World

Thursday

Liam Kennedy

Biden and the darker side of Irish-American history

My introduction to an Irish-American sense of history was not in Boston or New York but in the American Midwest. I was visiting the eccentric House on the Rock in rural Wisconsin. The receptionist told me proudly that she was Irish. ‘My people were driven out during the Famine by Cromwell… and Strongbow.’ I admired her compositional virtuosity in bringing together the 12th-century Cambro-Norman warlord Strongbow, the mid-17th-century hammer of the Gaels (and the Scots) Oliver Cromwell, and the Irish landlord clearances of the 1840s — all in one short sentence. What’s more, her declaration chimed with the self-mythologising of Irish-Americans who trace their origins back to the Great Famine

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Can Joe Biden stop America’s ‘uncivil war’?

Having won more votes than any presidential candidate in American history, Joe Biden might have hoped for a triumphant entry into Washington. Instead, he travelled to the inauguration in a private plane to deliver his speech to more members of the National Guard than guests. A combination of the pandemic and security fears ruined normal proceedings: the event had become a target, crowds too great a risk. The emptiness embodies the problem Biden needs to overcome: not just the spats between left- and right-wing politicians, but the unravelling of trust in American politics. His challenge goes beyond governing. It is the question of how to unite the country — or,

Harald Maass

What the West can do about China’s Uyghur labour camps

Coca-Cola’s most controversial bottling plant is a huge factory located in an industrial zone just outside the city of Urumqi in western China. Logistically, the factory is well situated: the international airport is a short drive away, as is the high-speed train station close to the fashionable Wyndham hotel. But the problem for Coca-Cola — and other western companies such as Volkswagen and BASF, which operate plants in the same region — is the existence of hundreds of facilities not mentioned on any official map. The Cofco Coca-Cola plant, a joint venture with a Chinese state company, is surrounded by prisons and re-education camps in which China suppresses local ethnic

Owen Matthews

Navalny and Putin: the next chapter

‘Arrest me? Why would anyone arrest me?’ said Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny to reporters last week as he boarded a Moscow-bound plane. Four hours later he was in jail — but not before spending an hour circling above the Russian capital as riot police shut down the airport where 2,000 supporters awaited him and diverted his plane to another. Did Navalny truly believe he would not be arrested? Did anyone? A week before his planned return from Berlin, where he had been recovering from being poisoned by Russia’s security services, Navalny posted a video on social media in which he openly taunted Vladimir Putin. ‘Putin has been stamping his

Douglas Murray

Where will the American right turn now?

Here’s a trick question: who said the following, and when? ‘Serious questions have arisen about the accuracy and reliability of new electronic voting machines, including concerns that they can be susceptible to fraud and computer hacking.’ A box of Roses chocolates for anyone who guessed correctly. That was Dianne Feinstein, Democrat senator for California, speaking aeons back in 2006. One decade later and another Democrat declared that she had lost the presidential election that year because Vladimir Putin had hacked the US voting system. A month after losing the 2016 race, a still-sore Hillary Clinton told party donors: ‘This is not just an attack on me and my campaign. This

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

At last, America has a gaffe-prone president again

‘Folks, I can tell you, I’ve known eight presidents, three of them intimately.’ So said then vice-president Joe Biden in 2012. A month earlier, he had assured a crowd in New York that President Barack Obama could, in Teddy Roosevelt’s famous words, ‘speak softly but carry a big stick’ when it came to international relations. ‘I promise you,’ he said. ‘The president has a big stick.’ The crowd started laughing at the double-entendre. Joe wasn’t joking. ‘I promise you,’ he repeated, gravely. That is just Joe being Joe. The 46th president is someone who quite often has no idea what he is saying. Curiously, everybody seems relieved about that. We’re

Darren Cormack

Covid-19 is hampering efforts to clear the world’s mine fields

How has Covid affected your life? For those in the world’s war zones, the impact of the pandemic has been truly devastating. Coronavirus is one of many dangers facing those who have fled violence and bloodshed. It has also left refugees with agonising choices: to remain in lockdown in camps, where resources may become scarce; or to return home, and risk death. In north east Nigeria, which is at the epicentre of a grave humanitarian crisis, there was a landmine casualty every single day for the first 20 weeks of last year. Here, food and other humanitarian aid has been disrupted by the pandemic. Strains on the system have prompted

