IT IS ILLEGAL for Americans to export weapons without a licence. You may not FedEx a ballistic missile to Europe or post a frigate to Asia. But in the 1990s the country’s labyrinthine arms-export controls covered something more unusual: cryptographic software that could make messages unreadable to anyone other than the intended recipients. When American programmers built tools that could encode a newfangled message, the email, their government investigated them as illegal arms dealers. The result was Kafkaesque. In 1996 a court ruled that “Applied Cryptography”, a popular textbook, could be exported—but deemed an accompanying disk to be an export-controlled munition.

THE WATER thieves come at night. They arrive in trucks, suck water out of irrigation canals and drive off. This infuriates Alejandro Meneses, who owns a big vegetable farm in Coquimbo, a parched province of Chile. In theory, his landholding comes with the right to pour 40 litres of river-water a second on his fields. But thanks to drought, exacerbated by theft, he can get just a tenth of that, which he must negotiate with his neighbours. If the price of food goes up because farmers like him cannot grow enough, “there will be a big social problem,” he says.

INDIAN EXPRESS on a Friday evening is always bustling. Diners from all corners of India dig in to kebabs and curries. Kingfisher, an Indian lager, flows freely, and Bollywood music blares from the speakers. A similar (if slightly more abstemious) scene plays out down the road at Radha Krishna, a vegetarian eatery. One might be in any of a dozen cities in India. But this paratha party is happening in Bangkok.

JUST BEFORE Donald Trump became the Republican nominee for president, the party published its foreign-policy goals: “Prevent world war three, restore peace in Europe and in the Middle East, and build a great Iron Dome missile-defence shield over our entire country”. The last of those promises has become a staple of the Trump campaign. In his speech accepting the nomination, he promised that an American missile shield will ensure “no enemy can strike our homeland”,  adding that it would be “built entirely in the USA”.

SUZIE JIMENEZ cried as she waited in the car park. Her 14-year-old son was in the emergency department, suffering from stomach pains. He felt humiliated when doctors in Austin, Texas, told him that because of his bigger body he would need to have a CT scan rather than an ultrasound. He was scared to tell them he weighed 360 pounds (163kg). A shortage of Wegovy had meant that despite being approved for the weight-loss drug, he had not yet been able to start it. Ms Jimenez, at times the sole breadwinner for her family of five, says they sometimes ate fast food for “comfort”.

THE OLYMPIC flame will illuminate the City of Light from July 26th, when the world’s greatest sporting spectacle gets under way in Paris. Although France still lacks a government after a snap national parliamentary vote in recent weeks, its capital will host the 33rd Olympiad in style. Dressage events will take place in the magnificent grounds of Versailles; volleyballs will whizz over nets by the Eiffel Tower. Organisers hope to show the best of France to visiting sports fans, business executives and foreign politicians. One of the thousands of volunteers involved describes “an infectious positive energy”.

GLOOM WILL accompany the 75th anniversary of the Geneva Conventions next month. Debates rage as to whether this batch of treaties, which govern how wars may be fought, and later protocols, which ban genocide, torture and more, remain fit for purpose. The head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has warned of “increasing elasticity” in how countries apply the laws of war, which the conventions underpin.

NOT LONG ago a part of the British government asked RAND Europe, a think-tank in Cambridge, England, to conduct some research on undersea critical infrastructure. The think-tank studied publicly available maps of internet and electricity cables. It interviewed experts. It held focus groups. Halfway through the process Ruth Harris, the leader of the project, realised that she had inadvertently unearthed many sensitive details that could be exploited by Russia or other adversaries. When she approached the unnamed government department, they were shocked. The reaction, she recalls, was: “Oh my god. This is secret.” When they learned that Ms Harris’s team was drawn from all over Europe, they demanded that it be overhauled, she says: “This needs to be UK eyes only.”

AT HIS FIRST summit with European leaders in 2021, after years of upheaval under Donald Trump, Joe Biden exulted: “America is back.” To which Emmanuel Macron of France asked: “For how long?” The question will resonate more loudly than ever as NATO leaders meet in Washington on July 9th-11th. Mr Biden is limping behind Mr Trump in the race for the White House. Mr Macron himself is being overwhelmed by a populist wave. And the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, is languishing in the polls. Sir Keir Starmer, set to become Britain’s new prime minister this week, may feel he is joining NATO’s last supper, not its 75th birthday party.

It was all supposed to be very different: a celebration of the world’s most successful alliance, created in 1949 in the early days of the cold war. Its longevity has defied naysayers for decades. And its purpose has been bitterly re-affirmed by Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine. Yet NATO again lives in dread for its future. Partly this is owing to external threats, but mainly it is because of the internal convulsions that will result if NATO-sceptics such as Mr Trump and Marine Le Pen, leader of the hard-right National Rally, come to power next year and in 2027, respectively.

The uncertainty will spread beyond NATO to America’s globe-spanning alliances, and could scarcely come at a worse moment. The dangers to the democratic world are greater than at any time since the cold war’s end. Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 and has threatened to use nuclear weapons. China menaces Taiwan, a self-governing island it claims as its own, and is bullying neighbours such as the Philippines. Russia and China have intensified their “no limits” partnership, and both have drawn closer to other Eurasian autocracies. Iran and its proxies are engaged in a deepening conflict with Israel and American forces. Iran has also sold drones and ballistic missiles to Russia. Similarly, North Korea has shipped hundreds of thousands of artillery shells and just signed a mutual-defence pact with Russia.

AT HIS FIRST summit with European leaders in 2021, after years of upheaval under Donald Trump, Joe Biden exulted: “America is back.” To which Emmanuel Macron of France asked: “For how long?” The question will resonate more loudly than ever as NATO leaders meet in Washington on July 9th-11th. Mr Biden is limping behind Mr Trump in the race for the White House. Mr Macron himself is being overwhelmed by a populist wave. And the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, is languishing in the polls. Sir Keir Starmer, set to become Britain’s new prime minister this week, may feel he is joining NATO’s last supper, not its 75th birthday party.

It was all supposed to be very different: a celebration of the world’s most successful alliance, created in 1949 in the early days of the cold war. Its longevity has defied naysayers for decades. And its purpose has been bitterly re-affirmed by Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine. Yet NATO again lives in dread for its future. Partly this is owing to external threats, but mainly it is because of the internal convulsions that will result if NATO-sceptics such as Mr Trump and Marine Le Pen, leader of the hard-right National Rally, come to power next year and in 2027, respectively.

In Japan it starts with the pulsating song of cicadas; in Alaska, with salmon swimming upstream. However it begins, summer in the northern hemisphere—where more than 85% of the world’s population live—soon involves dangerous levels of heat. This year is no exception—indeed, it carries the trend further. In Saudi Arabia more than 1,300 pilgrims died during the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, as temperatures exceeded 50°C. India’s capital, Delhi, endured 40 days above 40°C between May and June. And in Mexico scores of howler monkeys have been falling dead from the trees with heatstroke.

OVER THE past two decades the number of people studying in countries other than their own has tripled, to more than 6m. International students from China have caused most of that increase. Youngsters flocked to universities in English-speaking countries to expand both their minds and their opportunities. In return they brought valuable brainpower and large piles of foreign cash. Governments have sometimes viewed this bounty as a reason to put less of their own money into higher education. Institutions in Australia, Britain and Canada have grown increasingly reliant on foreign flows to subsidise research and to cover the costs of educating local scholars.

Now the market for international study is about to undergo a huge change. Chinese school-leavers are growing gradually less keen to travel; in their place, Indian students are becoming the main engine of growth. In 2022 Britain issued more student visas to Indian citizens than they doled out to Chinese ones (see chart 1). So did America. In both countries, it was the first time in years that had occurred.

THE ISLAND of Guam, a tiny American territory that lies more than 6,000km west of Hawaii, has long known that it would take a battering in any Sino-American war. The island’s expanding airfields and ports serve as springboards for American ships, subs and bombers. In the opening hours of a conflict, these would be subject to wave after wave of Chinese missiles. But an advance party of attackers seems to have lurked quietly within Guam’s infrastructure for years. In mid-2021 a Chinese hacking group—later dubbed Volt Typhoon—burrowed deep inside the island’s communication systems. The intrusions had no obvious utility for espionage. They were intended, as America’s government would later conclude, for “disruptive or destructive cyber-attacks against…critical infrastructure in the event of a major crisis or conflict”. Sabotage, in short.

For many years, Sino-American skirmishing in the cyber domain was largely about stealing secrets. In 2013 Edward Snowden, a contractor, revealed that the National Security Agency (nsa), America’s signals-intelligence agency, had targeted Chinese mobile-phone firms, universities and undersea cables. China, in turn, has spent decades stealing vast quantities of intellectual property from American firms, a process that Keith Alexander, then head of the NSA, once called the “greatest transfer of wealth in history”. In recent years this dynamic has changed. Chinese cyber-espionage has continued, but its operations have also grown more ambitious and aggressive. Russia, too, has intensified its cyber-activities in Ukraine, with Russia-linked groups also targeting water facilities in Europe. These campaigns hint at a new era of wartime cyber-sabotage.

An entire generation of tenants is tearing its hair out. Across the rich world—from America to New Zealand—millions spend more than a third of their disposable income on rent. The squeeze extends from social democracies that prize strong tenancy rights to Anglophone countries that prefer homeownership—and it is mostly getting worse. The good news for anxious renters is that they are gaining a louder voice as their numbers swell. The bad news is that campaigners and politicians mostly focus on the wrong kinds of solutions to their woes.

The 20th century saw an astonishing rise in homeownership. In 1920 about 20% of Britons owned their own home; by 2000, 70% did. Many Anglophone countries followed a similar path. Even in countries less attached to the idea of owning, private renting became less common after a boom in social housing.

ON MAY 6TH Rafael Grossi, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), travelled to Tehran and met Hossein Amirabdollahian, Iran’s foreign minister. Less than two weeks later, on May 19th, Mr Amirabdollahian was dead, killed in a helicopter crash that also took the life of Ebrahim Raisi, Iran’s president, among others.

Their deaths throw Iran’s sclerotic theocracy into a moment of confusion and uncertainty, one with far-reaching implications for the country’s nuclear programme. Mr Grossi, fresh from his trip to Iran, recently spoke to The Economist about the Iranian nuclear file, as well as the other items on his forbidding to-do list, from the Russian-occupied Zaporizhia nuclear-power plant in Ukraine to the “growing attraction” of nuclear weapons worldwide.

SAILING AROUND the northern point of Dadan island, the extent of the geopolitical challenge facing Taiwan becomes glaringly clear: to starboard a small military outpost guards Taiwan’s Kinmen islands and their 140,000-odd residents; to port a pair of curved skyscrapers tower over the Chinese city of Xiamen, whose 5m people stretch all round the bay.

So close are the two sides that the winners of an annual swimming relay race cover the few kilometres between them in less than 90 minutes. A Chinese takeover of Kinmen might not take much longer, such is the disparity in power. The boat’s owner is not keen on mainlanders fishing and dredging sand in Taiwan’s waters. But, having witnessed the artillery duels of the past, nor is he keen to fight to preserve his country’s democracy. “If Taiwanese soldiers left Kinmen, there would be no war,” he avers. And if China ruled Kinmen? “We would be richer and nobody would dare mess with us.” Such ambiguity in Taiwan gives China a vulnerability to try to exploit.

RARELY HAVE international courts been busier. In The Hague, the International Criminal Court (ICC) is considering war-crimes prosecutions against Israeli leaders, including Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, over the conflict in Gaza. It has already issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, for war crimes in Ukraine. The International Court of Justice (ICJ), also in The Hague, is weighing genocide charges against Israel. In Strasbourg the European Court of Human Rights will hear a request in June for Russia to pay compensation to Ukraine.

And yet, for all the legal action, rarely have activists seemed gloomier about holding rulers to account for heinous acts. “We are at the gates of hell,” says Agnès Callamard, head of Amnesty International. Countries are destroying international law, built over more than seven decades, in service of “the higher god of military necessity, or geostrategic domination”.

WHEN JIHADIST gunmen shot their way through Crocus City Hall in Moscow on March 22nd, killing more than 140 concert-goers and setting the venue alight, intelligence agencies across the West were aghast. It was the clearest warning that Islamic State (IS), seemingly smashed five years ago, is returning to spectacular acts of international terrorism. Western countries fear becoming targets.

The dread is deepest in France and Germany, which are hosting two of the world’s biggest sporting events this summer: the Olympic games and the Euro 2024 football championship. The floating ceremony along the Seine to open the Paris Olympics has been curtailed to limit the risk; a “Plan B” is in the works, too. “If you can do Moscow, you can do Paris,” explains Gilles Kepel, an expert on jihadism, “Moscow could be a training run for the Olympics.”

Terrorism is a grisly theatre of violence, for which mega events offer a tempting stage. Black September, a Palestinian group, gripped the world’s attention when it took nine Israeli athletes hostage at the Munich Olympics in 1972. IS likes to strike at big, crowded venues: the Bataclan theatre in Paris in 2015, the Manchester arena in 2017 and now Crocus City Hall.

These days the West has largely turned away from the long “war on terror”, having expended much blood and treasure to destroy the main jihadist groups. But extremists are on the march again. They have re-emerged in havens old and new, and are thriving in cyberspace. Furthermore, Israel’s war in Gaza is all but certain to radicalise a new generation.

The history of global jihadism is one of reinvention under pressure from the West. After September 11th 2001, America and its allies overthrew the Taliban in Afghanistan and evicted al-Qaeda. American forces killed its leader, Osama bin Laden, in Pakistan in 2011. Then his successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was eliminated by a drone strike in Kabul in 2022. Al-Qaeda has yet to name a new leader. Meanwhile IS, al-Qaeda’s even more wanton progeny, caused a sensation by carving out a “caliphate” across large parts of Iraq and Syria in 2014, drawing volunteers from Europe and elsewhere. Its last stronghold was destroyed in 2019 and IS has lost four leaders since that year began.

Even so, jihadists fight on. They still revile the West and feed insurgencies from Mali to the Philippines. Of the two brands, IS is the more dynamic. “In the war of ideas Islamic State has defeated al-Qaeda, especially among young people,” says Aaron Zelin of the Washington Institute, an American think-tank. “IS created the caliphate, even if it was destroyed. Al-Qaeda only talked about it.”

All this, says Mr Kepel, has produced three overlapping phases of violence: attacks directed by al-Qaeda in the 2000s; strikes enabled or assisted by looser networks linked to IS in the 2010s; and what he calls “ambient jihad”, the leaderless, self-started violence predominant in recent years. The greater the degree of organisation, the greater the carnage jihadists can generally inflict. Without a guiding hand, lone-wolf attacks are typically less deadly, but they are harder to detect and can be horrifying nonetheless. In France a school-teacher was beheaded in 2020 and another stabbed to death last year. And many fret about the growing number of minors drawn to militancy.

Today the jihadist movement is dispersed and fluid. Some factions focus on fighting the “near enemy”, ie, local governments, and seizing control of territories. Others are again turning towards the “far enemy”, the West. Today, as before 9/11, Afghanistan is exporting terrorism. President Joe Biden’s chaotic withdrawal in 2021, seeking to end America’s “endless wars”, led to the Taliban’s immediate return to power. The killing of Zawahiri was evidence that the Taliban are again sheltering al-Qaeda figures, who are lying low. The big headache is Islamic State’s franchise in Afghanistan, “Khorasan Province” (ISKP).

It burst to prominence during America’s retreat from Kabul, when a suicide bomber killed more than 180 people, among them 13 American soldiers. Unlike al-Qaeda, ISKP is suppressed by the Taliban, though not entirely. It has exploited networks in neighbouring countries. By Mr Zelin’s count, ISKP conducted or attempted one attack abroad in 2021, four in 2022, 12 last year and 15 so far this year.

Among its recent targets, it bombed a memorial service in Iran for Qassem Suleimani, an Iranian general slain by America, killing more than 90 in January. The Moscow attack proves it has the desire and capacity to cause harm ever farther far afield, say Western officials. “ISKP strikes where it sees an opportunity,” argues Hugo Micheron of SciencesPo university in Paris. “If it has not attacked in Europe it is because it has been thwarted so far.”

