World

Sunday

Charlie Gammell

Could Iran descend into civil war?

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a man whose life has been defined by the harshness of his rhetoric against the West (specifically, the US and Israel) and his ruthless rule, has died a martyr’s death under the rubble of his compound in Pasteur, Tehran.  It was always going to end this way. Khamenei came to prominence as a revolutionary first and then second as a wartime leader when he assumed the role of President of Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. What is needed is a clear plan that can unite Iranians behind a shared, inclusive vision of their country The Islamic Republic is facing its most serious crisis since January, when it

Freddy Gray

Why is Vance silent on Iran?

Twenty eight hours or so into the new war against Iran, and America’s Vice President J.D. Vance has yet to declare his support in public. His social media account on X, which is normally so lively, has been conspicuously silent for the last two days.  He seems keen to position himself apart from the administration’s more ardent hawks when it comes to the Middle East It’s likely that will all change today and Vance, as he did after the Venezuela operation, will take to the airwaves for the big Sunday news shows in order to once again repeat that administration’s line that Donald Trump, the ultimate decider, has boldly done

Saturday

Freddy Gray

Does Trump know what he is trying to do in Iran?

Donald Trump has urged Iranians to “take over” their government after the United States and Israel struck targets across the country. A multitude of Iranian military and government targets were hit by missiles in what is turning out to be a joint operation far more comprehensive than the 12-day air campaign last June. Freddy and Jacob Heilbrunn join to discuss why now, how this attack is fraught with risk for Trump’s presidency and how Trump’s administration was hijacked by the neoconservatives.

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Freddy Gray

Trump launches a remote-control regime-change war on Iran

“We’re going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground,” said Donald Trump, as he stood at the lectern in his white USA cap and announced the launch of a “massive and ongoing” military operation against Iran.  “It will be totally, again, obliterated.” He had to say “again” because he has insisted over and over that Iran’s nuclear facilities had been “utterly obliterated” last summer, after Operation Midnight Hammer.  But the objective of these latest midnight or very early morning strikes, conducted again by US and Israeli forces working together, is already far broader than the wiping out of weapons of mass destruction – whether that

Daniel DePetris

It’s unclear what threat Iran actually poses

Donald Trump has urged Iranians to “take over” their government after the United States and Israel struck targets across the country. A multitude of Iranian military and government targets were hit by missiles in what is turning out to be a joint operation far more comprehensive than the 12-day air campaign last June. Back then, Trump’s objectives were limited: degrade Iran’s three largest nuclear facilities. This time, Trump’s eyes are on a bigger prize – a full-scale decapitation of the Iranian leadership and a degradation of Tehran’s military power. Trump has just rolled the dice and plunged the United States into yet another war in the Middle East “We are

Friday

Gavin Mortimer

British politics is turning French

An editorial in Friday’s Le Figaro (France’s equivalent to the New York Times) is headlined “Mélenchon or the moral suicide of the left.” The same statement could be applied to Britain’s Green party. Their open pandering to the Muslim vote in Thursday’s Gorton & Denton by-election was arguably a new low in British politics. It wasn’t just Israel and so-called Islamophobes who were targeted (in Urdu) in their campaign leaflets and videos, so was India. Le Figaro’s scathing critique of the left-wing populist leader Jean-Luc Melenchon was written as a reaction to his visit to Lyon on Thursday evening. A fortnight earlier 23-year-old Quentin Deranque had been kicked to death

Thursday

Cockburn

Lauren Boebert’s sneaky texts derail Hillary’s Epstein deposition

Hillary Clinton and her husband Bill austerely complied with a House Oversight Committee subpoena in order to explain their ties to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. Yet Hillary’s testimony today didn’t exactly go to plan. Proceedings were halted after a breach of the hearing’s protocols – by a member of the committee. Congresswoman Lauren Boebert took two surreptitious photos of the closed-door hearing… and sent them to conservative influencer Benny Johnson. Johnson, in turn, plastered his watermark all over them and posted them on X. The Clintons had agreed to testify in a gambit to demonstrate that presidents and cabinet secretaries are not above congressional scrutiny – to put pressure on

