World

Saturday

Alexander Baker

Sharing our nukes with Germany would be madness

‘Utter and complete poppycock’: that was Viscount Montgomery of Alamein’s verdict on an US proposal in the 1960s for a multilateral nuclear force crewed by international Nato personnel. Famed for defeating the Nazis in North Africa, Monty didn’t mince his words about that plan. There’s little doubt what he’d make of the quiet resurgence of multilateral nuclear thinking. Defence chiefs in Britain – including a former chief of defence staff and Nato secretary general – have been urging the government to consider sharing Britain’s nuclear arsenal with Germany, which has none of its own. This would, the officials argue, help to counter the threat that Russia poses to European security

Friday

Lynne O’Donnell

Pakistan has lost control of the Taliban monster

The futile peace talks taking place between Pakistan and the Taliban over cross-border terrorist attacks have produced at least one revelation: Islamabad has become the Dr Frankenstein of the region. For decades, Pakistan’s generals believed they could manipulate Islamist militants and use them as instruments of their foreign policy. They thought it would be simple to create pliant proxies for ‘strategic depth’ in Afghanistan and leverage against India. Now the Taliban – battle-hardened, emboldened by victory and appeased by super powers – appear to be dictating the terms. The monster has turned on its master. Islamabad, long the sponsor and protector of the Taliban, now finds itself negotiating from a

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Who will save Ukrainian troops in Pokrovsk?

What matters more – land or the lives of soldiers? For each side fighting in Ukraine, the answer is different. For Vladimir Putin, every metre of captured Ukrainian soil is worth the lives of tens of thousands of Russians. For Kyiv, the priority is to stop the invaders while keeping casualties to a minimum. Ukraine’s military command has not always managed to hold that balance, at times allowing its troops to be encircled and slaughtered rather than ordering a timely retreat. Today, that same choice between territories and lives is being made in Pokrovsk. The battle for this fortress city in the Donetsk region has raged for nearly two years,

Harry Halem

The luck of the Irish is finally running out

For the past twenty years, Ireland has been Europe’s improbable overachiever. A small island nation on the fringe of Europe managed to turn EU membership, American corporate investment and allegedly shrewd strategic diplomacy into an economic success story. While the Celtic Tiger whimpered following the 2008 crash, it leapt back into action with remarkable agility, creating a low-tax, free-market economy. Dublin became the unlikely bridge for American tech and pharmaceutical giants to meet the European market, a centre of financial services and an agile diplomatic operator. As the US counts costs, not cousins, Ireland’s mix of moral posturing and strategic freeloading will wear ever thinner Throughout the Biden years, Ireland

Thursday

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Brigitte Macron has lost France’s sympathy

Ten people have been on trial this week in Paris, accused of transphobic cyberbullying against Brigitte Macron. France’s first lady, the wife of Emmanuel Macron, pressed charges after a claim that she was in fact a man went global. Some of those in the dock have apologised for spreading the allegations online but others have said that it’s just a bit of harmless fun and that in a free country one should be able to say what one likes. This argument was dismissed by Brigitte Macron’s lawyer, Jean Ennochi, who said: ‘They all talk to you about freedom of expression, defamation, they completely deny cyberbullying [and] mob harassment.’ Prosecutors have

Arnout Nuijt

The Dutch elections are still a victory for the right

Early coverage of the Dutch elections has inevitably focused on Geert Wilders – still the bogeyman of the country’s political establishment. Wilders lost seats and saw some of his support drift towards other parties on the right and to the liberal centre of Democrats 66 (D66). His Freedom party and D66 are leading in the polls, with both set to take 26 seats. Yet the real story lies elsewhere: in the spectacular downfall of former EU Commissioner Frans Timmermans, whose brief and ill-fated return to Dutch politics as leader of the Labour party has ended in a shattering defeat. Timmermans was as divisive a figure to the Dutch right as Wilders is

Ian Williams Ian Williams

Trump and Xi’s South Korean meeting changed little

Donald Trump says his meeting with Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the APEC summit in South Korea today was ‘amazing’ and that, on a scale of one to 10, it merited a 12. Which means that on a scale for scepticism, it probably deserves a 13. Its biggest achievement appears to have been to at least put the trade war between the world’s two biggest economies on hold, though stock markets, excitable all week as the summit approached, opened flat this morning. Fundamental issues remain unchanged, the momentum towards economic separation will continue, possibly accelerating during the breathing space provided by an extended truce that is unlikely to last.