The situation is all the more grave given other geopolitical complexities. American forces in Iraq and Syria are thinly spread and may draw down further, not least because they have been repeatedly attacked by Iran’s allies. America is renegotiating the status of its forces in Iraq. And an American withdrawal from Syria—advocated by Mr Trump and seemingly discussed by Mr Biden—could fatally weaken Kurdish allies and result in the breakout of thousands of jihadist fighters held in their prison camps.

In the Sahel, meanwhile, coups have forced French forces to leave Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. UN peacekeepers have also withdrawn from Mali; American troops are likely to leave Niger and perhaps Chad, too. In their place Russia’s Wagner mercenary outfit is being hired to protect the putschists. Whether they can beat back jihadists is doubtful. A recent UN report warns that regional branches of al-Qaeda are gaining ground, threatening west African coastal states, and may establish a “terrorist sanctuary”. Spooks fret that, in both regions, jihadists could turn to attacking the West. A similar worry applies to al-Qaeda’s powerful ally in Somalia, the Shabaab, and its branch in Yemen, AQAP, which have histories of cross-border terrorism.

The battle is under way in the digital realm, too. The physical caliphate may have gone, but the virtual one is potent. Jihadist tracts and videos are distributed in many languages. With the war in Gaza, the torrent has turned into a flood as al-Qaeda and IS try to exploit fury over the suffering of Palestinians.

The ferment is likely to radicalise a new generation of Muslims. On April 25th a Moroccan asylum-seeker was convicted of killing a British pensioner “because Israel was killing children”. New terrorist groups “are probably forming as we speak”, says Christine Abizaid, director of America’s National Counter-Terrorism Centre, the main intelligence hub on jihadists. For all the horror Hamas inflicted on Israel on October 7th, she added, Palestinian groups don’t seem inclined to attack the West.

Upstaged by Hamas, which it disdains, yet unable to land a blow on Israel, ISKP is inciting its followers to strike wherever they can. “Lions of Islam: Chase your preys whether Jewish, Christian or their allies,” urged ISKP in January.

So what next? Jihadist plots in Europe, successful and failed, abated with the waning of the caliphate, according to Petter Nesser of the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (see chart 1).

As jihadists regroup, however, the more organised sort of attack may return to the fore. In Europe France is most vulnerable, in part because of the clash between French state secularism and Muslim public religiosity. Britain and, increasingly, Germany, may be next on the hit-list. They have often been targets in the past (see chart 2). Sweden and Denmark have drawn ire because of their Koran-burning protests. Russia is prominent, adds Mr Nesser, given its intervention in Syria in 2015 and its alliance with Iran.

Jihadists have been arrested across Europe, often with ISKP links. The group operates in part through a diaspora of Muslims from ex-Soviet lands in central Asia and the Caucasus, a change from earlier cycles of terrorism that often involved extremists of north African and Pakistani extraction. Some ISKP figures in Turkey form what the UN calls “a logistical hub for [ISKP] operations in Europe”, not least by moving funds through cryptocurrencies.

Military experience, whether in training camps or actual jihadist battles, increases the zeal and lethality of attackers. Fortunately the flow of Western volunteers to warzones has slowed to “a dribble”, say security sources. But militants jailed for terrorism offences during earlier periods of violence can inspire and organise others once released from prison.

Some jihadists might be lurking among the mass of migrants moving to Europe and America. Nine people of central Asian extraction, arrested in Germany and the Netherlands last July for allegedly plotting attacks on behalf of IS, had come from Ukraine. In America, hundreds of people with possible links to terrorism have been found crossing the Mexican and Canadian borders since 2022. But Ms Abizaid says there is no evidence of known “operatives” trying to slip across land borders.

If they do attack, officials fear jihadists might import technologies from foreign battlefields, such as drones that drop munitions and bombs without metal parts. Encrypted communications—in apps, video games or the metaverse—make it easier for militants to organise. Artificial intelligence, perhaps including deep fakes, facilitates the production and translation of propaganda.

Always alert

Western intelligence agencies thus have a daunting task, tracking a mosaic of jihadists abroad while trying to spot self-starting ones at home. They must also watch far-right terrorists, usually self-radicalised, who both hate Muslims and often learn from jihadist manuals. And they must monitor an older threat: terrorism sponsored by radical states such as Iran.

Ultimately jihadism reflects the profound problems of the greater Middle East. The West lacks the power to fix them, and has often made them worse. Part of the answer lies in close intelligence co-operation. America warned Russia of the looming attack in Moscow, a sign of its central role in global counter-terrorism. The strike on Zawahiri, moreover, showed America’s ability to hit terrorists “over the horizon”. But funds and personnel have been shifted to other priorities, such as confronting the threat from Russia and from China. The West may have hoped to end the war on terrorism. But the terrorists are still at war. ■

FLOWS OF INFORMATION and energy underpin all economic activity, and advanced technologies support both. Hence the sky-high stakes in the tech wars between America and China. Started during Donald Trump’s first term in office, between 2017 and 2021, they have continued under Joe Biden. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, bridles at America’s export controls on “chokehold technologies”. The struggle is reshaping relationships and supply chains the world over. And its costs are mounting. Estimates vary, but the IMF reckons that the elimination of high-tech trade across rival blocs could cost as much as 1.2% of global GDP each year—about $1trn.

Whether China or America controls energy and information technologies is an “ethno-civilisational question”, says Evan Ellis of the Army War College. The temperature of the confrontation is likely to rise over the coming years. Neither Mr Biden nor Mr Trump will shrink from challenging China, perhaps the issue which enjoys the highest level of bipartisan support in Washington. And for China to back down from what it sees as its rightful place in the global order is unthinkable for Mr Xi.

The next stage of the tech wars will play out in two major arenas. One is chipmaking, which creates the world’s information-processing infrastructure, including the one that trains and runs artificially intelligent software. Any degree of Chinese control over the production of chips is intolerable to America. The other is green technology, as its components may become the backbone of the entire global economy. For China the strength of its companies in this arena is not just a natural consequence of two decades of focused industrial policy, but a confirmation of its important role as a global leader.

At the moment the battle is over apps. On April 23rd Congress passed a bill asking the Chinese owners of TikTok, a video platform used by 170m Americans, to sell up in 270 days or face a ban. Days before Chinese authorities forced Apple to drop WhatsApp and Threads, platforms owned by Meta, from its Chinese app store. But despite the outcries, apps are a second-order concern as they require chips and energy to run—not the reverse.

Consider the current positions of the two countries. America is pushing chipmakers to expand cutting-edge production on its shores. On April 8th the government announced $6.6bn in subsidies for Taiwan’s TSMC for three new fabs in Arizona. On April 15th came $6.4bn for South Korea’s Samsung to build fabs in Texas. The moves fall under its $280bn Chips and Science Act, an industrial policy introduced in 2022, which incentivises the creation of fabs and the training of staff for them. Also in America’s toolkit is the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a $369bn green-subsidy package passed in 2022. It supports domestic production of green gear through tax credits. Meanwhile, America maintains high tariffs on Chinese solar panels and EVs, of 14.25% and 25% respectively.

China has nonetheless raced ahead in green tech. Longi is the world’s largest solar-panel manufacturer; CATL is the largest battery maker and BYD is wrestling with Tesla for the title of the world’s largest maker of EVs. Chinese chipmaking has not panned out so spectacularly, however, despite government subsidies of about $150bn over the past ten years. That is to some degree a measure of America’s success in blocking the flow of chipmaking technology into the country over the past two years.

So what next when it comes to chipmaking? The first casualty in the tech wars was Huawei. It was the company on which the Trump administration honed the export controls that are now used on China as a whole. The question is what comes after America’s election in November. Whoever wins, the next president will almost certainly launch a new, Huawei-style campaign against other Chinese tech firms. This is partly because China hawks will pack any new American cabinet.

Under a Trump presidency, foreign companies may have extra reasons to fret. TSMC is one such: in July last year Mr Trump grumbled that Taiwan had taken away America’s chip business. But it is South Korean chip firms, SK Hynix and Samsung, that stand out most, having invested some $35bn in China since 2020. “Trump 2.0 is going to play a lot more hardball with the Koreans,” says one congressional staffer who works on Chinese tech policy. Under Mr Trump, he says, American subsidies will come with a requirement not to invest in China at all.

Firms in related industries are on alert. MGI Tech, a spin-off of the Chinese giant BGI which makes genome-sequencing equipment, is likely to be a target. Republicans, in particular, are upset that MGI’s machines have been installed in European hospitals. “Major multilateral controls on quantum technology” being exported to China are also likely, says a Republican staffer. That may be intended to deny China access to quantum computing and sensing technologies which may become important in the future, rather than waiting until they prove themselves in the market.

American corporations are not entirely relaxed, either. Although advisers and lawyers believe the Chips Act will remain in force, some big companies, such as Intel, may be keen to know that the contracts governing their disbursements under it are ironclad. “We want to make sure that is legally binding,” says a chip executive.

Tech bosses may also dislike discussions about reforming the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS). This is the agency in charge of the export controls which have been used extensively over the past six years to attack Chinese technology firms. Many Republicans and some Democrats believe that BIS staff have been slow-pedalling the controls. But chip firms rely on the bureau’s machinery, according to one tech boss. Some would consider moving some operations abroad and altering supply chains if BIS comes under fire, so as to be freer of Washington’s control.

If America acts against Chinese chipmakers, China lacks responses which are not obviously self-destructive. It found one last year: placing export controls on gallium and germanium, two materials which are small but important ingredients in the chipmaking process. China could do so because it supplied 98% and 60% of global output in 2022. Commodity-export controls are weak, however, compared with America’s grip on intellectual property.

More powerful are Chinese efforts to dominate the production of less technologically advanced chips. One open question in the tech wars is the extent to which growing Chinese control of less advanced chip manufacturing can satisfy global demand for the sort of computation that is found in EVs and smart grids.

What about green technologies? America has little it could deny China, and so its plan over the coming years is to withhold access to its market, the world’s second-largest, and to persuade allies to do the same. Mr Biden will probably continue down the climate-friendly path he has followed in office. He will reinforce links with allies and use public money to accelerate America’s decarbonisation while blocking many, if not all, Chinese imports. Mr Trump is a different story. Talk of the more aggressive, climate-agnostic approach that he is likely to adopt is already rattling executives in America and around the world.

The IRA should survive either man. “No Republican is going to say ‘I support it’, but I think they’re OK with the IRA continuing to exist,” says one Republican insider. That may be because $74bn of the $106bn IRA-stimulated investment to date has gone to Republican counties. An extreme aim may be to remove any and all Chinese components from the supply chains whose creation the IRA is encouraging. “The ability for Chinese companies to receive a single dime from the IRA is going to go,” says the same insider. It’s possible that the act morphs from a climate initiative into one exclusively supporting high-tech manufacturing in America.

The automotive industry could be among those which struggle most amid an anti-green onslaught. Mr Trump has called EVs a “hoax” and says Chinese-made EVs will destroy America’s car industry. That leaves car firms in a bind. The biggest, says one lobbyist, have developed plans to establish joint ventures with Chinese battery companies on American soil. So far only Ford has spoken publicly about its plans to license technology from CATL; Republican attacks followed. “I know that companies have negotiated these things. I suspect they’re waiting, because if Trump gets elected these [deals] will disintegrate,” explains the lobbyist.

Chinese solar, EV and battery firms will keep trying to find ways into the American and European markets. That could be through joint ventures with domestic companies, or through factories built in countries such as Mexico with which America has a free-trade agreement. But China’s domestic market, and that of the world outside the West, provides plenty of opportunity; China installed more solar in 2023 than America has in total. In chips China has market power, but not technological dominance. With green tech it has both.

Uncovering the costs

The potential effects of prolonging the tech wars are sobering. Any American administration that fights China on every front could lose focus on the fronts that matter most. Chinese green-tech exports are booming all around the world (see chart), and installations within China are growing faster than anywhere else, so denying access to the American market may not do much to weaken the grip of Chinese firms. And a more unilateral approach to controlling the flow of advanced technologies into China may harm the fragile co-operative relationship that the Biden administration has built with the Japanese, among others, in recent years. American policy could also alienate European allies. American policymakers report a lack of interest from their European counterparts on export controls and outbound investment screening against China.

But the biggest costs of the tech wars could be the bifurcation of the world’s information and energy-technology industries, leading to sagging economic growth and slower decarbonisation. They will probably accelerate firms’ secretive efforts to develop offerings for the Chinese market over which the American government has little or no control. That could inadvertently give China more power to set technological standards in parts of the world that use its equipment.

The Biden administration’s approach to China and technology has been relatively predictable. For that reason, it has been less disruptive. By all accounts, Mr Trump would break with Mr Biden’s policy even though it is a continuation of his own first term. Unfortunately, an even more aggressive campaign may lead to worse outcomes for America, China and the world. ■

BELLY DOWN in a muddy Dutch forest, Sabrina van den Goorbergh fires blanks from a Colt C7 assault rifle. The third-year medical student is taking part in the Dienjaar (service-year), a new programme that lets young Dutch sign up for a year-long trial in the armed forces rather than the regular four-year enlistment term. The programme is a success, drawing three applicants for each spot, and the government plans to scale it up from 625 to 1,000 trainees next year.

Yet it can hardly begin to solve the country’s recruitment problems. The Dutch armed forces number 49,000, less than a fifth of their size during the cold war, and one in ten positions is vacant. Last year regular enlistment yielded just 3,600 of a hoped-for 5,000 new soldiers. This is at a moment when, in the face of the largest war on the continent since 1945, many European countries actually want to expand their armed forces, not just maintain them. By 2030 Germany hopes to raise its troop strength from 182,000 to 203,000, and France from 240,000 to 275,000 (see chart 1). Poland plans to go from 197,000 to 220,000 by the end of this year, and eventually to 300,000.

The problem is that today’s career-oriented, individualistic young people are reluctant to join up. And it is not just Europe that is struggling with recruitment. In and around the world’s conflict hotspots the question of how to get more people into uniform is vital. Some countries are reconsidering an old solution: mandatory military service for young people (or young men), often for school-leavers. Terminology varies. Conscription typically means compelling civilians to enlist in the armed forces, whereas military service often refers to a subset of that—ordering young people to do a stint in the forces.

At the start of the 20th century around 80% of countries had some form of conscription; by the mid-2010s it was just under 40%. The practice reached its peak during the world wars, and many countries continued to rely on it throughout the cold war. Thereafter the West’s focus turned to high-tech counterinsurgency campaigns such as those in Afghanistan and Iraq. Mass-conscript armies were mostly replaced by smaller, professional volunteer forces. Since 1995, 13 members of the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, have scrapped conscription. All but eight of NATO’s 32 members have done away with it. But authoritarian countries such as Iran, North Korea and Russia have doubled down on their press-ganged armies.

The most urgent discussion around mandatory military service and conscription is in countries that face a serious threat of war, or are already in one. Take Ukraine. More than two years on from Russia’s invasion, thousands of men there are fleeing across the country’s borders, or hiding, to avoid being served enlistment papers. On April 2nd a lack of troops meant Ukraine’s government was forced to lower the minimum age of conscription from 27 to 25. Russia has thrown hundreds of thousands of forcibly mobilised men into the meat-grinder of its war.

In Israel, military duties are a central pillar of citizenship. After the October 7th attacks, some 300,000 Israelis left civilian life and rushed to join their units. Israel wants to lengthen male conscripts’ service to three years (young women currently serve for 24 months and young men for 32) and to extend the call-up age for reservists to 45. At the same time, ultra-Orthodox Jews’ exemption from service is the subject of a bitter political struggle.

Meanwhile in Asia, Taiwan is trying to prepare for a possible war with China as Sino-American tensions persist. Taiwan extended military service in 2022, from four months to a year. But the island still boasts just 169,000 active soldiers (China has around 2m). South Korea, where military service has a brutish reputation, is trying to make it more appealing. Service has been shortened to 18 months, wages are rising and sadistic drill-sergeants have been pruned. The government also wants to hire more women (men-only conscription has fuelled male resentment and anti-feminist politics).

