The 300,000 or so financial institutions subject to regulations in the United States have to report any suspicions they have about transactions, as well as reports of large cash payments, to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN. The idea is that their reports will alert investigators to crimes while they’re going on, and help the goodies catch the baddies.

DEFUNDING THE COPS

Sadly, however, FinCEN’s computer system is so clunky it’s like, as a former prosecutor once said, trying to plug AI into a Betamax. Investigators often have to create their own programmes to trawl a database that gains more than 25 million entries every year, or else just pick through them in the hope of finding something interesting. It effectively means that this vast and priceless resource is hardly ever used.

And now FinCEN’s budget looks like it will be slashed even further. “The pittance allocated to FinCEN in the current budget has been reduced even further,” wrote compliance expert Jim Richards, with a link to the 1,200-page supplement to the White House’s proposed 2026 budget with details about the cut. The reduction would take spending back to 2023 levels, which is worrying for anyone keen on seeing criminals stopped. And that’s even before you take into account the effect of workforce disillusionment at regulators such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, resulting from the cuts imposed by DOGE.

“I experienced some dark times during my SEC career, including the 2008-09 financial crisis and the Enron and Madoff scandals,” wrote Martin Kimel in a passionate column in Barron’s. “ But morale at the Commission is the worst I have ever seen, by far. No job is secure. Nobody knows what will become of the agency or its independence.” So, he added, “when the SEC offered early retirement and an incentive payment for people to voluntarily resign, I and hundreds of others reluctantly accepted.”

If you lose experienced personnel, and you lack the resources to invest in the latest technology, you will always lose ground against entrepreneurial and skilled financial criminals. That is the inevitable consequence of what is happening in the United States, which will be devastating for the victims of fraudsters, crooks, hackers and more.

THE UK PRECEDENT

There is, however, a cycle to this kind of thing. Governments that are determined to unleash the private sector always cut enforcement of regulations, but then they become embarrassed by the inevitable revelations of corruption, sleaze and incompetence that result. This is what happened in Britain, where years of news headlines about London being the favourite playground of oligarchs finally led to government action.

Three years ago, the British authorities imposed a special levy on financial institutions to fund the bodies that fight crime, and last month it published a report on the first year of spending. More than 40 million pounds has been invested in new technology to tackle Suspicious Activity Reports (so no more Betamax in London), and almost 400 people have been hired to do the work, including some of them finally beginning to try to drain the swamp that is the U.K.’s corporate registry. This is good news. 

It is inevitable that, just like in the U.K., the United States will eventually become so appalled by the rampant criminality that will result from the cuts to FinCEN, the SEC and other bodies, that politicians will start building a decent system to stop it. I just wish everyone would get on with it, so millions of people don’t have to lose out first.

THE EU GETS INTO GEAR?

You can accuse the European Union of many things, but you can’t say that it acts hastily. Several months after the last progress update from the Anti-Money-Laundering Agency (AMLA), it has appointed its four permanent board members. They represent an interesting cross-section of European expertise. 

There’s Simonas Krėpšta who, at the Bank of Lithuania, has overseen the country’s booming fintech sector and, therefore, has a good insight into the country’s booming money laundering sector, which has seen quite a lot of firms get fined, including arguably Europe’s most valuable startup Revolut. 

Then there’s Derville Rowland of the Central Bank of Ireland, who will bring inside knowledge of Europe’s most aggressive tax haven. And Rikke-Louise Ørum Petersen, who joined Denmark’s Financial Supervisory Authority in 2015, just when the money laundering spree by Danske Bank was about to explode into public view. Finally, there’s Juan Manuel Vega Serrano, who was previously head of the Financial Action Task Force, which gives him plenty of experience of working at an ineffective, slow-moving, superficially apolitical, supranational anti-money laundering organisation. 

All told, I’d say this is a pretty perfect group of people for the job. The European Union works slowly, but it works thoroughly. Of course, AMLA won’t actually be doing anything until 2028, and it probably won’t do much after that either. But you can’t have everything.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

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“This administration is clearly running the risk of losing hundreds of billions of dollars -- in fact, likely over $1 trillion -- through its destruction of the IRS. “At a time when deficits are high and rising, that seems a baffling policy choice,” said Larry Summers, noted economist, former treasury secretary, and former president of Harvard University.

