All talk, no sanctions: Trump lifts Syria embargo

0:28The Economist views. After the recent midterm elections, which one of the colorful characters vying for power is likely to succeed at the all-important presidential poll? And introducing VTubers, content creators who make virtual YouTube videos where they superimpose movements onto cartoon avatars so the live stream doesn't show their real face. Sound weird? Well, apparently we're all going to be watching them soon.

1:01First up, though.

1:09After discussing the situation in Syria with the crown prince, your crown prince, and also with President Erdogan of Turkey. Just one day into Donald Trump's trip to the Middle East, and already he's shaking up American policy in the region. I will be ordering the cessation of sanctions against Syria in order to give them a chance at greatness. That announcement got a standing ovation in Riyadh and big smiles from his host, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. And this morning, Trump met Ahmed al-Sharrah, Syria's leader. It's hard to overstate what Trump's decision to lift sanctions means for Syria.

1:55Greg Karlstrom is our Middle East correspondent. Those sanctions have been a major impediment to reconstruction, to investment, to trying to help Syria stabilize and get back on its feet after a long civil war. And removing them opens the possibility that money will start to come in and Syria can start to be rebuilt. Greg, there was a full gamut of sanctions against the Assad regime, which then fell in December. Just lay out for us how they're still affecting Syrians. Well, let me give you what I think is one of the most striking examples of the impact of sanctions. Russia obviously spent years propping up the Assad regime.

2:37It sent troops to Syria about a decade ago. It carried out countless airstrikes on rebel-held areas in Syria. It killed thousands of people. Obviously, Russia does not have a good relationship with this new post-Assad government in Syria. But over the past few months, Russia has turned into Syria's most important oil supplier, energy supplier. And the reason for that is sanctions, because many international oil companies, shipping companies, were reluctant to deliver oil to Syria because they were worried about falling foul of American sanctions. And that forced the Syrian government to turn to Russia.

3:18But they were the only ones willing to deliver oil to Syria. And so Russia, which ought to be losing influence in a post-Assad Syria, was able to retain some influence by becoming an energy supplier. And that's not the only case where sanctions have been a problem. They've basically frozen Syria out of the global financial system. They've made it difficult for countries like Qatar, for example, which was interested in donating money to Syria to help it pay public sector wages. It largely suspended that plan because it too worried that it would violate American sanctions by doing that. They have had a vast impact on just about every aspect of economic life in the country.

4:00And how did sanctions actually affect the Assad regime before it fell? The regime itself was largely able to deal with the consequences of sanctions, and it dealt with them by turning Syria into a narco state, by revving up production and distribution of Captagon, which is this amphetamine -like drug that has become quite popular in the Gulf and other parts of the Middle East. Syria, by some estimates, was pulling in about$6 billion a year from the captagon trade before the fall of the Assad regime. That money was used to pay salaries for the army and for pro-government militias. Of course, some of it feathered the nests of Assad and his cronies.

4:40The sanctions had a very sharp impact on ordinary Syrians, but the regime was able to find ways to endure. And how quickly will sanctions now be lifted and the effects of that be felt? I think first we have to wait to see the details of what America is doing here. Trump's speech in Riyadh on Tuesday made it sound like he is going to remove all of the American sanctions on Syria, but there's a lot of them imposed over decades. Some were the result of executive orders. Those are relatively easy for Trump to undo. He can issue new executive orders. Others, though, were imposed by legislation in Congress, and that might be a bit harder for Trump to unwind.

5:21If he does indeed lift all of America's sanctions, that should encourage countries like Saudi Arabia, like Qatar, to start putting money into Syria. That should facilitate some reconstruction, which will have knock-on economic benefits for neighboring countries like Lebanon and Turkey. It won't ameliorate some of Syria's underlying economic problems. This is a country that has been devastated by years of civil war. But if America does indeed lift all of its sanctions and if its partners in Europe follow along, they also have sanctions, although they're less significant than the American ones. It should, in the short term, at least allow some significant reconstruction aid to start to flow.

6:02Greg, was he right to do this? And if so, why did it take so long? I think it was very much the right thing to do. These sanctions were put in place to punish the Assad regime for chemical weapons attacks on civilians, for other atrocities committed during the civil war. They were meant to pressure the regime and hopefully to change the regime. That's happened. The regime has changed. And so these sanctions have outlived their usefulness. And the idea that keeping them in place might deliver better outcomes for Syria, might persuade the new Syrian government to be more inclusive or more democratic, those arguments never really made sense to me because these sanctions are such an obstacle to stabilizing and rebuilding the country.