In many places recruiters for the armed forces are struggling in the face of shifting values: young people have grown averse to fighting even in defensive wars. For decades the World Values Survey (WVS), an academic research project, has been asking people around the world the same question: “Would you be willing to fight for your country?” In the survey’s most recent round, between 2017 and 2022, just 36% of Dutch 16- to 29-year-olds said yes (see chart 2).

Recruiters try to counter with the rhetoric of patriotism, self-fulfilment and shared values; the emphatic slogan of Germany’s armed forces, the Bundeswehr, is Wir. Dienen. Deutschland. (We. Serve. Germany.) They also run campaigns with influencers on TikTok and Instagram. But it does not seem to be enough to hit their targets.

This is partly to be expected. As countries get richer, their citizens tend to become less eager to sacrifice themselves for the nation. Herfried Münkler, a German political scientist, called Western democracies “post-heroic” societies, in which “the highest value is the preservation of human life” and personal well-being. History certainly plays a role. Willingness to fight is low in the countries that lost the second world war (Germany, Italy and Japan). In Spain and Portugal, decades of military dictatorship left many citizens suspicious of the armed forces.

But things can change when conflicts draw near. According to a forthcoming paper by Wolfgang Wagner and Alexander Sorg of the VU University in Amsterdam and Michal Onderco of the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, proximity to war makes citizens more willing to fight. In Europe, this helps explain why countries close to Russia are less doveish.

Political alignment is a poor predictor of willingness to bear arms. “The radical right is not so eager to fight,” says Mr Wagner, at least in Germany and the Netherlands. Last year he and his colleagues commissioned a study in those countries which found that few people who planned to vote for either far-left or far-right parties were willing to fight for their country. Those who backed centrist parties, such as Germany’s Social Democrats and Christian Democrats, were more prepared to do so.

Besides changing values, military recruiters face an economic hurdle: young people currently have lots of employers bidding for their services. In most wealthy countries, Generation Z has its pick of jobs. Unemployment among 15- to 24-year-olds in the European Union was 14.5% last year, down from 22.4% in 2015. In Germany it was just 5.8%. In such tight labour markets, armies have a hard time competing with the private sector. Besides, sitting at a desk is rather nicer than crawling through mud.

In some wealthy countries, however, young people’s willingness to fight remains high. In France the share is 58% in the WVS. The figure is higher still in Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea. In Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, four of the wealthiest and most peaceful countries in the world, two-thirds or more of citizens say they are willing. (All are close to Russia.) Their expanding armed forces also have no trouble finding soldiers: all four have compulsory military service for young people.

Sweden actually eliminated the practice in 2011, but brought it back in 2018 after failing to meet recruiting targets. It is an intriguing case study for others. Having just joined NATO, it is scaling up from 69,700 to 96,300 soldiers, which requires about 10,000 recruits a year. All of the country’s 19-year-olds (men and women) must fill out service questionnaires; a bit under a third qualify, and a tenth are ultimately inducted.

Rather than souring young people on the armed forces, in Sweden mandatory service seems to make them more enthusiastic. In exit surveys at the end of their stints, “about 80% of the conscripts would recommend other young people to do military service”, says Pal Jonson, the defence minister. Some 30% re-enlist as soldiers or reserves. Because more young people qualify than are needed, only the best candidates make it in, and military service looks good on one’s CV.

This kind of conscription helps keep Nordic armies a melting-pot for different classes, and discourages political polarisation. (Volunteers in armed forces tend to skew towards the right; in Germany neo-Nazi cells have been uncovered in the Bundeswehr.) In the Middle East too, many states see military service for young people as a social adhesive. The United Arab Emirates introduced it in 2014 partly to forge a sense of shared identity among its youth. Morocco, Jordan and Kuwait have followed suit.

You got not time to lose

Shortfalls across many democratic states suggest that better recruitment strategies can do only so much to boost troop numbers. Few medical students have Ms Van den Goorbergh’s drive to take up infantry training on the side. In liberal societies, large segments of the population have come to see serving in the army as someone else’s job. Reintroducing obligatory military service for youngsters might be politically and practically unworkable for the same reason recruitment is falling short: citizens feel alienated from the armed forces.

Yet the Nordic model seems to help bridge that gap, ensuring that military service remains a natural part of social life and nudging more school-leavers to consider a related career. Other youngsters may still only join up in a crisis. “It is fear that moves you to action,” says Andrei, a former television producer now fighting in eastern Ukraine. He signed up the day after Russia invaded. Most Ukrainians did not believe they would ever have to fight for their country, either. ■

SNIFFY TYPES disdain the notion of “the global south”, which has exploded into something of a meme in recent years. Its inadequacies are obvious: three words could never capture the complexities of a group of more than 100 countries spread from Morocco to Malaysia and beyond. But the phrase has been adopted by Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron and Xi Jinping.

The simplest working definition is that it refers to the majority of non-Western countries. Its use also denotes how emerging economies want more power over global affairs and often have a critical view of Western policy. Thus the global south is said to be outraged by the war in Gaza, and unhappy about Western decisions on Ukraine, covid-19 and climate policy. Sarang Shidore of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, an American think-tank, says “the global south exists not as a coherent, organised grouping so much as a geopolitical fact.”

If the global south exists, sort of, then who leads it? Narendra Modi has suggested India could be the “voice of the global south”. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (known as Lula), the president of Brazil , reckons his country could be, too. To examine this question we have worked with a group of scholars to crunch data on trade, financial and diplomatic links. Our conclusion is, counterintuitively, that America still has the most influence of anyone over the global south, but that within the grouping itself China has become the most powerful member by far—giving Mr Xi the strongest claim to leadership. The sting is that China’s influence has glaring limits, and could even backfire. Meanwhile other powers are on the rise.

We worked with the Pardee Centre for International Futures (PCIF) at the University of Denver. It has built an index of states’ power from 1960 to 2022. The main metric is catchily known as “formal bilateral influence capacity”, a measure of how much power country A may have over country B, based on two dimensions. First, “bandwidth”, or the extent of connections back and forth: the volume of trade, diplomatic representation and so on. Second, “dependence”: how much country B depends on country A for arms, loans, investment, etc. More connections mean more chances for country A to exert influence—and asymmetry in power makes it easier to do so. Think of China’s power over Pakistan, for instance: there are both lots of connections and China has ample asymmetric influence. The exercise examines power relations among the 130-odd members of the global south found in the G77, a UN grouping.

America has been the country with the most influence over the G77 since the 1970s (see chart 1). Its “influence capacity” has been more or less constant even as the lure of the former colonial powers, Britain and France, has waned. But it is increasingly rivalled by China, which after 40 years of relative insignificance saw its influence grow from around 2000. According to the index, China’s “influence capacity” over the G77 is roughly double that of France, the third-most influential country, and around three times that of Britain, India or the UAE.

China wields the most influence in 31 countries. Its clout is greatest in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Russia and several states in South-East Asia. By contrast the next-most powerful member of the global south, India, is top dog with only six G77 members. According to an earlier analysis by PCIF, from 1992 to 2020 the number of countries over which China had more influence than America almost doubled, from 33 to 61. The United States remains pre-eminent in the Americas. But China has extended its influence in Africa and Asia.

The emporium of everything

Recently, China has become a lot keener on the idea of the global south. Last year Mr Xi and senior Chinese officials began referring to China as part of the “global south”, a description they had hitherto resisted (the term is credited to an American left-wing academic in the 1960s), in favour of phrases like “family of developing countries”. The semantic shift reflects an attempt to define the phrase in anti-Western and Chinese-led terms. In September, China published proposals on changing international institutions, rules and laws. It claimed this was a vision of “true multilateralism” where “universal security” replaced “universal values”—in other words, one not run by an interfering West. Last year China’s then foreign minister argued that the main divide in the world was not democracy versus autocracy, as Mr Biden has implied, but “between development and containment of development, and between global justice and power politics”.

China is intensely strategic about winning influence, by targeting swing states with infrastructure support, financing and more. From 2000 to 2021 it funded more than 20,000 infrastructure projects, many of which were under the “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI), across 165 countries with aid or credit worth $1.3trn. Some analysts have noted data showing that credit from large state-backed lenders such as the Export-Import Bank of China is drying up. But a paper published in November by AidData, a group from William & Mary university, argues otherwise. “Contrary to conventional wisdom, Beijing is not in retreat,” says Bradley Parks, one of the authors. The paper finds that there are many many more entities extending credit to the developing world today: in 2021 it counts lending of $80bn a year. “[China] remains the single largest source of international development finance in the world.”

China is targeting geopolitical fence-sitters. AidData reckons that around two-thirds of Chinese financing goes to “toss-up” countries where neither China nor America clearly holds sway. The group has identified a quid pro quo: if a foreign government increases its share of votes at the UN General Assembly (UNGA) that align with China’s by 10 percentage points, it can expect a 276% increase, on average, in financing from Beijing. China has also used its weight to curry favour on subjects such as its repression in Xinjiang. From 2000 to 2021 “low- and middle-income countries” voted on foreign-policy decisions with China 75% of the time at the UNGA. The impact of China’s raw power was on show last year at the BRICS summit, too, where it successfully pushed for five new members of the bloc.

China uses other tools, too. It is the main trading partner of more than 120 countries. It has provided $240bn, mostly since 2016, in emergency financing of the sort the IMF specialises in. China also builds infrastructure projects quickly in developing countries, pleasing their elites, and subsidises the roll-out of digital technologies such as those of Huawei. Over the past five years it has overtaken Russia as the main source of weapons for sub-Saharan Africa.

Buyer’s remorse

Though China’s leadership position among the G77 is formidable, it faces problems. First, its influence is limited in reach and intensity. It has yet to achieve a leading position in Latin America. And across the global south it has yet to win hearts and minds decisively. Polls show split support for America and China in developing countries. Afrobarometer, which monitors public opinion in Africa, has noted a dip in the share of those with positive views of America. Yet that figure was still 49% in 2022 (albeit down from 60% in 2019). Last month a survey in South-East Asia asked respondents whom they would rather their country align in the event of a new cold war: 50.5% of respondents picked China; 49.5% chose America. When asked what countries should do about Sino-American rivalry, most opted against picking a side.

China’s conduct and political values may stunt its influence. Its actions in business and politics have attracted calls for accountability. Countries sometimes lay the blame for their debt crises at China’s door. In Congo and other resource-rich countries Chinese miners face the same charges of exploitation as Westerners do (and often worse). China’s disdain for values-based interactions (it preaches non-interference instead) is apparent, and most of the one-party state’s closest pals are also autocratic. Countries in the global south where democratic values are strong, such as Brazil, are unlikely to have a close cultural connection with China. What is more, as China draws nearer to the likes of Iran and Russia it risks allying with countries that want to destroy, rather than reform, the international order. Witness its recent nihilistic decision to cut a deal with the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels over shipping in the Red Sea and Suez Canal, instead of working on a common solution.

Meanwhile China’s economic reputation could deteriorate. The public support it won through its lending binge happened before the money needed repaying. Some 75% of its BRI loans will require the principal to be paid back by 2030. It is probably no coincidence that the share of Africans who see China as having a positive impact on its development dipped from 59% to 49% from 2019 to 2022, according to Afrobarometer. Mr Xi’s latest response to economic problems in China is to launch massive industrial subsidies which could lead to manufactured goods flooding the markets of other emerging economies. Though some consumers may benefit, another “China shock” may stunt the industrial ambitions of governments in the global south.

Even as China faces headwinds, new rivals are emerging whose influence in the global south is rising. India is the front-runner. By 2045, as its economic, diplomatic and military links increase, its influence over the global south will overtake that of Britain and France, and place it behind America and China, according to forecasts by PCIF. The number of Indian embassies in Africa increased from 25 to 43 between 2012 and 2022. It is the continent’s fourth-largest trade partner and fifth-largest source of foreign-direct investment, according to Mr Modi. India’s own Export-Import bank has lent $12bn across 42 African nations over the past decade, according to Bloomberg. Last year it held training exercises with armed forces from 25 African countries.

India also has a very different proposition on values. It sees itself as vishwaguru, or “teacher to the world”, in areas where it has specialisms. For example it is offering its “stack” of digital platforms—including biometric identity technology—to countries such as Ethiopia, Sierra Leone and Sri Lanka. The Indian government is lending money to private hospitals to set up in Africa. And in November the Indian Institute of Technology opened its first campus abroad, on the island of Zanzibar, in Tanzania.

Some of India’s power is unquantifiable. As a flawed democracy with an ultra-pragmatic foreign policy (it has forged closer bonds with America at the same time as refusing to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) it is closer to the median worldview among the G77 than is China. India’s pitch to lead is also substantively different. Because it worries more about a China-led Asia than an American-led world, it is inherently more pragmatic about its approach to reforming international rules. It wants to be a bridge to the West, not a battering ram.

Other countries have specialist claims to power. If China is a supermarket of influence then its rivals in the global south are like boutiques, offering other members a smaller range of bespoke goods. Gulf states are using part of their hydrocarbon windfalls on renewable-energy projects and mining assets in the developing world. Turkish firms are often the main rivals to Chinese ones for African infrastructure projects; they have laid rail tracks across East Africa, built the national stadium in Rwanda and airports in Senegal and Niger.

Brazil, the world’s second-largest agricultural exporter, is using its chairmanship of the G20 this year to promote food security in the global south. In February, Lula brought that message to the annual meeting of the African Union, the continental bloc. However ridiculous it may seem in parts of the West, South Africa sees itself as the de facto moral leader of the global south, taking Israel to the International Court of Justice for alleged genocide in Gaza, and leading a “peace mission” of African countries to Ukraine and Russia.

Lastly, America and its allies are not out of the game. Rich countries in the OECD group spend more than $200bn annually in overseas aid (loans make up most of China’s financing). Over the past 20 years American firms have spent $515bn in foreign-direct investment in the countries in the bigger BRICS bloc (excluding China), versus just $215bn from Chinese ones. Trade between sub-Saharan Africa and, in total, America and the euro area, is greater than that between the region and China, according to IMF data.

In addition to alliances such as NATO, America has defence partnerships with 76 countries. Western countries remain the preferred choice for economic migrants seeking a better life and elites looking to educate their children. The West is also trying to tackle its weaknesses. In 2021 the G7 outspent China in infrastructure commitments, reckons AidData. America’s Development Finance Corporation has as much as $60bn to spend on extending credit or buying equity in firms in developing countries. America and France want the World Bank to offer more cheap loans and investment in green technologies.

Ringside seat

China probably hopes to see off this competition. Yet even if it does, it will be the leading power in a group that will never be defined by cohesion among its members. In November Brazil’s Lula argued of the global south that “there are many more interests that unite us than differences that separate us.” In fact there are divisions everywhere. More than 40 countries have consistently abstained or supported Russia in UNGA votes about Ukraine. Roughly 8% of countries account for 78% of global-south emissions of the past 30 years. The interests of those middle-income countries awash with carbon-intensive energy sources, such as India and South Africa, are very different to those of poor countries which use little energy. One group wants money for a “just transition”; the other just wants more electricity to power its development.

Reducing Western influence at international institutions is a goal China and many others embrace. But the details soon get tricky. China is not going to welcome India permanently on to the UN Security Council; Brazil and South Africa regularly disagree at the WTO over agriculture; debtor countries and creditors like China want different things from World Bank or IMF reform. China will find that countries in the global south will pursue their national interests, and often come into conflict with the West, China—and each other. The global south, in other words, does not want a leader. It is a zone of contest. Just not one that can be located on a map.  ■

SNIFFY TYPES disdain the notion of “the global south,” which has exploded into something of a meme in recent years. Its inadequacies are obvious: three words could never capture the complexities of a group of more than 100 countries spread from Morocco to Malaysia and beyond. But the phrase has been adopted by Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron and Xi Jinping.

