America

Questions are growing over who knew what, and when, about the hospitalisation of the American Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin, the most senior official in the chain of command between the president and the military. Austin was taken to hospital on New Year’s Day but the news was kept secret. Astonishingly, even president Joe Biden does not appear to have been told that Austin was unwell until last Thursday, four days after his admission to the Walter Reed National Medical Center in Maryland. Key figures in the Pentagon and members of Congress were also kept in the dark, and only informed on Friday. There have even been claims that senior members of his

To write that George Floyd died is to take a position. The received belief is that he was murdered – a murder bigger, in its consequences, than any other crime for decades. Unlike the relatively muted protests against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the streets of the world hosted men and women passionate in their denunciation of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, whose detention in May 2020 of Floyd by, apparently, kneeling on his neck for around ten minutes, had killed him.  Chauvin became a synecdoche for the perceived repressions of the state – any state, from South Africa to Germany, no matter how strongly committed to democratic governance and civil rights. In Melbourne, in

It’s fright month in Joe Biden’s America, folks. Today, 5 January, the US President will travel to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, to mark the third anniversary of the riot on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on 6 January 2021. He would have done it on the day but the event had to be rescheduled due to an incoming storm. Biden also likes to rest on the weekends.  Still, near the spot where George Washington and his continental army survived the brutal Revolutionary War winter of 1777-78, the increasingly ethereal 46th president will endeavour to summon the tough ghosts of America’s founding. He will deliver yet another warning about the petrifying threat which

A month ago, Claudine Gay of Harvard University was obsessed with putting things into context. Asked at that now infamous Congressional hearing on campus anti-Semitism whether calling for a genocide of the Jews is a violation of Harvard’s code of conduct, Gay said it would depend on the context. Her remarks raised eyebrows worldwide. The idea that there are some contexts in which it might not be a violation of Harvard’s code of conduct to say ‘Kill all Jews’ made many wonder what the hell is going on at that university. Fast forward four weeks and now Gay seems content to do away with context completely. Consider her resignation letter

A new year is a good time for nations, like families, to review the institutions they support. For 2024 I have a suggestion for the UK: it could do worse than standing back and considering hard how it should deal in future with the United Nations and its offshoots. We’re not talking here about leaving the UN as a whole. Except for the lunatic Republican fringe in the United States, there is no serious call for any country to do this. Indeed, there are legal doubts about whether this is even possible, the charter being silent on the matter. (Indonesia purported to quit in the 1960s, but it soon changed

A French member of the board of Airbus – the giant European aircraft and aerospace group – once told me that the French thought of it as their company while the Germans thought it theirs. In reality, both countries own it: the French state owns 11 per cent of Airbus capital, Germany 10.9 per cent and Spain 4.17 per cent, with the remaining shares quoted on Euronext. Assembly of Airbus planes from across Europe takes place in Toulouse, where the company’s operational headquarters are located, but the company’s official registered headquarters are in Leiden, Netherlands. For Brussels, Airbus is a model of European integration and EU strategic autonomy. But the invisible

In the United States, presidential elections are rarely won or lost on foreign policy. Domestic matters like the economy, crime, and the overall state of the country are far more relevant to candidates. Even so, incumbents can’t allow the world to degenerate in front of them. Just ask Jimmy Carter, whose 1980 campaign against challenger Ronald Reagan shrivelled away in part to the lingering Iranian hostage crisis. As Joe Biden looks to 2024, his administration is juggling a cornucopia of conflicts, challenges and crises. Whether events outside America’s borders will help or hurt him at the polls next November is anyone’s guess. But there is a sense that the next

Anti-Semitism is surging among the young. It is now positively hip to view Jews as ‘problematic’. Consider the recent Harvard/Harris poll which found that 67 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds in the US view Jews as an ‘oppressor class’. If that doesn’t send a chill down your spine, then I humbly suggest you read a few more history books. The poll results have horrified observers, as well they might. ‘Do you think that Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors or is that a false ideology?’, people were asked. ‘Oppressors’, answered two-thirds of the Gen Z respondents. Welcome to the era of TikTok fascism.

In November 2020, Oregon passed Measure 110, decriminalising non-commercial drug possession. The state also significantly increased funding for recovery and harm reduction programmes. It sounded like a great plan to voters, so it passed with 60 per cent approval. The deadliest, most addictive drug in history was introduced to a vulnerable population just as the state decriminalised drugs What has occurred though over the last three years is nothing short of tragic. When Measure 110 passed, fentanyl was starting to take over our streets. For homeless addicts it began as a general curiosity, which quickly devolved into the widespread use of the deadliest drug in history. Fentanyl is 50 times stronger

Hunter Biden was lost and now he’s found. That was the subtext of the president’s prodigal son’s speech outside Congress yesterday. ‘For six years, I have been the target of the unrelenting Trump attack machine shouting ‘Where’s Hunter?’,’ Hunter Biden told reporters. ‘Well, here is my answer, I am here.’ If Hunter’s statement was meant to put the Republicans on the back foot, it did not work. House Republicans James Comer and Jim Jordan vowed instead to launch contempt of congress proceedings against Hunter. Hours later, the thin Republican majority in Congress voted to formalise its impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden. The impeachment inquiry process, Republicans insist, will give Congress

