treasury at the turn of the 20th century, he could not boast coast-to-

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coast operations. In 2021 JPMorgan became the first lender with
branches in every one of America’s 48 contiguous states. The bank’s
combination of scale and market-beating efficiency means that it can
invest far more than its rivals in technology, draw on an immense
hoard of deposits for cheap and sticky funding, and benefit from
flights to safety when smaller banks wobble.

But the institution’s tremendous size, success and prominence pose

risks, too. Banking is not a business that suffers mistakes gladly; the
larger and more unwieldy an institution, the longer the list of
potential slip-ups. Being the biggest bank in a country where small
lenders are sacred makes JPMorgan an obvious political target, from
both the left and right. And then there is the succession question.
How do you replace a man of Mr Dimon’s reputation? And how does
someone without his stature prevent infighting and bureaucracy at
an institution of JPMorgan’s size?

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Mr Dimon sat down for an interview with The Economist on May
16th. We also met the four bosses of the bank’s biggest businesses
—the most likely candidates to succeed Mr Dimon—beforehand.
They are Troy Rohrbaugh, co-head of the commercial and
investment bank; Douglas Petno, its other boss; Mary Erdoes, who
runs the wealth-management arm; and Marianne Lake, leader of
retail operations. Each is a loyal lieutenant and JPMorgan veteran.
Mr Rohrbaugh is the most recent hire; he has worked at JPMorgan
for 20 years.

On January 1st next year, Mr Dimon will have been at the helm of
the bank for the same amount of time. On March 13th he will
celebrate his 70th birthday. His succession has been a subject of
relentless discussion on Wall Street for over a decade, spurred on by
two health scares and the prospect that he might be made treasury
secretary. Mr Dimon says that in the next few years he will step
down but remain the company’s chairman, and stubbornly refuses to
provide a firmer timeline. He does offer some traits for any future
leader of the bank: “There’s a work ethic; there’s people skills.
There’s determination. You better have a little bit of grit. There’s
humility; there’s ability to form teams. There’s having courage.
Constantly observing the world out there and thinking, ‘Well, what
can be done better?’”

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Well, what could be? Not much, if you listen to Mike Mayo of Wells
Fargo, the most prominent JPMorgan analyst and an uber-bull.
Indeed, Mr Mayo has asked why Jamie Dimon would want to step
down at all. The bank is, he says, the “Goliath of Goliaths” and the
best he has covered in his career; he expects it to be the first with a
trillion-dollar valuation. Part of his argument is that advances in
artificial intelligence mean investment in tech has grown in
importance, and JPMorgan, which he also calls the “Nvidia of

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banking”, can afford more than any rival. The bank will spend about
$18bn on tech this year, some 40% more than Bank of America.

The heft that JPMorgan has developed under Mr Dimon provides the
bank with a compounding advantage. Wall Street executives moan
about how hard it is to compete across JPMorgan’s full range of
businesses. The bank has an enormous base of $2.5trn in deposits.
Over the past two years it has paid out $190bn in interest on
deposits, while hoovering up $374bn in interest on loans (see chart
2). Yet the bank is not just larger than its rivals—it is also more
streamlined. Its efficiency ratio (non-interest expenses as a share of
total revenue) has dropped from 61% in 2015 to 51%, a figure that
is 15 percentage points lower than any competitor (see chart 3).

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Increasingly, JPMorgan’s competition is to be found outside banking.
“I want us to be better than the best in class, which is in many ways
the non-bank trading houses,” says Mr Rohrbaugh. “In other parts of
our business, like in payments, we’re not only competing against the
big banks, we’re competing against fintechs.” Vast trading firms such
as Citadel Securities and Jane Street have seized market-making
activities once dominated by banks, while techy upstarts such as
Stripe eat into payments.

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According to clients, JPMorgan has stayed efficient because its
businesses have remained complementary. It has avoided both
becoming a conglomerate made up of unrelated silos and falling into
zero-sum internal competition. “You have to sew all those pieces
together,” says Ms Erdoes, who has run wealth management since
2009, meaning she has been in her current job the longest of the
four bosses. “That’s really easy at our operating-committee level,
because we live with each other. It’s harder when you’ve got the
person in the Milan office who’s trying to find the person in the
Austin, Texas office.”

Mr Dimon’s “fortress” balance-sheet helps. Large reserves, low

leverage and plentiful capital serve JPMorgan well in times of stress,
allowing it to snap up firms. The bank bought Bear Stearns and
Washington Mutual, a pair of banks, as the financial crisis worsened
in 2008. Two years ago, during a smaller crisis, it acquired the lion’s
share of assets from First Republic, America’s 14th-largest bank. “We
did it because the government needed it,” says Mr Dimon. But “we
have to make it financially attractive to ourselves, obviously.”

Manning the fort

The stress in 2023 had lessons for JPMorgan. “When Silicon Valley
Bank failed, we learned a lot about what we didn’t do properly
covering Silicon Valley,” says Mr Dimon. “Even though we’re out
there all the time and we did a lot of stuff. The [lesson of the] deep-
dive was that we didn’t have a consistent, devoted calling on venture
capitalists.” That year JPMorgan hired John China, former president
of SVB Capital, Silicon Valley Bank’s venture-capital arm, to jointly
run its “innovation economy” business. His job is to tie America’s
financial capital to its tech capital.

At the same time as other firms are cutting back in San Francisco, or
abandoning the city altogether, JPMorgan last month announced
plans to increase the size of its offices in the city by 30%. “When
you bank the venture capitalist, you bank them individually, you

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bank their firm, you bank their startups and you bank their
founders,” notes Mr Petno. The exercise-obsessed, joke-cracking Mr
Petno is a veteran even among the veterans, having worked at
JPMorgan for 35 years. The firm’s analysts think that his promotion,
in January, to jointly run the investment bank puts him in serious
contention for the top job.

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Meanwhile, the bank’s retail operations are spreading across the
country. Ms Lake, their boss, who grew up in Britain and speaks with
a crisp English accent, wants a 15% share of American deposits, a
cautious goal. Over the past six years, JPMorgan has established a

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physical presence in 25 states. It takes several years for branches to
reach their potential, and in dozens of cities—Boston, Salt Lake City
and Washington included—the bank still oversees less than 3% of
deposits. JPMorgan is growing overseas, too. Almost four years after
launching a digital consumer bank in Britain, it has 2m customers.
Germany is next. “We have previously said Europe is more difficult,
but that is different today with digital banking,” explains Ms Lake.

Could anything halt JPMorgan’s ascent? Scale is no guarantee of

success. At the turn of the century, another institution accounted for
30% or so of the market capitalisation of American banks. After a
barrage of mergers and acquisitions, Citigroup was a titan. But its
lead was eroded by a series of scandals in the 2000s, and a bad
financial crisis. Today it accounts for less than 6% of the industry’s
market capitalisation. By comparison, JPMorgan has been pretty
scandal-free under Mr Dimon—with the exception of the “London
Whale” farrago, when a rogue trader cost the institution over $6bn.

JPMorgan’s size also makes it a target. In normal circumstances,

American law would not allow it to merge with another lender, owing
to its market share. But the rule does not apply if the lender is
failing, which is what allowed it to buy First Republic. All the same,
JPMorgan was criticised. Elizabeth Warren, a left-wing senator,
paired up with J.D. Vance, now vice-president, to attack the sale. It
made “the nation’s largest bank grow even bigger”.

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Mr Dimon is unrepentant, arguing large banks offer America vital
heft. “We move $10trn a day...We have lent $35bn to a company to
get a deal done. You know, we bank the biggest companies around,
we bank countries,” he says. “I don’t think necessarily the people
making those statements understand why you need a big bank that
does business in 100 countries and that market-makes like we do.”

A world of trade wars and geopolitical strife is difficult for any

globetrotting firm. JPMorgan and Bank of America were recently
criticised by members of Congress for underwriting a sale of shares
by CATL on May 20th. The firm is a Chinese battery manufacturer.
Its products are found in electric cars everywhere, but it is also
blacklisted by the Pentagon for links to China’s armed forces. Mr
Dimon notes that CATL does not face American sanctions. And he
still believes in commercial engagement: “It is not my thing to say
we are not going to engage with China anymore...I do not think the

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Chinese or the Americans want us to leave. I do not think the
American economy wants to leave. But we are going to have these
issues at the margin...It’s going to be harder.”

The last, and toughest, challenge is succession. During Mr Dimon’s

time as chief executive, more than a dozen supposed candidates
have been and gone. Indeed, he has been in the post for so long
that some have had several jobs since. Bill Winters, the boss of
Standard Chartered, and formerly of JPMorgan’s investment bank,
aspired to take Mr Dimon’s throne. Now he may retire before Mr
Dimon. In 2020 The Economist wrote that no one, even Mr Dimon,
thought that he would remain in his role for another decade. That
was five years ago, and Mr Dimon says he will remain for a few
more. We would no longer bet against him going the distance.

When probed on how they might run the bank, internal candidates
predictably do not step out of line: all are, it turns out, focused on
their jobs, work closely with one another and do not dream of being
the next boss. Each faces a fearsome job interview when the time
comes. And could the bank try to recruit from elsewhere?

Whoever triumphs will lack their predecessor’s stature. No matter

their experience, they will not have built a megabank. Few people
are recognisable by their first name on both Wall Street and Capitol
Hill. In a sign of his influence, Jamie was even credited with
softening President Donald Trump’s tariffs. It was not hearsay. Mr
Trump himself said that he changed his mind after watching an
interview with Mr Dimon on Fox News, during which JPMorgan’s boss
had said a recession was likely because of the wave of
protectionism. “He’s a genius financially, he’s done a fantastic job at
the bank,” the president gushed. Today’s all-conquering JPMorgan
has been built in Mr Dimon’s image.

Mr Dimon recalls the advice that he gave to Charlie Scharf, formerly

head of JPMorgan’s retail bank, when he left the firm to run Visa, a
payments giant. Two things change when an executive moves into a

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top job, explains Mr Dimon. “The first one is there is nobody to
complain to.” Second, a chief executive can no longer rely on a
backstop from a higher power. “There is no tacit approval. It is your
decision. It’s just different. Heavy is the head that wears the crown.”
And no Wall Street crown is heavier than JPMorgan’s. ■

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How to gauge fear

Wall Street and Main Street

are split on Trump’s chaos
The president prompted a similar divide last time round
5月 22, 2025 03:18 上午 | New York

NEWSPAPERS ACROSS America are filled with tales of woe. In Texas

fashion designers stay up at night worrying about “economic
uncertainty”. In Maine the boss of a brewery complains about “rapid
and massive fluctuations every single day on the tariffs”. In
Washington state, border levies are “shaking up Skagit Valley
farmers—spiking input costs, stalling sales, and fuelling uncertainty
from fields to food banks”.

