Spies isn’t everything: Putin’s global-chaos machine

Hey, Ryan Reynolds here wishing you a very happy half off holiday because right now Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of 50% off unlimited. To be clear, that's half the price, not half the service. Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price. So that means a half day. Yeah, give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront.

Payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow 135 gigabytes of network busy. Taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com.

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. Rich world governments just keep getting bigger, dealing with more and more safety net programs. Like any sprawling institution, that means they've been getting less efficient. How to avoid a doom loop for these lumbering leviathans and beans. Beans good for your heart. The British seem to know this better than most. The baked bean is a cultural institution. For a while there, there was almost no other bean to speak of. But more exotic and more upmarket kinds are now on the upper. First up though.

Russia's war in Ukraine has been accompanied by a crescendo of chaos, aggression, subversion, meddling by Russia around the world.

Shashank Joshi is our defence editor.

Russia has done this for decades. It's nothing new, but there's a tangible sense among Western governments, Western intelligence agencies that things are escalating to a really new level. This is the MI6 chief speaking recently. It's just a bit more reckless. I mean, I think Russian intelligence services.

Have gone a bit feral.

Frankly. That shift raises the question, is this just more of the same, more assassination, more skullduggery? Or are we seeing a step change in Russia's approach to the world?

So when you say aggression, subversion, meddling, give me some examples.

It's pretty much everything you can think of, Jason. So, for example, sabotage in Europe has grown dramatically. We recently had a warning from Ken McCallum, who's the head of MI5, Britain's domestic security service, on Russia's efforts in the UK.

The GRU in particular is on a sustained mission to generate mayhem on British and European streets.

This year alone we have seen a plot to attack American military facilities in Germany. There was a man arrested in Poland who was preparing to pass information on Rosheshev Airport, which is a key logistics hub for arms to Ukraine, to Russia. There was an arson attack on a Ukrainian owned logistics company In London, a Russian Ukrainian man was arrested in Paris, he was wounded whilst attempting to make a bomb. And perhaps most remarkably of all, there was a plot to kill the boss of Germany's biggest arms company.

So all of this is fairly brazen stuff. This is not on the down low.

No, well, it's a mix of things. A lot of it's bang, bang, blow stuff up, kill people, and that's standard Russian intelligence practice. There's also some more subtle stuff, what you might call psychological destabilization. Not very long ago, there were coffins draped with the French flag left at the Eiffel Tower in Paris and attached to them was the label French soldiers of Ukraine. This was accentuating this debate inside France over whether the country should be supporting Ukraine, the risks of doing so, whether it was getting dragged in. And that was attributed by the French to Russian intelligence. And clearly the aim there is to drive a wedge into these pre existing societal divisions. You see that lots all the way across Europe. A lot of it's about Ukraine, but it goes well beyond that. We've also seen hackers who have tried to paralyze Polish political, military, economic infrastructure. There's another interesting example example from France, which is a Russian disinformation effort which is taking normal English language news articles and is using AI like ChatGPT to rewrite these, not only in French, but adding a political slant. So adding a pro Russian or anti French government slant. And this is again not to achieve any narrow particular aim, not to improve its chances in Ukraine. It really is just to sow chaos. It is just stirring the pot.

Should I read anything into the fact that every example you've given so far is in Europe?

Well, obviously a lot of it's in Europe because Russia's aim is to try to dissuade Europe and America from giving arms to Ukraine. But it goes well beyond that. I think the place also to look is Africa, where you remember the Wagner group, of course, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the mercenary chief who met a sticky end in a plane after rising up against Putin. The remnants of his group have been taken over by Russian military intelligence and they're being used very effectively to supplant French and American influence in places like Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, or places that have recently suffered coups of one form or another. America has been forced to close its last military base in Niger. We've also seen officers of the gru, which is Russia's military intelligence service, working alongside the Houthi rebel group in Yemen, who are of course the group who are firing missiles at shipping in the Red Sea. And Russia has come pretty close to providing advanced missiles to the Houthis in retaliation for American missile aid to Ukraine. Now, the Russians haven't pulled the trigger on that, but they could do. And I think that's a great sign of how Russia is now so willing to cause harm to the west, it's even willing to jeopardize its own vital relationships, in that case, the relationship with Saudi Arabia, which is very worried about the Houthis.

But surely, in this American election season, one great way to take a potshot at the west is to mess with that.

We recently had a public warning from Avril Haynes, who's America's Director of National Intelligence.

Russia remains the most active foreign threat to our elections. The Russian government's goals in such influence operations tend to include eroding trust in US Democratic institutions, exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the United States.