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Edward Howell

North Korea’s boundless nuclear ambition

North Korea’s ninth party congress, held this week, was little more than a rubber-stamping exercise. That much was clear when the Chinese premier Xi Jinping congratulated Kim Jong-un on his re-election as the general secretary of the Workers’ party of Korea. But we would be wrong to dismiss this gathering as merely symbolic. The last time North Korea held such a congress, in January 2021, Kim outlined a shopping list of desired weapons and missiles. Since then, North Korea has tested or obtained each item. All this week’s congress did was cement North Korea’s self-perceived status as a nuclear-armed state. While Kim underscored how North Korea’s nuclear weapons will never

Wednesday

Gavin Rice

MAGA-nomics is working

Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, the longest in history, served as a reminder of the relentless will and unstoppable energy he brings to the office of the presidency. In a coup de grâce he humiliated congressional Democrats, securing footage of them remaining seated en masse as they refused to accept that the role of the government is to prioritize American citizens. He gently chastised the Supreme Court judges, assembled in the front row, for declaring his tariff program unlawful last Friday. Our political right should take heed: for all its roughness, this agenda isn’t going away The President’s opponents may be celebrating the judgment, but the Donald is

MAGAnomics
Philip Patrick

Japan is refusing to tiptoe around the Taiwan issue

One of the most serious issues in the well-filled in-tray of freshly endorsed Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi is Taiwan, which China claims as its own sovereign territory, and the lamentable state of Sino-Japanese relations. Takaichi provoked fury with comments in the Japanese parliament in November when she stated that were China to attack Taiwan, it would be interpreted as a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, implying a military response could follow. Under the terms of its constitution, Japan is severely limited in its military options but Takaichi appeared to be preparing more solid ground with her phrasing. A 2015 law changed the constitution allowing Japan to retaliate if the country

Jason M. Brodsky

Iran is ready for war – is America?

In 2001, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei met privately with Spain’s then-prime minister Jose Maria Aznar. Aznar recounted how Khamenei dubbed Israel a “cancer condemned to disappear” and said that an open confrontation with Israel and the United States was inevitable. Iran, the Supreme Leader insisted, would prevail. Fast forward to 2026, and the war that Khamenei prophesied is getting closer by the day. The Islamic Republic is already operating under the assumption of a US military operation For decades, durable diplomacy between America and Iran has failed because of the ideological nature of the Islamic Republic. It makes its decisions based on a mix of ideology and a desire for

Paul Wood

Inside the daring plan to reclaim the Chagos Islands

Peros Banhos on the Chagos archipelago looks like your basic tropical island paradise: turquoise waters and golden sands, waves lapping on a palm-fringed beach. But step off the strip of sand into the wall of green behind, and you’re enveloped by mosquitoes. The old well you were counting on for water is a shallow puddle. And the silver fish between your feet dart past a net, despite not having seen one in 50 years. The jungle has grown over the old British colonial buildings, and the jungle is a harsh place. Four Chagos Islanders have been here more than a week, along with the man who brought them, Adam Holloway

Owen Matthews

‘More than half our squad were executed’: Inside Russia’s rotten army

The Russians are on the warpath – and Europe is Vladimir Putin’s next target. That was British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s alarming claim at the Munich Security Conference in February. Britons “must be ready to fight, to do whatever it takes to protect our people, our values, and our way of life,” Starmer warned. Britain and Germany’s top military commanders delivered the same message in a recent article. Russia’s military posture “has shifted decisively westward,” wrote Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton and General Carsten Breuer. Soon the Kremlin “may be emboldened to extend its aggression beyond Ukraine.” Really? According to much western coverage in mainstream and social media, the

