World

Friday

Owen Matthews

Europe has left Ukraine living on borrowed time

Russia started the war on Ukraine, so Russia should pay for the damage it has wrought. Such was Volodymyr Zelensky’s forceful message to European leaders last night as he pleaded for a "reparations loan" backed by the €190 billion ($222 billion) of Russian Central Bank capital frozen in a Belgian clearing bank since Putin’s full-scale invasion. "Just as authorities confiscate money from drug traffickers and seize weapons from terrorists, Russian assets must be used to defend against Russian aggression and rebuild what was destroyed by Russian attacks," Zelensky told his European allies. "It’s moral. It’s fair. It’s legal." But after negotiations that went late into the night, Europe ultimately shied away from grabbing Russia’s money.

zelensky loan ukraine

Thursday

Alan Dershowitz

How Donald Trump could serve a third term

The 22nd Amendment leaves open several possible ways a two-term president could serve all or part of a third term without being elected. The text of that amendment, as ratified, prohibits a two-term president from “being elected” to a third term, but it doesn’t prohibit him from “serving,” “acting” or “holding” that office. Indeed, the framers explicitly rejected broader exclusionary language that would have made it constitutionally impossible for a two-term president to get anywhere near the Oval Office. Instead they accepted a compromise that created a loophole bigger than the new ballroom in the East Wing of the White House.This doesn’t mean that President Trump will actually run for a third term. He has told the media that he won’t.

Donald Trump
Terry Barnes

Anthony Albanese has failed to step up after the Bondi beach attack

It’s been three days since the jihad against innocent Jews at Sydney’s Bondi beach. A nation’s grief is swiftly turning to anger and Australia’s prime minister is floundering. As more is learned about the father-and-son killers who took 15 lives and wounded many more, questions are piling up. How did the father enter the country? How did security agencies lose track of the son, who not only imbibed his father’s Jew hate, but may have been further radicalized by reportedly studying with one of Sydney’s most notorious Islamist hate preachers? How did they manage to go to a militant area of the Philippines as recently as a month ago? How did the father manage to hold a gun license, given his own history and that of his son?

Wednesday

Ani Chkhikvadze

Boris Johnson: will cowardly Europe betray Ukraine again?

Boris Johnson has urged European leaders to hand $247 billion of frozen Russian central bank assets to Ukraine – but says he fears they “lack the courage” to do so, in an interview with The Spectator. The former British prime minister also warned that Trump is at risk of “morally polluting” himself if he caves to Putin’s demands in peace negotiations and encouraged his negotiating team to stop the “nauseating deals” they are discussing about joint business ventures.“I think Europe is at a very difficult point because Europe has got to do the reparations alone,” Johnson said. “And I'm worried that they lack the courage. They must do it. I think that's the only way to get the Americans to take Europe seriously.

Boris Johnson
Avi Loeb

The scientific case for the existence of intelligent alien life

The foundation of science is based on the humility to learn, not the arrogance of expertise. When comet experts argued that the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS must be a familiar water-rich comet as soon as it was discovered in July, they behaved like artificial intelligence systems: only able to reflect the data sets they were trained on. For decades, the data set that established comet expertise largely comprised icy rocks in the solar system. My counterpoint is simple: humanity launched technological objects into space, so we must conclude that alien life forms could do the same. This possibility must be added to the training data set of comet experts when studying interstellar objects.

Christopher Caldwell

European leaders have changed their tune on war

Ten days after Thanksgiving, news watchers were exposed to one of the more culturally incongruous images in recent history: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and French President Emmanuel Macron beaming in front of the British Prime Minister’s house at 10 Downing Street, giving each other the locked-thumbs handshake familiar to African-American jazz musicians and professional athletes of the 1970s. Right on, brother! At that moment, according to Ukrainian media, thousands of Zelensky’s soldiers had been encircled by Russian troops near the city of Pokrovsk (or Krasnoarmiisk, as it may well soon be renamed). Large gaps were appearing in the Ukrainian front, desertions were rising and Russians appeared to be opening a new front east of Kharkiv.

european leaders
Owen Matthews

Only the US is taking peace seriously in Ukraine

What exactly is the "platinum security guarantee" that Donald Trump is pushing Volodymyr Zelensky to accept? While the full details remain confidential, the deal is described as an "Article 5 style" guarantee after the clause in NATO’s charter that states that "an armed attack against one NATO member shall be considered an attack against all members" and triggers "an obligation for each member to come to its assistance." Sounds reassuring. Except that little weasel word "style" covers an abyss of real-world back-pedaling and caveats. For a start, NATO’s charter does not oblige members to actually take military action if one is attacked but instead leaves that decision to individual states.