The policy is indeed baffling if its aim is to collect taxes; it’s not baffling at all, though, if the intention is to help rich people dodge them.

An early announcement from Trump’s Department of Justice was to pause enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which has been central to global efforts against bribery since the 1970s. Trump has long argued that prosecuting American businesses for bribing foreign officials makes it harder for U.S. companies to compete. A new DoJ memo shows that it has now thought about what it wants to do, and how to do it in a way that prioritises American interests.

There have long been suspicions that U.S. authorities reserve their biggest fines for non-US companies (a French bank getting fined almost $9 billion, for example), and suggesting that prosecutions will be “America first” is unlikely to help with that perception. “Enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act ("FCPA") will now be focused on conduct that harms U.S. interests and affects the competitiveness of U.S. businesses, further suggesting that future FCPA enforcement will be focused on non-U.S. companies,” noted lawyers from White&Case in this assessment.

There is already widespread global concern that the Trump administration will exploit the U.S. dollar’s dominant position in finance to force foreigners to do what it wants. Suggestions that corruption laws are not equally enforced will only further that suspicion. The fewer foreigners who rely on dollars, the less impact US sanctions will have, so it would be good if officials would consider that before implementing their policies.

MINDING THE TAX GAP

Readers old enough to remember the financial crisis of 2007-8 will also remember the wave of popular anger against tax-dodgers that followed it. American prosecutors investigated Swiss banks (good times!); protesters occupied branches of Starbucks (fun!); almost all countries agreed to exchange information with each other about their citizens’ tax affairs to uncover cheats (massive!).

According to the EU Tax Observatory, this information exchange has been a triumph, and cut wealthy people’s misuse of offshore trickery by two-thirds. I have always been a little suspicious of these declarations of victory, however, despite them coming from such a good source, and find grounds for my doubts in this new report from the UK’s National Audit Office.

British tax authorities every year estimate a tax gap – the difference between what the country’s exchequer should receive, and what it actually gets – and politicians regularly talk about reducing it. If the Trump administration seems uninterested in clamping down on tax evasion, and financial chicanery in general, the British government has pledged additional resources for technology and investigators to try to understand what’s happening and whether its tax gap estimate is close to being accurate, so we may learn more about this in future years. Fingers crossed.  

But the NAO report suggests that the way it’s calculated may be a bit questionable. According to the standard estimate, wealthy individuals pay around 1.9 billion pounds less than they should. But, according to a different estimate (“compliance yield”), the tax authorities have successfully brought in an extra 3 billion pounds from wealthy people that would not have been collected without their efforts.

It is a little hard to understand how it is possible to increase tax compliance by 1.1 billion more pounds than the entire deficit that wealthy people are supposedly underpaying. It’s like losing two pounds down the back of an armchair, reaching beneath the cushion and finding three. Except with billions. Something else is very definitely going on. “The large increase in compliance yield raises the possibility that underlying levels of non-compliance among the wealthy population were much greater than previously thought,” notes the NAO.

I am, I admit, someone who fixates on offshore skulduggery, but I can’t help noticing the report states that a mere five percent of the UK tax authorities’ investigative efforts were looking into “offshore non-compliance”. Tax advisers are clever, well-paid people, and they’ll know very well about the best places to hide their clients’ money, and there’s even a suggestion for them in the report: if your client holds wealth in properties abroad, or owns shares in her own name rather than through an institution, her home government will never know about her income she earns from them. Happy days.

A POSTER CITY FOR ILLICIT FINANCE

And speaking of offshore skullduggery. The city of Mariupol has long been central to the war in Ukraine. Enveloped early by Russian forces, its defenders held out for months in an epic battle in the ruins of the Azovstal steel plant, before surrendering in May 2022. Moscow has since made it the poster city for the supposedly prosperous future available in a Russia-ruled Ukraine, but a new report makes clear how hollow such claims are.

