World

Ruaridh Nicoll

Cuba is next on Trump’s hit list

It’s hot in Havana. The summer’s electrical storms have arrived, lighting up the sky, while down on the ground we’ve been without power for 16 hours, meaning no sleep. The four-month-old US oil blockade is biting, but Cuba’s government still refuses to bend the knee to Washington, so surveillance aircraft are circling. An aircraft carrier, the USS Nimitz, has arrived in the neighborhood. We expect an attack at any moment. Donald Trump has made it clear that after Venezuela and Iran, Cuba is next on his list for decapitation. His administration wants a change of government and the economy opened up. Cuba’s 95-year-old ex-president Raúl Castro has been indicted for murder, opening the way for an abduction like the one in Caracas in January. "I do believe I’ll be...

cuba
Tim Shipman

Revealed: the missing Mandelson messages

Darren Jones has become the UK government’s Walter Model, the general known during World War Two as "the Führer’s fireman" for his deployment to shore up any position which appeared lost. In that capacity, Britain’s first Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister had the thankless task of presenting the government’s case to the House of Commons on Monday following the publication of 1,500 pages of documents relating to Peter Mandelson. Jones himself was spared direct embarrassment because none of his exchanges with the disgraced peer came to light in the trawl of memos, emails and WhatsApp exchanges.

mandelson
Lisa Haseldine

Russia is relying on drones to bring it victory in Ukraine

Earlier this week, Ukraine was subjected to one of the largest aerial assaults by Russia since the start of Vladimir Putin’s invasion over four years ago. Overnight from Monday into Tuesday, Russia sent 73 missiles and 656 drones into Ukraine, killing at least 21 and injuring dozens across the country. According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, this strike was retaliation for a Ukrainian attack on a vocational school in the occupied region of Luhansk on May 22. But, as the Kremlin’s war grinds on well into its fifth year, it also appears to signal a step change in how the Russian armed forces are choosing to fight.

russian
Cockburn

Andy Ogles goes both ways: congressman flip-flops on ‘homosexuality’ post

Andy Ogles, a Republican congressman from Tennessee, chose an unorthodox way to mark Pride month yesterday: by tweeting, “Homosexuality has no place in America. Happy Nuclear Family Month.” The backlash was swift and came from all quarters, even Ogles’s fellow Republicans. "The behavior of consenting adults is their business," Senator Ted Cruz said. "Andy, you have family, friends, neighbors, colleagues and constituents who are gay and lesbian," tweeted Representative Mike Lawler. "What an absolutely idiotic statement to make.” Some of those colleagues include Trump appointees such as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Under Secretary of State Jacob Helberg, as well as the President's top pollster Tony Fabrizio. Then came the climbdown.

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Ukraine

Theodore Griffin

Ukraine’s Jehovah’s Witnesses are refusing to go to war

Prison guards led Vitalii Kryschenko to an inhospitable, cramped cell. Inside, the prisoners were curious. They watched with great interest as Kryuschenko found his allotted place. A small, gentle man with a nervous expression, he wasn’t a typical criminal but a Jehovah’s Witness. Kryschenko was jailed by Ukrainian authorities for refusing to go to war; taking up arms is forbidden by his religion. He was now going to share his days with the very worst of Ukrainian society. This would include thieves, those guilty of assault or worse.  "I was living with murderers, people jailed for life," he said. "It was terrifying. On my first night, I asked myself how I would survive in these conditions. All the same, I continued my daily prayers and read the Bible.

ukraine
Svitlana Morenets

Putin’s nuclear escalation is a sign of desperation

As Vladimir Putin senses the momentum of the war shifting in Ukraine’s favor, he has redoubled his attempts to coerce Kyiv and its European partners. Russian troops are in retreat, losing territory overall for the first time since Ukraine launched its Kursk offensive in August 2024. Drone strikes have forced all of central Russia’s major oil refineries – accounting for a quarter of the country’s refining capacity – to halt or reduce output. Meanwhile, the cracks are beginning to show as Russians cease believing in their President, with some openly calling for an end to Putin’s so-called special military operation. His only available response, it seems, has been to resort to nuclear intimidation and threats of military confrontation with the Baltic states.