The simplest working definition is that it refers to the majority of non-Western countries. Its use also denotes how emerging economies want more power over global affairs and often have a critical view of Western policy. Thus the global south is said to be outraged by the war in Gaza, and unhappy about Western decisions on Ukraine, covid-19 and climate policy. Sarang Shidore of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, an American think-tank, says “the global south exists not as a coherent, organised grouping so much as a geopolitical fact.”

If the global south exists, sort of, then who leads it? Narendra Modi has suggested India could be the “voice of the global south”. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the president of Brazil (known as Lula), reckons his country could be, too. To examine this question we have worked with a group of scholars to crunch data on trade, financial and diplomatic links. Our conclusion is, counterintuitively, that America still has the most influence of anyone over the global south, but that within the grouping itself China has become the most powerful member by far—giving Mr Xi the strongest claim to leadership. The sting is that China’s influence has glaring limits, and could even backfire. Meanwhile other powers are on the rise.

We worked with the Pardee Centre for International Futures (PCIF) at the University of Denver. It has built an index of states’ power from 1960 to 2022. The main metric is catchily known as “formal bilateral influence capacity”, a measure of how much power country A may have over country B, based on two dimensions. First, “bandwidth”, or the extent of connections back and forth: the volume of trade, diplomatic representation and so on. Second, “dependence”: how much country B depends on country A for arms, loans, investment, etc. More connections mean more chances for country A to exert influence—and asymmetry in power makes it easier to do so. Think of China’s power over Pakistan, for instance: there are both lots of connections and China has ample asymmetric influence. The exercise examines power relations among the 130-odd members of the global south found in the G77, a UN grouping.

America has been the country with the most influence over the G77 since the 1970s (see chart 1). Its “influence capacity” has been more or less constant even as the lure of the former colonial powers, Britain and France, has waned. But it is increasingly rivalled by China, which after 40 years of relative insignificance saw its influence grow from around 2000. According to the index, China’s “influence capacity” over the G77 is roughly double that of France, the third-most influential country, and around three times that of Britain, India or the UAE.

China wields the most influence in 31 countries. Its clout is greatest in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Russia and several states in South-East Asia. By contrast the next-most powerful member of the global south, India, is top dog with only six G77 members. According to an earlier analysis by PCIF, from 1992 to 2020 the number of countries over which China had more influence than America almost doubled, from 33 to 61. The United States remains pre-eminent in the Americas. But China has extended its influence in Africa and Asia.

The emporium of everything

Recently, China has become a lot keener on the idea of the global south. Last year Mr Xi and senior Chinese officials began referring to China as part of the “global south”, a description they had hitherto resisted (the term is credited to an American left-wing academic in the 1960s), in favour of phrases like “family of developing countries”. The semantic shift reflects an attempt to define the phrase in anti-Western and Chinese-led terms. In September, China published proposals on changing international institutions, rules and laws. It claimed this was a vision of “true multilateralism” where “universal security” replaced “universal values”—in other words, one not run by an interfering West. Last year China’s then foreign minister argued that the main divide in the world was not democracy versus autocracy, as Mr Biden has implied, but “between development and containment of development, and between global justice and power politics”.

China is intensely strategic about winning influence, by targeting swing states with infrastructure support, financing and more. From 2000 to 2021 it funded more than 20,000 infrastructure projects, many of which were under the “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI), across 165 countries with aid or credit worth $1.3trn. Some analysts have noted data showing that credit from large state-backed lenders such as the Export-Import Bank of China is drying up. But a paper published in November by AidData, a group from William & Mary university, argues otherwise. “Contrary to conventional wisdom, Beijing is not in retreat,” says Bradley Parks, one of the authors. The paper finds that there are many many more entities extending credit to the developing world today: in 2021 it counts lending of $80bn a year. “[China] remains the single largest source of international development finance in the world.”

China is targeting geopolitical fence-sitters. AidData reckons that around two-thirds of Chinese financing goes to “toss-up” countries where neither China nor America clearly holds sway. The group has identified a quid pro quo: if a foreign government increases its share of votes at the UN General Assembly (UNGA) that align with China’s by 10 percentage points, it can expect a 276% increase, on average, in financing from Beijing. China has also used its weight to curry favour on subjects such as its repression in Xinjiang. From 2000 to 2021 “low- and middle-income countries” voted on foreign-policy decisions with China 75% of the time at the UNGA. The impact of China’s raw power was on show last year at the BRICS summit, too, where it successfully pushed for five new members of the bloc.

China uses other tools, too. It is the main trading partner of more than 120 countries. It has provided $240bn, mostly since 2016, in emergency financing of the sort the IMF specialises in. China also builds infrastructure projects quickly in developing countries, pleasing their elites, and subsidises the roll-out of digital technologies such as those of Huawei. Over the past five years it has overtaken Russia as the main source of weapons for sub-Saharan Africa.

Buyer’s remorse

Though China’s leadership position among the G77 is formidable, it faces problems. First, its influence is limited in reach and intensity. It has yet to achieve a leading position in Latin America. And across the global south it has yet to win hearts and minds decisively. Polls show split support for America and China in developing countries. Afrobarometer, which monitors public opinion in Africa, has noted a dip in the share of those with positive views of America. Yet that figure was still 49% in 2022 (albeit down from 60% in 2019). Last month a survey in South-East Asia asked respondents whom they would rather their country align in the event of a new cold war: 50.5% of respondents picked China; 49.5% chose America. When asked what countries should do about Sino-American rivalry, most opted against picking a side.

China’s conduct and political values may stunt its influence. Its actions in business and politics have attracted calls for accountability. Countries sometimes lay the blame for their debt crises at China’s door. In Congo and other resource-rich countries Chinese miners face the same charges of exploitation as Westerners do (and often worse). China’s disdain for values-based interactions (it preaches non-interference instead) is apparent, and most of the one-party state’s closest pals are also autocratic. Countries in the global south where democratic values are strong, such as Brazil, are unlikely to have a close cultural connection with China. What is more, as China draws nearer to the likes of Iran and Russia it risks allying with countries that want to destroy, rather than reform, the international order. Witness its recent nihilistic decision to cut a deal with the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels over shipping in the Red Sea and Suez Canal, instead of working on a common solution.

Meanwhile China’s economic reputation could deteriorate. The public support it won through its lending binge happened before the money needed repaying. Some 75% of its BRI loans will require the principal to be paid back by 2030. It is probably no coincidence that the share of Africans who see China as having a positive impact on its development dipped from 59% to 49% from 2019 to 2022, according to Afrobarometer. Mr Xi’s latest response to economic problems in China is to launch massive industrial subsidies which could lead to manufactured goods flooding the markets of other emerging economies. Though some consumers may benefit, another “China shock” may stunt the industrial ambitions of governments in the global south.

Even as China faces headwinds, new rivals are emerging whose influence in the global south is rising. India is the front-runner. By 2045, as its economic, diplomatic and military links increase, its influence over the global south will overtake that of Britain and France, and place it behind America and China, according to forecasts by PCIF. The number of Indian embassies in Africa increased from 25 to 43 between 2012 and 2022. It is the continent’s fourth-largest trade partner and fifth-largest source of foreign-direct investment, according to Mr Modi. India’s own Export-Import bank has lent $12bn across 42 African nations over the past decade, according to Bloomberg. Last year it held training exercises with armed forces from 25 African countries.

India also has a very different proposition on values. It sees itself as vishwaguru, or “teacher to the world”, in areas where it has specialisms. For example it is offering its “stack” of digital platforms—including biometric identity technology—to countries such as Ethiopia, Sierra Leone and Sri Lanka. The Indian government is lending money to private hospitals to set up in Africa. And in November the Indian Institute of Technology opened its first campus abroad, on the island of Zanzibar, in Tanzania.

Some of India’s power is unquantifiable. As a flawed democracy with an ultra-pragmatic foreign policy (it has forged closer bonds with America at the same time as refusing to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) it is closer to the median worldview among the G77 than is China. India’s pitch to lead is also substantively different. Because it worries more about a China-led Asia than an American-led world, it is inherently more pragmatic about its approach to reforming international rules. It wants to be a bridge to the West, not a battering ram.

Other countries have specialist claims to power. If China is a supermarket of influence then its rivals in the global south are like boutiques, offering other members a smaller range of bespoke goods. Gulf states are using part of their hydrocarbon windfalls on renewable-energy projects and mining assets in the developing world. Turkish firms are often the main rivals to Chinese ones for African infrastructure projects; they have laid rail tracks across East Africa, built the national stadium in Rwanda and airports in Senegal and Niger.

Brazil, the world’s second-largest agricultural exporter, is using its chairmanship of the G20 this year to promote food security in the global south. In February, Lula brought that message to the annual meeting of the African Union, the continental bloc. However ridiculous it may seem in parts of the West, South Africa sees itself as the de facto moral leader of the global south, taking Israel to the International Court of Justice for alleged genocide in Gaza, and leading a “peace mission” of African countries to Ukraine and Russia.

Lastly, America and its allies are not out of the game. Rich countries in the OECD group spend more than $200bn annually in overseas aid (loans make up most of China’s financing). Over the past 20 years American firms have spent $515bn in foreign-direct investment in the countries in the bigger BRICS bloc (excluding China), versus just $215bn from Chinese ones. Trade between sub-Saharan Africa and, in total, America and the euro area, is greater than that between the region and China, according to IMF data.

In addition to alliances such as NATO, America has defence partnerships with 76 countries. Western countries remain the preferred choice for economic migrants seeking a better life and elites looking to educate their children. The West is also trying to tackle its weaknesses. In 2021 the G7 outspent China in infrastructure commitments, reckons AidData. America’s Development Finance Corporation has as much as $60bn to spend on extending credit or buying equity in firms in developing countries. America and France want the World Bank to offer more cheap loans and investment in green technologies.

Ringside seat

China probably hopes to see off this competition. Yet even if it does, it will be the leading power in a group that will never be defined by cohesion among its members. In November Brazil’s Lula argued of the global south that “there are many more interests that unite us than differences that separate us.” In fact there are divisions everywhere. More than 40 countries have consistently abstained or supported Russia in UNGA votes about Ukraine. Roughly 8% of countries account for 78% of global-south emissions of the past 30 years. The interests of those middle-income countries awash with carbon-intensive energy sources, such as India and South Africa, are very different to those of poor countries which use little energy. One group wants money for a “just transition”; the other just wants more electricity to power its development.

Reducing Western influence at international institutions is a goal China and many others embrace. But the details soon get tricky. China is not going to welcome India permanently on to the UN Security Council; Brazil and South Africa regularly disagree at the WTO over agriculture; debtor countries and creditors like China want different things from World Bank or IMF reform. China will find that countries in the global south will pursue their national interests, and often come into conflict with the West, China—and each other. The global south, in other words, does not want a leader. It is a zone of contest. Just not one that can be located on a map.

The killing started on April 7th 1994, as members of the presidential guard began assassinating opposition leaders and moderates in the government. Within hours the genocide of Rwanda’s minority Tutsis was under way. It was among the fastest mass killings in history: 100 days later three-quarters of Rwanda’s Tutsis, about 500,000 people, were dead. Most were killed not by the army but by ordinary Hutus, the majority group. “Neighbours hacked neighbours to death,” wrote Philip Gourevitch, an American journalist. “Doctors killed their patients, and schoolteachers killed their pupils.”

The roughly 2,500 United Nations peacekeepers in Rwanda did almost nothing. Agathe Uwilingiyimana, the moderate Hutu prime minister, was among the first to die. She had been guarded by 15 UN peacekeepers, but they surrendered. Lando Ndasingwa, the Tutsi leader of the Liberal party, called the peacekeepers, saying that soldiers were preparing to attack his home. An officer promised to send a detachment, but was still on the phone when he heard gunfire. “It’s too late,” Lando said.

The world stood by and watched. Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian general commanding the peacekeepers, was warned beforehand of the extermination plan. In a cable to Kofi Annan, then the UN’s peacekeeping chief, he said he planned to raid arms caches and pre-empt the genocide. Annan refused permission and ordered him to do nothing that “might lead to the use of force”. Three weeks into the genocide, the Security Council voted to withdraw all but about 270 peacekeeping troops. “This world body aided and abetted genocide,” the general later wrote.

Thirty years later, the Rwandan genocide is remembered as one of two events in the 1990s that prodded a guilt-ridden world to pledge never again to stand aside and allow mass atrocities. The other was the massacre by Bosnian Serbs of thousands of Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica the following year. In 2005 the UN General Assembly unanimously adopted the principle that all countries have a “responsibility to protect” (R2P) people from genocide and war crimes, by force if necessary. The dream was that from Rwanda’s horrors would emerge a well-policed world.

Instead the nightmare has continued. In Ethiopia, Myanmar, Sudan, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere, global powers have done almost nothing as millions have been bombed, gassed and starved. The war in Gaza, too, has brought tensions between principles and geopolitics to a head, with bitter claims and counterclaims about Hamas’s atrocities and the legality of Israel’s destructive six-month-long military campaign, which have played out in the media, diplomacy and international courts.

To understand how the global push to prevent mass killings collapsed (and whether it can be revived), it helps to start with Rwanda, which strengthened the case of global human-rights advocates, and then to examine how cynical realpolitik made a comeback.

The early 1990s were hopeful years. The end of the cold war allowed democracy to blossom in eastern Europe and in Africa. The first Gulf war ejected Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait and signalled that wars of expansion would not be tolerated. Western powers led by America sent troops into famine-struck Somalia to guard a humanitarian mission under attack by warlords, showing that they cared not just about oil but about the welfare of the starving. The spread of liberal democracy seemed unstoppable.

Yet reality had a vote. Six months before the genocide in Rwanda, America pulled out of Somalia after 18 of its commandos were killed in Mogadishu, the capital. The battle cast a long shadow: UN peacekeepers in Bosnia were instructed not to respond forcefully when fired on, for fear that they “cross the Mogadishu line” and become embroiled in the fighting. Bill Clinton, America’s president, turned against peacekeeping operations unless they involved America’s national interests.

Rwanda did not. State Department lawyers warned officials not to call the atrocities there a genocide, lest it commit the government to “actually do something”. Britain’s ambassador to the UN warned against “promising what we could not deliver” in terms of protecting civilians.

Still, when the horror of the genocide became clear, Western voters and political elites were revolted by this cold-hearted calculus. Samantha Power, a former journalist who now heads America’s aid agency, recounts in her memoir that President George W. Bush scribbled “not on my watch” on a memo summarising an article she had written about America’s failure to act in Rwanda. “You had a generation of politicians like Tony Blair, David Cameron, Nicolas Sarkozy in France, who had seen their predecessors’ failings, and that shaped their responses to later crises,” says Richard Gowan, a veteran UN-watcher in New York with the International Crisis Group (ICG), a think-tank. In 2000 Mr Blair, Britain’s prime minister, sent troops into Sierra Leone, stopping rebels who were chopping off people’s hands.

Standing in the way of such interventions was the doctrine that countries should not interfere in each others’ internal affairs. The UN’s charter, signed in 1945, forbade meddling in “matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state”. Though its Security Council could authorise force, this was intended as a response to aggression, not to prevent atrocities. Newly independent African countries had had their fill of colonial powers trampling on their sovereignty. In 1963, when they formed the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), the members committed themselves to “non-interference”.

Rwanda shook that belief. In 2003 the African Union (AU), the OAU’s successor, gave itself the power to intervene to prevent grave crimes. Others went further: America, Britain and several other Western countries began claiming the right to use force unilaterally without the authority of the Security Council, which they argued had become paralysed because each of its five permanent members—America, Britain, China, France and the Soviet Union (now Russia)—has veto power. In a speech in Chicago in 1999, Mr Blair outlined a doctrine of just wars “based not on any territorial ambitions but on values”. He insisted the world could not simply allow mass murder. That doctrine has since become policy. In 2018 the British government reserved the right to prevent atrocities without the Security Council’s authorisation, if its paralysis would lead to “grave consequences” for civilian populations.

