Missile-stop tour: Zelensky in America

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The economist. Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. The word woke is an evocative one, especially as a major battle line in American politics. The key point is to define it woke up. When we do and then crunch some data. We find that the country seems to have passed peak woke and it is a huge date in the global calendar of football. Not the real kind, the video game kind. It's time for the latest update of the world beating game that for decades was simply called FIFA. We ask why it's not anymore. First up though, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is once again doing the rounds in.

America and we are grateful to America.

For supporting Ukraine all along. Later today we'll meet Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Yesterday he was in Washington meeting with supporters Vice President Kamala Harris and President Biden.

We stand with Ukraine now and in.

The future after a handful of trips to the US since the war began. It's all a bit familiar. But this trip may matter more than others because who wins the White House in November will determine how much support Ukraine will get in the future, and in turn, perhaps how the war in Ukraine ends.

President Zelensky is in America because it's an intense time for global diplomacy generally. The world's leaders are there for the Union General Assembly.

Daniel Franklin is our senior US Editor.

But it's also a critical moment for Ukraine, both diplomatically and on the battlefield. And we're ahead of an American election. So this is where a lot is going to be playing out in the coming weeks and months.

Before this visit, there was much talk of a peace plan that Mr. Zelenskyy was going to present. What is in it? What's the ask at this point?

Well, Ukrainians are still putting, if you like, maximalist demands. They have the moral high ground of restoring their full territorial integrity, including all the areas that Russia has occupied in the current war, but also Crimea. I think the trouble is that that's looking increasingly unrealistic on the ground, where the war is a grinding one of attrition. And if anything, right now Russia is gaining territory and is confident that time is on its side.

But what does Mr. Zelenskyy think the west can do to turn that around?

In essence, Mr. Zelenskyy wants more and continued support from the west in the form of more weapons, permission to use weapons in more ambitious ways than Ukraine has had so far, including striking deep into Russian territory in order for Ukraine to defend itself better. And there's also the question of Ukrainian membership of NATO, which is an aim for future security guarantee, and the question of when that membership might actually come about to make the country more confident that it could resist Russia and Russian aggression in the longer term.

In a sense, that sounds as if it's the same scope of ask that it has been every time that Mr. Zelenskyy has turned towards the West. What's different this time?

Well, it's quite true that there's a pattern of President Zelenskyy coming to America and asking for more help, bigger packages. This time, I think what's really different is the political situation in America as well as the situation on the ground in Ukraine. So in America, there's the awkwardness of an imminent election just a few weeks away now, and the outcome has an absolutely critical bearing on policy towards Ukraine. And the fact that Donald Trump might again be in power very shortly is mind concentrating. And then on the ground in Ukraine, the war is at a very tricky stage for the Ukrainians. Yes, they've shown that they can take some initiative by an incursion into Russian territory, but they're also facing huge difficulties on their own eastern front with Russian advances, small advances, but nevertheless, the prospect of retaking serious Ukrainian territory looks rather distant for now.

How is that playing into this politically in what is ultimately the end of a presidential campaign?

Well, of course, almost everything these days in America plays into the election campaign. And Republicans seize on things like President Zelensky going to a munitions factory in Pennsylvania, critical state with a Democrat who's running for a reelection. It's also true that it's hard to really discern what would actually happen if we had a new Trump presidency. You have people on either side of President Trump, some supportive of Ukraine, some like JD Vance, vice presidential candidate who seemed particularly pro Russian, and Trump himself saying without explaining really how, that he would end the war in no time at all. And to Ukrainian ears, that sounds very much like a recipe for really doing it on Russia's terms rather than Ukraine's.

When you say doing it, you mean a peace agreement that wouldn't look good to Ukrainian eyes?

Yes, imposing a peace that would look very different from the one that President Zelenskyy laid out at the UN this week.

We must ensure food security.

We need to bring home all our.

Captured soldiers and civilians, possibly deported to Russia. We must uphold the UN Charter and.