Charles Lipson

The tide has turned in Ukraine

The long war in Ukraine has morphed into a new and decisive phase, one that could lead to Ukraine’s upset victory over its much larger, more aggressive neighbor. The global consequences of Russia’s loss – and Vladimir Putin’s humiliation – would be enormous. What is this new phase? Is there really evidence the tide has turned in Ukraine’s favor? To sort out the answers and understand what’s new about the war’s current phase, we need to do a brief tour of the three phases that preceded it. The first phase began well over a decade ago, in February 2014, when Barack Obama was president. Ukraine fatefully signaled it wanted much stronger ties with Europe and the United States, not Russia, at the very moment US deterrence was weak.

Zelensky

Israel

Melanie McDonagh

It’s little surprise that an Israeli soldier was caught desecrating a crucifix

There’s something apposite, I suppose, about the desecration of a crucifix. In this case, it was an Israeli soldier in southern Lebanon who took a sledgehammer to one on private property and smashed the Jesus figure on the cross. The original crucifixion, as anyone who heard the gospels over Easter will recall, was marked by the humiliation of Jesus; this attack on the figure of one who took on suffering willingly was another humiliation, through the image. Mind you, if the charmer with the sledgehammer had reflected that the Christ-figure is, in Christian belief, not just God-made-man but God-made-Jew, he might have eased off a bit.

Jonathan Spyer

Israel won’t stop in Lebanon until Hezbollah is crushed

Direct US-brokered talks between Israeli and Lebanese representatives are set to take place in Washington this week. The Israeli delegation will be headed by Yehiel Leiter, Jerusalem’s ambassador to the US. Lebanon will be represented by Nada Hamadeh, the Lebanese ambassador to Washington. The State Department will host the negotiations. In his statement on Thursday announcing the talks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu framed their purpose as "disarming Hezbollah and establishing peaceful ‌relations between ⁠Israel and ⁠Lebanon." Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, for his part, expressed his hope that Beirut should become a "demilitarized city.

lebanon
Jonathan Spyer

Will Iran give Benjamin Netanyahu a wartime boost?

Israel’s current war on two fronts shows few signs of wrapping up soon. In Lebanon, the indications are that the IDF is looking to establish an expanded buffer zone north of the border, with the intention of holding it for as long as the government in Beirut fails to fulfill its pledge to disarm Hezbollah. In Iran, Israeli air attacks continue daily, even as Tehran's missiles and drones target Israel’s centers of civilian population. This year is an election year in Israel, with polls required by law to take place by October. So what impact, if any, are the conflicts having on the political debate inside Israel? Are they likely to decide the future political prospects of Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and if so, in what direction?

netanyahu

America

Europe

Andrew Doyle

Henry Nowak and the politics of deflection

While Britain is still reeling from the horrific murder of 18-year-old student Henry Nowak, an astonishing article has appeared in El País, Spain’s largest national newspaper. Rather than focus on the failures of the police officers, or the institutional bias within the force, the headline steers its readers away from the case and towards the outlet’s own obsessions. The headline translates as "Farage’s far right stirs up hatred in the UK after a young man is stabbed to death by a Sikh man." As Alejo Schapire (an Argentine journalist based in France) has pointed out, this is the first and only article produced by El País on the subject of the Nowak killing. Instead of an image of the victim, the newspaper has opted for a photograph of Nigel Farage.

henry nowak
Arnout Nuijt

Belgium has a free speech problem

The conviction by a Belgian court of far-right activist Dries Van Langenhove has alarmed both the country’s right and left. Van Langenhove – let there be no doubt – belongs to some of Belgium’s darker far-right movements. He has previously been convicted of racism and Holocaust denial. Yet he has now been fined €4,000, for what the judge described as  "apparently having the intention' to incite hatred and violence, rather than for a crime he was clearly proven to have committed. Bart Eeckhout, chief commentator of Belgium’s left-leaning daily De Morgen – certainly no friend of Van Langenhove – unexpectedly described the conviction for incitement to hatred, violence and racism as an injustice.

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Michael Evans

Should Europe mediate Russia-Ukraine talks?

