World

How will the world be different after coronavirus? Will everything return to the way it was or will there be lasting change? For this country, there is one thing that will clearly be different: the government’s approach to China. I understand that while Boris Johnson’s grand, integrated foreign policy review has been put on hold because of the pandemic, the work on Anglo-Sino relations has been brought forward as a matter of urgency. One of those heavily involved in the development of this new policy tells me that the aim is to get this country ‘off the trajectory of ever-increasing dependence’ on China. The issue is not that Covid-19 emerged

Norway is assembling a picture of what happened before lockdown and its latest discovery is pretty significant. It is using observed data – hospital figures, infection numbers and so on – to construct a picture of what was happening in March. At the time, no one really knew. It was feared that virus was rampant with each person infecting two or three others – and only lockdown could get this exponential growth rate (the so-called R number) down to a safe level of 1. This was the hypothesis advanced in various graphs by Imperial College London for Britain, Norway and several European countries. But the Norwegian public health authority has

The Chinese Communist party made an announcement yesterday which effectively ends ‘one country, two systems’ in Hong Kong, and in so doing launched a brazen assault on the international rules-based order. They have also dramatically changed the very nature and way of life of the city which was once my home. Over the past six years, the regime in Beijing has increasingly tightened its grip on Hong Kong, eroding its freedoms initially subtly but more recently with dramatic acceleration, and tearing up the promises it made in an international treaty with Britain before the handover. But yesterday came the final, most blatant nail in the coffin: the announcement that the

There are not that many advantages to electing a former investment banker as president. They are often aloof. They don’t have much in the way of a common touch. And they have a sense of entitlement that blinds them to their failings. There is, however, always this to make up for all that. They know how to make a bond issue work for the bottom line. And in designing a ‘rescue fund’ to get the EU through the Covid-19 crisis, France’s President Macron, an alumnus of Rothschild & Cie, has put some of those skills to work. Earlier this week, Macron announced a deal with Germany’s Angela Merkel to create

Libya has been in the midst of civil war for almost a decade. However, in the last year, the conflict has escalated and become a regional proxy war. This matters because Libya is a gateway for migrants coming to Europe and because whoever wins in Libya will emerge a powerful figure in the Middle East. Eastern Libya is run by Khalifa Haftar and his Libyan National Army. He is principally backed by the UAE, Egypt and Russia; and he appears to receive support from France, Saudi Arabia and Greece. The government in Tripoli is backed by Turkey and Qatar. Haftar seemed poised to take Tripoli in recent months but his

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned in the magazine how the Chinese Communist Party has been trying to bully our allies and friends in Australia. The government of that country having had the audacity to demand an independent and international inquiry into the origins of the Wuhan virus. Since then, the CCP has been upping its game, and not just with words, but by imposing huge tariffs on Australian products. Which I suppose means that the rest of us are going to have to make up for over a billion Chinese consumers and guzzle as much Australian shiraz as we can in the coming months. Can we do it?