World

Thursday

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Does China have Vatican City in its sights?

Last Sunday the Vatican released the first photograph of Pope Francis since his ordeal began. He was wearing a stole around his neck, indicating that he had concelebrated mass in the chapel of the Gemelli hospital. Admittedly, all he had to do was raise his hand and whisper a few words of consecration, but it would have been impossible to take such a photo a week earlier, when Vatican-watchers were checking their phones hourly to discover whether the See of Peter had become vacant. Francis is still very ill, of course, and everyone noticed that the picture was taken from behind, perhaps to hide his oxygen tube. The image was

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Welfare war, gold prices soar and gang jailed for toilet heist 

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, entertained 29 other national leaders online to seek a way of guaranteeing the future security of Ukraine. He then invited European defence leaders to meet in London. He spoke by phone to President Volodymyr Zelensky after the inconclusive conversation between President Donald Trump and President Vladimir Putin. John ‘Paddy’ Hemingway, thought to be the last Battle of Britain pilot, died aged 105. The government faced resentment in its own party against welfare cuts outlined by Liz Kendall, the Work and Pensions Secretary: the eligibility criteria for Personal Independence Payments would be tightened; incapacity benefits under universal credit would be frozen for existing claimants

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Ukraine is just one part of Trump’s Great Game

Washington D.C. For Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, it’s a case of today Ukraine, tomorrow the world. In their much-hyped telephone call this week, the Russian leader didn’t appear to give much away: a step towards a sort-of ceasefire, a prisoner swap and a few other bits and bobs. But Putin knows that Trump wants a lot more than just an agreement on the Donbas. Settling the most significant conflict in Europe since the second world war is merely a prelude to a much bigger deal in the Holy Land, a truly historic arrangement that could satisfy the Donald’s desire to be thought of as a peace legend. That’s why

Wednesday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Has Putin played Trump?

24 min listen

Russia and Ukraine have launched air attacks on each other, hours after Vladimir Putin told Trump that Russia would stop targeting Ukrainian energy sites. Has Putin outplayed Trump? And will Trump regret bringing Europe’s militaries back to life? Deputy and US editor Freddy Gray is joined by Americano regular and author Jacob Heilbrunn to discuss.

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Why don’t we hear more about Israel’s stunning blow against Hamas’s fascists?

Imagine if, following an Allied raid on Nazi positions, the newspapers the next day told us about nothing but the civilian casualties. No mention of the fascists who were killed. No utterance of their names, no information about their ranks. Instead, just pained commentary on the suffering of the innocents who tragically found themselves swept up in this act of war. This is one of the most blistering assaults on Hamas’s terror army since 7 October We would think that strange, right? We would consider it a reneging on the journalist’s duty to tell the truth about war. Well, that’s how I feel perusing the coverage of Israel’s resumption of

Yossi Melman

A storm is brewing for Benjamin Netanyahu

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is once again plunging Israel into a deeply polarising legal and political crisis. Over the weekend, he announced his plan to dismiss Ronen Bar, the chief of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service. This was followed on Tuesday by his decision to renew the war in Gaza, by violating the fragile ceasefire that had stayed in place for several months, showing disregard for the safety of the 59 remaining hostages in the process. Netanyahu, who is facing three criminal indictments for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, justified his decision to dismiss Bar by stating that he had lost confidence in his security chief. However, there

Ian O’Doherty

How Conor McGregor humiliated the Irish government

The Irish Taoiseach Micheal Martin will have felt some relief after his visit to the White House last week. While Trump criticised Ireland for poaching American pharmaceutical companies, the general consensus was that Martin had walked away pretty unscathed. In fact, the mood was so optimistic following the encounter that Tanaiste Simon Harris, also in America for the week, offered Trump a state visit to Ireland sometime next year.  But whatever warmth of feeling the Irish government may have had towards the American President will have plummeted into the freezing depths following Trump’s decision to invite Conor McGregor to the White House to mark St Patrick’s Day. It is perhaps

