World

Thursday

Qanta Ahmed Qanta Ahmed

Pilgrimage in the age of pandemic

To complete the Hajj is the pinnacle of Islamic worship, required once in the lifetime of every able-bodied Muslim who can afford the journey. In its 1,400-year history, the annual pilgrimage has been cancelled dozens of times, by wars, political strife and pandemics. As I found out when I made the journey, it is a swirling sea of humanity: some 2.5 million visiting Mecca over a few days, from all over the world. When the Covid crisis came, worship was suspended. But then something was attempted that would have once seemed impossible: carrying on the tradition, but under digitally monitored social distancing. The results were extraordinary. A pilgrimage famous for

Philip Delves-Broughton

As New Yorkers flee, the suburbs are under siege

New York ‘Land of the Flee’, screamed the New York Post front page this week. Moving vans are lining up in Manhattan. Residents have had enough. It had been ‘another bloody weekend in Gotham’ with 21 people shot, and a rising wave of non-gun violence. At 11 a.m. on Saturday, a man leapt on top of a young woman on a subway platform in midtown and began grinding against her until a group of bystanders forced him to stop. You can watch the whole thing on video and decide never to take public transport again. Living in New York has always felt like walking on a very narrow beam. The

Wednesday

David Patrikarakos David Patrikarakos

Did Erdogan order his generals to sink a Greek warship?

Could war finally be coming to the eastern Mediterranean? It’s not as excitable a question as it might first appear. In an article titled, ‘Erdogan’s calculated war,‘ the German newspaper Die Welt quoted sources from the Turkish military saying that president Recep Tayyip Erdogan had recently ordered his generals to sink a Greek warship, without inflicting casualties. They refused. Then came the suggestion to down a Greek aircraft. Again, they refused. Such reports would be alarming at any time. Now they are acute. Tensions between Greece and Turkey are greater than they have been since the 1990s. Ostensibly, the problems come from longstanding competition over resources. Recent exploration has shown the

Tuesday

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Putin’s culture war

One thing we know that Putin reads is history. He’s keen on chronicles and biography of great Russians, presumably with an eye to his own reputation. And this may help explain why he’s increasingly trying to control his country’s backstory. In Russia, 1 September is not just the start of the school year, it is Den’ Znanii or ‘knowledge day’. There is a whole ritual, a celebratory welcome to all the new crop of children coming from kindergarten to big school, with sonorous speeches about the value of learning and the promise of a new generation. For the head of state, this is usually a softball opportunity to play the role of father

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

What’s gone wrong in America?

44 min listen

Joe Biden yesterday issued his strongest condemnation of the riots and looting that are raging across American cities. ‘None of this is protesting’, he said. Regardless, Bridget Phetasy, a Spectator US contributor and host of Dumpster Fire on YouTube, says she won’t vote in November’s election because America will continue to burn under either candidate. What went wrong? Bridget joins Freddy Gray, editor of Spectator US.

Daniel McCarthy

After Trump, the reckoning

As voters prepare to pass judgment on Donald Trump’s presidency in November, they might want to entertain a few counterfactuals. Imagine that Russia had annexed Crimea during the Trump years rather than while Obama was president. MSNBC and other left-wing media would have hawked claims that Trump actively conspired with Putin to let the Russian president dismember Ukraine. More sober outlets, some of them ‘conservative’, would have chalked up the loss of Crimea to president Trump’s basic incompetence and reckless defiance of the foreign-policy establishment. Much the same narrative web would have been spun if, say, Otto Warmbier had been imprisoned by Kim Jong-un’s regime this year rather than in

Monday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

What tickles China’s political elite?

