Conversation peace: can Europe bargain with Russia?

0:10Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Rosie Bloor. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the event shaping your world.

0:24The fentanyl trade from Mexico to the US has wrecked lives in both countries. Our correspondent asks whether a proposal to beef up forces on the Mexican side of the border will really stem the flow of drugs. And Mohsen Hendricks, the world's first openly gay imam, opened a mosque in Karachi to provide a safe space for Muslims struggling to reconcile their faith with their sexuality. Our obituaries editor remembers him.

1:01First up, though.

1:09There was a particular urgency to this weekend's mosque meeting of European leaders in London about the future of Ukraine. Things don't look good for the prospects of a negotiated peace after Friday's extraordinary public row in the Oval Office between Donald Trump and Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelensky. You're not in a good position. You don't have the cards right now. With us, you start having cards. I'm not playing cards. I'm wearing serious, Mr. President. You're playing cards. You're gambling with the lives of millions of people. You're gambling You're gambling with World War III. You're gambling with World War III.

1:45The summit in London, said Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer, was a chance to work on a peace plan led by Europe. We are at a crossroads in history today. This is not a moment for more talk. It's time to act. He also talked about a coalition of the willing to deter Russia from attacking Ukraine again in the future. The UK is prepared to back this with boots on the ground and planes in the air. Together with others, Europe must do the heavy listing. Bold statements indeed. But what exactly is Europe proposing? The meeting in Lancaster House in London this weekend had two purposes, I think. Ed Carr is our deputy editor.

2:32The first was to show support for Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine's president, after his mauling in the Oval Office on Friday. And to do that without at the same time further alienating Donald Trump and sort of rubbing his nose and making it look like a conspiracy of Europeans, which would be a very frightening prospect for the Americans, I think. That was the first task. The second task was to signal with words and as much as possible with real pledges and actions that Europe was indeed willing to step up and defend Ukraine and do its part to try and ensure a workable and lasting peace. And Ed, how well did they achieve either of those things, signalling or actual agreements?

3:25I think they did well on the first, which was showing support for Zelensky. There was lots of friendly hugs and slaps on the back and that kind of thing, which was good. And plenty of people turned up, which was also good. I think they did less well, but better than they might have done on the second bit. There was lots of pledges. We will keep the military aid flowing and keep increasing the economic pressure on Russia to strengthen Ukraine now. It felt more concrete. It felt more urgent than previous meetings. If you remember, last month, there'd been a meeting in Paris after a kind of catastrophic week in which Trump had opened negotiations with Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, where various Europeans got together.

4:11And that was really a bit of a farce. Nothing had come out of it at all. This felt much more resolute and determined. And it felt as if it was sinking into European leaders that this was a major crisis for Ukraine, but also in transatlantic relations. The problem is that a lot still has to be done to turn those ideas, words, pledges into actual money and policies. Keir Starmer talks about a coalition of the willing. How viable is that idea? Well, this was in relation to the last part of this plan, which would be once you've demonstrated your support to Ukraine with weapons, you've got a ceasefire, you started financing and building up Ukraine.

4:56Then there's a peacekeeping force of various European countries that go in and that's the coalition of the willing. France and Britain are interested and that's highly significant because they are the two most powerful European nations. But others, Germany and Poland, aren't yet interested and haven't signed up for it. So it's not full on membership at all yet, but it's work in progress. The other thing that such a force requires is US backup. And that's because if European troops in Ukraine are attacked by Russia, they won't really be able to defend themselves without US support. And if they haven't got US support, they will therefore be much more attractive targets for Russia.

5:45And if European countries are attacked in Russia and can't stand up for themselves, it's a hammer blow to European defence. So it's not risk-free at all to put European troops into Ukraine, even with US support in terms of a willingness to come in if they're attacked. But without US support, it's almost an invitation for Russia to test them. And Ed, let's come on to that US support then. Obviously, on Friday, there was this catastrophic row between Zelensky, Trump and Vance in the Oval Office. Where is all that left US-Europe or US-Ukraine relations? In a terrible place, Rosie. Very, very bad indeed.

6:28over the weekend, various Republicans came on to US talk shows to confirm that they thought that President Trump was standing up for the United States, that Zelensky had shown incredible rudeness and ingratitude to come in and behave like that. The thing I think one needs to understand is that Trump's theory of this is that if there is an agreement for the US to be able to go into Ukraine and dig up various minerals, that that puts American workers and companies inside Ukraine. And that as far as Trump is concerned, that is, if you like, America's security force, that Putin simply won't dare to go into Ukraine and invade countryside where American workers and American companies are digging for various ores.

7:19That's his theory. And that's why when he says this deal is 95 % of what's required, and then he says 98 % of what's required, it's just security, just 2 % of the extra things you need. He means that this commercial plan, in effect, buys Ukraine American security. Now, I know Zelensky doesn't think that's remotely credible. I don't think the British think that's credible either. And it's simple. Why? That you can get Russian troops invading from the north that don't go near these fields. You can get assurances from Russia that American commercial interests will be fine. And let's face it, there were commercial interests in Ukraine when Russia invaded.

