World

Tuesday

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Ed Davey should stick to his silly stunts – not lecture us on Gaza

Ed Davey’s got this Middle East business figured out. The Liberal Democrat leader has tweeted — because, honestly, what else is there to do as Lib Dem leader other than tweet? — his latest insight into the Gaza war: ‘Now the Hamas terrorists behind the October 7 atrocities are trying to erode support for recognition of a Palestinian state by falsely claiming it would be a victory for them. Hamas do not represent the Palestinian people and have no future in Gaza with a two-state solution.’ I know who we can ask about what the Palestinians really think. Let’s ask…the Palestinians That’s nice, Ed. Now, I’m not suggesting you’re a

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Israel’s plan to occupy Gaza is a last resort

Reports last night from Israeli Channel 12 quoting a senior official in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office have confirmed what has long been rumoured, feared, and for some, awaited: the decision has been made to occupy the Gaza Strip. This is not yet formal policy, pending cabinet approval, but the trajectory is now unmistakable. The prelude has ended. The war is entering a new, graver phase. Western commentary will, as usual, rush to treat this as a moral failure of Israeli restraint, or as the inevitable result of hawkish ideology. Yet that interpretation is not only false, it is profoundly dishonest and the opposite of the truth. The occupation of

Monday

Tim Shipman

Vance & Farage’s budding bromance

16 min listen

Nigel Farage hosted a press conference today as part of Reform’s summer crime campaign ‘Britain is lawless’. He unveiled the latest Tory defector: Leicestershire’s Police & Crime Commissioner Rupert Matthews. Amidst all the noise of whether crime in the UK is falling or not, plus the impact of migration on crime, is Reform’s messaging cutting through? Would US Vice President agree with Farage’s message that Britain is lawless? Vance is in the UK, staying in the Cotswolds, as part of his summer holiday. Tim Shipman and Lucy Dunn are joined by James Orr, associate professor at Cambridge University, and a friend of Vance’s to talk us through the dynamics between

Alexander Kolyandr

Putin’s economic alchemy can’t last forever

The Kremlin’s accountants are having a problem: Russia’s state budget, once the engine of spectacular growth, is now flashing red. The mathematics are brutal. Russia’s fiscal deficit has ballooned to 3.7 trillion rubles in June – roughly £34 billion – skating perilously close to this year’s legal limit. As a share of GDP, the deficit threatens to breach the 1.7 per cent ceiling, a prospect that has Valentina Matviyenko, speaker of the Federation Council, preaching the gospel of ‘strict savings’ with all the enthusiasm of a Victorian governess. The transformation of a petro-state into a war economy was supposed to demonstrate Russian resilience The root of Moscow’s monetary malaise lies in

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The West has rewarded Hamas for the torture of Evyatar David

They’re making Jews dig their own graves again. In grim mimicry of their Nazi heroes, who would often force Jews to dig ditches before shooting them into them, Hamas has released a video showing a shockingly emaciated Israeli hostage digging a grave. ‘This is the grave where I think I’m going to be buried,’ says the bag of bones as he feebly scoops up dirt with a spade. It is one of the most chilling images we have seen in this century. The man in the video is 24-year-old Evyatar David. He was abducted from the Nova music festival during Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October 2023. He has been held

Sunday

Iain MacGregor

How did the Enola Gay’s crew live with bombing Hiroshima?

Eighty years on, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima continues to provoke fierce debate, reflection, and deep moral inquiry. How did the thirteen men aboard the Enola Gay – the US aircraft that delivered the bomb that killed at least 150,000 people – live with the knowledge of what they had done? The morning of 6 August 1945 began like any other on the Pacific island of Tinian. That was until the Boeing B-29 Superfortress lifted into the sky. Its destination: Japan. Its payload: ‘Little Boy’, the first atomic bomb ever used in warfare. Piloted by Colonel Paul W. Tibbets Jnr. and manned by a crew of twelve, the mission forever