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The Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) Index, developed by
economists at Northwestern and Stanford universities, is a measure
of Main Street’s nerves. It counts instances of the word “uncertainty”
(in the context of economic policy) in over 1,000 mostly local
newspapers. The current average for May would be its highest
monthly level in 35 years. Polls suggest that both Democrats and
Republicans trust their local rags, meaning it should reflect how
people feel.

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Wall Street, however, has calmed down. And it was not so panicked
in the first place. During the recent turbulence, the VIX, a fear
gauge, hit only its 24th-highest monthly level in the past 35 years.
The index measures expected volatility for American stocks, based
on the price investors pay for insurance.

This pattern is odd when you consider Donald Trump’s words. In

April he said he was “proud to be the president for the workers, not
the outsourcers—the president who stands up for Main Street, not
Wall Street.” Yet the same split appeared in his last term. Perhaps Mr
Trump distorts the EPU. At times it seems like his raison d’être is
attracting news coverage, ensuring more attention even than his
damaging policies deserve.

As Nicholas Bloom of Stanford notes, last time round Wall Street got
it right: Mr Trump was “all bark and no bite”. Will it be correct once
again? Stockmarkets have recovered, suggesting it might. But there
have been victims, too. The Cortland Standard, a paper in New York
state, was set up in 1867. It closed in March because proposed
tariffs on Canada raised the cost of newsprint.■

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and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly subscriber-only
newsletter.
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Bonanza denied

Trump will be unpleasantly

surprised by America’s tariff
revenues
He should expect billions, not trillions
5月 22, 2025 03:17 上午

IN THE EARLY 20th century, before America had an income tax,

tariffs paid many of the government’s bills. President Donald Trump
wants to revive that approach. He has repeatedly floated the idea of
an “External Revenue Service”, under which Uncle Sam would scrap
income taxes and instead rely on border levies, with foreigners, at
least in theory, funding the American government. “It will be a
BONANZA,” Mr Trump posted recently on his social-media site,

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claiming tariffs could all but eliminate income taxes for people
earning less than $200,000 a year.

There is plenty to dislike about tariffs. Economists bemoan the

distortions they impose on commerce. They are mostly paid not by
“external” firms but by domestic consumers. In 2020 Mary Amiti of
the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and colleagues found that
nearly all of Mr Trump’s first-term levies were ultimately borne by
American companies, in the form of lower margins, and buyers, in
the form of higher prices. Moreover, agreements with Britain and
China have reduced overall tariff levels from recent highs, which will
reduce the revenue they raise. Levels will continue to fall as America
inks more deals.

Yet Mr Trump’s tariffs will still bring in large sums. Quite how large?
Last year just $100bn of the total $4.9trn that the federal
government collected came from customs duties. Already, though,
that figure is rising. Daily data from the Treasury show a spike. By
May 13th gross tariff collections had reached $47bn since the start
of the year, about $15bn more than last year.

Disentangling how much of this is a consequence of Mr Trump’s

latest levies and how much represents firms rushing to bring in
goods ahead of further hikes is tricky; much is likely to be the latter.
A number of economists have nevertheless attempted to forecast
tariff revenues. Peter Navarro, Mr Trump’s trade guru, claims that
border levies could generate more than $6trn over the next decade,
or $600bn a year. His arithmetic is brazenly simple: take last year’s
$3.3trn in merchandise imports and apply a 20% effective tariff.

Such an approach ignores economic dynamics. Higher tariffs reduce

demand for foreign goods, shrinking the tax base. They also depress
income and payroll-tax receipts, offsetting as much as 25% of the
gains, according to most estimates. Factor in retaliation and levy-
dodging, and anticipated revenue falls further. Mr Navarro’s trillion-

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dollar projections rest on a fantasy of stasis, in which buyers, sellers
and trading partners shrug off price signals.

Independent estimates of tariff revenues are much lower. The Penn

Wharton Budget Model estimates that the full suite of proposed
tariffs, including the “reciprocal” levies currently on pause, would
raise around $290bn a year over the next decade. Its calculations
account for weaker import demand, as well as the effects on
corporate-income- and payroll-tax receipts. Other forecasts are lower
still. The Budget Lab at Yale, a non-partisan research centre,
forecasts annual revenue of $180bn; the Tax Foundation, a think-
tank, puts the number closer to $140bn.

There is an oddity to such calculations, however. The recent

reduction in the levy on Chinese goods—from 145% to 30%—does
not do much to alter their results. At 145% the tariff was on the
wrong side of the peak of the “Laffer curve”, the point at which
higher rates reduce, rather than increase, revenue. It would have
prompted imports from China to plummet, meaning that tax
revenues would have fallen despite the sky-high levy on goods still
coming into the country. According to estimates by Penn Wharton, a
levy of 145% on Chinese imports would raise only $25bn more a
year than the current rate of 30% will.

Even with this small mercy, the president’s tariffs will not enable the
large tax cuts he so desires. Last year America’s personal-income tax
brought in $2.4trn—an amount forecast to grow to $4.4trn over the
next decade. The Tax Foundation estimates that eliminating income
taxes for people earning less than $200,000 would cost almost
$740bn in 2025, or two to three times what tariffs could conceivably
raise. In theory, a revenue-neutral swap could cover those earning
around $80,000 or less, who account for just 10% of total income-
tax receipts. But eliminating taxes for low earners would, in practice,
mean cutting the lowest marginal rate, which applies to all taxpayers
on their initial income, and so would mostly benefit high earners. A
tax bill proposed by Republicans in the House of Representatives is

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stuffed with other giveaways, including raising most tax-bracket
thresholds, which by itself would dwarf tariff income.

Tariffs were able to sustain the federal government in the early 20th
century because its spending came to just 2% or so of GDP, being
largely confined to debt service, defence and infrastructure. Today
that figure is ten times higher. Imports are a narrow and volatile tax
base, making them ill-suited to funding a modern state. The irony is
that tariffs would make American spending reliant on Chinese
production. Most politicians do not try to return to the early 1900s
for a reason. ■

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revenues

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Sine laude

What the failure of a

superstar student reveals
about economics
Aidan Toner-Rodgers was enjoying a meteoric rise at MIT. Then
questions started to be asked about his work
5月 22, 2025 06:23 上午

WHEN THE economics department at the Massachusetts Institute of

Technology issues a statement, it is often to celebrate a Nobel Prize.
In the past decade, six of its professors have won the award—as
many as the next two universities combined. But on May 16th it
issued a different sort of press release: one disavowing research by
a high-flying graduate student.

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Aidan Toner-Rodgers was the author of the paper in question. It
assessed the use of an AI tool by an unnamed materials-science
firm. Even for techno-optimists, the results were striking: “AI-
assisted researchers discover 44% more materials, resulting in a
39% increase in patent filings.” They were widely reported, including
by The Economist. The work was praised lavishly by Daron
Acemoglu and David Autor, two of MIT’s leading economists.

MIT now declares “no confidence in the provenance, reliability or

validity of the data and...in the veracity of the research”. Mr Toner-
Rodgers’s paper has been withdrawn from the pre-print repository
on which it first appeared; his personal website has been taken
down. The lab at the heart of his findings remains unknown.

Academic misconduct often triggers a reckoning. In 2015 political

scientists grappled with the retraction of a well-publicised article that
claimed door-to-door canvassers could lift support for gay marriage.
More recently, behavioural science has come under scrutiny:
Francesca Gino of Harvard University and Dan Ariely of Duke
University have faced investigation over allegedly manipulated data
(both deny wrongdoing). Economics has some protection owing to
its record. The five leading journals have seen just four withdrawals
in their combined 570-year history, according to Retraction Watch, a
database.

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But even if economics is not the worst offender, it is no stranger to
social science’s replication crisis. Its biggest recent trend has been
empirical research, with a focus on credible causal designs (see
chart). Statistically significant results are prized, incentivising cherry-
picking and selective presentation of results. Prashant Garg of
Imperial College London and Thiemo Fetzer of the University of

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Warwick find that the share of papers reporting “null results” fell
from 15% in 1980 to 9% in 2023. Use of private data doubled.

More than in other disciplines, success depends on a few high-stakes

events. Job-market candidates are evaluated on a single paper,
rather than a body of work. Because institutional pedigree and
advisers carry lots of weight, young researchers may face pressure
to overstate results.

Bad economics research has real-world consequences. Mr Toner-

Rodgers’s paper was cited by the European Central Bank and in
Congress. It surely led more than one research-and-development lab
to consider its internal processes. Other retracted papers advised
against large debt-to-GDP ratios and on how to price corporate
bonds. All academic red herrings matter. But they matter more when
they have implications for national budgets, financial markets and,
indeed, the future of AI. ■

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Buttonwood

Hong Kong says goodbye to a

capitalist crusader
David Webb was an exemplary shareholder
5月 22, 2025 03:17 上午

DAVID WEBB was quick to get his hands on the ZX Spectrum or

“Speccy”, a computer launched in 1982 with up to 48 kilobytes of
memory and rubber keys. Before he turned 18, he had written a
book, “Supercharge Your Spectrum”, showing how to get the most
out of the contraption with his favourite machine-code tricks and
techniques. What set him apart from other tinkerers was how he
spent the royalties. He would cycle to his bank in Oxford to place an
order in London for some shares. (“Which stock, young man, do you
want to buy?”)

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That interest led naturally to a career in investment banking. His
methodical mind mastered what you might call the machine code of
capitalism: the rules, regulations and economic principles that make
markets work, holding firms accountable to their customers and their
owners. In 1991 he applied the same curiosity to Hong Kong, where
he moved for a two-year stint that never ended. “I loved the place,”
he says. By the time the Asian financial crisis rattled the city seven
years later, Mr Webb had made enough money to retire. So in his
early 30s he began trying to debug Hong Kong capitalism, sharing
his favourite tricks and techniques via his website (webb-site.com)
and a newsletter that now attracts over 30,000 subscribers.