“Powerful Moscow-based networks are controlling much of the reconstruction programme. Well-connected companies are benefiting from Russian spending that involves the widespread use of illicit finance and corrupt practices,” note its authors, David Lewis and Olivia Allison. They have specific policy recommendations, of which I think the most important ones relate to my old bugbear of sanctions, which should be better targeted and more strategically deployed. Russia’s crimes in Ukraine include the looting and economic exploitation of cities like Mariupol. 

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

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The Oxfam report argues that the “global oligarchy” of the super-rich, make international cooperation on solving issues like climate change and poverty all but impossible. “The immense concentration of wealth, driven significantly by increased monopolistic corporate power, has allowed large corporations and the ultrarich who exercise control over them to use their vast resources to shape global rules in their favor, often at the expense of everyone else,” the report says. 

Bill Gates is a case in point. Compared to the corrupt, nepotistic, Russian-style oligarchs that we tend to imagine when we think of “oligarchs,” Gates is a good kind of rich guy. The billionaire software engineer has given away more money than anyone else. He runs one of the world’s largest charities and, for years, he has passionately pursued the noble cause of fixing Africa’s severe food security crisis. 

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation established itself as the most influential player in fixing Africa’s food inequality. It is also the largest media funder of journalism on the African continent. But there are concerns that the foundation’s support for both journalism in Africa and for “development journalism” in general have essentially given Bill Gates full monopoly over the narratives on development in Africa. 

“One of the most difficult subjects for African journalists to write about is the work of Bill Gates and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Africa,” writes Simon Allison, International Editor and co-founder of The Continent, an independent digital publication. “This is not to suggest that the foundation is deliberately seeking to influence coverage but given the lack of alternative sources of funding, it doesn’t have to,” Allison says. 

The Continent’s recent investigation into the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s work in Africa is a rare example of accountability journalism on the Foundation’s work in Africa. Gates–the biggest owner of farmland in the US–centers his work in Africa on the belief that modern industrial agricultural practices can solve world hunger. If you describe it like this, the problem seems easy to fix: “to feed the people, you have to fix the farms.” 

But as The Continent investigation points out, the farms in this case refer to 33-million smallholder farms in Africa that currently grow 70% of the continent’s food with some of the lowest yields in the world. It’s not a small problem to fix, and multiple studies on the region have suggested that the American model of industrialized farming and genetically modified seeds is not working in Africa. There is a real consequential tension between philanthropic approaches and the urgent need for systemic policy reforms to establish equitable food systems and fight poverty

Reactions to The Continent’s investigation highlight the modern day axis of power: oligarchy, disinformation and digital technology. According to Allison, initially the investigation into the Gates Foundation was “widely popular online” among The Continent’s usual audience of policymakers, diplomats and businesspeople. But then “it got picked up and amplified by conspiracy theorists. These are not the people we want to be amplifying our work, and it has the effect of muddying the waters again between what is credible journalism and what is absolute nonsense.” 

One solution is taxation. A report by the French economist Gabriel Zucman, commissioned by Brazil, suggests that billionaires currently pay the equivalent of 0.3% of their wealth in taxes. This is a “phenomenal lost opportunity,” Nabil Ahmed, the director of economic and racial justice at Oxfam America, said in an interview with the Voice of America. “We know governments, rich and poor, across the world need to claw back these revenues to be able to invest in their people, to be able to meet their rights,” he said. 

Brazil–which currently holds the presidency of the G20–is leading a campaign to impose a 2% minimum tax on the world’s richest billionaires. According to their calculation, it would be possible to raise up to 250 billion dollars from about 3,000 billionaires. Enabling resources for healthcare, education and the needed funding to tackle climate change. South Africa, Spain and France all back the plan. The United States doesn’t. In the most recent G20 meeting in July, US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen told reporters: “The tax policy is very difficult to coordinate globally and we don’t see a need or really think it’s desirable to try to negotiate a global agreement on that.”

Correction: The earlier version of this article identified Simon Allison as the Editor in Chief of The Continent. His correct title is International Editor.

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If you’re waiting for your superyacht to be delivered, then I’ve got some bad news. Because of the global supply chain issues, as well as the general Covid difficulties, a lot of orders have been unavoidably delayed, so there’s a strong chance you won’t be out on the water for a while yet. You have my sympathies. But look on the bright side, you can at least take some comfort from the fact that lots of other high-net-worth people right now are in the same, well, boat.