Friday

Elisabeth Dampier

J.D. Vance is right about Germany’s civilisational suicide

This week, US Vice President J.D. Vance levelled a blistering critique at Europe, accusing it of ‘committing civilisational suicide’, and Germany in particular of bringing about its own demise, saying: ‘If you have a country like Germany, where you have another few million immigrants come in from countries that are totally culturally incompatible with Germany, then it doesn’t matter what I think about Europe… Germany will have killed itself, and I hope they don’t do that, because I love Germany and I want Germany to thrive.’ While some dismissed his remarks as yet another post-Munich Security Conference jab, Vance insisted his concerns for Germany were sincere. And he seems to

David Cohen

New Zealand is undoing Jacinda Ardern’s disastrous energy legacy

The centre-right government of New Zealand’s Prime Minister Christopher Luxon voted this week to overturn the previous Jacinda Ardern-led administration’s Starmeresque prohibition on new offshore oil and gas exploration. The earlier ban, enacted in 2018, was a major part of Ardern’s idealistic plan to shepherd the country of five million into a bright and limitless ‘clean, green and sustainable’ carbon-free future built on renewables rather than fossil fuel. It also threatened to shut out the nation’s lights. Ardern found herself accused of virtue-signalling on a particularly grand scale At the very least, critics warned at the time, it would likely lead to a future of economic instability – all the

Michael Taube

Mark Carney was asking for Trump to impose tariffs

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced on Wednesday that his Liberal government will recognise the state of Palestine at the United Nations in September, following the recent trend set by France and the UK. The decision to recognise Palestine at a time when the bloodthirsty terrorist organisation Hamas is firmly in control is abhorrent, especially when the Hamas-led October 7 attack on Israel is still so fresh in many people’s minds. Democratic countries like Canada shouldn’t be enhancing the status of a murderous outfit that’s the equivalent of pure evil in our world. Carney’s announcement about Palestine was a slap in the face to Trump The Canadian government argues that

Thursday

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Zelensky’s anti-corruption overhaul will not be forgotten quickly

Last week, the Ukrainian parliament voted to destroy two key anti-corruption institutions. Outrage followed, and now lawmakers have been forced to cut short their summer holidays and return to Kyiv to reverse the law. More than a thousand demonstrators shouted ‘Shame!’ as the MPs drove past them to the Verkhovna Rada.  In two rapid back-to-back readings, 331 lawmakers voted to restore the independence of Ukraine’s anti-corruption agency, Nabu, and the office of the anti-corruption prosecutor, Sapo. Zelensky signed it immediately. The reputational damage, though, was irreversible. The circus that followed the vote only deepened public disgust toward the politicians they no longer want to represent them.   For the first time

Edward Howell

Japan’s Shigeru Ishiba is losing power, fast

For the country known as the ‘Land of the Rising Sun’, the sun is only just still shining on the prime ministership of Shigeru Ishiba. When will it set? The recent legislative elections will go down in history for all the wrong reasons, marking the first time in 70 years that Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has lost control of both chambers of the legislature. Ishiba’s crisis of popularity comes at a precarious moment for Japan, as it continues to be engulfed by an unholy trinity of domestic economic woes, threats of tariffs from Washington, and ongoing security challenges across East Asia.  The LDP was already struggling to lead

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Massacres in Syria & the Congo: why aren’t Western elites drawing attention to religious persecution?

28 min listen

After the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, many people voiced fears that the religious minorities in the country could face increased persecution. This could be at the hands of the new government’s supporters, or simply because the new regime can’t protect them. Now those fears appear to have been realised. There is rising sectarian violence against Christians, the Alawites and the Druze (pictured). There are also frequent barbaric attacks on Christians in parts of Africa: more than 40 Christians have just been murdered by Islamists in the Democratic Republic of the Congo while attending church. Fr Benedict Kiely joins Damian Thompson on this episode of Holy Smoke to discuss the background

Henry Donovan

Merz’s Palestinian disaster

Friedrich Merz may have restored Germany’s diplomatic credibility internationally, but his latest foray into Middle Eastern statecraft shows the Chancellor has fundamentally misunderstood both the nature of the Palestinian project and Germany’s own moral obligations. Like Keir Starmer, by threatening to recognise Palestinian statehood if Israel fails to meet certain conditions, Merz has managed the remarkable feat of getting the entire equation backwards – demanding concessions from a democracy under siege while offering rewards to the very terrorists holding German citizens hostage. Unlike other national movements that have eventually embraced pragmatic statehood, Palestinian political culture has consistently defined itself through resistance rather than construction The moral inversion is breathtaking. At

