concerns that its war on Iran might affect its ability to deter a Chinese attack in the Pacific. On May 6th America test-fired a Tomahawk cruise missile from Philippine territory for the first time, even though the missiles are in short supply due to America’s burn rate in the Persian Gulf. With its 1,600km range, the Tomahawk could reach most of the Taiwan Strait from Philippine territory. “I’m not concerned at all about reduced deterrence,” Gilbert Teodoro, the Philippines’ defence minister, told Reuters last month. But he warned that if China saw “a perceived weakness or a perceived opening, they will take advantage” Perhaps as a hedge against the perception of American distraction or abandonment, the Philippines has invited other countries to get involved in this year’s exercise. Japanese ships form the largest part of the foreign naval contingent, and Japanese ground troops are participating for the first time. In the counter-landing exercise on May 4th they defended beaches that they once occupied in the second world war, as did soldiers from the storied Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. Australian, French and New Zealand troops are taking part in other elements of the drills. That is partly the result of a campaign by the Philippine president, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr to get other countries involved in the defence of the Philippines. Mr Marcos, who is increasingly outspoken about the threat from China, wants to signal that its concerns about Chinese aggression are not just a result of its alliance with America. Much of this year’s exercise, including the live-fire drill on La Paz sand dunes, has been held in the longtime Marcos family stronghold of Ilocos Norte near the Taiwan Strait. But what will happen after Mr Marcos leaves office in June 2028? The front-runner to succeed him is Sara Duterte, the daughter of Mr Marcos’s far more China-friendly predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte. If she becomes president, the future of the exercises will be in doubt. American troops might have to find another way to stay close this time of year.■ For exclusive coverage of Asian politics, economics and security, sign up to Asia Bulletin, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//asia/2026/05/06/america-is-massing-troops-near-taiwan- to-deter-troublemaking-by-china
The case against trees India’s bureaucrats are bad at trade-offs between nature and roads May 7th 2026 TWO YEARS ago the authorities tore down a building on Hill Road, a busy street in an overpriced part of Mumbai, to widen it and ease the traffic. But they left in place a large-canopied rain tree that stood in front of the vanished structure. In theory, the road has been widened. In practice, however, the building’s footprint is now an informal car park. The Hill Road tree is not an exception. Across Mumbai traffic is obstructed by trees that remained rooted as lanes were added. It is the same story in other growing cities. The reason for this bizarre state of affairs is that there is a noisy group even more feared by authorities than motorists, who are themselves no pushovers. That is the tree-huggers.
India has spent the past 25 years frantically building infrastructure, both in cities and between them. The pace sped up after Narendra Modi, who enjoys few things more than a highway inauguration ceremony, came to power in 2014. Yet a binary idea has taken hold that trees and development are antithetical to each other. This is rather a strange notion for a country that can do with a lot more of both. Indian cities badly need more green cover. A recent heatwave that pushed temperatures well past 40°C reminded everyone, not least the 90% of Indian households without air-conditioning, why urban trees matter. They not only provide shade to humans but also keep the asphalt underneath from warming up and radiating heat. But things quickly took a turn for the silly. One newspaper ran a story about a man who compared temperatures in the sun and the shade. “This isn’t magic,” the paper reported, apparently without irony, but something “forgotten in the rush to build more flyovers and high- rises”. Yet urban India needs to build more flyovers and high-rises, too. Some 40% of the country’s 1.45bn people live in its dysfunctional cities. One way to improve their lives—and their productivity—is by making it easier to get around. Poor road networks need scaling up. Public transport has to be rolled out. And everywhere requires vastly more housing. The state is keen to get all of this done. But often it does not help its own cause. In their rush to build a train depot in 2019, for instance, the bureaucrats in Mumbai cleared some 2,000 trees in the dead of night, hours after a court ruling and before activists had a chance to appeal. Official attempts to transplant trees have a mixed record. And it is hard to know whether promises to plant extra trees to make up for lost ones have been kept, since comprehensive data are rarely published. The details matter: a rain tree provides shade, habitat, air quality and carbon storage. A coconut tree provides coconuts. Without data to argue with, environmental types resort to appeals to emotion and circular logic. When cities widen roads or plan new ones, well-meaning citizens argue that this will only encourage car ownership, and that investing in public transport would be wiser. True. But many metro lines, including in Kolkata and Bangalore, have been held up by litigation over protecting trees.
