World

Sunday

Phillips O'Brien

Ukraine needs more than tanks

What weapons will Ukraine get next? It’s a crucial question that matters perhaps more than anything else for understanding how the Russo-Ukraine war will end. For the last few months two different systems have received the most attention, systems that Ukraine has asked for almost daily. These are tanks, or MBTs (Main Battle Tanks), the key armoured vehicle of 20th and 21st century land warfare, and ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile Systems), the longest-range ammunition now available for the US-made HIMARS rocket launchers already in Ukraine.  Both are needed for the quickest possible Ukrainian victory in the war, though for now it seems that the first, tanks, are on their way and the

David Abulafia

Why has president Xi got my book about the Mediterranean?

A few days ago, an email arrived from someone I know in China: my book The Great Sea had been spotted on the bookshelves of president Xi when he delivered his beginning of the year address to China and the world. China watchers were expending plenty of energy identifying the other books on his shelves, and came up with 62 titles. The great majority were by Chinese authors, including famous classics: the history of ancient China by Sima Qian and the Full Collection of Tang Poems, not to mention works by Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. Admittedly there is a scattering of translations, including Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy

Friday

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Has Soledar fallen to the Russians?

Moscow this morning hailed the ‘liberation’ of Soledar, a strategic point in the battle for control of the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine. The Wagner Group’s Yevgeny Prigozhin said on Wednesday that his mercenaries – who are spearheading the offensive – were in control of the salt-mining town (or what remains of it). It was denied at the time, but the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) has said it believes Russian forces have taken ‘most, if not all’ of the town. Ukraine insists that the fighting is ongoing and that its soldiers ‘are bravely trying to hold the defence’, but the institute says this probably refers to positions around Soledar and that it now seems

Thursday

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Will Putin’s latest general escalate the war in Ukraine?

So, one granite-faced general has been replaced by another. The announcement that, after just three months in post, General Sergei Surovikin is being succeeded as overall commander of Russia’s war in Ukraine by Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov may sound like appointing a new captain for a hull-breached Titanic. But it is significant in what it says, not just about the war, but Putin’s relationship with his generals. Surovikin becomes one of Gerasimov’s three deputies, in what is being sold not as a demotion but simply a reflection of the need for an ‘increase in the level of leadership’ because of the ‘amplified range of tasks’ and the

Wednesday

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Why Japan has been a post-Brexit ally to Britain

Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida is in London today to meet Rishi Sunak and sign an historic defence agreement which will allow the countries to deploy forces on each other’s soil. The two will also toast the new UK-Japan digital partnership which aims to ‘strengthen cooperation across cyber resilience, online safety and semiconductors’ and discuss trade including the UK’s accession to the CPTPP (Comprehensive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership). This all sounds great, but behind the official theatre, what is the substance of the upgraded relationship? The defence agreement is being trumpeted by the government as ‘the most significant between the two countries in more than a century.’ This references the

The Spectator

Why Britain’s space industry should be celebrated

The attempted launch of a rocket via a Boeing 747 from Spaceport Cornwall – the first such attempt in Europe – was not a giant leap so much as a giant plunge. While the plane took off and landed successfully, the rocket released from beneath its wing at 35,000 feet crashed and burned, taking with it the nine satellites it was supposed to launch into orbit. There is a lesson for the government in what happened at Spaceport Cornwall this week It is easy to imagine Vladimir Putin chortling at the news that Britain has failed to do something the USSR managed 66 years ago. Satellite launches have become routine,

Cardinal George Pell

The Catholic Church must free itself from this ‘toxic nightmare’

Shortly before he died on Tuesday, Cardinal George Pell wrote the following article for The Spectator in which he denounced the Vatican’s plans for its forthcoming ‘Synod on Synodality’ as a ‘toxic nightmare’. The booklet produced by the Synod, to be held in two sessions this year and next year, is ‘one of the most incoherent documents ever sent out from Rome’, says Pell. Not only is it ‘couched in neo-Marxist jargon’, but it is ‘hostile to the apostolic tradition’ and ignores such fundamental Christian tenets as belief in divine judgment, heaven and hell. The Australian-born cardinal, who endured the terrible ordeal of imprisonment in his home country on fake charges of sex abuse

