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December 3rd 2025

The Economist today The best of our journalism, handpicked each day

Brooke Unger Senior digital editor

I found the latest edition of The Telegram, our geopolitics column, fascinating but frightening. In Europe worries about America’s flakiness under Donald Trump are giving way to a bigger fear: that, while portraying himself as Western civilisation’s champion, he now regards actual Western democracies as adversaries. “In today’s Washington”, our columnist writes, Europe “is often spoken of with greater loathing than either China or Russia”.  Among the casualties could be Ukraine, which fights on thanks to American and other Western support. Russia claims that it has captured the Ukrainian town of Pokrovsk. Our chart-based article assesses just how much progress Russia is making on the battlefield.

The Telegram Trumpworld thinks Europe has betrayed the West Centrist governments across the continent rightly sense a trap

Related → Lawmakers demand answers about Pete Hegseth’s boat-bombing campaign

Slowly, not surely As America pushes peace, Russia’s battlefield advances remain slow Even at an accelerated recent pace, seizing Ukraine’s eastern regions would take more than two years

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Pumping iron Europe is going on a huge military spending spree But with America now an unreliable ally, will it be enough to counter Russia?

Newsletters Hurrah for the OBR Tom Carter, our Britain economics correspondent, argues that last week’s budget shows why the Office for Budget Responsibility is needed more than ever

Problems of the 0.00002% China’s property market is (somehow) worsening Government remedies are not up to the job

Latter-day Saints on the march Mormonism’s surprising boom in Africa The American sect has come a long way from being “the white people’s church”

International in 2026 The Arctic will become more connected to the global economy How fast it opens up depends on global warming and the new cold war

Stuff of fiction The 30-year-old dystopian novel that is the talk of TikTok “I Who Have Never Known Men” is a haunting story—and readers love it

Podcast

The Intelligence Stars and strikes: was America’s ship-bomb illegal? Also on the daily podcast: Gene-editing babies in America and women’s sumo