World

Thursday

Taki

A nicer side of Nero

New York I haven’t felt such shirt-dripping, mind-clogging wet heat since Saigon back in 1971. The Bagel is a steam bath, with lots of very ugly people walking around in stages of undress that would once upon a time have embarrassed that famed stripper Lili St Cyr. How strange that very pretty girls do not shed their clothes as soon as the mercury hits triple figures, but less fortunate ones do even if the number is a cool 80. June is my London party month, or used to be before the city was transformed into a prison camp. And what about The Spectator party? I haven’t heard a woid, as

The Spectator

The real value of the Australia trade deal

If Britain had been unable to agree a trade deal with Australia, then Brexit really would have been pointless. The country is one of our greatest allies and we have no rational reason to fear its beef, its sugar or its people. A free trade deal, aligned with visa-free travel, ought to have been the easiest deal to do. A deal is now done, phasing in these freedoms over 15 years. But even this sluggish pace is too fast for the protectionists who are popping up. Some have predicted that our beef farmers will be ruined and the countryside laid to waste as our markets are opened to competition. Many

Alexander Downer

The UK-Australia free trade agreement is a triumph

How significant is the UK-Australia trade deal announced this week during Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s visit to Britain? Well, Australia already has 17 genuine free trade agreements, including with the United States, Japan and China. But the free trade agreement with the UK is undoubtedly one of the highest quality agreements Australia has ever reached. In terms of the liberalisation of markets, it is only exceeded by the free trade agreement Australia has with New Zealand. This demonstrates something very important: that the UK, having left the European Union, is going to be a genuine champion of global trade liberalisation. That will not only be good for the British economy

Wednesday

Daniel DePetris

Why the Biden-Putin summit wasn’t a waste of time

The meeting between U.S. president Joe Biden and Russian president Vladimir Putin in Geneva started cordially enough. A quick handshake, toothy smiles for the cameras, and some standard words of diplomacy. ‘I would like to thank you for the initiative to meet today,’ a slouching Putin told an attentive Biden. ‘Still, U.S.-Russian relations have accumulated a lot of issues that require a meeting at the highest level, and I hope that our meeting will be productive.’ Putin’s words were something of an understatement. U.S.-Russia relations are scraping the bottom of the barrel and may very well be at their lowest point since the early 1980s, when Washington and Moscow were turning Europe into

Roderick Crawford

The protocol may be Boris’s greatest masterstroke

The jibes thrown at Boris Johnson over his unhappiness with the Northern Ireland protocol — based on the obvious observation that he was the one who signed it — have been based on the assumption that he is either a liar or a fool. A liar because he knew full well what he was signing up to, or a fool for not knowing what he was agreeing to. Does anyone think that officials told him that the protocol would prevent Northern Ireland having access to some cancer drugs? Or guide dogs being unable to move between GB and NI? Keir Starmer has repeated the jibe about Johnson. A further version is

Tuesday

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

France is divided on ‘taking the knee’

Until this month ‘taking a knee’ has not been a French phenomenon. When the Black Lives Matter movement spilled out of America twelve months ago and spread across the world, France was one of the few Western nations where it failed to make any headway. In a bold television address at the time, Emmanuel Macron declared that there would be no statues toppled in France. Meanwhile, the leader of the far-left France Insoumise, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, rubbished the idea of ‘white privilege’. The French looked on in bemusement as Britain seemed to lose the collective plot, hauling down statues, denigrating Churchill and then, when the rugby and football seasons started, dropping to their

Vuk Vuksanovic

Montenegro’s motorway to nowhere

Arching out across a quiet Balkan valley, Montenegro’s first motorway cuts across the rocky scrubland with unnatural precision: a modernist stroke of concrete that gleams against the stony outcrops of the Dinaric Alps. Hung on one of the vast grey pillars is the country’s distinctive crimson banner, a golden two-headed eagle at its centre. The project may bear a symbol of the young post-communist state but those living in the village beneath know who’s really behind the motorway. The Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia has faded but the communists are back. Montenegro is struggling to repay a £860 million Chinese loan for the highway’s construction, built to connect the port of Bar

