World

Are we really seeing a second European spike?

You’ve probably seen the graphs, cases are way up in France, even higher than the first wave, and yet deaths hardly seem to be up at all. Yet if you compare the latest number of deaths recorded, 130 for the week ending 3 September, they’re slightly higher than the 123 deaths in the week in March when the country locked down.  Meanwhile, in the UK, cases continue to rise with just under 3,000 new infections announced over the last two consecutive days. The deputy chief medical officer said last night that the rise is deeply concerning and that Brits had ‘relaxed too much’. Should we be panicking? Are we about

Does Catalonia really want independence?

In 1714, after a long siege, Spain managed to regain control of Barcelona after the War of Spanish Succession. Catalan nationalists point to the day Barcelona fell, 11 September 1714, as the point when Madrid began to strip their homeland of its ancient privileges, and three centuries of subjugation and repression began. To remind everyone of the importance of the year 1714, Barcelona fans chant in favour of independence for Catalonia when the Camp Nou football stadium clock shows that 17 minutes and 14 seconds of a match have passed. Meanwhile the day itself, 11 September, is commemorated every year as La Diada (‘The Day’), Catalonia’s national day. In most

It’s time for the West to ditch its Russian playbook

We have been here before. Russia is at the centre of an international crisis of its own creation. And we know how it plays out: briefly there is shock in Western capitals, quickly followed by outrage. This is entirely justified given that Alexey Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition figure – and the second most popular politician in the country – is lying in a coma in a Berlin hospital having been poisoned, according to the German government, by the nerve-agent Novichok. In diplomatic language, this is expressed as ‘deep concern’ with Russia’s ‘shocking and irresponsible’ behaviour, which is condemned ‘in the strongest terms’. Next comes Russia’s disinformation onslaught. Already, Maria

The truth about Tony Abbott

Last night’s confirmation that Tony Abbott is joining the Board of Trade has been reported, bizarrely, with accusations that he is somehow misogynist or homophobic. There was little mention of why the British government actually headhunted him: his ability to achieve big free trade deals quickly. In his two years in office, he did more to help Australia’s exporters than any other leader in the country’s history, finalising free trade deals with what are (now) Australia’s three most important markets: Japan, China and Korea. He also initiated talks on a trade deal with the EU after his Labor predecessors lazily ignored the opportunity for years. But as this is not

Melanie McDonagh

President Trump’s big Balkan deal

President Trump has presided over a notable deal between Kosovo and Serbia. It’s interesting in more ways than one. For starters, the deal is very, very Trump. It’s about the economy, stupid. The deal-maker-in-chief, Richard Grenell, former acting director of National Intelligence, has, as he said, flipped the script. The deal has put economic development ahead of political issues in Kosovo and Serbia. That, you may recall, was more or less the late John Hume’s prescription for peacemaking in Northern Ireland… if you focus on developing the economy and creating jobs, it makes the political issues an awful lot more manageable. And in the case of the dysfunctional economies of

John Keiger

Macron’s battle against the forces of French anarchy

This week France announced a €100 billion (£89 billion) stimulus package equivalent to 4 per cent of GDP over two years. It might seem churlish to ask why the French government has put so much money on the table. To save the French economy, of course. But there’s a graver concern in France that has lately come to the fore. But first, some context to the ‘France Revival’ stimulus programme. It adds to the most generous furlough scheme of any developed economy, which in the spring was already calculated to push France’s debt to GDP ratio over 121 per cent, according to France’s budget statistics. The rationale is that France’s economy

Navalny’s poisoning has shown the emptiness of German diplomacy

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has confirmed that tests showed ‘unequivocally’ that Russian dissident Alexei Navalny was poisoned by a military-grade novichok nerve agent. Germany became involved in the affair when Navalny was transported to the Charité hospital in Berlin two weeks ago. But, while Berlin decided to reveal the test result and called on the Russian government to provide answers about what happened to Navalny, this could easily become a typical case of German diplomacy. Critics of the government in Germany like to call its actions on the international level ‘zahnlos’, which can be translated as ‘toothless’ – its actions lack teeth to hurt another power, or at least leave

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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