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Israel should make its own statehood claims

Britain intends to follow France, and now Canada, in recognising a Palestinian state in September. I’ve already set out the practical and theoretical problems inherent in such a policy, not least the absence of a functioning Palestinian state to recognise. But we shouldn’t lose sight of another effect of this policy: in recognising a state which claims territory also claimed by Israel, Britain, France and Canada harm Israel’s sovereign interests in territories where Jewish self-government can be traced back three millennia. This is one of the most inflammatory acts possible in statecraft, one which Whitehall has noticeably refrained from in other conflicts. The British governing class is behaving as though

Douglas Murray

How to handle the Wagner problem

There are deep ructions across Europe, as in Britain. All come down to the same thing. The societies in question have decided to take in more people than they could ever absorb or integrate, and have done so at a rate that will ruin these societies financially as well as socially. It’s a little late for the occasional minister to talk about the fabric of the country being under ‘strain’, or the need for greater ‘social cohesion’. These things have been shot for years. What is interesting is not just what a mountain Wagner is for modern Germany, but how they deal with it The problem is that every counter

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Recognition for Palestine, victory for the Lionesses and no name for Corbyn’s party

Home Britain will recognise Palestinian statehood in September, Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, announced, ‘unless the Israeli government takes substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza, reaches a ceasefire, makes clear there will be no annexation in the West Bank, and commits to a long-term peace process that delivers a two-state solution’. He had convened a cabinet meeting to discuss Gaza, although parliament was in recess, a few days after a meeting by telephone with Germany and France. President Emmanuel Macron had said that France would recognise a Palestinian state in September. Some 255 MPs, 147 of them Labour, had signed a letter to Sir Keir calling

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Israel has gone too far

If any other country in the Middle East had behaved as monstrously as Israel has in recent weeks, the jets would be lined up on our runways ready to do a bit of performative bombing. Never mind BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) and diplomatic pressure. I mention this because those of us who support Israel, and have done so largely uncritically since 7 October 2023, need the scales to fall from our eyes a little – for the good of Israel, as well as the good of those starving Palestinians. I have been to Israel many times, as a journalist, as a holidaymaker, as a friend. I accept without demurral

Wednesday

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

Trump’s tariffs are taming China

Stockholm This week, the fate of the global economy could have been decided over a Mongolian barbecue in a Stockholm tourist trap. On Tuesday, just 50 yards from Sweden’s seat of government, Rosenbad – where the US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and the Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng had been wrangling over trade negotiations – the Chinese delegation suddenly exited the talks and headed for lunch near the Mongolian buffet place, where they had eaten the day before. Its windows were covered up and a sign announced it would be closed for three days for a ‘private event’. The Americans stayed behind, making do with salad. China, still the factory

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Starmer’s Palestine position is perverse

Keir Starmer’s declaration that Britain will recognise a Palestinian state unless Israel takes ‘substantive steps’ to end the war in Gaza is, on its face, a symbolic diplomatic gesture. Yet symbols, particularly in international affairs, carry weight. And this one is a blow to Israel, both politically and strategically. The question is not whether this decision is consequential, but how and for whom. If recognition is contingent on Israel achieving a ceasefire, then Hamas has every reason to prolong the conflict Framed as a humanitarian imperative, the British ultimatum appears, on closer inspection, to rest on an unsettling inversion of logic. The precondition for recognition of a Palestinian state is

Tuesday

Tim Shipman

How much pressure is Starmer facing over Gaza?

20 min listen

Ministers have been recalled for a rare cabinet meeting during recess to discuss the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza. As the UN warns of famine and aid agencies are raising concern about widespread starvation, countries are coming under pressure to change their approach and influence Israel. In the UK, the focus is on recognition of a Palestinian state, following Emmanuel Macron’s decision that France will do so in September and after more than 200 cross-party MPs signed a letter endorsing recognition. Political editor Tim Shipman and senior associate fellow at RUSI Michael Stephens join deputy political editor James Heale to discuss the situation, recognition and the UK’s role in the