Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Early in the pandemic, the question was whether a cooped-up planet would produce more babies or fewer.

The answer is now clear. Many, many fewer. We look into the prospect that on a planet with fewer people, there are fewer transformative ideas.

And a famed series of sculptures known as the Benin bronzes has become a focal point in a global discussion about the restitution of artworks to their homelands.

It's a debate that raises tempers and of great many questions.

First up, though,

Since 2013, French armed forces have been stationed in the Sahel, fighting jihadists.

France's forces have been stretched, just over 5,000 of its troops for a region roughly

the size of Western Europe. Such counterinsurgency operations might be challenging, but these

days, France's generals have their sights on something far larger. In the forests and the plains

of the Champagna-Arden region, the armed forces are beginning to prepare for the

return of a major conflict. Exercise Orion, a giant drill planned for 2023, will involve the full

range of French military capacity on a scale not tested for decades.

The specter of high-end war is now so widespread when you talk to military analysts

that there's an acronym for this scenario, HEM, which stands for it.

The English translation is a hypothesis of a major engagement.

Sophie Petter is our Paris bureau chief.

And it's really a seismic shift, I would say, for French forces, because if you think back

30 years ago, most of them were involved in overseas operations in peacekeeping.

And over the last decade, it's been a question of counterterrorism or counterinsurgency.

Most of that's either been in Operation Barkan in the Sahel or even a counterterror-terrorist operation called Operation Centenel in France itself.

But last year, the head of the army, General Thierry Berger, presented a strategic vision for 2030,

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