August 16th 2025

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The world this week
Politics
Business
The weekly cartoon
The world this week

Politics
August 14th 2025

Donald Trump deployed the National Guard to the streets of Washington,

DC, taking federal control of its policing operations. The order lasts for 30
days. Mr Trump evoked his authority under the 1973 District of Columbia
Home Rule Act, the first time a president has used it to federalise the police,
claiming that the city was awash in crime and homelessness. Violent crime
surged in 2023 but fell by 35% last year to a 30-year low.

Mr Trump was reported to have signed an order allowing America’s armed

forces to pursue drug cartels, possibly at sea or on foreign soil. Responding
to the reports, Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s president, “absolutely ruled
out” allowing American troops into her country. “We co-operate, we
collaborate, but there is not going to be an invasion”, she said. Such
collaboration includes the transfer this week of 26 suspected senior drug-
gang members to the United States.
Miguel Uribe, a conservative senator who was a leading contender in the
presidential election due next year in Colombia, died in a clinic two months
after being shot by an assailant at a campaign rally. In 1991 his mother, a
campaigning journalist and daughter of a former president, was killed when
Mr Uribe was four years old. Many Colombians fear a return to political
violence.

Ecuador’s president, Daniel Noboa, led a march to protest against the recent
decision of the constitutional court to suspend parts of the country’s new
security laws. The parts that are suspended include allowing intelligence
officers to use fake identities, the use of surveillance technology and a
presidential power to pardon security personnel convicted of criminal
behaviour in their crackdown on gangs. The opposition supports the court’s
decision and claims that Mr Noboa’s march threatened the judiciary’s
independence. At the demonstration the president said he had “the mandate
of the people”.

Israel launched intense air strikes on Gaza City. The war cabinet voted in
favour of seizing control of the city but has not said when it plans to do so.
Israel killed six journalists in one of the strikes. It claimed that one of them,
Anas al-Sharif, who worked for Al Jazeera, was a Hamas operative but
provided no convincing evidence for the allegation. Last year Israel banned
Al Jazeera, a popular Arab satellite channel, from reporting from Israel,
alleging that it was a mouthpiece for Hamas.

Hamas representatives arrived in Cairo for preliminary talks with Egyptian

officials about a deal to end the war in Gaza. Binyamin Netanyahu, the
Israeli prime minister, suggested that he hoped any agreement would secure
the release of all the hostages.

Fighting continued in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo between

government troops and M23, a rebel group backed by Rwanda. Both sides
accused the other of violating an agreement, signed in July, to work towards
a permanent ceasefire. Congo and Rwanda also signed a peace deal in
Washington in June.

At least 40 civilians were killed in an attack on el-Fasher, the capital of

Sudan’s North Darfur province, and a nearby refugee camp. The city has
been under siege by the Rapid Support Forces, one of the main parties in the
civil war, since April 2024. The group has been accused of carrying out
multiple atrocities there.

The White House played down expectations of Donald Trump’s summit

with Vladimir Putin in Alaska on August 15th, describing it as a “listening
exercise”. Volodymyr Zelensky called Mr Trump two days before the
meeting and described their conversation as positive. Meanwhile, Russia
was reported to have made its most significant military advance in Ukraine
for at least a year. Russian troops gained 15km (nine miles) of ground in
their drive to take a road leading to Kramatorsk, a city in the eastern Donbas
region.

Azerbaijan and Armenia signed a peace deal brokered by Mr Trump. The

two countries have been in an intermittent conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh
since the fall of the Soviet empire. The agreement creates a transit corridor
near the Iranian border for energy exports that America will have
development rights to. Iran wasn’t happy with that, and neither was Russia.

Finland became the first NATO country to lay criminal charges against a
captain and crew of a ship in Russia’s “shadow fleet” for alleged sabotage in
the Baltic Sea. The captain and two officers of the Eagle S were charged
with cutting underwater cables last December.
Rahul Gandhi, the official leader of the opposition in India’s lower house of
Parliament, and dozens of other senior opposition members were briefly
detained by police during a march on the country’s Election Commission.
Mr Gandhi and others say that voter lists in some states have been corrupted
in order to rig elections in favour of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. The
BJP and the commission reject the claims.

The Philippines criticised China for carrying out “dangerous manoeuvres” in

the South China Sea’s disputed Scarborough Shoal. A Chinese coastguard
ship collided with a Chinese naval vessel close to a Philippine coastguard
ship that was delivering supplies to fishermen in the area. The Philippines
claims that the Chinese vessels ran into each other as they tried to block its
ship. China said later that it “drove away” a US destroyer that came close to
the Shoal.

The Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar, a UN body,

reported evidence of widespread “systematic torture” in Myanmar’s
detention facilities. This includes beatings, electric shocks, strangulations,
gang rape and burning sexual body parts.

Donald Trump picked E.J. Antoni to lead the Bureau of Labour Statistics,
having sacked the former head of the agency for what he claimed was its
unfavourable manipulation of job-creation data (he has offered no evidence
of this). Mr Antoni is the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, one of
America’s foremost conservative organisations.

Billy Long was defenestrated as commissioner of the Internal Revenue

Service, less than two months into the job. Mr Long, a former Republican
congressman, reportedly refused to hand over tax records on certain illegal
immigrants and had clashed with Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary. Mr
Bessent is now the IRS’s interim commissioner, the seventh person to head
the agency this year.
This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//the-world-this-week/2025/08/14/politics
The world this week

Business
August 14th 2025

America and China suspended the imposition of retaliatory tariffs for

another 90 days as they continue to work towards a trade deal. November
10th is the new deadline. Meanwhile, the White House confirmed that
Nvidia and AMD have agreed to hand over 15% of the revenues they
receive from selling chips in China to the American government. It is
thought to be the first time that any company has come to such an
arrangement to obtain export licences. Separately, the Chinese government
has urged domestic firms not to use Nvidia’s H20 chips, according to
reports, but has stopped short of an outright ban.

Mr Trump backed off from his call for Lip-Bu Tan to resign as chief
executive of Intel. Mr Trump’s attack came after Tom Cotton, the chairman
of the Senate Intelligence Committee, questioned Mr Tan’s links to Chinese
companies, as well as “security and integrity” at Intel. Mr Tan, who
dismissed the concerns, recently suggested that Intel may quit the higher end
of chipmaking if its next-generation semiconductors do not gain enough
business. But after a hastily arranged meeting, Mr Trump praised Mr Tan’s
“success”.

Mr Tan was not the only corporate boss to take heat from Mr Trump this
week. The president suggested that David Solomon should stand down as
the boss of Goldman Sachs because of the bank’s “bad prediction” on the
impact of tariffs. Mr Solomon should “focus on being a DJ”, he said, a
reference to the bank executive’s erstwhile pastime.

The British government breathed a sigh of relief as new data showed that
Britain’s economy grew by 0.3% in the second quarter compared with the
first quarter (or by 1.2% on an annual basis). The figure was better than
expected; weak output was recorded in April and May, but GDP rebounded
in June. Higher employer taxes came into effect during the quarter, which
was also marked by uncertainty over trade.

Australia’s central bank reduced its benchmark interest rate by a quarter of a

percentage point, to 3.6%, as inflation eases in the country. The cut was
widely expected. The bank stunned markets in July by holding the rate
steady.

Consumer prices in America rose by 2.7% in July on a 12-month basis, the

same as June. The headline inflation rate was subdued by a dip in energy and
food prices. Excluding those items, core inflation accelerated to 3.1%,
mostly because of increases in the cost of services. Airline fares rose by 4%,
for example, month on month.
Stockmarkets cheered the inflation data, which raises the probability of the
Federal Reserve cutting interest rates in September. The S&P 500 and the
Nasdaq Composite both hit new all-time highs. In Japan the Nikkei 225 and
Topix broke records amid optimism about trade and speculation that the
government will expand fiscal stimulus. SoftBank’s share price surged to
new peaks after its quarterly profit beat expectations amid its big bets on AI.

Following billions of dollars in losses at its electric-vehicle division, Ford

announced a big shake-up of the business, which includes a $5bn investment
in factories in Louisville and Michigan. Ford will switch to a new “universal
EV platform” production system that will build a “breakthrough” low-cost
electric pickup truck starting at $30,000. It expects to start selling the pickup
in 2027. Some analysts think this could be a make-or-break moment for the
carmaker.

Perplexity, one of the best-known AI-driven search tools on the web, made a
surprise offer to buy Google’s Chrome web browser for $34.5bn. In a letter
to Alphabet, Google’s parent company, Perplexity said it was positioning
itself as a potential buyer if Google is eventually ordered to sell Chrome in
an antitrust case.
Orsted, the world’s biggest developer of offshore wind farms, lost a third of
its stockmarket value after announcing that it would have to raise 60bn
Danish kroner ($9bn) in a rights issue to boost its finances. The Danish
company blamed “material adverse developments” in the American market,
where the Trump administration is hostile towards renewable energy.

The long-awaited roll-out of GPT-5, OpenAI’s latest model, didn’t quite go

according to plan. After social media were flooded with complaints from
users, Sam Altman, the startup’s boss, admitted that its autoswitcher, which
guides queries to the most suitable model, had broken for a large part of the
launch day, so that GPT-5 “seemed way dumber”. With the fixes now in
place, GPT-5 could be the world’s best model in areas such as software
engineering.

AOL, an internet pioneer from the 1990s, quietly announced that it would
stop offering its dial-up service to customers. Around 160,000 Americans
still use dial-up rather than broadband. AOL’s decision was seen as a historic
moment by some; others scratched their heads in disbelief that its dial-up
service still existed.
This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//the-world-this-week/2025/08/14/business
The world this week

The weekly cartoon

August 14th 2025

Dig deeper into the subject of this week’s cartoon:

How to win at foreign policyWhat Putin wants from Trump in AlaskaThe

real collusion between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin

The editorial cartoon appears weekly in The Economist. You can see last
week’s here.
This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//the-world-this-week/2025/08/14/the-weekly-cartoon
Leaders
How to win at foreign policy
Xi Jinping’s weaponisation of rare-earth elements will ultimately
backfire
America and its Asian allies need to spend more to deter China
The shutdown of ocean currents could freeze Europe
Why South Africa should scrap Black Economic Empowerment
Leaders | President Unpredictable

How to win at foreign policy

Donald Trump’s capricious dealmaking destabilises the world
August 14th 2025

WHEN DONALD TRUMP meets Vladimir Putin in Alaska it will be the

seventh time the two have talked in person. This time is different, though.
Since their last sit-down, Mr Putin has launched an unprovoked war, lost
perhaps a million Russian soldiers (dead and wounded) and inflicted
ceaseless misery on Ukrainians in pursuit of an imperial dream.

Undaunted, Mr Trump hopes to get in a room with a wily dictator, feel him
out and forge a deal. It is the biggest test yet of his uniquely personal style of
diplomacy. It is also a reminder of how unpredictable American foreign
policy has become. Will Mr Trump be firm, making clear that America and
its allies will do what it takes to guarantee Ukraine’s sovereignty? Or will he
be in such a rush to reopen business with Russia that he rewards its
aggression and leaves Ukraine vulnerable to future attacks? As everyone
clamours for the president’s ear, no one knows what he will do.

At the beginning of Mr Trump’s second term his supporters had a theory

about how he would wield American power. Rather than relying on deep
relationships and expertise, he would rely on his gut. As a master negotiator
with a knack for sensing what others want and fear, he would cut through the
waffle and apply pressure ruthlessly. Everyone wants access to American
markets. By threatening to shut them out, he would force recalcitrant
foreigners to end wars and reset the terms of trade to America’s advantage.
Career diplomats and experts would be replaced by rainmakers. Yes, his
transactional approach might foster a bit of corruption. But if it brought
peace in Ukraine or Gaza, who cared?

Alas, there are drawbacks to this approach. Using tariffs as a weapon hurts
America, too. More fundamentally, junking universal principles for might-
makes-right repels friends without necessarily cowing foes. And the
substitution of presidential whim for any coherent theory of international
relations makes geopolitics less predictable and more dangerous. Mr Trump
is not a globalist, obviously. Nor is he an isolationist, or a believer in
regional spheres of influence. He simply does what he wants, which changes
frequently.

One way to make sense of Trumpism is that he divides his efforts at

dealmaking into three categories: high, medium and low stakes. In the first
category are America’s relations with unfriendly great powers, principally
China and Russia. Israel is here, too, because of its importance in American
domestic politics. Iran makes an appearance, because of the way it threatens
its neighbours. All these relationships are complex, difficult and matter a lot
to Mr Trump. If he scores a win here—if he ends the war in Ukraine, or
brings peace between Israel and the Palestinians, or finds a formula for co-
operating with China without endangering national security—then the pay-
off is potentially staggering.

In the medium-stakes category Mr Trump puts Brazil, South Africa and,

oddly, giant India. These are important countries that both America and
China want in their camp. In most cases, their values are far closer to
America’s than to China’s. Ties with them ought to be win-win. But they are
unwilling to be bossed around, and take offence when Mr Trump insults or
tries to bully them.

The small stakes, for Mr Trump, are in small or poor countries. A

superpower can wield great influence over such places, sometimes to good
ends. Mr Trump helped cement a peace deal between Azerbaijan and
Armenia, for example, and brokered a truce between the Democratic
Republic of Congo and Rwanda. These are welcome achievements.
Azerbaijan and Armenia had been fighting for 35 years. Mr Trump mediated
a reopening of trade and transport links. The fruits may include a weakening
of Russian influence in the area. The Congo-Rwanda deal is much shakier—
Rwandan-backed rebels have violated it repeatedly—but not nothing. And
there may be an upside for America, in the form of mineral deals.

When it comes to medium-size stakes, Mr Trump’s method works less well.

He has started needless feuds with the leaders of Brazil (because it is
prosecuting a Trumpy ex-president for allegedly attempting a coup), with
South Africa (because he believes, wrongly, that it is persecuting whites)
and with India (infuriating its prime minister with painful tariffs and
undiplomatic boasting). The result? India will draw closer to Russia again,
and be less inclined to act as a counterweight against China. Brazil and
South Africa see China as a more reliable partner than America. Mr Trump
has won headlines that play well with his most ardent supporters. But
America has lost out.

And when it comes to the highest stakes, the president is floundering. He has
tried to coerce China with tariffs, but it is fighting back. This week Mr
Trump blinked and extended another deadline. He also undermined his own
national-security policy by lifting a ban on exports of Nvidia chips to China,
while insisting that Uncle Sam gets a 15% cut.

On Ukraine, he has been wildly inconsistent, one day blaming it for having
been invaded and threatening to cut military aid, then accusing Mr Putin of
bad faith and threatening stiffer sanctions on Russia. On Israel, he has
consistently given Binyamin Netanyahu everything he wants and extracted
nothing in return. If Mr Trump’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites made Israel
safer, well and good. But he has failed to use his leverage to restrain Israel’s
unending war in Gaza.
Other countries are learning how to play Mr Trump. A crypto deal and a
nomination for a Nobel peace prize worked for Pakistan. A plane helped
Qatar. The corruption is turning out to be as bad as almost anyone feared;
the great deals have yet to materialise. Those who say Mr Trump is looking
out for his own interests, not America’s, have plenty of ammunition.

All this is only a preliminary judgment. If Mr Trump stands up to Mr Putin

this week, perhaps he can make his greatest-ever deal, ending Europe’s
worst war since 1945. Sadly, the odds are against it. ■

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weekly Cover Story newsletter.
This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//leaders/2025/08/14/how-to-win-at-foreign-policy
Leaders | Trade restrictions v ingenuity

Xi Jinping’s weaponisation of rare-earth elements

will ultimately backfire
How the West can break China’s grip on these vital minerals
August 14th 2025

Soon after the blockade started, the panic began. When China choked off the
export of rare-earth elements in April, producers and politicians around the
world were quick to sound the alarm. China provides over 90% of the
world’s supply of refined rare earths, which are used to make the strong
magnets inside almost anything with an electric motor, from vacuum
cleaners to cars, and which also appear in high-tech products from
smartphones to fighter jets. Some carmakers curtailed production; the
industry is in “panic mode”, said one boss. Ursula von der Leyen, head of
the European Commission, thundered against China’s “dominance” and
“blackmail”.
At first glance the use of rare earths as a weapon is working—and Xi
Jinping, China’s president, is getting what he wants. After the flow of rare
earths resumed, America’s president lifted controls on the sale of some
Nvidia chips, and delayed a hefty increase in import duties; on August 11th
America and China further extended their trade truce. In July Mrs von der
Leyen went cap-in-hand to Beijing, seeking looser restrictions. But in the
long term, China’s rare-earths weapon will backfire.

The new controls are a sign of just how sophisticated China’s economic
arsenal has become. After a political spat in 2010 it briefly blocked the
exports of rare earths to Japan; in a fit of pique in 2020, it increased duties
on Australian Shiraz and grass-fed beef. Now, however, Mr Xi has put in
place a system of export controls that seek to exploit China’s heft in global
supply chains. A licensing scheme covering more than 700 goods, including
manufacturing equipment and critical minerals, began operating in
December. Officials keep careful track of the ultimate consumer of the
products, and can revoke licences. Even though rare-earths exports have
resumed in recent weeks, sales to Western armsmakers, for instance, are still
choked off.

The aim is clear. Mr Xi wants to indigenise supply chains, so that China is

not at the mercy of its enemies for critical inputs—an effort that was
turbocharged after America banned the export of advanced chips to China.
He also hopes to use China’s control of supply chains as a source of power
over others. As long ago as April 2020 he told officials that dependency on
China could be a “deterrent” against foreigners who would “artificially cut
off supply”.

The difficulty for Mr Xi, though, is that export controls have unintended
consequences. Confronted with a ban, companies and entrepreneurs find
ways around the shortage. China’s dominance in rare earths stems not from
exclusive control of the world’s deposits, nor from the technological
sophistication of the refining process, but instead from efficiency and scale.
And the more it uses rare earths (or indeed other commodities) as a weapon,
the more it will encourage others to find alternatives—weakening its future
firepower.
Start with the nature of China’s chokehold. Despite their name, rare earths
are relatively abundant; less than half of all known reserves are found in
China. Refining is a painstaking and polluting business, but is not as
technologically complex as advanced chipmaking. China’s grip on rare
earths is therefore not as strong as the West’s on cutting-edge chips, and
easier to work around. Indeed, until the 1980s, America was the biggest
supplier of the minerals. The dominance of China came about because it was
more willing to accept the environmental consequences, and has since been
cemented by its gargantuan size, which allows rare earths to be mined
cheaply.

Efforts by China to restrict the flow of rare earths have already spurred
efforts to find alternatives. After the spat in 2010, Japan invested in rare-
earths mines and began building stockpiles; although it still imports rare
earths from China, its dependence has fallen from 90% to 60%. Earlier this
year the Pentagon took a stake in MP Materials, a miner in California, with
which Apple has signed a deal. All told, 22 new mining projects are
expected to be up and running by 2030.

Trendy “geoeconomic” theory points out that even a small erosion of

China’s dominance in rare earths could weaken its power disproportionately.
Reducing its share from 90% to 80% may not sound like much, but it would
imply a doubling in size of alternative sources of supply, giving China’s
customers far more room for manoeuvre.

Even so, this diversification could still take years. What could Western
governments do to speed it up? They have a responsibility, of course, to
secure their military supply chains. They could also streamline the process
of approving mining permits (which in America can take up to a decade),
and could revisit environmental rules. Lowering trade barriers would also
help the rest of the world mimic China’s scale.

It would be a mistake, though, for governments to seek to protect the entire

economy from the impact of shortages. That is because a far more powerful
—and underappreciated—response to shortages is innovation. Just think of
how America’s chip controls have prompted Chinese firms such as Huawei
and DeepSeek to develop new techniques, or how a cobalt crunch in 2022
quickly eased, partly as makers of electric vehicles found ways to do without
the metal.

Similarly, startups across the West are now working on the recycling of rare
earths, and on the development of alternative ways to make magnets and
motors that do not rely on them. BMW and Renault, two European
carmakers, already sell electric vehicles that do not use rare earths in their
motors. Other companies could follow suit. China’s restrictions will cause
disruption as producers rejig their processes, but long-term alternatives do
exist.

The more China uses its rare-earths weapon, therefore, the weaker it will
become. Time and again, enterprise and ingenuity have prevailed over
attempts to control the flow of goods. China itself learned that lesson as its
technology firms responded to America’s export controls on chips. It may
have to learn it again. ■

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brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader
correspondence.
This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//leaders/2025/08/13/xi-jinpings-weaponisation-of-rare-
earth-elements-will-ultimately-backfire
Leaders | Defence in the Pacific

America and its Asian allies need to spend more to

deter China
It should be a two-way street
August 14th 2025

Unlike in Europe or the Middle East, there are no big interstate wars taking
place in Asia right now. But the threat from China’s military build-up is
obvious. Across the Pacific, American airmen are busy restoring and
upgrading second-world-war airbases so that they can be used by their
forces today. This is part of a policy to deter China that began under
President Joe Biden. Now President Donald Trump is demanding that
America’s Asian friends contribute far more to this task.

The administration wants them to spend more on defence and do more to

deter an attack on Taiwan. Yet Mr Trump has sown doubts about America’s
commitment to its friends, most spectacularly with Ukraine and NATO, but
also with India. What should America’s Asian partners do?

Europe could plausibly defend itself without copious American help against
Russia, but America’s Asian friends would have little chance of deterring
China if they were abandoned by Uncle Sam, unless they resorted to nuclear
weapons. China’s relative advantage is larger, the geography is daunting and
there is no Asian alliance comparable to nato. Yet fortunately the Trump
administration’s commitment to the Pacific is deeper than to Europe. Its
Asian partners should build on that.

A lack of cash is a problem. Mr Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill”, passed last

month, will provide an injection of funds for America’s armed forces. But
his budget request for the next fiscal year is flat, implying a cut after
inflation. Congress needs to spend more if the Pentagon is to keep up with
technological change and have enough ships, airfields, troops and munitions
to counter China. Among America’s five main security partners in the region
—Australia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan—average
annual defence spending is a threadbare 1.8% of GDP.

Mr Trump is right to ask them to spend 3.5% on defence. Australia, South

Korea and Taiwan have low public debt compared with other rich countries,
and could afford to do more. Australia’s Labor government, for example, has
no excuse. Its own white papers warn of the seriousness of the threat from
China, but its defence budget, at just under 2% of GDP, tells a different
story. It should put off planned tax cuts and new social programmes or use
debt financing to commit to meeting the new target.

In Japan, tough decisions loom. A minority Liberal Democratic Party

government is under pressure to offer tax cuts, not a jump in defence
spending. With high debt, borrowing to pay for defence is harder. Across the
region the Pentagon should be careful about these conversations, however.
Pushing too hard for unpopular policies could create a backlash among
voters.

Even as they raise spending, America’s Asian partners should do more

together, not least by investing more in the region’s defence-industrial base.
This would helpfully place arms factories closer to where weapons might be
needed. It would also create a modest hedge against American abandonment.
Australia’s recent announcement that it would buy frigates from Japan is a
start. By lifting their own spending and beefing up their industrial bases,
they can protect themselves, show America that they are not freeloading and
build confidence that China can be deterred in the Pacific.■

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brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader
correspondence.
This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//leaders/2025/08/14/america-and-its-asian-allies-need-to-
spend-more-to-deter-china
Leaders | Climate tipping-points

The shutdown of ocean currents could freeze

Europe
When climate change poses a strategic threat, it needs a strategic response
August 14th 2025

Those who think about national security love to bandy acronyms such as
ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System) and WOMBAT (Weapon of
Magnesium, Battalion, Anti-Tank). They need to add AMOC to the list. The
Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is not a weapons system. But it
could lay waste a continent—specifically, Europe—to an extent that only a
nuclear war could outmatch.

AMOC is part of a system of currents which move heat around the oceans of
the world. It delivers a stupendous flow of that heat—more than 1,000
terawatts—to the North Atlantic. That sounds like the sort of planetary
juggernaut it would be incredibly hard for humans (whose global civilisation
runs at a mere 20 terawatts) to do anything about. Alas, no. AMOC is a
curiously delicate thing. Changes in sea-surface temperature and salinity
caused by global warming could conceivably make it stall; such abrupt
shutdowns are clearly visible in the geological record. For Europe that could
mean a sudden, severe cooling—even as the rest of the world keeps
warming.

Europeans sweltering through yet another summer heatwave might think

such cooling would be just the ticket. Again, alas, no. A complete AMOC
shutdown could see Brussels hitting -20°C (-4°F) in a bad winter. In Oslo
the figure would be almost -50°C (-58°F); not quite Yakutsk, but not far off.
February sea ice in the North Sea could come as far south as the Humber
estuary and the Frisian Islands north of Holland. Average rainfall in parts of
northern Europe would drop precipitously; according to one estimate as
much as 80% of England’s arable land would no longer be farmable without
irrigation. Storms would get worse; so, in some models, might summer
heatwaves. This would be the worst of all worlds.

And it’s not just Europe. By cooling the northern hemisphere as a whole, an
AMOC collapse would push the band of rain which girdles the tropics
towards the south. That would be very bad for the African countries on the
south edge of the Sahara; it could also be devastating to the Amazon.

These ghastly prospects are one of the reasons that AMOC takes a starring
role in worries about climate “tipping points”—effects of warming that
might be dramatic, damaging and irreversible. Another reason is the strong
suggestion, in both theory and models, that after a (currently unknown)
temperature threshold is passed, the collapse could take just a few decades.
A third is that AMOC, or at least parts of it, may already be in slow decline.

This is well known to people who think about climate change—as is the
level of uncertainty about how far away the threshold actually is and the
spirited debate over how complete a collapse might ensue. But there is no
evidence that such possibilities are feeding into government planning
processes.

You might argue that they shouldn’t: that the response to the risk should be
to redouble all efforts which might keep the temperature low enough to
avoid a tipping point. But preparedness makes sense. The Advanced
Research and Invention Agency in Britain is funding prototype monitoring
schemes that might make possible early warnings of accelerating collapse. If
it could be made robust enough, such a system could make possible years of
preparation.

If this were a military threat, such risk-reduction would be second nature, as

would table-top analysis of vulnerabilities and contingency plans for
softening impacts. Larger outlays are not, as yet, necessary. But larger
imaginations are. ■

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freeze-europe
Leaders | Racial justice

Why South Africa should scrap Black Economic

Empowerment
The ruling party’s flagship policy is a cause of the country’s problems, not
a solution
August 14th 2025

Some months after Nelson Mandela was released from prison in February
1990, he told businesses that South Africa must “deracialise the exercise of
economic power”. Such words unnerved the conglomerates that had
prospered under apartheid. Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC)
then thought that nationalising industries was the best way to uplift black
South Africans. To help convince the ANC of the merits of capitalism—
before it won power in South Africa’s first all-race election in 1994—the
firms proposed “empowerment deals” instead. Discounted assets were sold
to members of the new elite, including Cyril Ramaphosa, today one of South
Africa’s richest men—and its president.
What began as ad hoc inducements has become the most far-reaching state-
sponsored attempt at racial redress in the world. Black Economic
Empowerment (BEE) requires firms, in effect, to have a minimum share of
black investors, to hire and train black staff and to buy from black-owned
suppliers. Despite criticism of BEE from President Donald Trump, who cites
it to justify 30% tariffs on South Africa, Mr Ramaphosa has called it “not
just a policy choice but a constitutional imperative”. He says there is no
trade-off between racial “transformation” and economic growth.

Mr Ramaphosa is wrong. A policy that made him rich is making his country
poorer. It should be scrapped.

BEE is meant to reduce South Africa’s stratospheric levels of inequality. But

the main beneficiaries have been a tiny group of new Randlords. By one
conservative estimate around 1trn rand (more than $50bn at today’s
exchange rates) has been transferred to fewer than 100 people, many of them
returning again and again to strike BEE deals. This is oligopoly, not equality.
Under the ANC, inequality between black South Africans has exploded. The
top 10% of black earners have seen incomes more than triple. Those of the
bottom 50% have fallen slightly. This is mostly because of high joblessness,
which reflects persistently low growth.

One reason is BEE. Meeting ownership requirements and paying

extortionate transaction costs is an inefficient use of capital. De facto quotas
reduce productivity. Forcing firms to buy from black suppliers, even if they
are more expensive, squeezes profits. A recent estimate puts the costs of
complying with BEE at 145-290bn rand per year, or 2-4% of GDP. This
helps explain why South Africa is last for “ease of doing business” on a list
of 49 countries compiled by the World Bank.

Larger firms can more easily pay for consultants that advise on BEE,
shielding them from competition. The policy repels foreign investment. It
also discourages genuine black entrepreneurship. Why start a firm when you
could get a piece of someone else’s? All this helps explain why the rate at
which firms enter and exit the market is a third of that of other middle-
income states. Worse, BEE begets graft: when the state must procure based
on race, not cost, it makes deals with cronies easier.
Supporters of BEE say that scrapping it is impractical. Even if that were
true, the government could stop it from getting worse, for instance by
ditching plans for a 100bn-rand state-run “transformation fund” paid for by a
tax on firms.

They also argue that abolishing BEE would prevent dealing with the sins of
the past. But to improve the lot of poor South Africans it would be better to
focus specifically on poverty, not on race. Since the vast majority of the poor
are black people, they would be the main beneficiaries of pro-poor policies.

There is an argument that the elite bargain of the 1990s helped keep the
peace in a fractious country. But today it aggravates social tensions by
fostering inequality and keeping the salience of race high. In a large poll this
year pluralities of South Africans, including black South Africans, said that
BEE reduces economic growth and is “outdated and divisive”.

Mr Ramaphosa should take these views seriously. It is becoming ever clearer

that BEE is not the solution to South Africa’s problems, but a cause of them.
■

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economic-empowerment
Letters
Is the legislation of the GENIUS Act deeply flawed?
Letters | A selection of correspondence

Is the legislation of the GENIUS Act deeply

flawed?
Also this week, the Onion, the spread of electricity, religion and video
games, Superman
August 14th 2025

Letters are welcome via email to letters@economist.comFind out

more about how we process your letter

I support responsible innovation in finance, and quite agree that for

stablecoins to succeed appropriate governance and regulation are needed to
make them trustworthy (“GENIUS inspiration”, July 26th). But although the
Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins Act has
features that merit consideration globally, such as requiring issuers to be
registered and setting out clear rules on reserve requirements and
disclosures, the legislation is deeply flawed and serves as a template to
reward the issuers of stablecoins rather than the users.

As an innovation, stablecoins promise lower cost and speedy transactions.

That promise may not always be kept, once one factors in fees and the
vagaries of blockchain settlement. More important, they are exposed to
scams, illicit activity, and operational and cyber-security risks, and although
they are supposed to be backed by high-quality collateral that is not a
guarantee of safety. Financial shocks have recently affected even the US
Treasury market.

The GENIUS Act doesn’t address many of these vulnerabilities. Although

Donald Trump believes that dollar stablecoins will create new demand for
Treasury bills, they may simply reduce or eliminate demand for government-
only money funds. As Simon Johnson and Brooksley Born remind us, we’ve
seen this movie before in the Commodity Futures Modernisation Act, which
weakened oversight and amplified vulnerabilities in derivatives.

Excessive regulation can hobble innovation in finance and deny the benefits
of it to consumers and businesses. But in this case the rush to innovate may
create a race to the bottom if global regulators are to use the GENIUS Act as
a template.

Richard BernerCo-directorVolatility and Risk InstituteNYU Stern School of

BusinessNew York

Stablecoin issuance hinges on Treasury supply. If stablecoins take off, it

hands control of the money supply to politicians. So much for monetary-
policy independence. Similar to profligate monarchs, except this time the
person at the helm isn’t even trying to sustain a dynasty.

Amy HuberAssistant professor of financeWharton SchoolUniversity of

PennsylvaniaPhiladelphia
It is true that the adoption of artificial intelligence is proceeding at a snail’s
pace (Free exchange, July 19th). However, the history of the spread of other
ground-breaking technologies is instructive. Electricity, for instance, became
a commodity shortly after improvements in the light bulb in the 1870s and
early 1880s. The world’s first power station was established by 1882. Yet it
was only in the 1920s that electricity was fully integrated into
manufacturing. This delay wasn’t simply due to friction between various
interests or public-choice arguments. A deeper reason lay in business models
that were ill-suited for electric power. Factories designed around a central
shaft for steam power required a substantial overhaul to adopt electricity.
Similarly, the structural changes needed for AI’s full adoption require time
for new business models to emerge.

Isaac AlfonLondon

Regarding your piece on satire in the age of Donald Trump (“Sting like the
Bee”, July 26th), I’ve been an avid reader of the Onion for decades. This
includes through normal times (“It Only Tuesday”), dark times (“A
Shattered Nation Longs to Care about Stupid Bullshit Again”) and bizarre
times (“Kitten Thinks of Nothing But Murder All Day”). I’ve recently
wondered if my belief that it has got less funny is a function of my getting
older and grumpier or something else, and your article made something click
for me. It’s not that the Babylon Bee’s sense of humour is sharper or funnier,
but rather that the Onion has become more like the Bee, whose writers seem
to think that comedy consists of restating one’s beliefs in the format of a
joke.

The Onion’s writers are, as you say, “outraged and exhausted by the
administration”. And the internet has changed how humour is received (the
understanding of irony is virtually non-existent). One senses that the loss of
a certain satirical edge stems from both.

Unlike an earlier era not so long ago, it’s hard to imagine the Onion today, or
indeed most writers working in the broadly left-leaning world of mainstream
comedy, poking fun at socialism (“Marxists’ Apartment a Microcosm of
Why Marxism Doesn’t Work”). Or feminism (“Women Now Empowered by
Everything a Woman Does”). Or any other viewpoint with which the writers
sympathise.

Michael LuegerWakefield, Massachusetts

Video games are another perhaps surprising media format where Generation
Z is finding religious inspiration (Letters, July 5th). Sandy Petersen, a
designer on the blockbuster “Doom” franchise, saw its shotguns and
chainsaws as one form of worship, blasting demons back to Hell.

Joshua Graham, a character who was first introduced in “Fallout: New

Vegas” in 2010, is a missionary bringing the Good News back to a world
ravaged by nuclear war, and struggling to defend the community he has
adopted from marauding bandit tribes.

Recordings of his actions and dialogue in “Fallout” are on YouTube, and it is

instructive to read the viewers’ comments below them. You’ll invariably
find hundreds of remarks from young men saying how Joshua Graham
opened them up to appreciating a Christian perspective that their secular
upbringings had ignored, and more from revived Christians who thought that
they had lapsed from religion only to find Joshua Graham helping to inspire
them.
It was perhaps unintentional on the developers’ part; Joshua Graham is only
a small part of a much larger game-world after all. But “Fallout” has
probably done more to prompt a Christian revival than 100,000 happy-
clappy guitar jams.

Robert FrazeSalford

I read your piece on what Superman can tell us about American foreign
policy (“A man of steel for all seasons”, July 12th). One can only wonder
how the superhero would be treated as an undocumented alien in America
today.

Jim HarrisonRensselaer, New York

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deeply-flawed
By Invitation
The far north has become NATO’s soft underbelly, writes John Bolton
The world needs more than drugs to fight obesity, writes Novo
Nordisk’s ex-boss
By Invitation | Arctic geopolitics

The far north has become NATO’s soft underbelly,

writes John Bolton
The foreign-policy expert makes the argument for keeping the Chinese out
and the Russians down
August 14th 2025

This guest essay is one of three we have published to mark the centenary of
the Svalbard Treaty coming into force on August 14th 1925. The others are
by Mikhail Komin and Kieran Mulvaney.

ALTHOUGH LONG a factor in American strategic thinking, the Arctic now

receives far more attention in Washington than in decades. Several forces are
at play: increased use of Arctic maritime passages for military and
commercial purposes; Russia’s historical focus on its northern territories,
now magnified by its aggression against Ukraine; and, most salient
geopolitically, China’s undisguised aim to be an Arctic power. America and
its allies have yet to cope adequately with these challenges.

In the second world war, Greenland was critical to North Atlantic convoy
routes. The Pentagon clearly understood the Arctic’s cold-war role, building
the “DEW [distant-early-warning] Line” across Alaska, Canada and
Greenland to detect nuclear-equipped Soviet bombers or ballistic missiles
heading to the United States. Responding to the Sputnik satellite, in 1958
Dwight Eisenhower sent the USS Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear-powered
submarine, under the Arctic ice cap from the Bering Strait to the Atlantic, in
the first submerged transit of the North Pole.

Unfortunately, cold-war victory led to geostrategic complacency, not just in

Washington, but across NATO and bilateral American alliances. This
complacency is disappearing as the race for Arctic hegemony picks up, but
the West has much to do, and quickly, to counter the rising threats from
China and Russia.

The prize is potentially vast. Opportunities to exploit the fabled Northwest

Passage across Canada, or its counterpart across Russia’s northern coast, are
enormous. Greater access to Far North natural-resource deposits, both at sea
and ashore, are also generating a lot of attention.

Updating the jocular insight of General Hastings Ismay, NATO’s first

secretary-general, is a good starting-point for the West’s Arctic grand
strategy: “Keep the Chinese out, the Americans in, and the Russians down.”
The alliance’s soft underbelly is now probably the Far North, not the
Mediterranean.

President Donald Trump remains sceptical of NATO and, indeed, the very
concept of collective-defence alliances. Nonetheless, America is a front-line
Arctic power, as Alaska’s congressional delegation relentlessly reminds Mr
Trump, and the region’s importance to his presidency’s legacy should be
obvious.

American military resources are, however, currently wholly inadequate to

the task, with insufficient Navy and Coast Guard vessels worldwide, let
alone those required for Arctic (and Antarctic) operations, such as
specialised icebreakers. NATO’s admission of Finland in 2023 and Sweden
in 2024 helped plug some of the gaps in the alliance’s Arctic naval
capabilities.

William Seward, Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state, looks ever more

prescient. Had he not led the United States to buy Alaska from Russia in
1867, Russia might have remained a North American power, and the cold
war might never have ended. He also tried to buy Greenland from Denmark
in 1868. Had he succeeded, today’s circumstances might have been easier.

Mr Trump did not discover Greenland in 2019—when he first mooted

buying it—but he has greatly complicated addressing how the huge island
and its tiny population can once again be fully integrated into NATO
defences. The 1951 US-Danish Defence of Greenland treaty is a workable
basis for guarding against the Chinese and Russians, while allowing
Greenland’s political status to evolve. America had as many as 17 military
facilities there during the cold war, and today’s focus hopefully precludes
China and Russia from acting covertly against NATO’s security interests.

Norway’s Svalbard islands graphically embody the alliance’s dilemmas.

John Longyear, an American businessman, initially exploited their coal
deposits in the early 20th century (more evidence of how ahistorical today’s
American isolationists are). However, allowable under the 1925 treaty
confirming Norwegian sovereignty, Svalbard also features Russian mining
operations 30 miles from its major habitation, appropriately named
Longyearbyen.

A European intelligence official said recently that “Svalbard has to be near

the top of a list of where Russia might try something.” This is not fantasy.
China poses an analogous threat to Taiwanese islands like Kinmen and
Matsu, just off the mainland, which it could readily seize without invading
Taiwan outright. These are inviting targets, testing allied resolve in the Far
East and the Far North. Can Svalbard’s treaty-based demilitarisation be
preserved? As I found during a visit there in April, the islands provide
NATO’s adversaries excellent locations for naval or air bases.

Among NATO’s Arctic Ocean members, Canada is the hole in the doughnut.
Persistent Canadian underspending on defence during Justin Trudeau’s
governments remains uncorrected. Helpfully, however, relations between
America’s and Canada’s armed forces are otherwise quite good, including
through long-term development of national missile defences for both
countries. It is Canada’s politicians who have failed.

Moreover, spats between Canada and America over whether various aspects
of the Northwest Passage are international waterways or Canadian territorial
waters must also be resolved. One approach would be to agree that passage
by NATO-member warships would be freely permitted in fulfilling their
alliance obligations.

These are merely preliminary considerations. Formidable issues remain,

including the need for a massive increase in NATO defence expenditures,
not just for the Arctic but worldwide. Cold-war victory didn’t “end history”
in the Arctic any more than anywhere else. And, critically, isolationism can
play no part in strategising about a region so close and vital to American
nationalsecurity interests. Time to pick up the pace. ■

John Bolton was America’s ambassador to the UN from 2005 to 2006 and its
national security adviser from 2018 to 2019.
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soft-underbelly-writes-john-bolton
By Invitation | A weighty challenge

The world needs more than drugs to fight obesity,

writes Novo Nordisk’s ex-boss
Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen on how society can pull together to avoid a
health and economic catastrophe
August 14th 2025

OVER THE next decade, obesity and associated chronic diseases will have a
profound impact on economies and global health. Yet for all the publicity
around weight-loss treatments, it is clear that pharmaceuticals alone cannot
solve a crisis that already affects over a billion people worldwide. The
challenge lies not just in developing medicines and other interventions, but
also in finding ways to prevent obesity and other chronic diseases before
they start.