• “Delayed projects are nothing new – each year the GOB includes boats whose deliveries have slipped beyond our year-end, but the sheer number this year is significant, and double that of an average year. Covid-19, clearly, has played havoc with superyacht delivery schedules around the world.” That’s the top line from the Global Order Book (GOB), from Boat International.

But that’s not to say there aren’t some bright spots in this gloomy picture. Most notable is the strong growth in the number of new superyachts longer than a 100 meters. For the record, 100 meters is really big: that’s longer than the Statue of Liberty is tall, and many of these boats are bigger still. Biggest of all is the REV Ocean, which will be when completed – at 182.9 meters long – not only the longest yacht ever built, but also bigger than all but the very largest naval destroyers.

If you want an idea of what such a vast vessel might be like inside, here are some facts about the Azzam, the yacht it will displace at the top of the list, which is quite something. The interior of the Azzam features an amount of mother of pearl equivalent to the entire world’s annual production, although my personal favorite snippet about it is how hard the designers worked to ensure the chandelier in the main salon didn’t tinkle in rough seas.

• “It was difficult to know in advance how this would behave, but it was tested in every possible way with sophisticated software and set up challenging targets and it was not a problem,” says Mario Pedol, founder of Nauta Design, which helped design the boat.

Every possible way? The mind boggles.

Of course, most of these new yachts won’t be that big nor presumably will have such challenging lighting specifications (or indeed “a golf training room”), but still, they’re massive by any ordinary standards.

• “In the Netherlands, Feadship has just shipped a 118-metre project into one of its sheds, Amels has announced a 120-metre order and Oceanco has an impressive order book of five 100-metre-plus giants.”

It all helps color in the picture we’ve been drawing for most of the last two years, which shows how the world’s very richest people –the kind of people able to buy a yacht as big as a warship -- have found Covid-19 an incredibly profitable experience. It’s been, for example, a great year for Russian billionaires whose collective wealth has risen 30% to $630 billion. One study from earlier this year estimated that Russia’s top 500 people own more wealth than the bottom 99.8 percent of the adult population, which is 114.6 million people.

Still, even Russian billionaires pale in comparison to the finest available in the United States. In fact, considering what a spectacular year billionaires have had, Elon Musk was a highly appropriate recipient of Time’s person of the year award. And fair play to Editor-in-Chief Edward Felsenthal for not pulling any punches in explaining why he felt Musk’s incredible wealth deserved highlighting.

• “To Musk, that is progress, steering capital allocation away from the government to those who will be good stewards of it. To others, it is testament to capitalism’s failings as staggeringly wealthy, mostly white men play by their own rules while much of society gets left behind,” the magazine’s article on the award stated.

Concern over this widening gulf is affecting politics all over the world, including in the U.K., where Boris Johnson has promised to “level up” parts of the country left behind by economic progress. There are already plenty of reasons not to believe a word Johnson says, but this report into the effect of his two years in office provides yet another one.

• “The government’s handling of the pandemic has led to the richest families and regions getting richer, while the poorest families are even poorer now in real terms than the month of Johnson’s election victory (having been left particularly exposed to rising inflation). This would be an indictment on any government, let alone one where the promise to ​“level up” sits at the heart of its political and policy agenda.”

A fascinating driver of that has been house price gains, as shown in this new report, which also proposes some tax reforms that could help address it.

DEATH AND TAXES

When Benjamin Franklin was alive, it may well have been the case that nothing was certain except death and taxes, but that has been out of date for a long time. There are plenty of folks working to see if death can’t be negotiated away (or, at least, postponed for people rich enough to afford the requisite boutique services), and it looks like taxes are going to remain voluntary for a while longer yet. I always read anything on the minutiae of taxation policy with the weary recognition I will end up not understanding any of it, and this piece on Ireland’s threat to Joe Biden’s Global Tax Deal is no exception.