Wednesday

Jacob Heilbrunn

A Trump comeback? Don’t bet on it

He did it. Donald Trump made it through four years, not an accomplishment many of his detractors thought he would achieve, or even wanted him to. ‘See you soon,’ Trump said. A promise or a threat? The truth is that Trump has been badly diminished by his antics in the past few weeks, starting but not ending with the melee on 6 January. His enemies didn’t torpedo his presidency. He torpedoed himself. Trump’s valedictory remarks on Tuesday gave the game away. He couldn’t bring himself to breath the name of Joe Biden. He assumed zero responsibility for the pandemic, barely restraining himself from referring to the ‘Kung Flu’. And he

Daniel DePetris

Good luck to Joe Biden. He’ll need it

It’s official: the inauguration is over, the speeches have been given, and political power in the United States has been transferred to new hands. Joe Biden, a man who first entered the national spotlight in 1972 as a young senator from Delaware, is now the 46th president of the United States. Biden is the quintessential politician, someone who is an expert glad-hander and in many ways a creature of Washington. He knows how power is wielded, understands how to smooth the bloated egos of lawmakers, and is the one person his former boss, Barack Obama, felt comfortable taking the lead in negotiations with Republicans. Due to his long tenure in

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

When will Britain take a stand against Pakistan?

Well, now that we’re all fired up about Britain’s moral role in the world courtesy of Theresa May, who is indignant about cuts to the overseas aid budget, how about moving on to Pakistan? This week a Pakistani court has ruled that a 12-year-old Christian girl, Farah Shaheen, consented to her marriage with an alleged abductor over twice her age and consented freely to convert to Islam. When the girl was recovered from the household of Khisar Ahmed Ali in December, she was reportedly too traumatised to speak about what happened to her over the five months since she, ah, consented to marry a 29-year-old and convert to Islam. But according to

Ian Acheson Ian Acheson

How Joe Biden can be a true friend to the Irish

On this day in 1974, a body was recovered in quiet fields near the Country Tyrone village of Clogher, hard against Northern Ireland’s frontier. It was that of Cormac McCabe, the headmaster of a nearby secondary school, who was also a part-time officer in the Ulster Defence Regiment, locally raised ‘home battalions’ of the British Army. McCabe had been kidnapped the day before, having crossed the border to have lunch in Monaghan town with his wife and disabled daughter. Exposed and defenceless, he was the softest of targets for the Provisional IRA terrorists who abducted him, shot him in the head and then dumped him in a bog field. Joe

Matthew Lynn

Isn’t it time Michel Barnier retired?

He took the European Union to the edge of a no-deal Brexit, creating logistical chaos on both sides of the Channel. His high-handedness and patronising manner hardened positions on both sides. And his brinkmanship clearly failed, leading to a far more distant relationship with the UK than might otherwise have been possible. It would be hard to conclude from the wreckage of the last four years that Michel Barnier had been a great success as the man in charge of negotiating Britain’s departure from the EU. But heck, this is Brussels we are talking about, and you can’t let a little thing like success or failure derail the careers of

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Donald Trump’s predictably hilarious pardon list

So endeth the Trump presidency, not with a bang but a long and and predictably hilarious list of pardons and commutations. There’s 143 in total. It’s a last, parting gift for those of us who, in our sinfulness, have always regarded the rule of Trump as a sort of divine cosmic joke. The headline pardon is for Steve Bannon, his former chief strategist, who has been charged in connection with a scheme to launder funds from a crowdfunding campaign to ‘build the wall’ between America and Mexico. Trump reportedly dithered over whether to show clemency to Bannon. Publicly, the two men were not meant to have reconciled after falling out as