Angels with F-16s

All this converged into a current of thought known as “liberal interventionism”. In Kosovo in 1999 NATO bombed what was then part of Serbia, without Security Council authorisation, to stop a genocide against ethnic Albanians. An international commission subsequently judged the bombing campaign “illegal” but nonetheless “legitimate” because there was no other way to stop the killing of civilians. Yet many were unsettled that powerful countries were arrogating the authority to bomb others in the name of human rights. Weaker states worried it would excuse “neocolonial” interference.

Annan, by then the UN’s secretary general, tried to reconcile sovereignty and protection of civilians. In 2000 he asked: “If humanitarian intervention is indeed an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica?” The answer was R2P, which tried to reconcile the aspirations of liberal interventionists with the worries of weak states. The R2P resolution, passed unanimously by the UN in 2005, held that countries had a responsibility to intervene, but only when authorised by the Security Council. A British historian, Sir Martin Gilbert, called it “the most significant adjustment to national sovereignty in 360 years”. That goes too far, thinks Gareth Evans, a former foreign minister of Australia and one of the founders of R2P. Nonetheless, he calls it “a wildly successful enterprise”.

Mr Evans argues that R2P created a new norm: no official today can openly shrug off genocide for reasons of state, as Henry Kissinger, then America’s secretary of state, did while cosying up to Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge in 1975. Meanwhile, since Rwanda almost all UN forces have been ordered to protect civilians—though they are seldom given enough troops to do so, says Alan Doss, who ran such missions in Liberia and Congo. Critics counter that R2P creates no binding obligations on countries. The doctrine is a “slogan...enthusiastically avowed by states but one devoid of substance”, says Aidan Hehir of the University of Westminster.

In early 2011, in the first real-world test of R2P, the Security Council approved the use of force by NATO to protect civilians in Libya. (It did so again two weeks later in Ivory Coast.) “I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action,” President Barack Obama said. Crucially, the council’s three rotating African members (Gabon, Nigeria and South Africa) broke with the AU and supported the resolution. But not everyone was enthusiastic. John Bolton, a Republican former diplomat, had called R2P “a gauzy, limitless doctrine” whose greatest danger was not that it might fail, but that it might succeed and lead to ever more foreign entanglements.

In the event, what was to have been R2P’s vindication proved its undoing. At first the bombing in Libya worked, preventing a massacre of civilians in Benghazi, a city in the country’s east. Yet Britain and France then stretched the authority granted by the Security Council and toppled Muammar Qaddafi, Libya’s dictator. The subsequent civil war destabilised the entire region. That dampened the West’s enthusiasm for intervention. It also revived “long-held suspicions of the motivations behind Western interventions in Africa”, argues Karen Smith of Leiden University, a former UN special adviser on R2P. African supporters of the doctrine, such as South Africa, turned into sceptics. “Good intentions do not automatically shape good outcomes,” Ramesh Thakur, a former UN official and an architect of R2P, wrote after the effort in Libya went sour. “On the contrary, there is no humanitarian crisis so grave that an outside military intervention cannot make it worse.”

For many, mission creep in Libya was the original sin that undermined R2P. “It’s when things started to fall apart,” laments Mr Evans. Yet even had the Libyan campaign succeeded, the doctrine would probably have stumbled. Western publics were tiring of the decade-long “war on terror” and unsuccessful efforts at building liberal democracies in countries that did not seem to want them. “We now have a generation of politicians who have been shaped by the failure of intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan,” says the ICG’s Mr Gowan.

That became clear in 2013 when Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, dropped nerve gas on civilians. By then Mr Obama had grown sceptical about using force; he spoke of red lines but did little when they were crossed. Other Western powers were no more eager to act. Inaction, it turned out, has costs too. By 2023 Syria’s civil war had claimed perhaps 350,000 lives and displaced roughly half of the population, sending waves of refugees into neighbouring countries and Europe.

The Security Council remained hamstrung by the re-emergence of geopolitical rivalry. Some point to the problem of the “great-power perpetrator”, in which a permanent member of the council is itself committing mass atrocities. Russia, which invaded Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014, has been more interested in undermining the council than in supporting it. Between 2011 and 2022 it vetoed 17 resolutions on Syria. China has often been reluctant to approve actions to prevent atrocities, perhaps because it reserves the right to abuse its own citizens. On Syria it voted with Russia, insisting that sanctions would infringe on the country’s sovereignty.

The failure to act in Syria has been followed by passivity in the face of atrocities elsewhere. In 2017 government forces in Myanmar began killing and raping Rohingyas, a long-persecuted Muslim minority group, in what the UN and America have branded genocide. Again the Security Council was powerless, as China and Russia prevented it from issuing even mild statements of concern.

In 2020 civil war broke out in Ethiopia. Government forces sealed off Tigray, a northern region, and deliberately starved its roughly 6m people. By the war’s end two years later some 600,000 are thought to have died, almost all of them civilians. The Security Council stayed almost completely silent. Russia and China were not the only obstacles: the AU dropped its policy of “non-indifference” to war crimes and sided with the Ethiopian government, blocking efforts to raise the conflict before the council. As a result, “the atrocity-prevention toolbox for Africa is likely to remain shut, its tools quietly rusting away,” wrote Alex de Waal of Tufts University.

The situation is being repeated today in Sudan, where civil war risks triggering the world’s biggest famine, with at least 25m people in need of food. Much of the blame lies with the Sudanese Armed Forces, which have blocked the flow of aid into areas controlled by their enemy, the Rapid Support Forces, a group of rebellious paramilitaries. They, in turn, are accused of genocidal killings. For almost a year Russia and China blocked even calls for a ceasefire. The wider world has been indifferent. “We seem to be rapidly unlearning the lessons of Rwanda,” says Mr Gowan.

This is the backdrop for the claims and counterclaims in the Middle East. After Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th, killing and abducting 1,400 people, mainly civilians, the West affirmed Israel’s legitimate right to self-defence. Yet worldwide protests erupted almost immediately against Israel, and have spread as its military campaign has killed more than 32,000 civilians and fighters in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run health authority.

Tell it to the judge

From one perspective the conflict has triggered a renaissance in the use of international law to curtail violence. The Security Council has proved ineffective, with America, China and Russia blocking each others’ resolutions (although on March 25th America allowed one to pass, calling for a ceasefire and the release of Hamas’s hostages). But several countries have turned to international courts. South Africa asked the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague to order Israel to halt its military operations, invoking the Genocide Convention, which Israel has signed. It also filed complaints at the International Criminal Court (ICC), a different court in The Hague that can arraign individuals. (This was quite a turnabout: South Africa had previously flirted with quitting the ICC to avoid honouring its arrest warrants.) While the trial at the icj continues, it has ordered Israel to take steps including providing humanitarian aid, on the basis that it is “plausible” that it is breaching the genocide convention. Israel says it is complying with the order; many dispute that.

Yet from another viewpoint the icj case illuminates the shortcomings of international law in an age of bitter geopolitical divides. The ICJ has no jurisdiction over war crimes other than genocide, which encourages complainants to allege genocide even when the facts do not support it. That cheapens the taboo against genocide and discredits the court. The icj case has disillusioned some Western countries. America says the allegation of genocide is “meritless”, and Britain says South Africa’s decision to bring the case was “wrong and provocative” and that Israel’s actions cannot be described as genocide. For its part, China, usually a foe of international courts’ ordering countries around, has opportunistically decided it likes the claims against Israel. The case will take years to resolve and the icj cannot compel compliance with its orders without the help of the Security Council, which is split.

Is there still hope for a credible and universal doctrine to prevent mass-killings? Mr Evans thinks so, and that current conflicts may alert the midsize powers of the new multipolar world to the need to prevent atrocities. That seems more a wish than a prediction: his memoir, published in 2017, is titled “Incorrigible Optimist”. But it is hard to disagree with his aspiration. “We can’t afford to let the flame die,” he says. ■

ON A GREY morning in north-west London earlier this month an enthusiastic group gathered outside a community centre to fly the Indian flag—plus another one featuring the lotus flower, symbol of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Some wore saffron scarves, a colour associated with Hinduism. After staging a car rally through the neighbourhood, they reconvened outside a Hindu temple. A British Conservative MP addressed the crowd, praising the government of Narendra Modi. The gathering, organised by the Overseas Friends of the BJP, the party’s diaspora arm, got little attention in the local media. But footage of it soon appeared on the websites of many Indian outlets.

The rally was just one of countless such events run by the overseas branches of India’s parties, as the country’s general election that starts on April 19th beckons. India’s huge diaspora is an increasingly powerful force for mobilising support at home and abroad. Indian politicians court it for its financial and campaigning punch. As in India itself, the BJP has been more systematic and successful than its rivals. If Mr Modi wins a third term, as seems likely, he can partly thank the diaspora.

Indians abroad have long played a disproportionate role in politics at home, going back to India’s fight for independence. Many of the anti-colonial movement’s leading lights, including Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas Gandhi, spent years studying in Britain. Trained as lawyers, they used the ideas they had absorbed to argue for freedom back home. Some of the most notable post-independence prime ministers, including Indira Gandhi and Manmohan Singh, also spent long periods abroad.

Since then, India’s diaspora has grown in size and influence. Some 18m Indians who retain their nationality live abroad, according to the UN. That makes them the largest diaspora in the world, followed well behind by Mexicans (11.2m) and Russians (10.8m). If those who have relinquished their Indian passports are included, the number may exceed 32m, according to the Indian government’s estimates.

Most Indians abroad have been highly successful. In 2023 they sent home nearly $125bn in remittances, equivalent to around 3.4% of India’s GDP, according to World Bank estimates. In America 80% of citizens of Indian origin have college degrees. The median Indian household income there is $150,000, twice America’s national average. People of Indian descent lead Google, the World Bank—and Britain.

There are still plenty of low- or semi-skilled Indian workers filling menial jobs the host countries’ natives will not or cannot do, especially in the Gulf states. Yet even there the share of white-collar professionals as a proportion of Indians is growing. It now approaches 30%. Especially in English-speaking countries, today’s Indian diaspora has more cash and clout than earlier waves of migrants, who often started out dirt-poor.

What does this mean for their role in Indian politics? Most Indians who live outside India do not vote in Indian elections, as they can vote only in person in their constituencies back home. That costs too much for most of them in time and money. Only 120,000-odd are registered for this year’s poll, according to India’s election commission, and only a fraction of that modest number are expected to turn up.

In a country with nearly 1bn registered voters, 18m potential votes dispersed across hundreds of electoral districts would be unlikely to make a difference. Besides, plenty of diaspora Indians remain immune to Mr Modi’s charms. A survey of Indian-Americans in 2020 by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an American think-tank, found that while 48% approved of Mr Modi, 31% disapproved and 22% strongly so. Indeed, the diaspora is much less enthusiastic than Indians in India, 78% of whom are said to approve of him. One reason may be that they read a wider variety of news than their relatives at home, where most media are relentlessly pro-BJP. Moreover, an increasing number of migrants are from south India, where Mr Modi is not so popular.

At least in Britain, those who have recently migrated for work or education tend to be less politically strident, says Pratik Dattani, who runs Bridge India, a non-partisan diaspora outfit in Britain. For many in the diaspora, Indian politics may not be their main concern, ranking behind worries about jobs, education and daily life.

The real impact of the diaspora in politics is in funding, campaigning and spreading India’s influence. As overseas Indians have become more prominent in their host societies, many have begun to take more of an interest in politics both in their new countries and back home. So political parties, Indian and foreign, are wooing them more keenly.

Mr Modi and his BJP are acutely aware of this. Their election manifesto in 2014 called the diaspora “a vast reservoir to articulate the national interests and affairs globally” that would be “harnessed for strengthening Brand India”. The next year the party’s general secretary said the BJP saw the diaspora as India’s voice abroad, “the way the Jewish community looks out for Israel’s interests in the United States”.

Many Indians abroad have risen to the task. The Overseas Friends of the BJP in America plans to send 3,000 Indian-American activists back to India to put up posters and canvass voters. They say they will make 2.5m calls to people in India to persuade them to vote for Mr Modi. The Indian Overseas Congress, the equivalent outfit representing the opposition Congress party, has similar plans, though its organisers are vague about numbers. India’s opaque electoral-finance system makes it tricky to gauge exactly how much money the diaspora contributes; parties are rarely required to disclose the source of donations. But it is bound to be a lot.

The code of colour

Diaspora groups have long mixed politics with support for particular communities. But they have become more political and pro-BJP since Mr Modi took over. Play-dates for children or community prayer meetings are likelier to have a saffron tint. Members lobby MPs in Britain or members of Congress in America to back Mr Modi.

Yet most mobilisation of the diaspora happens away from the host countries’ politics. Much of the messaging is on social media, usually in WhatsApp groups. Members hail Mr Modi’s latest infrastructure drive or foreign-policy success. They also promote the BJP’s darker notions, such as “love jihad”, a conspiracy theory that Muslim men are systematically seducing Hindu women in order to convert them.

One reason for the government’s success in courting the diaspora is that the BJP’s activities abroad are as efficient as its electoral machine at home. Cabinet ministers on foreign trips make a point of meeting diaspora groups, often to raise cash. Hundreds of groups close to the BJP are active in Britain. Such diaspora mobilisation has also picked up in America.

Soon after his election Mr Modi starred at a rally for 18,000 fans in New York’s Madison Square Garden. He had previously been barred from America for his alleged part in deadly communal violence in his home state of Gujarat in 2002 (he was cleared of all charges). Many of his trips to countries with many Indians include such events, most recently in Abu Dhabi. Last year he wowed a diaspora crowd in Sydney (pictured).

These events serve two purposes, says Edward Anderson of Northumbria University, author of a recent book on Hindu nationalism in the diaspora. They help tie him to a group he values for its social, cultural and economic weight. And the pictures of crowds cheering him abroad shine his image back home as a feted statesman.

Mr Modi’s emphasis on India’s rising global stature resonates with many overseas Indians, says Mr Dattani. “There is a sense that India is now everywhere and this guy did it,” he says. In Abu Dhabi, where Mr Modi also inaugurated a huge Hindu temple, he was feverishly acclaimed by his fans. “For the past ten years under his rule India has really evolved,” says Ganesh Sarma, a sales executive aged 62. “He works only for the country, not for himself, and our relationship with almost the entire rest of the world is fabulous now.”

Efforts by Congress, by contrast, have fallen flat. Rahul Gandhi, the party’s figurehead, also travels the world to lobby the diaspora. His main concern has been to highlight social problems and Mr Modi’s increasingly authoritarian methods. That resonates with long-standing critics in the diaspora, but turns off most Indians abroad who want to think well of their country, says Mr Dattani. In 2023 Pew, a pollster, found that Indians in America, both citizens and migrants, had overwhelmingly favourable views of their home country. The BJP has used Mr Gandhi’s foreign visits to paint him as disloyal for talking down his country to foreigners.

The government has also targeted less prominent Indians, chiefly academics and journalists hostile to the BJP. Many hold a special status called “Overseas Citizen of India” that grants rights (such as the ability to live and work in India) to people who have dropped their Indian citizenship and to foreigners married to Indian citizens. (India does not allow dual citizenship.) The BJP weaponises this status by revoking it for those it deems unpatriotic.

In any event, Mr Modi and his BJP are adept, at home and abroad, at dealing with their foes. And much of India’s burgeoning diaspora is keen to ride along on a seemingly unstoppable bandwagon. ■

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In a trendy food market in Warsaw, Poland’s capital, two female engineers are discussing how hard it is to meet a nice, enlightened man. Paulina Nasilowska got a big pay rise a few years ago. Her boyfriend asked: “Did you have an affair with your boss?” He is now an ex-boyfriend.

Ms Nasilowska’s friend, Joanna Walczak, recalls a man she met on Tinder who revealed that he was a “red-pill” guy (a reference to “The Matrix”, a film, meaning someone who sees reality clearly. In the “manosphere”, a global online community of angry men, it means realising that men are oppressed.) He thought household chores and child care were women’s work, and that women could not be leaders. They didn’t have a second date.

