An Economist Reader from Dec 09, 2021 offers insights. Zanny Menton Beddoes has replaced this duo- note that she conducts her interviews, as if her male companions were mere widow dressing!
Adrian Wooldridge on the Political Apostacy of The Quincy Institute’s Andrew Bacevich and Michael Swaine. Richard Fontaine, of the Centre for a New American Security, shares the stage!
Sub-headline: The world that the West built after the attack on Pearl Harbour is cracking, not least because America is lukewarm about preserving it
What writer/propagandist, at The Economist, but the redoubtable Adrian Wooldridge, would have the brass to write these paragraphs:
A Line of white-painted moorings in Pearl Harbour—the old “Battleship Row”—traces the history of America’s participation in the second world war. At one end a memorial straddles the sunken remains of the USS Arizona, a battleship destroyed during Japan’s surprise attack on December 7th 1941; most of the 1,177 sailors who perished on board remain entombed in the wreck. At the other end, the USS Missouri looms above the tree-line with its imposing 16-inch guns. It was on her deck that General Douglas MacArthur accepted the formal surrender of imperial Japan, ending the war.
“The ships are the book-ends of the war,” notes James Neuman, the official historian of the naval base at Pearl Harbour. “Their legacy is with us every single day.” Families of deceased veterans still come to scatter their ashes in the waters. Some 30 survivors of the attack will attend a ceremony this week to mark its 80th anniversary.
The “date which will live in infamy”, as Franklin Roosevelt called it, transformed America’s place in the world. The country abandoned isolationism and, with “righteous might”, entered the war in the Pacific. Four days later Hitler declared war on America, ensuring that it would join the war in Europe. Victory in the global conflict, hastened by the use of nuclear weapons against Japan, established America as the world’s dominant power, which would go on to defeat the Soviet Union in the cold war.
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The American Wound tended by a British Jingo! America’s revenge against the ‘infamy’ were two Atomic Bombs, dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and horrific deaths of civilian populations, and the long lasting deadly effects of radiation on those who survived the blasts! The only nation to ever use Atomic weapons is now the stewards of political sanity? Mr. Wooldridge is in the territory of the Michael Bay, Jerry Bruckheimer, Randall Wallace epic ‘Pearl Harbor’ of 2001?
And its just the first 238 words of this 4,062 word shaming polemic.
A History Made to Measure follows. With the addition of a list of the Bad Policy Actors: Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft’s Andrew Bacevich and Centre for a New American Security’s Richard Fontaine.
The prime venue for such thinking is the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a think-tank in Washington set up in 2019 with money from both Charles Koch, a generous funder of right-wing causes, and George Soros, a supporter of liberal internationalist groups. Quincy cheered the withdrawal from Afghanistan. “We were very much heartened by Biden’s decision,” says Andrew Bacevich, its president. He urges Mr Biden to leave the Middle East next. odd military bases and depots around the globe. Such ideas have deep roots. He also thinks America should, over time, withdraw from NATO and close many of its 750-George Washington’s farewell address in 1796 enjoined the young nation to “to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world”. The think-tank takes its name from America’s sixth president, John Quincy Adams, who declared that America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy”.
Yet the Quincy recipe is too strong for most Democrats and Republicans. Commentators chastise it for endangering global stability and America’s security, and being soft on Chinese human-rights abuses. Public opinion seems divided. A poll for the Chicago Council on Global Affairs last summer found that Americans approved of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, but were far from ready to abandon American primacy in the world. For the first time, a majority also favoured defending Taiwan.
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What of Mr Biden himself? “On one side, he looks like our kind of guy,” says Mr Bacevich. “On the other, defence spending is going up for no particular reason. And the administration seems to be leaning into the idea of a cold war with China. Right now, Biden is all over the map.”
Richard Fontaine, head of the Centre for a New American Security, a think-tank whose alumni occupy some prominent positions in the Biden administration, says opinion among foreign-policy experts is broadly split by generation: younger scholars, disillusioned by years of fruitless war in Iraq and Afghanistan, are often sympathetic to the idea of restraint. Any zeal to export democracy has abated. “There is a big disillusionment with the missionary role,” he notes. “They say, ‘after Trump, the Capitol riots and covid, are we really going to tout our model?’” The restrainers’ arguments have been seeping into Washington’s discourse—both among doves who want to reduce America’s commitments globally, and among China hawks who want America to do less in the Middle East and Europe the better to direct attention and resources to Asia and the Pacific.
