Call it a statistical quirk if you must. But this year, with a bit of luck, Africa will grow faster than Asia. If the 54 African economies manage to outpace their Asian counterparts, it would be the first time in modern history that this has happened. To achieve it, African economies will need to grow marginally faster on average than they did last year. In 2025, despite war in Sudan, insurgency in the Sahel and coups in Madagascar and Guinea Bissau, sub-Saharan Africa is expected to have mustered growth of about 4.1 per cent. The IMF expects this to notch up to 4.4 per cent as economies continue to reap the benefits of a weak dollar — good for cutting debt-service payments and easing inflationary pressure — and of high commodity prices, including for gold and copper. At the same time, the IMF is predicting that, as the Chinese motor whirrs more slowly, the combined economies of Asia will slow in 2026 to around 4.1 per cent. That sets up the intriguing possibili...
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What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About National Security Margaret Mullins January 8, 2026 A soldier holding a drone at a military parade in Washington, D.C., June 2025 Jonathan Ernst / Reuters MARGARET MULLINS is Director of Public Options and Governance at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator. She served as Senior Adviser to the Deputy Secretary of Defense in the Biden administration from 2023 to 2025. In the summer of 1993, U.S. President Bill Clinton’s secretary of defense, Les Aspin, and William Perry, then the deputy secretary of defense, hosted a dinner at the Pentagon for defense industry leaders. The Cold War was over, they informed the gathering, and the federal budget would not support them all. With no looming Soviet threat justifying ever-rising defense budgets, consolidation would be necessary. Just after it happened, this meeting was dubbed the “Last Supper” by the CEO of the Martin Marietta Corporation, a major aerospace and defense firm that went on to merge with...
Navigated Menu Back Financial Times Financial Times Europe 9 Jan 2026 Buttons.Search Options Supplication is Europe’s only Trump policy Robert Shrimsley robert.shrimsley@ft.com Settings Print Share Listen Two words now sum up European policy towards Donald Trump’s United States: strategic supplication. The countries of Nato, including the UK, will render unto Caesar that which he declares to be his — in the hope that he does not ask for too much and looks kindly on their most urgent requests. This perhaps explains the muted reactions to Trump’s latest military and diplomatic claims on Venezuela and Greenland. European leaders may talk a bigger game but this week much of the pretence has been stripped away. Donald Trump’s senior adviser, Stephen Miller was more succinct: “We are a superpower and we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.” The former French premier Gabriel Attal says Europeans are now “powerless spectators of the unravelling...