Kenneth Hite

Trigger warning: how it feels to get shot

I got shot in the leg last week. I live in Chicago, in the Hyde Park neighbourhood, which traditionally doesn’t see a lot of shootings. Hyde Park surrounds the University of Chicago and the University Police Department is the third-largest armed force in Illinois. Hyde Park is where Barack Obama lived (about six blocks from me) before he had to take a job out of town. Cook County board president Toni Preckwinkle lives on my street. She controls about half of the patronage for the Chicago political machine, including jobs with the sheriff’s department. I’ve walked all over Hyde Park at all hours for 30 years, un-shot the entire time.

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

The genius of Adam Curtis’s TraumaZone

Topiary is the art of making something be something it wasn’t. This is achieved by subtraction. By clipping away everything about a yew bush that isn’t a swan, the topiarist creates a representation of that bird in living foliage. The topiarist’s swan is wondrous, but spare a thought for the clippings. Formless, meaningless to the human eye, they have meaning of their own. History is topiary. From a superabundance of data, the historian and his reader make themselves a story. The parts the narrative is constructed from stay: the rest, like foliage falling victim to the topiarist’s shears, is discarded. If one Wednesday morning W.E. Gladstone notices that a senior

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Did Biden also illegally hoard top-secret documents?

Remember the tale of Donald Trump and the ‘illegal hoarding’ of the top-secret documents? It was only last summer. On 8 August, the FBI raided the 45th President’s home in Mar-a-Lago to seize back highly classified material. An image of the reclaimed files promptly leaked to the press. Over-excited pundits started talking about Trump’s ‘Al Capone moment’ – the great villain had been caught out for an unsensational crime. Since then, the case has been stuck in the administrative cogs of the Justice Department. Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed Jack Smith, a former war crimes prosecutor, as special counsel for the two most grave investigations into Trump – the documents

Owen Matthews

Wasted energy: Putin’s plan to freeze Europe has failed

The Kremlin propaganda channel RT recently produced a festive video message for its overseas audiences. Somewhere in ‘Europe, Christmas 2021’ a happy family gathers in a cosy, Ikea-furnished house. A young girl cradles her present: an adorable hamster. Fast forward to Christmas 2022: the family huddles, freezing, under a blanket in a room illuminated only by the feeble glow of fairy lights powered by a tiny generator hooked up to the hamster’s exercise wheel. By Christmas 2023 the luckless Europeans, starving and shivering, celebrate with a thin soup made of… you got it. ‘Merry anti-Russian Christmas!’ trolls the final caption. ‘If your media doesn’t tell you where this is all

Charles Lipson

Losing Crimea would condemn Putin

As the fighting in Ukraine slows for the winter, three things stand out. The first is the most obvious: a small, highly motivated country, equipped with advanced weapons and intelligence, is slowly but inexorably defeating what used to be called the world’s second-most powerful military. We need to remind ourselves how stunning that is. The second is how Western political leaders have failed to explain to their citizens why the war matters. Taxpayers are naturally tiring of footing the bill for an unending flow of equipment and ammunition, and they need to be persuaded that their continued support is essential for their own countries’ interests. Popular support is already showing signs of cracking,

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Are we kidding ourselves over Ukraine?

Optimism can be surprisingly hilarious. In my last novel, two spouses agree to quit the planet once they’ve both turned 80, and the book explores a dozen possible outcomes of their pact. No chapter made me chuckle at the keyboard more than ‘Once Upon a Time in Lambeth’ – in which the couple don’t kill themselves but live to 110 in perfect health because they eat their vegetables. Young people flock to their table for advice, as my protagonists grow only wiser and more physically riveting in old age. Meanwhile, modern monetary theory makes everything free. Limitless energy is derived from carbon dioxide. A new portmanteau religion, ‘Jeslam’, eliminates Islamist

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

The truth about Martin Luther King

Why does the United States seem to be falling apart? The ideal that used to bring Americans together seems to have failed in some way. ‘Liberty and justice for all’ is the best summary. Sure, it was always a frail creed, and interpretations of it differed, but still. It semi-worked. The creed failed in a very paradoxical way. It was voiced too well, too purely. Its greatest articulator was Dr Martin Luther King, who is commemorated with a US national holiday celebrated on Monday. (Ronald Reagan signed Martin Luther King Day into law in 1983, in less sectarian times.) The problem, of course, was that Dr King was black. Half

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Has China admitted failure for zero Covid?

