World

German politicians have been understandably fired up about Boris Johnson’s plan to breach the Brexit treaty. While the relationship between the two countries already suffered during the Brexit negotiations, allies of chancellor Angela Merkel are astonished by Johnson’s recent actions. They believe that the UK will become an unreliable partner if the treaty will be broken. However, one lawmaker from Merkel’s Christian Democrats went a step too far in condemning Britain.  Backbencher Detlef Seif has made some waves in recent times with his statements on Brexit and EU politics. But nothing is likely to surpass his comment this week as to what is unfolding across the North Sea. Seif, who is the

Some things are right even if Donald Trump believes them. The President’s Constitution Day speech was a doughty defence of America from the slanders of its enemies domestic, but it was also an uncanny, if wholly inadvertent, defence of liberalism. Uncanny because liberals have waited a long time to hear a senior liberal politician demur from the ascendant anti-liberalism, let alone challenge its ideology head-on, and yet the dissent is being led by an anti-liberal of a different stripe. Mainstream Democrats quibble here and there with one aspect or another of the new regime — whether the giddy apologias for violence; conspiracy theories about routine, homicidal police racism; or contempt

Lots of excitement in Westminster circles this morning over the four ‘senior American congressmen’ who have written a stern letter to Boris Johnson wading into the latest row over the Withdrawal Agreement and Ireland. The four US lawmakers have warned that a US-UK trade deal would be imperilled by any action the government might take that could undermine the Good Friday agreement.  Steerpike can’t help but notice there’s rather less interest in the fact that, of the four congressmen — Eliot Engel, Peter T King, Richard E Neal, and William R Keating — two appear to have been overt IRA sympathisers, and one was a close friend of IRA leader

After the Hong Kong protests, America’s Black Lives Matter protests were like manna from heaven for Beijing. Now Chinese politicians could point the finger at the US as its own house was in disarray. Take just one example, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying: But China’s own problems with race leave the country open to allegations of hypocrisy. It wasn’t long ago that a Chinese laundry detergent advert had to be pulled because it showed a black man becoming Asian after being put in the washing machine (no, really). This week, perfumer Jo Malone has had to apologise for excising black actor John Boyega from the Chinese version of its latest ad campaign. Directed by

The monumental accords being signed in Washington between Israel, the UAE and Bahrain represent a new era in Israeli peacemaking. These agreements are being signed with Gulf states and they are a result of shared interests. At the top of the list of Israeli concerns is the Iranian threat. But Turkey’s increasingly aggressive stance in the Mediterranean and across the Middle East is easily overlooked as a catalyst for closer Israeli-UAE relations.  In the last year, Turkey has invaded parts of northern Syria, sent mercenaries to fight in Libya, launched a military operation in northern Iraq, and threatened Greece, Cyprus, Egypt and France. Ankara’s decision to deploy a naval flotilla in the

There’s a good chance that nothing that occurs in the new Japanese PM’s tenure will be nearly as interesting as how he got the job in the first place. While not quite in the Belarusian league, Yoshihide Suga’s victory in the ruling Liberal Democratic party leadership election was nonetheless a stitch-up of staggering brazenness for a law-governed democracy. Suga (71) the former Chief Cabinet Secretary in Shinzo Abe’s administration, would probably have lost out to rival Shigeru Ishiba had the election been held in the normal way, with all party members given a vote. But Suga’s cause was massively boosted when the party’s secretary general Toshihiro Nikai decided that in a time

Should Donald Trump be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize? So far the President has notched up two nominations in a twist that all but confirms my suspicions that 2020 is being directed by M Night Shyamalan. We appear to be witnessing a hinge moment in the Middle East, a region that has left successive US presidents battered, bruised and bitter. Now, in the space of two months, Trump has secured agreements from the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain to normalise relations with Israel, with more Arab and Muslim states expected to follow. True, these alliances have developed over time and are, in part, driven by the common threat of a

A few days ago, the results of a poll conducted in the Western Cape by Victory Research – one of South Africa’s most respected polling organisations – were released. They delivered quite a shock. Like recent Scottish opinion polls, they showed a small majority for independence among supporters of the Democratic Alliance (DA), now in its third straight term as the governing party of the Western Cape (South Africa’s other eight provinces are ruled by the ANC). The party will come under increasing pressure to hold a referendum on secession from the rest of South Africa. According to the polling, around two-thirds of the Western Cape’s DA supporters also want