As chief executive of Novo Nordisk from 2017 until earlier this month, I had
a front-row seat to the promise and limitations of pharmaceutical
interventions. These interventions have shown potential in weight
management, but they cannot on their own address the economic and
environmental factors that contributed to the obesity epidemic in the first
place.

The latest forecasts in the Lancet are stark: more than half of adults and one
in three children and adolescents are set to be obese or overweight by 2050.
This represents not just a health catastrophe but an economic one. The
annual global cost of obesity alone is forecast to reach $4.3trn by 2035. The
economic burden posed by other chronic conditions linked to obesity,
including diabetes and cardiovascular disease, will be measured in the
trillions too. Such eye-popping numbers underline the futility of any notion
that treatment alone can be a silver bullet.

If we are to reverse a curve trending in the wrong direction since the 1990s,
a radical rethink is needed. The next five years are crucial: in parts of the
population, notably children and adolescents, the number of people living
with obesity is set to overtake the number who are overweight but not obese.
Shirking from the urgent policy intervention that’s needed would be a
monumental societal failing.

A shift in focus is needed on many fronts. Obesity must be universally

recognised and addressed as a multi-faceted societal responsibility rather
than an individual one. This means restrictions on junk-food marketing to
children and continued work to reduce the stigma associated with the
disease. It also calls for urban planning that supports people’s health, for
instance by emphasising physical exercise over travelling by car. In short,
the world must prioritise prevention.

This may sound counterintuitive coming from a pharmaceutical executive.

But the reality is that even if every person living with obesity took
medicines, we couldn’t treat our way out of this crisis.

Obesity science has come a long way. It is now widely accepted that
socioeconomic, genetic and environmental factors play an important role in
the development of the disease. Appetite regulation and the body’s
resistance to weight loss are also much better understood. We know it is not
just a matter of calories in and calories out.
Moreover, our improved understanding of the hormones regulating glucose
levels and appetite reinforces the argument for a holistic approach to
interconnected cardiometabolic diseases. The evidence is clear: obesity is
associated with numerous comorbidities. Cancer, type-2 diabetes, sleep
apnoea, liver disease, chronic kidney disease, Alzheimer’s and
cardiovascular disease—the biggest cause of death globally—often overlap
in people living with obesity. Earlier interventions to prevent obesity are not
simply about limiting weight gain; they are about enabling good long-term
health.

This emerging area of science also offers clues as to how health care might
be redesigned to be more patient-centred. The norm is for cardiologists to
focus solely on cardiovascular disease while endocrine consultants treat
patients with diabetes. A holistic approach built around the patient, rather
than clinical specialisms, is the way forward.

As data collection and analysis methods improve, so does the ability to gain
new insights into why people develop obesity and which interventions work.
This is an area in which the private sector can step up to help governments
with limited resources, competing demands and a burning need to effect
change now to invest in the most effective measures.

Novo Nordisk is working with policymakers and academics as part of the

Childhood Obesity Prevention Initiative: a controlled study across six cities
in Brazil, Canada, France, Japan, South Africa and Spain, which is
evaluating interventions to improve diets and boost physical activity among
6,000 children from disadvantaged communities. At the end of the
programme, the plan is to produce a framework to guide regional and global
policy decisions. More public-private action in this area must follow with
pooled investment and, where appropriate, data-sharing.

Obesity interventions of this kind could mark a milestone in human health

care. However, if managing a single disease in isolation remains the sole
legacy of this era of scientific progress, the world will have missed an
opportunity to fundamentally change how society views and deals with
chronic disease.
Having recently stepped down after eight years at the top of Novo Nordisk, I
am filled with hope rather than despair. Yes, the obesity epidemic is a huge
challenge. But I have witnessed what is possible when science, policy and
human determination align. I have seen patients improve their health and
confidence. I have watched governments begin to act, from health-care
reforms to urban-planning reforms. Most importantly, I have observed a
fundamental shift in the understanding of obesity: from an issue of
individual responsibility to a condition requiring comprehensive and holistic
care.

The tools exist. The science is clear. Now we need to act on our knowledge.
My generation may have created this crisis, but the next generation, armed
with a deeper understanding and hopefully wiser policies, can solve it. ■

Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen was chief executive of Novo Nordisk from

January 2017 to August 2025.

Novo Nordisk has a commercial relationship with Economist Impact, a

division of The Economist Group. The Economist operates independently of
Economist Impact.
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drugs-to-fight-obesity-writes-novo-nordisks-ex-boss
Briefing
China’s power over rare earths is not as great as it seems
Briefing | Roiling stones

China’s power over rare earths is not as great as it

seems
There are lots of ways for the West to get around its near-monopoly
August 14th 2025

IT DOES NOT look like the epicentre of a geopolitical earthquake. JL

MAG’s headquarters in Ganzhou, in south-eastern China, features leafy
streets, a running track and a football pitch. The factory blocks are painted a
jaunty blue and white. The airy campus usually supplies China’s BYD and
America’s Tesla, the world’s two biggest manufacturers of electric cars, with
magnets made from rare earths—obscure minerals with a big role in modern
industry. Recently, however, China has restricted exports of JL MAG’s
wares and of rare earths more broadly, causing shortages that forced the
idling of some factories and alarmed Western firms and governments.
Rare earths, a group of 17 elements with unique magnetic, luminescent and
electrical properties, are vital to modern economies. Refined into powdered
oxides and sintered into magnets, they can be found in consumer appliances
such as mobile phones, vacuum cleaners and stereo speakers. Their use in
data centres, in the generators of wind turbines and in the motors of electric
cars—and also in the robots that assemble such things—makes them
essential to booming industries. They are important to the defence industry
(for jet engines, guided missiles and night-vision goggles) and to health care
(for lasers and scanners). As the world gets richer, greener and warier,
demand for all these things is surging. Adamas Intelligence, a research firm,
expects rare-earth consumption to more than double by 2035.

Rare earths are rare only in the sense that they tend to be found in very low
concentrations and are chemically difficult to isolate. Their production, in
contrast, is highly concentrated (see chart 1), with Chinese firms accounting
for 69% of the ore dug up, over 90% of the refined minerals produced and
nearly all of the manufacture of rare-earth magnets. In April, after America
slapped China with 54% tariffs, China began to restrict exports of seven rare
earths. Lately some shipments have resumed, but the West remains anxious.
Rare earths are a buzzword at intergovernmental summits. The Pentagon is
investing in projects to mine them. Is the world hostage to China’s near-
monopoly and, if so, can it free itself?
China began mining rare earths in the 1950s. At first it trailed behind
America, which had discovered rare-earth deposits in the 1940s as it
searched for uranium to make atomic bombs. But in the 1980s China granted
licensing authority to local governments even as it began welcoming foreign
investment and encouraging exports. Landlocked provinces saw a chance to
industrialise. Hundreds of mining firms sprang up. By the 2000s there was a
rare-earth glut. America’s main mine, Mountain Pass, had shut. Chinese
producers were the last men standing, but even they were suffering: the
industry was fragmented, illegal mining was rife and profits were scarce.

To shore up the industry, China’s government enlisted ministries, institutes

and universities to foster research. Between 2000 and 2016 the Chinese
Academy of Sciences produced 2,018 papers on rare earths. The authorities
also encouraged consolidation in the industry, culminating last year in the
formation of two giant firms. Northern Rare Earth, in inner Mongolia,
extracts “light” rare earths by digging. China Rare Earth (CRE), based in
Ganzhou, cranks out the “heavy” kind through leaching. The pair account
for nearly all of China’s rare-earth mining.

The same firms also refine rare earths from the ores—an area in which
China is even more dominant. As well as domestic feedstock, they have
access to cheap ore from neighbouring Myanmar, where a bitter civil war
has allowed a completely unregulated mining industry to flourish. Refining
is a complicated business, requiring lots of electricity, solvents and reagents.
Processing some ores involves more than 100 separate steps, the details of
which are fiercely guarded secrets. These techniques are also tailored to the
local geology, so are not easy to replicate.

Experience breeds efficiency, allowing yields to rise and costs to fall. A

patent filed in July aims to push the concentration of oxides extracted from
Bayan Obo, a northern rare-earth mine that is the world’s largest, past 60%,
says Cory Combs of Trivium, a consultancy (40-50% is typical). The
presence of all elements of the supply chain within China, be it producers of
such inputs as machinery and chemicals or consumers of rare earths, such as
manufacturers of magnets, generates more savings.

All this makes China’s domination of the industry hard to challenge.

Although alternative suppliers are starting to master a few links in the chain,
they “are always missing something”, says Wang Yue of Wood Mackenzie, a
consultancy. The Chinese authorities are determined to keep it that way. In
2023 they restricted the export of equipment used to process rare earths.
People with special expertise in the field are barred from travelling abroad.

China’s support for the rare-earths industry probably originally owed more
to economic opportunism than to geopolitical calculations. “I don’t buy the
argument that Beijing spent 50 years developing rare earths as a tool for
conflicts that hadn’t happened yet,” says Mr Combs. But, intentionally or
not, rare earths have become a source of pride and clout. A staffer at JL
MAG says Ganzhou’s prowess “has surpassed expectations”. A snack
vendor agrees: “Now everyone in the world recognises that our country is
strong.” In another part of the city, the gates of Yueci Mag-Tech, which
makes parts involving rare earths for aerospace and other industries, bear a
bright-red sign: “We will not waver as we forge ahead in the direction
indicated by General Secretary Xi Jinping!”

At the moment, Mr Xi seems to be steering China towards using rare earths

as a means of economic coercion. At first glance, they seem well suited to
the task. Their production does not depend on imports of raw materials,
unlike other vital commodities that China produces the bulk of, such as
copper and lithium. And the costs of curbing exports are strikingly
asymmetrical: for a few tens of millions of dollars in forgone sales, whole
foreign industries can be crippled.

The export controls China put in place on April 4th gave an indication of the
pain it could inflict. The rare earths involved (and magnets using them)
could no longer be exported without a special licence. The ostensible
justification was to prevent military uses. In practice, all sorts of industrial
supply chains snarled. Applications for export licences piled up and exports
plunged. The scant stocks available outside China soared in price. Ford and
Suzuki, among other carmakers, had to suspend production at some
factories.

Western executives and officials rushed to negotiate. Some companies

agreed to disclose commercially sensitive information about how they used
rare earths, including technical drawings, to secure the necessary export
licences. Approvals, especially for magnets, began to accelerate in June. But
exports remain low and inconsistent. German firms have received more
magnet licences than American ones, for instance. Carmakers in India,
which has strained relations with China, appear to be at the back of the
queue.

Even if exports revert to their previous levels, it could take months to

replenish stocks. Moreover, many of the licences that have been issued are
valid for only six months, after which buyers must reapply. And the rules
may always change again.

A refurbished bunker from the second world war at a confidential location in

Frankfurt gives a sense of how precious rare earths have become—and how
vulnerable the West remains to shortages. The bunker holds 300 tonnes of
minerals amid brutalist-chic security. The walls are two metres thick; the
door weighs 4.6 tonnes. For some rare-earth elements, the bunker holds 10%
of the world’s annual output. In one corner an Asian manufacturer maintains
a stash worth nearly $10m. Another firm, from Europe, stores enough here
to cover two years’ worth of use.

Yet most consumers have no buffers. The majority of the metal in the bunker
is owned not by end-users but by Tradium, a metals merchant whose sister
company, Metlock, runs the facility. Buyers who usually haggle over pennies
per kilogram “want material at any price”, says Matthias Rüth, Tradium’s
founder.

Western leaders consider the threat grave. Gracelin Baskaran of the Centre
for Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank in Washington, DC, says
“a whole-of-government effort” is under way in America to reduce
dependence on China. Mountain Pass, which resumed operations in 2018,
produced 47,000 tonnes of light rare-earth oxides last year. It aims to reach
60,000 tonnes by 2030. America’s Department of Defence has agreed to
guarantee a minimum price for its output well above the level that prevailed
before China curbed exports. In May Lynas, a firm backed by the American
and Japanese governments, began producing heavy rare earths in Malaysia,
making it the first commercial producer outside China. In June the European
Union said it would back rare-earth projects in Malawi and South Africa.
Hundreds more schemes are being mooted around the world.
The problem is that most of these are years away from starting up, if they
ever do. Project Blue, a consultancy, lists just 22 projects that hope to be up
and running by 2030. Delays are frequent in mining and rare earths present
particular difficulties. Chinese producers are so efficient it is hard to
compete with them and the current export restrictions are so mercurial it is
hard to know how long they will last. Financing big upfront investments in
mines under such circumstances is tricky.

But there are other options besides simply trying to replicate China’s supply
chain in the West. One possibility is recycling, which is currently negligible.
After all, says Frédéric Carencotte, the founder of Caremag, a rare-earth
startup, recycled magnets “are the richest kind of ore we know”. The EU,
which has no rare-earth mines of its own, is especially keen to foster a
recycling industry. A law adopted last year aims to satisfy a quarter of the
bloc’s demand for critical minerals, including rare earths, through recycling
by 2030.

Next year Caremag, which has raised €216m ($253m) from private investors
and the French government, hopes to begin producing recycled rare earths at
a plant in Lacq, in southern France. It plans to recycle around 2,000 tonnes
of magnets a year. The feedstock will include everything from big electric
motors in cars to the tiny ones in hard drives. A good deal of it, says Mr
Carencotte, will come from the swarf left over from manufacturing virgin
magnets in the first place. In 2024 the firm signed a ten-year supply contract
with Stellantis, a carmaker that owns the Chrysler and Fiat brands, among
others (and whose biggest shareholder owns a stake in The Economist’s
parent company).

Cyclic Materials, a startup based in Canada which has raised $84m from
investors including Amazon, Hitachi and Microsoft, has similar ambitions. It
is building two plants, one in America and another in Canada, which should
between them produce 500 tonnes of recycled rare earths a year, including
heavy ones. In May Cyclic inked a deal with Lime, an American firm that
makes rentable e-bikes, to recycle the vehicles at the end of their lives.
Besides rare earths, says Ahmed Ghahreman, its founder, it will also recover
aluminium, steel and copper. Mr Gahreman hopes that will help the firm stay
viable even if rare-earth prices tumble.
Some companies may be able to slash their consumption of rare earths. The
car industry provides possible examples. Most electric cars built today rely
on permanent-magnet motors (PMMs), in which powerful rare-earth
magnets are mounted on the rotor (the bit of the motor that moves), while
electromagnets are mounted on the stator (the bit that doesn’t).
Electromagnets are coils of wire that generate a magnetic field when an
electric current is passed through them. The interaction between the two
magnetic fields makes the rotor spin and the wheels turn.

PMMs are powerful, efficient and compact. But they are not the only way to
turn electricity into motion. Tesla’s early electric cars used induction motors.
These eschew magnets on the rotor and rely instead on a phenomenon called
electromagnetic induction to make it spin. Induction motors avoid rare
earths, but are generally bigger. They can be more efficient in some
circumstances, however. A few contemporary vehicles, such as Audi’s Q6 e-
tron, use induction motors alongside PMMs.

Another option is to replace the permanent magnets on the rotor with a

second set of electromagnets like the ones found on the stator. Such
“externally excited” motors (EEMs) are more complicated than permanent-
magnet machines. The engineering tricks necessary to transfer electricity
from the battery to the spinning rotor means they tend to be bigger, too. But,
like induction machines, they can be built without any rare earths.
Both BMW, a German carmaker, and Renault, a French one, sell cars
powered by externally excited motors, and boast about their lack of reliance
on rare earths in their ads. The technology is improving rapidly. ZF
Friedrichshafen, a big German supplier to the car industry, has developed an
EEM that is no bigger than an equivalent PMM. With no rare earths, the
motor is cheaper too, says Otmar Scharrer, who runs electric-powertrain
research for ZF. And the ability to control the magnetic field in the rotor
precisely means it can sometimes be more efficient, especially at high
speeds. Dr Scharrer says several carmakers are interested in ZF’s new EEM.
It hopes to start manufacturing at scale in 2028.

“Nearly all the big car companies at least have the option to build electric
motors without using rare earths,” says James Edmondson of IdTechEx, a
research firm. The question, he says, is whether they regard the current
shortages as a short-term disruption that can be ridden out or a longer-term
problem that will require changes to their business plans.

That question—of how long the disruption might last, and how willing
China might be to use rare earths as a weapon in future—will determine how
quickly and resolutely firms and governments seek to insulate themselves
from Chinese pressure. One the one hand, the woolliness and inconsistency
of the current Chinese restrictions may blunt the incentives to adapt. On the
other hand, this is not the first time China has weaponised rare earths.

In 2010, amid a Sino-Japanese maritime dispute, China throttled exports of

rare earths to Japan. Japanese manufacturers, with their lean, “just in time”
supply chains, were caught off guard. The Japanese government was forced
to release the captain of a Chinese vessel it had detained, after which China
allowed exports to resume. But the supply scare encouraged Japan to use
less rare earths, produce more of them itself and build stockpiles. Although
some of this caution has since dissipated (witness Suzuki’s difficulties),
Japan is still much less dependent on Chinese imports than it was 15 years
ago.

Furthermore, the West does not need to develop a home-grown substitute for
the entire Chinese rare-earth industry to reduce the threat China’s monopoly
poses. That would be prohibitively expensive and would require open-ended
subsidies. Instead, argues David Merriman of Project Blue, the West could
“significantly derisk” by cutting its reliance on China to 60-70% of
consumption. That would provide sufficient alternative sources of supply for
the most critical uses. Recycling, thrift and innovation could sort out the
rest. And of course, the more aggressive China is about using its market
power, the greater the incentive the rest of the world has to find ways round
it. The only way China can preserve its monopoly in the long run is to keep
rare earths both cheap and abundant. ■
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earths-is-not-as-great-as-it-seems
United States
Why Donald Trump is wrong to take over the DC police
Why the Trump administration excites some personal-injury lawyers
How many pythons could you catch in ten days?
Texas’s renegade Democrats prepare for a glorious defeat
Trump 2 is pushing environmentalists to rethink their approach
The real collusion between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin
United States | Capital offensive

Why Donald Trump is wrong to take over the DC

police
The emergency he cites is overhyped
August 14th 2025

AMERICA’S CAPITAL city was designed as a showcase for its democracy:

sweeping boulevards, white-marble palaces of administration, monuments
aplenty. Over the past few days, however, Washington, DC, has become a
manifestation of something less inspiring: the grandstanding instincts of the
current president.

This time, Donald Trump’s preoccupation is violent crime. Mr Trump has

been banging this drum for decades. “Roving bands of wild criminals roam
our neighbourhoods dispensing their own brand of twisted hatred,” warned
Mr Trump nearly 40 years ago. The occasion then was the rape and assault
of a white woman in New York’s Central Park, for which five black and
Hispanic men were later wrongfully convicted. On August 11th Mr Trump
all but quoted himself: “Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs
and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs
and homeless people,” he said from the White House briefing room. Then he
deployed the National Guard to Washington; took control of its police force;
and promised to “get rid of the slums” and clear out its homeless population.

This is not the president’s first use of the armed forces for civilian law
enforcement in a city that reviles him and that he reviles right back. Earlier
this summer Mr Trump sent National Guard troops to protect federal
property during protests over immigration raids in Los Angeles. In 2020 he
ordered them to disperse Black Lives Matter demonstrators in Washington.
In neither instance did local Democratic leaders ask for his intervention.
Now Mr Trump hints that the Washington deployment could be a blueprint
for other troublesome (ie, Democratic) places. “Every other blue-city
mayor” should take note, said Rick Scott, a Republican senator. Democrats
agree, describing Washington as a “dress rehearsal”.

That will be easier said than done. The capital has an unusual legal status as
a territory of the federal government granted qualified “home rule”.
Elsewhere the president would face more legal impediments. The practical
impact of his order may also be modest. He has authorised the DC Guard—
which is tiny—to act as cops. About 200 troops will support law
enforcement. Mr Trump’s control of the city police can last for only 30 days.
He says he will seek an extension from Congress, which is unlikely to
oblige. This is a long way from a federal takeover of Washington.

It is still absurd. Seeking to justify his order, Mr Trump cited several awful
attacks against government workers. In early August carjackers beat up and
bloodied a former DOGE staffer. In June stray gunfire killed a congressional
intern. Last year an official at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission
was shot to death in a carjacking. In 2023 a Senate aide was stabbed and a
congressman was robbed at gunpoint. “It’s becoming a situation of complete
and total lawlessness,” said Mr Trump, likening the capital to Baghdad and
Bogotá.

The president is right that violent crime in Washington surged in 2023 and
that it numbers among the more dangerous cities in America. He neglected
to say that crime there has since tumbled. This year’s murder rate is falling
towards the pre-pandemic trend. The number of carjackings, which doubled
between 2022 and 2023, is declining, too, though they are still more frequent
than they were before the pandemic. Overall the capital is much safer than it
was in the 1990s, when it had the highest murder rate in the country, and it is
a bit less dangerous than it was a decade ago, notes Jeff Asher, a crime
analyst.

If Mr Trump and his fellow Republicans were really concerned about public
safety in the city, they would not have put DC in an unnecessary fiscal
straitjacket. Congress has sweeping powers over the city’s finances, and
earlier this year Republicans used them to force it to slash spending, even
though its budget was already balanced (unlike the federal government’s).
That has made it impossible for the city to increase spending on the police—
or anything else. It has money sitting in the bank that Congress will not
allow it to spend. It is defund the police, Republican-style.

Mr Trump’s has a fixation with Washington the city, and not just because he
can see it from his bedroom window. The constitution gives the federal
government authority to run the city directly. It has much less power over
states and even other federal territories. The president commands the DC
National Guard—in states, governors have that job—and he can take
temporary control of the police department.

Washington’s unique status means these same tactics cannot easily be

replicated outside the capital. To “federalise” the National Guard for arrest
purposes elsewhere—to empower troops to act as cops—Mr Trump would
have to invoke the Insurrection Act. Only then can the armed forces legally
be put to use to quell a domestic uprising. The act was last used in 1992.
Invoking it again would be immensely controversial. Before Mr Trump, the
last president to deploy the Guard over the objections of a governor was
Lyndon B. Johnson, during civil-rights demonstrations in Selma, Alabama.

Army officials tend to dislike the idea of getting involved in law

enforcement—with good reason. The training and rules of engagement are
different. Battlefields require a mindset primed for combat.
As it is, Mr Trump’s prior National Guard deployments have been legally
fraught. A federal district judge in California is currently weighing whether
his use of the Guard there flouted the narrow scope allowed in that instance,
where they were only meant to protect buildings. Mr Trump’s decision to
send other states’ Guard units to Washington in 2020 was even more tenuous
from a legal perspective, says Mark Nevitt, a law professor at Emory
University.

Washington’s 700,000-odd residents have little recourse to resist Mr

Trump’s actions. They do not get any votes in Congress. Although the
federal government did grant them an elected mayor and city council in the
1970s, it could rescind “home rule” at any time. Mr Trump has threatened to
do so several times. Local politicians, for the most part, are trying to ward
off such a possibility by placating him. Mr Trump’s approach in Washington,
then, is clever when viewed through a politician’s or a lawyer’s lens. Which
is not to say that his order is justified or good policy. ■

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with fast analysis of the most important political news, and Checks and
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state of American democracy and the issues that matter to voters.
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take-over-the-dc-police
United States | A sharp prick

Why the Trump administration excites some

personal-injury lawyers
The strange case of vaccine-injury courts
August 14th 2025

Robert F. Kennedy junior once worked as a personal-injury lawyer. That

Donald Trump made him America’s health secretary was odd considering
the president despises such lawyers and derisively calls them the “lawyer
lobby”. More consequential for public health is the fact that Mr Kennedy
now intends to make some of his old cohort very happy.

Mr Kennedy wants to make it easier for people who say they were hurt by
vaccines to sue for damages. He would like to overhaul the Vaccine Injury
Compensation Programme (VICP), a legal regime covering more than a
dozen mostly childhood jabs. The scheme routes claimants to a special
vaccine court, where they get faster and easier payouts than in regular civil
court since they do not have to prove fault by vaccine-makers, a higher legal
bar. Damages for pain and suffering are capped at $250,000, plus medical
expenses and lost wages. Vaccine-makers fund the scheme through an excise
tax of 75 cents per jab. In return they are largely shielded from liability in
the normal tort system.

This arrangement underpins public health by ensuring that supply stays

cheap. A separate liability protection covered the covid-19 shot. Preventive
vaccines are low-margin; the risk of huge jury awards would drive firms
from the market. That is precisely what happened to the vaccine for
pertussis, or whooping cough, in the early 1980s and why Congress created
the VICP.

Adverse effects from vaccines are statistically rare. Roughly 30,000 are
reported to the government annually. About 15% of these are serious.
Meanwhile tens of millions of jabs are given to children a year. The rate of
injury—even assuming that each was caused by a vaccine—is a fraction of
1%. About half the cases in the VICP are dismissed. In 60% of the
compensated claims, the government does not accept that the shot caused the
injury but pays to resolve the case anyway.

Mr Kennedy says the VICP “routinely dismisses meritorious cases” and that
it is a “morass of inefficiency, favouritism and outright corruption”. He
dislikes that it takes between two and three years to adjudicate a claim on
average, a consequence of the fact that just eight “special masters” (ie,
judges) oversee more than 3,500 cases. Mr Kennedy is right that a
programme designed for efficiency has gummed up. But the number of
special masters is inscribed in law and only Congress can increase it.

What the health secretary can do is open the litigation floodgates, by making
more claims eligible for damages. The VICP automatically compensates
people for certain injuries if they appear within a set period from the time of
the shot. People with other “off-table” injuries can prevail if they show that
the vaccine caused theirs. Mr Kennedy has long pushed the debunked theory
that vaccines cause autism. Everyone thought this battle was over at the
VICP, which long ago dismissed autism cases. Through the rulemaking
process, however, the health secretary can add autism to the table or loosen
the definition of existing injuries.
Attacking that scheme is not the only way Mr Kennedy is upsetting the
market. He has terminated funding worth $500m for mRNA-related research
—which yielded some of the covid jabs—while publicly questioning the
safety of that platform.

The pandemic scrambled the politics around vaccine injury. Plaintiffs’

lawyers once aligned neatly with Democrats, who saw themselves as
consumer advocates, while industry backed Republicans, who tried to limit
lawsuits. When it comes to vaccines, however, MAGA types are now the
biggest bashers of pharma. One Republican congressman has proposed a
piece of legislation (which is unlikely to pass) to end the liability shield. Of
course anyone who believes that vaccines cause injuries ought to be glad for
the ease of the VICP, which is enabled by the shield, notes Michael Saks of
Arizona State University.

Eliminating it would hobble vaccine infrastructure. It would also benefit Mr

Kennedy. He held a financial stake in ongoing litigation against Merck over
allegations that its HPV vaccine caused autoimmune disorders. He
transferred this interest—a 10% cut of some plaintiff lawyers’ potential
winnings—to one of his sons. But the presiding federal judge has gutted
those lawsuits, citing the liability shield. ■

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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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excites-some-personal-injury-lawyers
United States | Conservation

How many pythons could you catch in ten days?

Florida gamifies conservation in the Everglades
August 14th 2025

Burmese pythons were introduced to Florida as exotic pets. The snakes grew
too big to be good housemates and were released (or escaped) into the
Everglades, where they feasted on native wildlife and bred rapidly. Pythons
are largely responsible for a 95% drop in the number of furry animals in the
park. No local species is immune: the snakes, which can grow to nearly 20
feet long, are known to strangle alligators and swallow them whole. They
have no natural predator to speak of, so Florida man (and woman) has
stepped in.

For ten days in July the state hosts the Python ChallengeTM, an annual open
competition to cull snakes. This year over 900 people descended on the
swamps, battling to take home $25,000 in prize money. Most were
Floridians; many were military men. The pursuit takes place in the dead of
night when the snakes leave their nests to forage. Hopeful hunters sit atop
slow-moving pickup trucks and shine flashlights into the grasses to scan for
movement. When they spot a snake they wrestle it with bare hands. At the
end of the night the snakes are killed, their brains scrambled with a metal
rod to ensure they don’t regain consciousness. “It’s like war: hours of sheer
boredom punctuated by seconds of exhilaration,” says an ex-marine training
to do it professionally.

Taylor Stanberry, a petite woman from Naples, clinched the grand prize this
year with a bounty of 60 snakes. That amounts to a fifth of all the pythons
caught in the challenge this year and triple the number that last year’s winner
took home. The challenge does not represent a “bloodlust for pythons”, says
Michael Kirkland, who works for the state. It is instead a publicity stunt for
Florida’s conservation project. The python elimination programme, managed
jointly by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the
South Florida Water Management District, employs 100 year-round
contractors. Since 2017 they have removed 16,000 snakes from the
Everglades.

Contractors are paid $50 for the first four feet of a snake and $25 for every
foot after that. Some choose to sell the snake carcasses to companies that
make the skins into handbags and the vertebrae into jewellery. Dusty Crum,
a self-described “python wild-man”, sells python-fat soap out of his pizza
parlour on the edge of the park. For many of the hunters the job is about far
more than money. Kristine Bartish, a biologist employed by the state who
hunts pythons five nights a week, says the mission itself becomes addictive:
going out to remove snakes for a good cause is “like an Easter egg hunt for
adults”. ■
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catch-in-ten-days
United States | A room of their own

Texas’s renegade Democrats prepare for a glorious

defeat
With the lawmakers in suburban Illinois
August 14th 2025

VIRGINIA WOOLF wrote in her essay “A Room of One’s Own” that

women who want to write fiction need physical space to think. When
Christian Manuel, a Democratic lawmaker, left Austin on August 3rd he
carried her book with him. He and nearly 40 of his colleagues from the
Texas statehouse would soon find themselves holed up in bare hotel rooms
in a sleepy suburb of Illinois.

If they were novelists this retreat would surely be calm. Instead they are in
the midst of a red-hot political rebellion: they have left the state to break the
legislature’s quorum and prevent a new congressional map that would give
Republicans an edge in future elections from getting a vote. Their absence
has incensed—and inspired—the very people they hoped it would. Greg
Abbott, Texas’s Republican governor, and Ken Paxton, the attorney general,
are suing to remove some of them from office, and Donald Trump’s FBI is
allegedly trying to hunt them down. Here in Illinois they walk around like
royalty, getting standing ovations in churches on Sunday and being greeted
by Chicago’s mayor as they scarf down hoagies on Tuesday.

Their battle has drawn national attention because they are spending hours a
day giving Zoom interviews with television stations near and far. But also
because they are Democrats who are walking rather than talking. Ramon
Romero Jr, a representative from Fort Worth, initially did not like the idea of
leaving the state for political reasons—he’d done it before in 2021, when
Democrats were trying to block or delay changes to voting laws, to no
practical avail. What changed his mind was a call from Hakeem Jeffries, the
house minority leader in Washington, who told him that Democrats are
looking for their politicians to show grit. “You’re in a position to fight when
a lot of us aren’t,” he recalls Jeffries saying in late July. For a party that feels
bulldozed by an overreaching president unfettered by norms or courts, the
fact that the Texans have stalled their opponents for nearly a fortnight is
significant.

The third day that the Democrats spent away from their families was the
60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, a law that banned states from
making it hard for black people to vote. The Texas Dems would like to see
themselves as the latest link in a chain of citizens fighting for suffrage. They
reckon the new map proposed by their legislature dilutes the power of
minority voters. To Jolanda Jones, who says she spent her whole life
working to make it out of a tough neighbourhood, going home would feel
like “selling out democracy”. “The Montgomery bus boycotts took a year,”
she says. James Talarico, an Austinite who packed just one suit jacket but
two pairs of cowboy boots, describes their walkout as “good trouble”.

The Democrats are under no illusion that their quorum break will stop
Republicans from eventually doing as they see fit and passing changes that,
all else being equal, would give Republicans five extra seats in Congress.
This week Mr Abbott, the governor, said that he is prepared to do battle over
the map for “years” by calling one special session after another. But the
fugitive politicians are not fighting to change laws—they are very used to
losing in Texas—but to grab attention.

They want more Americans to know what redistricting is and to understand

why voters should choose their politicians, not the other way around. Mr
Manuel reckons that the very fact that The Economist’s Texas correspondent
is sitting beside him in a midwestern coffee shop talking about it is evidence
that they’ve “already won”. ■

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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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prepare-for-a-glorious-defeat
United States | Green new squeal

Trump 2 is pushing environmentalists to rethink

their approach
The administration is trying to erase climate-change regulation
August 14th 2025

HALF A CENTURY ago Republicans were leading the charge to clean up

the environment. Richard Nixon prioritised de-smogging America,
protecting endangered species and establishing the Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA), the country’s pollution regulator. But Tricky Dick’s
environmentalism was complicated. The Watergate tapes capture a
conversation from 1971 between the president (“You can talk to me in
complete confidence, I can assure you”), Henry Ford II and Lee Iacocca.
The two auto executives allowed that some rules made sense (“The citizens
of the US must be protected from their own idiocy”) but complained about
the costs of complying. Nixon stammered his sympathies. Pollution was
real, he argued, but he was “extremely pro-business” and, in fact, some
environmentalists were “enemies of the system”.

President Donald Trump is using a version of that argument to erase the

regulatory framework that Nixon helped create. “Overregulation has really
suppressed economic opportunity,” argues Mandy Gunasekara, the author of
the “Project 2025” chapter on the EPA, whose ideas for how to reform the
agency are being put in place. The EPA has announced its intention to
weaken emissions and pollutant standards for coal- and gas-fired power
plants, renounce its ability to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions and stop
updating research that helps firms calculate those emissions, among other
things. The House appropriations committee wants to cut the EPA’s budget
by 23% next year.

Environmentalists are not surprised. The administration’s tactics reflect the

way climate policy has become entangled in the culture wars. On the day he
unveiled the agency’s deregulatory bonanza, Lee Zeldin, the EPA’s
administrator and a former congressman for New York, declared: “Today the
green new scam ends.”

Mr Zeldin’s biggest swing is his announcement that the EPA will move to
rescind the “endangerment finding”, a scientific judgment from 2009 that
underpins the agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions—from
cars, for example—as “pollutants” under the Clean Air Act. The Supreme
Court has several times declined to review the finding, but the Trump
administration will be hoping this time is different.

Mr Zeldin’s strategy resembles “a cluster-bomb approach”, says Michael

Gerrard of the Sabin Centre for Climate Change Law at Columbia
University. Several scientists—who Mr Gerrard says are “climate
minimisers, not climate deniers”—handpicked by Chris Wright, the energy
secretary, wrote a report suggesting that the science on climate change is not
settled. Defenders of the endangerment finding reckon that argument won’t
hold water in court: the effect of climate change on the environment and
public health has only become clearer. But the administration also contends
that regulating emissions is too important an issue for the agency to pursue
without express direction from Congress. The process of rescinding the
finding, and the inevitable lawsuits to come, could take years to shake out.
The episode has shed light on the flimsy structures for regulating emissions
at the federal level. Even the EPA’s staunchest defenders admit that the
Clean Air Act, while remarkably successful at eliminating pollutants, is an
awkward vehicle through which to tackle climate change. Its effectiveness
has been limited by the courts and changes in administration. Additionally,
most of the decline in America’s greenhouse-gas emissions in recent years
can be traced to the transition from coal to gas, not federal regulation. “It’s
not perfect,” says Mary Nichols, who ran the agency’s air and radiation
programme in the 1990s and later built California’s air-pollution regime. “It
would be better if Congress had passed one of several different efforts that
have been put forward…that focuses only on global warming, but obviously
that hasn’t happened.”

The Trump administration’s assault on the endangerment finding, and the

EPA more broadly, has pushed some climate hawks to question how they
should proceed. After more than a decade of ping-ponging between
Democratic administrations that try to regulate emissions and Republican
presidents who roll back those rules, is the status quo worth preserving?

Noah Kaufman, a former adviser to Barack Obama and Joe Biden who is
now at Columbia University, argues that climate policy in America has a
“path dependency problem”. Climate advocates may cling to a policy
because it already exists—or because Mr Trump is attacking it—and not
necessarily because it works well. It seemed plausible for the EPA to try to
regulate emissions using the Clean Air Act in 2009, but 16 years, two Trump
electoral victories and many conservative Supreme Court decisions later,
perhaps a new strategy is needed. “The climate-policy advocacy community
is freaking out justifiably because there is not science to back up what the
administration is doing,” says Mr Kaufman, but “let’s try something else.”

While Mr Trump is in office most of the action in climate policy will take
place outside Washington, DC. “It’s not the most optimal way to regulate
against climate change,” says Gina McCarthy, a former EPA administrator
and adviser to Mr Biden, “but we’ll have to go to the states.” Plenty of states
are already working towards net-zero emissions, have clean-energy targets
and, on the West Coast at least, economy-wide carbon markets.
Further inland, Ohio just passed a law to incentivise and streamline new
energy projects praised by groups as disparate as the Nature Conservancy
(an environmentalist outfit) and Americans for Prosperity (a libertarian
group founded by the Koch brothers). The law speeds permitting for all
kinds of energy projects, prioritises the redevelopment of former mines and
brownfield sites, and ends subsidies for coal. It may prove to be a template
for other states as they try to plan for more electricity generation to feed
power-hungry data centres while keeping energy prices in check. California
is implementing laws passed in 2023 that require big firms to disclose their
carbon emissions. Other states may follow the Golden State.

A potential flurry of state legislation helps explain why even the fossil-fuel
industry was not ecstatic about the Trump administration’s potential repeal
of the endangerment finding. Leaving climate policy to the states means
firms will have to comply with a patchwork of divergent policies. “I’m not
aware of any sort of industry trade association that was pushing for this,”
says Jeff Holmstead, who was an EPA official under George W. Bush and
now represents energy firms.

Yet there is retrenchment at the state level, too. Even before Congress
revoked California’s waivers—which since the 1960s have allowed the state
to set stricter vehicle-emissions rules—other states had begun to back away
from their commitments to follow California’s aggressive policies on zero-
emissions trucks. California, too, may allow for new oil drilling to keep
local refineries from shutting down. This is not a time for making big
statements and setting ambitious goals, says Ms Nichols.

This new reluctance to talk about the pace of the energy transition recalls
that conversation in Nixon’s Oval Office all those decades ago. “I don’t
think we want to talk to you today about emissions,” Ford told the president.
“It’s very political.” ■

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United States | Lexington

The real collusion between Donald Trump and

Vladimir Putin
It may be scarier than their critics long suspected
August 14th 2025

To thwart Donald Trump is to court punishment. A rival politician can

expect an investigation, an aggravating network may face a lawsuit, a left-
leaning university can bid farewell to its public grants, a scrupulous civil
servant can count on a pink slip and an independent-minded foreign
government, however determined an adversary or stalwart an ally, invites
tariffs. Perceived antagonists should also brace for a hail of insults, a lesson
in public humiliation to potential transgressors.

Vladimir Putin has been a mysterious exception. Mr Trump has blamed his
travails over Russia’s interference in the 2016 election on just about
everyone but him. He has blamed the war in Ukraine on former President
Joe Biden, for supposedly inviting it through weakness, and on the
Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, for somehow starting it. Back
when Russia invaded in February 2022, Mr Trump praised Mr Putin’s
“savvy”.

For months, as Mr Putin made a mockery of Mr Trump’s promises to end the

war in a day and of his calls for a ceasefire, the president who once
threatened “fire and fury” against North Korea and tariffs as high as 245%
against China indulged in no such bluster. He has sounded less formidable
than plaintive. “Vladimir, STOP!” he wrote on social media in April. His use
of the given name betrayed a touching faith that their shared intimacy would
matter to his reptilian counterpart, too.

When Mr Putin kept killing Ukrainians, Mr Trump took a step that was even
less characteristic: he admitted to the world that he had been played for a
fool. “Maybe he doesn’t want to stop the war, he’s just tapping me along,”
he mused on April 26th. A month later, he ventured that his friend must have
changed, gone “absolutely CRAZY!” Then on July 8th he acknowledged
what should have been obvious from the start: “He is very nice all the time,
but it turns out to be meaningless.” Mr Trump threatened secondary
sanctions on Russia but then leapt at Mr Putin’s latest mixed messages about
peace, rewarding him with a summit in America.