Typically for young Polish women, Ms Nasilowska and Ms Walczak support parties of the liberal left, which take women’s issues seriously and promise to legalise abortion. Young Polish men, they complain, hew more to the right, or even to the far right. Consider last year’s election. Then the top choice for 18- to 29-year-old men was Confederation, a party that touts free-market economics and traditional social values. (“Against feminists. In defence of real women” is one of its slogans.) Some 26% of young men backed it; only 6% of their female peers did.

Young Polish men have their own set of complaints. Feminism has gone too far, say two firemen in their 20s in a small town. Lukasz says he used to be able to go to a village dance party and “the women there were wife material.” Nowadays “they’re all posting shameless pictures of themselves on social media,” he laments. The media are “all biased and pushing the culture to the left”, complains Mateusz (neither man would give a surname). People no longer admit that men and women often want to do different kinds of work.

In much of the developed world, the attitudes of young men and women are polarising. The Economist analysed polling data from 20 rich countries, using the European Social Survey, America’s General Social Survey and the Korean Social Survey. Two decades ago there was little difference between men and women aged 18-29 on a self-reported scale of 1-10 from very liberal to very conservative. But our analysis found that by 2020 the gap was 0.75 (see chart 1 ). For context, this is roughly twice the size of the gap in opinion between people with and without a degree in the same year.

Put another way, in 2020 young men were only slightly more likely to describe themselves as liberal than conservative, with a gap of just two percentage points. Young women, however, were much more likely to lean to the left than the right, with a gap of a massive 27 percentage points.

In all the large countries we examined, young men were more conservative than young women (see chart 2). In Poland the gap was 1.1 points on a scale of 1-10. It was a hefty 1.4 in America, 1 in France, 0.75 in Italy, 0.71 in Britain and 0.74 in South Korea. Men and women have always seen the world differently. What is striking, though, is that a gulf in political opinions has opened up, as younger women are becoming sharply more liberal while their male peers are not.

For young women, the triumphs of previous generations of feminists, in vastly increasing women’s opportunities in the workplace and public life, are in the past. They are concerned with continuing injustices, from male violence to draconian abortion laws (in some countries) and gaps in pay to women shouldering a disproportionate share of housework and child care. Plenty of men are broadly in their corner. But a substantial portion are vocally not. Young women’s avid liberalism may spring from a feeling that there is much work still to be done, and that opposition to doing it will be stiff.

The gap does not translate straightforwardly into voting patterns, but it is visible. Fully 72% of young American women who voted in House elections in 2022 backed the Democratic candidate; some 54% of young men did. In 2008 there was barely any gap. In Europe, where many elections offer a wide array of parties, young women are more likely to support the most left-wing ones, whereas young men are more likely to favour the right or even the radical right.

In France in 2022 young men were much keener than young women on Eric Zemmour, a presidential candidate who wrote a book rebutting Simone de Beauvoir, France’s best-known feminist. Germany’s election in 2021 saw the largest ever left-right gap between the votes of young women and men, according to Ansgar Hudde of the University of Cologne. In Portugal, where the far-right Chega party surged in an election on March 10th, support for it is concentrated among voters who are young, male and less educated. And South Korea in 2022 elected an overtly anti-feminist president; more than 58% of men in their 20s voted for him. Some 58% of women in their 20s backed his rival.

Young and cranky

The attitude gap between the sexes is also visible in how they view each other. People in 27 European countries were asked whether they agreed that “advancing women’s and girls’ rights has gone too far because it threatens men’s and boys’ opportunities.” Unsurprisingly, men were more likely to concur than women. Notably, though, young men were more anti-feminist than older men, contradicting the popular notion that each generation is more liberal than the previous one. Gefjon Off, Nicholas Charron and Amy Alexander of Gothenburg University use a Dutch analogy to illustrate the difference between young (18-29) and old (65+) European men. It is as great, on this question, as the gap between the average supporter of Geert Wilders’s radical-right Party for Freedom and the Liberal Democrats.

A similar pattern holds in other advanced countries. Although a higher share of young British men think it is harder to be a woman than a man than think the opposite (35% to 26%), they are likelier than old British men to say it is harder to be a man than a woman. Young British women are more likely than their mothers to believe the opposite. Nearly 80% of South Korean men in their 20s say that men are discriminated against. Barely 30% of men over 60 agree, making their views indistinguishable from those of women in their 20s or 60s.

In China pollsters do not ask about voting intentions, but they find a similar divergence between young men and women when it comes to gender roles. Yue Qian of the University of British Columbia and Jiaxing Li of the Shanghai University of Medicine and Health Sciences looked at survey data for 35,000 Chinese people. In their analysis they found that young men were much more likely than young women to agree with statements such as “men should put career first, whereas women should put family first” and “when the economy is bad, female employees should be fired first.”

Young Chinese men’s views were not much different from those of older men, whereas young women’s views were far more egalitarian than their mothers’. Claire, a market researcher in Beijing (who uses an English name to preserve her anonymity), says she wants a partner who will treat her as an equal and share the housework. “I think most Chinese men would fail that test,” she sighs. Dr Qian notes that when Chinese parents go to “matchmaking corners” in parks, they brag about their sons’ jobs and degrees, but hide their daughters’ achievements, fearing they will put off potential suitors.

What is going on? The most likely causes of this growing division are education (young men are getting less of it than young women), experience (advanced countries have become less sexist, and men and women experience this differently) and echo chambers (social media aggravate polarisation). Also, in democracies, many politicians on the right are deftly stoking young male grievances, while many on the left barely acknowledge that young men have real problems.

But they do, starting with education. Although the men at the top are doing fine, many of the rest are struggling. In rich countries, 28% of boys but only 18% of girls fail to reach the minimum level of reading proficiency as defined by PISA, which tests high-school students. And women have overtaken men at university (see chart 4). In the EU, the share of men aged 25 to 34 with tertiary degrees rose from 21% to 35% between 2002 and 2020. For women it rose faster, from 25% to 46%. In America, the gap is about the same: ten percentage points more young women than men earn a bachelor’s degree.

Differences in education lead to differences in attitude: people who attend college are more likely to absorb a liberal, egalitarian outlook. The education gap also leads to differences in how men and women experience life, work and romance. To simplify: when a woman leaves university in a rich country, she is likely to find a white-collar job and be able to support herself. But when she enters the dating market (assuming she is heterosexual), she finds that, because there are many more female graduates than male ones, the supply of liberal, educated men does not match demand. Charelle Lewis, a 26-year-old health-care worker in Washington, DC, complains that men her age have “a little-boy mindset”.

The dating scene can also be bleak for men who did not go to university. Upwardly mobile women reject them. Michal Pazura, a young Polish dairy farmer, takes a break from inflating tractor tyres and recalls a girlfriend who “didn’t like the smell” of the farm and left him to live in a town. “I wanted a traditional, stable lifestyle. She wanted fun.” Male farmers have such a hard time finding spouses that a reality show called “Farmer Wants a Wife” is one of the most popular on Polish television. “It’s hard to say what young women want in a man these days,” says Lukasz, the Polish fireman. Previously, they just wanted a man with “a stable income, who could fix things in the house…and who had a driving licence”, he recalls.

Will the gulf in attitudes affect how many of today’s young people eventually couple up and have kids? It is too soon to know. But for those who think the rich world’s tumbling birth rates are a problem, the early signs are discouraging. In America, Daniel Cox, Kelsey Hammond and Kyle Gray of the Survey Centre on American Life find that Generation Z (typically defined as those born between the late 1990s and early 2000s) have their first romantic relationship years later than did Millennials (born between 1980 and the late 1990s) or Generation X (born in the decade or so to 1980), and are more likely to feel lonely. Also, Gen Z women, unlike older women, are dramatically more likely than their male peers to describe themselves as LGBT (31% to 16%). It remains to be seen whether this mismatch will last, and if so, how it will affect the formation of families in the future.

The backlash against feminism may be especially strong among young men because they are the ones who feel most threatened by women’s progress. Better jobs for women need not mean worse ones for men—but many men think it does. Older men are less bothered, since they are more likely to be established in their careers or retired. Younger men, by contrast, are just starting out, so they “are most likely to perceive women’s competition as a potential threat to their future life course”, argue Dr Off, Dr Charron and Dr Alexander. In a recent study, they found that young European men are especially likely to resent women (and feel that feminism has gone too far) if unemployment has recently risen in their area, and if they perceive their society’s institutions to be unfair. Anti-feminist views, they add, are a fair predictor of right-wing authoritarian ones.

Not all male grumbles are groundless. In some countries, divorce courts tend to favour the mother in child-custody disputes. In others, pension rules are skewed. Men enter the labour market earlier and die younger, but the retirement age for women in rich countries is on average slightly lower. In Poland it is five years lower, so a Polish man can expect to work three times longer than he will live post-retirement, while for a Polish woman the ratio is 1.4, notes Michał Gulczyński of Bocconi University. This strikes many men as unfair. Mateusz, the Polish fireman, recalls when a left-wing lawmaker was asked, if she was so keen on equal rights, what about equalising the pension age? “She changed the subject,” he scoffs.

Another factor that particularly affects young men is conscription. They are the first to be called up; women are often exempt. In South Korea, where military service is universal for men and notoriously gruelling, it fuels male resentment. In Europe conscription is no longer common, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has made young men in neighbouring countries, such as Poland, more scared they may be drafted, says Mr Gulczyński.

Social media, the lens through which young people increasingly view the world, may have aggravated polarisation. First, they let people form echo chambers. When homogenous groups of like-minded people discuss an issue, they tend to become more extreme, as individuals vie for affirmation by restating the in-group’s core position in ever-stronger terms, and denouncing those who dispute it.

When groups of frustrated young men link up online, the conversation often descends into misogyny. In male-dominated Chinese chatrooms the phrase “feminist whore” is common, along with a pun that inserts the character for “fist” into “feminist” to make it sound more aggressive.

Once a man joins an angry online group, the pressure to remain in it is strong. Benjamin, a student in Washington, DC, says he used to be a “red-pill guy …working as a janitor, eating McDonalds and wallowing in self-pity”. He’d watch classes online about how to boost his self-confidence and pick up women. When he quit the manosphere, his friends taunted him as a “blue-pill” (someone fooled by the establishment) or a “cuck” (a weak man).

Second, algorithms hook users with content that terrifies or infuriates, making the world seem both more frightening and more unjust than it is. Women who click on #MeToo stories will see more of them; ditto for men who click on stories of men being falsely accused of rape. Each may gain an exaggerated idea of the risks that they personally face.

“When you go into a gym to work out and a woman’s in your line of vision, you look at her and all of a sudden you’re famous on TikTok for being a sexual harasser or something,” says Kahlil Rose, a 28-year-old conservative man in Atlanta. This has not happened to anyone he knows. But he has seen it on his phone, so it looms large in his consciousness. Benjamin, the student in Washington, offers a similarly gloomy perspective: “Men my age are afraid to get married because they hear a cautionary tale: woman cheats, files for divorce and takes everything he worked for.”

Women see a different world online. Julia Kozik, a student in Warsaw, follows a tip she saw on TikTok. When she rides in a cab, she tears out a strand of hair and puts it under the seat in case she is abducted and the police need DNA evidence. “I avoid men at all costs, mostly,” she says.

The political left has done a fair job of persuading women that it cares about their problems. But it has not figured out how to talk to men, argues Richard Reeves, a liberal scholar, in “Of Boys and Men”. Progressives often assume “that gender inequality can only run one way, that is, to the disadvantage of women”. And they apply labels like “toxic masculinity” so indiscriminately as to suggest that there is something intrinsically wrong with being male. Rather than drawing immature boys and men into a dialogue about their behaviour, this “is much more likely to send them to the online manosphere, where they will be reassured they did nothing wrong and that liberals are out to get them”.

Making America virile again

Some politicians on the right, by contrast, have found ways to connect with disgruntled males. Donald Trump is an obvious example. He cultivates “an image of virility and manliness”, argues Mr Cox of the Survey Centre on American Life. He appealed to young men who don’t follow the news by showing up at an Ultimate Fighting Championship event. He also tends “to side with men in cultural conflicts”. In 2018 he decried what he said was a shift in the burden of proof in cases of rape and sexual assault: “It’s a very scary time for young men in America when you can be guilty of something you may not be guilty of...That’s one of the very, very bad things that’s taking place right now.” Progressives may dismiss this as the self-interested griping of a serial abuser. But there’s reason to believe that Mr Trump’s macho behaviour “resonates with young men”, says Mr Cox.

What neither side has done well is to tackle the underlying problems that are driving young men and women apart. Most important, policymakers could think harder about making schools work for underperforming boys. Mr Reeves suggests hiring more male teachers, and having boys start school a year later, by default, since they mature more slowly than girls do. Also, since “the desegregation of the labour market has been almost entirely one-way”, the state could beef up vocational training to prepare young men for occupations they currently shun, such as those involving health, education or administrative tasks. If such reforms help more boys and men adjust to a changing world, that would benefit both men and women. ■

In a trendy food market in Warsaw, Poland’s capital, two female engineers are discussing how hard it is to meet a nice, enlightened man. Paulina Nasilowska got a big pay rise a few years ago. Her boyfriend asked: “Did you have an affair with your boss?” He is now an ex-boyfriend.

Ms Nasilowska’s friend, Joanna Walczak, recalls a man she met on Tinder who revealed that he was a “red-pill” guy (a reference to “The Matrix”, a film, meaning someone who sees reality clearly. In the “manosphere”, a global online community of angry men, it means realising that men are oppressed.) He thought household chores and child care were women’s work, and that women could not be leaders. They didn’t have a second date.

Typically for young Polish women, Ms Nasilowska and Ms Walczak support parties of the liberal left, which take women’s issues seriously and promise to legalise abortion. Young Polish men, they complain, hew more to the right, or even to the far right. Consider last year’s election. Then the top choice for 18- to 29-year-old men was Confederation, a party that touts free-market economics and traditional social values. (“Against feminists. In defence of real women” is one of its slogans.) Some 26% of young men backed it; only 6% of their female peers did.

Young Polish men have their own set of complaints. Feminism has gone too far, say two firemen in their 20s in a small town. Lukasz says he used to be able to go to a village dance party and “the women there were wife material.” Nowadays “they’re all posting shameless pictures of themselves on social media,” he laments. The media are “all biased and pushing the culture to the left”, complains Mateusz (neither man would give a surname). People no longer admit that men and women often want to do different kinds of work.

In much of the developed world, the attitudes of young men and women are polarising. The Economist analysed polling data from 20 rich countries, using the European Social Survey, America’s General Social Survey and the Korean Social Survey. Two decades ago there was little difference between men and women aged 18-29 on a self-reported scale of 1-10 from very liberal to very conservative. But our analysis found that by 2020 the gap was 0.75 (see chart 1 ). For context, this is roughly twice the size of the gap in opinion between people with and without a degree in the same year.

Put another way, in 2020 young men were only slightly more likely to describe themselves as liberal than conservative, with a gap of just two percentage points. Young women, however, were much more likely to lean to the left than the right, with a gap of a massive 27 percentage points.

In all the large countries we examined, young men were more conservative than young women (see chart 2). In Poland the gap was 1.1 points on a scale of 1-10. It was a hefty 1.4 in America, 1 in France, 0.75 in Italy, 0.71 in Britain and 0.74 in South Korea. Men and women have always seen the world differently. What is striking, though, is that a gulf in political opinions has opened up, as younger women are becoming sharply more liberal while their male peers are not.

For young women, the triumphs of previous generations of feminists, in vastly increasing women’s opportunities in the workplace and public life, are in the past. They are concerned with continuing injustices, from male violence to draconian abortion laws (in some countries) and gaps in pay to women shouldering a disproportionate share of housework and child care. Plenty of men are broadly in their corner. But a substantial portion are vocally not. Young women’s avid liberalism may spring from a feeling that there is much work still to be done, and that opposition to doing it will be stiff.

The gap does not translate straightforwardly into voting patterns, but it is visible. Fully 72% of young American women who voted in House elections in 2022 backed the Democratic candidate; some 54% of young men did. In 2008 there was barely any gap. In Europe, where many elections offer a wide array of parties, young women are more likely to support the most left-wing ones, whereas young men are more likely to favour the right or even the radical right.