29 min listen

You can’t get far doing serious business in China without having friends in powerful places. So when her husband’s company, Jardine Matheson (which once upon a time had smuggled opium into the country), was invited back into a liberalising China in the 1990s, Tessa Keswick had rare access to the country’s top leadership. On the podcast, she recounts seeing Bo Xilai, the disgraced Chongqing party secretary, days before he was arrested by Xi Jinping; the prank that Zhu Rongji, the then Prime Minister, played on Henry Keswick; and what it was like inside Zhongnanhai, the secretive Beijing compound that China’s leaders work from. Tessa Keswick’s exceptional book, The Colour of

Constantin Eckner

Germany’s far-right and the rise of the anti-corona protests

Germany has been in uproar over the events that unfolded this Saturday, when 38,000 protesters gathered in Berlin and clashed with the police. The organisers of the gathering, entitled Umdenken (Rethinking), claimed they wanted to show their frustration at government measures to contain the spread of the coronavirus. Among the 38,000 were at least 3,000 far-right sympathisers and extremists, according to Berlin’s interior minister. The run-up to Saturday’s protests was already marked by controversy, as Berlin’s local government had initially banned the gathering due to concerns that the event could contribute to the spread of the coronavirus. As is often the case in Germany when governments ban political protests, a

Tim Ogden

Why Navalny may not be a friend of the West

At first glance, Alexei Navalny seems like exactly the sort of man the West would want to sit in the Kremlin. He’s anti-corruption, anti-oligarchy, anti-ballot rigging and – most importantly – anti-Putin. Many in the West believe his election would result in a seismic shift in Russian foreign policy – and perhaps even lead to historically unprecedented positive relations with Moscow. The Western media have certainly reinforced this idea, as they’ve reported on Navalny’s attempts to break Putin’s stranglehold on Russia and the many moves to silence him with a series of arrests, assaults, and poisonings – the most recent of which led to his hospitalisation last week. Perhaps influenced

Friday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Don’t underestimate Joe Biden

So is it over for Joe? Gloating Republicans and handwringing Democrats alike suddenly seem convinced that President Trump is headed towards an improbable repeat victory this November, especially after his acceptance speech last night. But there are multifarious reasons to believe that this is a bunch of hooey. For one thing, Biden has been repeatedly counted out only to bounce back. Consider the primary. Conventional wisdom was that Biden was a goner. Too old. Out of it. A dullard. On the eve of the South Carolina primary he was, in short, dismissed as a has-been, though vanity prompts me to note that yours truly, writing on this website, rightly predicted

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Putin prepares to send in the troops

Sometimes, Vladimir Putin just can’t help himself. Russian coverage of the popular revolution in neighbouring Belarus has been unusually even-handed, perhaps reflecting a belief that strongman Alexander Lukashenko might be on the ropes. Then Putin, having been quiet about Belarus for so long, used an interview with a tame TV journalist to drop a bombshell: a reserve force has been established that could intervene. Apparently Lukashenko had asked him ‘to create a reserve group of law enforcement personnel’ which could be deployed if ‘the situation becomes uncontrollable, when extremist elements… overstep the mark.’ He magnanimously continued that ‘we came to the conclusion that now it is not necessary, and I

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

France has partly seen sense on face masks

I went for a long walk last night in Paris. I chuntered most of the way, only breaking off to nod a greeting to the handful of other maskless pedestrians. We’re a dwindling band, but there’s a camaraderie among us, a bond created by our refusal to give in to hysteria. It’s an eclectic club, cutting across sex, age and ethnicity. A report this week stated that Frenchwomen in their 50s were the most reluctant to wear masks, but in Paris I would say it’s men in their forties and women in their early twenties. But to see someone on the streets in Paris without a mask has become increasingly

Dominic Green Dominic Green

Leaked letter: Boris Johnson rejects Trump on Iran sanctions

A leaked letter to the UN Security Council shows that the British government has rejected the US position on Iran’s nuclear and conventional weapons programs, is siding with France and Germany at the UN, and is risking a diplomatic confrontation with its closest ally. The letter, dated August 20, notifies the head of the UN Security Council that the ‘E3’ (Britain, France, Germany) remain ‘committed to fully implementing UNSCR 2231 (2015), by which the JCPOA [the ‘Iran deal’] was endorsed in 2015’, and that the United States request for ‘snapback’ on sanctions on Iran has no legal validity: ‘Germany, France and the United Kingdom (‘the E3’) do not consider that

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Trump goes for Biden’s jugular in convention speech