7:54But I think that's the kind of key difference. I think that Zelensky, if he's to rescue this deal, he'll have to eat humble pie, he'll have to go groveling back to the White House. And even then, I'm not sure that Donald Trump will be willing to entertain him. So what happens next, Ed? The really important thing next is that the Europeans have to show that the words that were spoken at Lancaster House this weekend actually mean something. You have a European Union summit on Thursday this week. It'll be important to see that various things are coming to fruition there. Can the EU use the bond markets by having common debt to raise money?

8:33Is there a really serious proposal for a special bank that can borrow money in order to finance arms? Are there pledges to increase budgets? If you look at defence spending, it has gone up a lot in recent years as the threat from Russia has become clearer, but it hasn't gone up enough. And Mark Rutter and others want, and Asil von der Leyen said it as well, want 3 % or more, 3.5 % even, maybe even higher than that, which is a massive increase in spending. unless we can see moves to put all of those things in place over the next few days the air will go out of this and I think it's important to bear in mind that pledging to do things saying you're going to do things and failing to do them is a sign of incredible weakness to the Kremlin nothing signals weakness more than being unable to do what you say you're going to do.

9:31Ed thank you so much for talking to me. Thank you, Rosie.

9:49Fentanyl is deadly. Exposure to an amount equivalent to a few grains of sand can kill you. Fentanyl is a powerful synthetic opioid and a big problem in the United States. Mia Dahl writes about Latin America. At its peak in 2023, it killed about 80 ,000 Americans. And it's so deadly that the Drug Enforcement Administration puts out safety videos for its staff in case they come anywhere near this drug. It is 40 to 50 times more potent than heroin. It is extremely dangerous to users and to those who simply come into contact with it. Most of it comes into the US from Mexico, particularly through Nogales in Sonora, not to be mistaken with Nogales in Arizona, which is just across the border with the United States.

10:40So this is the Mexican side of the wall in Sonora, and then the other side, Arizona. I recently visited the border, and I traveled along Trump's famous border wall. People even throw their passports, medicine, visas. It's interesting because you'll see that in the desert parts of the wall, it's just completely quiet. And then at the checkpoints, it's busy. You see all these military officials that check cars, do controls. You have about 10.6 million people using this crossing point to travel to the U.S. last year. and what I saw there was people on both sides, long lines of cars and trucks and lots of movement with some of these new military troops checking on people crossing through.

11:41This is a really important checkpoint because about 60 % of the 10 tons of fentanyl that was seized by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol last year was actually found at Nogales and other smaller Arizona Sonora crossings. So it's a route that the Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, is really keen to close in order to appease Donald Trump. So how does the Mexican president plan to close this fentanyl channel? President Sheinbaum hopes to disrupt this route by seizing much more fentanyl on her side of the border. On February 4th, she promised to send 10 ,000 additional members of Mexico's National Guard to the border to help with this.

12:35She said it was to protect the border and prevent drug trafficking, especially fentanyl, from Mexico. It was this gesture that led Trump to postpone his threat to impose tariffs on Mexican imports. And I saw evidence of that greater Mexican force while I was there. So what did you see? So I saw how they have started to put in some military officials at the border. It's not a lot. When I went through the border crossing between Nogales and Nogales, there was about a dozen military officials checking some cars, waving others through. And success seems quite limited. I also spoke to an agent from the U.S.

13:14Drug Enforcement Administration who said that he really welcomes this support, but that more manpower is not a panacea for this. he called the cartels ingenious and started to list the many ways that they smuggle the drugs through both cars and trucks, planes, people, tunnels, and it's a very long list. So fentanyl is often trafficked in small quantities and everything from fresh produce that just needs to cross the border quickly to petrol tanks or spare tires inside hollowed out tortillas or even slutted within the axles of lorries. Well, those tariffs you mentioned are due to come in tomorrow.

13:54But regardless, it sounds like it's going to be hard to stop the fentanyl trade across the border. Yeah, it's very hard indeed. A lot of these drugs actually pass the border through legal pathways, about 90 % of them. And they pass with United States citizens, not with migrants, as many think. So it's very hard to curb this trade. And stopping it at its source is very hard as well. And why is that so hard? Fentanyl is usually produced in very small quantities. It's quite easy to produce. It can literally be done in any kitchen.

14:35That's what Guillermo Valdés Castellanos, a former director of Mexico's National Intelligence Agency, told me when we spoke. So this all means that focusing on borders is necessary, but it's really not enough to stop the drug from flowing into the United States. So Mia, does that mean that those additional Mexican troops are basically futile? They're not going to be able to do anything? No, not exactly. There's been lots of efforts to stop fentanyl trade over the past years, and some of them have paid off. The amount of the drug seized at the southwestern border of the United States finally fell in 2024 by about 20 % compared to the year before.

