World

What, you might well ask, could possibly make the situation in Syria look much worse, after President Erdogan’s assault on the Kurds in Afrin? The Turks are, obviously, attacking the forces that did most of the heavy lifting when it came to dealing with Isis on the ground. Indeed, If it hadn’t been for the Kurds, it’s at least arguable that Isis would still be sitting tight in Raqqa rather than dispersed elsewhere. They are the only really reliable ally in the area for the US – though I take on board the argument that it was the US’s move in establishing a force of 30,000 border guards, dominated by

Compared to previous instances in US history when political paralysis and dysfunction shut down Washington for weeks at a time, the three-day government shutdown that ended on Monday was a rather mundane and unremarkable occurrence.  Indeed, unlike the 21-day saga in 1995-1996 between President Bill Clinton and House Republicans or the 16-day clash between House Republicans and President Barack Obama in 2013, this weekend’s fight had nothing to do with budget numbers, federal spending, tax rates, entitlements, or health care policy.  It was, instead, largely a crisis manufactured by Senate Democrats in an attempt to pressure their Republican colleagues on the immigration issue, one of the most controversial topics in

Turkey’s decision to send troops into Syria to fight the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone who has seen how the country is changing over the past few months. Turkey has become increasingly determined to forge its own way in the world, ignoring the entreaties of western countries, and indeed blaming the West for many of its troubles. The Erdogan government says the YPG is a terrorist organisation that, along with the PKK, is determined to do Turkey harm. When I visited Istanbul, Gaziantep and Izmir in December, the most striking thing about my meetings with political figures and members of civil society was

Donald Trump had hoped to mark his first anniversary as president basking in surprisingly positive media headlines and enjoying a lavish party at his Mar-a-Largo estate in Florida. Instead he must contend with a government shutdown and another major political crisis in Washington, the political swamp he promised to drain. Congress has remained in session all weekend as Republicans and Democrats seek to resolve the shutdown — and blame each other for having caused it. But who will Americans blame? The President? The Republican Party? Or the Democrats? The answer is everybody, probably. President Trump has taken a hardline with the Democrats, seemingly convinced that he can pin them for

Next up on America, it’s the season two premiere of The Donald Trump Show. All your favorite characters are back—or are they? Will The Mooch be able to scheme and scream his way back into the White House? Will Steve Bannon, last seen indulging a quaff from his hip flask as a door embossed with the words ‘Robert Mueller’ closed behind him, continue his vengeance against the man he helped elect? Will the Wooster-and-Jeeves act of Trump and chief of staff John Kelly endure now that the latter was caught undermining his boss’s authority in a meeting? Find out next only (I mean, it could only be) on Fox. I’ll

Next week at Davos, world leaders – including President Trump and Emmanuel Macron – will gather at the elite meet-up to flex their diplomatic muscles and prove how big a player they are on the global stage. Happily, Vladimir Putin has offered them an early lesson in how to show you’re a hard man. The Russian president joined millions of Orthodox believers in plunging bare-chested into icy water – with the temperature below -5C – in a Russian tradition marking the Epiphany. Captions in the comments please.

Journalists can guffaw at the silliness of President Donald’s Trump’s Fake News Awards as much as they like. The truth is he’s right: the media is biased against him to the point of insanity. And the way Trump has presented the awards on Twitter, and whoever wrote the announcements on GOP.com, has been funny, perceptive, and social-media savvy. In the war that is Trump versus the media, Trump is winning. Through Twitter, Trump has turned media bias against him into his great political asset. Voters who aren’t pathologically anti-Trump can see that he has a point about how unfair the mainstream coverage of him is, and increasingly people tend to believe him

This piece first appeared as the leading article in this week’s Spectator magazine. It is only a few months since gloomy economic commentators were confidently predicting that the world was about to plunge into a dark era of protectionism. Yet the global economy begins this year in its healthiest state ever, growing faster than any time since 2011. There has been a change in political rhetoric, but not in the willingness of people around the world to trade with each other. According to the OECD’s most-recent projection, made in November, world trade grew at 4.8 per cent last year. Something seems to be going badly right. Negative sentiments about the

The Trump presidency has been a disorienting moment in American political life. Imagine a time traveller starting in the year 1990. He steps forward 25 years to 2015. Who are the leading candidates for president? Bush and Clinton — again! What are the top issues? Iraq and healthcare — again! Now step backwards 25 years from 1965. The most powerful men in Washington are the head of the AFL-CIO, a federation of 55 unions across the US, and J. Edgar Hoover. There’s a draft and a telephone monopoly and urban riots and liberal Republicans. It’s a different world. I sometimes feel that what Trump has done is restore motion to

As a schoolboy, George Washington transcribed 110 Jesuitical maxims later published as Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation. In this pamphlet he counsels a regimen of behaviour so meticulous it forbids blowing on a spoonful of soup to cool it and specifies the proper method for dipping bread in sauce. Presidential mores have travelled three centuries and a few hundred degrees south since then to bring us Donald Trump, who not only disregards his predecessor’s instruction to ‘use no reproachful language against anyone, neither curse nor revile’ but serves as a snarling, swaggering rebuke to any notion of presidential decorum. ‘Why are we having all these people from

You could, I suppose, feel sorry for Justine Greening if you were a nicer person than me, not just for losing her job, but for being in the job after it had been occupied by Michael Gove. Mr Gove had the radical, indeed revolutionary perception that it was a scandal that there should be such a gulf in expectation and outcomes between state and private schools. And he acted on that basis – the best bit of his programme, in my view, being his hardening up of the curriculum, so state school pupils don’t get fobbed off with dud qualifications in dud subjects. Exams are harder, and harder to pass

Why the big fuss about the 100 eminent Frenchwomen, including Catherine Deneuve, who have criticised the #Metoo movement as a puritan backlash? Their viewpoint, expressed in a letter to Le Monde, is little different to the one expressed by their president in November, when Emmanuel Macron spoke out against sexual violence and harassment but warned against a culture of ‘denunciation’ where ‘each relationship between men and women is suspicious.’ In reminding France that they are ‘not a puritan society,’ Mr. Macron was tacitly drawing comparisons with the Anglo-Saxon world, long seen by the French (and other Latin countries) as prudish in sexual relations. Macron was subsequently criticised by some French