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The Spectator’s post-Budget briefing

World

Wednesday

Niko Vorobyov

Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs is catching up with him

I saw my first murder scene in Manila. On the evening of the 22 January 2018, a pair of assassins on motorbikes rode up to the scrap metal dealer Manny ‘Buddy’ Wagan and blasted him twice in the head. I didn’t witness the killing itself but arrived with my fixer just in time to see a passerby lighting a candle in honour of the deceased, the flickering flame reflected in the pool of blood, brain and skull spread across the pavement.  Manny’s death was one of up to 30,000 such slayings over the course of President Rodrigo Duterte’s six-year rule of the Philippines between 2016 and 2022. Duterte had declared a war against drugs

Jane Stannus

Is Canada doing enough to stop the US trade war?

There’s such a thing as cutting off your nose to spite your face, and the tariff war between Canada and the US is beginning to look like a case in point. On Monday, the premier of Ontario, Doug Ford announced a 25 per cent surcharge on electricity exports to the US, with 1.5 million households and businesses in New York, Michigan and Minnesota likely to be impacted. Trump responded with all-caps outrage, raising the March 12 tariff on steel and aluminium coming into the United States from Canada from 25 to 50 per cent — a threat that would mean curtains for Ontario’s auto sector. How, asked the US president,

Matthew Lynn

Trump’s Tesla stunt won’t help Musk

Tesla’s share price has halved, sales have slumped, boycotts are being organised and Chinese rivals are ready to steal the market. It has been a rough few weeks for the electric vehicle manufacturer, but Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk has been handed a lifeline by Donald Trump: the US president gave his full-backing to the company by buying one of its cars. Heck, he might even have used his own money. There is just one snag: Trump’s high-profile support will make things worse for Tesla, not better. Outside the White House yesterday, Trump chose from five shiny new Teslas. A day earlier, Trump had posted on his Truth Social feed that

Vazha Tavberidze

Oleksii Reznikov: ‘Trump and Zelensky fall-out was a clash of emotions’

‘What just happened – the suspension of military aid – was predictable. I expected it. It wasn’t too hard to predict,’ the former Ukrainian defence minister tells me. Oleksii Reznikov, speaking to me from Kyiv and wearing a ‘Saint Himars’ T-shirt, remains as upbeat as ever, chuckling as he recalls how, back in 2022, Ukraine was supposed to fall in three days. ‘We knew we wouldn’t. It was a matter of survival – three days became three weeks, three months, and now three years. These current events? Just another phase. We have tough negotiations ahead. This isn’t a two-player game – it’s multilateral, with competing interests and big personalities.’ Back

Michael Evans

Why Putin could reject a ceasefire

With all the good news coming out of the Jeddah talks about a 30-day ceasefire in Ukraine, there is only one question that needs to be answered: will President Putin be interested in any sort of deal right now? President Trump is convinced that Putin wants peace. But if the Russian leader really wants to bring his war to an end, will he do so on America’s terms, or wait until he has fulfilled one of his main objectives: the total subjugation of the four provinces in eastern Ukraine that he claimed he had annexed in the first seven months of the invasion? At a ceremony in St George’s Hall

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Christianity, culture wars and J.D. Vance: a conversation with James Orr

62 min listen

James Orr was living the life of a young, high-flying lawyer when, after a few drinks at a New Year’s Eve party, he asked for signs that God existed. The signs came; among other things, he narrowly avoided a fatal skiing accident. Now he is a passionate Christian and a conservative culture warrior who helped defeat an attempt to impose the tyranny of critical race theory on Cambridge University, where he is an associate professor of the philosophy of religion. He’s also an intellectual mentor to the vice president of the United States; Politico describes him as ‘J.D. Vance’s English philosopher king’. Dr Orr says Vance is ‘extremely articulate, but he takes

Tuesday

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Has Ukraine called Putin’s bluff?

