The Economist - 16 August 2025

Год выпуска: August 2025

Автор: The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group

Жанр: Экономика/Политика

Издательство: «The Economist Newspaper Ltd»

Формат: PDF (журнал на английском языке)

Качество: OCR

Количество страниц: 76

HOW TO WIN AT FOREIGN POLICY

• Donald Trump’s capricious dealmaking destabilises the world: leader, page 7.
• Ukrainians fear he may give Russia what it could not win on the battlefield, page 38.
• The real risk of collusion between Mr Trump and Vladimir Putin: Lexington, page 22.
• The far north has become NATO’s soft underbelly, writes John Bolton: By Invitation, page 12.

Breaking China’s rare-earths chokehold

• Xi Jinping’s weaponisation of rare-earth elements will ultimately backfire: leader, page 8.
• How can the West resist? Briefing, page 13.
• Mr Xi masters the dark arts of the trade war, page 31.

Climate tipping-points

• When climate change poses a strategic threat, it needs a strategic response: leader, page 9.
• Earth’s climate is approaching irreversible tipping points. Working out how close they are is a challenge, page 64.

Al and one-man unicorns

• How Al could create the first one-person billion-dollar company, page 51.

The glory of Pompeii

• The largest excavation in a lifetime is under way, page 68.

The world this week Politics

• 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.

Extra-territorial claims

• 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 Shein-baum, 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.

Not a Long time at the IRS

• 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.

The world this week Business

• 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.

Wham, bam, thank you Tan

• 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 rebounde in June. Higher employer taxes came into effect during the quarter, which was also marked by uncertainty over trade.
• 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 Al.
• 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 stock-market value after announcing that it would have to raise 6obn 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.

Web crawler

• 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.

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