At a farewell event hosted by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in

Hong Kong on May 12th, Mr Webb, who is battling cancer, was
philosophical about his achievements. Sometimes he changed things
for the better; on other occasions he delayed a change for the
worse. “That’s also a win,” he said.

Hong Kong was often celebrated as a bastion of economic liberty.

But when Mr Webb began his crusades, its corporate governance
was “lousy”, he says. Corporate reporting was slow and scanty.
Shareholders had to wait four months for a two-page summary of a
firm’s yearly results and another month for the annual report. At the
same time, shareholder meetings were fast and perfunctory. Even
important motions were often passed on a show of hands, no matter
how many shares each “hand” represented. Big business dominated
the legislature and the listing committee that sets rules for
companies on the stockmarket.

In 2003 he exploited a “wrinkle” in the company law inherited from

Britain, which allowed five shareholders to demand a formal poll on
company resolutions. He bought ten shares in each of the
companies in the Hang Seng index, Hong Kong’s main stockmarket
benchmark, dividing them between himself, his wife and three firms
he owned. With that foothold, he could oblige companies to conduct
polls properly: one share, one vote. He also threatened to publish

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the results himself if they did not. His extra five shares allowed him
to appoint proxies to appear at the meeting alongside him. He
offered these five places to the press, which was otherwise barred
from many meetings. “Tickets will be scarcer than the Rolling
Stones,” he joked. Some journalists took up the invitation, mostly
because they wanted to see what he, rather than the company, was
up to.

Listed companies have to disclose “significant investments”, including

shareholdings in other firms. At Mr Webb’s urging, the regulator
began to enforce the rule. That let him map out a web of holdings
among 50 firms he dubbed the Enigma Network. A company might
borrow from another on advantageous terms with no intention to
repay, or dilute the stakes of independent investors by issuing lots of
shares, snapped up at a discount by insiders if minority shareholders
did not fork out for them. An umbrella-maker issued 75bn shares
(“in case everyone on Earth wants ten”, as Mr Webb put it). In 2017,
six weeks after he published his map, the shares of many Enigma
firms crashed.

He also fought a rear-guard action against weighted voting rights,

which allow firms to issue special shares that carry more clout. He
feared this would further entrench tycoons, allowing their control to
exceed their ownership stake. But Hong Kong’s exchange was keen
to attract Chinese tech companies led by celebrity founders, which
are often popular even with minority investors.

Not all sharebuyers take much interest in capitalism’s inner workings.

Many simply want exposure to a stock’s returns, even without the
other rights of ownership. They are happy to free-ride on the efforts
of more careful stewards of capital, such as Mr Webb. Capitalism in
Hong Kong works better thanks to him. And it would work better still
if more capitalists were like him. ■

Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter,

which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays

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and reader correspondence.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/finance-and-
economics/2025/05/22/hong-kong-says-goodbye-to-a-capitalist-crusader

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Free exchange

America’s scientific prowess

is a huge global subsidy
And it is now under threat
5月 22, 2025 05:49 上午

ONE OF THE best things about living in Europe is America. Faced

with a moribund domestic stockmarket, European investors can
redirect their savings into the S&P 500. Residents enjoy the
protection of America’s security umbrella without having to foot the
bill. At times of crisis the continent’s central banks rely on swap lines
from the Federal Reserve. All the while they enjoy better food, nicer
cities and superior cultural offerings.

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But America, under President Donald Trump, now threatens to
withdraw many of these implicit subsidies. His administration’s
attacks on science, involving deep cuts· to the budgets of
institutions, may damage the biggest subsidy of all. America is a
research powerhouse. It has the best universities. It accounts for
4% of the world’s population, yet produces a third of high-impact
scientific papers. It also accounts for a third of global research-and-
development spending.

The MAGA revolution threatens America’s most innovative

place
MAGA’s assault on science is an act of grievous self-harm
China’s universities are wooing Western scientists·

Americans benefit most of all from their country’s scientific prowess.

The average American medical scientist earns $100,000 a year, for
instance—some 60% more than the average American worker. But
as any economist knows, knowledge is a public good, meaning
science has large “spillover” benefits. In 2004 William Nordhaus of
Yale University argued that companies only capture 2.2% of the total
returns from their innovations. Patents expire and even before that
competitors copy ideas. Innovation therefore drags up everyone’s
living standards, as lots of companies become more productive and
ordinary people benefit from better goods and services. America’s
average incomes are fantastically high.

Economists have devoted less attention to the question of

international spillovers. Nevertheless, America almost certainly runs
a surplus in science with the rest of the world, providing much more
to foreigners than it receives in return. In recent years, too, the size
of this subsidy has almost certainly grown. Three mechanisms stick
out—all of which are now under threat.

First, people. American scientific institutions are a melting pot. There

are twice as many foreign students today as in the early 2000s.
Many outsiders, having graduated, return home, taking ideas with

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them. We estimate that around 15% of the people who have
graduated from MIT, a top American science school, live abroad. On
that basis, the raw material of future scientific progress has already
spilled out from America to elsewhere.

Second, new ideas. When a scientist publishes a paper online,

almost anyone in the world can read it. Traditionally research was a
domestic affair. One bibliometric study found that in 1996 only about
40% of citations of American scientific publications were from
foreign researchers. More recently the globalisation of scientific
knowledge has intensified. By 2019 foreign scientists accounted for
about 60% of America’s citations. Scientists in the rest of the world
thus stand on the shoulders of American giants.

American consumers also subsidise R&D. This is most well-known in

the case of pharmaceuticals. Prescription drugs are more expensive
domestically than abroad. American consumers, in effect, pay for the
research that creates them. And this pattern is apparent elsewhere,
too. National-accounts data suggest that, on average, American
corporations earn returns on domestic capital that are more than
50% higher than abroad. So while Americans may fund corporate
R&D, the world shares the benefit.

The third factor is new technologies. Every other country has long
drawn from the well of American innovations. This was how Europe
rebuilt itself following the second world war. French steel executives
visited American steelworks in order to copy workflow designs.
Britain’s car bosses turned to American executives in an attempt to
improve plant efficiency. Economists struggle to measure the ways in
which American tech spills abroad today. In some cases the
American government explicitly provides it to the world for free, as
in the case of GPS. During the covid-19 pandemic America gave
away vaccines to poor countries. Many American artificial-
intelligence companies release “open source” models. Even when
American firms try to protect their intellectual property, foreign

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competitors find workarounds. Many other smartphone companies
have copied Apple’s aesthetic, for instance.

According to Nancy Stokey of the University of Chicago, one

quantitative measure of technological spillovers involves looking at
capital goods, in which new tech is often embodied. From the early
1990s to 2024 America exported nearly $5trn-worth of high-tech
capital goods, more than any other country, spreading the American
way to every corner of the Earth. Another proxy is outward foreign
direct investment. This is when an American buys a controlling stake
in a foreign business or builds a new industrial facility abroad—and
often introduces new tech as part of the bargain. Americans’ direct
investments abroad are worth some $10trn, which is far more than
any other country.

Nutty professor

If Mr Trump follows through with his proposed cuts, and America’s

scientific system stumbles, can another country pick up the mantle?
Many American scientists say they want to leave the country; a few
already have. China, which on some measures of scientific prowess
already surpasses America, may hope to capitalise. Yet few
foreigners want to do their PhD in China. A closed political system
slows down the diffusion of innovations across international borders.
So does the language barrier.

Even if China changed, however, decades of research on economic

clusters shows that they are rarely replicated. Just as you could not
uproot Hollywood and move it elsewhere, scientists leaving Berkeley
and Boston will not carry on as before when they arrive in Beijing or,
indeed, London. If America’s scientific system sneezes, the rest of
the world will catch a cold. ■

Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter,

which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays
and reader correspondence.

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This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/finance-and-
economics/2025/05/22/americas-scientific-prowess-is-a-huge-global-subsidy

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Science & technology

Trump’s attack on science is growing
fiercer and more indiscriminate
Death by a thousand cuts :: It started as a crackdown on DEI. Now all types of
research are being cancelled

How cuts to science funding will hurt

ordinary Americans
Disaster pending :: Federal agencies are struggling to predict the weather and
monitor disease

America is in danger of experiencing an

academic brain drain
Your loss :: Other countries may benefit. Science will suffer

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Death by a thousand cuts

Trump’s attack on science is

growing fiercer and more
indiscriminate
It started as a crackdown on DEI. Now all types of research are
being cancelled
5月 22, 2025 07:46 上午 | Boston and Los Angeles

SCIENTISTS IN AMERICA are used to being the best. The country is

home to the world’s foremost universities, hosts the lion’s share of
scientific Nobel laureates and has long been among the top
producers· of influential research papers. Generous funding helps
keep the system running. Counting both taxpayer and industrial
dollars, America spends more on research than any other country.

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The federal government doles out around $120bn a year, $50bn or
so of which goes towards tens of thousands of grants and contracts
for higher-education institutions, with the rest going to public
research bodies.

Now, however, many of America’s top scientific minds are troubled.

In the space of a few months the Trump administration has upended
well-established ways of funding and conducting research. Actions
with the stated goal of cutting costs and stamping out diversity,
equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are taking a toll on scientific
endeavour. And such actions are broadening. On May 15th it
emerged that the administration had cancelled grants made to
Harvard University for research on everything from Arctic
geochemistry to quantum physics, following a similar move against
Columbia. The consequences of these cuts for America’s scientific
prowess could be profound.

Under the current system, which was established soon after the
second world war, researchers apply to receive federal funding from
grant-making agencies, namely the National Institutes of Health
(NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) as well as the
Departments of Defence (DoD) and Energy (DoE). Once a proposal
has been assessed by a panel of peers and approved by the agency,
the agreed money is paid out for a set period.

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This setup is facing tremendous upheaval. Since Mr Trump’s return
to the White House, somewhere in the region of $8bn has been
cancelled or withdrawn from scientists or their institutions,
equivalent to nearly 16% of the yearly federal grant budget for
higher education. A further $12.2bn was rescinded but has since
been reinstated by courts. The NIH and the NSF have cancelled
more than 3,000 already-approved grants, according to Grant Watch,
a tracking website run by academics (see chart 1); an unknown
number have been scrapped by the DoE, the DoD and others. Most

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cancellations have hit research that Mr Trump and his team do not
like, including work that appears associated with DEI and research
on climate change, misinformation, covid-19 and vaccines. Other
terminations have targeted work conducted at elite universities.