Sergey Radchenko

Trump was naive to think he could negotiate with Putin

President Donald Trump’s creative diplomacy in the Ukraine conflict – which entails bullying the victim and making unilateral concessions to the aggressor – has achieved its latest non-result. After a telephone conversation that lasted for an hour and a half, Trump failed to convince his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to accept the US proposal for an unconditional ceasefire. The war continues. Putin attempted to dampen expectations shortly before the call. Speaking to a gathering of Russian businessmen earlier in the day, he predicted that sanctions on Russia would not go away. ‘These are not temporary or targeted measures; this is a mechanism of systemic, strategic pressure on our country,’ he

Matthew Lynn

China’s BYD could kill Tesla

Tesla and its hyper-active boss Elon Musk are having a bad month. On both sides of the Altantic, there have been protests against the ‘Nazi-mobile’ and the ‘Swasti-car’. The electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer’s sales are collapsing across Europe, and its stock is in freefall. On top of all that, its main rival, China’s BYD, has just announced a super-faster charger that allows you to ‘fill up’ your EV as quickly as you once could your petrol car. All companies go through bad patches, especially when they are leading a new industry. But Tesla is losing its technological lead to China. That could prove fatal. There is growing evidence that China’s

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Trump’s call with Putin has bought Ukraine time

So who won from yesterday’s phone conversation between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin? Arguably, no one did – but nor did anyone really lose. Efforts to end the fighting live, maybe to die, another day. Putin managed to find a third way between agreeing to an unconditional ceasefire – which the Russians believe would benefit Ukraine, and which would have infuriated the ultra-nationalists – and rejecting Trump’s proposals altogether. The moratorium he called on strikes against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure looks like a concession but actually has little real impact now that winter is past, and the drones and missiles which would have been hitting power stations are still targeting cities.

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Could a headscarf row bring down France’s government?

Might a headscarf bring down France’s coalition government? The question of whether the Islamic garment should be permitted on the sports field has revealed the ideological differences within Prime Minister Francois Bayrou’s fragile government. On the one hand, there are left-leaning ministers such as Elisabeth Borne (Education) and Marie Barsacq (Sport and youth) who see nothing wrong with the headscarf. Others, principally, Gérald Darmanin (Justice) and Bruno Retailleau (Interior), are fiercely opposed. Retailleau recently took Barsacq to task over her stance, saying the headscarf ‘is not a form of freedom, but a form of submission for women’. The headscarf is just the latest attempt by Islamists to destabilise France On

Katja Hoyer Katja Hoyer

Merz has paid a high price to pass Germany’s spending package

Yesterday, the German parliament approved a historic amount of debt-funded investment in defence and infrastructure. Over the next few years, Germany may spend up to €1 trillion (£841 billion) on its depleted military and crumbling roads, buildings and train tracks. These eyewatering amounts of money are intended to act as the glue with which to bind the country’s prospective coalition together. But they also give an indication of how much of their own programme the election-winning conservatives are willing to sacrifice in exchange for power. The likely next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, now starts on a credibility deficit. He’ll have to work hard to get back into the good books of

Jacob Heilbrunn

Cosying up to Putin has weakened Trump’s hand in Europe

Once upon a time, America practiced ping-pong diplomacy to try and improve ties with Mao’s China. Now Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are talking about organising hockey matches in America and Russia to bolster relations. Given that the two sides would be playing in ice rinks, it would be hard to say that Russia, which has been banned from the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup ever since its invasion of Ukraine, is coming in from the cold. But perhaps Putin, who has often taken part in games in Russia, will once more don his ice skates, while Trump serves as master of ceremonies.  Trump has inadvertently weakened his ability

Owen Matthews

Putin has played Trump like a fiddle

And so it begins. Welcome to the first episode of the latest season of Putin’s Theatre of Fugazi – the longest-running drama in global geopolitics. The first takeaway from yesterday’s nearly two-hour phone call between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin seems, at first glance, a positive one. Putin conceded, in principle, strong support for a ceasefire. And in practice, he conceded its first element: a moratorium on strikes on energy infrastructure, issuing orders immediately after the phone call to halt imminent strikes.  Fundamentally, though, Putin is merely cosplaying a willing participant in the peace process. In truth, today’s Trump-Putin phone call merely raised the curtain on what promises to be

Daniel Thorpe

Is Syria heading for a fresh dictatorship?