6:46If you leave them in place, you are not going to get an inclusive, democratic, prosperous Syria. You're going to get a country that becomes even more of a failed state. So I think he was absolutely right to do this. I think what took him so long was, for one thing, disagreements within his administration. People like Tulsi Gabbard, his intelligence chief, who was a supporter of the Assad regime when he was in power. She has argued in favor of leaving those sanctions in place. And then also pressure from Israel, which has been lobbying the US government and lobbying lawmakers in Washington to maintain the sanctions.

7:21Greg, one of the things that seemed surprising in the clip we heard from Trump was he attributed this move to a request from Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Turkey's President Erdogan. What do you make of that? A few things. First, he's right when he says that there has been a lot of lobbying in recent months from bin Salman, from Erdogan and from other leaders in the region. I think the fact that he listened to them is an encouraging signal for America's allies in the region. They have been increasingly frustrated over the years. They feel like America doesn't listen to them. America doesn't take their interests and their policy priorities seriously.

8:03And so the fact that Trump was swayed by this, the fact that some of Trump's closest advisors had been arguing for months that we can't trust the new Syrian government, we need to maintain a tough line, Trump listened to American partners in the region and overruled them. And so I think listening to his speech in Riyadh on Tuesday, what jumped out at me was at one point he took this very pointed jab at neoconservatives and what he called nation builders and interventionists, arguing that they have done more harm than good in the region. And he was, of course, referring to things like the Iraq War in 2003, when America went in with these grandiose dreams of reshaping the Middle East and forging a new democratic Iraq.

8:45And all it ended up doing was killing hundreds of thousands of people and unleashing a wave of unrest that is still reverberating across the Middle East. So the messaging from Trump tells you something, I think, about the ideological balance of power within his administration. The so-called isolationists, at least for now, seem to have the upper hand over the more traditional Republicans, the neoconservatives who like to do these sorts of nation-building projects. And I think saying that to a Saudi audience in Riyadh on a visit to the Gulf was going to be very positively received. That's what they want to hear.

9:22An American president who is not going to be on these sorts of ideological crusades, an American president who, yes, he's transactional, but he's focused on business. He's focused on economic opportunities. That is the sort of foreign policy that a country like Saudi Arabia would like to see. And so I think everything about the speech from the specific announcement on Syria to the overall tone of it. Pretty well received in the region. Greg, thank you so much for talking to me. Thank you.

10:07Midterms are usually pretty boring, but in the Philippines, every day of a campaign can feel like high drama at a pop concert.

10:27Some crowds were rooting for President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., also known as Bongbong. Others for Vice President Sarah Duterte. Only thing is, neither of them was on the ballot. But the vote this week was very much about them and their rather nasty feud. They both come from political dynasties with a grubby past. And though they came together to win by a landslide in 2022, their relationship has since collapsed, turning these midterms into a proxy battle with giant implications for the country's future and that of Asia. The stakes of this election were really about the survival of the Marcos and the Duterte dynasties.

11:10Josh Spencer is one of our Asian news editors. It was also about potentially who the next president is going to be of the Philippines. and it's also really about the Philippines and its alliances across Asia and also across the world. What we've seen so far, we're still waiting for the results to be finalized, is that the Dutertes seem to have had a big win. That's because the most important race, which is in the Senate, where Marcos had hoped to win enough seats to convict Sarah Duterte in an impeachment trial in July, he didn't get the seats he needed. The conviction in that case would have disqualified Sarah from running for president in 2028, but it now seems that she has enough votes in the Senate to block any conviction.

11:49So if she survives that trial, which is what seems likely at the moment, she is the odds-on favourite to be the next president of the Philippines. Josh, fill in a bit of the backstory for me here. Why do the president and vice president hate each other so much? The relationship between the Marcos and the Dutertes was always a kind of marriage of convenience. So they really came together just to win the presidential election in 2022, which they did. But right from the get-go, there were big disagreements. They disagree over policy. They've got quite different stances as it relates to America and China and where the Philippines should go in terms of foreign policy.