Much more is under threat. The president hopes to slash the NIH
budget by 38%, or almost $18bn; cut the NSF budget by $4.7bn,
more than 50%; and scrap nearly half of NASA’s Science Mission
Directorate. All told, the proposed cuts to federal research agencies
come to nearly $40bn. Many have already gone under the knife. In
March the Department for Health and Human Services (HHS), which
includes the NIH, announced it would scrap 20,000 jobs, or 25% of
its workforce. According to news reports, about 1,300 jobs, or more
than 10%, have been lost at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA), which carries out environmental and climate
research. Staff cuts were reportedly also due to start at the NSF, but
have been temporarily blocked by courts. To save more money, the
NIH, the NSF, the DoE and the DoD have launched restrictive caps
on so-called indirect grant costs, which help fund facilities and
administration at universities. (These limits have also been partly
blocked by courts.)

The administration says it has a plan. Mr Trump entered office on a

mission to cut government waste, a problem from which the
scientific establishment is not immune. On May 19th Michael
Kratsios, his scientific adviser, stood up in front of the National
Academies of Sciences and defended the administration’s vision. It
wants to improve science by making it better and more efficient, he
said—to “get more bang for America’s research bucks”. To do so,
funding must better match the nation’s priorities, and researchers
should be freed from groupthink, empowered to challenge each
other more freely without fear of convention and dogma.

Shaking things up

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He is right that science has a number of stubborn problems that can
hardly be solved by a business-as-usual approach. Scientific papers
are less disruptive and innovative than they used to be, and more
money has not always translated into speedier progress. In the
pharmaceutical sciences, new drug approvals have plateaued in
recent years despite ever larger budgets. Researchers also spend
much too long writing grant proposals and completing similar
administrative tasks, which keeps them away from their laboratories.

Some of Mr Trump’s proposals are, in fact, overdue. Many NASA

watchers, for example, would agree with his plan to find commercial
alternatives for the Space Launch System, a giant rocket being built
to take people to the Moon and beyond but which is years behind
schedule and billions of dollars over budget.

It would be hard, if not impossible, to improve the science funding

system without some disruption. The problem, however, is that the
administration’s cuts are broader and deeper than they first appear,
and its methods more chaotic. Take the focus on DEI, which the
administration bemoans as a dangerous left-wing ideology. The
agencies are targeting it because of an executive order banning
them from supporting such work. But DEI is notoriously ill-defined.
Programmes that are being cancelled are not just inclusive education
schemes, but also projects that focus on the health of at-risk groups.

Though it is mostly unclear why specific projects have been

cancelled, Grant Watch keeps track of words that could have landed
researchers in trouble. “Latinx”, for example, is a term for Hispanic
people flagged as a telltale sign of DEI by Ted Cruz, a Republican
senator. The NIH has cancelled a project on anal-cancer risk factors,
the abstract of which uses the word Latinx. Another cancelled
project concerns oral and throat cancer, for which gay men are at
higher risk. Its abstract uses the phrase “sexual and gender
minority”. There are many such examples.

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Other cuts may do more damage. Some NIH-funded research on
vaccines has been cancelled, as have $11bn-worth of special funds
from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for
pandemic-related research. In March Ralph Baric, an epidemiologist
at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who helped test the
Moderna mRNA vaccine for covid-19, had several vaccine grants
terminated. One project aimed to develop broad-spectrum vaccines
for the same family of viruses that SARS-CoV-2 comes from;
scientists fear other strains might cross from animals to humans.
Both the CDC and NIH justified such cuts by saying that the covid-19
pandemic is over. But this is short-sighted, argues Dr Baric, given the
number of worrying viruses. “We’re in for multiple pandemics” in the
future, he says. “I guess we’ll have to buy the drugs from the
Chinese.”

Even for scientists who have not been affected by cuts, other
changes have made conducting research more challenging. For
example, the NIH and NSF have both delayed funding new grants.
Jeremy Berg, a biophysicist at the University of Pittsburgh who is
tracking the delay in grant approvals, wrote in his May report that
the NIH has released about $2.9bn less funding since the start of
the year, relative to 2023 and 2024. According to media reports, the
NSF has stopped approving grants entirely until further notice.

At the NIH itself, the largest biomedical research centre in the

country, lab supplies have become more difficult to procure.
Department credit cards have been cut back and the administrative
staff who would normally place orders and pay invoices have been
fired. Scientists report shortages of reagents, lab animals and basic
equipment like gloves. All these factors are destabilising for
researchers—labs need a steady, predictable flow of cash and other
resources to continue functioning.

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If next year’s cuts to federal agencies are approved, more pain could
be coming (see chart 2). The NSF’s budget cuts, for instance, will hit
climate and clean energy research. And, according to leaked
documents, the research arm of NOAA would most probably cease
to exist entirely. That would almost certainly mean defunding the
Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University, “one
of the best labs in the world for modelling the atmosphere”, says
Adam Sobel, a professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty
Earth Observatory. NASA’s Earth-observation satellites would likewise
take a beating, potentially damaging the agency’s ability to keep
track of wildfires, sea-level rises, surface-temperature trends and the
health of Earth’s poles. Those effects would be felt by ordinary
people· both in America and abroad.

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And as Mr Trump increasingly wields grant terminations as
bludgeons against institutions he dislikes, even projects that his own
administration might otherwise have found worthy of support are
being cancelled. Take his feud with Columbia. His administration has
accused the institution of inaction against antisemitism on campus
after Hamas’s attack on October 7th 2023 and Israel’s subsequent
war in Gaza. On March 10th the NIH announced on X that it had
terminated more than 400 grants to Columbia on orders from the
administration, as a bargaining chip to get the university to take
action. Some $400m of funding has been withheld, despite Columbia
having laid out what it is doing to deal with the administration’s
concerns. Those grants include fundamental research on Alzheimer’s
disease, schizophrenia and HIV—topics that a spokesperson
confirmed to The Economist represent priority areas for the NIH.

Columbia is not alone. The administration is withholding $2.7bn from

Harvard University, which has responded with a lawsuit. Within hours
of Harvard refusing the administration’s demands, scientists at some
of the university’s world-leading labs received stop-work orders. The
administration has since said that Harvard will be awarded no more
federal grants. Letters from the NIH, the NSF, the DoD and the DoE
sent to Harvard around May 12th seem to cancel existing grants as
well.

While it is too soon to say exactly how many grants are involved,
188 newly terminated NSF grants from Harvard appeared in the
Grant Watch database on May 15th, touching all scientific disciplines.
A leaked internal communication from Harvard Medical School, the
highest-ranked in the country, says that nearly all its federal grants
have been cancelled. Cornell University says it too has received 75
stop-work orders for DoD-sponsored research on new materials,
superconductors, robotics and satellites. The administration has also
frozen over $1.7bn destined for Brown, Northwestern and Princeton
universities and the University of Pennsylvania.

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As these efforts intensify, scientists are hoping that Congress and
the courts will step in to limit the damage. Swingeing as the budget
plan is, the administration’s proposals are routinely modified by
Congress. During Mr Trump’s first term, similar proposals to squeeze
scientific agencies were dismissed by Congress and he might meet
opposition again.

Susan Collins, the Republican chairwoman of the Senate

appropriations committee, which is responsible for modifying the
president’s budget, has expressed concern that Mr Trump’s cuts will
hurt America’s competitiveness in biotech and yield ground to China.
Katie Britt, a Trump loyalist and senator for Alabama, has spoken to
Robert F. Kennedy junior, the health secretary, about the the need
for research to continue. (The University of Alabama at Birmingham
is among the top recipients of NIH money.) When on May 14th Mr
Kennedy appeared before lawmakers to defend the restructuring of
the HHS, Bill Cassidy, the Republican chairman of the Senate health
committee, asked him to reassure Americans that the reforms “will
make their lives easier, not harder”.

Courts will have their say as well. On May 5th 13 universities sued
the administration over the NSF’s new indirect-cost cap, and the
American Association of University Professors has likewise sued Mr
Trump over his treatment of Harvard and Columbia. Harvard’s suit is
ongoing. Dr Baric is one researcher who has had his grant
terminations reversed in this manner. His state of North Carolina,
alongside 22 other states and the District of Columbia, sued the HHS
over the revoked CDC funding for vaccine research. On May 16th the
court ruled that the federal government had overstepped and not
followed due process, and ordered the HHS to reinstate the funding.

Reversing more cuts will take time, however. And the uncertainty
and chaos in the short term could have lasting effects. A country
where approved grants can be terminated before work is finished
and appealing against decisions is difficult becomes a less attractive
place to do science. Some researchers may consider moving

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abroad·. American science has long seen itself as the world’s best;
today it faces its gravest moment ever. ■

Curious about the world? To enjoy our mind-expanding science

coverage, sign up to Simply Science, our weekly subscriber-only
newsletter.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/science-and-
technology/2025/05/21/trumps-attack-on-science-is-growing-fiercer-and-more-
indiscriminate

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Disaster pending

How cuts to science funding

will hurt ordinary Americans
Federal agencies are struggling to predict the weather and monitor
disease
5月 22, 2025 03:18 上午 | ATLANTA and LOS ANGELES

FROM LAW firms to universities, Donald Trump’s administration has

taken aim at elites. But the consequences of cuts to research
spending· and reductions in the federal workforce carried out since
Mr Trump returned to the White House will trickle down quickly.

Federally funded science agencies provide all sorts of services, many

of which save lives and generate economic value. The National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), for example,

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provides weather forecasts that farmers rely on to determine when
to plant, irrigate and harvest and that authorities use to prepare for
disasters. The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in
its role as America’s public-health agency, collects data essential to
the effective treatment of diseases and funds clinics that treat them.
Research on pollution at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA),
meanwhile, is critical for refining regulations that protect Americans
from contaminants. The cuts to these agencies and others are likely
to hurt ordinary Americans.

DOGE, Mr Trump’s cost-cutting special force, has already

implemented personnel cuts at NOAA. A leaked memo suggests that
Congress will soon slash its research budget and eliminate more
positions. This will further disrupt operations. In normal
circumstances the agency’s National Weather Service (NWS) offices
launch weather balloons twice a day. These balloons carry
instruments that record atmospheric pressure, temperature and
humidity data, all of which inform predictions of where storms
develop, how they move and how strong they may be.