The Reader’ stamina is being tested, as there are 2,530 words remaining ! Mr. Wooldridge has come to the readers assistance by titling the parts of his essay.
Troubles in battalions
Biden’ his time
Pounding sand
Awaiting the big wave in Hawaii
In need of friends
With the naming of the Apostates, Wooldridge begins his extemporaneous ramblings, on the politics that plague the Neo-Liberal/Neo-Conservative Cadre, that now constitutes ‘Political Centrism’:
Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, NATO, Ukraine , China, Taiwan etc., etc. … The Bad Actor Michael Swaine of the Quincy Institute appears:
Others favour retaining a military presence in the Indo-Pacific to “balance” China. Michael Swaine of the Quincy Institute says the cost of war would be enormous. America’s best hope of maintaining stability is not to embark on an arms race with China, but to reduce tensions and seek an accommodation based on an American commitment not to allow Taiwanese independence. “You cannot have deterrence without some degree of reassurance,” he says.’
Wooldridge did identify the Quincy Institute’s, Andrew Bacevich and Michael Swaine, as the central bad actors, in his Political Melodrama. Note Bacevich’s stand on NATO, as the ultimate crime against the American Imperium!
He also thinks America should, over time, withdraw from NATO and close many of its 750-George Washington’s farewell address in 1796 enjoined the young nation to “to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world”.
The concluding paragraph, is the point of arrival of Wooldridge’s shaming polemic, framed by A History Made to Measure. Was it worth The Readers time and patience?
Nevertheless, for all the lurches in America’s politics at home and abroad, many countries will continue to cleave to their main ally. As China, Russia and Iran become increasingly assertive, other countries may be driven closer to America for their own protection. America’s greatest strength is that its magnetic power goes beyond fear. On the day your correspondent visited Pearl Harbour, a pair of British offshore-patrol vessels were moored alongside American destroyers as part of a new, semi-permanent deployment to the Indo-Pacific. And a Japanese submarine was sailing out of port, with its crew lined up topside in white ceremonial uniform. If America succeeds in retaining its dominance in the world, it will be in no small part thanks to its ability to draw in old friends and foes alike.
Newspaper Reader : @FT seemes to echo Zanny Menton Beddoes, and her cadre of kitch meisters, that are Re-Writing American History via readable Politial Snapshots. Daumier & Hogarth be dammed!
The crisis of Western liberal capitalism has coincided with the rise of a powerful new form of state capitalism in emerging markets, says Adrian Wooldridge
… State capitalism increasingly looks like the coming trend. The Brazilian government has forced the departure of the boss of Vale, a mining giant, for being too independent-minded. The French government has set up a sovereign-wealth fund. The South African government is talking openly about nationalising companies and creating national champions. And young economists in the World Bank and other multilateral institutions have begun to discuss embracing a new industrial policy.
That raises some tricky questions about the global economic system. How can you ensure a fair trading system if some companies enjoy the support, overt or covert, of a national government? How can you prevent governments from using companies as instruments of military power? And how can you prevent legitimate worries about fairness from shading into xenophobia and protectionism? Some of the biggest trade rows in recent years—for example, over the China National Offshore Oil Corporation’s attempt to buy America’s Unocal in 2005, and over Dubai Ports’ purchase of several American ports—have involved state-owned enterprises. There are likely to be many more in the future.
The rise of state capitalism is also undoing many of the assumptions about the effects of globalisation. Kenichi Ohmae said the nation state was finished. Thomas Friedman argued that governments had to don the golden straitjacket of market discipline. Naomi Klein pointed out that the world’s biggest companies were bigger than many countries. And Francis Fukuyama asserted that history had ended with the triumph of democratic capitalism. Now across much of the world the state is trumping the market and autocracy is triumphing over democracy.