President Donald J. Trump just gave an impressive and unprecedented State of the Union address from the lawn of the White House…oh wait, it was his 2020 Republication nomination speech. It just felt like a quasi-imperial event. The address was long, too long for an acceptance speech — coming in at 6,000 words, it took more than an hour. Trump just always has to dwell on all his achievements. ‘I say very modestly that I have done more for the African-American community than any president since Abraham Lincoln, our first Republican president,’ he said. That really is his idea of modesty. The President hasn’t changed much after three and a

Thursday

Constantin Eckner

Merkel may come to regret her furlough generosity

As Britain’s furlough scheme winds down, Germany’s is set to continue: Merkel’s government has announced that its enormously-expensive policy will stay in place until the end of next year. Hubertus Heil, the country’s finance minister, says furloughing offers ‘the stablest bridge over a deep economic valley’. Many in Britain are clamouring for Rishi Sunak to adopt the same approach. But with a price tag of 30 billion euros (£26 billion) and no guarantee it will prevent a surge in unemployment, is Germany’s strategy really a sensible one? This isn’t the first time Germany is hoping furloughing workers can get it out of a crisis. Kurzarbeitergeld, or ‘short-work money’, is state-regulated

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Has China really beaten Covid?

It has to be seen to be believed: a pool party attended by thousands, with the young bodies packed so tightly that you could barely see the water. There was a DJ, neon lights and outlandish acrobatics from performers on water jetpacks. The scenes, captured on video and sent around the world, were all the more extraordinary because the party was in Wuhan. It wasn’t long ago that the same people were locked down in their millions. They were not even allowed to go outside for exercise. The only people you would see on the streets were the kuaidi xiaoge (‘delivery bros’), gig economy workers who dropped off groceries, medicines

Yiannis Baboulias

Med alert: Greece and Turkey are in a battle for hegemony

No one should fool themselves about the nature of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s vision for Turkey. It’s an imperialist project that would see Turkey’s hegemony stretch from the Mediterranean Sea and Libya all the way to Iran. Erdogan’s plans for his country’s expansion are evident in the current stand-off in the eastern Mediterranean between Turkey and Greece. Turkish frigates are accompanying a research vessel, the Oruc Reis, as it enters disputed waters to carry out a seismic survey in search of natural gas. In its path lies a joint force of Greek and French warships, attempting to prevent the Turkish from venturing further. The two sides have almost come to blows

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The West doesn’t know best

I’d always rather liked the Finns, until I came across the conductor Dalia Stasevska. When I asked my mother what they were like, back when I was five or six and enjoyed staring at a globe of the world, she described them as ‘drunken and stupid, but very brave’. This was, by Mother’s standards, an extremely kindly benediction. Most of her descriptions of the world’s various people did not contain commendations. There were a few exceptions — Trinidadians were ‘drunken and stupid, but very cheerful’, for example. But by and large, to her the world comprised people who were drunken and stupid, apart from the Muslim world, where people were

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

The Trump show: he could just win again

‘Keep America Great’ is President Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election slogan and it sounds off. The phrase doesn’t have the same ring as Make America Great Again, the mantra that Trump pinched from Reagan and repeated to victory in 2016. As an acronym, KAG is uglier than MAGA. The words particularly jar when America’s cities are burning, homicide rates are spiking, almost 180,000 Americans have died of or with Covid, and the country is reeling from the largest economic shock of all time. You call that great? Then again, 2020 is an even crazier year than 2016, and the maddest news is that Donald Trump might be about to defy the

Douglas Murray

Protestors are clearing a path for Trump

‘This city is not going to stop burning itself down until they [the protestors] know that this officer has been fired.’ Thus spoke Whitney Cabal, a leader of the Kenosha chapter of Black Lives Matter, in response to the latest police shooting in Wisconsin. The use of the passive in that sentence is revealing. As Theodore Dalrymple has pointed out (see ‘The knife went in’) it is common for people to assign motive to inanimate objects when they are loth to admit to being in the wrong. I suspect that the suitably named Ms Cabal knows that the state of Wisconsin did not auto-combust this week, as Krook does at