One current NWS employee, who requested anonymity for fear of

retaliation, says that his office has lost four of 13 forecasters since
the Trump administration took office. He and his remaining
colleagues are now sending balloons up only in the evening, in effect
halving the resolution of their data. Other offices have delayed or
suspended launches. The Mountain West region, which includes
Idaho and Montana, is hardest hit. “That’s where the storm systems
that produce severe weather really get going in the spring months,”
says Chris Vagasky, a meteorologist at the University of Wisconsin-
Madison. The NWS office in Jackson, Kentucky is no longer able to
staff overnight shifts. When tornadoes ripped through the state last
week, killing at least 19 people, the agency was hard-pressed to find
cover. Workers stayed overtime and neighbouring offices sent
support staff.

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Cuts to data collection are being exacerbated by cuts to the groups
responsible for warning people about dangerous conditions. Kayla
Besong worked at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre in Hawaii. Her
team wore pagers, like doctors in hospital, which alerted them to
earthquake activity. Using data about the location, size and
magnitude of a given earthquake, she says, they would have to
calculate the likelihood of a tsunami being generated and decide
whether the public needed to be warned. Two people were on watch
at all times, which made for lengthy work rotas for a small team. Dr
Besong was fired in February when probationary employees across
the federal bureaucracy were sacked by DOGE. She warns about the
toll that long shifts can take on her already thinly stretched
colleagues. Burnout was “a huge concern” even before the cuts, she
says. Overworked employees may make mistakes which, when it
comes to severe weather, could prove deadly.

At the CDC, fewer employees make it harder to prevent the outbreak

of disease. The Medical Monitoring Project, for example, was created
in 2005 to collect and analyse data on people with HIV. Until
recently state and local health departments across the country used
its data—on everything from comorbidities and behaviour that
causes transmission to barriers to receiving medical care—to direct
their services. On April 1st all but one of the 17-person team that
ran it was fired, abruptly ending the 20-year-long project. “The only
source of nationally representative information on people with HIV is
now gone,” says a CDC physician. As much as 45% of the broader
HIV-prevention team was also fired. All HIV research at the agency
has since been paused and many grants for basic medical care were
terminated.

HIV work is in the cross-hairs in part because of its focus on racial

and sexual minorities, who contract the virus at especially high rates.
Such focus is seen by the Trump administration as evidence of
“woke” ideology getting in the way of hard science. Empowerment
Resource Centre, an HIV clinic in downtown Atlanta, Georgia, is one
of many feeling the blow. Its $400,000 CDC grant for serving gay

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and transgender patients is in limbo—the funds for May have still not
come through. This week the entire HIV department in Fulton
County (in which Atlanta sits), its only other funder, was sacked.
Jacqueline Brown, the non-profit’s boss, says she is having to make
painful decisions about which kinds of services to cut and how to
reduce the number of clients the clinic serves. “We will try to
continue as long as we can, but inevitably we’ll have to suspend
programmes; there is just no money left,” she says. Leandro Mena, a
professor of medicine at Emory University, in Georgia, reckons that
such cuts mean HIV rates will rise in the next two or three years.

Across the board

Other agencies are also under pressure. In early May Lee Zeldin, the
Trump-appointed administrator of the EPA, announced a
restructuring that will see staffing at the agency return to Reagan-
era levels—equivalent to a 25% reduction—and its dedicated
research unit dissolved. The unit, known as the Office of Research
and Development, collates independent evidence on pollution, which
in turn informs the EPA’s guidelines and regulations. Since the
agency’s creation in 1970, these regulations have led to an almost
80% decrease in common air pollutants, saving hundreds of
thousands of Americans from early death each year. In Mr Trump’s
proposed budget, the EPA also stands to lose almost 55% of its
funding, achieved by scrapping “skewed, overly-precautionary
modelling” that informs regulations as well as “woke climate
research”.

The government may eventually come to understand that warning

people of deadly storms and easing access to medical care helps
many beyond the elites. But for now, at least, there are few signs of
any such policy reversals. ■

Curious about the world? To enjoy our mind-expanding science

coverage, sign up to Simply Science, our weekly subscriber-only
newsletter.

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This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/science-and-
technology/2025/05/21/how-cuts-to-science-funding-will-hurt-ordinary-americans

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Your loss

America is in danger of
experiencing an academic
brain drain
Other countries may benefit. Science will suffer
5月 22, 2025 09:08 上午

Editor’s update (May 22nd): The Trump administration revoked

Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students.

MATTHIAS DOEPKE was impressed when he moved to America as a

graduate student in the 1990s. Academic pay was better than in his
native Germany and university departments were slick and
organised. But what he appreciated most was the attitude. “You

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come to the US and you have this feeling that you are totally
welcome and you’re totally part of the local community,” he says. In
2012 he became a professor of economics at Northwestern
University in Illinois, and in 2014 became a naturalised citizen.

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But in April Dr Doepke resigned from Northwestern; he is now a
professor at the London School of Economics. He is clear about why
he and his family left: the election of Donald Trump as president.
“Once the election happened,” he says, “it was clear we weren’t
going to stay.” Mr Trump’s government is taking a chainsaw to
American science, pulling grants, revoking researcher visas, and
planning enormous cuts to the country’s biggest funders of research
(see chart 1). Academics talk of a “war on science”. Few have
followed Dr Doepke’s example and moved overseas just yet. But
plenty of data suggest they soon might. An exodus from the world’s
scientific superpower beckons.

Springer Nature publishes Nature, the world’s most prestigious

scientific journal. It also runs a much-used jobs board for academics.
In the first three months of the year applications by researchers
based in America for jobs in other countries were up by 32%
compared with the same period in 2024. In March Nature itself
conducted a poll of more than 1,200 researchers at American
institutions, of whom 75% said they were thinking of leaving
(though disgruntled academics were probably more likely to respond
to the poll than satisfied ones). And just as American researchers
eye the exit, foreigners are becoming more reluctant to move in.
Springer Nature’s data suggests applications by non-American
candidates for American research jobs have fallen by around 25%
compared with the same period last year.

Attitudes are souring at the bottom of the academic totem pole as

well. Searches for American PhDs on FindAPhD, a website that does
exactly what its name suggests, were down by 40% year on year in
April. Interest from students in Europe has fallen by half. Data from
another website, Studyportals, show less interest in domestic PhDs
among Americans, and a rise in interest in international studentships
compared with 2024 (see chart 2).

Greener pastures

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Why is America losing its allure? The most straightforward reason is
money, or the looming lack of it. Mr Trump’s administration has
cancelled thousands of research grants since January, when he took
office. Grant Watch, a website, calculates that at least $2.5bn-worth
have been rescinded so far, leaving researchers without salaries and
unable to pay expenses. Much more could be coming. The White
House’s budget for 2026 aims to slash science spending. The
National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s biggest funder of
biomedical research, faces a nearly 40% cut. The National Science
Foundation (NSF), another big federal funder, may lose 52%.

Such cuts must be approved by Congress. But if the budget is

enacted, The Economist calculates that more than 80,000
researchers could lose their jobs. American funding for academic
science would fall significantly behind that of either China or the
European Union, after adjusting for costs.

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Social Media Pakistan 0342-4938217
Funding is not the only issue. Many scientists, especially those who
are citizens of other countries, are beginning to feel intimidated. In
the first four months of 2025 at least 1,800 international students or
recent grads had their visas revoked without explanation, only to
have them restored again in April. Senior scientists report difficulty
obtaining visas for incoming researchers, and have advised junior
colleagues from overseas not to travel home, lest they be detained
on their return.

Others allege that the government is meddling with their research.

Kevin Hall, a researcher at the NIH, quit in April after two such
incidents. First, he says the NIH asked him to edit a section of a
paper that mentioned “health equity”. (“Equity” is an unpopular word
among Mr Trump’s supporters.) Later Dr Hall published a study
showing that ultra-processed foods did not activate the same
addiction pathways in the brain as drugs do—contradicting the views
of administration officials. Dr Hall alleges the NIH edited his
responses to a journalist, without his approval, to downplay his
findings. (The NIH told The Economist that it does not respond to
false allegations by former employees.)

Some other countries spy in all this an opportunity to beef up their

own scientific capabilities. Several Canadian universities, including
the Toronto’s University Health Network and Laval University in
Quebec, have announced funding worth tens of millions of dollars
explicitly aimed at diverting researchers from America. On May 5th
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission,
gave a speech in Paris urging scientists to “choose Europe”,
highlighting a wodge of new money and the bloc’s social safety-net.
The University of Helsinki has been targeting Americans with adverts
on social media, promising them “freedom to think”.

China is likely to be another beneficiary. According to the South

China Morning Post, the country is redoubling its efforts to lure
Chinese-born scientists from America by offering big salaries.
Between 2019 and 2022 the share of non-native artificial-intelligence

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(AI) researchers who left America for China after their PhD doubled,
from 4% to 8%. Springer Nature’s data suggest that in the first
quarter of this year applications for jobs in China from scientists
based in America were up by 20% compared with the same period
last year.

That matters, for much of America’s scientific pre-eminence has

been built by researchers who were not born there. Since 1901,
researchers based in America have won 55% of academic Nobel
prizes, and more than a third of these scientists were foreign-born.
Immigrant inventors produce an outsize share of patents, too. The
Paulson Institute, a think-tank, reckons that in 2022 almost two-
thirds of top-tier AI researchers working in America hailed from
overseas. Losing even some of those would be a blow to American
innovation.