Why, with this man, has Mr Trump been so accommodating? Efforts by

journalists, congressional investigators and prosecutors to pinpoint the
reason have often proved exercises in self-defeat and sorrow. The pattern
seemed sinister: Mr Trump praised Mr Putin on television as far back as
2007; invited him to the Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow in 2013 and
wondered on Twitter if he would be his “new best friend”; sought his help to
build a tower in Moscow from 2013 to 2016; and tried unsuccessfully many
times in 2015 to secure a meeting with him. Then came Russia’s interference
in the election in 2016, including its hack of Democrats’ emails to
undermine the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton. Some journalists
fanned suspicions of a conspiracy—“collusion” became the watchword—by
spreading claims Mr Putin was blackmailing Mr Trump with an obscene
videotape. The source proved to be a rumour compiled in research to help
Mrs Clinton.
Nine years later Mr Putin’s low-budget meddling still rewards America’s
foes by poisoning its politics and distracting its leaders. Pam Bondi, the
attorney-general, has started a grand-jury investigation into what Mr Trump
called treason by Barack Obama and others in his administration. The basis
is a misrepresentation of an intelligence finding in the waning days of Mr
Obama’s presidency. Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence,
has said that because Mr Putin did not hack voting machines, the finding that
he tried to help Mr Trump was a lie. The conclusion under Mr Obama was
instead that Mr Putin tried to affect the election by influencing public
opinion.

The exhaustive report released in 2019 by an independent counsel, Robert

Mueller, affirmed on its first page that “the Russian government perceived it
would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that
outcome.” Mr Mueller indicted numerous Russians, and he also secured
guilty pleas from some Trump aides for violating various laws. But he did
not conclude the campaign “conspired or co-ordinated” with the Russians.

To wade through the report’s two volumes is to be reminded how malicious

the Russians were and how shambolic Mr Trump’s campaign was. It is also
to lament the time and energy spent, given how little proof was found to
support the superheated suspicions. And it is to regret how little Mr Trump
was accorded a presumption of innocence. In the final words of the report,
Mr Mueller noted that while it did not accuse Mr Trump of a crime, it also
did “not exonerate him”. One might understand his bitterness.

The puzzle of Mr Trump’s admiration for Mr Putin may have been better
addressed by psychologists. Certainly Mr Putin, the seasoned KGB
operative, has known how to play to his vulnerabilities, including vanity. Mr
Trump was said to be “clearly touched” by a kitschy portrait of himself Mr
Putin gave him in March.

Yet that patronising speculation may be unfair to Mr Trump, too. It certainly

understates the hazard. He has weighty reasons to identify with Mr Putin.
Since the 1930s a cornerstone of American foreign policy has been that no
country can gain territory by force, a principle also enshrined in the charter
of the United Nations. Yet in his first term, in pursuit of his vision of Middle
East peace, Mr Trump twice granted American recognition of conquered
territory, for Israel’s claim to the Golan Heights and Morocco’s claim to
Western Sahara. He appears to envisage an end to the war in Ukraine that
would also award Russia new territory.

This is how “savvy” people like Mr Trump and Mr Putin believe the world
actually works, or ought to: not according to rules confected by stripy-pants
diplomats to preserve an international order, but in deference to power
exercised by great men. A world hostage to that theory may be the legacy of
their true collusion. ■

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The Americas
Liberal Uruguay and the right to die
A martyr in the making?
Bolivia’s crazy kingdom of coca
The Americas | Assisted death

Liberal Uruguay and the right to die

Could its approach spread across Latin America?
August 14th 2025

Pablo Cánepa was a normal, healthy 35-year-old Uruguayan. Handsome and

extroverted, he was a talented graphic designer who loved to host barbecues
with his girlfriend and was fanatical about Nacional, a local football team.
Taking a shower in March 2022, he suddenly felt dizzy. He thought little of
it.

But within four months he was trapped in his own body; his brain had lost
almost all control of his muscles. As a kid, he loved to draw. Now he cannot
sit, feed himself or control his bladder and bowels, let alone hold a pencil.
His 75-year-old mother must change his sodden nappies. His mind is lucid.
He knows exactly what has happened—what he has lost—but even his eyes
do not work; he sees double. Speaking is exhausting. For three years he has
been lying staring at the ceiling, unable to move his limbs to relieve the
stiffness and pain, his muscles withering. Trapped, he suffers panic attacks.
He has been denied even a clear diagnosis. All the doctors can tell him with
certainty is that he has irreversible brain damage with no known cause.
Pablo wants to die. He has said so repeatedly since early 2023. But under
Uruguayan law no one can help him to do so.

That could soon change. On August 13th Uruguay’s lower house passed a
law with a thumping majority to legalise assisted dying. The Senate, where a
similar bill got stuck in 2022, is widely expected this time to follow suit.
Legal assisted dying would continue Uruguay’s long liberal tradition and put
it among a handful of countries in the world to have legal marijuana, gay
marriage and assisted dying. For Pablo, the law cannot come soon enough.

In Colombia and Ecuador assisted dying was decriminalised after court

battles. Cuba recently declared it legal, too. None of these countries has a
comprehensive law to regulate it, so its application is often very limited.
Colombia is the most advanced but even there it is bafflingly complicated.
Uruguay would be the first country in Latin America to pass a
comprehensive law legalising assisted dying that would make it widely
available. Advocates in Chile, where an assisted-dying bill is stuck in the
Senate, are watching closely.

The law that Uruguay’s lower house passed is strikingly liberal, more so
than a current effort in Britain, where assisted dying would be limited to
those with a terminal illness who will anyway die within six months.
Uruguay’s bill imposes no such time limits. Moreover, it is open to people
with an incurable illness that generates unbearable suffering, even if it is not
terminal. That applies crucially to Pablo, whose disease is torture but not
terminal.

Uruguay’s bill still has constraints. Mental conditions such as depression are
not explicitly ruled out but patients need at least two doctors to determine
that they are psychologically fit to make the choice. Minors are excluded. So
are directives whereby people who are in good health can leave instructions
to be helped to die in the future, should they become so ill that they are
unable to communicate.
Opposition to the law comes chiefly from the religious. Daniel Sturla, the
archbishop of Montevideo, the capital, worries that, together with legal
abortion, assisted dying is creating a “culture of death”. He warns of “a
mindset where life is disposable and where there are lives worth living and
lives not worth living”. Some argue that palliative care renders assisted
dying unnecessary by reducing patients’ suffering as they near the end.
Others add that palliative sedation, which some doctors in Uruguay apply to
relieve suffering and, in effect, to marginally hasten death at the very last
moments, already does enough.

The frustration of the Cánepa family with such objections is palpable.

Pablo’s brother Eduardo lists a slew of Uruguayan organisations and
politicians campaigning against the law. “They claim to be empathetic
toward life…but it is only in the abstract,” he says, his voice cracking with
emotion. “None of them has called us, none of them has sent us a message to
see if we need something, to see if they can help—absolutely nothing.”

Palliative care is more widely available in Uruguay than in most of Latin

America. But for Pablo in practice it means two visits of perhaps 30 minutes
a week, even though he has both state help and private insurance. Palliative
care is undoubtedly necessary, but is not a substitute for assisted dying,
argues his brother Eduardo. Indeed in Canada, he notes, the vast majority of
people who choose an assisted death also receive palliative care.

Florencia Salgueiro, a leading campaigner for assisted dying in Uruguay, has

first-hand experience of the limits of palliative sedation. Her grandfather and
uncle died of a neurodegenerative disease. Then it got her father, who died
aged 57 in 2020 after a torturous last few months. Doctors obediently
followed the law, apologetically rebuffing his requests to be helped to die
sooner through palliative sedation.

Pollsters reckon some two-thirds of Uruguayans favour legalising assisted

dying. Remarkably, a solid majority of Uruguay’s Catholics back it, too.
“Uruguayan Catholics are different from Argentine Catholics or Brazilian
Catholics,” says Archbishop Sturla. “Secularisation [in Uruguay] has
reached the soul, the culture,” he laments. Indeed every country in Latin
America except Uruguay has a majority who say they are Christian.
Uruguay’s support for assisted dying is built on a strikingly secular and
liberal tradition that is unique in the region and was promoted by early
political leaders. Back in 1877 they declared state schools to be free,
obligatory and secular. That was five years before France, the exemplar of
secular education. Uruguay’s constitution of 1918 explicitly separated
church from state. Unlike in many countries, it is strictly followed. Easter is
officially (and widely) called “Tourism Week”. Christmas is “Family Day”.
The Argentine constitution, by contrast, still says the government must
“support” Roman Catholicism.

Liberalism in Uruguay runs just as deep. In 1907 it was the first country in
Latin America to fully legalise divorce, some 97 years before nearby Chile.
More recently, in 2012, it was one of South America’s first countries to fully
legalise abortion. In 2013 it was the second to legalise same-sex marriage. In
the same year it was the first country in the world to legalise marijuana.

History and public opinion may favour the Cánepas but they remain
cautious. “I want to see it approved before I believe,” says Eduardo. How
will he feel if it is? “Relieved,” he replies. “I don’t want people to die. I want
people to be able to choose.” ■

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to-die
The Americas | The death of Miguel Uribe

A martyr in the making?

The killing of a senator may reshape Colombian politics
August 14th 2025

History can repeat itself in terrible ways. In January 1991 Diana Turbay, a
Colombian journalist and daughter of a former president, was killed on the
orders of Pablo Escobar, a drug lord. She had been reporting on the
assassinations of presidential candidates at the height of Colombia’s violent
struggles. Her son, four years old at the time, grew up without a mother.

Last October, Miguel Uribe stood where his mother had died and launched
his presidential campaign in her name. “I suffered first-hand the same pain
that millions of Colombians have experienced,” said the then 38-year-old
senator of the Democratic Centre (Cd), Colombia’s largest right-wing party.
He vowed to end the violence that has robbed Colombians of “lives, hopes
and dreams”.
But on August 11th Mr Uribe died in a clinic in Bogotá, Colombia’s capital,
from bullets fired by a gunman on June 7th as he campaigned. It was
Colombia’s worst act of political violence for 35 years. Mr Uribe’s four-
year-old son was set to start school this week. Instead he will mourn a
parent’s death, just as his father did.

The country is in shock. Flags are at half mast. Carlos Galán, Bogotá’s
mayor, declared three days of mourning. (He was 12 when Escobar’s hitmen
murdered his father, a presidential front-runner, in 1989.) Many Colombians
fear that Mr Uribe’s assassination may signal a return of the political
violence they believed was over.

Marco Rubio, America’s secretary of state, demanded “justice for those

responsible”. But it remains unclear who ordered the killing. The
government of Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s first avowedly leftist president, is
blaming the Segunda Marquetalia, a dissident group. Security experts are
sceptical. The prosecutor’s office is unlikely to conclude its investigation
before the presidential election next May. Conspiracy theories are
proliferating in the gap.

Opponents of Mr Petro have seized on the tragedy to stoke fears of further

violence. Vicky Dávila, a journalist who is another presidential hopeful,
lambasted Mr Petro on X: “An opposition candidate was assassinated and
your government did not protect him.”

Mr Petro’s “total peace” policy is failing. He has sought to negotiate

simultaneously with all illegal groups and gangs. Instead, lawlessness has
spread. Kidnappings have increased. The government has shifted towards a
harder-line security policy, with military operations to kill prominent
commanders. That is “good for politics and cameras”, says Kyle Johnson, an
expert on the conflict, but does not solve the problem. Citizens cite security
among their main concerns.

Mr Uribe’s murder is a “big blow to the peace agreement” of 2016, says

Juan Manuel Santos, Colombia’s president from 2010 to 2018, the accord’s
architect. Under its terms, the Marxist revolutionaries of the FARC
disbanded. “The agreement was negotiated to avoid what happened to
Miguel,” says Mr Santos. It stipulated security guarantees for the opposition.
Had the deal been fully implemented, Mr Uribe would not have been killed,
argues Mr Santos. Both Mr Petro’s government and the previous one have
been blamed for being slow to implement the peace accord.

Colombia’s right now lacks a strong candidate. The deceased Harvard-

educated senator was a rising star. In 2022 he won his seat backed by Álvaro
Uribe (no relation), a former president who founded the Cd. After he was
shot in June, Miguel Uribe leapt to the top of voting-intention polls. The
conservatives must find and rally behind another compelling candidate.

Disarray in their ranks worsened on August 1st when Álvaro Uribe was
sentenced for bribery and perverting the course of justice to 12 years under
house arrest. His supporters claim both Uribes are victims of political
persecution. The living Mr Uribe would be wise to name a successor to
stand for the cd.

The right can at least count on Mr Petro’s divisive style of governing. “He
could unite the right in a much better way” than it is doing itself, thinks Mr
Santos. ■

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The Americas | Ever-present Evo

Bolivia’s crazy kingdom of coca

Former leader Evo Morales is hiding out there
August 14th 2025

After a few drinks, Feliciano Mamani hoicks up his trouser leg to show
where the police shot him 30 years ago, when he was a young coca farmer
resisting the government’s eradication programme, leaving a purplish crater
in his leg. Yet when he recounts the two times he came even closer to death,
this wound barely makes the cut.
War stories abound in the Chapare, Bolivia’s coca kingdom. It has been
peaceful since Evo Morales emerged from its coca farmers’ union to lead the
Movement to Socialism (MAS) to power in 2006. But that may soon change.
Torn into factions, the MAS looks set to lose the coming election. Mr
Morales was forced out of the MAS and is now in the Chapare evading
arrest for alleged statutory rape. He says the charge is politically motivated
and wants supporters to spoil their ballots to protest his exclusion from the
poll by a court ruling. His future hangs in the balance. So do the prospects
for the Chapare—and for Bolivia.

The split in the MAS goes back to 2019, when Mr Morales resigned after a
disputed election in which he sought an unconstitutional third consecutive
term in office. He went into exile, only to return when Luis Arce, his former
finance minister, retook the presidency in 2020. Mr Morales wanted another
run at the top post. But it soon became clear Mr Arce wanted to keep it.

After years of infighting, neither man has got onto the ballot this time. An
economic crisis, with fuel shortages and inflation likely to hit 30% this year,
ruined Mr Arce’s electoral chances, so he withdrew. Mr Morales’s candidacy
was blocked by a court ruling on term limits. In the process the MAS’s
reputation was wrecked.
The election Bolivia faces on August 17th is its most unpredictable in 20
years. The front-runners are Samuel Doria Medina, a centrist tycoon, and
Jorge Quiroga, a right-wing former president. Pollsters reckon neither will
surpass 25% in a field of eight; a run-off in October is likely. The left’s only
real hope is Andrónico Rodríguez, 36, the Senate’s president, who is running
not for the MAS but for the People’s Alliance. Though he is polling at under
10%, the rural vote has strongly favoured the MAS and is often
undercounted in polls: it could yet back him.

But Mr Morales stands in the way. Mr Rodríguez is part of the same coca
farmers’ union and was considered his political heir. Now Mr Morales calls
him a traitor and wants Bolivians to spoil their ballots. His plan is to
delegitimise the poll, then lead a resistance from the Chapare again.

The road to the Chapare winds from arid highlands into tropical forest.
About 260,000 people, many descended from internal migrants escaping
drought and poverty, live there across five coca-growing municipalities. The
newcomers turned to coca, which grows easily and can yield four harvests a
year. There is a market for leaves that Andeans have chewed as a stimulant
for millennia. But in the 1980s demand for coca to produce cocaine
exploded.

Coca farmers say the union was forged in the repression that ensued. When
forced eradication backed by the United States began, farmers fought back.
Eventually they won the right for each union member to have a coca plot of
1,600 square metres. With Mr Morales as president, the unions took
responsibility for stopping illegal production over the allotted limit.

Almost 50,000 coca farmers belong to an overarching body known as the

Six Federations, still led by Mr Morales. They pay dues, take part in
meetings and, if called upon, take to the streets. Now they also take turns
protecting Mr Morales in the village of Lauca Eñe, where hundreds of
people with sharp staves have formed a ragtag garrison ever since police
fired on his car last October. Mr Morales accuses the government of trying
to kill him; officials say his vehicle rammed through a checkpoint.

The Six Federations unofficially reigns over the Chapare and the five coca
municipalities. It runs the coca trade, controls prices and taxes the proceeds.
It controls much else, from land tenure to low-level justice. Its own media
pump out propaganda. Mr Mamani, who was a mayor in the Chapare for ten
years, says the union wants to have an international TV channel.

Under Mr Morales’s presidency the region flourished. Villa Tunari, the

biggest municipality’s hub, now has hotels, gyms and karaoke. Coca farmers
plant tropical fruits and dig ponds to farm tambaqui, a tasty fish. The price
of land has rocketed. A hectare by the main road that cost $300 or so in the
1990s, says a coca farmer, now goes for $10,000. Many farmers also own
property in the city of Cochabamba, where their kids go to university.

Not all this prosperity is legal in origin. Mr Morales kicked the US Drug
Enforcement Administration out in 2008. Much of the region’s coca feeds
the drug trade; many of its hotels and tourist ventures are said to be money-
laundries.

But things have soured since Mr Morales left power. Public money no
longer flows to the region. Drug labs have more often been busted. And the
mood could worsen still after the election. Mr Morales’s loyalists are sure
most Bolivians will spoil their ballots, though polls suggest no more than
15% of Bolivians overall plan to. But even 20% would be startling.

In any case, a big null vote makes the current opposition more likely to win.
And Messrs Doria Medina and Quiroga have both said Mr Morales will go
to prison if either of them is elected. “Evo would be a trophy,” says Iván
Canelas, ex-governor of Cochabamba and a friend of Mr Morales. “They
could kill ten people and grab Evo and lots of people in the city will say it’s
what had to be done.”

The Six Federations is preparing to resist. María Eugenia Ledezma, its top
female leader until a few months ago, says they will use guerrilla tactics
against soldiers who venture into the Chapare, depriving them of sleep, then
attacking with sticks and stones. She says miners have been teaching people
how to make boobytraps with dynamite; sympathisers in the army have been
training the young. “Many of us, many leaders, will surely die or be
imprisoned,” she says, grim-faced. ■
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Asia
America’s biggest ask in Asia
Cow’s milk, as well as Russian oil, fuels the US-India trade war
What Sara Duterte’s comeback means for the Philippines
Indonesia’s new president has daddy issues
Asia | Weapons and words

America’s biggest ask in Asia

Elbridge Colby and others push allies to ramp up defence spending
August 14th 2025

Despite wars in Europe and the Middle East, the Pentagon’s top strategists
have recently been focused on Asia. Having got members of the North
Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) to promise to spend 3.5% of their
GDP on defence and a further 1.5% of GDP on defence-related
infrastructure, they have now turned their attention to the budgets of Asian
allies. The European formula, they say, is the new “global standard”. That
would imply a massive increase in defence budgets from Sapporo to Sydney.
To hit 3.5% would add over $150bn per year in defence spending, the
biggest rise among allies in the Pacific in 50 years. America’s demand also
prompts three questions: what is the right budget level, how should allies
spend the money and will they comply?
Of America’s five big security partners in the region (Australia, Japan, the
Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan) discussions with Australia and Japan
appear to be the most advanced. They have been told that they should meet
targets of 3.5% of GDP—and quickly. When asked about the talks,
Australian and Japanese officials show flashes of quiet anger. America has
overstepped the mark, they say, by dictating sovereign budgetary decisions.

And despite talk of a global standard, Donald Trump’s administration has

suggested other figures as well. The Philippines and South Korea have been
told that they should be prepared to match other allies, but appear to be
under less pressure. South Korea already spends 2.6% of GDP on defence,
the highest of the five, while the much poorer Philippines spends the least
and would struggle to hit 3.5%. At the other end of the spectrum, Mr Trump
has long said that Taiwan should spend 10% of GDP on defence. (Taiwan is
not a formal treaty ally.)

Leading these conversations is the Pentagon’s third-ranking official,

Elbridge Colby. He is perhaps the most talked-about appointee to the role of
undersecretary for policy in a generation. His backers include J.D. Vance,
the vice-president, who introduced Mr Colby in glowing terms at his
confirmation hearing in March—an extraordinary gesture of support. When
speaking of America’s demands, allied officials talk of “what Bridge wants”
as often as “what the Trump administration wants”.

Some defence wonks question Mr Colby’s focus on top-line numbers. It

often takes years for budget increases to translate into new weapons systems
or combat formations. By the time they can make a difference, it might be
too late to deter China. Better, instead, to have conversations about how to
better integrate allies into existing war plans. But those have been made
more difficult by the way that demands to increase defence spending are
souring relations between allies.

In June Japan reportedly cancelled an annual meeting of its foreign and

defence ministers with their American counterparts in part because the
Pentagon bid up its ask from 3% to 3.5%. One Pentagon official involved in
the effort says that relations are fine, but admits: “Some of these
conversations can be challenging because they did not take place during the
Biden administration, and so our allies and partners are having these
conversations for the first time.”

An increase in defence spending is not the only request that America is

making of these countries. Australia has been asked to commit to joining
America in any defence that it might mount of Taiwan; Japan has been
pressed for more clarity over how it would respond in such a situation. The
Philippines has been asked to support the deployment of new weapons on its
territory. South Korea and Japan have been asked to pay more for the
privilege of hosting American forces. For its part, Taiwan is under pressure
to spend less on fancy, high-tech weaponry like fighter jets and tanks and
more on smaller, more mobile forces that would make it hard for China to
occupy the island.

Allies fear that America might abandon them. They worry that Mr Trump
may do a deal with President Xi Jinping that leaves them to face China
alone. Australian officials are anxious that America could gut the AUKUS
submarine-building pact.

Even so, unlike in Europe, where America’s allies have given serious
thought to “de-risking” their defence-industrial base against the possibility
of American abandonment, Asian allies have not hedged. Their reasons are
pragmatic. Whereas strategic autonomy in Europe may be possible, if not
cheap, for Asian allies it is out of reach. None is a nuclear power, so all
depend on America’s nuclear umbrella. Of the five, South Korea has the
biggest defence industry, and Japan has made strides towards reviving its
own. But the defence-industrial bases are small compared with Europe’s.
And the allies are looking at buying more American military gear, not less.

All five countries protest that they are already increasing defence spending,
but can’t hit the Trump administration’s new targets because of fiscal
constraints. Spending even more on defence, they argue, will require them
either to put up taxes or to cut social outlays. But this is really only true of
Japan and the Philippines, which have high levels of public debt relative to
their resources, and would struggle to finance any big new expenditure.

By contrast, Australia, South Korea and Taiwan have fiscal positions similar
to or better than the median NATO member. Scars from the Asian financial
crisis a quarter of a century ago have made them frugal. They worry about
the liabilities of ageing populations, high levels of private debt and keeping
their credit investment grade. But they could probably afford to debt-finance
any increase to 3.5% into at least the late 2030s without raising taxes,
cutting spending or going into debt distress.

Taiwan’s fiscal position is the best. Moreover, says Drew Thompson, who
managed defence relations with Taiwan under Barack Obama and in Mr
Trump’s first term: “Butter has won out over guns.” He points to the island’s
excellent education and health care. Yet Taiwan faces an existential threat
from China. In these circumstances, it should be able to afford to spend
another 2% of GDP on defence, on top of the 3% that President Lai Ching-te
has requested for the next fiscal year.

Political constraints play a bigger role. In Taiwan the opposition controls the
legislature and fears that higher defence spending will antagonise China. In
Japan an unpopular minority government is facing down a resurgent
opposition calling for tax cuts. And in Australia the Labor government wants
to squeeze through some big new social programmes while keeping its
reputation for fiscal prudence.
Experts and officials on both sides of the Pacific think that America is likely
to get some but not all of what it asks for. A bigger risk is that America’s
tactics will backfire. Mr Trump polls poorly in Australia, and Anthony
Albanese, its prime minister, seems tempted to profit politically by standing
up to him. In the other four countries, Mr Trump is a bit more popular. But
forcing governments to spend more on defence would not be. The Pentagon
dismisses these concerns. Allies could “leave themselves vulnerable to
Beijing, but that would evidently not be in their interest”, says another
Pentagon official. He may be right. But America’s allies will still bristle at
being bossed around. ■
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Asia | The white stuff

Cow’s milk, as well as Russian oil, fuels the US-

India trade war
There is another liquid the two sides cannot agree on
August 14th 2025

Donald Trump has beef with India for buying oil from Russia. But the
American president’s tariffs totalling 50% on many Indian exports—set to
come into force later this month—are not just about geopolitics. Agriculture
and dairy have been the most contentious issues in India’s talks with
America, which broke down this month. And it is over farming that India’s
equally combative prime minister, Narendra Modi, has chosen to fight back.
“India will never compromise on the well being of its farmers, dairy and
fishermen,” he thundered in Delhi on August 7th, a day after Mr Trump’s
announcement.
For Hindu-nationalist politicians like Mr Modi, the dairy industry has
particular importance (the cow is sacred in Hinduism). But it is also a source
of national pride, seen as a poverty-alleviating triumph of enlightened
policymaking, technological advance and international co-operation. India is
a milk superpower. For nearly three decades it has been the world’s biggest
producer and is now the source of about a quarter of the global total. Yet,
from the point of view of India’s trading partners, notably America, the
industry seems to sum up all that is wrong with India. It is inefficient,
subsidised, polluting (all that methane) and heavily protected by high tariff
barriers and a perplexing lattice of arcane non-tariff ones.

Can these views be reconciled? The answer matters a lot to India’s trade
diplomacy. It is not just America that complains about access to the Indian
market. It is a sticking-point in negotiations with the EU, too, and was one
of the thorniest issues in the negotiations leading to a free-trade agreement
with Britain signed last month. It may also have been the main reason why
India pulled out of a big regional trade deal in 2019. (As The Economist
noted at the time, Indians’ nightmare was that New Zealand would provide
her milk, while China ate her lunch.)

Indian dairy still basks in the glow of a “white revolution” launched in 1970.
At the time Indians already had more cattle than any other country, but they
consumed an average of about 100 millilitres of milk a day, far below
recommended nutritional standards. Some of that had to be imported. By the
turn of the century India had virtually doubled the availability of milk per
person. Dairy practices were modernised and the cross-breeding of cattle
had boosted yields. A network of tens of thousands of co-operatives was
established, improving distribution and logistics, financed by the sale of
skimmed milk powder and butter donated by the European Economic
Community, the EU’s forebear.

Yields have continued to improve this century, but the structure of the
industry remains unchanged. “White Revolution 2.0”, launched by the
government last year, aims not to reform but expand it, with co-operatives
increasing milk procurement by 50% over five years. Production will still
depend on tens of millions of smallholders—families with a cow that grazes
on their plot, produces dung and urine to be used as fertiliser, and provides
milk for the family, sometimes with a surplus to sell.
Himanshu (who goes by one name), a professor of economics at Jawaharlal
Nehru University in Delhi, points out that Mr Modi and Mr Trump are both
very “pro-farmer”. But their farmers, including dairy farmers, could hardly
be more different. India has about 200m cattle, of which the United States
Department of Agriculture estimates 62m are dairy cows. Yet the average
“herd” consists of fewer than four, and the average landholding has just one
hectare. A number widely used is that 80m families have one or more cows
or buffaloes. America has just 24,000 dairy farms, with an average herd size
of about 390.

Co-operatives guarantee Indian farmers a buyer for their milk, and pay them
bonuses when prices rise. A handful have become big organisations—
notably Amul, from Gujarat, home state of Mr Modi and his powerful
cabinet minister, Amit Shah. So vaunted is the success of the agricultural co-
operative system that in July Mr Shah unveiled plans to extend it to other
businesses such as tourism and green energy.

Proud as Indians are of their cows and their dairy farmers, they have to
admit that both are, by international standards, woefully unproductive. The
average American cow produces about seven times as much milk as her
Indian competitor. India protects its dairy farmers with import tariffs
comparable to those Mr Trump is now imposing on Indian exporters: 40%
on most butter and cheese and 60% on powdered milk. Without these
protections, says Shashi Kumar, boss of Akshayakalpa, a privately owned
organic-dairy business in southern India that works with 2,200 small
farmers, “smallholder farms will collapse”.

It is not just tariffs that Mr Trump’s negotiators object to. India excludes
imports of all genetically modified crops except cotton, and in dairy there is
a ban on what has become known as “non-veg milk”—with a requirement
that imported dairy products be certified to come from cows that have not
been fed animal products such as bone meal. The ban is often decried as a
non-tariff barrier dressed up in politically correct Hindu-nationalist clothes.
Vijay Sardana, a lawyer and agri-economist, points out it was in fact
introduced in 2003, when he drafted the law in response to the BSE (mad-
cow disease) scare in Europe.
Still, the perception that the Indian government will use any available tactic
to protect its farmers is probably justified. Harish Damodaran, the
agriculture editor of the Indian Express, a newspaper, points out that twice in
four years India’s farmers have fended off attempts at reform. In 2021 their
prolonged, angry protests in Delhi forced Mr Modi to repeal three laws
introducing sensible deregulatory reforms. Mr Trump’s effort to impose
change through diplomacy may prove equally fruitless. ■

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the-us-india-trade-war
Asia | Nepo politics

What Sara Duterte’s comeback means for the

Philippines
She could be the front-runner for the election in 2028
August 14th 2025

A FEW months ago, things looked grim for Sara Duterte, the vice-president
of the Philippines. The country’s House of Representatives had impeached
her, accusing Ms Duterte of misusing public money and threatening to
assassinate the president, Ferdinand “BongBong” Marcos. She faced a ban
from politics if convicted of the charges in a trial in the Senate. Then the
International Criminal Court indicted her father, Rodrigo, for crimes against
humanity committed in a brutal drug war during his presidency (he denies
this). The Duterte dynasty looked like it was over.

Yet the family now seems on the up. The Supreme Court struck down the
impeachment complaints against Ms Duterte in late July. A couple of weeks
later the Senate voted not to proceed with a trial for now. These wins make
Ms Duterte likely to be the front-runner to be the Philippines’ next president,
in 2028. It also means that over the next three years her nasty feud with Mr
Marcos, also a scion of a political clan with a grubby history, will become
even more disruptive for the country.

Ms Duterte typifies the Philippines’ dynastic political system, where

powerful families make up around 80% of Congress, one of the highest
shares in the world. She first took office in 2007 as vice-mayor of Davao, a
city where her father was elected mayor eight times. The family name
helped her win the vice-presidency in the 2022 election, during which she
formed an uneasy partnership with Mr Marcos.

She also thrives in a political culture dominated by big personalities.

Celebrities are often elected in the Philippines, and politicians play up to the
crowds on social media and in real life. At a recent election rally in Manila,
the capital, the mood felt more like a rock concert, with her supporters
wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Bring Him [Rodrigo] Home”
(from The Hague).

Her views appear to be similar to her father’s. She has criticised Mr Marcos
for tilting towards America and said that the Philippines “shouldn’t lean
toward any foreign power”. Still, it is not clear whether and how far she
would, or could, reorient the country towards China, which her father cosied
up to. Ties with America are stronger now than in 2016, when Mr Duterte
took office. In late July Mr Marcos secured a trade deal with America.
Philippine exports face a tariff of 19%. This is only one percentage point
lower than Donald Trump’s threat before the agreement, but Mr Marcos still
billed it as a win.

Yet with the Dutertes resurgent—for now at least—the dynastic dispute

could disrupt the second half of Mr Marcos’s presidency. Ms Duterte has a
growing number of allies in Congress. They may try to obstruct Mr Marcos,
who cannot run again because of term limits. As a result, he could become a
lame duck if enough politicians rally behind her. ■
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the-philippines
Asia | Banyan

Indonesia’s new president has daddy issues

Prabowo Subianto wants to imitate his father. Good luck with that
August 14th 2025

After Prabowo Subianto was elected president of Indonesia last year, he told
his younger brother that he would finally be able to “carry out programmes
from papi” and fulfil their father’s “aspirations and dreams”. That father is
Sumitro Djojohadikusumo, the architect of Indonesia’s post-independence
development. He served as a minister under both Sukarno, Indonesia’s first
president, and Suharto, the dictator who ruled for 32 years.

But the uncomfortable truth is that if Sumitro were alive today, he would be
appalled by the economic populism masquerading as his legacy. The
cosmopolitan economist, who founded the economics faculty at the
University of Indonesia, would probably see Mr Prabowo’s signature
policies—free school lunches, village co-operatives and a new sovereign-
wealth fund—as precisely the kind of undisciplined state spending he spent
his career warning against.

Sumitro’s economic philosophy wasn’t ideological. Rather, he was

pragmatic, believing in rigorous training and evidence. Though he came of
age as a socialist in Paris, his approach was grounded in a clear method.
First, identify the right problem; second, establish the facts; and only then
apply logic to find a solution. When Indonesia lacked trained economists, he
persuaded the Ford Foundation to send students to the University of
California. That produced the “Berkeley Mafia” of technocrats who would
later drive Suharto’s economic success. He argued as early as 1952 that the
government should avoid direct economic intervention if there was little
capacity to execute it well.

Mr Prabowo’s pledge to spend $28bn a year on free school meals is the kind
of sweeping state intervention Sumitro warned against. Indonesian children
eat enough, but not well. But instead of nutritional quality, the programme
increasingly prioritises raw numbers of meals served, says Arianto Patunru
of Australian National University. The best way to reduce stunting is to help
pregnant women and toddlers; the current policy misdirects resources to
schoolchildren.

Or consider the example of co-operatives. Sumitro supported them as tools

for genuine, decentralised development, not as instruments of political
control. This perspective had deep roots. In 1942 he completed his PhD
thesis on rural credit in Java while he was living in the Netherlands, which
was occupied by Germany at the time. For the rest of his career this research
fuelled his belief that small traders throughout Indonesia would remain
trapped in poverty unless the government invested in education, training and
co-operatives.

This spirit of grassroots empowerment could not be more different from Mr

Prabowo’s latest initiative of “red-white co-operatives”. Unveiled in July,
the programme imposes a uniform model on 80,000 co-operatives
nationwide, requiring each to run the same services regardless of local
needs, says Kevin O’Rourke, a political analyst. This betrays the spirit of
genuine co-operatives. The policy is designed to extend central control into
rural areas, rewarding loyal village heads.
The most glaring case of historical revisionism is Danantara, Indonesia’s
new $900bn sovereign-wealth fund. Mr Prabowo’s brother, Hashim
Djojohadikusumo, has said that it fulfils their father’s vision of
consolidating state assets and directing strategic investment. But Sumitro
might well have thought its structure was a mess. Danantara reports directly
to the president, is chaired by Mr Prabowo’s former campaign manager and
has little oversight. Sumitro would have recognised this as a textbook case
of what he called Indonesia’s “institutional disease”: the corrosion of public
policy by vested interests. He diagnosed this problem at the height of the
Asian financial crisis in 1998, when Suharto was bending state power to
serve his family’s businesses. This week the head of a state-owned farming
firm quit six months into the job, blaming Danantara for needless red tape.

Sumitro understood that a developing economy faces a delicate balancing

act. His policies aimed to attract foreign investment while steadily building
Indonesia’s institutional capacity. His son, by contrast, has chosen to trade
fiscal stability for flashy, vote-winning programmes that entrench his power
and do little to drive long-term growth. His administration blends
authoritarian control with populist spending. This is a travesty of Sumitro’s
real legacy: of the disciplined fiscal policy and strong institutions Indonesia
badly needs. ■

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issues
China
How scared should you be of “the China squeeze”?
China claims to want women to have children and a career
Hong Kong is super superstitious
China | Supply-chained

How scared should you be of “the China squeeze”?

Xi Jinping masters the dark arts of the trade war
August 14th 2025

“CHINA BEATS you with trade, Russia beats you with war,” mused
President Donald Trump on August 11th. “China is not beating us on trade,
not when I’m in charge,” he added. Many disagree. His reflection came mere
hours before he extended a fragile trade truce with China for another 90
days. After months of tit-for-tat tariffs, the Sino-American trade war has
settled into uneasy stasis. But China is using the time to hone a sophisticated
arsenal of economic weapons. Even as the sides contemplate a broader deal
to stabilise the planet’s most important trading relationship—worth $659bn
each year—China knows that its power is not in what it buys, but in what it
sells.
That is a far cry from the last time President Xi Jinping and Mr Trump went
head-to-head on trade, in 2019. Mr Xi agreed to buy more American goods
in a deal much criticised in China. It fitted a clumsy pattern. Back then
China tended to punish transgressions by cutting access to its consumer
market, such as for Australian wine or Lithuanian beef. No longer. Now Mr
Xi prefers to squeeze supply chains and the foreign industries which depend
on them.

Chinese victories have piled up in recent months. First came Mr Xi’s

masterstroke in April: retaliating against American tariffs by choking off
supplies of Chinese-refined rare-earth minerals and magnets critical to
American firms. American carmakers, among others, panicked and Mr
Trump sought peace. In July the European Union squealed in the run-up to
an EU-Chinese summit after flows of rare-earth minerals and battery
technology to Europe slowed without explanation. Speeding them up then
became a subject of negotiation.

It all appears in line with Mr Xi’s careful plan. In 2020 he called for China
to create asymmetric dependencies, by ridding its own supply chains of
foreign inputs, while also seeking to “tighten international production
chains’ dependence on China”. At a meeting in April that year, Mr Xi
explained to a Communist Party body that such dependencies are “a
powerful countermeasure and deterrent capability against foreigners who
would artificially cut off supply [to China]”. It wants other countries to
depend on it without it depending on them.
China’s use of economic sanctions of all sorts has reached an all-time high
in 2025, according to research by Viking Bohman of Tufts University and
co-authors (see chart). Like the American export controls on which China’s
new regime is modelled, Mr Xi’s weapons are difficult to resist using, even
at the risk of blowback. “Beijing was not surprised to find it has leverage,
but it must be used discreetly,” reckons Xiang Lanxin of the National
University of Singapore.

So how do China’s economic weapons work? In recent years Mr Xi’s

officials have been drawing up a list of goods that China makes and the
world needs. After Mr Trump’s re-election last year, China’s government
steeled itself. It implemented a long-expected export-licensing scheme for
more than 700 products, many of which are relied upon by Western armed
forces, including advanced manufacturing machines, battery inputs,
biotechnology, sensors and critical minerals. The listed items are not limited
to inputs for military kit, however. Many are also critical to industries that
officials view as strategic, such as electric vehicles and solar technology. For
some of the items, such as minerals and chemical precursors for medicines,
Chinese producers hold a near-monopoly over global supply. That is partly a
result of market forces concentrating production in China, where it is cheap,
scalable and often subsidised, and partly a deliberate strategy to control
industrial inputs.
Crucially, the rules formalise officials’ ability to switch off exports by
revoking licences. Chinese producers applying for them must know who is
the end user of their goods and report as much. This has allowed China to
continue choking supplies of rare earths to specific Western defence firms,
even as it has resumed the flow into America as part of the trade truce. A
shortage of heat-resistant magnets, for example, is pushing up costs for such
things as jet-fighter engines. The legislation also includes so-called long-arm
jurisdiction. It gives officials the power to mandate that goods manufactured
in third countries using Chinese-made inputs cannot be sold to specific end
users.

When China’s policymakers consider which industries to target through such

rules, they do not appear to focus on what will cause the most pain, but
rather on what will be good for their own firms. Export controls follow a
pattern of keeping high-value-added supply chains inside China, says
Rebecca Arcesati of MERICS, a Berlin-based think-tank.

If Chinese officials decided to ban exports of finished goods, such as

batteries or drones, it could hurt domestic producers. But by restricting the
flow of industrial inputs needed to make those goods, policymakers in fact
lower prices on domestic markets, and give their exporters a cost advantage
against foreign competition in important sectors.

This explains what China appears to be doing in India to stop it from helping
others break free of China’s grip. Licences have stopped being approved for
advanced manufacturing machines for India, where Apple is creating
alternative supply chains. The restricted flow of machine tools and
dysprosium, a rare-earth element, has apparently slowed production of
iPhones and AirPods, respectively. And in June Apple’s in-country
manufacturer, Foxconn, withdrew more than 300 Chinese engineers from
India, suggesting that the recent moves were co-ordinated.

China’s use of its economic weapons this year has mainly been defensive—
in response to American trade policies. But it all comes at a cost. Foreign
officials and firms now fret about being suddenly cut off from Chinese
suppliers, say, in a conflict over Taiwan. Chinese policymakers have done
themselves “enormous reputational damage”, laments a foreign business
leader in Beijing. Officials in Brussels, Tokyo and Washington are spooked
and a flurry of deal-making is under way.