And what she told Congress was that Russia sees that election meddling not necessarily as a way to secure one candidate or another. It was more a way to tear down Russia's principal adversary, to sort of sow chaos, the same kind of stuff that we saw back in 2016. American intelligence is already seeing Russia target specific politicians, specific demographics. It's promoting divisive narratives. Now, don't get me wrong, a lot of these efforts are very crude. They're ineffective, they're not necessarily going to swing the election, but they are prolific. Some of them are pretty innovative, technologically speaking. And what they do is they just corrode trust in American institutions. And look, these days, American institutions are not in the healthiest shape anyway.

Not too hard to get American blood up. I suppose at this point, the question is whether this is just a difference in magnitude of the chaos they're trying.

To sow or the visibility of it.

Or whether there's some sort of difference in kind.

Now, Russia, of course, denies this. Earlier this month, a Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said all of these accusations were unsubstantiated and baseless. But of course, the Kremlin spokesman is a habitual liar. So I would take that statement with all the integrity that it deserves. Russia and before that, the Soviet Union have done lots of this stuff, right? They have assassinated people abroad. They've pumped disinformation around the world. They've done what they call active measures. What I think is different this time is that Russia is acting as if it doesn't really have a stake in the post war international order. We saw Putin embracing this, right, recently. He said, we are in for probably the most dangerous, unpredictable and important decade since the end of World War II. This is a revolutionary situation. And I think that's what makes this so different and, frankly speaking, so dangerous. The red lines crossed so far, the assassination plots, the sabotage, the arson, I think that these are only the beginning of what is going to be a much more intense campaign in the months.

Ahead against which the rest of the world has. What kind of measures? I mean, what's to be done to crimp any of this?

Well, there's not an awful lot because you've pulled lots of the levers you can after the war in Ukraine, right? You've sanctioned Russia. You've already kicked out hundreds of Russian intelligence officers from Europe. The biggest ever expulsions. And in fact, ironically, that's why we're seeing some of the activity we are, because they've lost their official spies inside embassies and missions in Europe. They're hiring criminal middlemen to do this arson, to do these provocations that makes them more reliant on these half baked amateurs. It makes them less professional, it makes them easier to catch. And so the answer really lies in what Richard Moore, the head of MI6, called Good Old fashioned security and intelligence work. And there's a balance to be struck, Jason, because you don't want to tell your population to panic. You don't want to say, Russia's here, the red's under the bed, they're going to cripple our energy networks and take down our government and swing our elections. Because that kind of does the Kremlin's work for it. The important thing to remember is Russia is also feeling out the West's red lines. It doesn't want an all out conflict with NATO, it doesn't want a full scale war. It's doing this stuff under the radar precisely because it doesn't want missiles to be flying across borders. It doesn't want armies to be clashing in the field. But I think all the indications are Putin is still feeling out those red lines and he is probably going to cross some of them in the years to come.

Shashank, thanks very much for your time.

Thanks very much, Jason.

A big part of the global meddling machinery that Vladimir Putin operates is in Africa, where the Wagner group has been whipped into more organized shape, except perhaps in the Central African Republic. On the latest episode of the Weekend Intelligence, my colleague Tom Gardner slipped into the country, moving amongst the Wagner operatives. It's a fascinating look at how Russia protects its interests and raises cash half a world away. And it's only for subscribers. So let me remind you that subscribing to Economist Podcasts plus helps make our deep and daring journalism possible. Search Economist Podcasts plus for a free trial.

There's a sort of unspoken deal that.

People in the rich world have with their leaders. You pays your taxes, and for that.

You get what people who think about this stuff call entitlements. Pensions, old age, medical coverage, an unemployment safety net, that kind of thing. Problem is, politicians think, or they want voters to think, that entitlements can grow and sprawl, but the taxes for all that don't have to. This year, the typical family's tax bill.

Is thousands of dollars lower because under.

My plan, more than 100 million Americans.

Will get a tax cut.

Read my lips.

No new taxes.

Lip reading, not so easy on a podcast, but you get the idea. Yet entitlements and all the administration for them keep growing.

So lots of governments have become lumbering.

Leviathans, or that's what our senior economics writer, Callum Williams evocatively calls them.

By lumbering leviathans. What we're talking about here is a sort of change in the way that governments operate. What's basically happened over the past few decades is that governments have spent more and more money on good things, but as they do that, they're actually becoming less effective, less effective at delivering public services and less effective at being bureaucracies.

Give us some examples. What are the governments around the world that are ever bigger and ever less effective?