Matthew Lynn

We don’t have to swap sovereignty for trade

A new court will be established with powers over both countries. Labour and product laws will be harmonised. Flags with kangaroos and crowns will flutter over buildings, there will be a special parliament moving weekly from Cairns to Coventry and an anthem that mashes up Rolf Harris and The Beatles will be played at every opportunity.  For years, we have been lectured by europhiles that free trade requires a pooling of sovereignty There were lots of things that could have been in the Australian-UK trade deal that was finally agreed today but which aren’t. In truth, the most significant point about the deal is not what it includes, but what

Monday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Has economic engagement with China failed?

39 min listen

Exactly 20 years ago, China acceded to the World Trade Organisation. In the decades since, the globalised world became what we know today, with hundreds of millions of Chinese and people around the world lifted out of poverty through free trade. But the promised liberalisation – both economic and political – doesn’t seem to have happened. China is now challenging western-led world order, and too difficult to disentangle from the world economy. So was it a mistake to allow China into the WTO, and has engagement failed? With Stewart Paterson, author of China, Trade and Power, and Yu Jie, senior research fellow at Chatham House.

Limor Simhony Philpott

Can Naftali Bennett’s anti-Bibi coalition survive?

Sunday saw a watershed moment in Israeli politics: Bibi Netanyahu was removed from power after 12 years, and his government replaced by an eclectic coalition headed by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, both of whom will serve as Prime Minister under a rotation agreement, starting with Bennett. It may be that one of Bibi’s greatest achievements was bringing together politicians with little in common but the belief that it was time for Bibi to go. Anyone watching the vote to approve the new government would have been on the edge of their seat: the new government was approved by a single vote (passed 60 to 59). The vote was preceded

Lewis Thomas

Britain must take China to task for its brutal Uyghur abuse

‘Horror’ conjures up several images; a fanged Dracula or a night at the cinema perhaps. But there’s a deeper kind of horror; the slow, white-hot kind that grips you in its claws.  In hearing, over and over, testimonies to some of the most obscene violations of human rights imaginable. To look, as I have done, at China’s actions in Xinjiang, is to feel that horror in your guts, and to realise that Britain must take firmer diplomatic, economic, and political action against China. Recently, the Uyghur Tribunal heard evidence of rape, murder, mass imprisonment, torture, slave labour, by Chinese authorities in Xinjiang. It’s happening in plain sight – the Uyghur

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

The era of Bibi is over

Israel’s new government is a daring, possibly doomed but nonetheless fascinating experiment. Headed by tech millionaire turned nationalist figurehead Naftali Bennett and TV journalist turned voice of centrism Yair Lapid, Jerusalem’s 36th government is an ideological hydra.  Bennett’s right-wing national-religious Yamina party is joined by the secular liberals of Lapid’s Yesh Atid, along with Kahol Lavan moderates, Labor social democrats, Meretz socialists, and the Likud breakaway faction Tikva Hadasha, plus Yisrael Beiteinu’s secular right-wingers and Ra’am’s Islamic conservatives. This unwieldy rabble is held together by a coalition agreement to focus on areas of consensus — more investment in education, bumping up defence spending, cutting bureaucracy and regulation, tackling crime and

Andrew Tettenborn

Brussels has launched a full federalist assault

It’s not only in Northern Ireland that the EU has taken to acting like some imperial power. Last week, with international correspondents’ eyes conveniently fixed on the G7, it quietly began a legal push to take over large areas of its remaining member states’ domestic affairs. On Tuesday, the Commission announced that it was suing no fewer than seven of them in the Court of Justice for breaking EU law. Czechia and Poland are accused of not allowing EU citizens generally to join national political parties, and Hungary of not accepting migrants according to Brussels’s plans. The Netherlands, Greece and Lithuania are charged with failing to have severe enough laws