12:26But things got quite dramatic in November, which is when Sarah Duterte said she'd actually spoken to hit men about potentially assassinating the president, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., if she was killed herself. And that's what led to her impeachment by the House of Representatives. Things got even worse in March when the President Marcos Jr. allowed Philippine police to arrest Rodrigo Duterte, who's Sarah's dad, on charges of crimes against humanity on an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court. And he's now in The Hague facing those charges that he encouraged police to commit extrajudicial killings during his time in office.

13:09So things are messy, things are bad, and they don't get on. But it goes beyond that, doesn't it? I mean, that all sounds like a telenovela, but in some ways this is actually quite Shakespearean because these two families have dominated Filipino politics for decades. Absolutely. Dynastic politics is a feature of Philippine politics. Clans have dominated politics stretching back into hundreds of years ago in Philippine history. But yes, as you say, in the recent years, the Marcoses and the Dutertes have dominated. Many people will probably know Ferdinand Marcos Sr., not junior, who imposed martial law in the country when he was in charge before he was eventually ousted in 1986.

13:49They might know better his wife, Imelda Marcos, who was known for living a lavish lifestyle and particularly famous for having a collection of thousands of shoes. The Dutertes, for their part, perhaps less powerful over the history of the Philippines, but more recently, they've been dominant. Their base is in Davao, which is in the island of Mindanao in the south of the Philippines. And Rodrigo Duterte, who was the previous president to the current administration, was actually the first president elected from that part of the Philippines. And after he left office, he's passed things on to his daughter, Sarah, and she's trying to continue his legacy, even as he's sitting in The Hague.

14:28So we've done the history. You've been reporting on the ground in Manila recently. What was it like? So in Manila, I went to the final campaign rallies of both of the Duterte and the Marcos-backed candidates. And really, these rallies were more like pop concerts than political rallies. They felt almost like a party. Huge number of musical performances, almost outnumbering the number of speeches. How I told you that I love you. One of the things that really surprised me was at the Duterte rally, one of the senatorial candidates called Bato de la Rosa, who's fearsome. He was the chief of police under Rodrigo Duterte's presidency.

15:08He spent three of the five minutes he was allotted for his speech singing a karaoke song. At the Marcos rally, there was a famous Filipino rapper called Andrew E. who came out and performed. That was just before Marcos came on stage to give a serious speech about inflation data and economics. But what also struck me at the rallies going around and speaking to people is how much Rodrigo Duterte's arrest has impacted this election. Some of the people were in favour of the arrest and thought this was right. He was being held to account for the crimes that happened during his presidency. But to be honest, a lot of people that I spoke to, it seems like the arrest had almost increased their sympathy for him and his family and Sarah, the vice president, and boosted support for any candidates associated with him.

15:54Some of the supporters at the rally were wearing t-shirts that were saying, bring him home. And there was a sense that he should have been tried in the Philippines rather than taken to an international court. So as you say, these elections were a big boost for Sarah Duterte. To what extent do you think does that indicate that she could win a presidential election? It's too early to say for sure, but it's definitely an indication that the Dutertes are not dead. They're still very popular in many parts of the Philippines. So now it's all really about this impeachment vote in the Senate in July. And if she survives that vote, she then really becomes a favourite to win the next presidential election in 2028.

16:32It's not shoo-in. There are other candidates and there's still a chance she could be convicted in the impeachment trial in the Senate. Josh, the Philippines really stands out as one of the only big countries in Asia and probably the world to have really flipped from supporting the US to China and back to the US again. What impact would the presidential campaign and the election of one or other of these candidates have on the future of the Philippines? Well, it would have a massive impact. So Bongbong Marcos has allowed America more access to military bases in the Philippines. He's been strong at calling out China's bullying in the South China Sea.

17:12And this has set a message for countries across Asia that China can be stood up to, and it's improved America's ability to project power across the whole region. But when Rodrigo Duterte was in power from 2016 to 2022, he sought closer ties with China and really reduced them with America. The Philippines was almost essentially on China's side in the battle for power in Asia. It was giving in to maritime claims, and this was making it hard for all countries to stand up to China, with Duterte essentially giving up some of the Philippines' sovereignty, although he later rode back some of those claims.