Guarantee our right, Ukraine's right to territorial integrity and sovereignty.

Just as.

And the question of NATO membership, which is dear to Ukraine, is something that President Trump, who has not been a very voluble supporter of NATO in the past, that would be problematic as well.

But given those diplomatic troubles and uncertainties and the sketchy situation on the battlefield, as you say, do you think that Ukraine's ambitions, Mr. Zelenskyy's ambitions are changing?

Well, there's not a lot of sign of that yet. But at some point I think a sense of realism will have to kick in. It will depend on the politics in Washington. But the long war that is already two and a half years in shows no real sign of ending, doesn't seem to favor Ukraine, given the Ukraine's problems of manpower, the difficulties besetting its economy. It's got a very tough winter ahead with its energy infrastructure having been seriously downgraded by Russian missile strikes. So it's a question of whether a different changed way of thinking could come up with a package that would secure Ukraine's future as a Western minded liberal democracy in the longer term with economic revival, even if it has to sacrifice some of its maximalist war aims.

You mentioned that Ukraine's fate is obviously tied to the political situation in Washington. But what about the political situation at home?

For him, it's becoming more complicated. Undoubtedly his popularity has been sliding somewhat. There's different attitudes to the war depending on particularly generational differences. Older people seem to be more bullish on the war than younger people. There are quite high rates of Ukrainian soldiers going awol. So there's a much more mixed picture of politics back home in Ukraine. And at some point there will be elections. Rivals are already maneuvering to succeed President Zelensky. So it's a very different situation from the early days of the war.

Daniel, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

Part of what's setting the tone for international diplomacy is what Ukraine is willing to accept diplomatically, which ties into what it's being forced to accept militarily. Let me direct your attention to tomorrow's episode of the Weekend Intelligence. Our editor in chief, Zanny Minton Beddoes recently traveled to Ukraine, meeting soldiers and civilians near lines to understand what Ukrainians actually want two and a half years into the war.

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Back in 1931, nine young African Americans were wrongly accused of raping two white women, they were known as the Scottsboro Boys and they spent six years in jail.

John Prudhoe is our United States editor and a host of Checks and and Balance, our show about American politics.

Later, all nine had their convictions overturned or were pardoned after it became clear that they'd had an unfair trial. The story caught the attention of Lead Belly, an American folk and blues singer. In an interview he recorded where he spoke about the case, he gives one of the first uses of the word woke.

The lawyer what got him out. I know him pretty good.

I met him and he showed me the Scottsboro Boys.

I shake hands with him. So I made this little song about down there. So I advise everybody to be a little careful when they go along through that.

But stay woke, keep their eyes open.

He was warning other black Americans to stay woke or watch out for people looking to get them in case they might be accused of something similar. Even the most committed anti woke warriors would admit he had a point.

Do it again.

Didn't understand you.

But since that time, the word and those who champion it has changed.

Now, John, before we get into this, you know I'm a man who believes in definitions first and foremost. What's your definition of woke up?

The definition might be the hardest part of this, Jason. Everybody has their own. The difficulty with the word is it's changed. Lead Belly used it in a positive sense and many people have used it in a positive sense in the past. Now it's largely used as a pejorative. The way I conceive of it and the way we're going to use it in this discussion is that it's a worldview which takes as read that progress, particularly on race in America, is impossible, that America's various problems are all systemic or structural, and that the solutions to those problems tend to be things like positive discrimination on the basis of race. In a very blunt way, there's also a tendency within this kind of thinking to ascribe people identities as members of particular groups and then categorize those groups as either being victims or oppressors. And that really flattens people's identity and misses a lot of nuance.

And to your mind, how much of this wokeness as defined then is consuming America at the moment?

Well, less than was the case. So this is not just my assertion. We, being the economist, have done a lot of quantitative work on this. So we've looked at public opinion surveys, attitudes of Americans, we've looked at the language that's used in American media, we've looked at publishing, universities, what Corporations are up to. And what we found was there was a huge increase in wokeness of this variety in all walks of American life beginning in about 2016. And then it peaked around 2021 and has declined since then.