Rod Liddle

The West has become ungovernable

My favorite opinion poll of recent times was the one which showed that Donald Trump is disliked by more than 90 percent of Danes. This is a glorious achievement and one of which the President should be proud, and perhaps boast about from time to time – averse though he may be to boasting, of course. This was the lowest favorability rating for Trump anywhere in Yerp and I suppose is partly occasioned by his determination to pry Greenland from the grasp of these ineffably smug Scandis because they have no idea what to do with it and have mismanaged its meager affairs for decades. A personal admission: I cannot stand Danes.

Michela Wrong

A late Congolese ruler with a new following

At the exit of the National Museum in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), is a whiteboard for visitors to leave their comments. On that whiteboard, full of underlinings and exclamation marks, are messages like this: “Thank you for your life.” “Thank you for our national unity.” “You left behind a glorious historical legacy. We plan to follow in your footsteps.” A giant photograph of the man the messages refer to hangs in the museum’s main hall as part of its new exhibition, a man in dark glasses and leopard-skin toque, smiling down at his people. More than 28 years after fleeing into exile, Mobutu Sese Seko, once known as “The Leopard” and “The Great Helmsman,” is back in the limelight in the DRC.

The Spectator

Portrait of the year

January For three weeks wildfires raged around Los Angeles. Perhaps 30 people were killed but 200,000 were evacuated, 18,000 homes and structures destroyed and 57,529 acres burnt. Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 47th President. On his first day he issued about 1,500 pardons for people charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol in 2021; he created the Department of Government Efficiency (DoGE), led by Elon Musk; he signed executive orders on gender and immigration and withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization. The state funeral of Jimmy Carter, the 39th president, was held in Washington, DC. Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire and the return of hostages held in Gaza.

William Moore

Jung Chang: what the West gets wrong about China

No writer has done more than Jung Chang to bring the horrors of Maoist China to the attention of western readers. In her monumental memoir Wild Swans (1991), she recounted the Chinese Communist Revolution, the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution through the stories of her grandmother, her mother and herself. Its influence was enormous: Wild Swans sold more than 15 million copies, making it one of the best-selling nonfiction books of all time. In Mao: The Unknown Story (2005), co-written with her husband, the historian Jon Halliday, she blew apart decades of Chinese Communist party propaganda to reevaluate Mao as one of history’s greatest monsters, as bad, if not worse, than Hitler or Stalin.

Tuesday

Roger Kimball

America’s free-speech war on the EU

If I were a bookie, I would be making odds now about when the European Union will finally unravel and die. Unless there is an imminent and drastic course correction, the blessed event cannot be far off.  I might need a Doomsday Clock akin to the one publicized by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Their clock hovers near midnight, which signifies nuclear Armageddon, the minute hand pushed closer or farther away from the blast depending on minatory world events. My clock would measure the EU’s proximity to implosion. Its recent decision to fine Elon Musk and his company X €120 million for “non-compliance with transparency obligations” has me nudging the minute hand closer to midnight. “Non-compliance with transparency obligations.” What do you reckon that means?

William Atkinson, Lara Brown and John Power

Peter Thiel predicts the future

Peter Thiel has been described variously as “America’s leading public intellectual,” the “architect of Silicon Valley’s contemporary ethos” or as an “incoherent and alarmingly super-nationalistic” malevolent force. The PayPal and Palantir founder, a prominent early supporter of Donald Trump, is one of the world’s richest and most influential men. Throughout his career, his principal concern has always been the future, so when The Spectator asked to interview him, he wanted to talk to young people. To that effect, three young members of the editorial team were sent to Los Angeles to meet him. What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Monday