That means Mr Xi is likely to confront a drawback that America knows

well: the more sanctions are used, the less effective they risk becoming. For
a chokehold to be effective, a country must have a near-monopoly on
supplying a particular good or service, points out Matteo Maggiori of
Stanford University. “Sanctioning power is non-linear, which means that the
difference between controlling 95% and 85% of a market is the difference
between whether the targets of sanctions can find alternative suppliers, or
not,” says Mr Maggiori. He notes that whereas tariffs cause firms to increase
prices, export controls tend to spur them to invest in alternatives.

Some Chinese officials quietly understand. Certain senior ones have even
indicated to European businesses that urgent cases of rare-earth shortages,
such as those that would cause a plant to shutter, should be raised with the
Ministry of Commerce to find informal work-arounds to keep supplies
flowing. Such deft management of the controls by officials may help dull the
desire of foreign firms focused on short-term profits to invest in alternatives.
Wu Xinbo of the Centre for American Studies at Fudan University in
Shanghai told CNN in June that the flow of exports could be dynamically
managed. From the government’s perspective, “If the bilateral relationship is
good, then I’ll go a bit faster; if not, I’ll slow down.”

Ultimately, China finds itself in a delicate position. It is giving foreigners

reason to think that its supply chains are unreliable while warning them off
seeking alternatives. And its diplomats badger trade partners not to give in to
American demands that would isolate China from global trade. “Attempting
to decouple and disrupt supply chains”, Mr Xi told foreign bosses in March,
“will only harm others and not benefit oneself.” That is wise advice indeed.
■

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squeeze
China | Working mothers

China claims to want women to have children and

a career
But special “mum jobs” are hardly helping
August 14th 2025

WHEN MS WANG returned to work at a Chinese internet giant after having

a baby, her boss pulled her aside. She told her she’d be less invested in her
work because the country’s breastfeeding policy would allow her to leave
one hour earlier. “I’ll be a normal colleague, not a breastfeeding mother,”
she replied, staying past 10pm regularly like the rest. Based in Beijing, she
was entitled legally to 158 days of maternity leave. But she received the
worst performance rating in her team last year because others had to cover
her work while she was away. She was fired in April.

Meanwhile, the government is trying desperately to boost China’s birth rate.

On July 28th it announced that it would give households 3,600 yuan ($500)
a year for each child under the age of three. Economists estimate the subsidy
will cost the state about 100bn yuan a year, or about 0.07% of the country’s
GDP. And it promotes “mum jobs”, which offer mothers with children under
the age of 12 more flexible work schedules. In recent months Hubei
province launched one of the first province-wide schemes to provide them.

Mum jobs were first introduced in 2022, when China’s National Health
Commission issued guidelines for supporting childbearing. Increasingly
local governments encourage firms to create them as part of a national
campaign for “a birth-friendly society”. By the end of last year, Guangzhou
had listed 12,760 mum jobs in e-commerce, housekeeping, manufacturing
and other sectors. Chongqing has tallied more than 23,000.

But most of the time such jobs are menial, low-paid and hourly. Peng
Yingbin, for example, offers flexible schedules for between 30 and 50
mothers who work at his clothing factory in the poor province of Guizhou.
Paid per piece completed, his staff—most of whom moved to town with
their children for better schooling—can leave earlier for school pickups.

As the number of mum jobs grows, so does the backlash against them. “In a
gender-unequal society, this appears to offer mothers job opportunities, but it
actually offers them low-paid gig work,” wrote one online commenter.
Hubei’s new mum jobs scheme has raised a furore. “Why are there no dad
jobs?” many asked. (Shanghai got around this objection by introducing
“birth-friendly jobs” in 2024.)

On top of it all, the state also wants women to work as China’s population
ages. Liu Shenglong of Tsinghua University in Beijing, points out that
nearly 60% of current undergraduates are women. “If we were to remove
these people from the labour market, wouldn’t that be a huge waste?” Most
mothers also want employment. About four in five stay-at-home mums in
China want to re-enter the workforce, and about two in five of them are
interested in part-time or flexible roles, according to a survey conducted by
the All-China Women’s Federation in 2023.

While hunting for new positions, the mum jobs Ms Wang comes across are
basic administrative roles that don’t appeal to her. “They’re taking women
who are already marginalised in the workplace and pushing them even
further into marginal positions,” she says. Instead she hopes for changes to
workplace culture and greater corporate accountability. Officials should note
such pregnant ideas. ■

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children-and-a-career
China | For good or ill

Hong Kong is super superstitious

Why prophetic artists and feng-shui masters hold such sway
August 14th 2025

TATSUKI RYO is the finest diviner since Nostradamus, in the view of many
Hong Kongers. In 1999 the Japanese manga artist published a collection of
supposedly prophetic dreams warning of a “great disaster, year 2011, month
3.” In March 2011 Japan suffered from an earthquake, tsunami and the
Fukushima nuclear meltdown; perhaps 18,000 people died. So when her
manga predicted that a mega-tsunami would strike Japan on July 5th 2025, it
caused alarm.

Luckily, like her 16th-century antecedent (who thought the world would end
in 2012), Ms Tatsuki often gets things wrong. She thought Mount Fuji would
erupt in August 2021. And July 5th came and went. But on July 30th there
was a magnitude 8.8 earthquake off Russia’s eastern coast, which prompted
tsunami warnings around the Pacific. Fortunately no one died and the tallest
tsunami waves to reach Japanese shores were only 1.3m high. (In 2011 they
reached almost 40m.) Yet fans and anxious theorists saw the event on July
30th as another confirmation of her powers.

The prophecy sent tremors of fear across Asian social media in June. But
Hong Kongers took it particularly seriously. Several prominent feng-shui
masters, experts in ancient Chinese geomancy, warned locals to heed Ms
Tatsuki’s advice not to visit Japan ahead of July 5th. The number of Hong
Kongers who did so plunged by more than a third in June compared with a
year earlier, while visitor numbers from almost all other places rose. Local
carriers, such as Hong Kong Airlines, suspended flight routes to Japan
because of the drop in demand.

Japan will sting from all this. Though only home to 7.5m people, Hong
Kong was the fifth-largest source of international visitors to Japan last year
and its holidaymakers spent HK$33bn ($4bn) there. Even hard-nosed types
stayed away. One Hong Kong-based financial consultant reports that his
boss has refused to take in-person meetings in Japan all summer; she made
him attend them in her stead.

This is all a reminder of how pervasive superstition is in Hong Kong, even

compared with the rest of Asia. Tower blocks frequently skip all floors with
the number “four” because its Cantonese pronunciation is similar to the
word for “death”. Properties thought to be inhabited by ghosts lose a fifth of
their value on average, according to a paper in 2020 by Utpal Bhattacharya
of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. And feng shui
guides the design of even the most sober organisations’ offices. HSBC’s
headquarters has escalators reportedly angled to ward off evil spirits. The
Economist’s offices contain old coins for prosperity and a dragon image for
good luck, left by a visiting feng-shui master in recent years.

There is little harm in any of this. But superstition shouldn’t supersede

science. The Hong Kong Observatory, a public body, was forced to release
numerous statements in recent months reminding locals that it is impossible
to predict an earthquake. Seismologists and disaster experts also weighed in.
Even Ms Tatsuki cautioned her fans to heed scientific advice.
But their urgings did little to quell the disquiet. Something similar happened
during the SARS outbreak in 2003: many Hong Kongers spurned official
disease-prevention steps, instead turning to herbs to ward off the virus. You
don’t need to be a soothsayer to see that sometimes superstition can have
rather frightening consequences. ■

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Middle East & Africa
Race, power and money in South Africa
Ivory Coast’s president is overstaying his welcome
The world’s hardest makeover: Hamas
Lebanon’s government is taking on a weakened Hizbullah
The killing of journalists in Gaza
Middle East & Africa | A black and white case

Race, power and money in South Africa

The staggering costs of Black Economic Empowerment
August 14th 2025

After the end of apartheid South Africa embarked on one of the world’s
most extensive attempts to redress racial inequality. At the centre of this
effort is Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), a set of policies that, in
effect, force firms to sell discounted assets to black investors, hire more
black managers and buy more from black suppliers. Though strongly backed
by the African National Congress (anc), the party in charge since 1994, bee
is being questioned like never before.

The Trump administration cites BEE as a reason it is imposing 30% tariffs

on the country. Inside South Africa there is growing concern that these
policies, while perhaps necessary at first, are no longer useful. BEE has
mostly benefited a tiny black elite while constraining economic growth,
undermining the social stability it was meant to underpin.

BEE was conceived by South Africa’s largest conglomerates, six of which in

the early 1990s accounted for 86% of the value of the Johannesburg Stock
Exchange (JSE). To convince the ANC, hitherto committed to nationalising
the economy, of the merits of capitalism, they needed black capitalists. So
they sold discounted shares or units to ANC bigwigs such as Cyril
Ramaphosa, now South Africa’s president. The ANC’s response to criticism
of the policy as an elite stitch-up was the Broad Based Black Economic
Empowerment Act of 2003. The law turned ad hoc corporate atonement into
a vast regulatory system.

Today BEE is a form of gamified affirmative action. Firms are given points
based on meeting criteria for the portion of the firm owned by black
shareholders, the number of senior black staff, investment in black
employees’ skills, charity contributions and purchases from black-owned
firms. Firms with a low score struggle to get state contracts and licences or
attract commercial partners. “Your BEE rating will determine your success
in business in 90% of cases,” says Deirdre Mitchell of Honeycomb, a BEE
ratings firm.

To supporters BEE is a source of harmony. “If we had kept the pre-

democratic status quo, then South Africa would have imploded at some
point,” says Tshediso Matona, who heads the BEE regulator. He argues that
the policy has also grown the black middle class.

Yet South Africa, with one of the highest murder rates in the world and
periodic unrest, is hardly tranquil. Inequality is higher today than in 1994,
partly because of rising inequality among black South Africans. One study
suggests the gross real income of the top 10% of black earners tripled
between 1993 and 2019, while that of the bottom 50% fell. This reflects high
joblessness caused by slow economic growth. Less than 40% of black South
Africans of working age are in formal employment.

“Very, very conservative” estimates by William Gumede, an academic who

in the 2000s worked on a review of BEE, are that more than 1trn rand
($56bn) in assets may have been transferred to fewer than 100 people since
BEE began. The main beneficiaries were a mostly politically connected elite
and the (mostly white) facilitators who took large cuts. One banker says that
a “paper transfer” of 25% of a firm’s equity typically ends up being worth
8%, after transaction costs and loans to buy the assets are paid off. Mr
Gumede calls BEE “one of the most wasteful, costly and ineffective
redistribution strategies devised in any post-colonial society”.

Has BEE fostered a black middle class? The number of black-owned firms
doubled between 2002 and 2019, but that might have happened anyway. The
growth of black employment in the public sector has been more important.
Today 75% of senior managers in state employment are black (roughly in
line with the 82% of the population that is black) versus 15% in the private
sector (see chart). The latter could be evidence of enduring racism or the
lingering effects of apartheid-era schooling on the skills of black South
Africans.

In June the Free Market Foundation, a think-tank, estimated that the annual
cost for firms to comply with BEE was 145bn-290bn rand, equivalent to 2%
to 4% of GDP. Though there are reasons to quibble with the methodology,
BEE certainly adds costs and creates perverse incentives.
Firms maximise points by buying from businesses owned by black South
Africans, with extra points if they are owned by women. That often means
“three people in the supply chain rather than two,” says Ms Mitchell. The
state can spend 25% above cost if a good or service is from a black supplier,
according to the Institute of Race Relations, another think-tank. These “BEE
premiums” add to already soaring public debts. Procurement rules provide a
pretext for giving contracts to cronies.

BEE is plagued by “inputitis”, where points are given for spending, not
results. Firms can get points by paying for courses that are never completed.
This has led to a mini-industry of people enrolling in but never completing
multiple vocational schemes known as “learnerships”. Only firms with at
least 50 employees have to adhere to racial quotas. So companies forgo
growth or split into smaller units.

Some firms try to get around BEE by “fronting”. In its crudest form this is
when a firm dupes a black South African—the company driver, say—to be
their “BEE partner” on paper, while receiving little of the benefits. Mr
Matona says his commission has received more than 1,300 complaints about
fronting since 2017.

Foreign firms can win exemptions from the ownership rules of BEE through
“equity equivalence” schemes. Microsoft, for example, funded local
startups. Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite-internet firm, may be able to strike a
similar deal. But these are still extra costs for firms that could invest
elsewhere, adding to South Africa’s lack of dynamism. The rate at which
firms enter and exit the economy is a third of that in other middle-income
countries.

Moeletsi Mbeki, a commentator, says that BEE has created a “parasitic club”
of black South Africans, who (with exceptions) are content to take their
share of existing firms rather than build their own. Combined with high
salaries in the public sector—the state wage bill accounts for 15% of GDP
versus the OECD average of 10%—this leads to low levels of black
entrepreneurship, he argues.

Tshepo Mahloele, one of South Africa’s richest men, supports

transformation but worries about the way BEE can add an asterisk to black
success. The 57-year-old, who has taken part in BEE deals but has also
invested successfully outside South Africa, says that in some eyes “when I
walk into a room…I’m not first a business person; I’m a black business
person.”

A recent poll by Ipsos found that 44% of South Africans want BEE to
continue. Some 36% say it should end; 20% are unsure. Those who say it
slows growth are twice as many as those who say it fosters it. A plurality
agree it is “outdated and divisive”. Polling by the Social Research
Foundation finds that about 80% believe governments should hire the best
people and buy the cheapest goods, regardless of race.

The ANC remains wedded to BEE, despite pressure from the Trump
administration and from its main coalition partner, the liberal Democratic
Alliance. Indeed its solution to problems with the policy seems to be more
state control. It wants to set up a state-led “transformation fund” paid for by
firms. Tweaks passed this year have imposed more stringent quotas.

Mr Ramaphosa argues that BEE is “not just a policy choice but a

constitutional imperative”. He says it is a “false notion that we must make a
choice between growth and transformation”. The truth is that, more than 30
years on from apartheid, his country has too little of either. ■

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Middle East & Africa | Out with Ouattara

Ivory Coast’s president is overstaying his welcome

His plan to run for a fourth term raises the risk of violence ahead of
elections in October
August 14th 2025

There had been hopes that Alassane Ouattara, Ivory Coast’s 83-year-old
president, might make good on his promise to step down after three terms in
office. (The constitutional limit is two, though he claims to have “reset” this
through a constitutional review.)

At a time of democratic decline in the west African country’s

neighbourhood, bowing out would have signalled a commitment to a
peaceful transfer of power for the first time in 30 years. It would also have
shown a desire to protect the relative economic success that he helped usher
in after two devastating civil wars.
Alas, on July 29th Mr Ouattara announced that he would run for a fourth
term at presidential elections in October. He claims that the country’s
economic and security challenges require a leader who has “experience” in
managing such things.

That argument has not gone down well. Tens of thousands of Ivory Coast’s
33m people have taken to the streets in recent days to demand free and fair
elections and the reinstatement of banned opposition candidates. Observers
reckon the protests are the largest since 2020. Thankfully, they have so far
been largely peaceful. Yet unless Mr Ouattara de-escalates, worse may be to
come.

The protests reflect the success of opposition parties in rallying support on

the streets in the face of government repression. Several opposition
candidates have been barred from running in the elections. The two who
would have posed the most serious challenge to Mr Ouattara are Tidjane
Thiam, a former boss of Credit Suisse, and Laurent Gbagbo, a former
president who refused to concede to Mr Ouattara in the election in 2010,
sparking a civil war.

Mr Thiam was excluded when a court ruled that he was not an Ivorian
citizen when he registered his candidacy (he held French citizenship for
nearly four decades before renouncing it in March). Mr Gbagbo was barred
based on a criminal conviction for his conduct in the civil war in 2010-11.
The two men’s parties have joined forces to push for the reinstatement of
their candidates, an overhaul of the electoral commission and other reforms.

Yet with two months to go until the vote, the odds are against them. The
government, not content with barring opposition candidates, keeps arresting
their supporters. “It is really an autocratic state,” claims Noël Akossi Bendjo
of Mr Thiam’s party. Mr Thiam, whose citizenship status is still unclear,
says he cannot safely return to Ivory Coast and is running his election
campaign from Paris.

Having no legal avenue to reinstate the disqualified candidates, the

opposition alliance has little in common apart from its dislike of Mr
Ouattara. It has not managed to find a new s around standard-bearer around
whom to rally. With nominations due by August 26th, it is unlikely to do so
in time to mount a successful campaign.

Mr Ouattara, meanwhile, remains popular despite his refusal to vacate the

top job. He is protected by his party’s control over the country’s institutions,
says Beverly Ochieng of Control Risks, a consultancy. He has presided over
a stellar economic recovery and largely kept at bay the jihadists who have
been menacing neighbouring countries. Foreign investors see his
government as a beacon of stability in a chaotic region. So do many Ivorian
voters. He could probably win an election even without excluding
opponents.

Yet Mr Ouattara’s recalcitrance bodes ill for democracy in Ivory Coast and
the region. His victory in the election in 2020 sparked violent protests after
the opposition boycotted the vote and rejected the result. At least a dozen
people were killed in the violence. His age is another worry: should he
become too ill to govern while in office, it could spark a political crisis.

The coming election is Mr Ouattara’s second opportunity to make Ivory

Coast an example to its neighbours in politics as well as in economics. Short
of stepping down, he might yet make good on it if he finds a way of entering
into dialogue with the opposition and assuaging those Ivorians who are keen
for a change. But instead he looks set to squander it. ■

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president-is-overstaying-his-welcome
Middle East & Africa | The war in Gaza

The world’s hardest makeover: Hamas

Dissent against it builds inside and outside the strip
August 14th 2025

It was born as the Islamic Resistance Movement. It is more usually known

by its Arabic acronym, Hamas. But talks taking place in Cairo could
determine whether the Palestinian militants drop the middle word, abandon
their 22-month war in Gaza against Israel and reinvent themselves as a
political party.

On August 12th Khalil al-Hayya, the head of Hamas’s Gazan wing, arrived
in Cairo for negotiations mediated by Egypt with Qatar and Turkey. On the
table is a proposal to decommission its weapons, dissolve its armed
brigades, free the remaining hostages and surrender power. In exchange,
Israel would withdraw from Gaza, an interim Palestinian technocratic
administration would be put in place supported by a un-endorsed
international force and the rebuilding of the devastated territory would
begin.

The external pressure on Mr Hayya to accept such a deal is intense.

Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, is threatening to occupy the
whole of Gaza. On August 12th Israeli forces began heavy strikes on Gaza
city. Another offensive could destroy what remains of Hamas there and
hasten the ethnic cleansing of the entire strip. The weakening of Iran has
stripped the group’s armed wing, the Ezzedin al-Qassam Brigades, of its
main foreign backer. Hamas’s last regional backers, Qatar and Turkey, have
long favoured the group’s political arm. But they seem to be losing patience.
They are understood to have said that if Mr Hayya refuses a deal, they might
refuse to allow him and Hamas’s other leaders, who all left Doha a fortnight
ago, to return.

Hamas faces even more pressure from those on whose behalf it claims to
fight. The movement was born in Gaza. But the population that propelled it
to victory in elections two decades ago has turned on the group. Few see
value in a resistance that invites devastation upon them. While its fighters
shelter in tunnels and its politicians negotiate over the width of a buffer
zone, around a hundred Gazans were killed each day in July, nearly all by
Israel. Threats of reprisals no longer mute criticism. “People in Gaza are
furious with Hamas,” says a journalist from Gaza now in exile in Qatar.
“They just want the nightmare to end.” A political activist in Gaza blames
Hamas for the famine. “Hamas’s insistence on keeping power gives Israel
the pretext to starve us,” he says. “Hamas should dissolve and disappear.”
Dissent is even spilling through Hamas’s ranks. On WhatsApp groups, some
members are calling for a laying down of arms before Gaza suffers even
more.

Others in Hamas envision the group becoming a political party, in the

manner of Northern Ireland’s Sinn Fein or Israel’s own legal Islamist party,
the United Arab List. Justice and Development, one suggests calling it.
Reimagined, it could agree to the conditions set by the Palestinian president,
Mahmoud Abbas, for participation in recently announced Palestinian
elections. They include endorsing a two-state settlement, negotiations with
Israel and Mr Abbas’s demand for a monopoly on Palestinian weapons.
Given the disenchantment with Fatah, his own lacklustre movement, and the
admiration Hamas’s grit still attracts outside Gaza, they might even win.
“It’s been months since I’ve been this optimistic,” says an adviser to the
movement exiled from Gaza.

And yet in Gaza city the Brigades fight on. Apart from cobbling shoes out of
wood and rubber, it is one of the last job opportunities Gaza still offers.
Israel’s attacks may have decimated Hamas’s ranks, but they still have
weapons to harry their foe. Their presence spared Gaza even worse
atrocities, they say, implausibly. “Without the Qassam Brigades we’d have
had hundreds of Sabras and Shatilas,” argues the exiled son of a slain
military commander, referring to the slaughter of thousands of Palestinian
refugees in Israeli-occupied Beirut in 1982. Many still think they could
regain power in Gaza. Asked to describe the Qassam Brigades’ mood, a
Palestinian interlocutor with Hamas adopts an Irish lilt. “No surrender,” he
says.

Meanwhile in exile, Hamas’s leaders reckon that Israel may be winning the
battles but is losing the war. As in Algeria’s war of independence, their
reading is that the resistance has turned the enemy’s weapons against itself,
exhausting the Israelis and draining them of their international legitimacy
and moral authority. Far from ending the conflict, they argue, a mass exodus
of Palestinians from Gaza would intensify it. Algeria won independence
only after a million Algerians had lost their lives. “Be patient, Gaza,” says
Ghazi Hamad, a senior member of Hamas.

How can Hamas be pushed to accept a deal? A commitment, if given, by a

new Arab committee overseeing its implementation to integrate tens of
thousands of Hamas’s civil servants into a new Palestinian administration
and perhaps some fighters into the security forces might help. Hamas’s
political leaders have expressed readiness to hand over their weapons to a
new Palestinian administration in Gaza, once Israel fully withdraws. “The
Brigades will accept the movement’s decision,” says a strategist close to
Hamas in Istanbul.

But many obstacles remain. America and Israel must also accept the terms,
and neither has come to Cairo. Despite the rising costs for Israel, Mr
Netanyahu still prefers military to diplomatic endgames. The details of
Hamas’s disarmament, any international force and an interim technocratic
Palestinian government have yet to be determined, says an Egyptian
observer. And Hamas’s “pragmatism” has only ever gone so far. In 1991,
after the end of the first Palestinian intifada (uprising), and the start of direct
Israeli-Palestinian talks, one of Hamas’s founders declared mission
accomplished. He proposed disbanding Hamas’s armed wing and joining the
negotiations. How can we forgo our brand recognition, retorted his brothers?
Too many within Hamas may still feel the same. ■
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makeover-hamas
Middle East & Africa | Disarming Hizbullah

Lebanon’s government is taking on a weakened

Hizbullah
Anger at the Shia militia is giving its opponents an opening
August 14th 2025

Last week Lebanese soldiers retrieved the bodies of six of their comrades
from the smouldering ruins of an arms depot near the Israeli border. It was
the army’s deadliest day since the country was drawn into a regional war on
October 8th 2023. But they were not killed by enemy fire. They died
attempting to secure a cache of weapons believed to belong to Hizbullah, the
Iranian-backed militia that has dominated Lebanon for years.

Accident or not, the blast underscored the precariousness of Lebanon’s new

government. Backed by America, it seems willing to take unprecedented
steps to reduce Hizbullah’s influence. But any moves against the militia risk
causing further instability in a perennially unstable country.
Hizbullah’s grip on the state has never looked weaker. Many of its leaders
are dead. Its armoury is depleted. It has lost control of Beirut airport. Its land
corridor to Iran via Syria and Iraq has been cut off. And its supporters are
angry at its failure to rebuild what Israel destroyed last year.

America has put forward a four-phase plan to disarm Hizbullah. The group
would hand over its weapons by the end of the year. Israel would withdraw
from its five positions in southern Lebanon and the still-frequent Israeli air
strikes would cease. And Lebanon and Israel would have to demarcate their
border at last.

Ministers debated the proposal last week. Hizbullah’s representatives and

allies stormed out of the cabinet meeting; the government approved the
plan’s objectives regardless. Within days, Iran dispatched a senior envoy to
Beirut.

It has good reason to. Many of the Shia parts of southern Lebanon and
Beirut’s southern suburbs still lie in rubble. But Gulf donors say money to
rebuild is conditional on a credible disarmament plan.

Four decades of entrenched power cannot be dismantled overnight. “They

have been gaining control of the constitution for 40 years; they have banks,
financial institutions, everything,” says Nadim Shehadi, a Lebanese analyst.

And some Shias fear that without Hizbullah’s protection, they may face
violence or be forced from their homes. The fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria
to Sunni rebels has unsettled them. They look at the massacres of Alawites
in Syria and Israel’s destruction of Gaza and tremble.

But so far Hizbullah has done little to defend its weapons. And it is under
pressure from its Shia constituents. “The street is saying enough is enough,”
says Fouad Makhzoumi, a Sunni mp from Beirut and a vocal opponent of
Hizbullah. If Hizbullah does not get reconstruction going by the next
election, reckons Mr Makhzoumi, its support will collapse. And the group
looks increasingly isolated. “They don’t have allies,” says Muhanad Hage
Ali of the Carnegie Middle East Centre. “Going ballistic with internal
opponents would backfire.”
After the cabinet announced the American plan, Hizbullah members
swarmed through Beirut, burning images of the prime minister and blocking
roads. Disarming them will be not be easy for President Joseph Aoun. But
he knows America and the Gulf states will not wait for ever. ■
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is-taking-on-a-weakened-hizbullah
Middle East & Africa | War in the Middle East

The killing of journalists in Gaza

Almost 200 journalists have now been killed in Gaza
August 14th 2025

“Usqut, Anas (Shut up, Anas),” the Israeli agent would say in Arabic when
he called the Palestinian journalist’s mobile. He was not the only one. Other
journalists in Gaza getting such calls had chosen silence or fled the strip. But
Anas al-Sharif, a 28-year-old Pulitzer-prize winning correspondent in Gaza
with a global following of hundreds of thousands on social media, was
different. He spoke of the need to give Gaza a voice and ploughed on
regardless.

On August 9th, the night before an Israeli airstrike killed him and five
colleagues in their makeshift newsroom in a tent next to al-Shifa hospital, he
called a childhood friend in Qatar and told him Israel was preparing to kill
him. Together they recited the Islamic prayer to ward off fear. His last post
on X was to report the resumption of Israel’s heavy bombardment of Gaza.

Israel claims he was a Hamas asset; it has provided little evidence for the
accusation. (Last year it banned his Qatari-financed outlet, Al Jazeera, from
reporting in Israel on the grounds that it was a mouthpiece for Hamas.)

For 22 months Israel has banned all foreign journalists from independently
entering Gaza. It has restricted access to brief trips with military escorts.
Earlier this month it barred those accompanying air-drops of food into Gaza
from filming the devastation below. It stopped its own press corps or
Palestinian journalists in the West Bank from entering Gaza decades ago.

To date, 186 journalists in Gaza have been killed since the war began,
according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a monitor in New York
(see chart), a higher rate than in any conflict since its records began in 1992.
Citizen journalists have increasingly taken on their work. But they say Israel
targets them too. Anwar Nimr, an emaciated filmmaker, explains he wanted
to record the Russian roulette of Palestinians trying to collect sacks of flour
at aid hubs. But he then hid his phone, he says, afraid that Israeli troops
would shoot him. ■
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journalists-in-gaza
Europe
What Putin wants from Trump in Alaska
Donald Trump brokers a peace plan in the Caucasus
The Russian-run town squatting on NATO territory
The looming military threat in the Arctic
China’s planned Turkish EV factories have yet to power up
The colourful civic groups that hold Germany together
Must Europe choose between “strategic autonomy” and August off?
Europe | The US-Russia summit

What Putin wants from Trump in Alaska

As the leaders prepare to meet, Russian forces break Ukraine’s defensive
line
August 14th 2025

THE TIMING could not have been worse. Days before a crucial summit in
Alaska between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, scheduled for August
15th, Russian forces broke through Ukraine’s defensive line. Near the
breakout area, north of the Ukrainian stronghold of Pokrovsk, soldiers report
panic and confusion.

Shtyk, an officer in the 93rd brigade, says Ukraine is still working out where
the enemy is. He estimates the main breakthrough penetrated over 10km,
cutting a key supply road. “The wedge hasn’t expanded yet, but it’s a
depressing situation,” Shtyk says. “There was a failure to build defences.”
With crack units deployed to the scene, Ukraine will probably soon contain
the advance.

But the surge has convinced soldiers that Russia intends to keep pursuing its
war. They worry that the American president will draw the wrong lesson:
that Ukraine is weak, rather than that Russia is bloodthirsty. “Ukrainian
soldiers will always be against a bad peace on the enemy’s terms,” says
Deputy, a drone commander in the 30th brigade. If there is a ceasefire, he
wants to “hang up my uniform and never put it on again. Not to have to head
to draft offices again in five years.”

Three and a half years into the war, front-line soldiers are tired and criticism
of the leadership is growing. But everyone agrees that the “land swaps”
American leaders have been bandying about ahead of the Alaska summit are
unacceptable. Boar, the nom de guerre of a company commander in the 56th
brigade, says a retreat would betray fallen comrades. He has just returned
from three weeks in trenches near Chasiv Yar, where Ukraine has held a
narrow strip in the face of years of Russian assaults. Russia continues to
throw men at it, he says, losing perhaps ten soldiers for every Ukrainian.
Vasyl, an infantryman, goes further. “If Trump were here, I’d tell him to go
and do a Russian warship,” invoking the obscene reply Ukrainian border
guards supposedly gave Russian naval officers in the war’s first days.

Uncertainty hangs over Mr Trump’s summit. There will be no seat at the

table for Volodymyr Zelensky, nor for Ukraine’s European allies. Although a
ceasefire is on the agenda, The Economist understands that the talks will
venture further. One potential area is a deeper normalisation of diplomatic
and business relations between America and Russia, including a lifting of
sanctions. Mr Putin yearns for this kind of rehabilitation. Another is co-
operation in the Arctic, for example over energy.

What offers Russia might make for peace are less obvious. In July secret
talks between Ukrainian and Russian negotiators made notable progress,
bringing the two sides closer than they had been for some time. Then Mr
Trump lost patience with Mr Putin, threatening him with “crippling”
sanctions if he did not stop the war. That seemed to reflect the influence of
Keith Kellogg, a retired American general and presidential envoy.
But another faction in the White House has a competing vision. Steve
Witkoff, a longtime real-estate associate whom Mr Trump appointed as
another special envoy, made an unannounced visit to Moscow on August
6th. He appears to have made proposals much less acceptable to Ukraine.

Mr Witkoff favours a grand deal between America and Russia. His

involvement in negotiations has usually been to Ukraine’s detriment. It has
also been marked by incompetence. Reports suggest he did not understand
Mr Putin’s offer to “swap” Ukrainian-controlled land in Donbas for a
promise not to attack elsewhere—getting territory in exchange for words.
Mr Putin has a habit of offering “concessions” designed to fragment
Ukrainian unity.

Somehow, discussion of acknowledging Russian control of territory it

occupies has shifted into talk of giving Russia more. The concept of swaps
has been around since last year, when Ukrainian forces held positions inside
Russia’s Kursk region. Ukraine has since lost almost all of Kursk, rendering
that proposal moot. But the zombie notion of swaps remains alive in
Washington. Sources say Ukraine’s latest proposals insist that a full ceasefire
must come before talk of ceding territory. Anything else, one source warns,
would open a “Pandora’s box”. Yet the Americans are urging Ukraine to
make a counter-offer including some of its own land.
A remote summit on August 13th of European leaders with Mr Zelensky and
Mr Trump, chaired by Friedrich Merz, Germany’s chancellor, tried to create
a united front against such pressure. The Europeans agreed that a truce had
to precede any negotiations, that Ukraine must have a place at the table and
that it would receive security guarantees in any deal. Mr Merz said Mr
Trump “largely shares” the European and Ukrainian positions, leaving
unclear which ones he did not endorse. Yet Ukraine’s allies still worry that
America’s president will insist on land swaps that will be difficult for Mr
Zelensky to deliver. In recent days Mr Trump has returned to his old habit of
blaming Ukraine’s president for Russia’s invasion.

On the eastern front there is little time to read headlines. Life here brings a
different set of concerns, soldiers say. Boar has spent the past three weeks
trying to stay alive, sleeping with one eye open while watching for the next
group of Russians crawling towards his position. Mr Trump’s wishes carry
little authority, he says. “Authority means my brothers-in-arms. It means
Sasha, who carried 300 people out of a trench under fire…It is the rows of
crosses marking where our comrades fell. How can we simply give that
away?” ■

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Europe | Have a good TRIPP

Donald Trump brokers a peace plan in the

Caucasus
An American-backed deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan could weaken
Russia
August 14th 2025

THE SOUTH CAUCASUS is a mosaic of warring rivals and closed borders.

Lookout posts and bunkers dot its frontiers. On August 8th Donald Trump
met Armenia’s prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, and Azerbaijan’s president,
Ilham Aliyev, in an effort to end the conflict between their two countries. At
the White House the trio signed a peace declaration and agreements on trade
and security. Crucially, Armenia agreed to open an American-operated
transport route across its territory, linking Azerbaijan to its exclave,
Nakhchivan (see map). The corridor will be called the Trump Route for
International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP). “A great honour for me,” said
America’s president.
Mr Aliyev and Mr Pashinyan vowed to nominate him for a Nobel peace
prize. The deal will diminish Russia, which has long meddled in the conflict,
as well as Iran. It is not a formal peace treaty. But it paves the way to a
bigger prize: an end to one of the world’s most intractable conflicts and a
regional detente, including the normalisation of Armenia’s relations with
Turkey, Azerbaijan’s ally. Whether that happens will be a test of American
diplomacy and of Armenia and Azerbaijan themselves. Russia could still
sow trouble.

Armenia and Azerbaijan have been fighting for more than 35 years. In the
late 1980s, as the Soviet Union disintegrated, Armenian-backed separatists
seized Nagorno-Karabakh, a region within Azerbaijan, and later built a
buffer zone. For years the conflict was frozen. Azerbaijan, whose oil-and-
gas industry boomed, built a formidable army equipped with Turkish and
Israeli drones and missiles. In 2020 it recaptured the area around Nagorno-
Karabakh. In 2023 it took back the territory itself; some 100,000 Armenians
fled. Russia, which had supported Armenia during the 1990s, stood back. It
did so partly to punish Mr Pashinyan, a democrat, who rose to power in
2018 in a peaceful revolution that swept Armenia’s Kremlin-backed rulers
from office.
Since early 2024 the two sides have been inching towards a peace treaty. In
previous negotiations they have relied on intermediaries such as Russia,
Turkey or the Minsk Group, a multilateral forum set up in the 1990s to deal
with the conflict. But recently they have been speaking directly. In March
they agreed on a draft treaty.

Two obstacles remained. The first was Azerbaijan’s insistence that Armenia
remove references to Nagorno-Karabakh from its constitution, which will
require a referendum. The second was Azerbaijan’s demand for a transport
corridor to Nakhchivan. In 2020, as part of a ceasefire deal, Mr Aliyev and
Mr Pashinyan agreed to open a route supervised by Russian officials. Both
men later resiled from the idea that Russia should be involved, but could not
agree on an alternative.

Mr Trump provided a partial solution. For months, American negotiators

have been shuttling back and forth to the region to thrash it out. Armenia
will lease the land for 99 years to America, which will hire contractors to
run the route. The TRIPP gives America a long-term stake in the region’s
security. Iran is furious. Russia coolly stated the deal was “positive”, but
warned America not to repeat the “counterproductive outcomes” of its
interventions in the Middle East.

America has offered Armenia and Azerbaijan sweeteners, too. The boss of
SOCAR, Azerbaijan’s state energy firm, visited Washington with Mr Aliyev
to sign a deal with ExxonMobil, an American oil giant. Armenia, which
lacks Azerbaijan’s natural resources, has less to offer America’s mercantile
president, but will get some support on artificial intelligence and
semiconductors. Mr Trump also waived sanctions, introduced in 1992, that
have prohibited military co-operation with Azerbaijan. He announced a
“strategic partnership” with Azerbaijan, which is a staunch ally of Israel.

The peace deal could also pave the way for Turkey and Armenia to bury the
hatchet. The standoff with Armenia has been “Turkey’s Achilles heel, in
terms of its regional influence”, says Nigar Goksel of the International Crisis
Group, a global think-tank. Rapprochement between the two began in 2008,
but stalled.
To accommodate Mr Aliyev, Turkey had made normalisation with Armenia
conditional on a peace deal between Azerbaijan and Armenia. That obstacle
now appears to be gone. Turkey may decide to open its border with
Armenia, which it shut in solidarity with Azerbaijan during the Nagorno-
Karabakh conflict in 1993. “Things will start moving fast,” Ms Goksel
predicts.

Yet amid the Trumpian pomp, the deal leaves much to be done. In
Washington Messrs Aliyev and Pashinyan put their initials on a formal peace
treaty, but did not sign it. Azerbaijan’s demand for Armenia to change its
constitution is unmet. The TRIPP’s benefits will be concentrated in
Nakhchivan and Syunik, the sparsely populated Armenian region it will
cross. But the hope is that it could unlock more dealmaking. Azerbaijan and
Armenia could start talking about opening other parts of their fortified
border.

There are reasons to be cautious. Mr Pashinyan is unpopular: just 13% of

Armenians say they trust him. Nationalist hardliners, including Robert
Kocharyan, a former president, accuse him of compromising Armenian
sovereignty. (Mr Kocharyan, for his part, sold Armenian assets to Russia in
exchange for debt relief during the 2000s.) Holding the referendum that
Azerbaijan demands will be divisive, and an election next year will give
Russia a chance to interfere. In June Armenia’s government said it had
foiled a coup planned for September.

Azerbaijan could also disrupt the peace process. Mr Aliyev, an autocrat who
succeeded his father in 2003, had previously threatened to seize a transport
corridor by force. He has indulged in irredentist fantasies such as calling
Armenia “West Azerbaijan”. Laurence Broers of Chatham House, a British
think-tank, says such talk will be “kryptonite” for peace if it continues.
Azerbaijan’s military dominance only makes it harder for Armenia to trust it.

Another risk is that America loses interest. Historically, peace in the south
Caucasus has often been brought by outside powers. “It was Russia and
Turkey in 2020, it was the Minsk Group in the 1990s, it was the Bolsheviks
in the 1920s,” says Mr Broers. Mr Trump has positioned America as the
latest peace broker in a tough neighbourhood. Whether it lasts will not be in
his control. ■
Editor’s note (August 11th): This piece has been updated.

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the-caucasus
Europe | Svalbard at 100

The Russian-run town squatting on NATO

territory
Could Vladimir Putin exploit the odd legal status of an Arctic
archipelago?
August 14th 2025

A BUST OF Lenin glowers over Barentsburg. Signs are in Cyrillic script.

Russia’s flag flaps from buildings beside ones for Arktikugol, a Russian
mining company. Shops sell Russian tinned fish, and Russian scientific
institutes dot the town. Outside one, two geologists explain they are visiting
from St Petersburg.

Yet this is not Russia. Barentsburg is a geopolitical quirk: a Russian

company town squatting on Svalbard, an Arctic archipelago that belongs to
Norway. Thanks to a treaty, the NATO country has had control since August
14th 1925. As The Economist went to press, Jonas Store, Norway’s prime
minister, was set to preside over a 100th anniversary ceremony in
Longyearbyen, the capital. But the treaty also grants foreigners rights to
exploit resources. Russians have mined coal here since the 1930s.

Western intelligence officials fear the arrangement gives Russia an opening

to cause trouble. Three years ago Russian trawlers sabotaged a
communications cable. In March Russia accused Norway of breaching the
treaty with military activity in Svalbard. Mr Putin has declared Norway an
unfriendly country.

For Russians in Barentsburg, and those in even smaller Pyramiden nearby,

that means growing isolation. One woman who says she arrived from
Moscow a month ago to work with tourists confides that she is desperate to
leave. The population has slumped from 2,000 last century to an estimated
340. The coal from its uneconomic mine is burnt locally: the power station’s
chimneys spew soot over nearby glaciers.