The worst job in the world is to try negotiating with President Vladimir Putin to end the war in Ukraine to everyone’s satisfaction. Yet European leaders want to do just that. Frustrated by the failure of the Trump administration to negotiate anything of value with Putin, Europe is scurrying around looking for the ideal candidate to confront the Russian leader across the table and bash out a peace deal. It’s a fantasy world, of course. If Putin obstructed Trump, his old sparring partner, and never remotely got close to a deal with the Americans, why would he consider sitting down with some European leader, or ex-leader, to bring the four-year war to an end?

europe

Wednesday

Charles Cornish-Dale

France’s hidden immigration reality

A people was there, stable, occupying the same territory for fifteen or twenty centuries. And suddenly, very quickly, in one or two generations, one or more other peoples substitute themselves for it. It is replaced, it is no longer itself. Those are the words of Renaud Camus, France’s most controversial living intellectual. They describe a process he’s called “the Great Replacement.” He coined the term in 2010. Since then, the term has been bitterly disputed. Now, though, it’s becoming harder and harder to deny.

immigration

Tuesday

Jane Stannus

Canada is misremembering the Komagata Maru incident

Another day, another act of national self-abasement from the Canadian government. On May 23, it was all about the Komagata Maru incident, "a moment where Canada failed to uphold our values, with horrific consequences," according to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. Pierre Poilievre chimed in, calling it "a dark and shameful chapter in our history and a painful injustice." The official version is as follows: on May 23, 1914, 376 passengers of the SS Komagata Maru arrived in Vancouver, hoping for a better life. But because of racist Canadian immigration policy, most were denied entry. They waited for two months in the harbor with limited access to food, water and medical care, but were eventually forced to leave.

komagata maru
mexican
Joshua S. Treviño

How the US is taking on Mexico’s narco-politicians

Soberanía is non-negotiable. That’s what Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum repeats time and again, at her mañaneras, at speeches, at rallies, on television and in person. She says it, her government says it, her political party says it, her apparatus says it. The agents of the United States of America must never, ever set foot on Mexican soil in any operational capacity. The sovereignty of the nation comes first – even before the security of the nation, even before the nation’s own capacity to police itself, even before the safety and lives of its own citizens. As Sheinbaum herself has noted, the first American intervención in Mexico cost the country half its territory.

Sunday

Michael Day

Don’t forget the evil of the Iranian regime

America’s war on Iran was supposed to give Iranians their freedom. But even in February, at the start of the conflict, the prospects for regime change seemed doubtful. Now hardline IRGC generals appear to be calling the shots. They’ve used the war as a pretext to go after opponents and increase the Islamic Republic’s repression to horrific new levels. More than 6,000 people, including protesters, journalists, lawyers, human rights defenders, dissidents and members of ethnic and religious minorities have been detained under the guise of national security. Many are executed after being dragged through kangaroo courts.

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Friday

Rod Liddle

The secret shame of being ‘Reform-curious’

As a sucker for any melody which relies heavily upon fourth and eighth notes hammered out on a piano, I was always going to fall for Billy Joel’s 1978 hit single "My Life." The lyrics were, as ever with Joel, awful, mixing his cringeworthy ordinary guy New York vernacular shtick with what I dare say he thought were original and profound psychological insights. He is such a hack singer-songwriter. He makes Neil Diamond resemble Wittgenstein. But the tune made me swoon, even its two predictable cod-Beatles middle eights. What to do? Obviously, I couldn’t buy it. There were four record shops in Middlesbrough back then and I was known in all of them.

William Cook

My annual pilgrimage along the route of the Berlin Wall

Each time I return to Berlin – that wonderful, awful city where I whiled away the best days of my misspent youth – I take a walk along the cobbled path that marks the route of the Berlin Wall. Half a lifetime since it came tumbling down, there isn’t much left to see. A few stretches have been preserved as memorials, but it’s mainly an absence not a presence – a ghostly gap between the backs of buildings, a fissure between past and present, between the hard truths of the last century and the uneasy ambiguities of today. Why do I persist with this melancholy Wanderung, year after year? Because a walk along the Mauerweg (as Berliners call that zigzag footpath) is the best way to take the temperature of this Faustian metropolis.

Berlin Wall
Fr. Alexander Lucie-Smith

The rise of the cartel cults

“And this,” I was told, five minutes after arriving in Mexico, “is where they murdered the Archbishop.” I was at the entrance to the car park at Guadalajara airport. The archbishop was Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo, who died in a hail of bullets on May 24, 1993, along with six other people. He was murdered for daring to criticize the cartels, at least according to the official narrative. There are other theories: he may have been caught in crossfire between rival cartels, or it may have been a case of mistaken identity, and Posadas was assumed to be a cartel head, many of whom, presumably, look like archbishops; or else it was the work of the government itself, which feared Posadas knew too much about its collusion with the cartels.

cults
Daniel DePetris

Are Trump and Netanyahu heading for a showdown?

