World

Tuesday

Richard Sakwa

Whisper it, but Putin has a point in Ukraine

Around 100,000 Russian troops are currently massed on the Ukrainian border. Talk of an invasion fills the air. British intelligence claims President Putin is planning to install a Kremlin-friendly leader in Kiev. For the first time in at least a generation, there is the real prospect of war in Europe. It is easy for politicians in the West to talk about ‘Russian aggression’. What else is a massive build-up of troops if not an aggressive posture? But Russia is acting because its leadership feels threatened. From the high towers of the Kremlin, Ukraine looks like an increasingly hostile, American-backed Potemkin state. It was not always this way. In the decade following

Katja Hoyer Katja Hoyer

Germany’s naval chief has paid the price for Berlin’s pro Russia policy

Germany’s navy chief, vice admiral Kay-Achim Schönbach, resigned over the weekend. His crime? Saying something out loud that many German politicians intrinsically believe: that the Russian president Vladimir Putin deserves ‘respect’. Schönbach also made the mistake of suggesting Ukraine would ‘never’ regain the Crimean peninsula from Russia, and calling Western fears about Russia invading Ukraine ‘nonsense’. As Germany’s government scrambled to limit the collateral damage of Schönbach’s words as they went viral on the internet, it was clear he had to go. But for Ukraine, his departure is not enough: Kiev’s ambassador in Berlin, Andriy Melnyk, told the Welt newspaper that the incident ‘left open the question whether we can still trust the Germans politically as we used to.

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Biden’s mask has slipped

It was, in a way, a refreshing moment of mental alacrity from President Joe Biden. Asked if he thought inflation was a ‘political liability’, the Commander-in-Chief, the man who has apparently brought dignity back to the Oval Office, replied: ‘No. It’s a great asset. More inflation. What a stupid son of a bitch.’ In his sarcasm — we hope it was that; we can’t be 100 per cent — the President at least acknowledged that inflation was a genuine worry. His administration had spent months dismissing the issue as merely a ‘transient’ concern. All things are transient, I suppose. Take Joe Biden’s much-lauded decency; that quality which apparently most distinguished

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Cheer up Boris, the French still like you

If, as many are predicting, the wheels are about to come off Boris Johnson’s premiership, few world leaders will be as indifferent as Emmanuel Macron. He and the PM have rarely seen eye to eye.  It may very well have been more than just a coincidence that Johnson yesterday declared Britain was ‘open for business’ just as France’s full vaccine pass came into force. The contrast is clear, as the Prime Minister surely intended. While Britain — or at least, England — is emerging from the Covid crisis, France, has in place some of the most stringent restrictions in the West. Masks remain mandatory outdoors and adults without three jabs to their

Monday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Politics and language: decoding the CCP

59 min listen

All political parties have weaknesses for jargon and buzzwords, and the Chinese Communist Party more than most. It’s why Party documents – whether they be speeches, Resolutions or reports – can be hard going. Sentences like the following (from the Resolution adopted at the Sixth Plenum) abound: All Party members should uphold historical materialism and adopt a rational outlook on the Party’s history….We need to strengthen our consciousness of the need to maintain political integrity, think in big-picture terms, follow the leadership core, and keep in alignment with the central Party leadership. In other words, full of platitudes and dense Marxist terminology. So what is, then, the purpose of official

Grayson Quay

Who will win the battle for ‘based’?

Earlier this week, a pair of right-libertarian journalists announced the launch of their new site, BASEDPolitics. All hell promptly broke loose on right-wing Twitter. In the first editorial for their new site, co-founders Brad Polumbo and Hannah Cox define ‘based’ as ‘upfront, on point, or rooted in true principles.’ That fits pretty well with my understanding of the term, but it leaves something out. That ‘something’ accounts for the pushback they received from the post-liberal, national conservative crowd. According to them, libertarians like Polumbo and Cox are nothing more than Koch-funded shills who fight for tax cuts and weaker antitrust laws while drag queens read to our children. They are not

Sunday

Ian Williams Ian Williams

How China spies on the West

In December last year Oxford University students were offered £15,000 in prize money if they could solve challenges relating to the surveillance and tracking of devices and their users. ‘Huawei welcomes a selection of top-of-the-class students to their 2021 University Challenge’, the invitations read. The company added that the technology would be used for ‘business intelligence’ and ‘security services’. The invitation to the ‘hackathon’, as Huawei described it, was aimed at data science students, and was relayed by Oxford’s careers service just a few weeks before Christmas. When one student questioned whether it was appropriate for the careers service to be passing this on when Huawei’s technology was implicated in