Saturday

Edward Howell

The increasing cruelty of the North Korean regime

On a humid summer’s day in Singapore three years ago today, Donald Trump became the first incumbent US president to meet with his North Korean counterpart. For all of the summit’s theatre, Kim Jong-un’s pledge to ‘work toward complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula’ seems unlikely to be realised. Three years on, and the country shows little intention of either abandoning its nuclear ambitions or reforming Pyongyang. Instead, the regime has tightened its control over society, not least ideologically, after the failure of the Supreme Leader’s five-year economic plan. In 2018, the leadership assured North Koreans that the country had achieved its primary geopolitical aim of becoming a ‘fully-fledged nuclear

Senay Boztas

The manhunt dividing Belgium

Belgium’s leading virologist is in hiding, holed up with his family in a government safe house. The reason? A right-wing Flemish soldier. Jürgen Conings disappeared from his home on 17 May, leaving behind a booby-trapped car and a series of letters laying out his grievances against ‘the regime’. In a goodbye letter to his partner, Conings wrote: The so-called political elite, joined now by the virologists, are deciding how you and I should live… I don’t care whether I die or not, but I will live my last days the way I want. The muscular 5ft 9in former corporal is now officially a grade-4 terror risk. But that hasn’t stopped

David Patrikarakos David Patrikarakos

The war Israel is losing against Hamas

The Gaza conflict is bloody, brutal, and genuinely heartbreaking, but it is also perfunctory. This is a fight in which the military battle is predetermined: Hamas cannot win, and Israel cannot lose. What happens in between is almost balletic in its endless predictability. Hamas fires rockets, Israel fires back; Hamas targets Israeli cities; Israel bombs buildings in which Hamas hides and stores weapons. So what’s the point? Well, apart from Hamas needing to show strength – and Israel needing to, in the words of its security experts, ‘mow the grass‘ by periodically degrading Hamas’ military capabilities – there is a wider battle raging. This fight isn’t about missiles or rockets but about narratives;

Friday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

How to fix the protocol

The blame game between London and Brussels over the Northern Ireland protocol obscures the fact that there are solutions waiting to be found. There are, as I say in the Times today, ways to reform the protocol and better protect the Good Friday Agreement while not threatening the integrity of the single market. Three changes would render the protocol far more acceptable Three changes would render the protocol far more acceptable and would better position it to withstand the undoubted pressures it will come under when the EU and UK start to diverge their regulations.  The first of these is a trusted trader scheme for food. This would allow registered

Mary Dejevsky

Is it time to end the G7 spouse circus?

Turn on any television news broadcast and peruse any news stand on the eve of the G7 summit, and what was the favourite picture? Carrie and Jill take a barefoot walk along the Cornish sand beside the blue Cornish sea, and enjoy a frolic with little Wilfred (just past his first birthday).  Ahhhh. Isn’t that lovely, so natural, so normal, you say. Melania (snarl) would never have done that. Oh, and by the way, Jill’s jacket said ‘Love’ on the back, contrast with Melania’s during a visit to a migrant detention centre, which said (if you have already forgotten) ‘I really don’t care, do U?’ Well, you might care. Then

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Can the G7 beat Russia and China’s vaccine diplomacy?

8 min listen

As the G7 rolls on and the world leaders learn where their peers stand on certain issues post Covid…  ‘There’s still a chance the Northern Ireland protocol could come up at the G7 and cause some problems…’ – Katy Balls …the wealthy western nations need to decide how best to help vaccinate the world’s poorer countries without risking their own rollouts at home.  ‘It’s a very unusual leader who’s going to take risks sending vaccines abroad until they’ve done their own population…’ – James Forsyth Cindy Yu talks to Katy Balls and James Forsyth.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Macron is wrong. Nato must stand up to China

Joe Biden wants to use his visit to Europe for the G7 summit and the Nato meeting to rally democracies to take on the autocratic threat posed by Russia and China. But in a sign of how difficult that will be, Emmanuel Macron made clear last night that ‘the line I’m advocating for France, and I hope for Europe, is not to be made a vassal by China nor be aligned with the United States on this subject.’ He has also said that China should not be a Nato priority. If Nato is to stay relevant, it will have to become more involved in the effort to contain China This