Ian Bremmer, the president of Eurasia Group, a political-risk consultancy, claims that this is “the end of the free market” in his excellent book of that title. He exaggerates. But he is right that a striking number of governments, particularly in the emerging world, are learning how to use the market to promote political ends. The invisible hand of the market is giving way to the visible, and often authoritarian, hand of state capitalism.
Editor: Reader look to Wooldridge’s Cast Of Characters and the redoubtable Ian Bremmer, given to exaggeration!
As a long time reader of The Economist when Adrian Wooldridge and John Micklethwait held political sway, via one of their many their Best Sellers ‘The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America’ featuring the toxic politics of Bush The Younger, and his masters Vice President Dick Cheney and the long forgotten Karl Rove Mr. 1 % !
The resignation of Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, on Sunday brings the Starmer era in British politics to an end. The precise timing and mechanism of the prime minister’s defenestration is unclear. But his authority is shot to pieces, and his government has lost what purpose it had.
There is only one subject on the Labour Party’s mind: Who should replace him? The pros and cons of the two main candidates are endlessly debated. Wes Streeting, the health secretary, is a deft media performer. But is that a strength rather than a weakness in the post-Peter Mandelson era, with the party’s former spinmeister now in disgrace? Angela Rayner, the ex-deputy leader, is a charismatic champion of the left. But what about her tax affairs? Al Carns, the armed-services minister and former special-services officer, has made a well-publicized visit to NATO’s northernmost border on Norway’s Russia border. At least this relative unknown is free of political baggage.
But Labour needs more than a new leader. It needs a new sense of direction. The problem with Starmer’s leadership is not simply that he isn’t very good at politics. It is that he has never known what he wanted to do with power. He occasionally flirted with silly ideas — “mission-driven government” one day and reviving the spirit of Harold Wilson the next — only to abandon them. He never had an answer to the basic question: What am I here for?
Ideas are essential to politics because they give you both a sense of direction and purpose. Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair were successful prime ministers because they knew where they were headed and were willing to make sacrifices to get there. Starmer made up for his absence of ideas by over-relying on political operatives, most notably McSweeney, and their standard tools of spin, manipulation and “out of the box thinking,” culminating in the appointment of Jeffrey Epstein’s “best pal” Mandelson as British ambassador to the US.
Where can the Labour government get new ideas from at this late stage? Not from the Blairite right. The Mandelson affair has reminded us of everything that was wrong with the clique of insiders who ran the country during the Blair era. Not from think tanks such as the Resolution Foundation. Clever policies cannot deliver unless they are linked by a guiding philosophy. And not from the big-spending left, whatever Rayner’s political talents. Liz Truss’s disastrous Tory premiership has limited the slack the bond markets will grant the country.
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Editor: When dose it become utterly transparent that Blair and his cadre, not to speak of whole of the British Political Class, that made a protraced war against Jeremy Corbyn, while Blair nourished the political ambitions of an utter mediocratiy of Starmer! Yet some how the greater of too evils is the very definition of what Stamer manifested?
Robert Colevile in the Sunday Times of Saturday February 07 2026, 11.00pm GMT, The Sunday Times
Editor: The once reguilar reader of The Economist will be surprised by the comments of Adrian Wooldridge, who now writes for Bloomberg Opinion on the question of Mandelson’ and Starmer’s political trajectories
The challenges for Prime Minister Keir Starmer are piling up. He now faces another blow to his leadership, as further details about ties between Britain’s former Ambassador to the US, Peter Mandelson, and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein emerge. In his latest Bloomberg Opinion piece, Adrian Wooldridge argues that the fall of Mandelson may be an opportunity for systemic reform, with politicians and the press corps needing to break the habit of manipulating the country from on high and think about the long-term national interest. Adrian Wooldridge joins Stephen Carroll and Anna Edwards on Bloomberg radio to discuss.
Reader I will treat the these paragraphs as the comments of Adrian Wooldridge and not of his fellow travelers!