17:45So what we could see if Sarah Duterte, his daughter, gets elected in 2028, is that the Philippines could swing back towards China yet again. She hasn't said much in public about what she thinks of China, but reports behind the scenes suggest that her and Marcos have disagreed about how to respond to its tactics. If her views are anything like her father's views, she would probably reverse some of the current administration's positions. That would matter for countries like Taiwan, that would matter for countries like Vietnam, who also are facing contesting claims with China. So this is a story that matters not just for the Philippines, but for Asia as a whole.

18:24Josh, great to talk to you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Rosie.

18:45A glowing cube sits at the center of Makuhari Messe, a large convention center in Japan. The audience, thousands of them, cheers as Hoshimachi Suise emerges from the cube. Moiki Iida writes about Japan for The Economist. She's dressed in a short filly skirt, and her trademark blue hair is tied up. She kicks off the show with her hit song, Stellar Stellar. One by one, dozens of other performers follow. The audience is singing along, waving their pen lights, and cheering as each performer takes the stage. So far, you might think I'm describing a normal pop concert, but there's actually a twist. None of the performers are physically on stage.

19:31In fact, Suisei and the others are all digital avatars projected onto a screen. They look somewhat like anime characters. These entertainers are known as VTubers, short for Virtual YouTubers. There are real people behind these avatars, but they never show their real faces. Instead, they use webcams that track their facial expressions and movements, which are then mapped onto these anime-like characters in real life. And these VTubers have become popular, not just in Japan, but in many parts of the world.

20:06Mareka, I'm really having a hard time envisioning what you're talking about here. And the only thing I can think of is in the dark days of the pandemic, when people tried to make Zoom calls more appealing, when they'd turn their face into a cat or a dog or something. Is that the kind of thing we're talking about here? Yes, there is a similarity. But what we see here with VTubers is it's not just their faces, but it's their full body. So these characters are like anime girls. They have big, wide eyes, very typical of anime, and they're often wearing short skirts and cutesy outfits. These VTubers are not just performers.

20:42VTubers are more like YouTubers or streamers, so they're active on platforms like Twitch as well. They might play video games, or they might do singing karaoke, or just talk to their audiences through the chat function. And these fans can look at these videos from the comfort of their bedrooms. Moeka, this is still a really bizarre trend to me. Where did it all start from? So VTubers emerged in Japan about a decade ago. That's when the first VTuber came out. But it really took off during the COVID-19 pandemic, both in Japan and globally as well. During this time, people were stuck at home and a lot of people were looking for entertainment online, but also a sense of connection as well.

21:26And you might think, oh, what a strange phenomenon, but it's surprisingly going mainstream. So in Japan, VTubers are becoming increasingly mainstream and you see VTubers even partnering with local governments and major companies as well. But even globally, they've become a multi-billion dollar industry. I would say most people in Western countries wouldn't know what VTubers are, but within the community of fans, it's a very big deal. One anecdote to show the popularity of VTubers on the global stage is at the Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles. There's a VTuber called Go Gura, who is an American. And she wears this shark costume.

22:06But she basically did a performance at the Dodgers Stadium and that gathered tens of thousands of American fans. So who's watching these videos? So I would say the concert is very representative. There were thousands of people in the audience. Most of them were men and young men, including teenagers. But if you look at statistics, as well. The VTuber fan base is predominantly men. And a lot of them come from anime fandom. A lot of them are attracted to these cutesy anime characters. They're already familiar with the aesthetic. They're familiar with the format of anime. But then they were very intrigued by the content.

22:44It's like anime characters come to life and interacting with them. So you've talked about the interaction and connection, but what else is it that makes VTubing so popular? To kind of boil it down, I think the popularity of VTubers represents two very powerful cultural exports from Japan, the popularity of anime. And the other thing is Japan's idol culture, forming these intense emotional bonds between stars and the fans. And what makes an idol different from usual stars is that they're very accessible through intimate meet and greet events. VTubers have adapted this format to the digital realm by using this function called Super Chats on YouTube.

23:26Fans can send a message to a VTuber through the Super Chat function with a tip in the hopes that they will respond to them. So if you pay for a Super Chat, the VTuber could highlight your comment and they might also call your name. And there was even a Japanese VTuber who's estimated to have made half a million dollars from Super Chats last year alone. Absolutely fascinating. Thank you so much, Mareka. Thank you so much, Rosie.

24:06That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.

24:19Thank you.