How is it you've come to that conclusion?

Well, just to take one example, we did a huge study of the words that American media for the past 10 or 15 years to talk about racial injustice in America, but not just racial injustice, lots of other subjects as well. And to use one example, the term white privilege was used two and a half times for every million words written by the New York Times in 2020. When wokeness was peaking last year, it was down to 0.4 times per 1 million words. So that's a very steep decline.

And so talk me through the trend line here, though. You said that this began to take a Turn upwards in 2016, peaked in 2020ish or so. Walk me through the timing.

What happens in 2016, you may remember, Jason, is that Donald Trump is elected president of America. And that has a profound effect on the country, and it has a profound effect on the American left. It strengthens those who had argued for a long time that America is irredeemably racist and sexist. How could the country not be if it elected this man? Is the thinking on the left, on the left wing of the Democratic Party. And that really squashes centrist Democrats, center left people in America. They're worried about being canceled. You have the rise of no platforming at universities, controversial speakers get prevented from addressing students. And then later on in this period when there's much more discussion about racial inequality in America. And just to be clear, I think that's a very healthy discussion. It's a good thing that American society has this discussion in the 2000 teens and into the early part of this decade. This gets taken up in corporate America in the late part of this period. And you see in some cases managers getting rewarded, getting incentivized for hiring against DEI targets. And then since Joe Biden's election in 2020 and him being inaugurated in 2021, this falls away very sharply.

And so what do you think is going on there? It's easy to imagine the timeline you describe here being purely political. Trump in power or threatening to be in power. Wokeness is high, is on the rise. Once that fades away, it goes away. It sounds like a political phenomenon.

I think it is largely a political phenomenon. I think it came out of a feeling of powerlessness on the left when Donald Trump became president, a feeling that Politics as normal didn't work. And then when Joe Biden is elected, some of those concerns among activists on the left fade away. I also think the Democratic Party internalizes the lessons, that some of the messages that it became associated with at Peak Woke Defund the police being one of them, are politically toxic, will lose elections. And so you see the Democratic Party moving away from a lot of this stuff and some power and some influence draining away from this movement. I think you've seen the same thing happen on university campuses. The data on that is pretty definitive as well. It's true in companies, it's true in politics, it's true in American academic institutions. And all of that, I think, is largely a change for the good.

Well, is it, though? I mean, the other end of a trend line like that is we get back to a place where these things are not seen with clear eyes, these things are not discussed. People don't consider these issues at all.

I think that's a good point. I don't think we've gone there and thank goodness. So if you look at our charts, what they show is wokeness increasing through the 2000 teens and then declining a bit from 2021. And I think that if you squint a bit, you can say this is how progress is made. It's a good thing that American companies, American instit institutions, looked at their role in racism in the country, in perpetuating it, and had a really hard think about that. And I think they will continue to do so. But what you've seen is some excesses of the movement. People being fired for no very good reason, people often feeling like they can't express their opinions for fear of being taken out of context or misconstrued. That seems to have gone away. And that's good.

Now, this sounds like a rich vein for a certain American politics podcast. I know. Tell me.

Yes, that's right. This week's episode of Checks and Balance, available in all good podcast shops, will be about this subject, about Peak Woke in America. Passing Peak Woke, we'll go in some depth into the work that the Economist has done and we'll have a bit more time to chew over these ideas with Charlotte and Idri. So please come and listen to that if you're interested in this.

You know I will, John, for now. Thanks very much for your time.

Thanks, Jason.

A new football season begins today and it's not the English Premier League or Spain's La Liga. It's the annual update of the world's favourite football video game.

Tom Wainwright Is the Economist's tech and media editor.

Ea sports.

It's in the game.