The Epstein files threaten to topple the government. Not Donald Trump’s in Washington, but Keir Starmer’s in London. The British prime minister huddled with Labour MPs yesterday in a desperate effort to quell a party rebellion over his disgraced former ambassador to Washington, Peter Mandelson, and his frequent appearances across the 3.5 million pages released by the US Justice Department. Starmer issued a public apology to Epstein’s victims and said “sorry” for believing Mandelson’s assurances about the nature of his ties with the deceased convicted pedophile. It may not be enough. While Westminster is no stranger to sleaze, the explosiveness of the scandal has few parallels in recent British history. Some reach back more than six decades to the Profumo affair, when the then-secretary of state for war’s dalliances with a woman linked to Soviet officials precipitated the downfall of Harold Macmillan’s government. Already weak and unpopular, Starmer looks to be governing on borrowed time, preserved only because his most likely replacements — such as Health Secretary Wes Streeting and former Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner — aren’t ready to challenge him. The prime minister faces pressure to fire his chief of staff. Betting odds on Starmer leaving office in the first half of the year have soared. It’s been a shocking reverse for the man who led Labour to a landslide election win barely 18 months ago promising a renaissance of the British left. Instead, he’s battling a resurgence of the populist right, in the form of an antagonistic Trump administration and Reform UK leader Nigel Farage. While Trump’s Democratic opponents were hoping the Epstein files would weaken the president, his British ally Farage may be the biggest beneficiary for now. The Brexit campaigner only has to stand back and cheer the ongoing scandal. Little wonder Farage joked yesterday he didn’t want Starmer ousted: “I want him to stay forever.”
In an effort to cut costs, Agence France-Presse (AFP) management wants to reduce the number of expatriate positions by two-thirds. The reform, which would spell the end of staff mobility, would result in the loss of the agency’s network, warns the AFP’s journalists’ association.
Published on February 6, 2026, at 4:45 pm (Paris) 3 min read Lire en français
Today, behind the acronym AFP, which readers find at the bottom of thousands of articles on the web and in the newspapers worldwide, without always fully understanding what it stands for, behind those three letters mentionned in passing during news flashes on radio and television broadcasts, or appearing under the photos that illustrate the news, lies a global network of several hundred journalists, driven by an ambition to offer their clients the fastest and most reliable information possible.
AFP has forged its strength from its unique perspective on the world, enriched by the six languages it operates in. This unifying force is a diverse and shared vision, regardless of the nationality of its journalists.
As a wholesaler of news, AFP sells its wires, photos, videos, live coverage, fact-checks and infographics to thousands of clients worldwide, the vast majority of whom are other media outlets that value our unique perspective, our rigor, and our independence.
AFP is facing financial difficulties, like many media organisations. To cut costs, management wants to undermine its very foundation and strength: the mobility of its journalists throughout its global network. Because it believes AFP can no longer afford this, it wants to reduce by two-thirds the number of expatriate positions that last three to five years.
Shortsighted plan
Only 80 to 90 positions would retain the financial support (housing, schooling for children, travel, etc.) they currently receive, while the others would be subject to significantly less advantageous local conditions (contracts under the law of the country, salaries, social protection, retirement, etc..).
The strength of the AFP network lies in the synergy between local and expatriate journalists: the in-depth expertise of the former combined with the fresh perspective of the latter and their mastery of in-house know-how. Expatriates are a key element in this balance. They help spread the company culture within the offices and protect their colleagues from pressure by local authorities, particularly in countries with authoritarian regimes.
Reducing the number of expatriates by more than two-thirds (from 270 to 80) will dangerously weaken foreign offices and undermine the principle of journalist mobility. How can you believe that drastically reducing their compensation packages will convince as many journalists to go abroad in the future? How can you believe that, in return, local salaries will be increased, given that management has set itself the objective of making savings?
More seriously, by effectively killing mobility, this reform will cause the agency’s network to collapse – a network in which management is also considering merging bureaus, with the risk of becoming detached from the field, at a time when being close to what is happening has never been more important.
We are obviously aware of the financial difficulties that AFP is facing, like all players in the sector. But we believe that management’s short-sighted plan – driven solely by accounting considerations, would lead to our complete demise.
Without a strategy or a vision for the future, the Agency might stabilise its finances, but its integrity and purpose will die. If what constitutes the very essence of AFP is diluted or disappears, what added value will we have compared to our competitors?
The French state helps fund our international network in the name of our public service mission. If we turn our backs on who we are, there is a real danger that this public funding will diminish or even disappear.