In France in 2022 young men were much keener than young women on Eric Zemmour, a presidential candidate who wrote a book rebutting Simone de Beauvoir, France’s best-known feminist. Germany’s election in 2021 saw the largest ever left-right gap between the votes of young women and men, according to Ansgar Hudde of the University of Cologne. In Portugal, where the far-right Chega party surged in an election on March 10th, support for it is concentrated among voters who are young, male and less educated. And South Korea in 2022 elected an overtly anti-feminist president; more than 58% of men in their 20s voted for him. Some 58% of women in their 20s backed his rival.

Young and cranky

The attitude gap between the sexes is also visible in how they view each other. People in 27 European countries were asked whether they agreed that “advancing women’s and girls’ rights has gone too far because it threatens men’s and boys’ opportunities.” Unsurprisingly, men were more likely to concur than women. Notably, though, young men were more anti-feminist than older men, contradicting the popular notion that each generation is more liberal than the previous one. Gefjon Off, Nicholas Charron and Amy Alexander of Gothenburg University use a Dutch analogy to illustrate the difference between young (18-29) and old (65+) European men. It is as great, on this question, as the gap between the average supporter of Geert Wilders’s radical-right Party for Freedom and the Liberal Democrats.

A similar pattern holds in other advanced countries. Although a higher share of young British men think it is harder to be a woman than a man than think the opposite (35% to 26%), they are likelier than old British men to say it is harder to be a man than a woman. Young British women are more likely than their mothers to believe the opposite. Nearly 80% of South Korean men in their 20s say that men are discriminated against. Barely 30% of men over 60 agree, making their views indistinguishable from those of women in their 20s or 60s.

In China pollsters do not ask about voting intentions, but they find a similar divergence between young men and women when it comes to gender roles. Yue Qian of the University of British Columbia and Jiaxing Li of the Shanghai University of Medicine and Health Sciences looked at survey data for 35,000 Chinese people. In their analysis they found that young men were much more likely than young women to agree with statements such as “men should put career first, whereas women should put family first” and “when the economy is bad, female employees should be fired first.”

Young Chinese men’s views were not much different from those of older men, whereas young women’s views were far more egalitarian than their mothers’. Claire, a market researcher in Beijing (who uses an English name to preserve her anonymity), says she wants a partner who will treat her as an equal and share the housework. “I think most Chinese men would fail that test,” she sighs. Dr Qian notes that when Chinese parents go to “matchmaking corners” in parks, they brag about their sons’ jobs and degrees, but hide their daughters’ achievements, fearing they will put off potential suitors.

What is going on? The most likely causes of this growing division are education (young men are getting less of it than young women), experience (advanced countries have become less sexist, and men and women experience this differently) and echo chambers (social media aggravate polarisation). Also, in democracies, many politicians on the right are deftly stoking young male grievances, while many on the left barely acknowledge that young men have real problems.

But they do, starting with education. Although the men at the top are doing fine, many of the rest are struggling. In rich countries, 28% of boys but only 18% of girls fail to reach the minimum level of reading proficiency as defined by PISA, which tests high-school students. And women have overtaken men at university (see chart 4). In the EU, the share of men aged 25 to 34 with tertiary degrees rose from 21% to 35% between 2002 and 2020. For women it rose faster, from 25% to 46%. In America, the gap is about the same: ten percentage points more young women than men earn a bachelor’s degree.

Differences in education lead to differences in attitude: people who attend college are more likely to absorb a liberal, egalitarian outlook. The education gap also leads to differences in how men and women experience life, work and romance. To simplify: when a woman leaves university in a rich country, she is likely to find a white-collar job and be able to support herself. But when she enters the dating market (assuming she is heterosexual), she finds that, because there are many more female graduates than male ones, the supply of liberal, educated men does not match demand. Charelle Lewis, a 26-year-old health-care worker in Washington, DC, complains that men her age have “a little-boy mindset”.

The dating scene can also be bleak for men who did not go to university. Upwardly mobile women reject them. Michal Pazura, a young Polish dairy farmer, takes a break from inflating tractor tyres and recalls a girlfriend who “didn’t like the smell” of the farm and left him to live in a town. “I wanted a traditional, stable lifestyle. She wanted fun.” Male farmers have such a hard time finding spouses that a reality show called “Farmer Wants a Wife” is one of the most popular on Polish television. “It’s hard to say what young women want in a man these days,” says Lukasz, the Polish fireman. Previously, they just wanted a man with “a stable income, who could fix things in the house…and who had a driving licence”, he recalls.

Will the gulf in attitudes affect how many of today’s young people eventually couple up and have kids? It is too soon to know. But for those who think the rich world’s tumbling birth rates are a problem, the early signs are discouraging. In America, Daniel Cox, Kelsey Hammond and Kyle Gray of the Survey Centre on American Life find that Generation Z (typically defined as those born between the late 1990s and early 2000s) have their first romantic relationship years later than did Millennials (born between 1980 and the late 1990s) or Generation X (born in the decade or so to 1980), and are more likely to feel lonely. Also, Gen Z women, unlike older women, are dramatically more likely than their male peers to describe themselves as LGBT (31% to 16%). It remains to be seen whether this mismatch will last, and if so, how it will affect the formation of families in the future.

The backlash against feminism may be especially strong among young men because they are the ones who feel most threatened by women’s progress. Better jobs for women need not mean worse ones for men—but many men think it does. Older men are less bothered, since they are more likely to be established in their careers or retired. Younger men, by contrast, are just starting out, so they “are most likely to perceive women’s competition as a potential threat to their future life course”, argue Dr Off, Dr Charron and Dr Alexander. In a recent study, they found that young European men are especially likely to resent women (and feel that feminism has gone too far) if unemployment has recently risen in their area, and if they perceive their society’s institutions to be unfair. Anti-feminist views, they add, are a fair predictor of right-wing authoritarian ones.

Not all male grumbles are groundless. In some countries, divorce courts tend to favour the mother in child-custody disputes. In others, pension rules are skewed. Men enter the labour market earlier and die younger, but the retirement age for women in rich countries is on average slightly lower. In Poland it is five years lower, so a Polish man can expect to work three times longer than he will live post-retirement, while for a Polish woman the ratio is 1.4, notes Michał Gulczyński of Bocconi University. This strikes many men as unfair. Mateusz, the Polish fireman, recalls when a left-wing lawmaker was asked, if she was so keen on equal rights, what about equalising the pension age? “She changed the subject,” he scoffs.

Another factor that particularly affects young men is conscription. They are the first to be called up; women are often exempt. In South Korea, where military service is universal for men and notoriously gruelling, it fuels male resentment. In Europe conscription is no longer common, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has made young men in neighbouring countries, such as Poland, more scared they may be drafted, says Mr Gulczyński.

Social media, the lens through which young people increasingly view the world, may have aggravated polarisation. First, they let people form echo chambers. When homogenous groups of like-minded people discuss an issue, they tend to become more extreme, as individuals vie for affirmation by restating the in-group’s core position in ever-stronger terms, and denouncing those who dispute it.

When groups of frustrated young men link up online, the conversation often descends into misogyny. In male-dominated Chinese chatrooms the phrase “feminist whore” is common, along with a pun that inserts the character for “fist” into “feminist” to make it sound more aggressive.

Once a man joins an angry online group, the pressure to remain in it is strong. Benjamin, a student in Washington, DC, says he used to be a “red-pill guy …working as a janitor, eating McDonalds and wallowing in self-pity”. He’d watch classes online about how to boost his self-confidence and pick up women. When he quit the manosphere, his friends taunted him as a “blue-pill” (someone fooled by the establishment) or a “cuck” (a weak man).

Second, algorithms hook users with content that terrifies or infuriates, making the world seem both more frightening and more unjust than it is. Women who click on #MeToo stories will see more of them; ditto for men who click on stories of men being falsely accused of rape. Each may gain an exaggerated idea of the risks that they personally face.

“When you go into a gym to work out and a woman’s in your line of vision, you look at her and all of a sudden you’re famous on TikTok for being a sexual harasser or something,” says Kahlil Rose, a 28-year-old conservative man in Atlanta. This has not happened to anyone he knows. But he has seen it on his phone, so it looms large in his consciousness. Benjamin, the student in Washington, offers a similarly gloomy perspective: “Men my age are afraid to get married because they hear a cautionary tale: woman cheats, files for divorce and takes everything he worked for.”

Women see a different world online. Julia Kozik, a student in Warsaw, follows a tip she saw on TikTok. When she rides in a cab, she tears out a strand of hair and puts it under the seat in case she is abducted and the police need DNA evidence. “I avoid men at all costs, mostly,” she says.

The political left has done a fair job of persuading women that it cares about their problems. But it has not figured out how to talk to men, argues Richard Reeves, a liberal scholar, in “Of Boys and Men”. Progressives often assume “that gender inequality can only run one way, that is, to the disadvantage of women”. And they apply labels like “toxic masculinity” so indiscriminately as to suggest that there is something intrinsically wrong with being male. Rather than drawing immature boys and men into a dialogue about their behaviour, this “is much more likely to send them to the online manosphere, where they will be reassured they did nothing wrong and that liberals are out to get them”.

Making America virile again

Some politicians on the right, by contrast, have found ways to connect with disgruntled males. Donald Trump is an obvious example. He cultivates “an image of virility and manliness”, argues Mr Cox of the Survey Centre on American Life. He appealed to young men who don’t follow the news by showing up at an Ultimate Fighting Championship event. He also tends “to side with men in cultural conflicts”. In 2018 he decried what he said was a shift in the burden of proof in cases of rape and sexual assault: “It’s a very scary time for young men in America when you can be guilty of something you may not be guilty of...That’s one of the very, very bad things that’s taking place right now.” Progressives may dismiss this as the self-interested griping of a serial abuser. But there’s reason to believe that Mr Trump’s macho behaviour “resonates with young men”, says Mr Cox.

What neither side has done well is to tackle the underlying problems that are driving young men and women apart. Most important, policymakers could think harder about making schools work for underperforming boys. Mr Reeves suggests hiring more male teachers, and having boys start school a year later, by default, since they mature more slowly than girls do. Also, since “the desegregation of the labour market has been almost entirely one-way”, the state could beef up vocational training to prepare young men for occupations they currently shun, such as those involving health, education or administrative tasks. If such reforms help more boys and men adjust to a changing world, that would benefit both men and women. ■

We are hiring a global correspondent. The job will be London-based and involve travel. The successful candidate will provide ambitious coverage of global trends in policy, economics and politics. A knowledge of economics is essential; familiarity with data analysis would be helpful. Applicants should send a CV, a cover letter and an unpublished article of 600 words suitable for publication in The Economist to [email protected].  The deadline is April 5th 2024.

THE STRUGGLE over America’s elite universities–who controls them and how they are run–continues to rage, with lasting consequences for them and the country. Harvard faces a congressional investigation into antisemitism; Columbia has just been hit with a new lawsuit alleging “endemic” hostility towards Jews. Top colleges are under mounting pressure to reintroduce rigorous test-based admissions policies, after years of backsliding on meritocracy. And it is likely that the cosy tax breaks these gilded institutions enjoy will soon attract greater scrutiny. Behind these struggles lies a big question. Can American universities, flabby with cash and blighted by groupthink, keep their competitive edge?

The origins of the turmoil lie in extreme campus reactions to Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7th. They led to a blockbuster congressional hearing in December. In it politicians accused three presidents of stellar colleges of failing to stamp out anti-Jewish speech. The University of Pennsylvania’s then president, Elizabeth Magill, stepped down just days later. Claudine Gay, formerly Harvard’s president, resigned from her job in January amid twin furores over antisemitism on campus and plagiarism in her scholarship (which she contested).

Plenty of faculty—both at Harvard and at other elite universities that have recently seen their reputations trashed—insist that hard-right Republicans and other rabble-rousers are fabricating controversies. Stirring up animosity towards pointy-headed elites can win them political advantage. But thoughtful insiders acknowledge that, for some years, elite universities, particularly those within the Ivy League, have grown dangerously detached from ordinary Americans, not to mention unmoored from their own academic and meritocratic values.

In theory, these difficulties could promote efforts to correct flaws that are holding back elite education in America. But it could also entrench them. “America’s great universities are losing the public’s trust,” warns Robert George, a legal scholar and philosopher at Princeton. “And it is not the public’s fault.”

History lessons

To understand the mess that the Ivies and other elite colleges find themselves in, first consider how they broke away from the rest in recent decades. Although America’s elite universities have centuries of prestigious history, much of their modern wealth flows from a bull run that began in the more recent past. Back in the 1960s, only a modest gap divided the resources that America’s most and least selective colleges could throw around, according to research by Caroline Hoxby, an economist at Stanford. By the late 2000s, that had widened to an abyss.

This happened in part because of changes that enabled elite universities to enrol ever cleverer students. The collapsing cost of air fares and phone calls made sharp school-leavers gradually more eager to apply to ritzy colleges far from their homes. Smart youngsters from around the world joined them. At about the same time, the expansion of standardised testing made it easier for colleges to identify the very brightest sparks from far and wide. These smarter, more ambitious entrants were more likely to value top-notch faculty and facilities, and were more willing to pay for them, according to Professor Hoxby’s analysis. And they went on to greater success, which meant the size of donations elite universities could squeeze from alumni began to increase.

New-fangled ways of managing endowments also boosted America’s super elite colleges. For years top universities managed their nest eggs cautiously, says Brendan Cantwell of Michigan State University. But in the 1980s the wealthiest ones began ploughing into more hazardous assets, including commodities and property, with considerable success. The richest universities were both more willing and more able to take risks; they could also reinvest a larger share of their returns.

All this has opened a chasm between America’s top-ranked colleges and the rest. A mere 20 universities own half of the $800bn in endowments that American institutions have accrued. The most selective ones can afford to splash a lot more money on students than the youngsters themselves are asked to cough up in tuition, which only makes admission to them more sought after. Acceptance rates at the top dozen universities are one-third of what they were two decades ago (at most other institutions, rates are unchanged). Lately early-career salaries for people with in-demand degrees, such as computer science, have risen faster for graduates from the most prestigious universities than for everyone else. Higher education in America “is becoming a ladder in which the steps are farther apart”, says Craig Calhoun of Arizona State University.

For all their success, America’s best institutions are now flying into squalls. One clutch of challenges comes from abroad. American universities still dominate the top rungs of most international league tables–but their lead is becoming somewhat less secure. Every year Times Higher Education, a British magazine, asks more than 30,000 academics to name the universities they believe produce the best work in their fields. They are growing gradually less likely to name American ones, and a bit more likely to point to Chinese ones (see chart one).

Research in disciplines such as maths, computing, engineering and physics is becoming especially competitive. Rankings produced by Leiden University in the Netherlands, which scores universities solely on the impact of the papers they produce, now place Chinese universities in pole position for all those subjects (see chart two). “The difference from five or 10 years ago is quite astonishing,” says Simon Marginson at Oxford University. The challenge is not that American output is growing weaker, he reckons, but that the quality produced by rivals is shooting up.

Competition among countries to snag the world’s smartest students and faculty is growing more severe, too. Twenty years ago America attracted 60% of the foreigners studying in English-speaking countries; now it gets about 40%. Starting around the time of Donald Trump’s election, high-achieving Chinese–who once had eyes only for America’s finest universities–began sending additional, “back-up” applications to institutions in places such as Singapore and Britain, says Tomer Rothschild, who runs an agency that helps them.

As challenges from abroad multiply, America’s elite universities are squandering their support at home. Two trends in particular are widening rifts between town and gown. One is a decades-long expansion in the number of managers and other non-academic staff that universities employ. America’s best 50 colleges now have three times as many administrative and professional staff as faculty, according to a report by Paul Weinstein of the Progressive Policy Institute, a think-tank. Some of the increase responds to genuine need, such as extra work created by growing government regulation. A lot of it looks like bloat. These extra hands may be tying researchers in red tape and have doubtless inflated fees. The total published cost of attending Harvard (now nearly $80,000 annually for an undergraduate) has more than doubled in twenty years.