Liberal Russians have fled to prosperous Longyearbyen, 40km away. One

Russian there says it grew “complicated” to stay after she spoke out against
the Ukraine war. Russians who travelled from Longyearbyen to vote in last
year’s presidential election say they were searched.

Svalbard’s Norwegian governor, Lars Fause, supervises the towns. He

reports no tensions, but discourages non-Russians from visiting them. Some
still do, to spot wildlife including polar bears and whales. A garish Soviet
tower block from 1974 is promoted as “the world’s northernmost
skyscraper”. It is four storeys tall.

Relations were better in the cold war. The mayor of Longyearbyen, Terje
Aunevik, says residents have stopped exchanging visits on national days.
The Russian parades are more militaristic now, he says. One of the
geologists from St Petersburg says he worked in Svalbard for decades
alongside German and Norwegian scientists. Today he works only with
Russians.

Russia won’t close its crumbling settlement. It still has propaganda and,
perhaps, intelligence value. The coal may not be worth digging out, but it
gives Russians an excuse to remain dug in. ■
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lenin-presides
Europe | Frosty geopolitics

The looming military threat in the Arctic

Great-power competition in the far north puts renewed attention on
Svalbard
August 14th 2025

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threat-in-the-arctic
Europe | Slow to spark

China’s planned Turkish EV factories have yet to

power up
When they do it could spell trouble for TOGG, Turkey’s domestic EV
maker
August 14th 2025

WHEN BYD, China’s biggest electric carmaker, offered a $1bn investment

in the summer of 2024, Turkey rolled out the red carpet. Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, the country’s president, attended the signing ceremony. Officials in
Manisa, where the company plans to open a new factory, mused about a
future “Chinatown” to house BYD workers. Yet a year down the line,
despite reports the company would accelerate work on the plant at the
expense of one in Hungary, things have not progressed much. The factory is
supposed to open next year, but there are no signs of construction save for a
few containers and the occasional dump truck.
Turkey’s location and relatively low labour costs make it a big draw for
Chinese EV makers. So does its customs-union agreement with the
European Union, which allows cars built in Turkey to be exported to the
bloc tariff-free. Last year the EU slapped tariffs of up to 35%, on top of an
existing 10% duty, on Chinese EVs. Other Chinese auto makers looking to
Turkey as a way to avoid the tariffs include Chery, said to be eyeing a $1bn
investment.

China is also keen to grab a slice of Turkey’s booming domestic EV market.

High fuel prices and an extortionate consumption tax of up to 220% for
conventional vehicles have driven up demand for EVs. Over 100,000 fully
electric cars were sold in Turkey in the seven months to July, an increase of
147% on the same period in 2024.

Desperate for foreign investment but hoping to stem the tide of cheap
Chinese EVs—which threaten its own electric carmaker, TOGG—Turkey
has sought to solve both problems in one go. Last year the country raised
tariffs on Chinese cars to 50%. But it made BYD and other carmakers who
pledge to invest in Turkey exempt. Sales of BYD cars have surged.

On paper TOGG, one of Mr Erdogan’s flagship projects, has fared well.

Since its launch in 2023, it has outsold every other EV brand at home, partly
thanks to government support. But competition from foreign EVs and the
prospect of 150,000 BYD cars per year from the plant in Manisa could spell
trouble. “They may not survive in such a market,” says Cagdas Ungor of
Marmara University.

Chinese investments in Turkey amount to only some $5bn, lower than in

Saudi Arabia, Egypt or Iraq. Politics is no longer the main obstacle. Turkey
has toned down its criticism of China’s treatment of its Uyghurs, a Turkic
ethnic group. The biggest brake is instead Turkey’s rule-of-law record. Mr
Erdogan and his inner circle enjoy nearly unchecked power. “Regulations
and tariff decisions are made overnight without any consultations with the
key actors,” says Ceren Ergenc of the Centre for European Policy Studies, a
Brussels think-tank. “China perceives that as a high risk.”

China’s EV operations in Turkey have not escaped scrutiny by EU

bureaucrats. Earlier this year the European Commission warned that it
would go after countries and companies that engage in tariff circumvention.
EU anti-dumping rules mean that cars made in Turkey could face punitive
tariffs if imported parts account for 60% or more of their value, unless
assembly adds over 25% to manufacturing costs. To have unfettered access
to the EU market, companies like BYD will need to source at least some
parts from Turkey.

Fear of pushback from the EU may explain why work in Manisa has slowed.
Firms like BYD are hedging their bets, says Ms Ergenc, and waiting for the
EU and China to settle their EV tariff dispute. Local officials and other
analysts say BYD will finish the factory, though perhaps not on time. Turkey
may be a convenient backdoor to the EU, but the Chinese have not yet
prised it open. ■

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have-yet-to-power-up
Europe | A fine Verein

The colourful civic groups that hold Germany

together
Clubs for shooting, rabbit-keeping and everything else are the backbone of
its society
August 14th 2025

TUCKED away in the car park of a drinks warehouse, hundreds of men in

green jackets and feathered caps, plus a handful of women, are swapping
gossip and glugging beer. Suddenly comes the call: “Schützenbrüder
antreten!” (marksmen line up), and the men fall into columns as a brass band
strikes up. They begin a good-natured, not especially disciplined parade up
the streets of Arnsberg, a small town in Germany’s Sauerland region,
hollering “Horrido!”, an old hunting cry, to well-wishers. Soon they arrive at
a large tent where, after a Catholic mass, the festivities begin: speeches,
dancing and a lot of beer. Later that evening—having been forced to learn,
somewhat against his will, a dance called the “discofox”—your
correspondent takes his leave as a conga line begins.

This is the summer festival of Arnsberg’s St Hubertus Schützenverein, or

shooting club (nicknamed ”Muffrika” after its neighbourhood). It is one of
several in town. With their archaic traditions and military cosplay,
Schützenvereine, rooted in medieval militias, look anachronistic. But in
many German Catholic heartlands, they are thriving. In 2015 unesco added
German shooting culture to its “intangible heritage” list. Some clubs have
had awkward brushes with modernity: the feathers of older Schützenbrüder
have been ruffled by such novelties as Muslims winning shooting contests.
But they are soon smoothed.

No understanding of Germany is complete without an account of the Vereine

(clubs or associations) latticed across the land. As an old joke has it, when
three Germans meet, the first thing they do is form a Verein. The 19th
century saw a Cambrian explosion of these clubs, catering to every interest,
as cities grew and an industrial bourgeoisie emerged. By the 1920s Vereine
were so established that Kurt Tucholsky, the great Weimar-era satirist, poked
fun at them in his poem Das Mitglied (The Member): “I only really get
excited in my club/I look down on those who aren’t in it.”

The requirements for a Verein are simple: seven people, a board and statutes.
The template has proved versatile and enduring: there are over 600,000
Vereine across Germany, spanning interests as mainstream as painting and
football—some Bundesliga teams are organised as Vereine—and as niche as
sugar-packet collecting. The number of clubs has grown faster than their
membership has, suggesting diversifying interests in a plural society. One
recent trend: with municipal budgets squeezed, Fördervereine, or “support
clubs”, have mushroomed to help fund cultural and educational institutions.

Their champions see Vereine as social glue: Edmund Burke’s “little

platoons” enshrined in Germany’s civil code. In Arnsberg members say they
provide a place for younger folk to party and older ones to socialise, and
note that committed members chip in time or labour. Jonas, a younger
member, celebrates the levelling that unites the carpenter and lawyer: “With
these jackets on, we are all the same.” It is a romantic sentiment, befitting a
society that still aspires to a certain egalitarianism.
And if there seems to be rather less shooting than drinking at the club—a
breathalyser is available for tipsy motorists—that need not undermine its
community purpose. Schütze means protecting those who need it rather than
shooting as such, says Horst Thoren of the Association of Historical German
Shooting Brotherhoods (bhds). In the pandemic members mobilised to drive
vulnerable locals to vaccination centres. During refugee waves Vereine have
been called on to help newcomers integrate, albeit with mixed results.

Indeed, Germans freshly arrived in a new part of the country will often seek
out a sympathetic Verein. Big claims are sometimes made for the Verein’s
powers of integration: Friedrich Merz, Germany’s chancellor and a proud
Sauerlander, recently congratulated shooting clubs for doing a “great job”
integrating people into village communities. The sentiment is welcomed in
Arnsberg, Mr Merz’s home town, even if outsiders are plainly not thick on
the ground. “Of course these clubs don’t drive social integration,” says Peter
Schubert, a social scientist who has conducted surveys of Germany’s
Vereine.

The claim may ring truer in Germany’s 86,000 sports clubs. “The Verein
became my connection to German people,” says Asadullah Nemati, an
Afghan who arrived in Stuttgart in 2016 knowing no one. A keen wrestler,
he joined a club and met people who helped him find a flat and a job. He is
now a star on his local team, nicknamed the “Swabian Afghan”. Dedicated
Migrantenvereine often provide newcomers with a foothold in Germany.

The future of some Vereine is threatened by red tape, and especially the
struggle to find youngsters to commit to roles beyond “episodic”
volunteering. “I’d like to retire,” says Wolfgang Heitner, chair of the
Muffrika club. “But I can’t find anyone to take over.” Mr Schubert blames
the huge demands Vereine place on volunteers for the slowing rate of their
formation.

Germany’s resurgent far right presents a different challenge. In 2019 the

Alternative for Germany (afd) called for a “march through the
organisations”, in a conscious echo of 1960s student protesters. Especially in
rural regions, the afd and other radical groups have tried to exploit Verein
structures rather than create their own. In response the bhds has banned afd
members from its clubs. Sportvereine have strategies to keep the far right at
bay. “Politics is the last thing we talk about,” says Jürgen Hufnagel, a
veteran Muffrikaner. Nevertheless, last year the Arnsberg shooting clubs
created a one-off Gegen Extremismus (against extremism) campaign.

“I’ve always liked the idea of Vereine as schools of democracy,” says Daniel
Watermann, a historian, “but I’ve always doubted that it’s universally true.”
Based in Halle in eastern Germany, fertile ground for the far right, he notes
that the success of Vereine in organising and propagating ideas is precisely
why they appeal to extremists. Researchers have found that Nazi ideology
spread more quickly in parts of Weimar Germany with a high density of
Vereine.

In Arnsberg, as the beer flows, the Bratwürste grill and the band plays on,
such concerns seem far away. Muffrika was founded in the 1950s, and its
grounding in tradition is why the members love it. Asked how he would
spend his time if there were no shooting club, Mr Hufnagel does not miss a
beat: “I’d start one.” ■

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germany-together
Europe | Charlemagne

Must Europe choose between “strategic

autonomy” and August off?
A continent on holiday from geopolitical reality
August 14th 2025

Europeans and Americans concur: there is something fishy about a two-

week summer holiday. But the rationale for their concerns is markedly
different. To Wall Street and Silicon Valley types, indulging in an
uninterrupted fortnight of vacation—a whole fortnight!—means essentially
throwing in the towel. Imagine what opportunities for promotion will be
forsaken by bunking off for 14 straight days. To office toilers in Stockholm,
Rome or Paris, two weeks of leave seems equally suspect. Seulement two
weeks? That would be acceptable only as the opening act of a proper
summer break. Ideally this should stretch to a whole month. How else to
recover from the existential drudgery of work? American out-of-office
emails beseech the sender to wait a few hours while the holidaying recipient
snaps out of beach mode to respond to their message (sorry!). European out-
of-office messages politely invite the sender to wait until September (not
sorry).

Europe quietly revels in being a lifestyle superpower, with better food and
longer life expectancy than America. But it is also an anxious place these
days. The two months since June 21st—the traditional start of the
Scandinavian holiday season—will go down as a summer of geopolitical
subservience. At a NATO summit in June, a parade of European leaders
toadied to Donald Trump; the alliance’s (Dutch) boss elicited cringes by
praising him as the group’s “Daddy”. A summit marking the 50th
anniversary of the European Union’s diplomatic ties to China in July was
shifted to Beijing after President Xi Jinping made clear he had no intention
of travelling to Brussels. The killing in Gaza goes on, even as European
leaders protest. They have also had to swallow Trumpian edicts on trade,
meekly agreeing not to reciprocate even while their exports to America get
walloped with tariffs. On August 15th Mr Trump will host his Russian
counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in Alaska to discuss Ukraine. For France,
Germany and other Europeans, the war is the ultimate threat to their
continent’s security, yet they will not get a seat at the table.

The Alaska confab is a sharp reminder to Europeans that they live in a world
where others increasingly call the shots. The idea that the continent needs to
recover some measure of “strategic autonomy” was once a French
obsession. Now it is widely shared. But shaping one’s own future—spending
more on defence, producing more stuff instead of importing it, and so on—
looks a lot like hard work. Shorter summer holidays by themselves will not
rid Europe of its dependencies on China and America. But Europe’s
geopolitical irrelevance is in no small part down its somnolent economy.
There, working habits do matter. Whereas productivity gains in America and
China have in recent decades translated into higher GDP, and in turn
geopolitical heft, in Europe those advances have been used to toil less
instead.

Though not exactly an indolent continent, Europe prides itself on indulging

in la dolce vita. Not feeling tip-top as you head to the beach? Fret not: under
EU law employees can suspend their holidays if they are unwell, ensuring
that any sick days translate into more holidays later. Taken as a whole,
Europeans work fewer hours in the week than most others globally, either
because of legal restrictions or thanks to a penchant for part-time work
(nearly a third of Europeans work fewer than 35 hours a week, a world
record). They then work fewer weeks in the year, thanks not just to long
holidays but to parental leave—as much as 480 days, for Swedish mums and
dads. The average German now takes 15 days of sick leave every year, too.
And to top it all off, Europeans work fewer years in their career, despite long
life expectancies. The average Frenchman spends 23 years in retirement,
over half a decade more than his Japanese or American counterparts.

E allora? some might say. By forsaking the office or factory floor Europeans
are in effect purchasing leisure, rather than putting in extra hours to buy yet
more stuff. Who is to say an inflated pay slip is worth more than time spent
eating and playing? Yet increasingly, it feels like the extra cash would come
in handy. Europe’s public finances are ever more stretched. Hefty defence
commitments agreed in June are framed as a tussle of “warfare v welfare”,
as if governments can only spend on defence by cutting pensions. But
Europe might not need to choose between guns and butter: by working more
it might be able to afford both. The focus in the continent’s economics
ministries has been to improve productivity. Fostering innovation and
cutting red tape are indeed needed to squeeze more output for every hour of
labour. But while working better matters, what about working more?

Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, has warned that “work-life balance”
and four-day weeks stand in the way of national prosperity. He is right.
Happily for holidaymakers in Berlin and beyond, little is likely to change
soon. While “strategic autonomy” sounds nice to those voters who can make
sense of it, more time at the beach sounds even better. Politicians who have
goaded their compatriots to put in an extra shift—Nicolas Sarkozy, a former
French president, suggested people “work more to earn more”—have been
rewarded with early retirement. A plan to cut two national holidays in
France to help public finances has been greeted with the kind of enthusiasm
reserved for August storms.

There is nothing reprehensible about wanting to work to live rather than live
to work. Alas, the laws of geopolitics, unlike most European labour codes,
do not offer five weeks of holiday. Put simply: more working means more
money, and more money means added clout in global affairs. Until the 1960s
Europeans toiled longer hours than Americans, and mattered somewhat
more in the world. That is no coincidence. If Europeans want a seat at the
global geopolitical table, they will have to work for it.■

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autonomy-and-august-off
Britain
Britain is a global gaming superpower
The Fantasy Premier League is changing Britain’s favourite sport
Asian tourists are returning to Britain. But they look different
Vaccinations to prevent cervical cancer have plummeted in Britain
Still want to be a London cabbie?
Aux barricades, boomers!
Britain | Game changing

Britain is a global gaming superpower

Can it remain one?
August 14th 2025

The arrival of “Grand Theft Auto VI” in 2026 will be less a video-game
release than a cultural moment. The game, which has players stealing cars,
selling drugs and killing cops, will have cost upwards of $2bn to build. Yet it
will almost certainly turn a profit within its first week. With its glitzy
cityscapes, radio soundtrack and trademark swagger, the series looks, sounds
and feels like a warped parody of America. Yet this blockbuster began its
life in the small Scottish city of Dundee and is still made by a team of tartan
nerds in Edinburgh—a feat celebrated in the British government’s strategy
for the creative industries, released in June.

Such recognition is overdue: gaming has long been a British superpower.

The industry generates annual revenues of some $200bn globally. Strip out
the Cayman Islands (a British overseas territory) and Britain is the third-
largest exporter of video games, behind only America and Japan.
Understated and quirky, it often plays the role of incubator. “Tomb Raider”,
a billion-dollar franchise with its own Netflix series, began as a sketch in
Derby. Recent successes include “Fall Guys”, a battle-royale obstacle
course, “LittleBigPlanet”, a pioneer in user-generated content, and “Total
War: Warhammer”, based on the tabletop series. In Britain video games
generate more revenue (£4.3bn, or $5.8bn) than the film (excluding
streaming) and music industries combined (£3.4bn).

Not everyone is convinced that Britain should be as supportive of its gaming

industry as of, say, its life sciences. Outdated stereotypes that gaming turns
youth into obese oddballs or school shooters still prevail in parts of
Westminster. Others fret about the future: with investment slowing and
artificial intelligence (AI) looming, the global gaming industry is in turmoil.
Such pessimism is misguided. As in other creative industries—from film to
fashion—British ingenuity makes it well-placed to thrive in an age of
(sameish) AI.

To understand Britain’s unique role in the global gaming industry, go back to

its origins. In the early 1980s cheap, programmable home computers gave
rise to a generation of bedroom coders. This grassroots mix of creativity and
code stood in contrast with America and Japan, where console-driven
markets, not PC games, took off first. Britain’s offbeat scene spawned hits
with cultish fan bases, such as “Broken Sword”, a mystery adventure
starring an American puzzle-solver. This soon attracted the attention of
industry giants. In 1997 Dundee’s Abertay University launched the world’s
first computer-game degree.

Britain is also good at making mobile games, which are more accessible and
cheaper to create than console blockbusters. Golf Clash, the top-grossing
sports-mobile game in America in 2021, was made in less than a year by
around 20 people in a leafy town in Cheshire. Tripledot Studios, popular for
its Solitaire game, is based in London. In June it bought the mobile-games
arm of AppLovin, a Nasdaq-listed American tech firm, for $800m.

As the industry has grown, with exports increasing from $3.4bn in 2016 to
$8.8bn in 2021, its benefits have become more evident. It employs 30,000 or
so developers, artists and composers and is unusually productive. The gross
value-added per video-games worker is almost double the British average,
according to government data.

It is also a sector where Britain really is levelling up. Almost four-fifths of

video-game developers work outside London (clusters tended to form
around successful early studios and to reflect the sector’s bedroom origins).
Katie Goode, a burgundy-haired rocket scientist turned games designer, runs
her virtual-reality (VR) studio from north Cornwall—one of the country’s
remotest corners. Hubs have emerged in places like Dundee, Leamington
Spa, Slough and Teesside.

Britain has also begun to recognise gaming’s wider benefits. In the right
hands, gaming encourages learning, not laziness. Take Demis Hassabis,
known for starting DeepMind, an AI company bought by Google for $600m
in 2014. He attributes much of his success to making a theme-park game as
a teen in north London, and later founding a games studio. VR is changing
how doctors rehearse surgery and how pilots train for take-off. The National
Health Service now prescribes games to treat anxiety and depression.

Yet the belated recognition comes at a tough time. Some issues are specific
to Britain. Gaming suffers from the same woes as British tech more broadly:
mainly a shortage of venture-capital funding. Smaller studios that struggle to
attract investment are unable to scale up. Instead they are often snapped up
by foreign buyers, such as Tencent, a Chinese tech conglomerate, which
bought Sumo Group, a developer based in Sheffield, in 2022. “We’re
incredibly good at creating games,” says Sir Ian Livingstone, the first Briton
knighted for services to the industry. “We’re not so good at hanging onto
them.”

The second challenge is a global slowdown. The pandemic helped gaming

boom. Investors piled in, hoping to profit from millions of housebound
players. British exports grew by 259% between 2016 and 2021. But the
surge led to overproduction. In July Microsoft, maker of the Xbox,
announced mass lay-offs in its gaming division, leading to the cancellation
of projects in Britain. Sony, a Japanese publisher, closed its London studio in
2024.
At the industry’s biggest annual conference in Britain, held in July in
Brighton, the mood is subdued. Jobseekers wander the halls with lanyards
reading “seeking new opportunities” or “looking for work”.

Technological disruption adds to the unease. Gaming has long been at the
bleeding edge of tech—Nvidia made its GPUs for gamers long before they
were used on AI models. Alan Turing, a British computer pioneer, created
the world’s first algorithm capable of playing chess. But many developers
are wary of being displaced by machines. “A lot of us feel like Luddites…
we just want to start burning the textile mills,” says one attendee in
Brighton. One game on show lets players explore the abandoned server of a
failed studio, its fictional founders’ ideas drowned in a tide of generic
content, or “AI slop”.

Yet as artists and disrupters have shown through the ages, in turmoil lies
opportunity. And Britain is uniquely well-placed to reap the benefits. Some
of the laid-off are starting their own studios, such as Yasmina Fadel, who co-
founded a games company after being made redundant last year.

There are also signs that Britain is beginning to better value its ideas.
Licensing its distinctive IP to gaming developers helped turn Games
Workshop, the creator of “Warhammer”, into a FTSE 100 company in 2024
(it has focused on mid-size games). The government’s new strategy includes
a promise of funding through the British Business Bank to help plug the
venture-capital gap, and a promise of a copyright scheme to protect firms’ IP
from AI.

AI may end up increasing the value of British developers rather than

depleting it. It can boost productivity. At one studio in Brighton, a level that
once took 90 days to build now takes just ten, notes Nick Poole of UK
Interactive Entertainment, an industry body. “In a world of synthetic
material and AI-generated content,” the government’s creative-industry
strategy correctly identifies that “human endeavour and creativity will be
more important than ever.” The only way to mitigate the threat of AI is to
“tell great stories that haven’t been told before”, notes Charles Cecil, the
creator of “Broken Sword”. What is exciting, he says, is that it is “playing to
[British] strengths”.
In Brighton that is clearly on display. One arcade-style game, made in
Cornwall, stars a cat wielding a revolver and a samurai sword. In
“Atomfall”, players explore a post-apocalyptic Lake District, complete with
distinctive red British telephone boxes. “Thank Goodness You’re Here”, a
surreal indie hit, follows a travelling salesman through a Yorkshire village as
he helps residents free themselves from drains, and bake oversize meat pies.
“It captures a bit of the British soul,” purred Le Monde. Only a human,
arguably only a British human, could dream up ideas like this. Eccentricity
may well be Britain’s greatest asset. ■

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Britain | Soccer stats

The Fantasy Premier League is changing Britain’s

favourite sport
Football is becoming nerdier
August 14th 2025

Liverpool against Bournemouth on August 15th is the first Premier League

game since May 25th. Some dread the first whistle as the end of 12 weeks of
premier-football-free peace. For others those three months have felt like a
lifetime.

Among them are not just traditional fans but a new generation of nerds—
data obsessives who pore over metrics like PPDA (pressures per defensive
action), and compare players’ statistical profiles. Outlets like the Athletic
cater to them with reporting that highlights, say, players in the 98th
percentile for dribbling success. Freelance analysts, or “tacticos”, make a
career on social media using data to explain how players fit different tactical
systems.

Nowhere is this hunger for data keener than among participants in the
Fantasy Premier League (FPL). The game, with more than 11m players
worldwide, is simple. Each week you pick a team of 11 players. If they do
well in real life, you get points. Some rely on intuition for team selection.
They are not the ones who win. The game is dominated by analytical types
who obsess over the “expected goals” (xG) created, conceded, and
converted.

xG is the poster boy of football’s data obsession. It uses data on hundreds of

thousands of shots to estimate a player’s chance of scoring from various
points on the pitch. Such metrics took off in the mid-2000s, propelled by
numerate hobbyists. It took years for the football mainstream to recognise
their value.

Football managers were insulted by the notion that speccy whizzkids might
know the game better than them. European football experts resented the
American investors, inspired by the stat-heavy strategies of the most
successful baseball teams, pushing this data revolution. Some saw analytics
as but another stage in the gentrification of the working man’s game.
But football is about results. Liverpool’s embrace of data in the 2010s is
often credited for enabling them to compete with petrostate-owned
Manchester City. “Yo-yo” clubs like Brighton and Brentford, owned by
gambling experts who were among the first to enact a data-led strategy, have
become established Premier League outfits.

Over the past decade scouting departments have been overhauled, and
specialist coaches using analytics to perfect corner and throw-in routines
brought in. And fans are warming to data. Nathan Clark, an analyst for the
“Extra Inch”, a Tottenham Hotspur podcast, explains: “Fans want to know
why their club is losing games when they’re losing them, and…why they’re
winning them when they’re winning them.”

Data are invaluable for an aspiring FPL player. By ascribing numerical

values to specific footballing actions, FPL turns a subjective game into
something more formulaic. Specialised FPL websites charge players to
access data tables. Influencers add context. Last season, when asked if
Nottingham Forest’s Chris Wood might be a good choice for an upcoming
week, one FPL expert replied: “Not when his wife is eight and a half months
pregnant.”

Some are still reluctant to accept data’s growing role. On social media
“proper football blokes” lament the “complete bollocks” of metrics like
“expected assists” (which measures the xG value created by a pass). There
will always be some holdouts, but the rise of data is inexorable. “We’ve won
the culture war,” proclaims Mr Clark, “for better or worse.”■

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changing-britains-favourite-sport
Britain | Foreign visitors

Asian tourists are returning to Britain. But they

look different
No more coach parties
August 14th 2025

“York is very famous. It’s a must-go place!” insists Yuxia, a tourist from
Beijing, who is growing frustrated with questions about why she chose to
visit a small city in northern England. She learned about York by watching
videos on TikTok, Xiaohongshu and other social media. With impressive
vigour, she has popped over from Cumbria, some 120km away, for the day.

In 2019 fully 1.7m people visited Britain from China (excluding Hong
Kong) and India, according to the Office for National Statistics. Although
much less numerous than American or French visitors, the Chinese in
particular were loved for their free-spending ways and because they visited
from spring to autumn, not just in the summer. The tourism industry was
bereft when covid-19 drove the number of Asian visitors almost to zero.

Now they are returning. Just over 1.1m visitors arrived from China and India
last year; the Grand Hotel in York says that Asian customers are booking
almost twice as many nights as they did in 2019. But the recovery in
numbers is less striking than other changes. Today’s Asian tourists seem to
be younger than those who came before the pandemic, and they behave
differently.

North Yorkshire lies between London and Edinburgh, two obvious

destinations. Will Zhuang, who works with the York tourism agency, says
Chinese visitors also find it more unfamiliar and exotic than London: “They
come to Yorkshire and they say, ‘This is England.’” That is important,
because Chinese tourists now want to experience something of British life,
he says. No longer do they stream out of a coach, take a few pictures and
move on. These days they tend to visit in small groups, and linger.

The change is also evident at Castle Howard, near York. The 18th-century
stately home has been famous in East Asia since Jay Chou, a Taiwanese
singer, held his wedding reception there in 2015. Ammie Jones, head of
sales at the house, says that Chinese visitors have taken to buying tickets
individually, rather than in big groups as they did before the pandemic. They
seem more patient and curious. Castle Howard offers audio guides in nine
languages. Chinese is the third-most-popular, after English and German.

The most intrepid tourists from China, India and other Asian countries make
it across the North York Moors to Whitby, a seaside town. Some are drawn
by Bram Stoker’s novel “Dracula”, which mentions the town and its ruined
medieval abbey, says Michelle Brown of English Heritage, a charity. An
added attraction in summer is the chance to observe British holidaymakers
as they engage in traditional native customs such as fishing for barely edible
crabs, swimming in the frigid North Sea and working on their sunburns.

Elsewhere, Asian tourists are drawn to film locations. Polling for

VisitBritain, the national tourism promoter, found that 84% of tourists from
China and 79% of those from India (but only 47% of those from France)
visited somewhere they had seen in a film or tv series. The Scottish
Highlands still benefit from appearing in the “Harry Potter” films of 2001 to
2011. A particularly popular spot, Glen Nevis, appears in those films and in
a Bollywood production, “Bade Miyan Chote Miyan”, where it doubles as a
Himalayan valley.

One reason why Asian tourists have become more independent is that solo
travellers and families can negotiate visa and other bureaucratic restrictions
more easily than big groups. The Chinese government lifted many of its
covid-era restrictions only in 2023. Organised coach tours of Britain often
take more than a year to put together, so a recovery has been delayed. The
whirlwind itineraries of the past might yet return.

But the number of independent visitors could keep growing, too. To judge
by the accounts of Asian tourists in the Shambles, a picturesque street in
York, the habit of researching destinations by watching videos on social
media has become ingrained. The videos could make tourists feel
comfortable tackling stranger places. Besides, some are visiting Britain for
the second or third time. They have seen London.■

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britain-but-they-look-different
Britain | Falling off a cliff

Vaccinations to prevent cervical cancer have

plummeted in Britain
Blame declining confidence, a lack of convenience and rising
complacency
August 14th 2025

HUMAN PAPILLOMAVIRUS (HPV) is an unwelcome consequence of a

joyful pursuit. Skin-to-skin contact during sex allows the virus to spread,
which can lead to genital warts and cancers of the reproductive system. In
Britain HPV causes about 3,500 cases of cervical cancer each year and 900
deaths. A vaccination programme that inoculates against the virus—once a
runaway success—is floundering.
The HPV vaccine is given to children aged between 12 and 15 before they
are typically sexually active. Take-up in girls was around 90% in the years
up to 2017. Today the rate for year-nine girls is 74%, on a par with Sierra
Leone. In boys, who have been offered the jab for five years, it has fallen by
nine percentage points to 69%. In some areas, such as Luton and Leicester,
fewer than half of children are vaccinated.

Vaccination rates have fallen in all of Britain’s child-immunisation

programmes, but the drop is sharpest for HPV. The evidence of the vaccine’s
efficacy is unequivocal: a study from Scotland in 2024 found no cases of
cancer-causing HPV virus among women who received it a decade earlier.
The National Health Service (NHS) wants to eliminate cervical cancer by
2040, but says it needs to achieve a 90% vaccination rate by 2030. To do so
means tackling the three Cs of vaccine hesitancy: confidence, convenience
and complacency.

Confidence in vaccines was dented during the coronavirus pandemic.

Surveys conducted by the Vaccine Confidence Project (VCP), a research
group, find that the share of respondents who agreed that vaccines are “safe”
and “important for children” declined sharply during the pandemic in many
countries, but the drop was especially pronounced in Britain.
New survey data from the VCP on vaccine attitudes in Britain, shared
exclusively with The Economist, show that confidence in vaccines in
general has since improved. Among a representative sample of adults, 85%
agree that “in general, vaccines are safe”, 15 percentage points up on 2023.
But when asked specifically about the safety of the HPV vaccine, that figure
drops to 74%.

Blame disinformation. Anti-vax parents allege that it causes ovarian failure

and other issues. In 2019 Robert F. Kennedy junior, now America’s health
secretary, called it “the most dangerous vaccine ever invented”. Numerous
studies have found that its adverse effects are similar to, and no more
frequent than, other common vaccines. The UK Health Security Agency
(UKHSA) says that the rates of ovarian failure and other illnesses are no
greater than would occur naturally in adolescent girls.

Are today’s children affected by anti-vax views? Surveys of teenagers show

that they know where to seek information they trust about vaccines: from
their parents. Worryingly, the latest VCP survey shows that middle-aged
people (ie, the parents of teenagers) are among the least likely to say the
HPV vaccine is safe (see chart).
The HPV vaccine is administered in schools, but parents must sign a form to
consent to their child being inoculated. The UKHSA says that many go
unsigned, not because a parent actively objects but because of a lack of
convenience. It wants to tackle this by allowing children to self-consent if
the nurse giving the vaccine believes that they are mature enough—though
only one in five teenagers say they alone should decide whether to get
vaccinated, rising to one in three by age 16.

Some parents worry that vaccination might affect their child’s behaviour. Dr
Tehseen Khan, a GP in the London borough of Hackney, says Orthodox
Jews he works with believe the vaccine is unnecessary because their
children will have only one lifelong partner. Although there is no evidence
that having the vaccine changes sexual behaviour, some parents fear that it
promotes promiscuity. In Scotland, which (unlike England) publishes data
by ethnicity, Pakistani and Polish children have the lowest HPV vaccination
rates; white British and Chinese the highest.

Complacency may also lead children and parents to wonder why the vaccine
is necessary. Helen Bedford of University College London says parents
often ask: “Why do I need to get my child who is not yet sexually active
vaccinated against something which may or may not happen to them in 20 or
30 years’ time?” Vaccination programmes are often victims of their own
success, making cervical cancer less common and parents less worried about
it.

The NHS recently launched a catch-up campaign, targeting some 400,000

women aged under 25 who did not get inoculated in school. Whether they
will get a jab may not be down to the facts. Margaret Stanley at the
University of Cambridge, whose research helped develop the HPV vaccine,
says at this stage you should “forget the science, it’s all about the
marketing.”■

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cancer-have-plummeted-in-britain
Britain | The Knowledge

Still want to be a London cabbie?

Surprisingly, many do, and are prepared to study for the gruelling test to
become one
August 14th 2025

Asif tugs at his right cheek as he ponders how to navigate from Holloway
Road Station to the Quality Chop House, two miles away on Farringdon
Road. A dozen fellow students of the Knowledge of London, the gruelling
qualification required to drive one of the capital’s famous black taxis, watch
him squirm under the instructor’s classroom interrogation, with another
dozen listening in via a video call. Eventually he concedes defeat and rejoins
the onlooking semicircle.

London’s cabbies have had a hard few years. Ride-hailing platforms such as
Uber upended the market, with satnav-equipped drivers who no longer
needed to memorise routes. Tighter environmental standards pushed up the
cost of vehicles. Councils blocked favourite cut-throughs. Over half of
London’s roads now have 20mph (32kph) speed limits. Since 2017 the
number of black-cab drivers has fallen from about 25,000 to barely 16,500,
according to Transport for London (TfL).

Before picking up their first passengers, all black-cab drivers must pass the
Knowledge, a 160-year-old test that involves memorising more than 6,000
streets and points of interest within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross. They
also need to navigate between them by the most direct route, as mileage
helps determine fares. Examiners can make things even harder by insisting
on being set down on a specific side of the road or impersonating customers
with heavy regional accents.
Surely satnav, augmented with live traffic insights, has made the Knowledge
an anachronism? Up to a point. Expert navigation is only part of the purpose
of the exam. It also serves to protect access to what is in effect a 371-year-
old guild.

Students are discouraged from using satnav. “Google Maps is full of errors
and often calculates routes which are the quickest,” says Gert Kretov, an
instructor at the Knowledge Point School. “We must learn the shortest
route.” He estimates that passing the Knowledge costs £10,000 ($13,300)
over two to three years, including classes and renting a scooter, the favoured
means of sussing out routes.

Another threat to cabbies now looms in the rear-view mirror: taxis that don’t
require a driver at all. From next spring the government will allow pilot
schemes for autonomous taxis to roam England’s roads without human
oversight. This brings the country into line with China and American states
including California and Texas, where Tesla and Alphabet’s Waymo division
are operating robotaxis.

A fleet of 15 autonomous Ford Mustangs (overseen by safety drivers for

now) is already venturing onto London’s roads from the King’s Cross
headquarters of Wayve, a British tech company that last year raised over
$1bn from Japan’s SoftBank and others. On a recent 15-minute demo ride, it
drove with a mix of calm and authority, like the best taxi drivers. Wearing a
crown of seven cameras, the car was unfazed by pedestrians dawdling near
zebra crossings, impatient cyclists jumping red lights or road works blocking
its path.
For all these challenges, a new generation of drivers is in training: 1,166 are
currently studying the Knowledge, an increase from the low of 759 students
in 2022, according to TfL data. Unlike existing drivers, who tend to be
white, this new cohort is more ethnically mixed. Many are Uber drivers
seeking higher wages and freedom from the ride-hailing apps. Students
complain that the apps can pay as little as £1 a mile; a typical black-cab fare
might be five or six times that. “We’re seeing more and more communities
realising what the earning potential is,” says Steve McNamara, general
secretary of the Licensed Taxi Drivers’ Association.

At the Knowledge Point School on a Tuesday evening in July, Robleh Salah

takes a break from studying the large laminated maps that line the walls to
explain that his main motivation is independence. A former mechanic, he
has been studying the Knowledge for three years and is close to finally
passing. His schedule is 11am to midnight at the school, four days a week.
He drives an Uber on the other three days.
London’s transport authorities seem unsure how to treat taxi drivers. The
mayor has set a target that 80% of journeys should be made on foot, by bike
or with public transport by 2041 (though that figure has never breached 64%
since he announced the goal in 2018). Are taxis to be nurtured as essential
public infrastructure or punished like private cars? “Anything on four wheels
that isn’t a bus falls into the 20%,” says Elly Baker, chair of the London
Assembly’s transport committee. “Taxis, as shared transport (because I think
that’s how they should be categorised), I think they’ve got the crappy end of
the stick.”

The future of London’s cabbies isn’t entirely black. In a recent simplification

of the Knowledge, TfL limited the list of locations to be memorised. Ride-
hailing apps have allowed their fares to rise—and they have also introduced
new clients to the convenience of taxis. “There’s a whole generation of
people, young people, who have never got a bus,” notes Mr McNamara.
“Uber did us a favour.” Nowadays passengers can even book a black-cab
ride through Uber.

Drivers are also sceptical that robotaxis will ever be able to navigate central
London’s roads, or that passengers will want them. “It will take quite a while
for your average Londoner to be comfortable with not having somebody
actually there,” reckons Ms Baker. For now, however, the number of
licensed cabbies keeps ticking lower. ■

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Britain | Bagehot

Aux barricades, boomers!

The rise of the revolutionary retiree
August 14th 2025

One by one, the police plucked supporters of Palestine Action, a banned

terrorist organisation, from the crowd outside the Houses of Parliament on
August 9th. At 75 years old, Sir Jonathon Porritt, an environmentalist, was
fairly typical. About one in five of those arrested was in their 70s. A frail 81-
year-old was gingerly shepherded away by three policewomen (“She’s got a
stick!” shouted one protester). She was not the only octogenarian. Fifteen
80-somethings were carted away by the Metropolitan Police, compared with
only six teenagers. By day’s end 532 people had been arrested, half of whom
were over 60 years old.

An army of pensioners had gathered to protest against a silly law. The

government placed Palestine Action on a terror list in July after its members
vandalised two aeroplanes on a British air base. Most were arrested for
holding a placard reading “I oppose genocide” (which is legal to say) and “I
support Palestine Action” (which contravenes section 13 of the Terrorism
Act 2000). Yet it revealed an overlooked facet of British politics. At street
protests, it is often the boomers who are on the barricades.

Britain is an outlier when it comes to the politics of its elderly. In other

European countries, boomers are a bulwark against radicalism. In France,
for instance, Marine Le Pen struggles among pensioners. In Britain, boomers
are often ballast for radical parties or movements. It was older voters who
dragged Britain out of the European Union. Pensioners provide the bedrock
of Reform uk’s support. It is the same on the radical left, where
octogenarians outnumber teens in standing up against Britain’s, at times,
deranged anti-terror laws.

Politics is always more of an older person’s game than people think. When
Jeremy Corbyn took over the Labour Party, the image was of young lefties
flooding the party. In fact, the average age of new joiners was 51. For all that
Reform likes to boast about its TikTok presence, it is the elderly who flock
to its rallies when the Nigel Farage Show rolls into town. When liberal
England rebelled against Britain’s departure from the EU, it was pensioners
who led marches through Whitehall, wearing blue berets covered in yellow
stars. Naturally, the designer of the “bEUret” was an OAP.

Now the radical fringes of politics are dominated by aged agitators. After all,
the retired have the means to be there. Protest may be a right. Being able to
turn up is still a privilege. Who has the time and money to travel to London,
sit in the sun, be arrested, spend two hours in a police tent and then spend
the next few months worrying whether the police will press charges?