So we're talking about the rich world here, and governments across the rich world have grown much, much larger. What that means is that now they account for roughly 40% of GDP across the rich world. So really high it was only about 30% in the 1960s. At the same time, though, they've become less effective. So it's a bit of a paradox. So if you look, for example, at the United States, when Joe Biden came into office in 2021, he promised an infrastructure revolution. In fact, since then, spending on infrastructure has gone down, so the infrastructure push has been ineffective. And then if you look at, say, the uk, everyone in the UK knows that the National Health Service gets more and more money every year, but doesn't seem to get really any better. And if anything, seems at the moment to be getting worse. And then if you look at Germany, an example, where you'd think that the bureaucracy was really effective, German trains now are kind of a national joke. They're always late. The workers are always on strike. And then if you see what happened in Germany during the energy crisis of 2022, the government inexplicably decided to mothball its three remaining nuclear power plants even as the cost of energy soared. So it's this weird thing where governments are both bigger but also much less effective than they were before.

So is this not just an example of growing inefficiencies with size?

That is kind of what it is, but it's also to do with a reallocation of the kind of things that governments spend money on. This is really the crucial change. And the way to think about it is, again, it's a two stage process. Governments are spending a lot more money than they were before on entitlements. And by entitlements, we mean lots of different things. So it includes pensions, welfare payments, on healthcare, housing, all that kind of thing. And what that basically is doing is squeezing out spending on other aspects of what governments typically do. So we're thinking in particular, public services and bureaucracies. Go Back to the 1950s, in the US government, spending on public services equaled about 25% of American GDP. So quite a lot. And at the same time, spending on entitlement. So pensions and all the other things that equaled a few percentage points of GDP, 4 or 5% of GDP max. But then over time, that has slowly flipped. So now what we have is that entitlements and public services both equal about 15% of GDP. So in other words, entitlement spending has ballooned and spending on public services has come a long way down. And what that basically has meant is that, yes, there's a lot more redistribution by the government, but it means that spending on public services has been really squeezed.

But if there's a fixed pot of money, then surely everyone could see this coming. Why is it that across the rich world, governments are willing to spend that much more if it's going to come at the cost of the other things governments are supposed to do?

So I would challenge you on one thing. There is not a fixed pot of money. Governments can choose to tax more if they want to. For various reasons, political reasons, I think governments over the past 20 years have actually found it much more difficult to increase taxes. If you look at the kind of reforms that now take place across the rich world, they are much more likely to be measures that reduce the tax take than increase the tax take. So if you look at what Donald Trump is promising, you look at what Kamala House is promising, they're both basically promising to cut Taxes, even at a time when the US fiscal situation is pretty dicey over the long run. But it doesn't have to be that way, right? So governments are choosing not to raise the money and that forces them into this sort of straitjacket of if you want to increase spending on one thing, you have to decrease spending on another thing. I think then there's a question of why are they choosing to spend more on entitlements and less on public services. My personal view is that it's basically a short termist, a bias in government that has probably increased. In a world of social media, of 24 Hour News, of political polarization, you basically get a lot of bang for your buck immediately with spending on pensions and spending on healthcare subsidies and housing subsidies, whereas spending on public services, these are longer term things, especially when you're investing in new hospitals or investing in new schools. The payoff from that can take a long time. So I think what it really reflects is a sort of choice change in the way that politicians think about managing the economy. They're much keener on the short term wins and much less keen on the.

Long term wins, and pretty squeamish about raising taxes. But there must be a way to do it that makes it more palatable if the promise is better public services.

Well, that's true. So there are ways in which governments can sensibly raise revenue. Scandinavian countries are a good example here. For a long time they've had big states, big government sectors alongside market economies that have done pretty well. They've done this in large part by having high rates of value added tax, kind of a bit like a sales tax, not quite the same thing. These are one of the least distorting taxes and so they're pretty good as a way of raising revenue versus taxing labour and that kind of thing. They've also kept taxes down on capital, which are pretty harmful to growth. But the thing is, outside of Scandinavia, politicians really have preferred to act as if extra spending can just happen without having to raise taxes.

That road will come to an end, right? I mean, how do you see this playing out? This can't be all entitlements and no public services in the long run, right?

No, that's true. So there will have to be a decision at some point over do we cut entitlements or do we raise taxes in order to fund better public services? Some countries have already kind of faced this problem head on. Countries in Southern Europe, Greece, Cyprus, Italy, to a degree in the 2010s was kind of confronted with this problem, at some point, governments will probably have to bite the bullet. You know, the crucial thing will be what happens in the US because, you know, what happens in the US tends to determine to a great degree what happens outside the us that conversation is absolutely not happening in the US at the moment. That's basically because interest on US government debt is actually still pretty low. Governments can and politicians can enact these enormous borrowing binges seemingly right now without really any cost to them. Who knows when that will change? It's basically impossible to predict, but at some point it probably will. And that will mean eventually the world is going to have to have a sensible conversation about taxation.