15:20And the number of deaths attributed to synthetic opioid overdoses in the United States also dropped in 2024 for the first time in over a decade, down by about 30 % compared with 2023. That's not just due to border changes, but it also has to do with what's happening inside the U.S., as well as some of the efforts in Mexico to make drug gangs limit their production of fentanyl. The fentanyl deaths are decreasing in the U.S., but it's not entirely clear if it's because there is less trade or because there are more health measures in the U.S. Carlos Mantieso works for the security consultancy Data Int.

16:02So far, it seems that nothing has worked in the border to reduce the traffic, the fentanyl traffic. He told me these drops cannot be explained by any military deployment. Rather, they're down to changes in U.S. health policies, increased control over production methods, and the grim reality that many fentanyl users have already died.

16:33Matt Dienso told me that most of all, what Shane Bowne's government is trying to do is to signal to the Americans that Mexico is really willing to help on this. So beyond signaling that they want to help, what can actually be done to stop the flow of fentanyl? It's a very difficult task, Rosie. They've been trying to do this for decades with very limited success. But the first step to really get to that is just to collaborate. So the Mexican and U.S. authorities need to build trust and to work together to try to undermine the drug gangs themselves. And then, of course, there's a consumption problem that the U.S.

17:13really needs to reduce its demand for fentanyl for this to happen. So that's probably what would work. Mia, thank you so much for talking to me. Thank you too, Rosie.

17:39The hardest part of Moussin Hendrix's life was when he had to come out to his mother. Anne Rowe is our obituaries editor. She started mentioning that he had got divorced and then she couldn't possibly finish the sentence. She couldn't utter the word gay, so he uttered it for her. He should have been her ideal son, and for a long time he probably seemed so. She had nine children. He was an obedient little boy. It was a fierce household in a way that he grew up in because his grandfather was an imam, and he would give sermons that were quite full of anger and insisting on discipline. When he was older, he went off to Karachi to study Arabic and Islamic jurisprudence.

18:29and then he became an imam in Cape Town. And all this should have made him the ideal son for any mother but although she'd known him for 29 years by the time he came out she hadn't really known about his inward self.

18:49From the age of five he'd been aware that he was different. He was teased for being girlish. By puberty, he was clearly being attracted to boys, and this terrified him, because he was told by his grandfather, not least, that homosexuals were going to burn in hell. For a long time, he tried fasting on Tuesdays and Thursdays to try to cure himself. And he also puzzled and puzzled why Allah, whom he thought of as all-compassionate and all-merciful, could possibly consign him to the fire just because he was gay. When he went to Karachi to study, it was really to check whether the Quran actually condemned homosexuality because he suspected it did not.

19:40And he found in the end it did not. And what he also found when he was in Karachi was that although gay sex was illegal there, that men walked hand in hand with their boyfriends in the street, and he was soon doing the same with his.

20:00So those were the foundations of a 30-year ministry that he carried out in Cape Town. He set up meeting places, he started a mosque, and it was all to provide a safe space for Muslims who were struggling to reconcile their faith with their sexuality. And he had a special feeling that women should be welcome there because they too could feel ostracized in Islam, whether they were gay or straight.

20:33And he decided that he would lead his flock to look at the Koran differently, to read it afresh, with queer eyes, as he liked to say, because they would get something out of it that had never been visible when they had been taught by traditionalists. His main principle was to say that Islam was a religion of peace and love and that Allah, far from being an angry ruler on a throne, was actually a loving energy, a compassionate light. Homosexuality was part of the great diversity of Allah's creation. it was therefore part of a plan it was divinely intended and he could not find that it was condemned anywhere in the quran allah had made creation in pairs so animals were in pairs and humans were in pairs but the idea of pairing was to foster tranquility it was not necessarily to procreate.

21:39And so in all these ways, he presented an entirely new picture of creation to his congregation.

21:49As soon as he came out, he was fired from his imam position in Cape Town. He was fired from one post and then he resigned from two others before he was pushed. The council then exiled him, as they put it, from the fold of Islam, because he took part in a documentary which was called A Jihad for Love. He was sometimes called Mr. Hendricks by them, very dismissively and not given his title of Imam, because they did not consider he was one, and if he strayed into other more traditional mosques, people often kept their distance from him and wouldn't engage at all. In 2024, just after Pride Month, there was another fatwa issued by the council against gay lifestyles.

22:37He mocked it and said they obviously hadn't thought about it much, which is why it was rather a short fatwa. But even in South Africa, which was a very liberal country by African standards, which had actually been the first country in the continent to legalize gay marriage and actually had in its constitution debarring of any discrimination for sexual orientation, Even in such a liberal place, he was really not sensible to be so openly defiant, but he just insisted on it because he felt he would not be true to himself. He would not be authentic if he did not insist. Friends told him to get bodyguards, but he always refused.

23:23The important thing to him was never to compromise, always to be his authentic self. When, in the end, he was shot and killed, and it's not known whether it was a targeted killing or simply a crime, a carjacking, as was very common in South Africa, he would not have been afraid or daunted by that eventuality. For him, the most beautiful thing would be to meet Allah as his entire authentic self, as the person he was. Anne Rowe on Moussin Hendricks, who was shot dead aged 57.

24:24that's all for this episode of the intelligence we'll see you back here tomorrow