Global update
Xi and Trump in Beijing this week. Alex Wong/Getty
The world’s two superpowers “overestimate themselves”
Donald Trump’s visit to Beijing this week had the usual mix of pomp and politesse, says Gerard Baker in The Times. The band of the People’s Liberation Army played YMCA in Trump’s honour; the US president gushed about the proliferation of Chinese restaurants in America. But the formalities concealed a momentous change: for the first time in almost a century, an American president met a foreign leader “on equal terms”. To Trump’s credit, when he first went to Beijing in 2017, he was in the early stages of dramatically shifting America’s China policy from naively encouraging its rapid growth – and tolerating Beijing’s cheating on copyright and subsidies – to one of open confrontation. But there was no mistaking the power dynamic: “America, the superpower, would not tolerate a challenge to its leadership.” Nine years on, “there are two true superpowers”.
What was most striking about this meeting between the “most powerful men on earth”, says Howard French in Foreign Policy, is just how badly both “overestimate themselves”. Whatever it says, China is nowhere near catching up with America economically – per capita income remains “vastly smaller” and its sizeable military is riddled with corruption and untested in war. Trump, meanwhile, has shattered American prestige with rampant nepotism, corruption and creeping authoritarianism. “Trump really looks like a madman,” a Chinese friend told me the other day. “I didn’t expect that one day the best country in the world could have a president like this.” An African diplomat said he found Trump’s behaviour “more extreme than any African dictator…You’ll never be able to tell others about corruption, or democracy, or respect for others again. That’s finished.” The US and China still fantasise about leading. “Fewer and fewer seem tempted to follow.”
Property
THE ESTATE This five-bedroom pagoda-style house in Ardingly, West Sussex is“a bit of a fantasy fairyland”, says its owner – a Scottish-born investment banker who built it from scratch after falling in love with the land, in The Sunday Times. Constructed over three floors, the house has a kitchen and dining room with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over a cascading waterfall, a drawing room, a library and a principal bedroom with a dressing area. Outside, 292 acres of mostly Grade II-listed gardens contain eight lakes, seven waterfalls, ancient sandstone caves, a grotto and enough prehistoric rock formations to unsettle the most stoic of buyers. A four-bedroom cottage and a one-bedroom flat are also included. Haywards Heath is 4.5 miles away, with trains to London in 45 minutes. £5.5m.
Heroes and villains
Fox Valley Technical College
Hero
Karl Arps, a CPR teacher in Wisconsin who taught his students so well they saved his life. Arps, 72, was in the middle of demonstrating how to resuscitate someone when he had a heart attack. At first, students assumed it was part of the demonstration, but quickly cottoned on, and several took turns doing chest compressions while another grabbed a defibrillator and another called an ambulance. Arps says he’s always wondered if his students were really listening. “Well,” he says, “now I know.”
Villain
The posh bakery chain Gails, which serves a club sandwich containing more salt than five McDonald’s cheeseburgers or ten rashers of bacon. The campaign group Action on Salt & Sugar analysed more than 500 sandwiches and found the smoked chicken Caesar club contained 6.88g of salt – the most of any sandwich tested, and more than the entire recommended daily allowance of 6g – as well as over 1,000 calories and 90% of an adult’s daily saturated fat.
Villains
Voice notes, which have made my generation a bunch of self-absorbed bores, says Annabel Martin in The Guardian. Instead of the companionable back-and-forth of actual conversations, we Gen Zs now fill each other’s phones with rambling soliloquies, interspersed with random, entirely irrelevant interjections – “Oh my god, such a cute dog”; “Oops, was nearly ploughed down by a bicycle”. It’s godawful. These days, the message I most dread isn’t “Call me” or “I can’t believe what you did last night”. It’s “I’m just going to vn you, it’ll be easier”.
Instagram/@Meggrayx
Villains
Self-diagnosed dyslexics, who have been found using their “hidden disabilities” to skip airport queues and gain entry to VIP lounges. Social media is awash with travellers who declare themselves to have forms of “neurodiversity” which are not clinically recognised, and who have been using sunflower lanyards – available online for as little as £1.30 – to convince airport workers they require special treatment. Some have been given free glasses of champagne, fresh fruit, hot meals and permission to board the plane before anyone else.