A second trend is the gradual evaporation of conservatives from the academy. Surveys carried out by researchers at UCLA suggest that the share of faculty who place themselves on the political left rose from 40% in 1990 to about 60% in 2017—a period during which party affiliation among the general public barely changed (see chart three). The ratios are vastly more skewed at many of America’s most elite colleges. A survey carried out last May by The Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, found that less than 3% of faculty there would describe themselves as conservative. Three-quarters called themselves liberal.

Why has this happened? One argument is that academics’ views have not in fact changed that much; instead, Republicans have abandoned them by moving to the right. But conservatives insist that bright sparks with right-leaning views have been choosing to leave or stay out of the profession, in part because lefty colleagues have been declining to hire and promote them. This mix of bloat and groupthink helps explain why prestigious universities have so often found themselves at odds with the American public in battles over access and speech.

Getting in and getting on

Start with access: elite colleges clung to affirmative action long after the majority of Americans had decided that it was unfair to give black, Hispanic and Native American students with slightly lower grades an advantage when deciding who to admit. Academics who spoke against the practice—arguing, for example, that some youngsters were being catapulted onto courses they were poorly prepared for—have often been slammed as bigots by their students and peers.

In theory the Supreme Court’s decision to outlaw racial preferences last year should encourage posh universities to junk admissions practices that are even more irksome—such as favouring children of alumni. Instead many have made their admissions criteria even more opaque, potentially damaging universities’ meritocratic pretensions further. At the start of the pandemic, most stopped requiring applicants to supply scores from standardised tests. Now hard-to-evaluate measures such as the quality of personal statements are having to carry more weight. For some institutions that has proved unsatisfactory: in recent weeks Dartmouth and Yale announced that they will require standardised test scores from applicants once again. They are the first Ivies to do so.

As for speech, elite colleges have done a particularly poor job of handling a generation of youngsters who are alarmingly intolerant of views they don’t like. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), an NGO, rates freedom of expression across America’s best-known campuses. Last year it placed two Ivy League outfits, Harvard and Pennsylvania, among the five worst performers; Harvard came dead last. More than half of students in these bottom five colleges believe it is sometimes okay to stop peers attending a speech by a controversial figure. Only about 70% agree that it is “never acceptable” to use violence to stop someone talking.

Universities stand accused not just of tolerating small-mindedness among their students, but of perpetuating it. One theory holds that, if elite universities worked their students harder, they would have less time and energy to fight battles over campus speech. Between the 1960s and the early 2000s the number of hours a week that an average American student spent studying declined by around one third, notes Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank. Yet grades do not seem to have suffered. At Yale, the share of all grades marked “A” has risen from 67% in 2010 to around 80% in 2022; at Harvard it rose from 60% to 79%.

More often blamed are administrative teams dedicated to fostering “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (DEI). They have grown in size as the number of administrators of all kinds has increased. They have an interest in ensuring that everyone on campus is polite and friendly, but little to gain from defending vigorous debate. In theory they report to academic deans, says Steven Pinker, a psychologist at Harvard and a member of a faculty group committed to defending academic freedom; in practice they move laterally from university to university, bringing with them a culture that is entirely their own. Critics of DEI departments insist these offices have helped soak campuses with unsophisticated “woke” ideologies that depict complex problems as simplistic battles.

All these problems would be better handled if universities had more effective governance. University presidents, and the deans beneath them, have too often looked intimidated by activist students and administrators, and unwilling to stand up for academics bullied for unpopular views. FIRE, the campaigners for academic freedom, reckon that between 2014 and mid 2023 there were at least 1,000 attempts to get academics sacked or otherwise punished for things they said (one fifth of those resulted in people losing their jobs).

Years of wishy-washiness about what speech campuses will and will not tolerate have made it more difficult for university leaders to referee the clashes that have erupted between students supportive of Palestinians and those speaking up for Israel. Presidents who have not always held firm on free expression now find themselves besieged by censors of all political stripes. College leaders who, since the start of the Gaza war, have rediscovered their commitment to vigorous debate have inevitably ended up looking partisan.

University boards appear especially weak. They have not grown much more professional or effective, even as the wealth and fame of their institutions has soared. Many are oversized. Prestigious private colleges commonly have at least 30 trustees; a few have 50 or more. It is not easy to coax a board of that size into focused strategic discussions. It also limits how far each trustee feels personally responsible for an institution’s success.

Furthermore, trusteeships are often distributed as a reward for donations, rather than to people with the time and commitment required to provide proper oversight. Universities generally manage to snag people with useful experience outside academia. But many trustees prefer not to rock the boat; some are hoping that their service will grant children or grandchildren a powerful trump card when it comes to seeking admission. Too many see their job as merely “cheerleading, cheque-writing and attendance at football games”, says Michael Poliakoff of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, an organisation that lobbies for governance reform. And at many private universities the way in which new trustees are appointed involves cosying up to current ones or to university authorities. Outsiders can struggle to be picked.

Testing times

Where is all this going? Reports of campus antisemitism have roused lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. In December a bipartisan group in Congress added new language to a draft bill that aims to boost funding for short, non-degree courses. They proposed finding the cash for this by preventing students at very rich universities from taking federal student loans. That idea was dropped in February, amid worries that it would create new obstacles for poor students, but it has since been replaced with a new proposal: that wealthy universities be required to “share risk” with the government by covering the government’s losses in the event that federal loans are not repaid. Universities of all shapes and sizes have long resisted talk of such schemes.

Elite universities’ tax advantages are another possible target. For years politicians have accused them of “hoarding” huge endowments while raising prices for students and snaffling government money for research. Ten top colleges got about $33bn in federal research grants and contracts between 2018 and 2022, reckons Open the Book, an NGO. Over the same period, the endowments swelled by about $65bn. Until 2017 universities paid no tax on income from these nest-eggs; that year Mr Trump hit the very richest with a 1.4% charge. He has implied that, if re-elected, he will take another bite.

At a minimum a Republican administration would make much sharper use of regulators, such as the civil-rights monitors employed in the federal education department. They might be encouraged to launch more investigations, for example into admissions rules or the work of DEI teams. They have already meddled energetically in the running of public universities, over which they have far greater control. The University of Florida announced on March 1st that it had got rid of all its DEI positions in order to comply with a newish state rule. Signed into law a year ago by the Republican governor Ron DeSantis, it prevents state money from being spent on such things.

Better for universities to heal themselves. Smaller, more democratically selected boards would provide better oversight. More meritocratic admissions would improve universities’ standing. Greg Lukianoff of FIRE wants to see campuses stripped of bureaucrats “whose main job is to police speech”. Instead universities should invest in programmes teaching the importance of free and open debate, says Tom Ginsburg at the University of Chicago, who runs a forum designed to do just that: “If your ideas aren’t subjected to rigorous scrutiny, they’re not going to be as good.”

Reformers would also like more people in the political centre, and on the right, to make careers in academia. No one thinks this will happen quickly. But college bosses could start by making it clear that they will defend the unorthodox thinkers they already have on their payrolls, reckons Jim Applegate, who runs a faculty group at Columbia University that aims to promote academic freedom. They could discourage departments from forcing job applicants to submit statements outlining their DEI approach (one study a few years ago suggested this was a condition for a fifth of all university jobs, and more than 30% at elite colleges). Lately these have looked less like honest ways of spotting capable candidates and more like tests of ideology.

The furore over antisemitism could bring the impetus universities need to reform. But a less optimistic scenario exists, too. Seeking to escape heat over hate speech, college leaders could choose to become all the more watchful of what their students and faculty say. Tighter rules about speech on campus might deflect brickbats in the short term; in the long term, they would only degrade the quality of teaching and research at American universities. “We are at an inflection point,” reckons Professor George of Princeton: “It could go either way.” ■

AFRICA’S WILLINGNESS to break with the West has been flaunted in recent years. After Russia invaded Ukraine 17 African countries abstained from a UN vote condemning the invasion. Last year, as the West refused negotiations with Russia, South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa and three other African presidents led a peace mission to Russia and Ukraine. This year South Africa’s case against Israel’s actions in Gaza in the International Court of Justice was a public act of defiance (America decried it as “meritless” and “counter-productive”). Mr Ramaphosa has also attended meetings with the presidents of China, Iran and Russia over the past eight months.

African leaders believe that a multipolar world of transactional international relations, where many powers compete for influence, is in the ascendant. Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are among those offering themselves as investors, security partners and allies. Meanwhile, America has lost focus on Africa. It remains absorbed with Asia and preoccupied by wars in Europe and the Middle East. And if Donald Trump wins back the presidency in November, America may neglect African issues further. The result is that Africa, perhaps to a greater degree than any other region, is adapting itself to a multipolar world.

The challenge involves both big opportunities and grim risks for the continent. Above all, it means African governments have more agency over their affairs. “The benefit of a multipolar world is that there is not just one centre of decision-making,” explains President Macky Sall of Senegal. “When there is just one centre it becomes a diktat, you have no choice.”

The greatest prize is investment, which is critical for a continent in extraordinary need of it. But a multipolar world is fraught with risks. Financing from new partners can become bad debt. And the dangers posed politically and militarily are greater still. Autocratic allies can help leaders to overstay in power and enable coups. Meddling foreign powers can spread conflict and make wars more destructive.

History offers a sobering precedent. During the cold war African leaders also had greater flexibility to pick their partners. But the results were often ugly. With Soviet support, the Derg, the socialist junta in Ethiopia, stayed in power from 1974 to 1991 despite a famine that killed perhaps a million people. Mobutu Sese Seko, the dictator who ruled Congo absurdly and ruinously for more than three decades, was backed by the CIA.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall American dominance ushered in a wave of democratisation in Africa and conflict abated somewhat. The continent’s economic progress was limited, however, and investment from the West failed to meet even a small share of its needs. That made many Africans receptive to China’s advances in the 2000s. While the Americans offered criticism, the Chinese offered cranes. Now other powers are offering alternatives.

Buying up friends

African leaders’ enthusiasm for a multipolar world makes greatest sense economically. About half of the 1.2bn people living in sub-Saharan Africa lack electricity. And some 400m people on the continent cannot access clean drinking water. Sorting all this requires vast investments. The World Bank estimates sub-Saharan Africa needs investment worth about 7% of its GDP in infrastructure every year to achieve near-universal access to water and electricity as well as improved roads by 2030. Current investments are only about half of that.

Much can go awry with individual deals and loans but, given the scale of financing needed in Africa, more countries and institutions investing is welcome. So is a surge in new commercial partners. Trade with some non-Western countries has risen impressively (see chart).

China has led the way on investment in Africa. From 2000-2022 Chinese state financiers lent it $170bn, about two-thirds of which was for infrastructure such as roads, railways and ports. The average Chinese project raised annual GDP growth by a healthy 0.41 to 1.49 percentage points after two years, finds Bradley Parks of AidData, a research group at William & Mary University in Virginia, and co-authors. But amid economic troubles at home, China’s lending to Africa has recently fallen markedly. Chinese loan disbursements in 2022 were only about 10% of their peak in 2016.

For African leaders that makes diversifying their sources of funding further even more important. It is beginning to happen. The UAE has invested nearly $60bn across the continent in the past decade, making it the fourth-biggest investor in that time after China, America and Europe. Turkish construction firms have completed some $85bn-worth of projects in Africa, say Turkish officials. Africa needs far more cash but the continent’s elites reckon that the Gulf countries, Turkey and perhaps India may be able to provide a useful chunk of it. Europe and America have interests and are trying to reassert themselves, particularly in critical minerals. The hope is that competition for Africa’s resources can help it secure better deals for them.

New flows of cash bring new risks. Corruption is an obvious one. Debt can also prove difficult to manage. There is little evidence of debt-trap diplomacy in Africa (the idea that China tricks borrowers and later seizes their assets). But China does often require unusual levels of confidentiality, as well as special conditions, to ensure that it is the first creditor to be paid back. It also tends to use escrow accounts and can be inflexible with countries in trouble. Zambia defaulted in 2020 but only managed to strike a deal with China on restructuring its debt in the past month.

Another risk is that a multipolar world splits. Rising tensions between China and America could divide the world into two isolated trading blocs, one led by China, the other by America and Europe. Sub-Saharan Africa would suffer a bigger economic hit in that scenario than any other region, with more than half of its international trade at risk, reckons the IMF.

The political effects on Africa from its multipolar dealings will also be vast. One advantage is that the new order will allow its governments to take positions that were their preferences for years but which they avoided to stay onside with the West, says Menzi Ndhlovu of Signal Risk, a consultancy in South Africa. But the results of greater African agency may at times cause consternation in the West. After decades of tensions between Uganda and America over gay rights, last year President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda finally concluded that he could ignore the Americans and passed harsh anti-LGBTQ laws. Ethiopia has built close ties with China to pursue unorthodox economic policies such as state-led development that America and the institutions it dominates, such as the World Bank, have long discouraged.

Other downsides may accompany a freer political hand. One is democratic backsliding. Mr Sall has been attempting to hold on to power in Senegal past the end of his mandate, presumably confident that plenty of foreign powers still support him. On February 3rd he announced that an impending election would be postponed indefinitely, but Senegal’s judges slapped down the move. Whether Mr Sall steps aside in April when his mandate ends remains to be seen, especially as there is now talk of an election in June. Others have tried similar ruses. In Ivory Coast the president is in his third term after an earlier tweak to the constitution. Last year the president of the Central African Republic, who is protected by Russian mercenaries, got approval for a constitutional change in a referendum so that he can run for a third term in office should he so choose.

Backsliding is sometimes more abrupt. Under the American-led order putschists were often isolated. No longer. During the cold war there were on average over 20 successful coups in Africa each decade. By the 2000s that fell to just eight. Yet in the 2020s there have already been nine successful coups in Mali and Burkina Faso (two each) as well as in Chad, Guinea, Sudan, Niger and Gabon. Russia has backed the generals in Burkina Faso and Mali with fighters and arms. Niger has chucked out French troops (who had been pushed out of Mali and Burkina) and cosied up to Russia and Iran for cash and weapons.

The results of these manoeuvres are grim: more people died in violent conflict in the Sahel last year than in any year since jihadist violence began over a decade ago. Even so, Russian muscle, diplomatic cover and shipments of grain have helped keep the juntas in the Sahel and Guinea in power despite pressure from the West and sanctions from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the regional bloc. The Sahelian trio are sufficiently confident in their Russian backing that last month they decided to quit ECOWAS altogether.

Bloody stakes

The competition between rival powers in Africa also risks spreading insecurity and war. The number of conflicts on the continent has risen sharply from the relative lows of the 2000s to reach 104 in 2022, according to the Peace Research Institute Oslo. That is the highest in decades. And 2022 was the deadliest year for state-based conflicts in Africa for more than 30 years, largely owing to war in Ethiopia between the forces of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government and those of Tigray.

The brutal civil war in Sudan illustrates how the new geopolitics makes conflicts in Africa more destructive. The Rapid Support Forces, a genocidal militia, has been receiving a steady flow of weapons from the UAE (the country’s officials deny this). Mercenaries from Russia back them, too. The Sudanese Armed Forces are hitting back with Iranian drones and, it seems, the support of Ukrainian special forces. As the conflict rages, the result is that more people are displaced in Sudan than in any other country in the world, and among them are 3.5m children.

Today many countries are also willing to sell arms to regimes that take little care to avoid civilian casualties. Turkey has sold attack drones to Ethiopia, Burkina Faso and Mali—places the West has been reluctant to arm. And Russia is now the top weapons supplier to sub-Saharan Africa, accounting for a quarter of all sales between 2018 and 2022. China is in second place. Its drone sales have triggered recent escalations in conflict between Rwanda and Congo around Goma, the largest city in eastern Congo. Some 135,000 people have been displaced in just a month, joining a half a million already sheltering in the city.

Maximising the benefits of a multipolar world to ordinary Africans without exposing them to dire risks will require deft leadership. Yet such a world also makes it easier for bigwigs to rule in their own interest and retain foreign backing. The central question is likely to be whether African leaders ultimately act in the interests of their people or not. The record so far is worryingly mixed. ■