Other countries might gain, but the disruption would harm science
as a whole. At around $40bn, Mr Trump’s planned funding cuts are
too big for other countries to make up by themselves. (The extra
funding promised by Mrs von der Leyen, for instance, is worth only
€500m, or $566m, over three years.) Many researchers will probably
leave science altogether. Everyone would lose—even if America lost
most. ■

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technology/2025/05/21/america-is-in-danger-of-experiencing-an-academic-brain-drain

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Culture
Sam Altman is a visionary with a
trustworthiness problem
Prometheus unbound :: Two books tell a similar tale about OpenAI. It is worrying

In Germany, the Nazis invaded people’s

dreams
No rest from the wicked :: A remarkable work of journalism, newly translated into
English, shows how authoritarianism warps the subconscious

“The Handmaid’s Tale” reveals the limits of

dystopian television
Goodbye Gilead :: Six seasons of suffering is more than enough

The story of capitalism, told by its

detractors
Musing on Mammon :: An ambitious new history of the idea that forged the modern
world

How FDR shaped the doctrine of national

security in America
Up in arms :: The New Deal gave rise to the idea, a new book shows

The hottest gadget of the summer? A

portable pizza oven
World in a dish :: The question is why many spend time making a food that is easily
bought

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Prometheus unbound

Sam Altman is a visionary

with a trustworthiness
problem
Two books tell a similar tale about OpenAI. It is worrying
5月 22, 2025 04:56 上午 | LOS ANGELES

The Optimist. By Keach Hagey. W.W. Norton; 384 pages; $31.99

and £25

Empire of AI. By Karen Hao. Penguin Press; 496 pages; $32 and
£25

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IN GREEK MYTHOLOGY Prometheus stole fire from the gods and
brought it to Earth. He paid for that by being bound for eternity to a
rock face, where an eagle tormented him daily by pecking at his
liver. Such was the price of humanity’s first great technology. In the
21st century the story of Sam Altman, the co-founder and chief
executive of OpenAI, has a Promethean ring to it, too. He
spearheaded the creation of ChatGPT, which was launched in late
2022, stunning the world: suddenly the revolutionary capabilities
and risks of generative artificial intelligence (AI) were unleashed. A
year later the capricious gods—that is to say, OpenAI’s non-profit
board—sought to banish him. Unlike Prometheus, however, Mr
Altman emerged unscathed.

This story is the subject of two excellent new books. They explore
the murky mix of missionary zeal, rivalry and mistrust at OpenAI in
the run-up to the birth of ChatGPT. The tensions are even more
apparent in the chaos leading up to the attempt to fire Mr Altman
during the abortive boardroom coup in November 2023.

It is testimony to the skill of the authors, who are journalists, that

they have produced deeply researched, gripping accounts, both
published on May 20th, almost exactly a year and a half after that
event. Better still, they tell the story in different ways.

Keach Hagey’s “The Optimist” is what could be called the authorised

version. She had access to Mr Altman and many of the main
characters in his story, including his family and friends. His
personality is vivid and complicated enough that her story never
flags. It is no hagiography.

Karen Hao got no such access for “Empire of AI”. OpenAI kept her at
arm’s length, which gives her account more bite. Both books reveal
disturbing traits about Mr Altman, OpenAI and the culture of Silicon
Valley that are useful to bear in mind amid the hype about
generative AI.

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Mr Altman is a beguiling character. As Ms Hagey says, the first things
you notice about him are his slight stature and the intensity of his
gaze, “as though he is speaking to the most important person in the
world”. Brought up in the American Midwest, from a young age he
was a technology whizz who was surprisingly witty. He proved a
natural crusader: at 17 he shocked a school assembly by revealing
his homosexuality in order to promote gay rights.

Throughout his career, he has combined an ambition to create

world-changing technologies with a gift for storytelling that helps
him raise large sums of money to fund his dreams. He started with a
location-tracking phone app called Loopt. Since then, his large bets
have included a cryptocurrency backed by eye scans to certify digital
identity in a world of AI; life extension through cellular-rejuvenation
technology; nuclear fusion; and, of course, the quest for
superintelligence.

Some liken his abilities to Steve Jobs’s “reality distortion field”—the

Apple co-founder could make people believe in what they thought
was impossible. But unlike Jobs, who was often abrasive, Mr Altman
is a sensitive listener who knows how to frame what he offers in
ways that people find alluring.

From early on, his people skills have attracted powerful mentors.
Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator (YC), a startup incubator,
said of Mr Altman: “You could parachute him into an island full of
cannibals and come back in five years and he’d be king.” Indeed Mr
Graham and his partner, Jessica Livingston, handed the reins of YC
to Mr Altman within a few years, elevating him at the age of 28 to a
position of near-unrivalled power in the Silicon Valley startup scene.

Playing with fire

Even then, there were misgivings about his candour. “If Sam smiles,
it’s super deliberate,” a former YC founder tells Ms Hao. “Sam has
smiled uncontrollably only once, when [Mr Graham] told him to take

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over YC.” At Loopt, which he sold for $43m in 2012, his colleagues
twice sought to convince the board to sack him as CEO because, as
Ms Hagey says, he pursued his own ideas without informing them.
Their concerns about his trustworthiness are recounted in both
books—even if, in the end, his financial backers remained loyal.

Likewise, at YC, Mr Graham and Ms Livingston grew frustrated with

Mr Altman’s moonlighting at OpenAI, which he started with Elon
Musk and others in 2015, while still running YC. Ms Livingston fired
him but, as Ms Hagey recounts, he left chaos in his wake. Not only
was he overseen by a non-functioning board, he had also used YC
equity to help lure people to OpenAI. She says some YC partners
saw a potential conflict of interest, “or at least an unseemly
leveraging of the YC brand for Altman’s personal projects”.

These details are important. Both accounts suggest that his

ambition, speed and silver-tongued way of telling people only what
they want to hear have come close to unravelling OpenAI.
Paradoxically, some of these same traits helped OpenAI amass the
huge amounts of money and computational power, not to mention
the troves of data scraped from the internet to feed its models, that
helped give the firm the lead in generative AI.

On one occasion, known as “the divorce”, he so alienated some of

OpenAI’s researchers focused on safety that they left the company
and founded one of its main rivals, Anthropic, in 2021. On another,
known as “the blip”, he was sensationally fired after his top
lieutenants and the board lost trust in him because, as both books
say, he told them conflicting stories and failed to give them straight
answers about his and OpenAI’s investment activities. Yet he
returned triumphantly a few days later when they realised that the
company might collapse without him.

Underpinning both these episodes, and running through both books,

is the ideological struggle between those who favour speed over
safety when rolling out generative AI. OpenAI has suffered heavily

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from an internecine rift between “doomers” and “boomers”. Many of
the doomers are part of the effective-altruism (EA) movement, a
philanthropic philosophy aimed at finding the most potent way to
help others, which took a keen interest in the possibly catastrophic
risks of AI. The boomers, or “effective accelerationists”, are more
concerned that if America does not win the AI race, China will. In
reality, as Ms Hao points out, they are two sides of the same coin.
Each is striving to push the boundaries of machine superintelligence
as far as is safe or possible—even if one warns of “fire and
brimstone” and the other offers “visions of heaven”.

Equally interesting are the rivalries in a field full of quasi-geniuses

and the technological leaps they perform to keep ahead of each
other. Both books chronicle the falling-out between Mr Musk and Mr
Altman, which is vividly catalogued as part of a lawsuit Mr Musk has
filed against OpenAI, its boss, and Microsoft, the biggest investor in
OpenAI’s for-profit entity.

Throughout, the two books diverge in ways that underscore the

question at the heart of their common story: does the end, the quest
for superintelligent AI, justify the means? Ms Hagey appears to think
so. She explains away some of Mr Altman’s behaviour as aversion to
conflict and a “move fast and break things” mindset common in
Silicon Valley.

Ms Hao, meanwhile, accuses OpenAI of betraying its mission. She is

critical not only of Mr Altman, but of the heads of rival firms, who
she insists are in the same power struggle. She says generative-AI
models are “monstrosities”, consuming too much data, power and
natural resources. She goes too far, however, in likening OpenAI and
other labs to colonial empires.

But taking the evidence from both books, her concerns about Mr
Altman seem valid. In any organisation a CEO who does not seem
fully trustworthy is a problem. This is particularly so at the helm of a

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firm like OpenAI, which is building potentially Promethean
technologies. ■

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controversies, sign up to Plot Twist, our weekly subscriber-only
newsletter
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https://www.economist.com/culture/2025/05/20/sam-altman-is-a-visionary-with-a-
trustworthiness-problem

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No rest from the wicked

In Germany, the Nazis

invaded people’s dreams
A remarkable work of journalism, newly translated into English,
shows how authoritarianism warps the subconscious
5月 22, 2025 03:17 上午

A living nightmare

The Third Reich of Dreams. By Charlotte Beradt. Translated by

Damion Searls. Princeton University Press; 152 pages; $24.95 and
£20

IN 1933, AFTER Adolf Hitler had taken power, a German housewife

dreamed that her stove was snooping on her. “It said everything
we’d said against the regime, every joke we’d told” to an

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eavesdropping stormtrooper. “God, I thought, what is it going to say
next? All my little comments about Goebbels?” The woman’s fears
about privacy and Hitler’s chief propagandist were recorded by
Charlotte Beradt, a Jewish journalist who collected the dreams of
Germans under fascism.

Three decades earlier Sigmund Freud had posited that dreams

reveal unconscious thoughts. To Beradt, they disclosed truths about
authoritarianism that no one would dare say aloud. Some of her
subjects were nervous to share their stories. Half a dozen dreamed
that it was forbidden to dream. A businessman imagined that
Goebbels visited his factory. “It took me half an hour to get my arm
raised, millimetre by millimetre,” he recounted. As he struggled to
salute, his spine snapped.

Beradt collected dreams from more than 300 people over several
years, transcribing them in code. “Party” became “family”; Hitler
became “Uncle Hans”. She concealed the records in bookbindings
and smuggled them abroad. They were published in Germany in
1966; an early English translation went out of print. Newly
translated, the remarkable collection—which is unique in the canon
of Holocaust literature—may now find more readers. It arrives at a
time when people are more interested in the connection between
sleep and well-being than ever before.

Beradt organises the material into types of dreams, interweaving the

accounts with her own trenchant analysis. A man imagines sitting
down to write a formal complaint against the regime, but the page
he sends in is blank—a dream reflecting his inaction. An eye doctor
pictures that he is summoned to treat Hitler because “I was the only
one in the world who could; I was proud of myself for that, and felt
so ashamed of my pride that I started crying”—a dream suffused
with guilt. A young woman envisions having to produce identity
papers and she is desperate to prove that she is not Jewish—a
dream of racial paranoia.

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Many of the dreams are eerily prophetic. The doctor dreams about
Nazi militiamen knocking out hospital windows four years before
Kristallnacht, the “night of broken glass” (pictured on previous
page), when stormtroopers destroyed buildings including
synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses. The woman dreams of
hiding under “a big pile of dead bodies”. It was the early 1930s,
years before the world would learn of the mass murder committed in
concentration camps.