Terry Barnes

Bondi Beach and the heroism of Ahmed al-Ahmed

As the appalling story of Sunday’s anti-Jewish mass shooting at Sydney’s Bondi Beach continue to unfold, and 16 people are now dead, there have been few glimmers of light in the darkness. The men identified as the shooters are a father and son, Sajid Akram, 50, and Naveed Akram, 24. The father was shot and killed by police last night, and the son was overpowered and taken into custody. The New South Wales police commissioner says little is yet known about the pair, but Sajid Akram was a licensed gun owner, with six guns in his possession. Old social media posts have also emerged of Naveed Akram being praised for his Islamic studies in 2022.

ahmed
Bondi
Brendan O’Neill

The Bondi Beach shooting was a pogrom

This is not a time to mince words. Moral clarity is our sole duty on this dark day. What happened in Bondi in Sydney was an act of fascist barbarism. It was a pogrom on a beach. It was a massacre of Jews that brought to mind the horrors of the mid-20th century. If this pitiless atrocity doesn’t prize open the eyes of the West, nothing will. The details are beyond grim. At least 11 people mercilessly slain in an attack targeted at Sydney’s Jewish community. More than a thousand Jews had gathered near a playground at Bondi to mark the first day of Hanukkah. Then two men opened fire. They marked the innocents for death. It was an act of savage racial hatred. Australian officials have confirmed that rancid Jewphobia was the fuel of this crime against humanity.

Kast Chile
Nigel Jones

Chile turns rightward

Chile has joined the right-wing trend sweeping Latin America by electing the ultra-conservative candidate Jose Antonio Kast as its first rightist president since the demise of Pinochet's military dictatorship in 1990. Kast, 59, leader of the Republican party, trounced Jeannette Jara, a communist party member, and the candidate of Chile’s current ruling left-wing coalition, winning almost 58 percent of the vote in Sunday’s poll. Jara, a former Labor minister, conceded victory to Kast, saying “Democracy has spoken loud and clear” and wishing her opponent success “for the good of Chile.

Saturday

Ani Chkhikvadze

Putin moves troops into Trump’s backyard

Clandestine US military forces are not the only foreign military troops operating in Venezuela. Russia has quietly dispatched military advisors of its own to the country, moved to reinforce Venezuela’s air defenses and signaled readiness to deepen military cooperation. While Donald Trump has authorized the CIA to conduct covert ops on Venezuelan soil and just days ago approved the seizure by US troops of an oil tanker leaving Venezuela, Vladimir Putin has pledged his support for Nicolás Maduro. In a phone call with Maduro on Thursday after the tanker was captured, the Russian president “expressed solidarity with the Venezuelan people.

Friday

Owen Matthews

The war in Ukraine is reaching its endgame

Painfully and chaotically, the outline of the peace deal that will eventually end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is emerging as the US leans on Kyiv to abandon key red lines. It may still be months before the guns finally fall silent. But one by one various roadblocks to an eventual agreement are falling away. Crucially, this week Volodymyr Zelensky conceded that his country needed new presidential and parliamentary elections. Moreover, for the first time, he floated the possibility that a Ukrainian military withdrawal from Donbas could be put to a national referendum.  "The Ukrainian people must answer the territorial question," Zelensky told reporters on Thursday. "I say clearly: yes, I support elections.

Bonnie Blue

Bonnie Blue: I stand with Nigel Farage

I have sweet memories of Christmas. My dad is proper old-school and would set up the video recorder. I don’t think we’ve ever watched the footage; I don’t know if he was even filming. But we couldn’t do anything until it was filmed. We never had loads of money, but Mum always went above and beyond. There was gold wrapping paper for presents from Santa. My family say I’m impossible to buy for now I’m better off. This year, I’ve asked for Disney princess pajamas. Christmas is a time for me to give back. Last Christmas was a bit of a shock. I was due to be in Australia but was then banned for my sexual stunts. My family was glad because it meant they got me for Christmas. Not that I’m much help. Cooking isn’t my forte.

Owen Matthews

Will US businesses profit from a return to the Russian market?

Rome Will peace in Ukraine also prove to be a great deal for US business? Vladimir Putin would certainly like Donald Trump to think so. Within days of Trump’s election victory last November, the Kremlin ordered major Russian corporations to prepare detailed proposals for economic cooperation with Washington. Coordinating these efforts were Maxim Oreshkin, deputy head of Putin’s presidential administration, and Kirill Dmitriev, the US-educated Harvard, Stanford and Goldman Sachs alumnus who heads Russia’s sovereign investment fund.