Buses, comes the answer, would be cheaper, more flexible and less ecologically burdensome. Fine. But buses need roads to ply on. And so it goes, round and round, with infrastructure roll-outs taking longer and costing more than they should while greenery is lost anyway. This column is named after a tree, for Ficus sake. So it is with due respect that Banyan argues: some trees need to go. There is a better way to balance the trade-offs between nature and urbanisation than to do both badly. But that would require courage on the part of the state: to release data, to publish plans and to persuade the people it nominally serves. And it would require citizens to give up on some trees, which they would surely do if given a chance to offer feedback and to have it taken seriously. The odd thing is that everybody knows the current dynamic is counterproductive. Ask environmentalists about why they fight over single trees—there were some 3m trees in Mumbai at last count in 2018—and they will admit they do it to keep up the pressure. It forces bureaucrats to think twice about chopping down thousands. Officials paint critics as impediments to progress. But privately they, too, admit that tree-huggers play a useful role. Without them, engineers would cheerfully fell entire forests if it meant roads could be built faster and cheaper. Everyone is acting rationally. No one is behaving sensibly. The result is right there in the middle of Hill Road. ■ Editor’s note: This is the last Banyan column. In two weeks’ time it will reemerge in a different form. Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//asia/2026/05/03/the-case-against-trees
Artificial intelligence revives a cold-war-style dilemma A Chinese high-seas misadventure in luxury yachts China thinks America is declining but still uniquely dangerous
Artificial intelligence revives a cold-war-style dilemma America and China are weighing co-operation and competition May 7th 2026 WHEN XI JINPING and Donald Trump meet in Beijing on May 14th-15th, they may discuss such vexing problems as war in the Middle East, trade imbalances and the status of Taiwan. Add to that cheering list artificial intelligence. Elites in both Beijing and Washington are unnerved by the technology’s rapid advance. The smarter AI models become, the more vital they are for prosperity at home and geopolitical heft abroad. But the risks they pose grow alongside. Not since the creation of the atomic bomb have great powers faced such a dilemma. The Trump administration increasingly recognises as much. It has ditched its hands-off approach to tech regulation after recent sparring with Anthropic,
an American lab, and is considering ordering new models to be vetted by the government. Anthropic said in April that it had created Mythos, a model so capable at finding holes in cyber-defences that it could not be publicly released. America and its rivals took note. After initial scepticism, China’s state media noted Mythos’s “unprecedented cyber-attack capabilities”, while a Russian broadcaster called it “worse than a nuclear bomb”. Fears that ever more capable models may launch cyber-attacks, design bio- weapons or slip loose from human control have made AI diplomacy urgent. Some in America and China are quietly weighing whether they can agree on guardrails for a technology that each regards as essential to beating the other. Distrust abounds. Neither side wants to slow its own development and risk handing the other an advantage. Some American tech types theorise that being the first to build a self- improving—and therefore ever more powerful—AI model could create an enormous strategic advantage. Chinese experts tend to view AI as key to economic growth: more nuclear power than nuclear weapon. America and China have a “mutual interest” in AI safety, Xue Lan, an adviser to the Chinese government, told attendees at an event in the US Capitol one evening in late April. “If one country is not safe, all of us are not safe,” he said. Mr Xue and Yi Zeng, the boss of Beijing’s AI-safety institute, called for global efforts to regulate and even slow AI development. That chimes with Chinese policy. Soon after the arrival of ChatGPT in 2022, China began pushing for international co-operation on AI and the creation of a UN body. Chinese diplomats have floated the idea of “pausing” AI development, and argue that global standards should be adopted to ensure humans remain in control. Their plan calls on the West to share its AI kit with poor countries so as not to divide the world into tech haves and have- nots. A bilateral approach is more likely, and favoured by officials in Washington. Together America and China house 90% of the world’s frontier computing power and so are the only ones with real regulatory clout. American officials also view China’s AI ecosystem as a particular source of risk. Chinese models are mostly “open source”, meaning the weights that allow them to