Why did China end its zero Covid policy so abruptly? This question has confounded China-watchers and even the Chinese people over the last month. For the last three years, the Chinese government dictated its people’s lives to an extent unseen since the Cultural Revolution. Zero Covid had become part of Xi Jinping’s political legacy. It was touted as proof of socialism’s concern for human life, compared to capitalist indifference. And yet, almost inexplicably, zero Covid ended pretty much overnight at the beginning of December. For the first time ever, the Chinese government appears to have admitted the real reason – zero Covid was failing to control the Omicron variant. In

Andrew Tettenborn

Ron DeSantis is the Republican party’s best hope

Florida governor Ron DeSantis is shaping up as the GOP’s best hope for next year’s US presidential election. Large parts of his popular appeal are his open attack on (now fairly well-established) left-wing infiltration in education and to some extent in commerce, and his expressed intention to make Florida the state ‘where woke goes to die’. Hitherto his success has been limited. But recently there have been signs that he may be learning from his mistakes. His troubles started with a failure to grasp that a direct legal attack on left-wing influence, however electorally popular, was likely to be doomed. However fed up Floridians might be with the spoutings of left-wing professors

Tuesday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Will Mexico help Biden stop illegal immigration?

27 min listen

President Biden is visiting Mexico this week to meet with President Obrador, and Prime Minister Trudeau of Canada. Biden is expected to bring up illegal immigration with Obrador, and hopes that he can offer him some way out of what is becoming a spiralling crisis. But is any help coming? Freddy Gray speaks to Todd Bensman, author of the upcoming book Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Biggest Border Crisis in US History.

James Snell

Is this the real reason Russia is trying to seize Bakhmut from Ukraine?

Bakhmut is not of immense strategic importance. It’s a backwater, empty of almost all civilian life, and largely in ruins. But the city is where Ukraine’s war of self-defence has been at its most intense for months.  The defenders are suffering, under a hail of artillery fire and under constant threat of attack. But the Russians are losing more. Almost daily, it seems, Putin’s forces advance without cover across a moonscape torn with shell-holes. They are cut down in their tens every time. The front line has barely moved in weeks. Russian bodies, uncollected in the cold, litter the surrounding fields.   To Ukrainians and their allies, these suicidal attacks are no longer simply foolish. They

Limor Simhony Philpott

Why does Israel want to patch things up with Russia?

Is Israel cosying up to Russia? When Eli Cohen, Israel’s foreign minister, spoke to his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov last week, it was the first such call between the countries’ foreign ministers since the start of the war in Ukraine. Israel’s ministry of foreign affairs, Cohen said, was planning to establish a new ‘responsible’ policy with regard to the country and ‘talk less’ about the war in public. The announcement of the call caused a frenzy, with speculation that Israel wants to adopt a pro-Russia policy. It prompted a public admonition from senior Republican senator, and ally of Israel’s newly reinaugurated prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Lindsey Graham. Graham tweeted ‘The idea that Israel should speak less about Russia’s criminal invasion of Ukraine is a bit unnerving.’ He continued, calling Lavrov ‘a

Monday

Andrew Downie

Can Lula use the pro-Bolsonaro riots to unite Brazil?

A week is a long time in politics. Just ask Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.  On 1 January this year he was greeted by adoring crowds at Brasilia’s presidential palace after being sworn in for a four-year term. Seven days later that same building had been overrun by far-right insurrectionists intent on overthrowing him. The incredible scenes in Brasilia were almost a carbon copy of the Trump insurrection of 6 January 2021, bar a few key details.  First, the North America mob wanted to prevent Joe Biden taking power. In Brazil, Lula was already in office, having replaced Jair Bolsonaro after winning a narrow election victory in October. Second,