William Nattrass William Nattrass

Eastern Europe’s toxic relationship with Russia has left the EU divided

Joe Biden’s fatalistic statement this week that suggested a ‘minor incursion’ by Russia into Ukraine might be tolerated by the United States was only the latest indictment of the West’s failings when it comes to holding off Vladimir Putin. Less remarked on was Emmanuel Macron’s futile call in the European Parliament the same day for Europeans to ‘collectively make our own demands and put ourselves in a position to enforce them.’ The French President’s vision for the EU as a ‘power of the future’ hinges on member states holding a common position when it comes to international threats. But reports this week about the EU’s conflicted attitudes towards Russia are

Saturday

Jane Stannus

The mystery of Canada’s indigenous mass graves

When a young anthropologist claimed in late May 2021 that she had discovered 215 unmarked graves near the Kamloops Residential School in British Columbia, a wave of horror swept across Canada. Local First Nations chief Roseanne Casimir said that her community had ‘knowledge’ that indigenous children who had died at the school were secretly buried in the nearby orchard. In the late 1990s a child’s rib was apparently found by a tourist in the area, and a tooth in a subsequent dig in the early 2000s. The anthropologist, Sarah Beaulieu, scanned the orchard using ground-penetrating radar. She found 215 areas which showed soil disturbance that could be indicative of graves

Ian Acheson Ian Acheson

How did the security services fail to catch the Texas synagogue terrorist?

Just how many databases was Malik Faisal Akram on? It turns out that the 44-year-old Briton – who was shot dead by an FBI Hostage Rescue Team last week as he held four people at gunpoint in a Texas synagogue – was no stranger to Britain’s creaking protective services. The US is now asking the UK to explain how Akram was able to leave our shores and enter the country two weeks ago to carry out an anti-Semitic terrorist attack without any flags being raised. The information that is slowly emerging is not encouraging. MI5 investigated Akram in 2020 as a possible terrorist and closed his case after a month.

Kit Wilson

Will our future lives be like a video game?

A few years ago, the software company Owlchemy Labs released a computer game called Job Simulator. Its premise was simple. Players find themselves in a future world, roughly 30 years from now, in which super-efficient robots have snaffled up all the jobs. No longer needed for work, humans entertain themselves instead by donning virtual reality headsets and reenacting ‘the glory days’ — simulating what it was once like to be an office clerk, chef, or shopkeeper. The gameplay, therefore, consists entirely of, well, yeah… carrying out endless mundane tasks: virtual photocopying, virtual cooking, virtual newspaper sales. Job Simulator is pretty tongue-in-cheek, crammed full of dry, self-referential jokes. In the game,

Friday

Dalibor Rohac

Europe can’t expect America to ride to its rescue against Putin

Joe Biden received a lot of flak for suggesting that Nato might be divided about what to do next if Vladimir Putin limits Russia’s aggression against Ukraine to a ‘minor incursion’. While clumsy and ill-advised, the comments were what Americans call a ‘Kingsley Gaffe’ – a situation when a politician accidentally tells the truth. After all, Nato does have a problem, and has had it for a while. Back in 2019, Emmanuel Macron raised eyebrows for claiming that Nato was becoming brain dead due to waning American interest in Europe. The first year of Biden’s mandate as president showcased a host of policy decisions that revealed that Europe was an afterthought for

Wolfgang Münchau Wolfgang Münchau

Blair is right: Boris doesn’t have a plan for Britain

What can Boris Johnson and the Tories learn from Tony Blair? While Labour’s former leader remains deeply unpopular – and indeed ultimately fell over a grave misjudgement – he was the UK’s last successful prime minister. Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Theresa May and, now, Boris Johnson exist in his shadow. The PM would be wise then to look to Blair’s rise to power – and his strategic approach to government – to learn some lessons. In a speech yesterday, Blair warned that:  Margaret Thatcher was the last Tory leader with an actual agenda ‘There is a gaping hole in the governing of Britain where new ideas should be.’ Blair is right. While Partygate continues to dominate the