Syria’s new constitution quickly drew a lot of criticism. Signed by President Ahmed al-Sharaa last week, the document aims to help guide the country through the next five years following the ousting of the dictator Bashar al-Assad. Yet many in the country have already rejected it, claiming it gives the president too much power, promotes an Islamist agenda, and fails to address the concerns of religious and ethnic minorities. The new constitution claims it is ‘based on the principle of separation of powers’, but in practice, this does not appear to be the case. Al-Sharaa as interim president will wield the executive power. But he will also appoint a third

Tuesday

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Is Putin’s partial ceasefire really a victory for Trump?

It may be taking him longer than the 24 hours he pledged on the campaign trail, but it appears that US President Donald Trump might be getting somewhere on halting the war between Russia and Ukraine: following a call lasting an hour and a half, he has persuaded Vladimir Putin to agree to a partial ceasefire in the conflict.  According to the statements beginning to emerge from the Kremlin and White House, the call appears to have gone well. This is despite Putin seemingly delaying the call by at leat 50 minutes, after speaking at a conference for business lobbyists in Moscow earlier in the afternoon. A classic power play

Monica Porter

Elon Musk is wrong about Radio Free Europe

The termination of US government funding for the two venerable radio stations Radio Free Europe (RFE) and Radio Liberty (RL) by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) shows how blindly fanatical the Tesla owner’s axe-wielding has become. Musk claims RFE/RL is run by ‘radical left crazy people talking to themselves while torching $1 billion a year of US taxpayer money’. But that is an ignorant distortion of the truth. For 75 years these beacons of open journalism have provided a lifeline for millions trapped inside dictatorial regimes – a necessary pro-democracy corrective to lies, propaganda and censorship. The stations were originally created to serve audiences behind the Iron Curtain

Ali Kefford

Our nuclear submarines are spending too long at sea

A Vanguard-class submarine used for Britain’s nuclear deterrent has resurfaced after a record-breaking 204 days at sea. Relatives gathered on the Rhu Narrows point yesterday to welcome back their loved ones as the sailors returned to HM Naval Base Clyde, in Scotland. When the submarine departed last year, it was still summer, President Biden was in office and Chancellor Rachel Reeves had yet to deliver her first budget. The boat would have sailed out to open sea, dived and followed a pre-planned route known only to the commanding officer and a handful of others on board, meticulously avoiding any other vessel in her path. She will have remained underwater for the entirety of

Andrew Roberts

Why we wrote the 7 October parliamentary report

‘Amnesty International and Harvard,’ says Alan Dershowitz of the 7 October 2023 massacre, ‘blamed it on Israel even before the first shot was fired in Gaza.’ It was true; the Israel Defence Force (IDF) did not enter Gaza until 27 October, but already there were ‘River to Sea’ anti-Israel demonstrations, anti-Semitic posts on TikTok, the first stirrings of the Tentifada movement on campuses, a deafening silence in the United Nations (especially from its women’s committee which was to take six months to denounce the mass rapine) and a worldwide attempt to blame 7 October on its victims rather than its perpetrators. On Saturday 15 May 2024 there were two consecutive articles in the Times, a full eighteen

Alexander Horne

Britain has little influence over Israel’s war in Gaza

As the world focused its attention on a possible peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, it might have been easy to forget that the fragile truce between Israel and Hamas did not mark an end to the crisis in the Middle East. This morning, that ceasefire looked near collapse with Israel ramping up pressure on Hamas and reportedly killing 300 people (including Hamas deputy interior minister, Mahmoud Abu Wafah) overnight. In addition to the resumption of air strikes, Israel has also sought to use other tactics to compel Hamas to release the remaining hostages, including restricting the flow of aid into the territory and cutting off supplies of electricity. These