World

Thursday

Charles Lipson

Nine lessons from the Republican and Democrat conventions

What’s the bottom line so far? The Democrats think they will win by making the race a referendum on Donald Trump (more the person than the policies, though they hate both). They are effectively trying to run Joe Biden as a generic Democrat. The Republicans think the path to victory is to make the race a choice, Trump versus Biden, to say the Democratic Party is dominated by the far left and that Biden is unable or unwilling to stop that oppressive movement. Drawing a sharp contrast between the two parties was the whole point of Vice President Mike Pence’s speech to conclude the convention’s third night. For the most

Wednesday

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

It’s time for Boris to back Israel

Dominic Raab has visited Israel for his first trip as Foreign Secretary. By all accounts, he was made very welcome, despite the UK’s craven abstention at the UN over extending an arms embargo on Iran, a country where they arrest our ambassador, burn our flag and chat ‘Death to Britain’. Quite the dilemma we faced in that vote. According to the Foreign Office, Raab met Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas, now in the 16th year of his four-year term as president of the Palestinian Authority. He was keen to ‘reinforce UK commitment to preventing annexation and pursuing a negotiated two-state solution’.  ‘Annexation’ is what we call now-suspended

Tuesday

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Don’t Panic! How to talk about climate change

23 min listen

Can the conversation around climate change all too often get heated, hysterical, and panicked? Should we be appealing for more calm in the climate debate? In the first of this mini podcast series featuring Bjorn Lomborg and Matt Ridley, host Kate Andrews challenges Bjorn and Matt on their views over the best way to conduct what some say is the most important debate of our lifetimes.

Andrew Foxall

Why Putin might not be to blame for poisoning Alexey Navalny

In news that should surprise nobody, the German government says there is a ‘certain likelihood’ Alexey Navalny, the Russian opposition figure who fell ill while on a domestic flight last week and was evacuated to Germany on the weekend, was poisoned. According to doctors treating him, Navalny was poisoned by an unknown substance from ‘within the group of cholinesterase inhibitors’, indicating he is likely the victim of a nerve agent attack. For many (perhaps too many), this already has Vladimir Putin’s finger prints all over it. Yet over the last two decades of being in power, Putin has blurred the boundaries between state, quasi-state, and non-state to the point where

Seth J. Frantzman

The paradox of Israeli peace

Days after the UAE and Israel announced a deal, Israelis were already talking about trips to Dubai and all the great five star hotels the Gulf offers. At the same time, the country has been speculating about which states will be next in line to make peace. This sense of a coming era of peacemaking is palpable. However, the reality in the region is that while many countries have been considering closer ties with Israel because of shared threats and interests they are also moving cautiously. Oman is a good example of this paradox. Oman welcomed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a surprise visit in 2018 and it appeared to

Monday

Lee Jones

The myth of China’s ‘debt-trap diplomacy’

It is hard to remember now, but just five years ago David Cameron’s No. 10 was declaring a ‘golden era’ of Sino-British ties. Now the US sees China as a ‘strategic rival’ and Britain has joined a growing coalition of Western nations attempting to limit Beijing’s power. There are certainly good reasons to be wary of China’s regime. But there’s also a clear risk that growing Sinophobia distorts the reality of Chinese behaviour, which is often far less strategic than is widely supposed. This is particularly clear with respect to China’s ‘belt and road initiative’, an attempt to build a rail and maritime trade network across the globe. Launched in

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Could blood plasma be used to treat Covid-19?

What are we to make of the decision by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to grant emergency use authorisation for blood plasma treatment of Covid-19? Is this a medical breakthrough or a dangerous move forced on it by a desperate president who sees his electoral chances slipping away unless he somehow gets on top of the crisis over the next few weeks? It goes without saying that the approval of drugs ought to be above partisan politics. Introducing novel drugs into everyday use has the potential to bring a huge amount of good – but also the potential to cause a great deal of harm. The only satisfactory

Saturday

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Spectator Out Loud: Lionel Shriver, Simon Cooper and Gerri Peev

22 min listen

On this week’s podcast, Lionel Shriver says that the real determinant of coronavirus isn’t race – it’s obesity (01:00) Simon Cooper asks whether the return of beavers to English rivers is really something to be celebrated (09:35) Gerri Peev asks why the European Union keeps backing Bulgaria’s kleptocratic government. (15:40)

Robert Tombs and John Keiger

Why can’t France’s middle class learn to love Britain?

Many of us British Francophiles discover early on in our relationship with la belle France that there is an undercurrent of – well, to put it bluntly, Anglophobia. It is not quite blotted out by French geniality and (usually) courtesy towards les Rosbifs individually. When we first went to France many years ago, we were frequently taken to task about burning Joan of Arc or sinking the French fleet at Mers el Kébir. Today, it takes the form of irritation at Brexit (with a confident expectation that it will bring disaster), and competition over which country has the most (or least) cases of Covid. One rarely comes across crude Anglophobia. It

Friday

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

It’s time for Imran Khan to accept Israel is here to stay

‘Our stand on Israel is clear,’ Pakistan’s prime minister Imran Khan said this week. ‘We cannot recognise Israel until Palestinians get their right’, he said. For Khan, the UAE’s deal with Israel – which will inevitably lead to more Muslim states formalising relations with Israel – counts for little. But Khan is no stranger to volte-faces. It’s time for him to make another one – and formalise ties with Israel. Pakistan was actually closer to recognising Israel this time last year, in the aftermath of India scrapping the special status of Jammu and Kashmir, than it is today. Many politicians in Pakistan came to realise that if the Arab states

Gregorio Sorgi

Could Giorgia Meloni become Italy’s first female PM?

