America

Hours after his first bilateral meeting with Donald Trump earlier this week, the South Korean President Lee Jae-myung admitted that he feared that his one-to-one would become a ‘Zelensky moment’. Although the reality was far from the case, it made for somewhat vomit-inducing listening. As Lee showered Trump with praise for his handling of North Korea during his first term, Trump’s ego ballooned one sentence at a time. Monday’s episode was a clear example of how Trump likes diplomacy to be done, but for all Trump and Lee’s calls for talks with Kim Jong-un, both leaders will face the obstacle of North Korea’s recent affirmations of its lack of interest

The Duke of Wellington, assessing newly arrived British soldiers during the Peninsular War, is supposed to have said, ‘I don’t know what effect these men will have on the enemy, but by God, they terrify me.’ Having watched Donald Trump greet Vladimir Putin with a red carpet in Alaska a week ago, then direct his secretary of defense Pete Hegseth to sack another general and two admirals, I’m not certain that the US President even knows who the enemy in this case is. Leading the most recent casualties was Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse, an experienced intelligence officer serving as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. His mortal sin was obvious:

When dealing with rogue states, being pessimistic often means being realistic. The much-anticipated summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin last week allowed the Russian leader to relish the bright Alaskan lights of summitry with Trump, buy the precious commodity of time, all while maintaining his ambition to defeat Ukraine. Amidst this week’s numerous meetings between Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a resolution to the Ukraine war remains elusive. But we must not forget that hours before Trump and Putin met in Alaska, another high-level meeting took place in Pyongyang between Kim Jong-un and the Chairman of Russia’s state Duma. It was a stark reminder that ending the Ukraine war on

When President Trump unveils a massive investment in the microchip manufacturer Intel on behalf of the American people it will no doubt be accompanied by all the usual hyperbole. No doubt we will hear all about how it will be the ‘deal of the century’, delivered personally by the ‘investor in chief’. But hold on. Sure, we can understand why the President wants to help one of the US’s most strategic companies. But the blunt truth is that Intel is well past its peak – and it will prove to be a terrible deal.  It will be one of the largest industrial investments the White House has ever made. According

Every year the US State Department is required to produce a report on the human rights situation in every country in the world. The report card for the UK came out yesterday. While otherwise fairly anodyne, the US was painfully scathing about our record on free speech. Unsurprisingly, the State Department was unhappy about the Online Safety Act’s long-arm provisions affecting US websites, our abortion protest laws and our strict contempt rules (which last year forced the New Yorker to take the drastic step of geoblocking an important and informative article about the Lucy Letby case). It was particularly caustic about the fallout from Southport, where it did not mince its words. It stated,