The deal was supposed to set a minimum floor of 15% tax rates, and thus end the race to the bottom which has led to countries competing against each other to offer ever more generous terms to already incredibly wealthy companies and people. Ireland, it turns out, has already worked out how to neuter this, thanks to its generous treatment of intellectual property.

• “Ireland’s relatively generous tax allowances permit multinationals with a presence in the country to sell intellectual property, such as patents and brands, from one subsidiary to another to generate deductions that can be used to shield future profits from tax,” the article says.

If I understand this correctly, this is like me selling me the rights to my book, and thereby cancelling out my tax bill for the next decade. Presumably, it makes more sense when translated into accountant-ese.

• “In 2020, Adobe Systems Software Ireland Ltd purchased intellectual property from another subsidiary that was both an Irish-registered company and a resident in Bermuda for tax purposes. The set-up meant no tax was due on the $11 billion profit from the sale. Meanwhile, Irish-tax resident Adobe Systems Software Ireland registered an $11 billion expense that could be used to offset taxes on profits over a period of about eight years because it is an asset that depreciates over time, according to the subsidiaries’ accounts.”

See? Simple really.

SUMMIT ON DEMOCRACY

Did the Summit on Democracy achieve anything? Answers on a postcard. Still, it’s good that the White House is trying to do something, considering the parlous state of democracy pretty much everywhere, and Joe Biden deserves credit for that.

I’m not sure, however, that the list of people sanctioned (I don’t understand why the State and Treasury lists are different, but I’m sure there’s a good reason. Perhaps it’s just to confuse the bad guys) on International Anti-Corruption Day is quite as exciting as some people are making out. Yes, it’s good to deprive corrupt people of their access to our financial system, but wouldn’t it also be good to sanction people while they were still in power? It wasn’t exactly a secret for example that Isabel dos Santos was accused of skullduggery during her ascent from daughter of the Angolan-president to Africa’s richest woman, although she denies any wrong doing and insists her current difficulties are politically motivated.

Similarly, there were a lot of questions about the head of Ukraine’s constitutional court before he was dismissed last year, as well as the former head of the Ukrainian presidential administration, and others. I appreciate that all governments have to negotiate with whomever happens to be in charge in another country, and can’t just sanction them all willy-nilly, but – considering the questionable guest list for the Summit on Democracy – waiting until people aren’t in a position to be corrupt anymore before sanctioning them for being corrupt does leave a bit of bad taste.

Anyway, this is just nitpicking compared to my objections to the “first major speech” made by Britain’s Foreign Secretary Liz Truss last week under the theme “the network of liberty”, which sounds like one of those absurdly-overblown names dreamed up for a US military operation, but was in reality intended to dovetail neatly with the White House’s agenda. I wrote an article about it last week laying out the main way I hate it, but there’s an extra aspect I didn’t have room to mention there. The trouble with the U.S. stressing a theme is that all the other countries that want to be America’s bestest best friend then talk about it too (Russia used to be very good at doing this with the “War on Terror,” and cynically rebranded the war in Chechnya that it was already conducting to make it sound connected to 9/11. A Kremlin source of mine at the time used to laugh about how gullible the Americans were).

I would urge any Americans reading this not to be persuaded by rhetoric like this from Truss: “as JFK put it, we will inspire others not with an imperialism of force or fear, but the rule of courage and freedom, and hope for the future of man.” It’s the diplomatic equivalent of my kids wangling a late bedtime out of me by suggesting that we watch a film they already know I like. The current British government should be called out for its backsliding on basic integrity, not congratulated, no matter how many times its leading figures reference JFK.

WHAT I’M READING

We are beset on all sides by catastrophes: climate change, kleptocracy, human rights abuses, genocide. Most people want to leave the world a bit better than they found it and would like to do something to make these catastrophes a bit better, including by how they invest their pensions and savings. This is why ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) ratings are so important, because they show us whether a company is not just making money, but also doing good. We don’t have time to comb through every detail of a company’s operations, and an ESG rating makes everything clear in one little snapshot. Yay, my money’s on the side of the angels.