Depending on which day it is, the ongoing peace talks between the United States and Iran are either a few days away from being finalized or close to hitting another roadblock. The status of the negotiations fluctuates about as much as Donald Trump’s mood swings. For those on the outside looking in, the whole storyline can be discombobulating. It doesn’t help that US and Iran are still taking pop-shots at each other. Early on Thursday morning, Tehran attacked a US base in response to a fresh round of US strikes on an Iranian base in Bandar Abbas.  Fortunately, the shooting is not killing the diplomacy – at least not yet. There does appear to be a general framework on the table.

netanyahu

Thursday

Ed West

What is ‘Q Manivannan’ doing in British politics?

In an age full of nepobaby second-generation politicians posing as "outsiders," new Green Party MSP "Q Manivannan" is the real thing. Indeed, the St. Andrew’s postgraduate is so much of an outsider that he doesn’t even hold British citizenship or permanent residency, and is unable to take up paid employment as a condition of his student visa. "Q" was allowed to stand for office last month because the Scottish government – the Wuhan Lab of terrible ideas in UK politics – recently changed the rules allowing foreigners with only limited leave to remain to compete in elections. Although Manivannan faced a probe into his visa, the powers-that-be ruled that being a politician wasn’t a real job.

Michael Murphy

Ireland is desperate for its own George Floyd moment

Ireland is in the midst of its own "George Floyd moment." At least, that’s how a string of international headlines have portrayed the death of Yves Sakila, a Congolese shoplifter who was pronounced dead in hospital after being restrained by security guards, one of whom appeared to kneel on his head or neck. The circumstances of the 35-year-old’s death are being investigated, but, as yet, there is no evidence it resulted from racism or excessive force. Court records show Sakila had a history of theft, and a post-mortem reportedly found no signs of foul play or visible injuries on his body. That has not stopped activists and parts of the establishment from co-opting a personal tragedy to fuel a campaign of racial grievance.

Wednesday

Gavin Mortimer

France’s migration crisis will outlast Emmanuel Macron

France has maxed out on migrants. It’s a message that Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party has been pushing for years, but it’s one now endorsed by the government’s Justice Minister. In an interview with a newspaper at the weekend, Gérald Darmanin declared that the Republic has "reached the limits of our capacities for integration and assimilation." Darmanin believes that a three-year suspension of legal immigration is the answer, and in particular he wants a crackdown on the policy of family reunification. Introduced in 1976, the policy allowed migrants – mainly from North Africa – who came to France to work to also bring their family. "We must put an end to immigration as it exists today," said Darmanin.

france
Andrew Tate
Margaret Mitchell

The rise of the Orienfluencers

The term “Orientalism” has always implied some kind of caricature of the eastern world. It was originally coined as a way of describing how the West imagines the East as its negative to shore up self-confidence and justify conquest: “The Oriental is irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, ‘different’; thus the European is rational, virtuous, mature, “normal,’” Edward Said wrote in Orientalism. Now, reverse “the Oriental” and “the European” and you have an idea of the new Orientalism, where the enlightened East becomes the foil to a decadent, violent, barbaric West. The new Orientalists aren’t academics, policymakers or Wall Street Journal opinion columnists.

Tuesday

Fredrik Karrholm

Why Greta is so angry about Swedish immigration

Greta Thunberg is 23 years old. Six years have passed since her emotional address to the UN Climate Action Summit about the end of the world. She has since shifted her attention from climate activism to one fashionable left-wing cause after another, but her tone is as shrill as ever. The other day, she denounced Sweden’s migration policy as inhumane. Her conclusions, as usual, wrong. But she is at least right about one thing: Sweden has adopted an entirely new migration policy. In Sweden, the system has until now often penalized the honest and rewarded the dishonest For years, Sweden took more asylum seekers per capita than any other country in Europe. Now asylum numbers have fallen to their lowest level since 1985, even as pressure across the rest of the continent remains immense.