Has Vladimir Putin’s bluff just been called? It certainly looks like it. So long as the Ukrainians were refusing to countenance a ceasefire, then Moscow could portray them as being the obstacle to the kind of quick deal Donald Trump appears eager to conclude. Kyiv had previously floated the idea – after another unhelpful intervention from French President Emmanuel Macron – of a limited ceasefire extending just to long-range drone attacks on each others’ cities and critical infrastructure and operations on the Black Sea. But this was a non-starter that was too transparently a trap for Putin, hoping to make him look like the intransigent party if he turned it

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Ukraine agrees to US plan for 30-day ceasefire with Russia

Ukraine has agreed to an American proposal for an immediate 30-day truce in the war against Russia. Kyiv’s decision to accept a month-long ceasefire follows nine hours of talks with members of US President Donald Trump’s administration in Saudi Arabia today.  Making a statement this evening following the conclusion of the talks, the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the ‘ball is now in Russia’s court’ to agree to the ceasefire. It would be ‘the best goodwill gesture’ Moscow could provide, Rubio added. Confirming Rubio’s announcement, Ukrainian President Volodymyr  Zelensky – who didn’t take part in today’s discussion – declared that ‘Ukraine accepts this proposal, we consider it positive,

James Snell

Is this the deal that might give peace in Syria a chance?

A Kurdish-led rebel coalition which dominates north-eastern Syria has signed a deal with the interim government in Damascus. The agreement, which means the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) will look to hand over border posts and oil and gas fields under its control, recognises the Kurdish minority as ‘an integral part of the Syrian state’. Peace in Syria is now a little bit more likely. After a week of new threats to the stability of Syria, with hundreds killed in a series of massacres, this tentative deal is one that many thought might never happen. SDF commander Mazloum Abdi was not in his usual military garb when he signed the deal

Matthew Lynn

Does Trump want a stock market crash?

There ‘could be a recession’, said President Trump over the weekend with the kind of nonchalant shrug that suggested he was not too bothered one way or the other. He was even going to buy a Tesla to help out his ‘first buddy’ Elon Musk as the company’s share price collapsed. The markets had assumed there was a ‘Trump put’ – that is the President would always ride to the rescue to keep the bull market running. But there is no sign of it. Instead Trump seems perfectly relaxed about the huge losses, even encouraging the sell-off. Of course, it might just that he does not know what to do.

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Calin Georgescu is a victim of illiberal Europe

Violence erupted in Bucharest on Sunday evening after Romania’s Central Electoral Bureau disbarred Calin Georgescu from standing in May’s re-run presidential election. In a statement, the bureau justified its decision to exclude Georgescu on the grounds his candidature ‘doesn’t meet the conditions of legality’ because he ‘violated the very obligation to defend democracy’. Supporters of Georgescu, who has been described by the BBC as a ‘far-right, pro-Russia candidate’, gathered outside the Central Electoral Bureau to vent their fury, and they soon clashed with police. Until six months ago the name Georgescu was unknown outside Romania. Then the 62-year-old stormed to victory in the first round of November’s presidential election, a

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Migrants who hate Jews shouldn’t be allowed in Britain

If you’re a foreigner who hates Jews, should you be allowed to move to Britain? For me it’s a no-brainer: absolutely not. The safety and dignity of Britain’s Jews count for infinitely more than the ‘rights’ of a racist migrant. Does the Labour government agree? Does it agree that overseas anti-Semites are not welcome here? We are about to find out. There are disturbing reports emerging that a man from Gaza with very iffy views has arrived in Britain. He goes by the name Abu Wadee. He is said to be an ‘influencer’ with a substantial following on social media. Last week he reportedly posted a video of himself sporting

Monday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Rana Mitter on the legacy of Sun Yat-sen

43 min listen

Walking around Taipei a couple of years ago, I spotted a familiar sight – a bronze statue of a moustachioed man, cane in his right hand, left leg striding forward. The man is Sun Yat-sen, considered modern China’s founding father. I recognised the statue because a larger version of it stands in the city centre of Nanjing, the mainland Chinese city that I was born and raised in. That one figure can be celebrated across the strait, both in Communist PRC and Taiwanese ROC, is the curious legacy left behind by Sun. March 12th this year is the centenary of Sun’s death, so what better opportunity to look at his