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

The empty promise of Turkey’s charm offensive

On Thursday, Turkey Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu will land in Brussels to meet with European Union officials to start to ‘build Turkey’s future in Europe’. Next week, Turkey is expected to resume talks with Greece to resolve their maritime disputes after a five-year hiatus. The clash in the eastern Mediterranean between Ankara and Athens has brought the two states to the brink of war and is one of a long list of reasons why Turkey has so far failed to ‘build’ that ‘future in Europe’. Speaking to the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen earlier this month, Erdogan vowed to ‘turn a new page’ in relations with the EU,

Mark Gettleson

Joe Biden’s plan to keep the Democrats in power

Today the Trump administration ends. The first time a President has failed to win re-election since 1992. The first time the Republicans have spent just four years in the White House since 1892. And America’s first President to have been impeached twice. No one, as Donald himself might say, has ever seen anything like it. The incoming President and his team, meanwhile, have been remarkably lucky in the cards they now hold. While Biden won the popular vote by 7 million and 4.4 percentage points, he only scored an Electoral College victory thanks to 42,844 votes across three states (Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin), a fraction of the total cast. His

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Will Navalny’s gamble backfire?

For years, Alexei Navalny had been – barely – tolerated by a Kremlin that was willing to permit very limited opposition and criticism. When security officers tried to poison him last year, it reflected a distinct swing towards more ruthless authoritarianism. Back in Russia, and back in prison, Navalny likewise seems to have taken off the gloves. Until now, everyone was fair game for Navalny’s investigations into official corruption – except for Vladimir Putin and his family. Yesterday, after Navalny had been sent to Moscow’s notorious Matrosskaya Tishina prison until his next trial date in February, his team released their latest investigation. In a characteristically slick and entertaining video, almost

Christopher Andrew

Trump’s exit is an opportunity to ditch the nuclear ‘football’

Among the most alarming episodes during Donald J. Trump’s tumultuous final weeks in the White House was an announcement by the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, on 10 January:  ‘This morning, I spoke to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff [General] Mark Milley to discuss available precautions for preventing an unstable president from initiating military hostilities or accessing the launch codes and ordering a nuclear strike.’ Almost half a century earlier, there had been a similar – though secret – alarm about another unstable president with his finger on the nuclear button.  At the height of the Watergate Crisis in 1974, when president Richard Nixon,

Tuesday

Edward Howell

What will Joe Biden do about North Korea?

Kim Jong-un marked the new year by treating North Koreans to several days of lengthy speeches followed by a display of North Korea’s nuclear and missile capabilities. Behind this show of power lies a truth that Jong-un and his country faces a series of unprecedented challenges this year. Sanctions continue to bite and, combined with the coronavirus pandemic, the North Korean economy remains paralysed. Yet this doesn’t mean the task for Joe Biden in dealing with a problem like North Korea will be easy: in fact, with domestic problems exacerbating, it will make Biden’s task even harder. In 2018, the North Korean leader set out a ‘new strategic line’. In

Monday

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Why Navalny is becoming a danger to Putin

The man with no name is now a prisoner with a number. Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader poisoned by security officers back in August, flew back to Moscow yesterday and was promptly arrested. Whether this is symbolic catch-and-release or a sign that the Kremlin plans to bury him – literally or metaphorically – in its prison system remains to be seen. The Kremlin certainly did everything they could to prevent his return being a media event. He was due to arrive at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport, where a crowd of journalists, supporters and riot police jostled in anticipation. So too did a rent-a-mob of supposed fans of a Russian media

Sunday

Constantin Eckner

Who is Merkel’s successor, Armin Laschet?

Armin Laschet is the new chairman of Germany’s Christian Democrats – the party that was led by Angela Merkel for almost two decades. Laschet was elected in a runoff vote during the digital party conference on Saturday, beating centre-right candidate Friedrich Merz, by 521 votes to 466, to resolve a three-way contest that had also featured the foreign policy expert Norbert Röttgen. Among the three candidates, Laschet, who since 2017 has been the premier of Germany’s most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia, is the one who stands most strongly for a continuation of Merkel’s centrist course.  A Catholic from the Rhine region, Laschet represents a large group of Christian Democrats that