Last summer, a bare-chested Matteo Salvini, leader of the right-wing League and interior minister at the time, roamed the trendiest beaches on the Adriatic coast drinking Mojitos and dancing to DJ sets. But twelve months on, the partying has stopped and Salvini has lost his magic touch: the League has been ousted from the government and support is draining away by the day. ‘Papeete Syndrome’ – named after the tawdry beach club which became the League’s unofficial headquarters last August – is now a synonym of self-defeating hubris in Italy’s political lexicon. And today Italian conservatives worship a new idol: Giorgia Meloni. Salvini’s decline in the polls has largely coincided

Pieter Cleppe

Lukashenko has learned to ignore the EU’s empty threats

On Belarus, the EU has been eager to talk the talk. But it has been slower to walk the walk. Belarus’s sham election – in which the country’s authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko won 80 per cent of the vote – was condemned by EU leaders as ‘neither free nor fair’. But Brussels stopped short of explicitly demanding a new election, in spite of pleas from the opposition in Belarus as well as from four central European countries: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. In refusing to go further and call for a re-election, the EU is struggling with a dilemma faced by other Western countries: what is the best way

Thursday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Where will the next local lockdown be?

10 min listen

Birmingham and Oldham are on the brink of reentering lockdown, with cases in both rising significantly in comparison to the rest of the country. But how severe is the outbreak, and can the government risk shutting down the UK’s second largest city? Cindy Yu speaks to Kate Andrews and Katy Balls about the contenders for Britain’s next local lockdown, and also asks whether there are alternatives to the 14-day quarantine for returning holidaymakers.

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Why the Kremlin sees Britain as its greatest foe

Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny is, as of writing, fighting for his life, hooked to a ventilator in a hospital in Omsk. He was flying back to Moscow from Tomsk when he fell suddenly ill, and many assume poison. Think the government did it? Of course not: according to the Kremlin’s lead propagandist, it was us. Navalny’s efforts to establish a nation-wide political party in all but name – every time he tries to register a party, the Kremlin finds a way to disallow it – and his glossy exposés of elite corruption presumably struck a chord at a time when the city of Khabarovsk is still

Dominic Green Dominic Green

Mike Pompeo: ‘I regret’ Britain’s Iran sanctions vote

The halls of the UN are a habitual stage for empty gestures and vaporous rhetoric, but last Friday’s Security Council vote was a dangerous theatre of the absurd – and one in which two American allies played ignominious supporting roles. The Council not only rejected the Trump administration’s proposal to extend Resolution 2231, which restricts conventional arms sales to the rogue regime in Iran. Britain and France both abstained. Why are Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron signalling that the pressure is off, the coast is clear, and the mullahs are free to arm themselves with the kind of advanced Chinese and Russian weaponry that would alter the balance of power

Anne Applebaum

The poisoning of Putin critic Alexei Navalny

Alexei Navalny, the most important opposition leader in Russia, is unconscious in hospital after drinking poisoned tea on an airplane. This has happened before: Anna Politkovskaya, the crusading Russian journalist, was also poisoned on an airplane. She recovered, but was later murdered outside her apartment. This latest assassination attempt comes just as anti-government demonstrations gain strength in Belarus and the Russian Far East, demonstrations which have built on the example of Navalny, among other things. Over the past decade, Navalny promoted a new ethos and new forms of dissidence in Russia, using the internet to interact with millions of people, inspiring people to find new ways to participate in public

Douglas Murray

The Foreign Office has lost the plot in the Middle East

Last Friday the UN Security Council rejected any extension of the arms embargo on Iran. That embargo — imposed in 2007 — began to get phased out after the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. But a ‘snapback’ provision was put in place intended to allow the return of all such sanctions should Iran violate the terms of the deal. Iran has been violating those terms for some time, but on Friday, when the United States hoped that its allies would join it in deploring this fact, only the Dominican Republic voted with it. The UK, like France and Germany, chose to abstain. On the question of whether Russia and China should

The Spectator

The Democrats’ complacency is Trump’s greatest weapon

There is a great mystery lying behind the 2020 US presidential election: how come a country of 350 million, which leads the world in academia, science and more, is unable to find two more inspiring candidates than Donald Trump and Joe Biden? Where is the voice of hope, or even just a reassuring voice of calmness and competence? Instead, come November, citizens of the most powerful nation on earth will be forced to choose between a narcissist and a man whose claim to his party’s candidature appears to be based on the principle of Buggins’ turn. Biden’s longevity is impressive — and we would never dismiss a candidate simply on

Francis Pike

Hirohito, the war criminal who got away

This month the global media marked the 75th anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The cities’ destructions were momentous indeed, but the coverage has squeezed out other memories of the Pacific War. Who remembers Japan’s genocidal campaign in China that killed more than 20 million people — thousands of them by poison gas and canisters containing plague and typhus? Or the murder of 35 per cent of the 200,000 soldiers and civilians held in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps that meted out unspeakable cruelties? Certainly not the BBC, which failed to put Hiroshima and Nagasaki into any kind of historic context. For example, a BBC article on

Ed Husain

A new world is taking shape and Britain is nowhere to be seen

Britain cannot afford for its place in the world to be limited by those stuck in the thinking and guilt of the last century. Beyond Covid-19 and Brexit, a new world is taking shape. Three of our closest allies – the United States of America, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates – negotiated a brave and historic peace accord and we were nowhere to be seen, heard or even thought about. Why?  The Middle East is on the cusp of more peace accords – triggered by the vision of the Emirates and Israelis – with trade deals and security alliances to follow. Understandably, Boris Johnson has been busy dealing with Covid and