Senay Boztas

Have the Netherlands rejected Geert Wilders?

With the most dramatic result in the history of Dutch elections, the liberal democratic D66 appears to have inched ahead of populist Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom, winning an election for the first time. On Thursday morning, both parties were projected at 26 seats out of the 150-seat chamber, neck-and-neck but with a 2,000-vote lead for D66. Under its dynamic 38-year-old leader – and former junior athlete – Rob Jetten, the progressive party made a last-minute sprint in the final week of the campaign, when a third of Dutch voters make up their minds. It has almost tripled its current nine seats and scored the best result in

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Why is Putin obsessed with nuclear ‘wonder weapons’?

I don’t think it’s accurate or helpful to think of Vladimir Putin as some Bond villain figure – but he certainly does make it harder to hold this line sometimes. In particular, his enthusiasm for ‘wonder weapons’ – often of questionable strategic value – does suggest a certain grandiose vanity. Some have genuine military utility, but others seem more useful in psychological than actual warfare. Last week, the Russians announced a successful test of the 9M730 Burevestnik (‘Storm Petrel’), a nuclear-armed and -powered cruise missile. Its reactor allows it to travel further than any regular cruise missile, manoeuvring at altitudes as low as 50 metres. This would mean that it

The Spectator

Mystic Milei proves ‘austerity’ needn’t be a dirty word

Javier Milei’s election in 2023 was a repudiation of decades of Peronist turmoil, corruption and inflation. Milei offered shock therapy, delivered with an Austin Powers haircut and chainsaws. This is a man who had worked as a tantric sex coach and claims to speak not just with animals but also with God himself. Eyebrows were raised. Could such a strange man, one who seems to embrace the new occultism outlined in our cover piece, deliver his promised reconstruction of Argentina? Or would voters soon grow tired of the state-slashing mystic? Yet this former frontman of a Rolling Stones tribute band has proved his sceptics wrong. He took office with inflation

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

How the occult captured the modern mind

The British science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, proposed a ‘law of science’ in 1968: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ Clarke’s proposition had a quality of rightness, of stating the obvious with sparkling clarity, that propelled it into dictionaries of quotations. The timing was perfect: Concorde would soon be flying over rock festivals packed with hippies obsessed with ‘magick’. Naturally Clarke’s readers understood the difference between aerodynamics and sky gods. But African tribesmen gawping at an early aeroplane, or Pacific Islanders watching an atomic explosion, could only conclude that they were witnessing a supernatural event: for them, a scientific explanation was literally

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Hurricane hits Jamaica, Plaid reigns in Caerphilly and sex offender gets £500 to leave Britain

Home An Iranian man who arrived on a small boat and was deported to France on 19 September under the one in, one out scheme returned to England on another small boat. Hadush Kebatu, the migrant whose arrest for sexual assault sparked weeks of protests outside the Bell hotel in Epping where he was living, was freed by mistake from Chelmsford prison; he was arrested two days later and given £500 to be deported to Ethiopia. The Home Office ‘squandered’ billions on a ‘failed, chaotic and expensive’ system of asylum accommodation, a Commons home affairs committee report found. Some 900 of the 32,000 asylum-seekers in hotels might be rehoused in

Daniel McCarthy

Trump should beware of backing regime change in Venezuela

Few Americans find much to celebrate in the Iraq War or the intervention in Libya. Regimes were successfully changed, but what came after Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi was civil war, regional instability and mass migration that exported many of those nations’ troubles to their neighbours. Now the Donald Trump administration wants to do to Venezuela’s despot, Nicolas Maduro, what George W. Bush did to Saddam and Barack Obama did to Gaddafi. But that will also do to the Americas, including the United States, what the war on terror did to the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. The chaos and population flows that regime change sets off are a

Wednesday

James Tidmarsh

Should mocking Brigitte Macron be a crime?