And boomers are able to live with the consequences. For younger people, a
terror charge, however overblown, is not something one wants on a CV. It is
a heavy burden for someone in their 20s, but it is a smaller deal for someone
in their 80s. Those who turned up at the weekend knew they would probably
be arrested. Age, however, brings a certain invincibility. “I’m retired so I’m
not scared,” one pensioner told a camera. “I won’t lose a job over it.”
If the young were radical in the 1960s, it was because they could afford to
be. Jenny Diski, who wrote a memoir about her activism in the period,
summed up the quid pro quo: “The underlying promise was that after we had
dropped out, we would be able to drop back in.” Education, work and
stability would follow. In more precarious eras, such gay abandon is
impossible for many. Only the old can afford to rebel. The spirit of ’68 is
held by those who are now 68.

Boomer impunity can result in more extreme actions. Older folk made up a
surprisingly large share of last summer’s riots, when mobs gathered outside
hotels full of asylum-seekers. Some of those charged were well past 50;
others were pensioners. “Get off me, I’m fucking 70, you pricks,” shouted
one rioter. The officer replied: “Then why are you here? Why are you at a
fucking riot?”

Yet the radicalisation of the old attracts little notice compared with the
panics about the young. “Adolescence”, a Netflix drama about a 13-year-old
boy who stabs a girl to death after falling under the spell of “toxic
masculinity”, triggered weeks of political discourse. Sir Keir Starmer, the
prime minister, demanded it be shown in schools. Few panic about the
potential for a similar dynamic among the elderly, even when memes rip
through boomer WhatsApp chats, like smallpox through an Inca village.
Grannies on Parliament Square have seen the same horrifying images from
Gaza on social media as their grandchildren.

Elderly extremists can be just as deadly as the more sprightly. Actual

terrorism is increasingly an older man’s game. Thomas Mair was 53 when
he shot Jo Cox, a Labour MP, just before the Brexit referendum, after
devouring racist memes online. In 2022 Andrew Leak firebombed a migrant
centre in Dover after a similar spiral. At 66, he had just qualified for his state
pension.

The fiscal problems of an ageing population are well-covered; its strange

political consequences less so. A group of voters are able to live an
insulated, consequence-free existence, with the mortgage repaid, pension
guaranteed and children off the books. Radicalisation can affect all voters,
but Britain’s boomers have the time and the money to act on it.
Rebellion while young can be cut short. Prosaic life admin—bills, children,
work—sometimes makes it impossible. But once such burdens have
disappeared, it can flower again. There is no reason for it not to stay in
bloom. The 60-, 70- and 80-year-olds on Parliament Square are too old to
grow up. And why should they when righteous rebellion is such fun?
Photographers caught the moment one of the eldest activists was arrested.
An 89-year-old woman in a beige bucket hat was carried away by the police,
surrounded by paparazzi. In at least one picture she was beaming. ■

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International
America’s new plan to fight a war with China
The end of the second world war
International | Rumble in the jungle

America’s new plan to fight a war with China

Readying for a rumble in the jungle
August 14th 2025

IT COULD BE a giant archaeological dig. Bulldozers tear at the jungle to

reclaim the history of the second world war and its dark finale: the atomic
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 80 years ago this month. The work on
Tinian, a speck in the Pacific Ocean, has exposed the four runways of North
Field. Glass protects the cement pits where Little Boy and Fat Man, the first
and only atom bombs used in war, were loaded onto American B-29s. For a
time Tinian was the largest air base in the world, but it was soon mostly
abandoned.

With China as its new rival, America is reviving old wartime facilities across
the Pacific. Tinian once allowed its bombers to smash Japanese cities. These
days China wields the long spear: it has built up a vast stockpile of missiles
that can blast American bases in the region. Any war between the
superpowers would be a cataclysm. And both now have nuclear weapons.

As in the cold war, nuclear worries go hand in hand with preparations for
conventional conflict. The air force is expanding Tinian’s small commercial
airport as a backup landing place. On the day your correspondent visited,
two F-22 jets—America’s most capable fighters—took off with a deafening
roar. Crews huddled in tents as C-130 transporters brought gear.

The fighters had deployed from Alaska for the recently concluded
REFORPAC exercise—part of the biggest air-force war game in the Pacific
since the cold war—involving more than 400 aircraft and 50 locations
thousands of miles apart. It demonstrated America’s ability to bring forces
quickly from the American mainland. It was also a test of “Agile Combat
Employment” (ACE), a doctrine of hide-and-seek whereby American
aircraft disperse to small bases to survive attacks by China, rejoin in the air
to punch back and then scatter again—like a murmuration of starlings.
Because of China’s reach, the air force can no longer mass its planes in big
bases close to the action, as it has done in recent decades. It must plan to
survive and fight throughout China’s deep “kill zone”, learning from the
island-hopping campaigns of the Pacific war and more recent conflicts.
Ukraine has shown how, even under relentless attack, its planes can keep
fighting by hiding and moving. America intends to do the same on a grand
scale. “In a peer conflict our airmen will be under constant threat,” explains
General David Allvin, the chief of the air force. “We must be lethal and
agile, aggregating for effect and disaggregating for survival.”

Even so, it faces formidable difficulties, including the vastness of the

Pacific; the density of China’s firepower; the paucity of usable airfields; the
shortage of bomb-proof hangars; the vulnerability of air-refuelling tankers;
the complexity of logistics; and the disruption of data networks.

China would be fighting mostly in its backyard, within the “first island
chain” that runs from Japan to Malaysia—with Taiwan, about 100 miles
away, at its heart (see map). Most American forces would be rushing in from
the far side of the vast ocean, thousands of miles away. Many of China’s
ballistic missiles have a greater range than the usual combat radius of
America’s fighter jets (typically 500-600 nautical miles, or nm).
Calculations for The Economist by Timothy Walton of the Hudson Institute,
an American think-tank, illustrate the challenge. His model suggests China
could rain about 2,000 bombs or missiles a day on targets within 500nm,
including hundreds on Kadena, a big American air-force base in Okinawa. It
could simultaneously drop some 450 munitions a day over the second island
chain, including Guam and its vital complex of bases, 1,600nm away; 60-
odd over important rear bases in Alaska; and perhaps a score a day over
faraway places such as Hawaii, the headquarters of America’s Indo-Pacific
Command (INDOPACOM), 3,600nm back. Missiles can strike quickly and
accurately, though most munitions would in fact be delivered by aircraft.
(These theoretical figures assume that no planes or missiles are shot down,
and Chinese facilities are not attacked.)

There are relatively few good landing spots east of the first island chain
before reaching the continental United States. Mr Walton counts just 21 in
American and allied territories with the runways, aprons and fuel supplies to
take tankers, bombers and larger aircraft. Smaller fighter jets could use up to
125 airfields, but most are farther from China than their usual range, even
with air-to-air refuelling. All this assumes host countries would grant
permission for “ABO”—access, basing and overflight—and risk China’s
wrath.
Aircraft-carriers, which helped win the Pacific war and have symbolised
American power ever since, are increasingly vulnerable to China’s long-
range “carrier-killer” missiles, such as the DF-26B with a range of more than
2,000nm. Unlike carriers, which may sink when struck, airfields can be
repaired, often within hours.

Thus the importance of Tinian. Its four new runways, once refurbished, will
provide valuable alternatives to the two at Andersen air base on Guam, and
two more that have been refurbished nearby. The air force, which says it just
needs “places, not bases” to make ACE work, is concentrating on dispersal
and improved air-defence systems for the likes of Guam. But the more it
scatters, the more places it must defend.

American think-tanks say it is neglecting passive defences such as hardened

aircraft shelters made of concrete. Portable pop-up shelters that can stop
shrapnel would be useful, too, since China would have to fire more missiles
to hit all of them, including empty ones, in a high-stakes shell game.
Generals talk of dispersing planes within airfields and “flushing the force”
by getting planes in the air before a missile can strike.

And yet, even during the ACE exercise, about two dozen fighter jets were
parked close together in the open in Guam—convenient for pilots and
ground crews, but an easy target for missiles. Similar concerns apply to fuel
dumps and, indeed, ground crews. It is also unclear how far the air force is
responding to newer threats, exemplified by Ukraine’s use of lorry-launched
drones to destroy Russian bombers thousands of miles from the front.

In a war, America would fire at Chinese ships crossing the Taiwan Strait and
other targets with long-range bombers, submarines and ground units lurking
on islands. It would require vast amounts of air-to-air refuelling. Yet tankers
and bombers are precious assets and, apart from the B-2, easy to see on
radar. Moreover, America’s tanker fleet is more than 50 years old, on
average. Mr Walton says China is optimising missile warheads to seek big
planes such as tankers and airborne radars. Most may have to be held far
back. But the farther planes must commute to war, the less effective they are.

Hiding and moving complicates China’s targeting, but also America’s

logistical task. Fuel, crews and spare parts must be brought to the right place
at the right time. Supply convoys would be juicy targets. Logisticians are
thinking about how to move them through safer routes, via Australia. 3D-
printing of spares in theatre will help, as will artificial intelligence. The
lesson of the second world war, notes General Kevin Schneider, the head of
Pacific Air Forces, is that “logistics and sustainment are absolutely key to
generating air power.”

Co-ordinating an ever-shifting military kaleidoscope requires robust

command-and-control systems. Combatants will seek to wreck each other’s
data systems, not least by attacking satellites. Even so, top brass argue, data
flows may be degraded but not permanently severed. Units will have
“windows” of connectivity. Above all, they will rely on “mission
command”, the ability to act without explicit orders in line with the
commander’s intent. That initiative, say generals, gives America an
advantage over rigidly controlled Chinese forces.

Is that enough to win? China may not need to defeat America, only hold it at
bay for long enough to take Taiwan. War games suggest that, as China runs
out of long-range munitions, American forces could move closer and defeat
a landing, albeit at great cost. But America is short, too, and China’s greater
industrial capacity may give it the means to outlast America.
David Ochmanek of the RAND Corporation, another think-tank, reckons
China has enough firepower to overwhelm airfields in the first island chain
for as long as needed, and may soon be able to do so in the second chain. He
argues that, close in, the air force must shift to drones that do not need
runways. These would be bigger than the hand-held quadcopters ubiquitous
in Ukraine, or even the loitering munitions that INDOPACOM is thinking of
to create a “hellscape” for China near Taiwan. Air-combat drones with
greater range, sensors and even weapons could be fired from rails, lorries or
rockets, he argues.

The air force is far from giving up on pilots, though this year it will start
testing prototypes of the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), a drone that
for now will use runways and be controlled by crewed aircraft to augment
their firepower. Yet even if drones can be made “runway independent”, they
will still need ground crews, fuel and munitions.

For all the Trump administration’s boasts of a trillion-dollar defence budget,

it has provided only a sugar rush in its “Big Beautiful Bill”. Its core defence-
budget request is flat, ie, a cut after inflation.

After Tinian’s capture in 1944, construction teams started building North

Field. B-29s were using it within six months. The modern restoration is
slower. Eighteen months after starting work, engineers are still clearing
vegetation. When might the first F-22 be able to use it? Enveloped in smoke
and rain, the officer in charge shrugs. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, wants his
armed forces ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. America, though, is still
preparing for war with a peacetime mindset. ■

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war-with-china
International | Archive 1945

The end of the second world war

How The Economist reported on the war, week by week
August 14th 2025

THE POST-1945 order is crumbling. Donald Trump, who holds a warped,

America-First view of history, trashes the transatlantic alliance formed to
keep peace after the second world war. In June he belittled the role of
America’s allies in defeating Nazi Germany. Vladimir Putin, Russia’s
president, exploits the Soviet Union’s wartime past to fuel nationalist
support for his invasion of Ukraine. On September 3rd he will join Xi
Jinping in Beijing for China’s Victory Day parade. Don’t expect a sombre
commemoration. China’s leader wants a sabre-rattling pageant of military
might.

Every week since January, The Economist has republished excerpts from its
archive—a time capsule of how we reported on the final year of a war that
transformed the world order.

“The year 1945 is opening gloomily for the Allies.” Locked in the Battle of
the Bulge with Germany, hopes of a quick end to the war were lost.

The Nazis used eastern Europe as a factory hub. As the Red Army advanced
it would land “a very severe blow to Germany’s war industry”.
“The world’s triumvirate” of America, Britain and the Soviet Union met in
Yalta to weigh the “last stages of the war and the first steps of the peace”.

“Mussolini is dead. So, according to general belief, is Hitler, though the

world has not yet been given the spectacle of his corpse...kicked around the
streets as proof of death.”
Meetings between German soldiers and survivors of Nazi camps were “a
cross-section of the great problems of Germany and Europe”.

“The bombs which wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki stopped the war”, but
started “a new age in human history”. Japan was defeated.
On August 15th, as The Economist went to press, North and South Korea
marked the anniversary of the peninsula’s liberation from Japan, now a
staunch American ally. Earlier this month Japan commemorated America’s
nuclear attacks. The Philippines will mark its liberation on September 3rd.

The geopolitics of modern Asia was forged in 1945. The atomic bomb, now
wielded by both China and North Korea, casts an especially long shadow.
Taiwan, occupied by Japan during the war, is today the world’s most
worrying flashpoint. At the most dangerous time since 1945, it pays to look
back. ■
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Business
How AI could create the first one-person unicorn
Japan’s carmakers are trying to tinker their way out of tariff pain
A 400-year-old Chinese cough syrup is winning over Westerners
Italian bosses want Giorgia Meloni to hurry up with reform
A new wave of clean-energy innovation is building
Should you trust that five-star rating on Airbnb?
Trump wants to command bosses like Xi does. He is failing
Business | The rise of the “solopreneur”

How AI could create the first one-person unicorn

The technology is allowing entrepreneurs to start and grow businesses on
their own
August 14th 2025

Sarah Gwilliam is neither a software engineer nor—by her own admission—

someone who “speaks AI”. But after her father died recently she got the
spark of an idea for creating a generative artificial-intelligence startup that
would help others like her handle their grief and sort out their late loved
ones’ affairs. Call it wedding planning for funerals.

Her firm, Solace, is still more of an early-stage startup than an established

business. But apart from herself, almost no human being is helping her build
it. She has joined an AI-powered incubator, called Audos, which decided
that her idea was promising. Its bots helped to set her up online and on
Instagram. If her idea works out, the incubator will not only provide capital;
its AI agents will support Ms Gwilliam with product development, sales,
marketing and back-office work, all in exchange for a royalty. She does not
need staff. In effect, AI helped her co-found the company. “I can’t tell you
how empowering it was,” she says.

As is its custom, Silicon Valley has already coined a neologism that

describes single founders like Ms Gwilliam: they are “solopreneurs”. In tech
circles, there are bets on which of them is likely to create the first single-
person unicorn—an unlisted firm worth more than $1bn. Some hope that
generative AI will make starting a business so cheap and hassle-free that
anyone will be able to become an entrepreneur much as anyone can become
a YouTuber—a breath of fresh air in America’s concentrated business
landscape. Whether people like Ms Gwilliam will be able to escape the
suffocating grip of the tech giants, however, is another matter.

Technological revolutions have a habit of shaking up the way firms do

business. The increased importance of machinery combined with the
expansion of transport networks in the late 19th century led to the rise of
giant corporations. Ronald Coase, a British economist, argued in his 1937
paper “The Nature of the Firm” that their existence was a testament to the
efficiency of consolidating and managing work within the confines of a
business, rather than outsourcing activities to the market. That, however,
began to change thanks to digital communication. Not only could companies
more easily outsource manufacturing and back-office jobs to low-cost
countries. They could also rely on internet platforms like Google for
marketing and Amazon Web Services for computing.

The rise of AI could well accelerate the trend, as semi-autonomous agents

provided by Silicon Valley enable firms to perform the same amount of work
with fewer employees. Henrik Werdelin, who co-founded Audos, says that
the rise of cloud computing helped him start several new businesses over the
past 20 years or so with little more than the swipe of a credit card to get
going. He describes AI as the next wave in that “democratisation”. “You
don’t need to code, you don’t need to be able to use Photoshop, because you
can get AI to help with that.” This, he hopes, will give rise to a flood of
startups built by people like Ms Gwilliam with no background in technology
but who have identified real problems to solve.
Another evangelist is Karim Lakhani of Harvard Business School. It now
offers a leadership course for executives in which they use generative AI to
build a snack-food company in 90 minutes, using the technology to perform
customer research, generate recipes, find suppliers and design packaging. In
a recent paper, Mr Lakhani and his co-authors presented a field trial in
which 776 professionals at Procter & Gamble, a consumer-goods company,
were asked to address a real business need either individually or in two-
person teams, with and without using generative-AI tools. It found that AI
significantly boosted performance, helping individuals with AI match the
performance of teams without it. AI proved to be more of a “teammate” than
a tool.

With the era of free money over, entrepreneurs are eager to find ways to
keep costs down. Peter Walker of Carta, which helps startups manage equity
ownership, says that founders used to boast about how many employees they
had. “Now it’s a badge of honour to say, ‘look how few people work for
me’.” According to Carta’s data, the typical period it takes founders to hire
their first employee after their startup incorporates has risen from less than
six months in 2022 to more than nine months in 2024 (see chart). Base44, an
AI coding startup, was recently sold to Wix, a web-development platform,
for $80m. It had just eight employees.
It is early days, of course. For one thing, AI agents are far from foolproof. In
June Anthropic, an AI lab, revealed the results of an experiment in which its
Claude Sonnet model operated a vending machine at the firm’s headquarters.
The bot’s goal was to avoid bankruptcy. It was good at identifying suppliers
and adapting to user requests (including hunting for a tungsten cube
mischievously requested by one employee). But it ignored lucrative
opportunities, hallucinated, offered too many discounts and ultimately failed
to make money.

Other forces may also get in the way of an AI-infused surge in

entrepreneurship. Despite the growth of the internet, social media, software-
as-a-service and cloud computing over recent decades, business formation in
America was anaemic until the pandemic—the result in part of an ageing
population. That demographic pressure will only intensify.

For all the promise of generative AI, it poses problems for entrepreneurs,
too. Annabelle Gawer of the University of Surrey notes that although the
technology lowers barriers to entry for new businesses, it also makes it
easier to quickly copy ideas. Unless a founder has unique expertise in their
domain, that may make it harder to sustain a competitive advantage.

Moreover, the provision of AI tools is dominated by tech giants and the labs
they invest in, such as OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, and Anthropic, backed
by Amazon and Google. Ms Gawer draws an analogy with the rise of cloud
computing in the 2010s, which those three tech giants dominate. Although
that infrastructure has made life easier for startups, it has also left them
dependent on the cloud triumvirate, which has been able to capture a good
share of the value these firms have generated. Last year the trio’s net profits
were equivalent to 7% of America’s total, up from 2% a decade before.

Another possibility is that the tech giants could pinch smaller companies’
best ideas. For now, Ms Gwilliam of Solace is sanguine. What she calls
“first-mover disadvantage” could be “a bummer”, but it could also validate
her idea. “Maybe they’ll come to me and say, ‘We want Solace.’ And then
I’ll be, like, ‘Great, sold!’” Just like a typical entrepreneur, then. ■

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person-unicorn
Business | The Toyota Way

Japan’s carmakers are trying to tinker their way

out of tariff pain
Clever optimisation will only get them so far
August 14th 2025

Ever since Toyota entered America in the 1950s, the country has been a vital
market for it. The carmaker, which sells more vehicles worldwide than any
other, hawks around a quarter of its cars there. That makes President Donald
Trump’s 15% tariff on Japanese vehicles a big problem, considering that
only around half of the cars Toyota sells in America are made in the country
(see chart). In an earnings call on August 7th, Japan’s most valuable
company said that American duties cost it ¥450bn ($3bn) in the three
months to June. For its full fiscal year it expects the impact to be close to
$10bn, the biggest hit reported so far by any carmaker.
Toyota could, of course, pass tariffs on to consumers through higher prices.
But this brings with it the risk of losing market share to competitors that
choose not to do so. Instead, the company is relying on one of Japan Inc’s
great strengths: obsessive tinkering. In the second quarter it revealed a
¥305bn boost to operating profit from various efforts to optimise its
business, offsetting around two-thirds of the tariff hit. That included a mix of
cost-cutting, marketing to boost sales, particularly of more profitable
vehicles, and measures to earn more from add-on services, such as car parts
and vehicle financing.

Toyota is not the only Japanese carmaker pursuing such efforts. Mazda,
which also generates a sizeable share of its sales from America, is pruning
costs and shifting what cars it sells where to lift profits. It reckons it can
offset nearly three-quarters of the tariff hit. Subaru, which sells more than
70% of its cars in America, is also busily pursuing measures to mitigate the
duties. Nissan, whose troubles predate Mr Trump’s tariffs, is in the middle of
a sweeping overhaul of its business.

Eventually, however, Japan’s carmakers may run out of ideas to boost

profits. Cox Automotive, a consultancy, reckons carmakers both foreign and
domestic have already incurred more than $25bn in tariff obligations on
vehicles imported into America so far this year, equivalent to a little over
$5,000 per vehicle. Even for cars made in the country, duties on imported
parts and materials such as steel are adding to costs. In time the fear of
losing market share will run up against the need to make selling cars in the
world’s second-largest market profitable.

Shifting more manufacturing to America, as Mr Trump desires, would be

another solution. For those carmakers with limited production in America,
assembling more vehicles there may make sense. Subaru suggested earlier
this year that it might expand production at its factory in Indiana. Japanese
carmakers have long tended to suffer from a home-production bias. Toyota,
for example, sold around a seventh of its cars in Japan last year, but made
around a third of them there, which is hardly a cheap place to manufacture.
American tariffs may encourage a rethink.

Yet that would require much more clarity on future tariffs than has so far
been given. Building factories can take years. Once completed, they should
last for decades. Mr Trump’s duties, by contrast, seem to change every few
weeks. That makes it difficult for Japan’s carmakers to commit to any lasting
changes to their production footprint. The upshot is likely to be ever more
tinkering—and, in time, pricier cars for Americans. ■

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tinker-their-way-out-of-tariff-pain
Business | Herbal essences

A 400-year-old Chinese cough syrup is winning

over Westerners
Young shoppers in particular are going gaga for Nin Jiom Pei Pa Koa
August 14th 2025

The recipe for Nin Jiom Pei Pa Koa has not changed since it was first
concocted in the 1600s. Yet the sweet Chinese cough syrup, which has the
colour and consistency of mud, is enjoying a renewed surge in popularity.
Sales rose by almost a third between 2019 and 2024, reaching 635m yuan
($88m) last year. Those coughing up for the syrup are not just in China, but
increasingly in the West, too.

Pei Pa Koa, as it is known, can now be found in more than 20 countries.

Bottles of the medicine, which includes ingredients such as loquat leaf and
pomelo peel, go for around $5 in pharmacies in Hong Kong, where it is
mostly manufactured. But they fetch around three times that price when sold
through third parties on Amazon, an e-emporium, in America.

The enthusiasm has been particularly infectious among young people.

Worldwide Google searches for Pei Pa Koa rose by a quarter last year;
tutorials on how to administer it have racked up millions of views on
TikTok, a short-video app. Western celebrities have espoused Pei Pei Koa’s
benefits: Zayn Malik, a singer for One Direction, a now-disbanded pop
group, has praised the cough syrup’s ability to soothe scratchy vocal cords,
as have Cynthia Erivo and Jonathan Bailey, two actors in last year’s film
adaptation of the musical “Wicked”.

Traditional Chinese medicines have been steadily gaining interest in the

West, spurred on in part by the social-media craze for “biohacking”, which
focuses on improving health through experimental—and often spurious—
fads. Chugging herbal cough syrups is but one example (Pei Pei Koa is
unlikely to receive the blessing of America’s Food and Drug Administration
any time soon). Ancient Chinese healing techniques such as gua sha
(rubbing coloured rocks on your face) are also all the rage among young
Westerners, with social-media tutorials likewise accruing vast numbers of
views.

As for Pei Pa Koa, stubborn coughs are not its only enemy. In 2020 America
revoked Hong Kong’s special customs status, meaning products imported
from the territory are now subject to the same duties as those from the
mainland. Donald Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods—including a 30% levy
that was extended for another 90 days on August 12th—will translate into
higher shelf prices for American fans of Pei Pei Koa. Herbal remedies are
particularly vulnerable to tariffs: many of the syrup’s ingredients come from
China and cannot be sourced elsewhere. There will be little relief for as long
as the trade war lasts. ■

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is-winning-over-westerners
Business | Step on the gas

Italian bosses want Giorgia Meloni to hurry up

with reform
Will she squander her chance?
August 14th 2025

The forest of cranes along the skyline of Milan attests to the construction
boom that is under way in the financial capital of Italy. Rich foreigners have
lately been flocking to the city, drawn not only by the promise of la dolce
vita, but by the country’s annual flat tax of €200,000 ($230,000) on
worldwide income. Yet Italy as a whole continues to stagnate. The economy
has barely grown over the past decade. In June the national statistics bureau
downgraded its forecast for growth this year from a measly 0.8% to an even
more paltry 0.6%.

Italian business leaders want Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister, to pick up
the pace of reform. She has now been in power for almost three years, a rare
feat in a country with such unstable politics. She has succeeded in keeping
her three-party coalition government together while deftly handling Italy’s
foreign relations. “Now she has a once-in-a-lifetime chance to implement
internal reforms,” says Andrea Bonomi, chairman of Investindustrial, a
private-equity firm.

Ms Meloni’s record in the eyes of Italy SpA has so far been mixed. She was
roundly criticised for scuppering a proposed merger between UniCredit and
Banco BPM, two banks, which fell apart last month as a result of opposition
from the government. But she has been making an effort to cut the red tape
that is strangling Italian companies, including by shortening the delay they
encounter when resolving disputes and recovering debts. Ms Meloni has also
launched a commission to come up with reforms to the tax code, and another
to look into changes to the financial rulebook known as the Testo Unico
della Finanza (tuf).

Rather than a simple reduction in the headline corporate-tax rate, some

bosses have been arguing for incentives to spur growth. Ms Meloni’s
government has cut the tax credits for innovation, from 10% to 5%, and
intangible investment, from 15% to nothing. “The government made a grave
error,” says Corrado Passera, a former economy minister who runs Illimity, a
bank specialised in lending to smaller Italian firms. Others want changes to
payroll taxes. Angelica Donati, boss of Donati Immobiliare, a construction
business, says that employers’ social-security contributions are a big
problem for her industry. These amount to around 40% of the employee’s
gross salary, compared with only around 30% in Spain, for instance.

Reforming the TUF, including simplifying public listings, could also give a
much needed boost to Italy’s capital markets. Most local companies rely on
banks for finance, rather than the stockmarket. The total market value of
investible Italian shares is around €660bn, roughly a fifth as much as in
Britain. A dearth of opportunities, in turn, leads investors to look elsewhere.
Shallow capital markets is one of the reasons why Italy has fewer big
businesses than other large European countries. Only five of the world’s 500
biggest companies by revenue hail from the country, according to Fortune, a
magazine, compared with nine from Spain, a smaller economy, and 30 from
Germany. Among Europe’s 20 most valuable companies, none is listed in
Italy.
The country also still lags behind when it comes to the use of private credit,
which offers more flexible terms than conventional bank lending. Only
around a quarter of debt transactions in Italy are financed this way,
compared with an average of 60% across the European Union and as much
as 90% in the Netherlands. There are, however, signs this is changing. This
year, for example, Carlyle, an American private-equity firm, and Arcmont,
an asset manager based in London, lent €470m to Bianalisi, a medical-
diagnostics business.

Plenty of bosses praise Ms Meloni. “She is a pragmatic leader who

understands the needs of business, in particular small business,” says Ms
Donati. But others still worry that she will be swayed by Fratelli d’Italia, her
party, which is sceptical of free markets. The prime minister has between
now and the next election in 2027 to prove her doubters wrong. ■

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to-hurry-up-with-reform
Business | Different shades of green

A new wave of clean-energy innovation is building

Donald Trump’s attacks on wind and solar will not stop it
August 14th 2025

MAKE YOUR way around the busy warehouses of Torrance, near the twin
ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, and you will find an unexpected
sight. Dozens of electrified 18-wheelers belonging to Maersk, a Danish
logistics firm, are hooked up to fast chargers. The lorries are tapping into
electricity from linear generators, which are more efficient, and thus greener,
than traditional rotating ones. These generators are the product of
Mainspring, a Californian startup that has raised over $250m this year.

Its success may be surprising amid what seem like dark times for climate
tech. Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) act, signed last
month, stripped away subsidies for solar and wind power in America. Next
week the Treasury Department is due to unveil tax guidance that will clarify
just how damaging the law will be for these industries. Orsted, a Danish
offshore-wind developer, saw its shares plunge on August 11th when it said
that it would raise $9bn of equity to shore up its finances as Mr Trump’s
aversion to the technology weighs on project valuations.

Look past wind and solar, however, and the picture is brightening for other
forms of green-energy innovation. Global equity funding for climate-tech
firms plunged in 2023 amid rising interest rates. But investment has recently
been climbing back up, rising by nearly 60%, year on year, in the first half
of 2025, according to BloombergNEF, a data provider (see chart). There are
good reasons to believe that the next few years will see the emergence of a
new wave of innovative clean technologies.

The first cause for optimism is, strangely enough, the OBBB itself, which
solidifies American support for certain novel energy technologies preferred
by Republicans, even as it withdraws it for solar and wind. The law extends
tax credits for, among other things, linear generators, geothermal energy,
fuel cells, which can produce electricity using various possible fuels, and
new types of nuclear power. Tim Latimer, the boss of Fervo, a startup based
in Texas which uses fracking techniques to harness geothermal energy, notes
that the law provides the long-term, bipartisan certainty his firm needs.
At a time when politicians have become increasingly concerned about
energy security, such technologies have the added benefit of reducing
dependence on imports, whether of oil, minerals or solar panels. That
impulse is also strong in Europe, which wants to shed its reliance on Russian
gas while continuing to decarbonise.

A final force behind the new wave of green-energy innovation is America’s

tech giants, which are struggling to find sufficient power for their data
centres. Rich Powell, head of the Clean Energy Buyers Association, which
represents large power users with a green mindset, says that its members are
“now investing in the next wave of climate tech”, having played a pivotal
role in scaling solar and wind over the past decade. New forms of nuclear
power are particularly popular among the tech firms; Amazon and Google
have both signed deals with startups developing small-modular reactors.

Stationary fuel cells like those made by Bloom Energy, a Californian

company that has seen its share price rise by over 80% this year, are another
option. Last month it announced a deal to supply its technology to Oracle, a
software company that is investing heavily in building cloud infrastructure.
At a vast data centre in San Jose, banks of the fuel cells silently provide
power that is not just cleaner but also more flexible and reliable than that of
traditional generators. Before long such sights may well be commonplace. ■

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innovation-is-building
Business | Bartleby

Should you trust that five-star rating on Airbnb?

How to make sense of online customer reviews
August 14th 2025

It’s summer in the northern hemisphere. And as holidaymakers travel to

unfamiliar places, that means demand for online customer reviews. Want to
find a restaurant that won’t give everyone food poisoning, or the perfect
accommodation for a city break, or a mosquito repellent that actually works?
Whether you are looking on Tripadvisor, Airbnb or Amazon, you will almost
certainly be guided by reviews from other people. Should you be?

The short answer is yes: better to have some information than none. But the
flaws of online reviews are evident. For products with some objective
measures of quality, there is a big gap between the views of punters and
experts. A study in 2016 by Bart de Langhe of Vlerick Business School, in
Belgium, and his co-authors found that user ratings for 1,272 items listed on
Amazon.com bore little relation to either the verdict of Consumer Reports,
an American product-testing organisation, or to their resale value.

That might be because consumers place greater value on more subjective

things like a product’s brand. But if ratings are based on subjective criteria,
then another problem arises: what if your tastes differ from other people’s?
The best book ever, according to members of GoodReads, an online
community of bibliophiles, is “The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins.
You may agree, but plenty of people do not.

Another problem is that the people who bother to leave reviews and ratings
may not be representative of consumers as a whole. In a study published in
2020, Verena Schoenmueller of Esade, a business school in Spain, and her
co-authors examined the distribution of ratings left in around 280m reviews
of more than 2m products and services on 25 different platforms. They
broadly confirm a familiar pattern: a polar distribution of ratings, with more
of them at the extremes of the scale than in the middle, and a skew towards
more positive ratings.

There are lots of theories as to why online reviews follow this pattern.
People who have chosen to buy something are already more likely to be
satisfied with it. Extreme experiences, good and bad, are more likely to
prompt reviews. Some write-ups are not real: estimates of the prevalence of
fake reviews vary but they are certainly a problem, and one which
generative AI may make worse.

The type of platform matters, too. Sharing-economy markets have a different

feel. You could leave a four-star review for your Airbnb stay, but now that
you have established a relationship with the hosts, and since they are also
rating you, it’s much easier to just award five. A paper by Georgios Zervas
of Boston University and his co-authors, last updated in 2020, found that
average ratings for Airbnb properties are consistently higher than those for
hotels on Tripadvisor.

In theory, businesses have an interest in soliciting as representative a sample

of reviews as possible. Honest customer feedback is the best way to spot and
fix problems, after all. In practice, the importance of good ratings,
particularly for firms that are struggling for visibility, is an incentive for
jiggery-pokery. A study from 2013 by Dina Mayzlin of the University of
Southern California and her co-authors suggested, for example, that small,
independently owned hotels generated more positive fake reviews on
Tripadvisor than branded hotel chains.

If the incentives of businesses and consumers do not always align, then

platforms have an interest in ensuring that reviews are as informative as
possible. Weighting scores by the number of reviews that a customer writes
could help mitigate the problem of polarity; Ms Schoenmueller’s research
suggests that the more reviews a person writes, the less extreme their ratings.

But consumers can also help themselves. Mr de Langhe’s research suggests

that people put too much weight on the overall average rating. The absolute
number of reviews is a better indicator of actual popularity. And it is the
detail in a review that tells you whether the person writing it prefers
dystopian young-adult fiction to other genres, or whether a diner values buzz
or the ability to hear themselves think. Reviews, then, are even more useful
if you read them. ■

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Business | Schumpeter

Trump wants to command bosses like Xi does. He

is failing
His dealings with business borrow from China’s playbook
August 14th 2025

Ignore for a moment Donald Trump’s shakedown of Nvidia, in which he has

allowed the world’s most valuable firm to resume limited exports of its
artificial-intelligence (AI) chips to China in return for giving a 15% cut of
the proceeds to Uncle Sam. Think instead of the argument about whether it
is wise to let China have access to one of America’s most coveted
technologies.

One side of the debate wants to flood China’s market. By permitting Nvidia
to resume exports of its dumbed-down H20s, the argument is that it will
reduce the incentive for China’s own chipmakers, such as Huawei, to
develop substitutes. That will keep Chinese developers of generative AI
hooked on American hardware, and make China less likely to invade
Taiwan, where the bulk of the world’s cutting-edge chips are made. The
other side takes a tougher approach. Its advocates, including this newspaper,
contend that choking off access to the H20s, which are hot stuff in China
even if sub-par by American standards, would slow the development of
Chinese technology just enough for the US to secure an insurmountable lead
in the AI race.

Mr Trump alluded to neither of these arguments when he confirmed on

August 11th that Nvidia would resume selling H20s to China (AMD, a rival,
will be able to sell some of its AI chips there, too). Instead he boasted of the
haggling that took place between himself and Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s boss,
to determine how big a cut America should get in return for the favour (and
floated a similar approach for Nvidia’s “super-duper-advanced” Blackwell
chips). Contrast that with the shrewder way China has used one of its most
sought-after resources—rare earths—as a bargaining chip. When it comes to
meddling with markets, America’s nickel-and-dimer-in-chief has much to
learn from Xi Jinping.

A lot about the way Mr Trump has handled chip exports to China pales in
comparison with how America’s rival has used rare earths for leverage. The
American president’s strategy is capricious and confusing. In the space of
three months, H20 sales have been banned and unbanned. His export levy
probably violates Article 1 of the constitution, so it may face a legal
challenge. By contrast, China’s approach is becoming more sophisticated. In
recent months it has established a system of export controls that tries to track
the end customer of commodities and spans hundreds of products, from
sensors to manufacturing equipment.

So far Mr Trump’s approach appears neither to help America nor to hurt

China. He has surrendered an important part of America’s national-security
strategy for a pittance. Assuming H20 sales generate $20bn of revenues for
Nvidia, the 15% surcharge would net $3bn—less than the cost of a new
nuclear-powered submarine. Mr Trump has also given away one of
America’s biggest sources of leverage before a proper deal is reached with
China. Meanwhile, Mr Xi still has the rare-earths cudgel in hand, even if in
the long run its use would spur efforts around the world to reduce
dependence on Chinese supplies.
Mr Trump’s H20 gambit is muddle-headed. If his intent is to undercut
Huawei and make China dependent on American chips, it would make more
sense to dump cheap Nvidia products rather than raising their price through
an export tax. That is the approach China has taken with great effect in its
exports of solar panels, electric vehicles and drones (as well as, on occasion,
rare earths). It knows the implications. Perhaps that is why it is pressing
Chinese firms to shun the H20s.

Mr Trump’s ham-fisted approach to chips is not the only way in which he is

proving to be a poor student of Mr Xi. Consider the pair’s efforts to assert
themselves over their countries’ chief executives. When Jack Ma, co-
founder of Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce giant, became too big for his
boots in 2020, Mr Xi’s government did not just reprimand him. He was
purged from public life for five years. Such was Mr Xi’s paranoia about the
balance of power shifting from China’s Communist Party to its internet
billionaires. Mr Trump is similarly determined to keep America’s bosses
under his thumb. In the past week he has called directly or indirectly for the
resignations of Lip-Bu Tan, the new boss of Intel, a chipmaker, and David
Solomon, chief executive of Goldman Sachs, an investment bank. But he is
more easily won over than Mr Xi. After Intel’s boss visited the White House
on August 11th, Mr Trump hailed his career as an “amazing story”.

Mr Xi has likewise been more effective at whipping up patriotic fervour

among companies in order to get them to do his bidding. China installs party
cells to ensure they adhere to the government’s objectives. Mr Trump has
used the threat of tariffs to encourage companies like Apple to reshore
manufacturing to America. Yet America’s president receives mostly lip
service. When Apple’s boss, Tim Cook, unveiled a $600bn, four-year
investment pledge into America this month, it was more of an update than a
change of plan. Not for nothing did he embellish it with a 24-carat gold gift
to Mr Trump.

It is perhaps unsurprising that Mr Trump, who lacks Mr Xi’s authoritarian

power, has been less effective at making his country’s businesses subservient
to his political goals. It is also a relief. China’s approach of state capitalism
may seem attractive to politicians in countries held back by democratic
processes that make it difficult to effect change. But the model has its flaws.
Growth in China has slowed and venture-backed entrepreneurial activity has
waned in recent years. Businesses are mired in a brutal price war.

Thankfully, Mr Trump only dabbles in state capitalism. Even so, his

approach is damaging. These days businesses in China can at least rely on a
degree of coherence and consistency in policymaking. America Inc will not
thrive amid chaos. ■

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xi-does-he-is-failing
Finance & economics
Growth-loving authoritarians are failing on their own terms
Where will win from Trump’s tariffs?
Ivy League universities are on a debt binge
To sell Fannie and Freddie, Trump must answer a $7trn question
America’s housing market is shuddering
Palantir might be the most overvalued firm of all time
What 630,000 paintings say about the world economy
Finance & economics | Putting the boot in

Growth-loving authoritarians are failing on their

own terms
In Asia, East Africa and the Gulf leaders now face an unpleasant choice
August 14th 2025

Muhammad bin Salman is one of the world’s most secure autocrats. He has
no need to pay off rivals or buy elections. Yet by 2030 his government will
have spent almost $3trn on Vision 2030, a plan to transform Saudi Arabia’s
economy. Officials are backing man-made islands, luxury hotels and
electric-vehicle factories. “They will take anything that has the smallest
chance of creating economic growth, even if it is in decades,” says a
megaproject executive, “even fantasies and failures.”

MBS is one of several autocrats fixated on economic growth. Gulf

monarchs, East African leaders, strongmen in (just about) democratic
countries—all are inspired by China and Singapore, which managed to
combine authoritarian rule with economic success. Many are willing to
adopt orthodox policy. They see growth as a source of legitimacy, seeking to
enrich their populations, rather than just elites. As such, they employ skilled
technocrats to set policy, try to lure investors with promises of stability and
engage in lavish industrial policy. And yet, despite all this, they are
increasingly struggling to deliver growth.

China and Singapore are an inspiration for a reason—they stand out.