As news agency reporters, we work behind the scenes, in the shadow; our names are not in the spotlight. We have only one ambition: to inform, and keep informing; to be on the ground everywhere; to go where others do not go or no longer go.
Today, given the gravity of the situation, we are appealing for the support of all our clients –media outlets, institutions, NGOs, businesses – of all those committed to maintaining the only international news agency of French and European origin in this world where information has become a battlefield.
AFP’s journalists’ association, with the support of all trade union organizations (SNJ, SNJ-CGT, FO, SUD, CFDT, CFE-CGC, CFTC) and employee representatives on the AFP board of directors.
The American reader of The Economist’s ‘our review of American History’ in short self-serving pithy paragraphs, and presents it’s self as a ‘review’ instead of a more complex and nuanced History ! In sum this is propaganda, aimed at an auidence whose actual asquentenceship with American History is minimal at best. Even if they are American: The Women and Men who trade in the Business of Markets and other forms of Investments, need a relable source of carefully packedged ‘History’ provided by Zanny Minton Beddoes and her cadre of undelings. To impress others with a kind of glib knowledge: a self-presentation that demonstrates even an ersatz iteration of mastery, in conversation, is another mode of manipulation. The Economist and its writers have harnesed a kind of ‘History’ via the predations of Madison Avenue!
In a House Of Commons debate about the appointment of Peter Mandelson, SNP MP Stephen Flynn made his feelings clear regarding Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and his handling of the Jeffrey Epstein saga. …
Editor: The first two paragraphs of this execise, in a bubious approximation, of the intellectual giant Bagehot?
In retrospect, the signs were there. In February 2025 Peter Mandelson was asked by the Financial Times about his relationship with the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The soon-to-be British ambassador to America offered a forthright response. “I’m not going to go into this. It’s an FT obsession and frankly you can all fuck off. OK?”
Exactly a year on, Lord Mandelson has gone, and Sir Keir Starmer’s government is embroiled in Britain’s worst political scandal of this century. The peer lost his job in September, after emails emerged in which he questioned Epstein’s conviction for procuring a minor. On January 30th another tranche of emails revealed an intimate relationship. Lord Mandelson and Epstein giggled about strippers and joked about “a well hung young man”, in between discussing multi-million-dollar jobs post-politics and casually leaking confidential government documents. A political embarrassment has become a criminal investigation. Lord Mandelson’s behaviour raises depressing questions about the past but a more intriguing one about the present. What is the point of Sir Keir staying in office?
Editor: Let me engage in a bit of self-serving prestidigitation! The Reader might even conjecture, that I follow the well worn a pastisch of what an ‘actual Bagehot’ might opine?
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“Keir’s not driving the train. He thinks he’s driving the train, but we’ve sat him at the front of the DLR,” a driverless train in east London, which has a pretend control panel for the enjoyment of toddlers. Somehow the Starmer train has still crashed.
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To add insult, former ministers shuffled to the backbenches last year were surprised to learn that Lord Mandelson had offered advice on the reshuffle, in between canapés at the White House. It is one thing to lose your job; it is another to do so at the behest of a man who will go down as a 21st-century John Profumo, a Tory minister whose exit because of sex, lies and spies became the benchmark for government-crushing scandal.
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Sir Keir’s failings on Lord Mandelson were common across parts of the Labour Party, which could never resist the charms and talents of the former minister, despite his flaws. More gifted politicians than Sir Keir have fallen prey to them.
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In a rare bout of clear-eyed analysis, Sir Keir saw the damage being done by the Mandelson scandal. He warned his cabinet that “the public don’t really see individuals in this scandal, they see politicians.” For all the prime minister’s failings, he understands the seriousness of the moment, even if he does not himself possess the means to meet it. Sir Keir is correct that the shamelessness personified by Lord Mandelson is a fatal poison for the body politic. But if he truly believed what he said, he too would go.
Editor: The Reader of this essay might even come to the unwelcome conclusion, that David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and Kier Starmer represent the utter failure of the whole British Political Class! How telling that Jeremy Corbyn was/is a possible represetative of a politics of reliability, and steadfastness, that even the shade of Bagehot might have found …?
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