Philip Patrick

Japan isn’t as safe as you think

I was robbed in Tokyo recently, an experience as unexpected as it was distressing. Despite long years in London, plus decades of rough and ready globetrotting to some of the sketchiest places on earth, I have never been a victim in any of these notorious crime hotspots (I feel snubbed especially by London), but this was the second such experience in supposedly the safest city in the world.   What are the odds? The first time I dropped my wallet in a branch of the bargain bucket Don Quijote store and later received a phone call from the staff saying they had it, with ID cards intact but 50,000 yen gone.

Saturday

Ian Evans

Welcome to Transnistria: the country that’s not a country

I’ve been on holiday to a country that doesn’t officially exist. It has its own border, passport, flag, currency and army but no one recognizes it – not even its main sponsor, Vladimir Putin. Transnistria is sandwiched between its proper motherland Moldova – which is itself really Romania – and Ukraine, which Putin thinks is part of his motherland. Confused? It doesn’t get any easier.  In 1992 there was a short war between the newly created state of Moldova and separatist, ethnic Russians which resulted in nearly 1,000 deaths and the breakaway "country" (via a peace accord) policed by Russian "peacekeepers.

Transnistria
Matthew Palmer

Inside the Ukrainian army’s art division

The Ukrainian Cultural Forces’ headquarters is situated above a non-descript shopping center not far outside downtown Kyiv. The walls are covered in artwork and photographs, sculptures are dotted about; the initial impression is of a university arts department, though with more security and military figures. Officially part of the Ukrainian Army, though independently set up and run, the Cultural Forces employs artists, musicians, publishers and data analysts. They are something between an artistic collective, an information operations unit and a wartime parallel to the UK’s British Council. Their remit is broad and continually expanding.

Thursday

Geoff Hill

Why the Pentagon has Nigeria in its sights

For the Pentagon, Nigeria is firmly on the list of countries where terror has run amok. In 2025 and again in January and May this year, the US Air Force bombed rebel camps in the north in an effort to halt a spree of murders and abductions that has left thousands dead or missing. US bombings earlier this week killed Islamic State’s second in command, Abu Bakr al-Mainuki, but the insurgency shows no sign of slowing; 17 trainees died recently in an attack on the army’s special forces academy and the conflict has spread to nearby Mali. In Nigeria, keeping the peace is a challenge. Since independence from Britain in 1960, there have been six coups and a civil war.

Nigeria
andrew
Alexander Larman

Why did the Queen push for Andrew to become a trade envoy?

The Andrew formerly known as "Prince" was always supposedly his mother’s favorite child. He had a degree of indulgence paid to him that his (far more deserving) siblings never received. Newly released files suggest that this indulgence went far beyond any kind of explicable or appropriate fashion. Correspondence between Sir David Wright, chief executive of British Trade International, and then-foreign secretary Robin Cook from 2000 suggests that the late Queen was "very keen" for the former Duke of York to take on a "prominent role in the promotion of national interests." This, in turn, led to the creation of "Air Miles Andy," with Mountbatten-Windsor acting as a roving trade envoy.

Owen Matthews

Russia is becoming embarrassingly dependent on Beijing

A week after Donald Trump was greeted in Beijing by well-orchestrated crowds of flag-waving schoolchildren, it was Vladimir Putin’s turn to pay a visit to China’s Red Emperor. Protocol-watchers spotted a distinctly lower level of pomp and circumstance afforded to Putin than to Trump – though Kremlin media were quick to emphasize that this was a working meeting, the latest of over 40 Putin-Xi summits over the last two decades.  Both sides paid formal homage to the ongoing strength of the Dragon-Bear alliance. Xi observed that relations between Beijing and Moscow were at "the highest level of comprehensive strategic partnership," as he called on both countries to oppose "all unilateral bullying" in the international arena.

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

What does Massie’s loss say about the future of the right?

Congressman Thomas Massie, one of the most vocal Republican critics of Donald Trump lost his fight for re-election in Kentucky to a Trump-backed challenger. Freddy is joined by Spectator contributors Daniel McCarthy and Christopher Caldwell to discuss where Thomas Massie went wrong, how corruption centered around the campaign, whether or not Trump's success is a reflection of the upcoming midterms and the way Europe reacts to Trump more broadly.

What does Massie’s loss say about the future of the right?