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Roger Kimball

What Trump got right in his State of the Union address

Watching Donald Trump’s State of the Union Address tonight, I thought of two homely things. One was something that a friend used to say to her young daughter: “Don’t forget to have an attitude of gratitude,” she would remind her preteen when that attitude was absent. The second thing I thought about was a fact I recently learned about Ulysses S. Grant. He was a great general, yes, and he was also a great, if generally under-appreciated, president. One sign of his greatness came posthumously. At his funeral, two of Grant’s pallbearers were Confederate generals. Grant had won the civil war, defeating the Confederacy, saving the Union. But in death he underscored his

Tuesday

Gavin Mortimer

The killing that has divided Washington and Paris

Washington’s warning last week about the spread of far-left violence in France did not go down well in Paris. In an interview on Sunday, France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot accused America of wading into a matter that “concerns only our national community”. This doesn’t surprise conservative commentators in France who have coined the phrase “Red Privilege” The diplomatic spat began at the end of last week when Sarah Rogers, the US State Department under-secretary for public diplomacy, posted on X. Referring to the murder of a young nationalist student, Quentin Deranque, allegedly kicked to death by members of a far-left organization called the Young Guard, Rogers said his death demonstrated why

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Is Trump being played by Iran?

Half of America’s deployable air power sits within striking distance of Iran, and yet Washington is negotiating. Gaza is promised a gleaming future, and yet Hamas still refuses to disarm.Is this strategic patience, or proof that the US President has been dangerously misled, indulging adversaries who are buying time? By placing comprehensive proposals on the table, publicly, the administration creates a test for Iran Two US carrier strike groups sit in the eastern Mediterranean and the Gulf. Land-based fighters rotate through Jordan and the Gulf states. Long-range bombers have been repositioned. Analysts calculate that somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of America’s deployable air power is now concentrated in the

Henry Donovan

The German army’s drones disaster

German politicians like to talk about Zeitenwende – the country’s great turning point in its defense policy since the invasion of Ukraine. And it has certainly turned: toward spending billions of taxpayer euros on drones that cannot fly in frontline situations, seemingly cannot hit their targets, and whose largest investors sit not in Berlin or Brussels, but in Silicon Valley boardrooms with direct lines to the White House and CIA. If this is European defense sovereignty, one could wonder what this dependency actually looks like. And if Europe really is serious about this change. Last week, Reuters confirmed that the German government plans to award contracts worth €536 million ($631 million) to

Christopher Caldwell

The deep state vs Nixon

Americans took a break from their partisan vituperation in February to mull over newly revealed testimony that Richard Nixon gave to grand jury investigators in 1975, a year after the Watergate scandal drove him from power. James Rosen, a veteran Washington journalist and the biographer of Nixon’s attorney general John Mitchell, revealed the episode in the New York Times. Nixon had argued that his program of wiretaps had been made necessary by another spying operation that senior American military commanders were carrying out against him and his top aides. The outline of this story has been known to historians since James Hougan laid it out in Secret Agenda (1984): a

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Monday

Joshua Treviño

The truth about Mexico’s cartel wars

To understand the latest disturbing spasm of violence in Mexico, it helps to go back six years to an ultra-wealthy colonia called Lomas de Chapultepec, near the heart of Mexico City. Lomas de Chapultepec is protected, partly by a large security apparatus net that has been thrown around it, and partly by the pacto de narco, which protects the high-income neighborhoods in which both cartel leadership and their political partners live, along with their families. Not long ago, former Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was publicly threatening to use the Mexican armed forces to defend cartels That was why it was surprising when, on June 26, 2020, Mexico City’s

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el mencho
Niko Vorobyov

El Mencho’s death plunges Mexico into chaos

Mayhem has erupted across Mexico after security forces eliminated Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, the drug lord widely known as El Mencho, in a gun battle in the town of Tapalpa. El Mencho was the head of one of Mexico’s most violent and sadistic organizations, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG). Henchmen forced passengers out of their cars before setting the vehicles alight, leaving them as burning roadblocks Their reaction was about as solemn and dignified as you’d expect. Henchmen forced passengers out of their cars before setting the vehicles alight, leaving them as burning roadblocks. Scorched sedans and toasted trucks lined the highway to the World Cup stadium in Guadalajara, Mexico’s