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to Washington a year ago was a love-fest, characterised by standing ovations from American politicians, lavish praise from president Biden and a commitment to keep the aid flowing. His visit this week, however, occurred in a much different atmosphere. The politics of Ukraine aid have changed, with a growing number of Republican lawmakers wondering whether sending more taxpayer dollars to underwrite a stalemate is a wise course of action. While Ukraine’s cause has received a better hearing in the senate, Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, is intent on using the Biden administration’s $106 billion (£85 billion) national security supplemental request (more than half of which is

No amount of presidential bluster or White House spin can disguise the fact that the Biden administration appears increasingly clueless about what to do about the war in Gaza. Having tied US policy to Israel’s war aims – specifically the destruction of Hamas – US president Joe Biden now finds himself in a tight spot as the death toll in Gaza continues to rise. It is not entirely his fault: backing Israel – both militarily and  politically – is  a longstanding pillar of US Middle East policy, regardless of which political party is in power. Biden was merely reaffirming this when he stood behind Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’ in the wake

At 6.30 p.m. on Thursday 16 December 1773, a group of between 100 and 150 Americans raided three East India Company merchantmen moored in Boston and threw 92,000lb of tea (worth $1.7 million in today’s terms) into the harbour. A central part of the American founding story, the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party is being commemorated this month as a key moment when patriotic Americans fought back against the greedy British and their oppressive taxation policies that forced up prices on commodities such as tea, which in turn led to the American Revolution. The ‘Sons of Liberty’ were essentially the henchmen of the rich smuggler-barons who were faced

There are many rituals surrounding the placement of a new Japanese Emperor on the Chrysanthemum Throne. Perhaps the most peculiar is the would-be emperor’s encounter with aquasi-sacred, 1300-year-old bronze mirror, the Yata no Kagami. This object, which embodies ‘wisdom’, is so enigmatic the aspirant emperor isn’t even allowed to see it; instead, functionaries are sent to assure the mirror of the new emperor’s fidelity. Some historians believe the mirror no longer exists, and was lost in a fire in Honshu’s Ise Shrine, 980 years ago. Thus it is with Labour leaders and Margaret Thatcher. Ever since the departure of the Iron Lady, aspiring or actual Labour prime ministers have made obeisance to the strange, overpowering ghost of British politics, years after her retirement and death, when her continued omnipresence is therefore a kind of Zen mystery. Tony Blair, as ever, got in his fealty precociously early. As a young Labour frontbencher, he expressed his high regard for her election winning clarity,

Sans Trump, the Republican presidential debates of 2023 have mostly been piddling contests in a shallow pool. We’ve seen nasty insults — most aimed at or directed by Vivek Ramaswamy — and that’s fun to watch. But you can catch those bits on social media and the rest hasn’t been worth tuning in for. Maybe the problem isn’t just the lack of the Big Orange on stage. Maybe it’s just that the TV debate format doesn’t really work in the internet age. It’s never a battle of compelling ideas. It’s a clash of off-putting egos, each looking to land the big viral moment. DeSantis is just hard to like: he

The next few weeks will be filled with remembrances, fulsome appreciations, and harsh criticism of Henry Alfred Kissinger, who died on Wednesday at 100. His prominence is well deserved. The only modern secretaries of state who rank with him are George C. Marshall and Dean Acheson, who constructed the architecture of Cold War containment in the late 1940s. Kissinger’s central achievement was updating that architecture to include China, less as an American ally than as a Russian adversary. Until the late 1960s, Washington and Beijing had seen each other as bitter foes, not only because they had fought each other in the Korean War but because they represented the era’s two

Javier Milei, Argentina’s anti-establishment, pro-dollarisation and pro-privatisation president, is already making a splash. Milei, who won a surprise victory in the country’s election on Sunday, said in his campaign that the future of the Falklands ‘cannot be ignored’. The islands, he said, must be returned to Argentina. It didn’t take long for Britain to hit back. ‘The Falkland Islands are British. That is non-negotiable and undeniable,’ defence secretary Grant Shapps wrote on Twitter/ X this morning. Brits – and Argentines – should brace themselves for much more of these bust ups now that Milei is in charge. But the future of the Falklands is likely to be far down the

Vice presidents are meant to be dependable – and in a funny way Kamala Harris is exactly that. Joe Biden knows that, no matter how bad his poll numbers, hers will be worse: she’s the most unpopular vice president since polling began, according to one recent survey. Biden can afford to be pitifully vague in public partly because she is so painfully annoying. He loses his thread; she loses the plot.  That’s one of the reasons why, for all the alarm in Washington circles about the Commander-in-Chief’s ‘job performance’ and the distinct possibility that he might lose to Donald Trump next year, the Biden-Harris ticket seems locked in place for