Joanna Rossiter Joanna Rossiter

Putin won’t be fazed by Britain’s show of military support to Ukraine

Can the British army afford to take on Russia? That’s the burning question that has been left after Defence Secretary Ben Wallace announced this week – to surprisingly little fanfare – that the UK is sending 30 elite troops and 2,000 anti tank weapons to the Ukraine. Wallace clearly intended to send a message to Moscow on where Britain’s allegiance lies, but such political posturing can only be beneficial if it’s backed up by sustained support in the long term – something the British army is in no place to do. As Britain seeks to reduce the size of its army to just 72,500 regular soldiers, Russia has amassed over 106,000

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

The fate of the French Socialists is a warning for Boris Johnson

The defection of Christian Wakeford to Labour has put a spring in the step of the left-wing party. Apparently it marks the start of their revival. Give it two years and Keir Starmer will be waving from the steps of Number 10. That’s one scenario. A more likely one is that the good people of Bury South will unseat Wakeford at the next general election as Labour suffer another humiliating defeat. What so many in the Westminster bubble don’t get is that for the average voter in Bury, Basildon or Blyth Valley, ‘partygate’ is not top of their grievances with Boris Johnson. It’s often immigration, tax rises and the nonsense

Thursday

Matthew Lynn

Has Macron shot France’s energy industry in the foot?

Gas prices are soaring. Europe could be about to witness electricity shortages. Power companies are collapsing by the day, and, on top of all that, the government is set to phase out traditional energy to meet its net zero target.  So might think that a cable to ship in cheap, greener electricity from the other side of the Channel is something of a knight in shining armour. Yet the government blocked the proposal today, and it was absolutely right to do so. Britain may need all the electricity it can get its hands on right now — but the last thing it should do is increase its dependence on Macron and Putin. Britain

John Jenkins

Iran’s hidden hand in the Houthi drone strike on Saudi Arabia

Over the past six years, Saudi Arabia and its allies have – not always accurately – dropped western-built munitions worth billions of pounds on both military and civilian targets in Yemen. On Monday, the Houthis, the Zaidi militia they are fighting, hit back. The Houthis claimed to have struck a number of targets in the UAE – including a petroleum storage facility and Abu Dhabi airport – with a mix of drones and missiles, all probably Iranian-built and therefore cheap as chips. In a stroke of nominative indeterminism, the Saudi-led campaign was initially called ‘Storm of Decisiveness’. The Houthis rather more soberly named their latest attack ‘Hurricane of Yemen’. It’s hard

Stephen L. Miller

Joe Biden will never change

During a rare press conference on Wednesday, which lasted well over an hour, President Joe Biden told the press corps that he ‘didn’t believe the polls’, said he’d ‘over-performed’ in his first year, accomplishing more than any president in history in his first year, scolded RealClearPolitics reporter Philip Wegmann and blamed the country for somehow misunderstanding what he meant when he labelled his political opponents as allies of Bull Connor, who opposed the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Biden also noted that without his voting legislation, the 2022 and 2024 elections would be rigged and not legitimate. The presser came at a time when a phenomenon is occurring in

Wolfgang Münchau Wolfgang Münchau

In the pipeline: would Germany side with Russia in a conflict?

If Russia were to invade Ukraine, would Germany side with the Russians? For most of our post-war history, that would have been an absurd question, but things are changing fast in Europe. In the wake of recent events, it would not be irrational for Vladimir Putin to bet that if push came to shove, he could count on German neutrality — or even support. The Ukraine crisis continues apace, with up to 100,000 Russian troops now gathered near its border. The obvious question is: what would happen if Putin were to invade? It would split the EU, exposing its energy dependence on Russia, ruin what is left of transatlantic relations

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Joe Biden’s Civil War re-enactment

We can’t blame American progressives for yearning to relive the civil rights movement. Those were heady days. Opposition to segregation — real ‘structural racism’ — placed you conspicuously on the proverbial right side of history. Joining the cause was like shooting up moral heroin. So maybe it’s predictable that when talking up his two voting rights bills in Atlanta last week, Joe Biden evoked the 1963 bombing of a black church in Alabama and MLK’s storied march in Selma two years later. Yet it’s one thing to wax nostalgic, quite another to insist that it’s still 1965 — much less 1865. Biden’s speech recalled a Civil War re-enactment, with polyester