Except, actually not yay at all, it turns out. As this extraordinary investigation from Businessweek makes clear, ESG ratings have all the coherence of debt ratings just before the 2007-8 finance crisis. Except, if ESG ratings are wrong, it’s not Lehman Brothers that will go pop, but the whole world. Read it, get angry, then find somewhere else to put your money (if you’re lucky enough to have any).

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Last week, I talked about tax havens, and how they appear spontaneously; in a similar way to how my dog appears spontaneously whenever I sit down to eat. Thinking about it though, I wish there was a term for these places other than “tax haven,” because they are about so much more than tax. The Tax Justice Network calls them “secrecy jurisdictions,” which is good, but that doesn’t go far enough either.

The most successful havens provide all the services that the rich and powerful want, whether that’s shielding them from scrutiny, selling them fine art, helping them evade justice, and more. And in that context, I am fascinated by a legal challenge being brought by Irish Council for Civil Liberties, which reveals a hidden side to Ireland’s highly successful career as a haven for giant U.S. companies looking for a comfortable base in the European Union. Dublin has previously fought off attempts by the European Commission to make it impose higher tax bills on Apple and other large tech companies, but now it appears to be using rather sneakier techniques to stop them having to obey EU rules.

The EU has sought to provide the world’s strongest regulation on tech companies, with its flagship General Data Protection Regulation designed to give individuals control over their own data. The bloc might not have created many tech giants, but at least it could make sure consumers wouldn’t be harmed by anyone else’s. Or at least that was the theory.

There is a flaw, however, which is that enforcement of the GDPR depends on national level regulators. And that means its fate is in the hands of an Irish government that has built an entire generations-long development model on giving U.S. corporations and the tech oligarchs exactly what they want, and resisting pressure from foreigners to make them hand over a penny.

• “There’s also that conflict of interest factor, that Ireland benefits a lot from having those tech companies there, and I think it puts them under unfair pressure to have to hold those things in tension,” Frances Haugen, who exposed Facebook’s practices to public scrutiny earlier this year, told members of the European parliament. “Because I’m sure Ireland cares about the safety of our children, Ireland cares about our democracies being threatened, but they also have extreme pressures being exerted against them.”

Some of the practices used by tech giants in the European Union are troubling, including this analysis of Google by Norway’s Consumer Council, which suggests it was deceiving consumers into agreeing to being tracked. (Google has said it has updated its approach.) French regulators fined Google 50 million euros, but Ireland has shown much less urgency.

And this is not the only example. Europeans began to notice that complaints brought against tech companies were taking much longer to investigate in Ireland than in other member states, and this is what the IPPR set out to investigate. What it found was worrying, not least because Ireland oversees regulating compliance by Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, all of which have major offices in the country, and that is pretty much everyone that matters.

• “The Irish Data Protection Commission is the bottleneck of GDPR enforcement against Big Tech across the EU. Almost all (98%) major GDPR cases referred to Ireland remain unresolved,” a report by the group concluded. “No other GDPR enforcer in the EU can intervene if the Irish DPC asserts its lead role in cases against big tech firms headquartered in Ireland. As a result, EU GDPR enforcement against Big Tech is paralyzed by Ireland’s failure to deliver draft decisions on cross-border cases.”

The group has written to the European Commission complaining about its failure to demand action from the Irish regulators.

• “The fanfare surrounding the GDPR was such that the EU’s global influence will wane if it is allowed to fail. Consumers will suffer too, because innovative start-ups and venerable news publishers will be unable to compete because of Big Tech’s entrenched internal data free-for-alls. The worst cost will be that continuing data misuse will tyrannize citizens, and debase politics,” the letter says.

It will be fascinating to see the outcome. Haugen is arguing for the EU to have a single central regulator, which she said would help to prevent the kind of issues that she exposed at Facebook (or whatever it’s calling itself these days).

• “I think there’s a real, real need for there to be some kind of centralized authority in Europe,” she said. “If there’s only maybe 200 or 300 people in the industry who have enough experience and insights around how these systems work and what the consequences of them are, if we expect to spread them across 27 agencies, I think it’s going to be very ineffective.”

