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Hello from London
This will be a week when the Bretton Woods conference of 1944 will be much in the air. The 80th anniversary is to be the theme of the annual meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in Washington, DC. It also hangs over the summit this week of the “BRICS” countries, in Kazan in Russia’s Tatarstan Republic.
As our new story explains,
this event will give Vladimir Putin the chance to hobnob with other national leaders, and to pursue his idea of building an entirely new global payments system to attack one legacy of Bretton Woods—America’s dominance of global finance—and, he hopes, shield Russia and its pals from sanctions.
That sanctions are already a sometimes ineffective weapon is amply demonstrated by a
remarkable report
in the week’s issue by my colleague, Matthieu Favas, on how Iran finances its provocative foreign policy and the network of militias it uses to implement it. This enables Iran to thwart the straitjacket of financial and other sanctions in which America has tried to confine its regime.
Huge uncertainty remains over
when and how Israel will retaliate
for Iran’s big missile attack on October 1st. But there is virtually no doubt that it will indeed retaliate, raising the risk of another dangerous cycle of escalation, more than a year after the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7th 2023.
It is still hard to see an end to the bloodshed and escalation that atrocity prompted. But the killing of Hamas’s leader, Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the massacre, marked the achievement of one of Israel’s main war aims, and has sparked some faint hopes that confrontation and carnage might give way to negotiation and perhaps even compromise.
His death will, our correspondents conclude,
change the Middle East.
But how? Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, has insisted that the war is not over, and that Israel will fight on until all the remaining Israeli hostages held in Gaza are brought home. But he has held out hopes that Sinwar’s death could mark “the beginning of the end”. Hamas, too, has given no public sign of backing away from the conflict, repeating that only when Israel ends its “aggression” will the hostages be released.
But Sinwar’s death leaves Hamas not just bruised, battered and much diminished after a year of brutal warfare. It is also decapitated and, for all the public blustering defiance, presumably demoralised.
Our analysis
of its next steps concludes that it is “shattered and divided”, but that Sinwar’s death does not rid Hamas or the world of his pernicious influence. On the contrary, in some ways he will continue to hold sway over the organisation from beyond the grave. The future of the conflict will depend in part on who wins out in its internal power struggle.
On a lighter note, I am sure I am not the only reader who found themselves reliving with a somewhat nervous chuckle two familiar but embarrassing experiences of modern office life: the nightmare of
the reply-all email;
and losing a fraught struggle with an
Excel spreadsheet.
And don’t forget our fun games:
Dateline,
which tests your memory against our 181-year archive, and our
pint-sized news quiz.
A quick update on our app. The relaunch Adam mentioned last week is being rolled out steadily, and some of you will already be using the new version. In the next few weeks you should all benefit from its rebuilt structure, and a faster, smoother and more stable experience.
Lastly: the caption competition. This week, I have plumped for the image we used at the top of this week’s International section, about Vladimir Putin’s “everything, everywhere, all at once” strategy for sowing mayhem in the West. What caption would you suggest to accompany this triptych of the man? Write to me at
economisttoday@economist.com.
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