Ten people have gone on trial in Paris accused of harassing France’s First Lady, Brigitte Macron, online. The defendants, eight men and two women aged between 41 and 60, are charged with ‘moral harassment by electronic means’ and mocking a false claim that she was born a man by the name of Jean-Michel Trogneux. Prosecutors say their posts, many of which mocked her marriage to the President and repeated the rumour about her gender, amounted to targeted abuse. In closing, prosecutors requested suspended sentences. The defendants deny wrongdoing. The British expect their public figures to endure ridicule, whereas the French state tends to police it The case stems from a complaint

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Zarah Sultana’s pompous, luxury beliefs about Ukraine

Zarah Sultana loves to pose as a champion of the working class, seeing the world through the lens of class struggle. Even, it seems, the war in Ukraine. In her latest interview, she calls Nato ‘an imperialist war machine’ and advocates for putting all our effort into ending the war, rather than making weapons, thereby giving money to those who profit from conflict. ‘Putin is a dictator, a gangster,’ she says, but ‘Zelensky isn’t a friend of the working class either’. She met Ukrainians and Russians in Paris, she adds, who explained this to her. Sultana embodies the kind of British leftist who would do anything for the world’s working

Jake Wallis Simons Jake Wallis Simons

What is Hamas doing at a five-star hotel in Cairo?

Imagine the horror of discovering that you have been rubbing shoulders with terrorists. No, I’m not talking about those gullible souls who join the Gaza marches in London, but about the British airline crew who had an unfortunate brush with Hamas at a five-star Marriott hotel in Cairo. Full marks to the Daily Mail, whose veteran photographer Mark Large snapped several of the 154 jihadis freed by Israel as they lived it up at the inexplicably named Renaissance Cairo Mirage City. What’s a terrorist to do? You recruit suicide bombers, oversee a bus bombing or murder a police officer, get banged up, luck out with early release as part of an

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Is Japan’s new PM the Thatcher to Trump’s Reagan?

‘My wonderful ally and friend’ is how Japan’s brand new, and first female, prime minister Sanae Takaichi described President Trump in her recent tweet. As has been commented in Japan, this is a bit strong given that the two have spent a total of one day together (Trump is visiting as part of a tour of South Asian). The accompanying photo shows the two in couple-y proximity inside a US army helicopter at Yokosuka naval base. Trump looks relaxed and happy. Takaichi? Positively smitten. Could we be witnessing the emergence of a new geopolitical power couple in the mould of Thatcher and Reagan? Takaichi is known to have been inspired

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Hamas is testing Israel’s patience

In the wake of yet another rupture in the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, the region finds itself suspended in an unstable equilibrium – tense, volatile, but for now, deliberately held back from tipping into open war. On Tuesday, Hamas terrorists launched a coordinated double attack against Israeli troops operating inside the designated ‘yellow zone’ in Rafah – territory under clear IDF operational control. First came sniper fire, killing Master Sergeant (Res.) Yona Efraim Feldbaum. Minutes later, anti-tank missiles struck an engineering vehicle. The attack, both fatal and brazen, represented a clear violation of the ceasefire, exposing not only the presence of armed Hamas cells within IDF-controlled space but

Jonathan Spyer

Will the Gaza ceasefire hold?

In the latest blow to the beleaguered Gaza ceasefire, Israeli aircraft this week struck targets in Gaza City after Hamas carried out an attack using rocket-propelled grenades and sniper fire on IDF soldiers in the Rafah area. One Israeli reserve soldier was killed in the Hamas attack. The exchanges of fire took place amid continued Hamas stalling on the issue of the return of the bodies of slain Israeli hostages.  There was widespread Israeli outrage this week after filmed evidence emerged showing Hamas fighters re-burying body parts of a murdered hostage whose corpse they claimed to have already returned. After burying the body parts of Ofer Tzarfati, 27, of Kibbutz Nir

Tuesday

Luke Lyman

How Javier Milei won

In this episode, US arts editor Luke Lyman is joined by Kate Andrews, formerly of The Spectator, to discuss President Javier Milei’s landslide victory in the Argentinian elections this week. The polls were wrong – how did the self proclaimed anarcho-capitalist survive? Plus, Luke and Kate discuss Kamala Harris’s suggestion that she could run again in 2028.