The dreams of Germans in the resistance are different. The night

before her execution, Sophie Scholl, a 21-year-old activist, dreamed
that she was carrying a baby up a mountain to be baptised. Before
she could get to the church, a crevasse cracked open on her path;
she was able to set the baby down before she disappeared into the
chasm. Scholl saw this as a metaphor for the fight against fascism.
“The child is our idea, and it will prevail despite all obstacles,” she
explained. “We can prepare the way for it, even though we will have
to die for it before its victory.”

Beradt puts Jewish dreamers in their own section as their dreams,

“sharpened by the acute threat they were under...seem downright
clairvoyant”. In 1935 a housewife dreamed that “We shouldn’t go
back to our homes, something was going to happen.” She wanders
from building to building, seeking refuge and finding none. As Beradt
notes, the dream anticipated events to come—the displacement of
Jews in hiding during the “final solution”.

Robert Ley, a high-ranking Nazi, suggested in 1938 that the only

Germans with any privacy were those sleeping. He under-rated the
regime’s power. Dreams reflect and refract an individual’s
experience, shaped as it is by policy and the public mood. Even in
sleep, the Reich occupied the minds of its subjects. ■

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controversies, sign up to Plot Twist, our weekly subscriber-only
newsletter

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This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/culture/2025/05/22/in-germany-the-nazis-invaded-peoples-
dreams

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Goodbye Gilead

“The Handmaid’s Tale”

reveals the limits of dystopian
television
Six seasons of suffering is more than enough
5月 22, 2025 03:18 上午

No freedom to speak of

IN THE SPRING of 2017 a troubling vision of America arrived on

television screens. Based on Margaret Atwood’s novel of 1985, “The
Handmaid’s Tale” depicted a country that had been transformed into
Gilead, a theocratic dictatorship. Women were stripped of their civil
rights. Those who were fertile were enslaved as “handmaids”:
childbearing vessels for the ruling class.

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The show had its premiere on Hulu, a streaming service, not long
after Donald Trump’s inauguration, when people feared democratic
backsliding and the creep of religious fundamentalism into politics.
As the president stacked the courts with anti-abortion judges and
called for the defunding of Planned Parenthood, a reproductive-
health organisation, some exclaimed that Ms Atwood had produced
not a work of fiction, but a prophecy.

The handmaids’ costume became a visual metaphor of resistance:

protesters dressed in red robes and white caps stood outside
statehouses across America. Critics breathlessly described the
adaptation as the defining artwork of the Trump era. “The
Handmaid’s Tale” went on to win eight Emmy awards for its first
season and became the first streaming show to win Outstanding
Drama Series.

Six seasons later, it will come to an end on May 27th. The final
season began not long after Mr Trump re-entered the White House.
Yet the fervour around the show has dissipated; after a peak in
2021, viewership has declined. It no longer dominates the public
discussion. Why?

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One reason is that “The Handmaid’s Tale” is not, in fact, a mirror of
the Trump era. Though there are parallels—an early episode showed
an attack on the Capitol, three years before the real one—Mr Trump
has not instituted compulsory rape or the death penalty for
dissenters.

Another is that the show has suffered by extending the story beyond
its source material. After using up the plot of Ms Atwood’s slim novel
in the first season, the show’s writers faced the tricky task of
keeping the story compelling and the stakes high. June (Elisabeth
Moss, pictured), the protagonist, has been trapped in a cycle of
capture, escape and recapture that has strained the story’s credibility
and tested viewers’ patience.

Resistance fatigue has also played a role. “The draw of the initial
season was that it was so apocalyptic,” says Karen Ritzenhoff, an
academic. Yet outrage is difficult to sustain, on screen and off it. Mr
Trump remains unpopular, but his second term has not seen protests
on the same scale as in 2017, when some 4m Americans took part in
the Women’s March.

The show’s main problem, however, is that it is unrelentingly bleak.

One critic has called it a “hellhole” of “utter despair and soul-
destroying misery”. Another said she had an anxiety attack after
watching. For those concerned about the future of American
democracy, “The Handmaid’s Tale” offers no respite.

Viewers may prefer the forthcoming adaptation of “The Testaments”,

its sequel, instead. Watching people struggle under a totalitarian
regime does not make for an enjoyable evening. Watching that
regime collapse may be rather more thrilling. ■

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controversies, sign up to Plot Twist, our weekly subscriber-only
newsletter

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This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/culture/2025/05/22/the-handmaids-tale-reveals-the-limits-
of-dystopian-television

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Musing on Mammon

The story of capitalism, told

by its detractors
An ambitious new history of the idea that forged the modern world
5月 22, 2025 03:18 上午

Cogs in the machine

Capitalism and Its Critics. By John Cassidy. Farrar, Straus and

Giroux; 624 pages; $36. Allen Lane; £35

TO THOMAS CARLYLE, it was “one of the shabbiest gospels ever

preached”. Adam Smith was an early fan, but was still suspicious of
those who practised it. Rosa Luxemburg thought it fuelled
imperialism and violence. Karl Marx hated everything about it. Even

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John Maynard Keynes believed its survival depended on the whole
system being refashioned.

There are two great challenges to overcome in writing a history of

capitalism, as John Cassidy has in his new book, “Capitalism and Its
Critics”. The main one is that almost anyone, when confronted with
the words “history of capitalism” and a 600-page doorstopper, will
start wondering what’s on Netflix. The other is pinning down what,
exactly, the subject of that history is. George Orwell wrote in 1946
that “The word fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it
signifies ‘something not desirable’.” Today he might have observed
something similar about the word “capitalism”, seldom used by
politicians on either left or right unless it is to describe an aspect of
the market economy they dislike.

Capitalism has always been a shape-shifter. Does the 18th-century

system, based on colonial monopolies such as the one held by the
East India Company, belong to the same tradition as the industrial,
factory-based capitalism of the 19th century? How about the
“plantation capitalism” that involved enslaving Africans and
transporting them to harvest sugar in the Caribbean? None of it
seems much to resemble the technology-dominated capitalism of
2025. Marx railed against those who owned the means of
production; in today’s knowledge economy, the most important of
these are within educated workers’ heads.

Mr Cassidy wastes little ink agonising over precisely what capitalism

means. Instead, he tells its story in mosaic fashion, using the
criticisms made by its detractors over the centuries. The result is an
intriguing account of how some of the most consequential ideas in
economics developed, and how they forged the modern world.

The author includes thinkers many readers will not have met before.
There is William Thompson, a contemporary of John Stuart Mill. He
advocated “co-operatives”, in which production was organised by the
community and income was divided equitably. There is Flora Tristan,

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who in the 1830s travelled around Britain, wrote a stinging exposé of
the destitution of its working class and campaigned to establish a
universal workers’ union.

Then there are those who knew all too well how British capitalism
extracted value from its colonies while immiserating locals. Starting
in 1929, J.C. Kumarappa, an associate of Mohandas Gandhi,
described how farmers in the poor Indian region of Matar Taluka
were forced to pay land taxes amounting to between 70% and
215% of the value of their annual crop. In the 1930s Eric Williams,
Trinidad’s first prime minister, argued that slavery helped set
industrial capitalism in motion by developing new markets for British
manufactured goods and supplying raw materials.

As Keynesian thinking gained popularity after the second world war,

the system drew critiques from the right, too. Milton Friedman
thought public spending had to be cut drastically to tame inflation.
In the 1970s Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s dictator, put Friedman’s
“shock treatment” theory into practice, quelling price rises at the
cost of a deep recession, and murdering thousands to maintain
order. Friedrich Hayek convinced Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s prime
minister in the 1980s, to destroy much of the trade unions’ power.

The book’s focus is capitalism’s critics in the past rather than in the
present. Mr Cassidy notes that, as globalisation advanced from 1980
onwards, hundreds of millions of people escaped poverty. Then
comes a hand-wringing discussion over the precise number of
percentage points by which the share of income earned by America’s
richest 1% rose over the same time period. Still, several enjoyable
evenings might be spent with Netflix off and Mr Cassidy’s new book
open. ■

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detractors

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Up in arms

How FDR shaped the doctrine

of national security in
America
The New Deal gave rise to the idea, a new book shows
5月 22, 2025 03:18 上午

Total Defence. By Andrew Preston. Belknap Press; 336 pages;

$29.95 and £24.95

FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT (FDR) was in Chicago in October

1937 to open a new bridge. It was a typical example of the
infrastructure projects that were integral to the president’s New
Deal, which had alleviated the Great Depression and given

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Americans a sense of economic security. Perhaps 1m people turned
up to hear him speak and enjoy a parade. Roosevelt used the
occasion to deliver what would become one of the most
consequential foreign-policy speeches in history.

In what became known as the “quarantine speech”, he warned his

audience of a spreading “reign of terror”. Nazi Germany was rapidly
rearming and imperial Japan was mercilessly attacking the civilian
population of Shanghai. The world, he said, was now in “a state of
international anarchy and instability from which there is no escape
through mere isolation or neutrality”. FDR argued that belligerent
states must be quarantined before they infected others with the
virus of war.

Roosevelt knew that it would take more than a speech to begin

preparing Americans for the possibility of war. Since the early 19th
century America had essentially enjoyed “free security”. The
country’s geography and continental scale seemed to make it
invulnerable; with its territorial integrity unchallenged, it could forgo
the cost of maintaining a large army. Threats in Asia or Europe
seemed distant. Congress was more interested in fighting battles
over the New Deal than preparing for battles abroad.

When Woodrow Wilson made the decision to take America into the
first world war, some of the arguments he used were to be echoed
by Roosevelt 20 years later. But there were subtle differences.
Wilsonian idealism was about defeating militarism and forming a
new world order based on self-determination and collective security
that would protect America’s own democracy. However, his plan fell
apart when realpolitik won out at Versailles and Congress failed to
vote for America to join the nascent League of Nations (a precursor
to the United Nations). The “Wilsonian moment” was just that—
fleeting. Faced with a new global crisis, it fell to Roosevelt to learn
from Wilson’s mistakes.

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Andrew Preston, a professor at Cambridge University, shows in
fascinating detail how Roosevelt used similar language when talking
about the social-protection policies and public-investment
programmes of the New Deal and the emerging concept of national
security. Both required centralised planning and the mobilisation of
vast resources to address the peril confronting Americans.

To be persuasive he had to exaggerate the dangers the country

faced. In September 1940, more than a year before the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbour, he described a German invasion that would
eradicate the American way of life: “The greatest attack that has
ever been launched against freedom of the individual is nearer the
Americas than ever before. To meet that attack we must prepare
beforehand—for the simple reason that preparing later may and
probably would be too late.”