If you've heard that title sequence before, then you've probably played FIFA, one of the biggest franchises in console gaming. FIFA's a football game that's been going since 1993 and it's become an absolute colossus in the gaming world itself needs nearly 30 million copies a year. And on top of that, it has a subscription product within the game, which means that overall its revenues are more than $3 billion a year. The game accounts for nearly two thirds of the profits of its publisher, Electronic Arts. I've been referring to this game as FIFA, but actually these days it's not called FIFA. EA changed the name of the game last year to EA Sports fc. Now this was a bit unexpected because FIFA was one of the biggest names in gaming. So why change it? Well, the reason was that its negotiations with FIFA Football's world governing body, broke down. It was reported that FIFA had asked for more money than EA had been paying it up until now. And so rather than pay that extra money, EA decided to go for a huge rebrand of this big franchise. One year on, it seems that this gamble has paid off. EA says that revenue from the game has continued to grow. They said that up to March revenue was up by a high teens percentage year on year. They gave an update in June saying that revenue from the game was up in the single digit percentages. It seems that it's continued to grow even without the FIFA name. One way that it's achieved that is through a big marketing blitz.

Hey, this is the world's game. It's played here and here.

So for example, they've paid to sponsor the Spanish league La Liga, which is now known as La Liga. EA Sports. The deal with La Liga is an interesting one. It's brought them a lot of publicity through the name, obviously. But they've also managed to convince La Liga to change the format of its live TV broadcasts so that it more closely resembles gameplay from the FC video game. It's things like the fonts and the on screen graphics have changed so that when you're now watching La Liga live on tv, it looks more like you're playing FC La Liga.

EA Sports transforming the game.

Losing the relationship with FIFA has hurt EA in some ways because obviously it's a very well known brand, but in other ways it's created some new opportunities. One interesting one is that it means that they can work with some of the commercial partners who previously were off limits, Nike and Pepsi for example, were previously very difficult for EA to work with because FIFA is sponsored by Adidas and Coca Cola, who, of course are the arch rival of Nike and Pepsi. The big question is whether FIFA is going to hit back, and they've previously said that they will. Earlier this year, FIFA said that it was working on a rival video game, which it said will be the best. Like everything we do. We haven't heard anything much about it since it was rumoured that Take Two, which is a big maker of games, including Grand Theft Auto, might be involved as a possible partner. But earlier this year, Take Two seemed to downplay those rumors. Konami, which makes a game called eFootball, which our older listeners may remember as Pro Evolution Soccer, is another possible partner. The FIFA brand, it's worth noting, is going to become more valuable in the next couple of years because we've got a big World cup coming up in 2026 in North America. And people are particularly interested in this World cup from a marketing point of view because they see it as a chance to interest Americans in football, who, of course, so far have not shown all that much interest in the game. I think anyone's going to struggle, really, to compete with EA and FC at this stage. They've been pretty much at the top of the football video gaming business for about three decades now, and this length of time has given them some powerful advantages. I mean, one is they have these network effects because they've got so many players now who like to play against each other online that it's quite difficult to break into the market. You know, people like to play against their friends, and if all your friends have got fc, then that's probably what you want to play. The other big moat that EA has built is all its licensing deals. Now they've lost the FIFA deal, but they still have literally hundreds of deals with individual footballers, with clubs, with leagues, the rights to have likenesses of particular stadiums. And these deals are complicated and time consuming and very expensive to negotiate. Some of them are exclusive deals as well, so somebody coming in, even with the FIFA brand, wouldn't automatically have the rights to all those other players, clubs, leagues and so on. It's going to be hard for anybody to really tackle fc, whether they have the FIFA name or not.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. The show's editors are Chris Impey and Jack Gill. Our deputy editor is John Jo Devlin and our sound designer is Will Rowe, with help this week from Alex Port Felix. Our senior producers are Rory Galloway and Sarah Larnyuk and Our senior creative producer is William Warren. Our producers are Maggie Khedifa and Benji Guy. And our assistant producer is Henrietta McFarlane. With extra production help this week from Peter Greenitz and Jonathan Day. We'll all see you back here tomorrow for the weekend. Intelligence.