World

Wednesday

John Keiger John Keiger

Even the Olympics can’t unite France

Writing of the state of France in the twilight of the fateful Second Empire, the left-wing journalist Henri Rochefort observed: ‘France contains 36 million subjects, not including the subjects of discontent.’ Has anything changed since 1868? From the European to the legislative elections, France is a profoundly divided nation. At present and probably until mid-August, she has a caretaker government because the National Assembly is irremediably split into three camps. One might have thought that the Paris Olympic Games could have united the country. Instead, it has deepened division. France was desperate to be enthralled, and above all, distracted by the Games France was desperate to be enthralled, and above all,

Jake Wallis Simons Jake Wallis Simons

The far-right threat to Israel’s democracy is growing

Israel is the only meaningful democracy in the Middle East. This is as true today as it was last week. But the shameful scenes of far-right violence in response to the arrest of a group of soldiers is a gift to those who wish to undo it. On Monday, dozens of hardline activists tried to disrupt the arrest of nine reservists detained as part of an investigation into ‘suspected substantial abuse of a Palestinian detainee’. They were accompanied by far-right politicians, who barged into an army base and occupied it for several hours. A firebrand like Ben-Gvir is clearly the last thing Israel needs at a time like this When

Monica Porter

What would Reagan make of Trump?

If the Donald Trump-JD Vance ticket is successful in November and the pair head to the White House, there is a former US president who would surely turn in his grave: Ronald Reagan. While Reagan saw the importance of American involvement in Europe, Trump and his running mate Vance seem in favour of adopting a more hands-off attitude. It’s an approach that could unpick Reagan’s hard-fought legacy in eastern Europe. What a different world it was back in the Eighties when Reagan was US president and the epitome of Western power and influence. In June 1987, he stood before the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin and gave a historic speech,

Tuesday

Jonathan Spyer

Can Israel hold back from all-out war with Hezbollah?

On 27 July, 12 children from the Druze community of the Golan Heights were slaughtered when an Iranian Falaq 1 missile hit a soccer field in the town of Majdal Shams. The office of Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, issued a terse statement on the same day vowing that the country would ‘not allow the murderous attack to simply pass on by, and that Hezbollah will pay a heavy price for this that it has not paid until this point’. This incident was the single bloodiest attack on an Israeli target since the massacres of 7 October. It represented a severe escalation in the conflict which has been under way

Matthew Lynn

Why has Donald Trump embraced crypto?

No one ever accused Donald Trump of ideological consistency. And yet, even by the standards of a man who often seems capable of switching positions several times in the same speech, and sometimes in the same sentence, it is quite a turnaround. As president he condemned Bitcoin and other crypto currencies ‘a scam against the dollar’. And yet, during this campaign he has turned into an enthusiastic convert, promising to govern as a Bitcoin President if he retakes the White House in November. That raises an intriguing question. Could the Crypto Bros turn Trump into a small state libertarian?  Trump’s embrace of cryptocurrencies will shift him towards small-state liberalism Speaking

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

The truth about Kamalamania

In a society that worships the self, identity politics is a very powerful force. We see this now in Kamalamania – the dizzying speed with which the vice-president and presumptive Democratic nominee has been turned, through mass acclamation, from national embarrassment to Democratic saviour.  Will Kamalamania last until the election is over? The fact that Harris’s transfiguration doesn’t make much sense is sort of the point – the more improbable it seems the better. We are memetic creatures, especially in the digital age, and the meme of the moment is that Harris has magically invigorated the Democratic base and turned the 2024 US presidential election around in their party’s favour. It’s

Jake Wallis Simons Jake Wallis Simons

Why should Israel tolerate Hezbollah’s deadly rocket attacks?