Autocrats have tended to pursue growth haphazardly at best. Kevin Grier of
Texas Tech University and Michael Munger of Duke University have found
that, from 1950 to 2006, those who managed a decade or more in power
produced growth of 1% a year, a measly amount. The worst treated policy as
a means of personal enrichment. More often the likes of Suharto in
Indonesia and Myanmar’s junta ran the economy in such a manner as to
placate elites, apportioning profits to allies while repressing citizens.

The new breed of rulers was first identified in 2015 by Hilary Matfess of the
Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank. She termed them
“developmental authoritarians”. Paul Kagame has courted investors by
opening Rwanda’s capital account, promising subsidies and sending
roadshows across the world. In Ethiopia Abiy Ahmed, who came to power
after Ms Matfess’s paper, has scrapped capital controls and floated the birr.
In the Gulf ruling families are trying to reduce their dependence on oil.
Vietnam may already be South-East Asia’s fastest-growing economy, but To
Lam, its new ruler, wants to up the pace.

After all, under Park Chung-hee’s authoritarian rule, which ran from 1963 to
1979, the average South Korean’s income went from that of a sub-Saharan
African to that of an eastern European. And whereas South Korea became a
democracy, Deng Xiaoping in China showed that there was nothing
inevitable about such a transition. Instead, he oversaw strong economic
growth and cemented his party’s rule while doing so. Today everyone from
Mr Kagame to Indermit Gill, the World Bank’s chief economist, professes
admiration for China’s and Singapore’s achievements.

The change of approach reflected demographic trends. In the 2000s

economists talked of “authoritarian bargains”, in which despots compensated
for the general unpleasantness of life without political rights with handouts.
Today populations are too large and too young for such deals. The Gulf is
racing against the depletion of oil funds; Ethiopia’s population is forecast to
grow by 90m from 2020 to 2050.

Melding pro-growth policy to an authoritarian political economy means

ceding control. The Rwandan government has provided venture capital for
everything from milk production to peat mining. It then sells stakes in
successful ventures to private investors (part of a telecommunications firm
recently went to T-Mobile, an American giant, for instance). One of Mr
Lam’s first policies in Vietnam was to exempt small businesses from
corporate tax. Two years ago, for those putting more than $50m into the
country, Bahrain got rid of almost all the paperwork foreign investors
usually require. MBS’s latest reforms, introduced in February, seek to bring
employment practices into line with America.

Well-run, relatively efficient state-owned conglomerates also attract foreign

investors. They crave stability and a young, popular autocrat is less likely to
rip up commitments than a cast of leaders in a democracy. Why, ask state-
sponsored salespeople who tour investment conferences, take the risk? Abiy
is 48 and MBS is 39; they make plans in decades. Alongside Saudi Arabia’s
Vision 2030 (published in 2016), there is Bahrain’s Vision 2030 (published
in 2008) and Ethiopia’s Growth and Transformation Plan (lasting until
2030).

Despite the alluring pitch, in recent years flaws have emerged. Foreign
businesspeople complain of micromanagement. State-owned firms crowd
out private ventures: so ambitious are the government’s plans, Saudi Arabia
suffers from a shortage of construction materials; the IMF has warned
Ethiopia its banks are too busy lending to the state to support local
businesses. In some places, when goals are not met, officials may fiddle the
figures to avoid reprisals. Indeed, an IMF official suggests that the true
Rwandan GDP growth rate is a couple of percentage points below the
official one. Ethiopia appears to be overstating its wheat production.

Although many of the plans are long-term, they have been in place for long
enough to start to make judgments. We have picked four measures: foreign
investment and economic growth reflect core ambitions; GDP per person
and health spending, the extent to which benefits are trickling down. Most
regimes are failing to meet their own lofty goals. In 2000 Mr Kagame said
he wanted Rwanda to be a middle-income country by 2020—a target he is
still to meet. Non-oil portions of Gulf economies are growing more slowly
than the upper-middle-income average. Since 2015 the average income of
someone under a growth-fixated autocrat has risen by 14%, against 23% in
comparable countries.

This is not to say that growth is meagre everywhere. Ethiopia’s economy

grew by over 7% last year, four percentage points above the African
average. Rwanda managed a similar pace, according to official figures.
Saudi Arabia was thought to be among the most sluggish. But on August 4th
the IMF revised its calculations, looking at more industries. Its non-oil
growth estimate for 2023 rose from 3.8% to 5.8%.

In many cases, though, growth relies on state spending. The Public

Investment Fund, Saudi Arabia’s wealth fund, is responsible for a tenth of
non-oil GDP. Last year over half Rwanda’s investment came from state-
owned firms. Foreign private-sector cash would indicate a true capitalist
boom. Last year Saudi Arabia received less than the average country in the
region as a share of GDP; Bahrain, less than Nicaragua. Trade balances have
hardly improved. Saudi Arabia imports three times more non-oil goods and
services than it exports.

All told, growth has not been sufficient to satisfy ballooning populations,
nor to boost tax revenues. In 2023 Saudi Arabia collected less tax, as a share
of GDP, than an average low-income country. Fiscal pressure is building and
iMf economists reckon the country’s non-oil growth will stay below 3.5%
for the next two years. Rwanda’s debts will force Mr Kagame to cut back.
Although technocratic policy has delivered better outcomes, and some
measure of popularity, leaders may soon face a choice: properly liberalise,
turn to even nastier methods of securing acquiescence or try to buy
popularity with handouts in tighter times. How deep does their commitment
to economic change run? ■

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authoritarians-are-failing-on-their-own-terms
Finance & economics | Asian trade

Where will win from Trump’s tariffs?

New rates mean new “China plus one” locations
August 14th 2025

One question looms for a manufacturer working out where to build a

factory: how big is a potential location’s tariff gap with China? President
Donald Trump’s latest levies, which took effect on August 7th, have shaken
things up. Despite his fighting words, China appears to have a better deal
than before, at least compared with other countries: the gap between tariffs
applied to it and the rest of the world has shrunk. Mr Trump also promises a
clampdown on “transshipment”, which would curb firms’ ability to tariff-
hop.

As a consequence, some now suggest that he has delivered a mighty blow to

“China plus one”—a strategy which led firms to build production hubs
outside China, particularly in India and South-East Asia. By creating
economically meaningful tariff differentials between China and its
neighbours, Mr Trump’s first trade war in 2018 supercharged the trend.
From shoemaking in Vietnam to car assembly in Thailand, foreign
investment poured into alternatives to China. Now with the gap between
China and the rest of the world shrinking, will the trend go into reverse?

Perhaps not. For the China-plus-one strategy is not just a way to dodge
tariffs. It is also a way to avoid rising Chinese labour costs, political
crackdowns and American export controls. On top of this, headline tariff
rates are misleading. The fentanyl-related tariffs America imposes on China
cover many more products than the “reciprocal” duties it imposes on most
countries. According to data from Fitch, a rating agency, when these are
taken into account, the gap between China’s tariff rate and the rest of Asia’s
has in fact swollen.

Thus “China plus one” will live on, but in a new form. Previous winners
have seen big rises in their effective tariff rates, too, even if not by nearly as
much as the region’s superpower. One new winner is Malaysia; the effective
rate applied to it has risen from under 1% last year to a (comparatively)
modest 12% today. As a result, the China-Malaysia effective-tariff
differential has shot up, from ten to 30 percentage points. Meanwhile, the
likes of Cambodia and Indonesia have made up less ground.
Which country is most exposed to a transshipment crackdown? America has
yet to specify what this will mean in practice, but Chinese-made goods sent
via third countries to its shores appear to be in Mr Trump’s sights. We have
previously identified such locations, ranking them by the extent of suspected
transshipment, using American and Chinese customs data to examine
products where there have been simultaneous increases in imports from
China and exports to America. By this measure, we found that most re-
routing happened in India, Thailand and Vietnam. For the time being,
Cambodia, Indonesia and (once again) Malaysia seem most likely to avoid
American retribution.

In the event of a crackdown, countries will seek to sell to big markets other
than America. Cambodia and Vietnam, which each send a third of exports to
America, may struggle. India, Indonesia and Malaysia rely less on Uncle
Sam, who attracts less than a fifth of their exports. Some 40% of Indonesia’s
sales already go to Australia, China, Europe and Japan; just 10% head for
America. In preparation for what may be to come, Indonesia’s prawn
farmers, whose main market is America, have recently stepped up marketing
efforts in China.

Across the three measures, Malaysia is best positioned if levies stay put. It
has favourable tariff differentials, limited transshipment and less reliance on
American demand. Firms have noticed: “It puts Malaysia in a good light for
investments,” cheered Datuk Seri Wong Siew Hai of the country’s
semiconductors association. Some countries outside Asia also look well-
placed. Hungary, which has so far acted as China’s gateway to Europe, faces
effective American tariffs 30 percentage points lower than China does.

There is a tension, though. If Malaysia’s tariff gap with China and lower risk
of a transshipment crackdown leads more firms to set up shop there to sell to
America, its dependence on American demand will rise, making it more
vulnerable. Something similar happened last time round. In 2024 Malaysia
sent 13% of its exports to America, up from 9% before Mr Trump’s first
trade war. And President Joe Biden targeted the country’s solar-panel
industry for facilitating Chinese tariff-dodging. In the new China-plus-one
regime, it will be hard for even winners to feel secure. ■
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trumps-tariffs
Finance & economics | College credit

Ivy League universities are on a debt binge

The borrowers, including Harvard, Princeton and Yale, benefit from a
“prestige premium”
August 14th 2025

For stewards of university endowments, the past year has been difficult. All
eight Ivy League colleges lagged behind the S&P 500 index by at least ten
percentage points in their most recently reported fiscal year. Those ensnared
in President Donald Trump’s culture wars, including Columbia and Harvard,
are writing cheques for hundreds of millions of dollars to settle disputes and
regain public funding. And the endowment model itself is under strain.
Devotion to alternative assets is being questioned amid high fees, revised
valuations and low liquidity. Some colleges, including Yale, have sought to
offload private-equity stakes in order to raise cash.
Treasurers can take comfort from the size of their funds—Harvard’s comes
to $53bn, for instance—and the fact that, over the long run, their
endowments have outpaced smaller peers’. They can also console
themselves with one other perk: privileged access to debt markets.

Since January, Ivy League universities have together issued more than
$1.7bn in debt, the most in any year since 2020. In doing so, they have
borrowed at rates many firms, governments and less illustrious rivals must
envy. Even the priciest recent bond issuance by Harvard, Princeton and Yale
trades at 0.34 percentage points above the Treasury curve—about the same
as debt issued by Johnson & Johnson, one of only two American companies
with a triple A credit rating. Lenders are less forgiving to universities further
down the league table. Many of Pepperdine’s bonds trade at more than two
percentage points above corresponding Treasuries.

The pattern holds across the pecking order. Using US News & World
Report’s rankings of colleges, and comparing them with value-weighted
spreads on their debt, a clear pattern emerges: the better a private university,
the lower its borrowing cost. This reflects the size of their endowments, a
comfort to creditors. As in the corporate world, where larger firms are more
likely to borrow on the bond market and benefit from cheaper rates, a similar
pattern appears in academia. All the top 15 private colleges have tapped
bond markets; by contrast, only 26 of the next 45 have any outstanding bond
debt.

Although elite universities would prefer not to borrow, ready access to debt
markets allows them to commit more capital to illiquid assets and reduces
the need to sell during downturns. This, in turn, lets them capture the extra
returns such alternative investments can offer. As such, low borrowing costs
boost their performance. Cheap leverage is not what made elite universities
elite, but it certainly helps them keep their lead.■

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universities-are-on-a-debt-binge
Finance & economics | Liquid courage

To sell Fannie and Freddie, Trump must answer a

$7trn question
Investor optimism means the duo are outperforming Nvidia
August 14th 2025

“Nothing is so permanent”, noted Milton Friedman, “as a temporary

government programme”. Friedman died in 2006, a couple of years before
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two enormous government-sponsored
enterprises (GSEs) that provide liquidity to the American mortgage market,
were bailed out during the global financial crisis. The firms were taken into
“conservatorship”, a form of temporary government control. It has now been
in place for almost 17 years.
The temporary measure may at last be coming to an end, however. President
Donald Trump’s team is looking into plans to return the government’s stake
in the GSEs to the private sector via an initial public offering. Investors in
the duo’s battered stocks have already made enormous returns in anticipation
of such a sale, enjoying gains of over 2,000%. Even buyers of Nvidia may
look on with envy.

In reality, any privatisation will be extravagantly difficult. Returning the

GSEs to private hands will mean unpicking knotty inconsistencies in the
bail-outs that followed the financial crisis, which other administrations have
avoided touching. It may also mean resolving questions about American
housing policy that date back to the 1930s. And it will mean clarifying
exactly what the Trump administration hopes to achieve with the process.

The first challenge is the companies’ insufficient capital. Fannie and Freddie
have vast balance-sheets, holding more than $7trn in mortgage debt. As
private institutions, they would face shortfalls of “Tier 1” capital, as required
by regulators, of $188bn and $139bn, respectively. Issuing such a large
amount of equity in one go would be a ludicrous undertaking. To put it in
context, the IPO of Saudi Aramco in 2019, the biggest ever in nominal
terms, raised $26bn. The amount could be negotiated down during the
privatisation. But even raising smaller sums in chunks over a period of years
would prove tough. Although lowering capital requirements might speed
things up, it would raise the risk of another blow-up.

The second, related question is what role the government will play in the
firms’ future. So far, the administration’s approach has been confusing. Bill
Pulte of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie and
Freddie, has suggested they might remain in conservatorship even after an
IPO begins. Yet conservatorship means purchasers of any stock would lack
the ordinary rights of shareholders. Good luck finding buyers for billions of
dollars in newly issued equity who are willing to accept continued
government control.

How will the Treasury deal with its own financial interest? It has invested
$193bn in the companies, in the form of senior preferred shares which used
to pay a dividend of 10%. A tweak to the rules in Mr Trump’s first term
allowed the firms to skip the dividends and retain earnings, building up their
capital. In exchange, the government gained a “liquidation preference”
(money owed if the GSEs are ever sold). This had risen to $355bn by the
end of June.

Owners of the private stakes, who include Bill Ackman, a competitive tennis
player and sometime investor, think that the government has made quite
enough money from the firms already. He notes the Treasury was paid more
than $300bn in dividends before the end of 2019. In his proposal for
privatisation, the government would combine Fannie and Freddie as a single
entity, and would in effect write down its own holdings. That would be great
news for owners such as Mr Ackman, whose firm does not disclose the size
of its stake in the GSEs. But American taxpayers may disagree that leaving
hundreds of billions of dollars on the table makes sense.

The last, and perhaps largest, challenge is what to do about the government’s
implicit guarantee of the GSEs. The idea that the state will come to their aid
in a crisis, which proved to be true in 2008, has underpinned their cheap
funding and high credit rating. Without it, the duo might be downgraded by
credit-rating firms. Ultimately, the lack of a government-backed player
could raise mortgage rates across the country, as holders of mortgage-backed
securities demand higher returns to compensate for the additional risk.

Mr Trump, no fan of subtext, pledged to keep the arrangement in a social-

media post in May: “I want to be clear, the US Government will keep its
implicit GUARANTEES.” Small-government types have long wanted
Fannie and Freddie returned to private hands, hoping to spark more
competition in mortgage finance. John Cochrane of the Hoover Institution, a
think-tank, has noted that GSE rules on asset purchases in effect prevent new
types of home lending from emerging. But Fannie and Freddie would have
to lose their guarantees, in effect a subsidy, to encourage such innovation.
With Mr Trump’s promise of state support, it is not entirely clear what
problem privatisation is intended to solve. Taxpayers would yet again be left
on the hook in the case of any future blow-up. Government intervention in
the mortgage market would continue, just in a new form. Public risk would
enable private gain.

There is a reason why no administration since the bail-out of Fannie and

Freddie has found the time, or made the effort, to end the temporary fudge
which governs the pair. The benefits of returning the GSEs to private hands
are far from certain, and doing so will create a group of losers. Despite
investors’ excitement, it is far from clear the Trump administration has an
appetite for the immensely difficult task. ■
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freddie-trump-must-answer-a-7trn-question
Finance & economics | Stone cold Austin

America’s housing market is shuddering

For the country’s homeowners, the good times are coming to an end
August 14th 2025

Few pandemic-era bets will have paid off quite as nicely as nabbing a house
in a boomtown such as Atlanta, Austin or Miami with a two-point-
something-per-cent mortgage rate—and holding on as its value soared in the
subsequent years. People wanted sun, space and an escape from covid
killjoys. These cities offered it.

Now, though, the good times are coming to an end. America’s housing
market is flagging. Across the country, prices have drifted down in the first
half of the year, with most cities seeing falls in the past three months (see
chart 1). Tight monetary policy has kept interest rates high. And this is
feeding through to the property market, just as President Donald Trump’s
tariffs are chipping away at the economic growth that had been keeping sales
strong.

Prices are still creeping up in the north-east and the mid-west, but the west
and, in particular, the south are hurting (see map). Pity the homeowner in
Dallas or Phoenix who bought last year. They are carrying a beefy mortgage
rate of 7% or so and the value of their house is already down a few
percentage points in nominal terms, or more after accounting for inflation.

Such cities face a number of difficulties. Fewer Americans are moving to the
sunbelt than during the pandemic, when internal migration jumped (see chart
2). Mr Trump’s border crackdown may be making a difference, too, by
reducing international arrivals. Housebuilding boomed in these cities when
demand was high and rates were low. Although it has slowed, many covid-
era constructions are only just hitting the market. Worse, public perception
of the cities has changed. Austin and Miami failed to attract enough
superstar firms when they were in favour; few tech bros today tout them as
the new Silicon Valley.
For similar reasons, some of the worst-performing markets in the north-east
are holiday towns. Prices are falling in Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard
and on the coast of Maine. Big-city suburbs, another pandemic winner, do
seem to be faring better—whereas dialling into Zoom from the beach house
doesn’t quite work, hybrid work schedules perhaps make adding 15 or 30
minutes to the commute viable.

The state that fares worst of all combines these trends and adds a few
peculiarities of its own. It is Florida, where prices have fallen by 4% in the
past year. Aziz Sunderji, an independent analyst, points to high and rising
home-insurance premiums owing to climate change ($11,000 or so a year in
Florida, versus $2,400 nationwide). Other reasons are a sharp drop-off in
demand from rich Canadians (a surprising number of whom flee cold
winters to Florida) and expensive new safety rules that came in after a
condominium in Surfside, a Miami suburb, collapsed in 2021.
What does the market say about America’s economy? Historically, housing
has been one of the most interest-rate-sensitive sectors; buyers lever up to
make purchases, and are less likely to do so when borrowing is expensive,
dampening sales and construction. The industry both helps drive economic
growth—housing employs lots of people and homes are a slug of families’
wealth—and is worth watching to see where the economy is heading.

The current slowdown is partly deliberate: the Fed is keeping policy tight to
squeeze out the last of America’s above-target inflation. Other parts of the
economy are cooling, too: real private consumption and investment rose at
an annualised rate of just 1.2% in the second quarter of 2025, having run at
or above 2% for most of the past few years.

Yet relief for the housing market, in the form of much looser monetary
policy, may not be on the horizon (even if the Fed does look likely to lower
rates a bit in the months ahead). Tariffs have complicated the job for
policymakers, as they may cause inflation to spike. At the same time, a
colossal build-out of artificial-intelligence infrastructure, data centres and
the like is helping buoy growth. Capital spending by the “magnificent
seven” big technology companies now accounts for over 1% of GDP, and
has near doubled in just a few years, according to Renaissance Macro
Research, reducing the need to stimulate the economy. The past decade has
been very kind to America’s homeowners. Perhaps aspiring buyers are due a
break. ■

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market-is-shuddering
Finance & economics | At Orthanc’s peak

Palantir might be the most overvalued firm of all

time
What would make it worth buying?
August 14th 2025

For a few days in March 2000, as the dotcom bubble neared bursting point,
Cisco was the world’s most valuable company. Now the seller of networking
gear is a cautionary tale, even if it is also an enduring success, with real
earnings per share of four and a half times what they were back then.
Investors became so exuberant about the firm’s prospects 25 years ago that
they valued it at more than 200 times its annual profit, around $1trn in
today’s money. Starting from a valuation that stratospheric, Cisco’s solid-
but-unspectacular growth was a bitter disappointment. Its market value is
now $280bn.
No one can accuse Palantir, a data-analysis outfit and the most searingly hot
stock of 2025, of unspectacular growth. It reported revenue of $1bn for the
second quarter of this year, 48% higher than for the second quarter of 2024
and quadruple the figure for the same period in 2020. Silicon Valley types
seek out companies satisfying the “rule of 40”, meaning that the sum of their
operating margin and year-on-year sales growth, both expressed in
percentage points, is higher than 40. Palantir’s score on that measure is 94:
higher than any other enterprise-software firm with equivalent or greater
sales. Among the world’s 25 biggest companies by market value—of which
Palantir is one—only Nvidia, with its near-monopoly on artificial-
intelligence chips, scores higher.

Any investor would want a piece of that. The trouble is that Palantir’s
market value has already soared to $430bn (see chart 1), more than 600
times its past year’s earnings and nearly triple the equivalent multiple for
Cisco (or, indeed, Nvidia) at its peak. Software firms often prefer to express
their valuation in terms of underlying sales, which puts Palantir’s multiple at
around 120. For comparison, in 2005, the year before the Oxford English
Dictionary added the verb “Google”, Google’s price-to-sales ratio peaked at
22.
You need not look far to explain why Adam Parker of Trivariate Research,
an investment firm, has published a note entitled “Could Palantir be the best
short idea?” Writing in late May, he examined the ratio of enterprise value
(which adjusts market value to account for debt and cash on the balance-
sheet) to forecast sales for the coming year. On this measure Palantir then
scored 73 and now scores 104. Mr Parker looked for other listed companies
that had hit a multiple of 70 since 2000. Excluding financial firms and those
with annual revenue of less than $50m, he found 14, the largest of which has
a market value around a quarter of Palantir’s. That was Strategy (formerly
MicroStrategy), a firm that sells some software but pitches itself to investors
as a “bitcoin treasury company”, with a value derived from its
cryptocurrency holdings rather than its sales.

Mr Parker also looked at the shareholder returns such companies have

generated. He first lowered the bar to an enterprise-value-to-sales ratio of
30, since so few firms have ever hit Palantir’s heights. He then measured
their subsequent returns after first hitting this level, relative to the S&P 500
index (see chart 2). A year after its multiple first hit 30, the median firm had
underperformed the index by 22% and seen its multiple contract to 18.

What, then, would it take to make Palantir’s shares worth buying? The firm
helps everyone from spooks to fast-food chains analyse their data better and
thereby improve their operations. Its blistering recent growth comes, in large
part, from enthusiasm over adopting AI for such purposes. Palantir’s
competitive advantage derives not just from its software and clever
engineers, but from a high-level security clearance allowing it to process
classified information from America’s defence and intelligence agencies.
This gives it a “moat” with which to fend off competitors.

It will certainly need one. To reduce its price-to-sales valuation to “only”

Google’s at its peak in 2005, while maintaining its current share price,
Palantir needs to multiply its revenue by 5.6—substantially more than the
barnstorming progress it has made over the past five years. Doing this over
the next five would require an annual growth rate above 40%.

Sustained revenue growth of that magnitude or more is possible, even at

Palantir’s scale: Google (now called Alphabet), Meta and Nvidia have all
managed it. Yet none was priced to do so in advance—and they are, after all,
among the most successful firms in history. On a call with analysts and
investors after announcing Palantir’s most recent results, Alex Karp, the
chief executive (pictured), admitted that “this is a once in a generation, truly
anomalous quarter.” The remarkable thing is that shareholders need the
company’s revenue to continue to grow at a similar rate just to have a good
chance of breaking even. There is no allowance for an upstart competitor, a
scandal that makes clients wary or even a mere slowdown. If any of those
strike, Cisco will need to make way for a new cautionary tale. ■

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Finance & economics | Free exchange

What 630,000 paintings say about the world

economy
Kandinsky, Monet and Rembrandt were economists as well as artists
August 14th 2025

Two figures share a table, but not much companionship, in a Parisian café.
The man looks distracted, a pipe gripped in his mouth. The woman, eyes
down, shoulders slumped, nurses a glass of moss-green absinthe. The
painting, unveiled by Edgar Degas in 1876, boasts several titles
(“L’Absinthe”, “In a Café” and others). It also divides opinion. One viewer,
appalled by the woman’s loose morning shoes and the thought of her soiled
petticoats, saw the painting as a cautionary tale against idleness and “low
vice”. He then changed his mind. “The picture is merely a work of art”, he
later said, “and has nothing to do with drink or sociology.”
Great paintings can inspire entire volumes of interpretation. The ArtEmis
project, which concluded in 2021, took a more concise approach. It recruited
people to log their emotional responses to thousands of paintings in a digital
archive. These “annotators” could choose one of eight feelings, each
illustrated by an emoji. Based on this exercise and a later, bigger project
called ArtELingo, complex works of art like Degas’s 1876 masterpiece can
be succinctly summarised in a handful of numbers. When asked how
L’Absinthe makes them feel, over three-fifths of people choose “sadness”.
Almost a fifth choose amusement. About a tenth pick contentment (perhaps
they appreciate roomy footwear). None chooses the other listed emotions:
anger, awe, disgust, excitement or fear. A few pick a ninth, residual option:
“something else”.

ArtEmis carried out polls for 80,000 or so paintings. The project also tried,
with mixed success, to emulate human responses with artificial intelligence,
training a model to predict how people might feel. A new paper, entitled
“State of the Art”, by Clément Gorin of the Sorbonne School of Economics,
Stephan Heblich of the University of Toronto and Yanos Zylberberg of the
University of Bristol, tries to do the same. The authors trained a model on
70% of the paintings, and tested if it could predict poll results for other
works. Once satisfied, they unleashed this automated aesthete on over
630,000 paintings from the 15th century onwards.

The trio describe the data as a “historical time series of emotions”,

subscribing to a theory of art laid out by Tolstoy in 1898. He believed that
artists could transmit feelings to an audience through their work, as if by
contagion. “The stronger the infection, the better is the art as art.” If
paintings do communicate in this way, then, in principle, the steps of
transmission can be retraced in the reverse direction, from audience back to
origin. The emotional response of people today to an artwork of yesteryear
tells you something about its creator and the world that shaped them.

Messrs Gorin, Heblich and Zylberberg show that painters have their own
emotional signatures. Kandinsky tends to excite or amuse, Monet evokes
contentment, Rembrandt sadness. If you simply know the artist, you can
explain 40-50% of the variation in art’s emotional valence, the authors
calculate. But that leaves a lot to be explained by other factors. There are,
for example, small but systematic differences between countries in the
impact of their art. Pick a random year and painting, and the chances that it
will evoke contentment are 31-32% if it was produced in Denmark or Britain
but only 26% if in Italy or Spain. These probabilities also respond to
historical upheavals, such as the Spanish civil war.

Individual painters change over the course of their career. Evocations of fear
increased in the later work of El Greco, a Greek painter who moved to
Spain, perhaps because of the Counter-Reformation. Degas himself had ups
as well as downs. About a quarter century after “L’Absinthe”, he produced
another famous painting, “Blue Dancers”, depicting four ballerinas, yet to
take the stage, their gleaming limbs and (unslumped) shoulders arrayed in
striking diagonals across the canvas. When asked how this work made them
feel, only one out of 20 people chose sadness.

Messrs Gorin, Heblich and Zylberberg wonder if shifts in an artist’s

emotional repertoire can be linked to changes in their country’s economic
circumstances. This is not straightforward. Look at a chart of GDP per
person in almost any country over recent centuries and it tends to look like a
“hockey stick that is more or less delayed”, Mr Zylberberg points out,
whereas the output of a country’s artists is always far more crooked. The trio
nonetheless find that economic growth was associated with changes in
artists’ emotional mix. If GDP per person were to rise by 4% a year over 25
years, the chance that a given artist’s painting would convey sadness falls by
2.2 percentage points from 11% to 8.8%. The chance it would evoke
contentment rises from 31.4% to 33%.

The three authors also find suggestive correlations between artistic mood
and economic openness. In the last three decades of the 19th century, for
example, Britain’s trade with the rest of the world expanded briskly: imports
grew from 28% of GDP to 48%. This kind of globalisation is associated with
happier artwork, according to their calculations: a decline of 1.4 percentage
points in the chances that a given artist’s work will evoke sadness, and a rise
in the probability that it will convey contentment or even awe. This
newspaper was established in the 19th century in the belief that free trade is
good. It turns out it can also be awesome.

Art critics may object to the reduction of great paintings to emotional

percentages, especially as most of the numbers are generated by a machine.
None of the three economists claims any qualification in art history. But as it
happens, Mr Zylberberg’s father was a professional painter. Deeply marked
by the Holocaust, his early work evoked “fear and anger”, says his son.
Towards the end of his career, his art “became more positive”. This data
does not appear in the paper. It is nonetheless a poignant illustration of the
thesis that art reflects society—and that shifts of feeling in an artist’s oeuvre
can serve as an emotional index of the times. ■

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Science & technology
Earth’s climate is approaching irreversible tipping points
Smoke from boreal wildfires could cool the Arctic
Drones could soon become more intrusive than ever
Are nightmares bad for your health?
Science & technology | Points of no return

Earth’s climate is approaching irreversible tipping

points
Scientists are racing to work out just how close they might be
August 14th 2025

THE AMAZON rainforest is so big that it makes its own climate. As they
photosynthesise and transpire, its billions of trees collectively produce
enough moisture to form clouds. These, by some estimates, are responsible
for at least a third of the rainforest’s life-sustaining rainfall. But climate
change is disrupting this circular process. The build-up of greenhouse gases
in the atmosphere has raised regional temperatures, worsened droughts and
increased the risk of fires. All kill trees.

Fewer trees means less rainfall, higher temperatures and yet more fires.
Climate-change-induced deforestation therefore risks becoming self-
perpetuating. And the more humans with chainsaws do to help things along,
the sooner the dire day will come when the forest has shrunk so far that
nothing can be done to restore it. Much of the basin will turn into a dry
savannah, and the tens of billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide stored there
will be released into the atmosphere, further heating the planet.

“Amazon dieback”, as this grim scenario is known, is just one example of

what climate scientists refer to as a tipping point: a threshold beyond which
self-sustaining processes irreversibly push a part of Earth’s climate system
from one state into another. Those who study them think there are many
other examples (see chart on next page). These include the breakdown of the
vast Greenland ice sheet, which would raise global sea levels by more than
seven metres, and the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning
Circulation (AMOC), the powerful system of heat-distributing ocean
currents that keeps northern Europe reasonably temperate. Should amoc
collapse, temperatures and rainfall levels could fall dramatically across
Europe, greatly damaging the continent’s ability to grow crops.
In the 20-odd years since this way of thinking about the climate became
formalised, the scientists involved reckon they have arrived at a decent—
though not perfect—understanding of which parts of the climate system are
most vulnerable to tipping, and why. Now they, along with politicians and
business leaders, are trying to answer other, increasingly pressing questions:
how to tell if a tipping point is actually being crossed, for one, and how to
prepare for the consequences if it is.

The exact level of warming required to trigger any specific tipping point is
not clear. Earth’s climate is governed by myriad interconnected processes,
many of which—like the dynamics governing ice-sheet disintegration, or the
potentially cooling effects of wildfires—are only poorly understood. Others,
such as the formation of light-reflecting clouds, occur at scales too small to
be properly incorporated into planetary models. To further complicate
things, one tipping point can trigger another, domino-style. The fresh water
released into the oceans from a collapsing Greenland ice sheet, for example,
would weaken AMOC, further reducing rainfall over the Amazon.

Different models, therefore, rely on different approximations and make

different projections of when tipping points will occur. Some models
suggest, for instance, that the Greenland ice sheet could start to enter an
irreversible decline once global temperatures are 0.8°C above pre-industrial
levels—something that happened around the turn of the millennium. Others
put the threshold at closer to 3°C—which might never be reached. Similarly,
the Amazon’s decline is projected to become unstoppable somewhere
between 2°C and 6°C of warming, though it could be greatly hastened if
humans keep cutting down or burning trees at current rates.

It may thus be possible to defer the Amazon’s tipping point simply by

reducing deforestation as much as possible. Averting others, though,
depends on the bigger and more difficult task of limiting how much global
temperatures rise. And, with the global average now 1.2°C above pre-
industrial levels, and projected to breach 2°C by the end of the century, it is
unclear how much time is left in which to do so. That makes it ever more
important to get a sense of whether any of these tipping points are already
being crossed.

In order to help answer that question, Britain’s Advanced Research and

Invention Agency (ARIA) announced in February that it was going to fund
systems that could produce and process the data needed for an “early
warning system for tipping points”. ARIA’s initial five-year, £81m ($109m)
programme involves 26 teams focusing on two tipping points in particular:
the breakdown of the Greenland ice sheet and the collapse of the subpolar
gyre, a circulating current in the north Atlantic which helps power AMOC.
If too much fresh water from melting ice flows into the gyre, it could be
disrupted, increasing the odds of an AMOC collapse.

Kelly Hogan, a marine geophysicist at the British Antarctic Survey (which,

despite its name, is functionally bipolar), is co-leading one of the teams
focused on the Greenland ice sheet. They plan to use a fleet of small
underwater drones to both map the shape of the ice face and measure
properties such as salinity, temperature and the force of currents. These data
will shed light on the way temperature and salinity change at the interface
between ice and water—things scientists expect to influence melting. They
will also deploy robots that can roam the surface of the ice taking
measurements and drilled-in sensors for longer-term monitoring.
Other teams are following a similar logic. Oshen, a British startup, intends to
deploy small, self-sailing robots with solar-powered sensors in the subpolar
gyre, where they will measure such things as sea and air temperature and
wind speed. Marble, another British company, is developing drones that can
monitor the position and size of icebergs, the location of the glacier front
and the height of the Greenland ice sheet, three variables that are essential to
accurately forecast melting.

Both Oshen and Marble say their work is only possible because smartphone
technology has made sensors and processing power cheap. Control systems
that once required proprietary software can now be run using free, open-
source code. And widespread 4G coverage means that data can be
transferred quickly. “We’re not inventing some new breakthrough laws in
physics,” says Mathieu Johnsson, Marble’s CEO. “We’re exploiting a lot of
technologies that have been there for a little while…it’s just that they
haven’t been put together in the right way.” Meanwhile, several other ARIA-
funded teams—including one led by Tim Lenton, a climate scientist at the
University of Exeter and a pioneer of tipping-point research—are working
out how these data might inform an early-warning system.

For all this to be useful, says Dr Lenton, policymakers need to think more
about the consequences of tipping points being crossed, and how societies
must prepare for them. Laurie Laybourn, who leads the Strategic Climate
Risks Initiative, a British think-tank, agrees. “The mental model of the
climate threat among key people—particularly in senior parts of government
—has yet to catch up with the fact that the nature of the climate threat
includes things like tipping points,” he says. In his view, no government is
considering scenarios like ice-sheet collapse with the seriousness afforded to
other high-impact risks, such as pandemics. In fact, Mr Laybourn reckons,
with the possible exception of the Nordic countries, most governments have
not really been thinking about them at all.

For some, talk of tipping points is a harmful distraction. In 2024 an

international group of well-known scientists published an article in Nature
Climate Change arguing that a focus on tipping points diverted attention
from the more general need for climate mitigation and adaptation, around
which the science is much more certain. Others worry about fostering a
sense of fatalism, by framing some catastrophic changes as unavoidable.

Regardless, the concept is slowly but steadily gaining ground. In July a big
conference on tipping points in Exeter attracted actuaries, insurers and
pension funds as well as scientists and activists. Emergency services and
humanitarian organisations are showing increasing interest, too. And so are
the Brazilian organisers of COP30, this year’s United Nations climate
summit, who are expected to place particular emphasis on the subject. The
conference is being held in November in Belém, a city dubbed “the gateway
to the Amazon”. The setting could scarcely be more apt. ■

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climate-is-approaching-irreversible-tipping-points
Science & technology | Fires that freeze

Smoke from boreal wildfires could cool the Arctic

But the damage such blazes cause outweighs their benefits
August 14th 2025

There are two things which climate scientists hate about “positive
feedbacks”. One is that they are bad news. A positive feedback, in the
science of complex systems, is an amplification; in climate change, this
comes about when a consequence of rising temperatures drives a further rise
in temperature. Such feedbacks are the sorts of things that drive tipping
points.

The other problem is that they sound like good news. Negative feedbacks
face the opposite problem. In a negative feedback, which need not be
harmful, a change in the system produces a response that pushes the system
back towards where it was. Think of an air conditioner’s temperature setting
or a radiator’s thermostat.
A recent analysis by Edward Blanchard-Wrigglesworth of the University of
Washington and colleagues suggests that a much more important negative
feedback may now be operating in the Arctic, one which could curb the
region’s rapid temperature increase and markedly slow the decline in its sea
ice. Indeed, it looks strong enough to have an effect on overall global
average temperature.

This particular negative feedback is driven by the increasing frequency, size

and intensity of wildfires in boreal forests. The climate models that scientists
use to simulate warming over the coming century run on scenarios that
assume these fires will continue more or less as they did in the 2000s and
early 2010s. Since then, though, they have become considerably larger.

Where there is fire, there is smoke. Some is sooty and dark; some is lighter.
Dr Blanchard-Wrigglesworth and his colleagues think that the brighter, more
reflective smoke wins out, cooling the ground below. Taking the fire-trend
into account, they reckon that, in the 2030s, the extent of sea-ice cover in the
Arctic ocean will be at least 3m square kilometres more than it would be in a
fire-trend-free model. Without the fire trend, an ice-free Arctic September
would be expected in 2050. Fires delay its onset by over a decade.

None of this says that the fires are a good thing, or that they will avert
catastrophes elsewhere. Fires are a massive shock to ecosystems, and smoke
which reflects sunlight also harms humans and other animals. Moreover, the
carbon that fires release will warm the entire planet for some time to come.
That is clearly bad news. ■

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wildfires-could-cool-the-arctic
Science & technology | Eyes in the sky

Drones could soon become more intrusive than

ever
“Whole-body” biometrics are on their way
August 14th 2025

For all the impressive tasks that drones can do, there is one that remains
beyond their power: facial recognition. Drones are generally much farther
from their subjects than the kind of cameras, such as CCTVs, that are
ordinarily used for biometrics. At these distances a face may consist of only
a few dozen pixels. Atmospheric turbulence caused, for example, by rising
hot air, can distort features like the distance between one’s eyes. And
because they record from the sky, drones’ on-board cameras may capture
only a partial view of a face (or, if someone is wearing a wide-brimmed hat,
none at all).

But new technology from a team at Michigan State University (MSU) seeks
to change all that and extend the spying powers of artificial intelligence (AI)
into the skies. The system, known as FarSight, suggests that long-range
aerial surveillance could soon become far more accurate—and intrusive—
than ever before.

The project is funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects

Activity (IARPA), part of the American government responsible for
marshalling fanciful spy-gadget ideas into real-world use. Other current
IARPA projects include an effort to build a device that can modulate a voice
in real-time in order to avoid detection by speech-recognition tools, as well
as an initiative to make snooping devices small and pliable enough to be
woven directly into clothing.

FarSight works with a similarly crafty technique known as “whole-body

biometric recognition”. Rather than trying to recognise a subject from their
face alone, the system uses a combination of biometric-recognition
algorithms that run in parallel.

One set of algorithms discerns a person’s gait. Another generates a 3D

reconstruction of their body. Xiaoming Liu, a professor of computer science
and engineering at MSU who leads the project, likens it to essentially
undressing subjects in order to generate an accurate model of their anatomy,
regardless of what they happen to be wearing.

A third set of algorithms runs the subject’s face through a turbulence model
that seeks to undo the refractive effects of the choppy air on the light that
comes into the camera. This returns the image gathered by the drone to a
simulated undistorted state, from which a detailed mapping of the subject’s
features is then extracted.

Once captured, the three biometric markers—gait, body shape and face—are
fused into a combined profile. This profile can be matched to those of
known individuals or, if the target is new, saved for future matching. The
entire operation happens in about a third of a second, says Dr Liu. His team
is working to scale down the system so that it could fit on a quadcopter

Though it is still an experimental system, FarSight’s early results are

impressive. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST),
America’s standards body, which has been rating facial-recognition systems
for more than a decade, tested FarSight on a set of tricky low-resolution
images and videos collected at hundreds of metres, in many cases from a
high angle. FarSight outperformed all other systems tested on the same set.