Callum, thanks very much for your time.

Thank you, Jason.

Marja Vilczek is a news editor at the Economist, and she has a can and a question for me.

Okay, Jason, So are you a fan of baked beans?

So when you say baked beans to me, I don't think of the sort of thing that Brits do. I think of the American version, which is much sweeter, more molasses y kind of thing.

Well, that's the original baked bean. So the recipe actually came from America in its original form. It had meat in it as well. But then it was adapted to British taste, to wartime rationing, to mass production. That's how we arrive at what Brits consume 2 million cans of every day.

Yeah.

We cannot overstate just how much Brits like baked beans. And here's the weird part for me at breakfast.

Oh, so when would you have them?

It's a lunch dish, it's a. It's a dinner dish. It's a big barbecue dish.

Yeah. No, there are all these cultural associations. In America, they're seen as something that you have aside with a barbecue, but in Britain, they're very much a breakfast food. Brits eat more than the rest of the world combined of baked beans. So haricot beans cooked in a tomato sauce, usually served hot on toast, or a jacket potato.

Baked potato as I know it.

Yes. But to the point where actually they've become such a national symbol that both of King Charles's wives, so Princess Diana, now Queen Camilla, list them amongst their favorite meals. But also, just because Brits have such a singular obsession with the baked bean recipe, they don't really eat other pulses as much or experiment with beans in their other forms. But now that's starting to change.

In what way and why?

Well, there are a number of food trends that are driving this. For one, Brits are eating a lot less meat. So as they seek out other sources of protein. Pulses just happen to be cheap, filling and healthy. Brits are also looking into gut health more. 9 out of 10 people in Britain don't get enough fibre, so pulses are a good source of that as well, to the point where local authorities are actually pledging that they will be serving more beans in places like hospitals, government buildings, prisons. There are also programs to get children in schools to eat more beans at lunchtime.

And so this is getting away from the baked beans because, like, we've got a can of these things here in front of us and it's not got all that much sugar in it, but it's got a can of these things, has 21% of your daily recommended intake of salt, for example. This isn't a health food.

Well, that's true. It's good that people are eating more beans in general, but there are certainly healthier ways of preparing them. I've spoken to a number of people who are trying to persuade British eaters that there are other things that they can do with their haricot beans rather than to smother them in a sweet sauce. And one of them is Amelia Christine Miller, who founded Bold Bean Company two years ago with the aim of changing the perception around beans as something that isn't dull and uninspiring, but actually is healthy and delicious. Both she and various other recipe writers, food influencers, activists, have been posting lots and lots of recipes online. And more and more recipe books actually feature pulses to encourage people to experiment more and try them in different forms.

Okay, so expand my world then. How should I be eating beans? How do you eat beans?

The way I have beans is I often like to just have them in a salad. So I'll buy some cooked beans. My favourite is with tuna, chicory and a parsley dressing. But there are lots of other ways. In lots of Mexican recipes, you'll get black beans. Chickpeas will feature in many Middle Eastern dishes. And actually I've. Even if that's a little too exotic for some British eaters, I've even seen a version of Coronation Chickpeas, which is replacing the chicken and the much loved creamy curry sauce that's usually put in sandwiches with the pulses instead.

At the strong encouragement of our producer, I'm going to open this can of beans that's on the table and we are going to performatively eat some beans. Are you happy with that?

Yep. We'll do what we have to do.

Oh, that's the stuff.

Wait, how are we gonna heat them up?

We don't have budget for that. Right out of the can. We suffer for our art.

It's a bit like a soup. How do you like them?

I mean, I prefer them hot and on toast, I suppose if given choice, straight cold out of the can. Feels like something I might have left.

Behind in my student days.

But, you know, not the worst thing the world.

But that's indeed how many people perceive baked beans. So people like bald bean, et cetera, et cetera, they acknowledge that familiarity is important for people. And trying new recipes with beans, it can be too big of a hurdle. So some companies are now launching premium baked beans as a way of encouraging Brits to try them in a slightly different guise with. With some oregano thrown in or some tamarind sauce or some other way of making them gourmet. And indeed, there is some growth in the segment out of all canned food categories. Cantor, which is a market research firm, shows that beans are actually the only ones that are growing, but particularly baked beans. That segment grew 1.7% in the year to January, whereas other types of beans only grew by 0.2%. And that's largely because for most people, they're still not really clear on what to do with them.

Maria, thanks very much for that. Would you like the remaining beans?

Oh, no, no. Knock yourself out. All yours.

That's all for this episode of the Entire Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.