Roosevelt characterised the rearmament programme, followed by

entry into the second world war in December 1941, as “total
defence”. However, as Mr Preston notes, the search for complete
security proved difficult to call off even after the war had finished.
Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, concluded nearly two months
after Japan’s surrender that “Peace must be built upon [American]
power…never again can we count on the luxury of time with which
to arm ourselves.”

Basic safety, others concluded, could be achieved only if

international law was backed up by “a military position of offensive
readiness…so formidable as to be beyond challenge”. This time,
America had the political will and economic might to make it a
reality. So it was that the American national-security state was born
and with it the aim of containing the new threat to safety, the Soviet
Union: an implacable ideological foe that would soon have the
atomic bomb.

Surprisingly, Mr Preston makes only passing reference to the

existential dread nuclear weapons induced in ordinary Americans.

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The top-secret National Security Council report called “NSC-68” gets
just one mention. Completed in 1950, it argued that the Soviet
Union’s expansionist ambitions were a threat that could be
countered only by another build-up of military might. It was in many
ways the document that shaped the cold war.

The author concludes with thoughts about what the second coming
of Donald Trump might mean for a concept of national security that
has lasted for more than 80 years. Since the book went to press, the
answer has become clear. Mr Trump wishes to weaken the
“administrative state” that was created by the New Deal, as well as
its progeny, the national-security state. When bureaucrats resist, he
sees a “deep-state” conspiracy. The wars he has chosen to fight are
on “woke” and trade. FDR would not be impressed. ■

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controversies, sign up to Plot Twist, our weekly subscriber-only
newsletter
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national-security-in-america

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World in a dish

The hottest gadget of the

summer? A portable pizza
oven
The question is why many spend time making a food that is easily
bought
5月 22, 2025 03:17 上午

IF YOU WANT to get your hands on a pizza, the easiest way is to

order one by phone or app; within the hour it will land on your
doorstep. (So convenient is this method that Americans spent $17bn
on pizza deliveries last year.) Nevertheless, some people prefer a
harder way: making a pie from scratch. Even inexpert bakers will
manage to ferment flour, water, yeast and salt into a decent dough,

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before topping it with pureed tomatoes, mozzarella and some basil.
The problem comes when it is time to cook the thing.

For a long time, you had three choices. First, use a conventional
oven—but, because they rarely get above around 250°C, the pizza
will be flat and dry. Second, buy a giant wood-fired oven: perfect for
anyone with thousands of dollars and an immense amount of space
to spare. Third, anyone with many hundreds, a large garden and a
taste for backbreaking manual labour could build their own.

But in recent years, a fourth option has emerged: portable ovens.

These are just big enough for a single pizza and fuelled by wood,
propane or electricity. They tend to be domed; the shape reflects
heat downwards, as in a professional oven. Crucially, they are
reasonably priced, starting at around $250. Sales of such ovens
began taking off during the pandemic, when restaurants were closed
and people wanted a way of socialising outdoors. Ooni, a Scottish
company, saw sales quadruple in 2020-21. When Gozney, another
British firm, launched an oven called the “Dome” in 2021, it sold out
within hours of release.

The rising cost of living has hampered sales somewhat, but over the
next five years the market for home pizza ovens is still expected to
grow steadily, with outdoor gas-powered versions the most popular
type. The delicious pizza they produce shatters a long-held belief
that cooking with wood or coal was the only way to make one of
restaurant quality.

In fact, different heat sources produce little or no discernible

difference in flavour. A pizza’s cooking time is brief—around 90
seconds—and it is not being smoked by the charcoal. Gas ovens get
hot enough (upwards of 450°C) to produce the puffed, leopard-
spotted crust that defines a first-rate pizza. Portable electric ovens,
now offered by many brands, provide a similar experience without
the annoyance of pellets or propane.

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That just leaves the question of why anyone would spend time and
money making perhaps the most easily acquired takeaway food on
Earth. One reason is taste: pizza straight from the oven is much
more delicious than the same pizza 30 minutes later, partly stuck to
a cardboard box. Another is social: with an oven, dough balls,
toppings and some friends, a summer party emerges. Last is pride.
Anyone can pick up a phone, but when a dish hits your eye and it’s
your own pizza pie, that’s amore. ■

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controversies, sign up to Plot Twist, our weekly subscriber-only
newsletter
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https://www.economist.com/culture/2025/05/19/the-hottest-gadget-of-the-summer-a-
portable-pizza-oven

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Economic & financial indicators

Economic data, commodities and markets
Indicators ::

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Indicators

Economic data, commodities

and markets
5月 22, 2025 03:41 上午

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This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/economic-and-
financial-indicators/2025/05/22/economic-data-commodities-and-markets

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Obituary
Ed Smylie knew this stick-fast wonder
could fix anything
Thanks, duct tape! :: The NASA engineer who saved the crew of Apollo 13 died on
April 21st, aged 95

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Thanks, duct tape!

Ed Smylie knew this stick-fast

wonder could fix anything
The NASA engineer who saved the crew of Apollo 13 died on April
21st, aged 95
5月 22, 2025 04:56 上午

IS THERE ANYTHING duct tape can’t do? It can seal up a box, mend
a boot and reinforce a bumper; it can give a book a spine, lag pipes
and stick bunting to a tricky corner. Enthusiasts have proved that it
can also suspend a small car, replace the whole skin of a light
aircraft, be woven into a plausible raft and make a fully functional
trebuchet. And all without the need for scissors. In “A Prairie Home
Companion”, Garrison Keillor’s much-loved radio show, it also
slimmed waists. Each broadcast would include a message from the

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American Duct Tape Council, announcing another miracle cure with
the sign-off “Thanks, duct tape!”

Ed Smylie did not invent this wonder. That was the achievement of
Vesta Stoudt from Illinois, a world-war-two ammunition-packer who
worried that the paper seals on the boxes were too unreliable for
soldiers to open under fire. But it made him extremely famous for a
few heart-stopping days in April 1970, winning him and his team the
Presidential Medal of Freedom and a public mention from President
Nixon himself. Twenty-five years later, his dealings with duct tape
were reprised in the film “Apollo 13”. That was all hammed up for
cinema, with a lot of hollering and screaming that didn’t happen in
real life; but the story was a good one. It was Mr Smylie who got his
team to invent a device that saved the crew of a stricken spacecraft
200,000 miles from Earth, and all because he spotted “tape” on the
craft’s stowage list.

He had long been a fan of it. As a southern boy, growing up in rural

Mississippi, he absorbed an immovable principle: if a thing wouldn’t
move when it was supposed to, use WD40; if it moved when it
wasn’t supposed to, use duct tape. The heresy no self-respecting
southern boy would utter was: “I don’t think duct tape will fix it.”
Once he saw the word “tape”, on the stowage list—suggestively, the
113th item listed—he knew they were home free, however big the
problem.

And it was big enough. Fifty-six hours into the mission, on April
13th, an oxygen tank on the spacecraft exploded. It was quickly
empty; then the second one, too, began to leak. It was the first-ever
emergency on a manned spaceflight. The command module had to
be shut down, and the three men on board, Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert
and Fred Haise, moved into the lunar module to breathe the oxygen
there. But there were too many of them, and not enough canisters
of lithium hydroxide (a carbon-dioxide scrubber) to filter three men‘s
exhalations. Unless a way could be found to purify the air in the
lunar module, all of them would die.

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Mr Smylie was at home in Houston, relaxing and watching evening
TV, when a message interrupted the programme. It was calm and
not alarmist, but it said—as Mr Lovell famously, and calmly, told
Mission Control—that they had “had a problem here”. Those words
marked the end of Mr Smylie’s sleep, except in brief shifts, for the
next two days. At first he thought he could just siphon in lithium
hydroxide from the command module. But that was shut down; and
the scrubbers were not interchangeable. In the command module,
they were square bricks; in the lunar module they were cylindrical.
Another simple proverb that sprang to his mind was that you
couldn’t put a square peg into a round hole. He and his team had to
find another way.

Working through the stowage list he found plastic bags, a spare suit
hose to connect a square scrubber to a round one, and a piece of
cardboard (the cover of the flight plan) to stop the whole
contraption collapsing as air ran through it. A sock came in handy,
too. Everything was fixed to the square scrubber with an even grid
of duct tape, applied by Swigert as, step by step, he followed the
instructions read out to him by Mission Control. Another virtue of the
stuff was that it stuck every bit as fast in space, in a vacuum, as it
did at home. The whole thing worked; the astronauts came home
safe, splashing down into the South Pacific in a smother of orange-
and-white parachutes.

Nixon called this a jerry-built operation. Mr Smylie had to agree. It

was so straightforward that a college sophomore could have come
up with it. But an engineer’s work at NASA in those days did often
have a sophomore feel about it. President John F. Kennedy had told
them, more or less, to put a man on the Moon, and they rushed to
do it in the tightest time they could. He had rushed too, applying
immediately for a job at NASA in Houston because Douglas Aircraft,
for which he was working in California, had put in no bid for space-
work. He longed to be a part of it all.

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The challenges were quite new, however, and the specifications
unknown. He had a lot to do with spacesuits, for example. But what
exactly were men going to do on the Moon? Were they merely going
to look, and leave? Or were they going to walk about and pick things
up? (In which case, they needed less bulky gloves.) How could the
suits be cooled, and rid of condensation, and “burped” of excess
oxygen bubbling into the water, if astronauts were going to spend
several hours there? All these problems he laboured over and largely
solved, earning patents for a few of them. Luckily, in the early days
he could just build a prototype in his workshop, take it over to the
technicians and get it approved at once. Things got much more
drawn-out later.

In all he spent decades at NASA, working on the Mercury, Gemini

and Apollo programmes. He devised the first proper carbon-dioxide
sensor for 24-hour missions and a heat-shield for the Space Station.
When he left, he became an aerospace consultant for various
corporations. His firmest advice, though, was never to take individual
credit for what he had done. America’s space programme was an
immense undertaking involving thousands. The rescue of Apollo 13
had taken 60 guys in the back room, all chipping in their ideas. He
had organised them, true. But his real contribution was simply to
spot, on a list, the word “tape”, and believe it could do anything. ■
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/obituary/2025/05/22/ed-smylie-knew-this-stick-fast-wonder-
could-fix-anything

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