The slaughter of a dozen child footballers on Sunday came as a startling sign that the situation in northern Israel cannot continue. Since October 7, thousands of Hezbollah rockets have rained down on the Jewish state, claiming many lives and causing 70,000 people to flee their homes. There comes a point where the only option is war. According to UN Resolution 1701, issued in 2006, Hezbollah forces must not stray south of the Litani river, about 18 miles from the Israeli border. They have violated that ruling for years, with no real punishment from the UN or anybody else. On a trip to the region before October 7, I saw

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

The filthy Seine is a fitting symbol of Macron’s chaotic Olympics

The good news for France is that their athletes have been winning some medals in the Paris Olympics. The bad news, well, that just keeps coming for the organisers and for Emmanuel Macron, who had wanted to use the Games to showcase his country. The latest debacle is the postponement of the men’s triathlon event this morning because the water in the River Seine is too filthy. Organisers can hardly say they weren’t warned. Things clearly aren’t quite working out as Macron hoped. First there was the attack on the country’s rail network last Friday; the president had hoped the day would be all about the splendour of the Opening

Joseph Dinnage

How to solve Europe’s anti-tourist backlash

In the town of Sintra, a suburb of Lisbon, some strongly-worded graffiti greets travellers like me. It reads: ‘F**k you tourist scum’. Locals have mounted a campaign fighting against the scourge of ‘mass tourism’. According to residents’ group QSintra, ‘Enough is enough!’ The time has apparently come for the state to intervene and bring about: ‘A revitalisation of the community and quality of life for residents; greater care and discretion in urban planning and management; quality tourism, not quantity’. Alienating millions of travellers who boost your prosperity each year seems like economic seppuku This kind of sentiment isn’t only amusing fodder for a photo-op, or limited to Portugal; it’s part

Monday

Catherine Ellis

Maduro’s ‘win’ spells despair for Venezuela

It was meant to be a crushing defeat ending 25 years of socialist rule, and the presidency of a man many see as largely responsible for Venezuela’s economic woes, a humanitarian crisis and rampant corruption. But for many Venezuelans, the only thing crushed following Sunday’s presidential election was hope. Many of those who are desperate for change say they’ll take to the streets A few hours after polls closed – and amid complaints of some observers monitoring the process being thrown out of polling stations or prevented from entering – the country’s National Electoral Council announced Nicolás Maduro as the winner with 51 per cent of the vote; in second

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Was the far left to blame for France’s Olympic railway chaos?

Trains are again running normally in France today after engineers worked over the weekend to repair the damage caused by Friday’s coordinated attack on the network. Also working overtime are fifty specialists from the national crime unit, who have pored over the three sites where saboteurs struck. ‘Even though the fires melted hundreds of cables, at the risk of destroying precious clues, samples are currently being examined in the Gendarmerie laboratories,’ a police source said. A bullish Gérald Darmanin, the Minister of the Interior, declared over the weekend that the investigation to identify the culprits was progressing well and ‘we will know fairly quickly who is responsible’. The French far

Niko Vorobyov

Trump’s crackdown on Mexico’s narco-cartels won’t work

Donald Trump has said he would not rule out military action against Mexico’s narco-cartels which he blames for the opioid crisis killing astronomical numbers of Americans. ‘Mexico’s gonna have to straighten it out really fast, or the answer is absolutely. They’re killing 300,000 people a year with fentanyl coming in,’ he told Fox News host. The narcos are invisible, deeply embedded within their communities This isn’t the first time Trump has talked tough when it comes to drugs. The former and possible future president has mulled deploying commando teams to take out the narco godfathers bin Laden-style. He has also weighed up putting Mexico under naval embargo.  Trump also isn’t the the only Republican to

Sunday

Robert Tombs

The Olympics can’t mask Macron’s troubles

Politics and sport have always been cynical and self-interested bedfellows. Rulers since the Caesars have been eager to spend vast sums of taxpayers’ money on circuses to distract the plebs. In more recent times, Louis XIV (a ghostly presence in Friday’s Paris Olympics ceremony) made self-glorification through spectacle a pillar of his reign. Emmanuel Macron made no secret of his desire to follow in the Sun King’s footsteps. Friday night was to be his apotheosis. It would have been absurdly optimistic to think this could rebuild his popularity at home, but he must have relished cutting a great global figure.  Emmanuel Macron made no secret of his desire to follow in the Sun King’s footsteps

Saturday

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Damian Thompson, Paola Romero, Stuart Jeffries, Ysenda Maxtone Graham, and Nicholas Farrell

35 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Damian Thompson argues that Papal succession plotting is a case of life mirroring art (1:26); Paola Romero reports on Venezuela’s mix of Evita and Thatcher, Maria Corina Machado, and her chances of bringing down Nicolas Maduro (11:39); reviewing Richard Overy’s book ‘Why war?’, Stuart Jeffries reflects that war has as long a future as it has a past (17:38); Ysenda Maxtone Graham provides her notes on party bags (24:30); and, Nicholas Farrell ponders on the challenges of familial split-loyalties when watching the football in Italy (27:25).  Presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Friday

Niko Vorobyov

Could Kamala Harris end the war on weed?

