Everyone wants to know what caused President Trump to dump national security adviser H.R. McMaster. Today’s papers are saying it was because McMaster, addressing the Munich Security Conference in February, said he had ‘incontrovertible’ evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump was quick to signal his disapproval. ‘General McMaster forgot to say that … Read more
Is the third time the charm? President Trump has already run through Mike Flynn, who enjoyed the shortest tenure in history of any national security adviser. Next came three-star General H.R. McMaster. Now John Bolton, the former George W. Bush ambassador to the United Nations who has been angling for the job ever since Trump … Read more
John Dowd, a personal attorney of Donald Trump, stepped down today from his role as head of the legal team representing the president in the special counsel’s investigation of possible collusion with Russia. The news came just as the House Intelligence Committee was set to vote on whether to release a report from Republicans in … Read more
At last, some students in the West are campaigning for freedom and democracy. Following years of supposedly rad students banning pop songs about sex, and force-fielding their campuses against offensive speakers, and even expelling certain newspapers from their common rooms as if they were heretical abominations, a group of students has emerged to demand more … Read more
Throughout the course of the inquiry on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, White House lawyers have attempted to drill a message into the president’s head. It is a simple one: whatever you do, don’t go after Robert Mueller personally or suggest in any way that you will shut down the investigation. You … Read more
Boris Titov is running to be president of Russia, but he’s eager to talk himself out of the job. ‘I am not a good politician,’ he says, over breakfast at the Lanesborough hotel in Knightsbridge, London. ‘To be a president means you need to be wise, a big politician like Thatcher, Deng Xiaoping, Lee Kuan … Read more
Donald Trump today called it a ‘very sad situation.’ The ‘it’ in question is of course the chemical weapons attack in Salisbury, a fresh indicator, if one were needed, of malign Russian intentions toward the West. Even as Theresa May plays, or tries to play, Margaret Thatcher, Trump has been no Ronald Reagan. He doesn’t … Read more
The Trump administration’s foreign-policy team is beginning to look a lot like a Marco Rubio foreign policy team. It’s not hard to imagine a generally hawkish Republican like Mike Pompeo serving as Secretary of State under Little Marco, and John Bolton – widely tipped to replace H.R. McMaster as national security adviser – would have … Read more
For a president who usually tweets first and asks questions later, Donald Trump’s initial reaction to the Salisbury attack has been curiously slow. Eleven days on from the poisoning of a former Russian agent, Trump’s Twitter account remains silent on the subject. But now that Theresa May is ramping up the rhetoric against Russia – … Read more
For Donald Trump, yesterday was a bad day to bury good news. While Rex Tillerson’s resignation as Secretary of State dominated the headlines, the biggest and most important story of the day came from Devin Nunes and the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee. Their news was good for Trump, and very bad indeed for … Read more
Sometimes it’s almost as if Donald Trump wants the world to think he’s a Russian patsy. Yesterday, Rex Tillerson, as Secretary of State, warned Putin that Russia’s alleged assassination attempt on British soil would trigger ‘a response’. Today he’s been sacked. Mike Pompeo, Director of the CIA, will become our new Secretary of State. He … Read more
British Prime Minister Theresa May has given Russia until Wednesday to explain why a nerve agent that it has developed was used in an attack in Salisbury, Wiltshire. She told the House of Commons that it was ‘highly likely’ that Russia was responsible for the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter. She said that … Read more
Does Donald Trump deserve a Nobel Peace Prize?
Has Donald Trump sparked off a trade war? His plans for a 25 percent tariff on steel imports and 10 percent tariff on aluminum have shocked friend and foe alike. China is outraged; so are Canada, Japan, and South Korea—allies that in fact export more steel to the U.S. than China does. They stand to … Read more
As Kim Jong-un might blow up the world next year, if not this, and people are forever trying to work out what is going on in his country, perhaps it is worth describing a military parade I attended in Pyongyang a few years back. The occasion was the centenary of the birth of the current … Read more
For many years, the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Tariq Ramadan, has been one of my closest enemies. In Switzerland and France this Islamist dauphin had a slightly hard time establishing his reputation. This was not just due to his poor scholarship (the basis of which lay in a fawning book about his … Read more
Why aren’t spy stories sexy anymore? The revelations last year that Beijing destroyed America’s espionage ring inside China a few years ago, including executing a number of US informants, got a brief flurry of attention and then subsided beneath the waves. News reports of American bureaucrats arrested for passing information to the Chinese have also barely raised … Read more
Prince Harry’s imminent wedding to Meghan Markle will reinvigorate the dying special relationship between Britain and America. It is a boost for the fading American regard for the monarchy. In America, the mother country is increasingly the forgotten country – and it has been fading for a century, ever since the First World War. As … Read more
The first election day since Donald Trump was elected president a year ago brought a funereal mood to Washington that you could feel on the streets. The swamp, apparently, remains undrained. Elections for governor in Virginia and New Jersey and for mayor in New York City cheered the locals a bit, producing the expected victories … Read more
‘Feminism’ isn’t producing guides for helping men. It is producing manifestos for torturing them