This of course pre-supposes that EU member states want their regulators to be effective, or that they would be prepared to share their right to tax and regulate companies with their fellows even if they did. The EU also has its hands full with challenges to other aspects of its supposedly shared values, not least from Poland and Hungary. However, it’s hard to see how the EU can continue to hold itself up as an exemplar of tech regulation if it allows a member state to willfully refuse to enforce the regulations the union as a whole has agreed.

In the meantime, however, it’s euros-in for the tech companies.

SUMMIT FOR DEMOCRACY? SHMUMMIT FOR SHMEMOCRACY!

So, Russia and China are totally fine with having not been invited to Joe Biden’s online Summit (Zoomit?) For Democracy next month, as they explained in a joint article last week, because nothing says “we don’t care” better than a 1,000-word rant written in that kind of weird mangled English autocracies used before the world got Google Translate.

• “This trend contradicts the development of the modern world. It is impossible to prevent the shaping of a global polycentric architecture but could strain the objective process,” the two countries’ ambassadors informed readers of The National Interest, a conservative magazine published by a think tank founded by that noted believer in due process, President Richard Nixon.

Both countries make a strong defense of their democratic-ness, though I personally would have found China’s insistence that its “eight non-Communist parties” proved the plurality of its set-up more convincing if it had just said it has nine political parties. Similarly, Russia’s claim that a referendum last year strengthened its “democratic institutions” only makes sense if you weren’t aware that it rubberstamped Vladimir Putin’s desire to be president until 2036.

• “There is no need to worry about democracy in Russia and China. Certain foreign governments better think about themselves and what is going on in their homes. Is it freedom when various rallies in their countries are dispersed with rubber bullets and tear gas? It does not look very much like freedom.”

I apologize for the extended quotes. I am a connoisseur of this kind of nonsense, and this is a vintage example. The article wound up with some forceful points about how modern history shows that you can’t export democracy militarily, which would have been more relevant if that was what the White House was doing, rather than convening the leaders of several dozen friendly countries for a chat. Some 109 countries are invited, plus the European Union, which likes to pretend to be a country at times like this, plus Taiwan.

• “Civil society groups have documented 15 consecutive years of global decline in democracy.  This, of course, presents huge challenges to global stability and prosperity that can only be solved collectively, with likeminded democracies coming together to reverse this decline,” said U.S. Under Secretary of State for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights Uzra Zeya, last month.

Inevitably, journalists started trying to parse the invitation list, to figure out the criteria by which countries had been considered democratic. It is undeniably a little hard. Poland got invited, but Hungary didn’t. Iraq got invited, but Turkey didn’t. Angola got invited, but Mozambique didn’t. Anyway, the brave folks at the Carnegie Institute have tried to impose some logic on it, which concludes that Iraq probably only got invited to prevent Israel being the only Middle Eastern attendee; while Pakistan’s attendance is more about keeping it on team anti-China than anything else. As for Angola, no one appears entirely sure what’s going on there.

• “Biden’s team intends for the December summit to be merely the first step in what administration officials are billing as a “year of action.” The real make-or-break moments will occur in the months ahead and revolve around a simple question: can the summit galvanize real reform commitments and reverse fifteen years of democratic decline?” the report’s authors asked.

Anders Aslund has written an interest analysis of previous attempts to do what the summit supposedly aims to do, and it’s not very hopeful.

BELARUS FREE THEATRE

If you don’t know the Belarus Free Theatre, you’re in for a treat. They are the inheritors of the legacy of the kind of brave, creative, innovative voices that opposed communism in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. Sadly, because of the difficulties of working in Belarus, their directors are based in London, but they have maintained performances and rehearsals at home as much as possible.

If you are in London on December 10, they are part of the panel discussing the documentary Alone, which will be given a U.K. premiere at the Barbican. Go along.

WHAT I’M READING

I am lucky enough to be from the Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye, which is home to the world’s finest books and ideas festival. We have just had the Winter Weekend, which is like a smaller (and colder) version of the summer gathering, and it was awesome to be in a big tent with lots of people once more. I really enjoyed seeing the historian Dan Jones talking about his new book, which compressed the entire millennium between the fall of Rome and the reformation in a single volume.

So, I’m reading that, and I’ve got quite a long way to go, but it’s very enjoyable so far.

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