Politics

When the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) expires tomorrow, the United States and Russia will, for the first time since the early 1970s, operate without a binding agreement limiting their strategic nuclear forces. That fact alone is striking. What is less obvious – and more consequential – is what the expiration reveals about the state of nuclear order in a world increasingly shaped by authoritarian ambition and multipolar competition. Signed in 2010, New START capped each side at 1,550 deployed strategic warheads and restricted the number of missiles and bombers that could carry them. Equally important were the verification provisions: inspections and data exchanges designed to reduce uncertainty

One of the enduring myths about Donald Trump is that he is an isolationist: a president bent on dismantling alliances and hauling up the drawbridge on America’s engagement with the world. The reality is more unsettling. Trump’s instincts may incline toward retrenchment, but they coexist with a pugnacious temperament and a visceral conception of American honor. Given that volatile combination, it is easy to imagine an adversary taunting him out of restraint – or a well-meaning but insufficiently sensitive ally, or even an unprovoked emotional spasm, producing the same effect. After that, who knows where events might lead? Over the past year of his second presidency, Trump has authorised the

It’s been a cherished belief of progressives over the decades that you change the way we think, and in turn transform society, by changing the kind of language we use. This stretches back to a 1980s strand of feminism determined to jettison default masculine terms such as “chairman” and “headmaster” and replace them with gender-neutral equivalents. Then there are today’s hyper-liberals, who believe they can erase binary thinking on sex by introducing expressions such as “pregnant people” or forgo “he” and “she” altogether and substitute everywhere with “they.” Many radicals have imagined that linguistic revolution is essential to actual revolution. Unfortunately for these idealists, new research suggests that their faith has

The news broke this morning that Donald Trump has, after considerable deliberation, settled on Kevin Warsh as his nominee to replace Jerome Powell as chairman of the Federal Reserve. “I have known Kevin for a long period of time,” said Trump, on Truth Social. “There’s no doubt that he will go down as one of the GREAT Fed Chairmen, maybe the best.” “On top of everything else,” added the Commander-in-Chief, “he is ‘central casting’ and he will never let you down.” The use of the phrase “central casting” shows Trump’s reality TV brain at work. The President likes people in major government positions who look the part on screen. Inevitably,

The collective memory of Donald Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen has, for most Americans, been buried if not entirely forgotten.  Donald Trump, however, is not the sort of man who moves on from such matters. In his mind, Crooked Joe Biden stole the election from him through widespread voter fraud, at the heart of which was Fulton County, Georgia. And now a succession of court battles that started with him in the dock is ending with Team Trump doing the prosecuting.  The FBI and his Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, have raided a warehouse in Fulton stuffed with 2020 votes and taken them away in trucks.

For years, we have heard rumors that Ramzan Kadyrov, dictator of Chechnya, is mortally ill. Unlike the lurid tales about Vladimir Putin, these rumors appear to be true, and the Kremlin is bracing itself for a potential succession crisis at the very worst time. This week, one of the official news agencies even quietly updated their canned obituary of him, just in case. This means Putin may soon face a fearsome dilemma: risk losing Chechnya or lose what momentum he has in Ukraine? Daudov won Ramzan’s favor by literally bringing him the head of rebel Suleyman Elmurzayev, who had claimed responsibility for the murder of his father Kadyrov has had