The project also illustrates how large vision models (LVMs), a variant of
large language models, could be useful for surveillance. The MSU team used
CLIP, a model made by OpenAI, to annotate images of thousands of subjects
with textual descriptions—“Muscular-slender, long torso”, “Short torso”,
“High-waisted”, “Low-waisted”—which it then used to train the body-shape
reconstruction system. The gait-recognition feature is based on a different
large vision model, called DINOv2, which was released last year by Meta.

Dr Liu says that LVMs could have even broader applications in the years
ahead. This is because LVMs achieve high-performance recognition without
requiring big training-data sets, which are difficult and expensive to
produce. FarSight’s training and testing data, much of which were collected
by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a scientific-research facility, consists of
876,000 videos and photos of about 3,000 subjects. An LVM, by
comparison, is already pre-trained on billions of images and videos, and may
require only minimal fine-tuning before it can be used for surveillance-video
analytics.

FarSight is not yet ready for the field. Although it outperforms other systems
on long-range recognition, its accuracy, as well as its false-positive and
false-negative rates, remain “far behind the performance that would be
required to make the system deployable”, says Josef Kittler, a professor
working on biometrics and computer vision at the University of Surrey, who
was not involved in the research.

The system has other limitations, too. A person’s gait, for instance, can
change drastically if they carry a heavy load or have suffered an injury, says
Dr Kittler. In a second NIST test on a wider data set, FarSight was not the
best performer. Dr Liu says that FarSight’s performance also drops
considerably if the camera’s angle is very high, if the weather is warm
(which causes fiercer turbulence) or if the distance to the target exceeds a
kilometre.

Should these shortcomings be resolved, though, it is not hard to imagine

how such a system might end up overhead. According to contracting
documents, IARPA is looking to create a technology not only for drones but
any high or distant camera, such as those mounted on tall buildings or
border-surveillance towers. The agency has noted that the outcomes of the
programme—which is known as BRIAR and has at least one other active
research team, led by an American company called Science and Technology
Research—are also intended for “protection of critical infrastructure and
transportation facilities”.

“That implies its routine use on civilian populations,” says Jay Stanley at the
American Civil Liberties Union, and “creates serious risks of abuse and
chilling effects on people’s sense of freedom”. In cities like London or New
York, where CCTV cameras are ubiquitous but not contiguous, whole-body
recognition could help track individuals across long distances. Veritone, an
American company, already markets a system that can match individuals
according to such attributes as body shape and hairstyle. In May the
company’s boss, Ryan Steelberg, told MIT Technology Review, a magazine,
that the tool could be useful in cities where facial recognition is banned.

Those who take matters of privacy into their own hands might also find their
personal powers of evasion diminished in the face of whole-body
biometrics. Someone wishing to evade a tool like FarSight could no longer
just rely on an outfit change or a big hat. They would also need to adjust
their gait and, somehow, present a different body shape to cameras. In other
words, Dr Liu says, “the whole enchilada”. ■

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become-more-intrusive-than-ever
Science & technology | Sweet dreams

Are nightmares bad for your health?

If you have them often, the answer seems to be yes
August 14th 2025

Night hags and night mares. Succubi and incubi. Sleep has long been a
demon-haunted world. In olden days such visitations were thought to drain
the dreamer of life-energy and, though modern science has no truck with
actual demons, the fear that bad dreams somehow sap a dreamer’s health has
not vanished. Instead, it has been confirmed.

Almost everyone has nightmares. But it is among those who have them
weekly—somewhere between 2% and 6% of the population—that
connections with ill-health seem to arise.

Some links are to be expected. Depression, anxiety, schizophrenia and post-

traumatic stress disorder, for example, all have nightmares as a common
symptom. The same goes for chronic pain. But other connections are more
mysterious. Research by Abidemi Otaiku, now at Imperial College London,
suggests that nightmares may warn of neurological illnesses, such as
Parkinson’s disease and dementia. And other groups have shown that other
conditions including cardiovascular problems and autoimmune diseases like
lupus, seem linked to nightmares, too.

Worst of all, nightmares may kill. Dr Otaiku’s most recent work, presented
in June at a conference in Helsinki, shows that frequent nightmares are
stronger predictors of early death than smoking, obesity, poor diet or sloth.

Dr Otaiku reached this conclusion by analysing six long-term studies from

America and Britain, involving more than 180,000 adults and almost 2,500
children. Those with frequent (at least weekly) nightmares were three times
more likely to die before the age of 70 than those who had them less than
once a month. Out of 174 people who died prematurely, 31 had frequent
nightmares.

Part of the explanation is his finding that the chromosomes of the nightmare-
prone show signs of accelerated ageing, perhaps brought about by the stress
hormones nightmares are known to promote. These chromosomal effects, he
reckons, are responsible for about 40% of the increased risk of premature
death in those prone to nightmares. Where the other 60% comes from is
unknown.

All of which suggests paying attention to nightmares is a good idea. Where

they are a symptom, they can warn of trouble ahead. And where they are a
cause, treatments to reduce nightmares can be undertaken as a priority.

That is not to say the two are always easy to distinguish. In the cases of
depression, anxiety and so on, nightmares are both symptom and cause. Bad
dreams triggered by psychiatric disturbance induce stress that reinforces the
underlying problem.

Something similar is probably also true of lupus, in which the immune

system attacks healthy organs, including the brain, promoting inflammation.
That may well trigger nightmares, with any stress hormones released as a
consequence then likely to make things worse.
In conditions such as Parkinson’s and dementia, though, which are the
results of specific types of neurological damage, nightmares are unlikely to
be anything other than symptomatic. By contrast, for cardiovascular
problems they are probably causes, not consequences. The stress they create
will encourage blood-vessel-damaging inflammation.

Treating nightmares is harder than spotting them. Psychotherapy may help

some. And certain drugs, such as prazosin (ordinarily used to treat high
blood pressure), may assist. But the study of nightmares remains an
underexplored field of medicine. That needs to change.■

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for-your-health
Culture
The largest dig in a lifetime is under way in Pompeii
Bombs, dinosaurs and UFOs: Luis Walter Alvarez’s eclectic career
Private chefs are spilling the culinary secrets of the super-rich
The four years when old New York died and a new one was born
What’s your preferred playback speed: 1x, 1.5x or 2x?
Thought John Proctor was one of the good guys? Think again
Culture | Roman, not ruins

The largest dig in a lifetime is under way in

Pompeii
What lies beneath the pumice in the ancient city is magnificent
August 14th 2025

Was he her lover? The two skeletons, male and female, were clearly
physically close when they died: she on a bed, he on the floor. Archaeology
offers other hints. She seems to have been richer (or at least was carrying
gold); they spent their last hours together (debris trapped them in the room);
those hours were terrible (he, his injuries show, died first). Archaeology
offers one final clue: their ages. She was in her 30s or 40s; he in his teens or
early 20s. Perhaps they were lovers, or mother and child, or total strangers.
Even at the distance of 2,000 years you find yourself hoping she did not
watch her own son die.

Welcome to Pompeii. This is the ancient city both as you have seen it before
—graffiti, frescoes, tiles, toilets and some highly enviable terrazzo—and as
you have never seen it before. The largest dig in 70 years is under way:
3,200 square metres have been uncovered and innumerable tonnes of soil,
rubble and pumice have been moved. In them are, so far, three houses, a
bathhouse, a fresco that looks so like a pizza that archaeologists call it the
“not-pizza” fresco, five human skeletons and, this being Pompeii, lots of
phalluses.

The dig feels faintly surprising, less for what is being found (little has been
able to surprise archaeologists since Pompeii’s infamous god-having-sex-
with-a-goat statue was unearthed in 1752) than that there is anything left to
be found at all. Pompeii feels so familiar: it has appeared in films
(“POMPEII” in 2014) and fiction (Robert Harris’s “POMPEII”) and non-
fiction (Mary Beard’s—guess what—“POMPEII”).
In the three-odd centuries since excavations began, it has been used—and,
critics say, abused—by almost every generation. It has been used as a stone
quarry (nice stones) and a classical one (nice statues). It has been held up as
a parable of sexual liberty (its frescoes); sexual immorality (that goat) and
debauchery (ditto). It has been seen as a paradigm of civilisation (its
plumbing) and barbarism (its slavery).

Every generation has offered a reaction: Christians tutted at it; Mussolini had
dinner in it; Professor Beard metaphorically winked at it. It is often called a
“lost city” but few cities have had such exposure per square metre. Its art is
found on fridge magnets and its mosaics made into doormats. The city has
been recast as a souvenir. So much of Pompeii is known that it is easy to
forget how much is not known: one-third of Pompeii is still unexcavated.

That is obvious once you look closely. Walk through the popular bits of
Pompeii—past the theatre, amphitheatre and brothel—and keep going and
you will find yourself in quieter streets with fewer people and more pigeons.
There are shopfronts here too, but their windows open onto a wall of earth:
nothing seems to be behind them. These are the undug streets.

But, after an injection of EU cash, archaeologists started digging in 2023.

The dig is “complicated”, says Gabriel Zuchtriegel, the director of the site
and author of “The Buried City”, a recent book. If you were to add an
archaeologist to your novel, you would add Dr Zuchtriegel: German,
handsome, he is fluent in three languages and mildly forbidding in all of
them. (To cheer himself up, he reads the New Testament in ancient Greek.)
Ask him his feelings on uncovering this stuff and he says “nothing”: you are
just “so concentrated”. The epigraph of his book comes from Herman
Melville’s diary: “Pompeii like any other town. Same old humanity. All the
same whether one be dead or alive.”

To call this a “dig” is to underplay the speed of it. Pompeii offers some of
the finest archaeology in the world; it also offers some of the fastest. When
Vesuvius erupted in 79AD, sending a cloud of ash 32km into the sky and
surprising the locals—who not only did not know that Vesuvius was a
volcano, but had no word for “volcano”—what fell on Pompeii was not lava
but pumice stones, so light that locals, as Pliny the Younger, a Roman writer
watching from a nearby villa noted, “tied pillows over their heads…for
protection”.

The stones kept falling at a rate of 15cm an hour. In three hours, they
reached people’s knees; in six, the height of a toddler. Most people fled—
perhaps 90% escaped. Those who sheltered and stayed became, like the
skeletons in the house, trapped. Their room, says Sophie Hay, an
archaeologist, “became their tomb”. Walls started to collapse under the
weight (one killed the young man). Then the volcanic cloud collapsed and a
wave of superheated pumice, gas and ash raced, at speeds of 100kph and
temperatures of over 200°C, down the slope. In Pompeii, people suffocated.
In Herculaneum, people’s brains boiled.

It is hard to imagine a more appalling end—or, for archaeologists, a better

one. The grains of pumice beneath were so light and dry that they protected
all they fell on; so easy to remove that archaeologists, says Dr Hay, call it
“Amazon packaging material”. You less excavate Pompeii than unbox it,
brushing grey, frozen-foam crumbs of pumice from a fresco here and
shovelling it out of a swimming pool there. In days columns start to emerge,
inverse Excaliburs, from a slowly sinking lake of grey.

The problem with Pompeii is not getting stuff out: it is keeping it upright
once you have. The same pumice-pyroclastic one-two that caught bodies as
if in freeze-frame—this one clawing at a throat, or that little boy writhing—
caught buildings in the same way. A shattered column or wall mid-fall can
be wholly held up by pumice. Take it away and, like a game of giant Jenga,
the whole thing might fall. A cat’s cradle of scaffolding winds its way
around the walls (see picture). Dr Zuchtriegel likens digging to performing
“a complicated operation”.

It has been worth it, as what has been found is breathtaking. That is partly
because, like so much else in Pompeii, it is untouched by time and partly
because, like very little else in Pompeii, it is untouched by archaeologists.
Pompeii’s relics have suffered as much from enthusiasts as eruptions. The
Bourbons plundered Pompeii (you can still see the holes, cut as if by giant
mice, in the walls). Napoleon’s sister, Caroline, planned, with Napoleonic
efficiency, to uncover it all in three years. Everyone has stolen from it.
The new excavations, by contrast, are pristine. A bathhouse has such perfect
curved steps on its plunge pool you could imagine slipping into it today. A
nearby wall is painted with such rich pigment you might find it on a Farrow
& Ball colour chart (“Cataclysmic Ochre”). Many of the houses are mid-
refurbishment. In one, roof tiles sit stacked, ready, on the floor; a builder’s
plaster-splashed bucket waits by a wall. Archaeologists play a game—a
Roman Rightmove—of which house is nicest: the not-pizza-fresco one? The
baths one?

It is a bit of fun. But there is a ghoulish guiltiness to ogling Pompeii.

Posterity accuses the Bourbons of “collector syndrome”—the urge to acquire
antiquity. But, Dr Zuchtriegel suggests, tourists are guilty of it too, acquiring
experiences as greedily as Bourbons snatched artefacts. Millions visit each
year, sweating across its forum, smirking in the brothel where the audio
guide tells you about “la vie sexuelle de Pompéi” in nine languages. Dr
Zuchtriegel has limited the daily number of visits to 20,000, down from
36,000.

He would prefer people not to tick off lists but to look at one thing, carefully.
Which thing? He shows a favourite: in a small house there are little charcoal
drawings of some gladiators. When they first uncovered this last year, they
thought it might have been a stylised adult’s drawing. Then they dug further
and found that the artist had, in their way, autographed it, drawing round
their own hand in charcoal. To judge from the size of the hand, the artist
must have been six or seven. When they see it, everyone does the same
thing, Dr Zuchtriegel says: they stretch out their own hand to hold it over
where the Pompeiian child put theirs. Same old humanity, whether one be
dead or alive. ■

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lifetime-is-under-way-in-pompeii
Culture | On the case

Bombs, dinosaurs and UFOs: Luis Walter

Alvarez’s eclectic career
He won a Nobel prize in 1968 for his work on particle physics. But his
interests ranged far beyond that field
August 14th 2025

Luis Walter Alvarez’s career was marked by two explosions. The first was
one the physicist enabled: a plutonium bomb, whose design he oversaw,
destroyed the Japanese city of Nagasaki in August 1945. The second was
one he theorised: the terrestrial impact 65m years ago of an asteroid
sufficiently powerful to drive the dinosaurs to extinction. It may be for the
asteroid theory—developed alongside his son and widely accepted after his
death—that Alvarez is best remembered, rather than his groundbreaking
contributions to the Manhattan Project.
Yet, as a new biography by Alec Nevala-Lee shows, Alvarez’s scientific
contributions extended far beyond even those two projects. He developed
airborne radars that are sometimes credited with winning the second world
war, as well as enabling the Berlin airlift. His work on particle physics won
him the Nobel prize in 1968.

Mr Nevala-Lee calls Alvarez “the world’s foremost scientific detective”.

(The author’s previous book was about Buckminster Fuller, another
polymath.) The list of mysteries on which Alvarez consulted would have
raised even Sherlock Holmes’s eyebrows. Alvarez investigated the
assassination of John F. Kennedy, looked into unidentified flying objects and
searched the pyramids of Giza for hidden chambers.

His interest in science developed early, in part because both his father and
paternal grandfather, an immigrant from Spain, were doctors. A bright
student—so unlikely to make mistakes that he completed his maths exams in
pen, not pencil—he graduated from high school at 17 and enrolled at the
University of Chicago in 1928. Alvarez’s arrival could not have been better
timed. Nuclear physicists in those decades were the first to set foot on a new
scientific continent: any experiment might yield a Nobel-prizewinning
discovery. Moving fast and fearlessly was the only way to build a reputation,
even if it meant exposure to dangerously high doses of radiation. Alvarez
never stopped getting his hands dirty.

His combination of ambition, intellect and self-belief meant he was not

always easy to get along with. One early collaborator described him as a
“little fascist”; another deplored his manner of treating colleagues as
servants. Frustrated by his frosty reception among palaeontologists, he
dismissed them as stamp-collectors rather than real scientists. Alvarez’s
dedication to his work also strained his relationship with his first wife,
Geraldine, a brilliant mind herself.

Most notably, he clashed with J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director

of the Manhattan Project, whose alleged communist sympathies led to a
hearing and the revocation of his national-security clearance in 1954.
Alvarez was one of Oppenheimer’s most persistent critics, which Mr
Nevala-Lee attributes to Oppenheimer’s post-war change of heart with
regards to the use of atomic energy for war. (Alvarez considered the
development of a thermonuclear bomb to be a national priority.) Whatever
his motivations, there is little doubt that Alvarez’s testimony helped him
make friendships with powerful figures in Washington that would
subsequently benefit his career.

Unsurprisingly, Alvarez was particularly proud of his Nobel prize, awarded

for his work designing a new generation of bubble chambers: giant vats of
liquid hydrogen in which the paths of individual particles could be observed
and photographed. No less noteworthy to Alvarez was the fact that his award
citation was the longest ever for a Nobel prize in physics. (The record would
not be broken until 2013.)

In a fast-moving career spent pushing the boundaries of what was known

and what was possible, it is remarkable how rigorously Alvarez vetted his
own reasoning. That tendency to look for trouble, inculcated by a university
instructor who encouraged students to secretly interfere with each other’s
experimental set-ups, saved him from embarrassment on multiple occasions.
In an age where people are all too prone to believing what they wish to be
true, rather than challenging their own assumptions, it may also be the most
important lesson his example can offer. ■

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alvarezs-eclectic-career
Culture | World in a dish

Private chefs are spilling the culinary secrets of the

super-rich
On social media they serve recipes with a side of celebrity intrigue
August 14th 2025

“My celebrity client wants a $2,000 pizza,” Brooke Baevsky (pictured), a

private chef, tells the camera. How do you prepare such a pie? Add lashings
of caviar, organic figs and manuka honey, then dust everything with 24-carat
gold flakes, which are tasteless in both senses of the word.

The pizza was the appetiser for a posh dinner party in Los Angeles. Ms
Baevsky—who says she cooks for royalty, sports stars and actors—made
sure to record herself serving the pizza, lest anyone think it was satire.
Known online as Chef Bae, she is part of a batch of private chefs offering
their followers a chance to ogle opulence.
Private chefs serve up their recipes with a side of celebrity intrigue. They
give fans tours of gargantuan fridges and record trips to fancy food shops
such as Erewhon and Citarella. Ms Baevsky says a client spent $20,000 to
send her across the world to fetch some favourite chocolate and nuts. Emily
Ruybal serves four-course menus on yachts in the Bahamas. All this draws
in viewers: the hashtag #privatechef has been viewed some 5bn times on
TikTok.

In the summer many private chefs head to the Hamptons, an upscale coastal
resort near New York. Private chefs such as Meredith Hayden, whose
username is @wishbonekitchen, have gone viral for video diaries of 17-hour
catering shifts. According to TikTok the “Hamptons aesthetic”, a style of
decor inspired by the luxurious beach houses, is one of the trends of the
moment.

Menus in the Hamptons typically involve salad leaves rather than gold ones,
harvested by hand from immaculate vegetable gardens. As Jill Donenfeld,
co-founder of The Culinistas, an American private-chef agency, puts it,
clients not only seek “caviar and lobster” but also simple “farm-fresh
ingredients”. The firm’s most popular dish is its “burrata bar”, in which the
creamy cheese is heaped with toppings such as prosciutto, peaches and
pistachios. Some clients ask chefs to make the dishes served at their
favourite restaurants.

The industry has benefited from its viral moment. The Culinistas says
business in the Hamptons this summer is up by 40% from the year before. (It
costs around $50,000 to hire one of its chefs for the season.) The rich and
famous are seeking out chefs they see on their Instagram feeds. In turn,
private cheffing—a career long seen as inferior to chefs de cuisine—is being
taken more seriously by culinarians.

Yet not much is private about TikTok’s private chefs. In a business that often
demands discretion, Ms Baevsky notes how “fun” it is to make videos with
Hollywood clients such as Emma Roberts and Sarah Michelle Gellar. Some
chefs are now celebrities themselves. Ms Hayden’s “The Wishbone Kitchen
Cookbook” is a bestseller. She has quit the long shifts and bought her own
house in the Hamptons. Perhaps, in time, she will hire a private chef. ■
This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//culture/2025/08/11/private-chefs-are-spilling-the-
culinary-secrets-of-the-super-rich
Culture | Donnie, Rudy, Al and the gang

The four years when old New York died and a new
one was born
Some of America’s most outlandish politicians also made their debuts in
1986-89
August 14th 2025

Mike Bloomberg once mused that New York was “a luxury product”. The
former mayor meant that businesses—and, by extension, their staff—should
be willing to tolerate higher costs in exchange for the advantages of living in
a megacity. But many voters crave Manhattan buzz at Midwestern prices.
This is one reason why New York’s Democrats recently backed a young,
charismatic, far-left mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani, whose plans to
ease the cost of living (such as a rent freeze) would surely make things
worse (by discouraging new construction).
Because New York has been tolerably well run since the 1990s, some New
Yorkers have forgotten how much damage a dysfunctional city government
can do. New York nearly went bankrupt in 1975, after decades of financial
mismanagement. By the early 1980s crime and homelessness were visibly
out of control. “Squeegee men” menaced motorists while purporting to clean
their windscreens. Vandals and graffiti artists despoiled public spaces
unchecked. The police were inept and sometimes corrupt. Between 1986 and
1989 an average of 1,760 people were murdered each year: nearly five times
as many as were killed in 2024. AIDS, crack, racial tension, welfare fraud
and cronyism added to the sense of chaos. Yet in “The Gods of New York”,
Jonathan Mahler—a writer for New York Times Magazine and author of
“Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning”—argues that “luxury” New
York was born in those four turbulent years.

Part of the pleasure of this book, especially for readers too young to
remember the late 1980s, is that it chronicles a time when several important
American political figures first strode onto the public stage. Here is Donald
Trump, suing everyone, puffing out clouds of bluster and braggadocio,
wildly overspending on his Atlantic City casinos and taking up with Marla
Maples while still married to Ivana.

There is Al Sharpton, a rabble-rouser leading street protests—a rather

different figure from the slender, sober-suited version who appears on
network tv today. Here is Rudy Giuliani (pictured), with “the demeanour of
an undertaker and the verbosity of a lawyer”, as one columnist wrote,
making his first failed run for mayor. And an ambitious young medical
bureaucrat named Anthony Fauci faces withering criticism from gay
activists for what they see as his too-cautious response to the spread of
AIDS. (Readers may wonder whether the long lockdowns he recommended
during covid-19 were an overcorrection.)

Mr Mahler paints a portrait of a city facing multiple crises. AIDS was at first
not just a death sentence but also a terrifying mystery, as healthy young men
swiftly sickened and died. New York accounted for one-third of America’s
recorded AIDS deaths by March 1987, and the city’s response was woefully
inadequate, with too few beds and tests, and public nursing homes that
would turn infected patients away, for fear of contamination. New York’s
efforts to deal with homelessness were similarly flat-footed.
Race relations were dire. Black men were murdered for setting foot in white
enclaves of Brooklyn and Queens. Five black and Latino teenage boys were
falsely convicted of beating and raping a jogger in Central Park; Mr Trump
took out newspaper adverts urging New York to bring back capital
punishment. In 1984 a vigilante was acquitted of attempted murder after
shooting four black teenagers who he thought were about to mug him—and
became a folk hero to many white New Yorkers.

Presiding over the chaos was Ed Koch, first elected mayor of New York in
1977. Querulous, combative and tireless, he said he wanted to be “mayor for
life”. Mr Mahler recounts his political demise. He was an avatar of an older
New York—more working-class, with political control wielded by “white
ethnics” (largely Italian, Irish and Jewish Americans)—and he failed to
understand or respond to a changing city. Elected for a third term in 1985, he
would lose the Democratic primary in 1989 to David Dinkins, the staid and
courtly Manhattan borough president who would go on to become New
York’s first black mayor.

The city’s economic engine also changed in this period; the industrial base
was gone, and Wall Street’s boom in the 1980s presaged the rise of FIRE—
finance, insurance and real estate—that would drive the city’s remarkable
growth through the 1990s and beyond. As the crack epidemic ebbed, and as
policing improved when Mr Giuliani was mayor (1994-2001), New York
grew safer and more desirable. Rents soared as people flocked in.

Mr Mahler’s book is skilfully constructed and vividly written. The author

avoids the longtime New Yorker’s trap of nostalgia. As with all great cities,
things are always dying and being reborn: anyone who wants placidity is
free to catch a flight to Bruges or Santorini. ■

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died-and-a-new-one-was-born
Culture | Digital media

What’s your preferred playback speed: 1x, 1.5x or

2x?
Young people, in particular, want audiobooks, podcasts and videos to go
faster
August 14th 2025

GLEN POWELL, a Hollywood heartthrob, likes 1x listening speed: “I want

to hear people talk at a normal human rate.” Bowen Yang, an American
comedian, prefers his narration fast and loose—“You can round up to 2x”—
though he reckons 1.8x is the perfect “Goldilocks” pace.

Both men appeared in an advert by Audible, an audiobook platform, earlier

this year, which featured various celebrities talking about the speed at which
they listen to their chosen titles. It provoked fierce debate online for
implying that those who make haste are weird, even psychopathic. “I
listened [to] your judgmental ad on 2x speed,” one TikTok user said. Some
claimed to feel “shamed” by the advert and threatened to cancel their
subscriptions.

The online brouhaha points to the changing way in which audiences,

particularly young ones, engage with digital media. Polling by The
Economist and YouGov found that 31% of Americans between the ages of
18 and 29 listen to audio at playback speeds faster than 1x, compared with
8% of people aged 45 and over.

Both Apple and Spotify offer users the option to dash through podcasts.
Many newspapers—including this one—offer audio versions of their articles
at a variety of tempos. Netflix has a button to switch up videos’ speed in its
web pages and apps. YouTube has a similar feature and recently rolled out a
4x option for its premium subscribers, apparently by popular demand.

The time-saving benefits can be enormous: YouTube claims that its viewers
collectively save more than 900 years per day thanks to its fast-playback
feature. If you had a ten-hour journey, you could listen to “Persuasion” in
eight hours and 13 minutes at 1x speed. But, if you clicked 1.5x, you’d hear
all about Anne Elliot’s exploits in five and a half hours, leaving space for
“Animal Farm” and “The Little Prince”, with time to spare (they would take
120 and 80 minutes at 1.5x, respectively).

A more garrulous pace does not seem to affect listeners’ ability to

concentrate. The average person speaks at a rate of about 150 words per
minute, but most brains are capable of processing information faster than
that, says Marcus Pearce, a cognitive scientist at Queen Mary University of
London. A recent meta-analysis led by academics at the University of
Waterloo in Canada looked at the test scores of students who had watched
lectures back at varying speeds. They found that up to 1.5x there was not
much of a difference in performance, although scores started to decrease
noticeably as playback speeds approached or exceeded 2x.

For audio and video platforms, there is no downside to offering different

playback options: the more books or episodes a subscriber gets through, the
better the advertising and sales revenues. But for listeners, the experience
differs greatly between 1x and 2x. “There’s an art of pacing, tone and
suspension” to reading aloud, says Kimberly Wetherell, an audiobook
narrator. “If you speed that up too much, you’re losing that part of the
performance.”

Rhetoric often relies on rhythm and pauses for emphasis and meaning: few
actors race through the soliloquies in “Hamlet”, for instance. Yet for many,
to speed or not to speed is no longer a question. ■

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1x-15x-or-2x
Culture | From hero to zero

Thought John Proctor was one of the good guys?

Think again
A hit Broadway show brings “The Crucible” into the era of #MeToo
August 14th 2025

On Broadway, among the jukebox musicals turning out the old hits, the stage
adaptations of blockbuster films and the star-studded revivals with eye-
wateringly expensive tickets, a new play with a single set and a mostly
teenage cast has been quietly packing the house night after night. Audiences
have been leaving the Booth Theatre stirred and tearful.

“John Proctor is the Villain” is about a classroom of clever high-schoolers

who grapple with “The Crucible” in the wake of #MeToo. It opened to
acclaim in April and was meant to close in early July, but popular demand
kept extending its run. It will vacate the stage in September only because the
theatre has another play on deck, but Universal has recently picked up the
film rights and tapped the talented young playwright, Kimberly Belflower,
to adapt her sharp script for the screen. Schools and universities across
America are licensing the play for their own productions.

Ms Belflower wrote and set the play in 2018. In October 2017 Harvey
Weinstein, a Hollywood producer, was accused of sexual abuse by multiple
women, setting off a tidal wave of allegations against powerful men. Women
across the world shared their experiences of harassment and violence; voices
long silenced were suddenly heard and even believed. It was a thrilling
moment and an alarming one, in which long-standing rules about sex and
power were being rewritten in real time.

This is the charged atmosphere in which the teenage girls in a one-stoplight

town in Georgia grapple with Arthur Miller’s take on the Salem witch trials
of 1692-93. It is a classic play their energetic and beloved teacher, Mr Smith
(Gabriel Ebert), says features “one of the great heroes of the American
theatre” in John Proctor, a married farmer who is doomed to hang for
refusing to falsely confess to witchcraft. Proctor’s resolution and refusal to
provide untrue testimony was seen as especially admirable when “The
Crucible” was first staged in 1953. It was the height of McCarthyism—a
time when many were baselessly accusing their fellow Americans of
communist ties or sympathies.

The consensus view that Proctor is a hero conveniently overlooks the fact
that the play’s drama stems from an affair Proctor had with a 17-year-old
orphan girl named Abigail, who worked for him as a servant before she was
fired over their romance. In the cold light of 2018, this aspect of Proctor’s
behaviour seems dishonourable at best. “I think he sucks,” says Shelby, one
precocious student (played originally by Sadie Sink, of “Stranger Things”
fame, and now by Chiara Aurelia).

This ensemble play is rich with vivid, well-developed characters, but in

many ways it is Shelby’s story—though it takes around 30 minutes for her to
make her entrance. Much of the play involves learning just why Shelby has
good reason to identify with Abigail, whom Proctor dismisses as a vengeful
“whore”. In the same classroom where Mr Smith teaches both English and
sex education, the other girls meet after school at their new “feminism club”
to talk about Taylor Swift, sex, the hotness of their teacher (“Have you seen
how big his feet are?”) and Shelby.

In hushed tones they make it clear that Shelby betrayed her best friend by
sleeping with her boyfriend. She has been mysteriously absent for months;
her return triggers a cascade of uncomfortable revelations, which bring the
thorniness of #MeToo into the classroom.

Ms Belflower, like many Americans, read “The Crucible” in high school,

but she saw something different in the play when she returned to it in 2018.
Her decision to revisit it was prompted, in part, by Woody Allen’s dismissal
of #MeToo as a “witch-hunt”. (The film-maker has been accused of sexual
assault by his daughter. He has denied the charges and said he is “perfectly
innocent”.) “I said to my dad: ‘It’s so weird because it seems like John
Proctor is the villain,’” Ms Belflower says. “I knew the title of this play
before I wrote it.”

The playwright was 30 and just out of graduate school when she started
writing the play, her Broadway debut. The dialogue of her ensemble of
awkward, thoughtful teens rings true, in all its searching and stuttering. The
show is artfully directed by Danya Taymor, who won a Tony award for “The
Outsiders” last year.

Today it is fashionable to dismiss #MeToo as an overcorrection, maybe even

a witch-hunt. But what makes “John Proctor is the Villain” such an
intelligent, invigorating drama is that it captures the excitement many people
felt at the time of suddenly having a language to describe sexual
transgressions—and of being in a society receptive to hearing it. Many of
the teens in high school at the time are now entering the workforce with a
few more terms and tools at their disposal.

The play lands differently now from the way it would have even a few years
ago. The fairness the girls hoped for has not transpired. Few abusers other
than Mr Weinstein have been brought to justice. Some disgraced men have
been able to resurrect their careers with ease, even at the level of America’s
highest office. ■
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Economic & financial indicators
Economic data, commodities and markets
Economic & financial indicators | Indicators

Economic data, commodities and markets

August 14th 2025
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data-commodities-and-markets
Obituary
Razia Jan insisted on educating Afghanistan’s girls
Obituary | Most willingly to school

Razia Jan insisted on educating Afghanistan’s girls

The fearless teacher and campaigner died on July 20th, aged 81
August 14th 2025

Every day she was at her school, Razia Jan held a kindergarten inspection.
Passing along the desks of excited, fidgety little girls, most of them proudly
in their uniform of green scarves and grey salwar kameez, she commanded
each small mouth to open. “Did you brush your teeth this morning?” “Yes,”
each one answered, often unconvincingly, for these were country children
from dusty village compounds. “Are you fibbing? I’ve told you before, if
you don’t have toothpaste, use salt.” Nothing escaped Auntie Razia’s eagle
eye. “What’s that stain on your scarf? Didn’t I tell you to get your mother to
wash it? You must always come here clean and neat.” Her stern commands
were still met with joyful smiles, for she was their teacher.
This was not, however, her first inspection of that day. The first was to visit
the hose in the playground from which they replenished the water coolers.
She filled her jolly spotted mug to the brim and drank it steadily down. Then
she wandered round for a while, just to see if the water would sicken her. If
she was absent, staff did this for her; not a day could be missed. In girls’
schools elsewhere in Afghanistan the wells had been poisoned. Other
schools had been set on fire or attacked with guns and grenades, mostly by
Islamist Taliban terrorists. The rule for girls walking to school, since almost
all of them walked, was to go in pairs or a group, keep their heads down, and
go fast. Even so some were pelted with stones, or had acid thrown in their
faces, by men who thought that girls should not go to school at all.

Razia Jan never ceased to be outraged by this. She grew up in the 1940s and
1950s in a beautiful country and in a well-off, liberal family. As a matter of
course she went freely anywhere, never covered her head and even rode a
bike. Naturally she went to school and after that to college, studying early
education and ending up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In America, where
she stayed because the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan, she had full
charge of her own life. She brought up her son Lars alone, started a tailoring
business on Boston’s South Shore and rose to be president of the local
Rotary chapter, a force to be reckoned with.

After the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001 her attention turned back
to Afghanistan. Her country, though now free of Soviet invaders and a five-
year Taliban government, needed everything: not only physical rebuilding
but food, clothing, medicines and fuel. She helped send over 30,000 pairs of
children’s shoes, but random donations like that barely scratched the surface.
Only a much slower, deeper project would assure a brighter future for her
country: defying the blind bigotry of most Afghan men, she had to champion
the education of girls.

Her school, the Zabuli Education Centre, opened in 2008 in a cluster of

seven poor villages called Deh’Subz, 30 miles north of Kabul. With typical
persistence, she had persuaded the Ministry of Education to donate a plot to
her. There, in the teeth of intense local suspicion, she saw her school
emerge: two storeys, 14 smallish rooms, with funding largely from
American Rotary friends.
Girls soon flooded in. More than 100 enrolled in the first year; in 2020, 800
were there. In 2016 Zabuli celebrated its first graduates from 12th grade. She
had an institute ready for them, where they could train as midwives or
teachers to educate more girls. But then, in 2021, the Taliban returned to
power and all that stopped. No institute, and no classes beyond sixth grade
when the pupils, at 11 or 12, were beginning to revel in learning English,
Persian and Pashto, harder maths and science. Auntie Razia had even added
a tech lab with a computer and internet in it. There the older pupils could
watch videos, all crowding wide-eyed round her.

That loss of half her students made her sadder than she could say. But she
was still there, having got further than almost anyone else. Her secret was
her fearless handling of men. She liked to think they were a bit afraid of her,
because she was so forthright and also because she was old. Mind you, she
had not made life easy for herself by building a school in the countryside.
There the crazy views of women persisted, whether or not the Taliban were
in power. In early meetings with the village elders, 35 of them, none would
look at her. She was talking! And she wasn’t covered! But her own head was
high; she knew how to soften them up. A man, addressed as “honorable
Headmaster”, was the last word on discipline. She appealed to the elders to
protect the school, employing some of them to guard the gate. Very early on
all pupils were taught to write their fathers’ names, as many of their fathers
could not do. This caused joy and astonishment. The school fed and clothed
the girls, and sometimes their families, free of charge.

Hostility surfaced again, though, when little girls became teenagers. Older
pupils would be stopped in the street and admonished to wear the burqa.
They became engaged, even married, and usually to men they had not
chosen. An acclaimed film of the school, “What Tomorrow Brings”, made in
2016, showed how girls might stop attending then, spending hours, like their
mothers, crouching in murky kitchens to chop coriander, or cleaning the
house. Razia and the other teachers struggled to rescue them, confronting the
fathers if necessary and, if they failed, at least continuing to send books. The
school had a mobile library that still functions for housebound, frustrated
young women.

Amid her own frustrations, Auntie Razia stayed positive. When the older
girls left, she took in many more younger ones. To plant even a little
education in a girl’s mind was to sow a seed that would flower. As she was
building her school, some elders had asked her to make it for boys, since
these were the backbone of the community. Ah, she said, but women were
the country’s eyes. Though silent, they did not miss much. They observed
the little things, as she did: the stain on a scarf; the bruise from a beating; the
pride at reading a sentence, colouring a small girl’s face. ■
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afghanistans-girls
 Table of Contents
The world this week
Politics
Business
The weekly cartoon
Leaders
How to win at foreign policy
Xi Jinping’s weaponisation of rare-earth elements will ultimately
backfire
America and its Asian allies need to spend more to deter China
The shutdown of ocean currents could freeze Europe
Why South Africa should scrap Black Economic Empowerment
Letters
Is the legislation of the GENIUS Act deeply flawed?
By Invitation
The far north has become NATO’s soft underbelly, writes John Bolton
The world needs more than drugs to fight obesity, writes Novo
Nordisk’s ex-boss
Briefing
China’s power over rare earths is not as great as it seems
United States
Why Donald Trump is wrong to take over the DC police
Why the Trump administration excites some personal-injury lawyers
How many pythons could you catch in ten days?
Texas’s renegade Democrats prepare for a glorious defeat
Trump 2 is pushing environmentalists to rethink their approach
The real collusion between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin
The Americas
Liberal Uruguay and the right to die
A martyr in the making?
Bolivia’s crazy kingdom of coca
Asia
America’s biggest ask in Asia
Cow’s milk, as well as Russian oil, fuels the US-India trade war
What Sara Duterte’s comeback means for the Philippines
 Indonesia’s new president has daddy issues
China
How scared should you be of “the China squeeze”?
China claims to want women to have children and a career
Hong Kong is super superstitious
Middle East & Africa
Race, power and money in South Africa
Ivory Coast’s president is overstaying his welcome
The world’s hardest makeover: Hamas
Lebanon’s government is taking on a weakened Hizbullah
The killing of journalists in Gaza
Europe
What Putin wants from Trump in Alaska
Donald Trump brokers a peace plan in the Caucasus
The Russian-run town squatting on NATO territory
The looming military threat in the Arctic
China’s planned Turkish EV factories have yet to power up
The colourful civic groups that hold Germany together
Must Europe choose between “strategic autonomy” and August off?
Britain
Britain is a global gaming superpower
The Fantasy Premier League is changing Britain’s favourite sport
Asian tourists are returning to Britain. But they look different
Vaccinations to prevent cervical cancer have plummeted in Britain
Still want to be a London cabbie?
Aux barricades, boomers!
International
America’s new plan to fight a war with China
The end of the second world war
Business
How AI could create the first one-person unicorn
Japan’s carmakers are trying to tinker their way out of tariff pain
A 400-year-old Chinese cough syrup is winning over Westerners
Italian bosses want Giorgia Meloni to hurry up with reform
A new wave of clean-energy innovation is building
Should you trust that five-star rating on Airbnb?
Trump wants to command bosses like Xi does. He is failing
Finance & economics
Growth-loving authoritarians are failing on their own terms
Where will win from Trump’s tariffs?
Ivy League universities are on a debt binge
To sell Fannie and Freddie, Trump must answer a $7trn question
America’s housing market is shuddering
Palantir might be the most overvalued firm of all time
What 630,000 paintings say about the world economy
Science & technology
Earth’s climate is approaching irreversible tipping points
Smoke from boreal wildfires could cool the Arctic
Drones could soon become more intrusive than ever
Are nightmares bad for your health?
Culture
The largest dig in a lifetime is under way in Pompeii
Bombs, dinosaurs and UFOs: Luis Walter Alvarez’s eclectic career
Private chefs are spilling the culinary secrets of the super-rich
The four years when old New York died and a new one was born
What’s your preferred playback speed: 1x, 1.5x or 2x?
Thought John Proctor was one of the good guys? Think again
Economic & financial indicators
Economic data, commodities and markets
Obituary
Razia Jan insisted on educating Afghanistan’s girls