Michael Evans

What Zelensky needs to do in Saudi Arabia

President Volodymyr Zelensky needs all the advice he can get, as he prepares for talks with American negotiators in Saudi Arabia tomorrow. A statement over the weekend from the Ukrainian presidential office disclosed that the latest western visitor to make the long train ride into Kyiv was Jonathan Powell, Sir Keir Starmer’s national security adviser and veteran crisis negotiator. The meeting between Powell and Andriy Yermak, the head of Zelensky’s office, provided further evidence that the UK is currently attempting to play an influential role in moderating what might seem, at present, to be a one-sided effort by the US to bludgeon the Ukrainian president into signing a deal to

Stephen Pollard

Why was Syria’s president ever treated like a centrist dad?

There’s an old journalistic maxim: If it bleeds, it leads. But some crucial words are missing from the end: If we can hold the Jews responsible. It’s not by chance that most news organisations have more correspondents in Israel than in the rest of the Middle East put together. True, that’s partly because Israel – unlike its neighbours – is a democracy which allows dissenting voices, and is home to and welcomes a cacophony of both homegrown and foreign media voices. If you want to cover the Middle East, you’ll likely base yourself in Israel. Al-Sharaa’s arrival as Syria’s de facto president was greeted not as the ascension to power

Jonathan Spyer

No one should be surprised about the Syrian massacres

Shock and outrage are appropriate, but no one really has an excuse for being surprised at the dreadful scenes that have emerged from Syria’s western coastal region in recent days. The civilian death toll is now thought to be somewhere above 750, with over 1,000 people killed in total (Alawi sources place the number much higher). Around 125 members of the Damascus regime’s security forces have also died. Video clips, many of them filmed by the perpetrators, show people in civilian clothes being summarily executed by Islamist gunmen; the humiliation of Syrian Alawi men and women; and the inevitable Sunni jihadi battle cries of ‘Allahu Akbar.’ The specifics of the

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

Will Trump cause a recession?

Donald Trump has refused to rule out an American recession. He ‘hates to predict things like this’, he said yesterday. When asked if a downturn was coming this year, the President responded that a ‘period of transition’ was on the cards. On Thursday last week the Atlanta Fed’s GDP ‘nowcast’ model was forecasting that America’s economy would shrink by 2.4 per cent in the first quarter of this year – a slight improvement on the 2.8 per cent contraction it had predicted three days earlier. If this reading for the first three months of 2025 proves to be true, and things don’t pick up shortly, could the USA be heading

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

What Reform can learn from France’s National Rally

The crisis currently ripping apart Reform is nothing new to Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party. Indeed, the reason her party is called the ‘National Rally’ is a result of her ‘dédiabolisation’ strategy, which aimed to soften the party’s image. Le Pen ditched its original moniker, the National Front, in early 2018, a few months after her comprehensive defeat to Emmanuel Macron in the presidential election run-off. Her father, Jean-Marie, who had co-founded the National Front in 1972, was furious, saying it was ‘totally absurd… a betrayal of the movement’s history’. It wasn’t the first time that father and daughter had fallen out over the party’s direction; in 2015 she

Jane Stannus

Mark Carney will be Canada’s Project Fear PM

Oh no, Canada. The maple smoke has floated up from the Liberal party’s headquarters, and the bad news is out: our new Prime Minister is Mark Carney, banker, Davos darling, and ruthless climate radical. It’s not even Canadians’ fault this time. Trudeau, admittedly, was. But Carney is a Liberal party pick, which sounds reasonable until you learn that the Liberal party didn’t require its members to hold Canadian citizenship – or even be an adult – to cast a ballot to replace Trudeau as leader. The vote took place online, and while around 400,000 people registered as party members, a glitch-ridden verification process meant only around 160,000 were cleared to vote. It’s