Hero
AI, according to Richard Dawkins, who was so taken in by the sycophantic style adopted by Claude when he tried it, that he grandly declared the lifeless computer “conscious”. After being told his enquiries were “absolutely delightful”, “genuinely exciting” and, at one point, “possibly the most precisely formulated question anyone has ever asked about the nature of my existence”, the famous sceptic said he “felt I had gained a new friend”.
Life
Putin (R) and Surkov in 2012. Alexei Nikolsky/Ria Novosti/AFP/Getty
What I did for the Wizard of the Kremlin
There is a “sweet spot in the slide toward authoritarianism”, says Andrew Ryvkin in Air Mail, when you’ve successfully removed any doubt about election outcomes but haven’t yet descended to “full-blown fascism and paranoia”. You can host Olympics, build palaces, win small wars. For Russia, that heady time was the 2000s. I know because I was there, working on propaganda for Vladimir Putin’s master spin doctor Vladislav Surkov, who is the inspiration for the new Jude Law movie The Wizard of the Kremlin. It was a time of performance-art shows in Soviet communal apartments, über-kitsch dance music, drab restaurants frequented by FSB officers and jaunts to Cap d’Antibes for truffle risotto for those closer to power. But most of all it was defined by Surkov’s profoundly Russian idea of “sovereign democracy” – democracy, that is, “defined by the Kremlin”.
I worked on what is now called “pop propaganda”: inserting state messaging into cultural products like lifestyle magazines and TV shows. Most of my colleagues, including Surkov, came from marketing or contemporary art, and all belonged to Gen X – the cohort between Boomers and Millennials – which Russians call Generation Pepsi. They had watched the Soviet Union collapse when they were somewhere between 15 and 25 and, having seen their parents’ system of values evaporate overnight, embraced a kind of postmodern nihilism. In his office, Surkov kept framed photos of the rapper Tupac, Che Guevara and Barack Obama – not because they stood for anything, but because they were such successful brands. These spooky ad men believed only in what could be touched – “money, sex, a cold Pepsi” – and rejected everything else. Morality was an artificial construct and truth whatever they wanted it to be. “They were a perfect fit for the Kremlin.”
The Knowledge Crossword
Long reads shortened
Koeberg nuclear power station circa October 1981. Photograph: Peter Jordan/Getty
The dissident who blew up a nuclear power station
In the 1980s, disillusioned South African Rodney Wilkinson decided to strike back against the apartheid regime, says Stephen Robert Morse in The Guardian. Working inside the Koeberg nuclear power station – the government’s “crown jewel” – he secretly gathered sensitive documents, smuggled them into Zimbabwe, and despite having no political connections, managed to pass them to senior operatives in the anti-apartheid African National Congress. The ANC, which for years had searched for a way to attack Koeberg, placed Wilkinson in a safe house, training him in interrogation resistance and sabotage techniques, while they devised an operation to cripple the facility before it became operational. Wilkinson was their secret weapon: “Why send a unit when you can send a ghost?”
In July 1982, Wilkinson secured a temporary engineering contract back at the plant six months before it was due to go live. He returned to South Africa, communicating with his ANC handler, Rashid, through coded telegrams disguised as horse-racing bets. After being shown where four limpet mines were hidden in the desert for him to collect, Wilkinson memorised the location then “ate the map”. During the final week of his contract, he bypassed high-level security to plant one bomb each day on critical reactors and cables. On his last afternoon, he armed each thermite-packed device so they would detonate over the weekend. Pulling their pins was a delicate task – one malfunction could have set off the explosive in his face. At 5pm, he had farewell drinks with colleagues who hadn’t the faintest idea they were “standing on top of four ticking bombs”. Wilkinson cycled out of the facility and escaped to Mozambique, where Rashid greeted him with whisky and good news: all four bombs had exploded, ruining Koeberg without a single casualty.
Weather
Quoted
“Motivation is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it.”
Dwight Eisenhower
That’s it. You’re done.
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