Us politics

If you thought the last two years of transatlantic relations were bad, things are about to get even worse. Donald Trump and his hard-charging secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, have scheduled a Middle East security conference for February 13th and 14th. Poland, perhaps the only country in Europe that looks fondly upon Trump as a world leader, will be hosting the two-day affair. Normally, this is the kind of multilateral event European heads-of-state are more than happy to participate in. Not so this one. Trump plan to elevate Iran’s destabilising actions in the region as a principle – perhaps the principle – topic during the conference is giving senior European officials cold feet

For Angela Merkel, the chief guardian of Europe’s centrist politics, 2018 was a year of tribulation – and she admits it. In her New Year’s speech, the German chancellor acknowledged the hardship of the last twelve months while begging her countrymen to unite in the year ahead. “We will only master the challenges of our times if we stick together and collaborate with others across borders,” Merkel told the German people in what can only viewed as a call for the country to come together. Merkel’s words, however, don’t only apply to Germany. Europe as a whole is entering 2019 with many people agnostic about the European Union, exhausted with the familiar

For Silicon Valley, 2018 was defined by one impossible question: should there be limits to free speech on the internet? The first amendment is hardwired into the (American) CEOs of the big three social media sites: Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. Each platform grew its user-base with a “words can never hurt me” attitude. Back in 2012, Twitter defined itself as the “free speech wing of the free speech party”; Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has defended his users’ right to be wrong – even for Holocaust deniers. For years, social media platforms allowed posts that could arguably inspire real-life violence in the US, Germany and in Myanmar. But now things are

The past few months have been testing for the so-called special relationship. President Trump’s visit to the UK ended in disaster for Theresa May when the US President gave an interview to the Sun in which he declared that her proposed Brexit deal would kill any chance of a UK/US trade deal. However, not all Cabinet ministers had a wholly bad experience. On Tuesday night, Mr S headed along to Jeremy Hunt’s Foreign Office Christmas reception at Lancaster House – also known as the ‘Foreign Secretary’s leadership launch,’ according to a fellow Cabinet minister. In his speech, Hunt told guests how his own relationship with Trump had flourished on that

The US secretary of state Mike Pompeo strutted into Brussels yesterday like a man on a mission. His task was almost impossible from the start: to convince America’s friends and allies in Europe that the United States under Donald Trump is still the leader of the liberal world order European politicians care so deeply about. It’s difficult to believe Pompeo convinced anyone. America’s top diplomat could have done what many of his predecessors have chosen to do: tell the European foreign policy community to relax and take a deep breath, America won’t be throwing you to the wolves. Instead, Pompeo was far more confrontational, channeling the fire and brimstone of his

Twenty years ago almost no one in the West had heard of Female Genital Mutilation. Then in the 2000s, thanks to a few brave and vocal campaigners like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, knowledge of this barbaric practice began to spread. Originally there was some queasiness about taking up the subject at all. Lawmakers and opinion formers took a while to work out their line. There was an early question mark over whether FGM wasn’t just the same as male circumcision. Most people swiftly learned that the difference was, gynaecologically speaking, almost everything. There were some hold-outs among people who thought that since FGM was practiced among Muslims there might be something

As Theresa May prepares to unveil her Brexit deal, we ask: just how bad is it, and what happened to ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’? In the American midterms, the Blue Wave didn’t happen, but Democrats did take control of the House of Representatives – what next for Trump’s presidency? And last, as we approach Remembrance Sunday, who are the lives we are remembering, and is it time to move on? First, Theresa May is serving up two unpalatable options on Brexit – her deal or no deal. If we take her deal, Britain risks being tied to the EU forever through the customs union; but if

Midterm elections are traditionally nightmares for the party of a sitting president. Just ask former president Bill Clinton, who suffered the humiliation of seeing his Democratic Party lose 54 seats during Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Republican Revolution. Ask George W. Bush, whose blunders in Iraq cost the GOP control of both chambers of Congress in 2006. Or maybe ask Barack Obama, who candidly admitted after the electoral disaster of 2010 (in which the GOP picked up 63 seats on their way to capturing the House) that he needed to do a better job presiding over America’s economic recovery. Democrats and the thousands of hungry progressives who canvassed for them certainly hoped