Kamala Harris is the Democrats’ new hope for keeping Agent Orange out of the Oval Office. It’s probably for the best. Many younger, more progressive voters saw president Joe Biden as a dinosaur, a relic of a bygone era. Among other things, Biden was an old-school drug warrior who co-wrote the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which made the penalty for handling crack rocks a hundred times more severe than powder cocaine; the 1994 Clinton Crime Bill, which massively expanded the prison-industrial complex; and, in 2002, he proposed the Reducing Americans’ Vulnerability to Ecstasy (RAVE) Act, which would have held party organisers liable for drugs consumed on their premises (this had the

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

France descends into chaos on the Olympics’ opening day

France’s Olympics could not have got off to a worse start. Hundreds of thousands of train passengers have been left stranded after the country’s high-speed rail lines were targeted by a series of suspicious fires. Rail company SNCF says it’s a ‘massive attack aimed at paralysing the network’, with security services suggesting this morning that the far left may have been behind the attack. Whoever is to blame, one thing is clear: France’s president Emmanuel Macron will be furious. The world’s eyes are on Paris tonight as the opening ceremony gets underway. Macron wanted them to see France at its best; instead, they will see a country in chaos. The

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Macron’s Olympic delusion

All the world’s a stage and the Olympic Games in Paris is the greatest stage of all for the comedian president. Emmanuel Macron declared a political truce amidst the political nervous breakdown of France, so that his show could go on. The opening ceremony spectacle last night culminated in Macron declaring the Games open and the lighting of the Olympic cauldron. The president ordered Thomas Jolly, his personally selected director, to outdo London 2012. Off stage, France is in crisis. France doesn’t have a real government. There’s no calculus showing how one might even be possible in a fractured new National Assembly of more than a dozen factions who loathe each other. The left and

Thursday

Eliot Wilson

Britain’s defence declaration with Germany is pure waffle

The new cabinet cannot be accused of laziness. John Healey, secretary of state for defence, has just been on a 48-hour tour of France, Germany, Poland and Estonia, all of them important military allies in different ways, trumpeting the new government’s ‘Nato-first’ defence policy. The highlight of Healey’s breakneck trip was his meeting with the German defence minister, Boris Pistorius. The two men have much in common: born 30 days apart in 1960, they worked as political advisers before achieving elected office. Both are solid, reliable, unshowy centrists within their parties. And on Wednesday, these two workhorses agreed a joint declaration on enhanced defence co-operation between the United Kingdom and Germany. It

Charles Lipson

Joe Biden delivers his own eulogy

Joe Biden delivered a eulogy for his presidency and his political career from the Oval Office Wednesday evening. It was a sad, sluggish ending to a life in politics, decades in the Senate, two terms as vice president, and finally a single term as president.   President Biden needed to accomplish three things in the speech: explain why he decided to withdraw from the race after months of insisting he would stay in and after receiving 14 million primary votes; convince the country that he is still fit to serve the remaining months of his term; and promote the candidacy of his replacement on the Democratic ticket, Kamala Harris. Polls show most Americans are genuinely

Arieh Kovler

Netanyahu’s speech to Congress won’t achieve much

Nearly ten months after Israel’s worst day, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made history far away in Washington DC when he became the first world leader to address Congress four times. Even Winston Churchill only managed three. The last time Netanyahu spoke to Congress was in March 2015, as the Obama administration was finalising the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, better known as the ‘Iran Deal’. Netanyahu arranged the session with House Speaker John Boehner against Obama’s wishes, and made a charged and politicised speech urging Congress to reject the deal. The speech was seen as colluding with the Republicans to meddle in US domestic politics, and the damage it caused