World

Thursday

Yossi Melman

Israel’s plan for a new Iran war

Metaphorically speaking, champagne bottles were uncorked in the Jerusalem office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after Donald Trump declared at the NATO summit in Ankara that the ceasefire with Iran was over. Trump’s remarks – in which he branded Iran’s leaders "scum," "a cancer" and "liars" – were sweet music to Netanyahu and his government.  The 60-day ceasefire, brokered by Pakistan and Qatar on June 17 to end the war between the United States and Israel on one side and Iran on the other – a war that began on February 28 – was effectively imposed on Netanyahu. The Israeli Prime Minister, Mossad, the Israel Defense Forces and the Israeli Air Force all wanted the fighting to continue.

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John O’Neill

Fact check: Rupert Lowe on Joe Rogan

The American right has developed a morbid fascination with Britain over the past two years, particularly after Elon Musk began tweeting about grooming gangs. Some European influencers have found it lucrative to present Britain and parts of the continent as having "fallen," posting videos of crimes by immigrants and appearing on American podcast networks as weary ambassadors from broken countries to warn: "It could happen here." Yesterday The Joe Rogan Experience podcast released a two-hour interview with Rupert Lowe, leader of Britain's Restore party. Was Lowe there merely to create content – or is Restore a serious political party? Some of his statements suggest it’s the former rather than the latter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

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Jawad Iqbal

Both Iran and Trump need peace

The US military has launched a fresh round of strikes against Iran – the second in the past 48 hours – after President Donald Trump declared the fragile ceasefire agreement between the two sides was “over.” Trump said the latest attacks were in “retribution” for Iranian strikes on three cargo ships in the Strait of Hormuz. Trump, in an angry tirade, referred to the Iranian leadership as ‘scum’ Trump added that if there were further attacks on shipping “it will get much worse!” The strikes hit a railroad bridge in Iran’s northeast, according to Iranian state media, as well as a military base in the coastal city of Bushehr, which is the site of the country’s only civilian nuclear plant.

Matthew Fraser

Marine Le Pen’s return is a nightmare for French centrists

Marine Le Pen’s comeback has thrown France’s presidential election into disarray as rivals for the Élysée Palace scramble to revise their game plans. Before this week’s court ruling opened the way for Le Pen to enter the presidential race, other declared candidates on the left and right were counting on her lieutenant Jordan Bardella to be the right-wing National Rally’s candidate. Bardella has definite strengths, especially his handsome looks and appeal to young voters thanks to his massive following on social media. But his youth and inexperience, at age 30, are a handicap that opponents almost certainly were planning to exploit, especially in live television debates. Now it appears the Bardella scenario is off.

Wednesday

Terry Barnes

Why Albanese’s Kylie Minogue remarks went down so badly in Australia

Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is someone who wants to be liked even more than respected. He wants to be seen by Australians as one of them, a "bloke’s bloke," one of the lads. In politician-speak, authentic. Australia is different these days: it’s now a woman’s world, and an increasingly puritan and humorless society, in which many voters would not even have understood Osborne and Albanese’s humor, let alone appreciated it That’s the only explanation for Albanese choosing to invite a ribald Australian podcaster, Nikki Osborne, to his official residence for a boisterous sit-down chat that has gone globally viral, for all the wrong reasons.

anthony albanese australia kylie minogue
andy burnham
Alex Morton

Andy Burnham is Britain’s Biden

Watching Andy Burnham in Manchester, dressed in his T-shirt and jacket and pronouncing the return of a more old-fashioned, pro-worker left, I had a sense of déjà vu. I had seen this movie before, but with different accents. For the politician Burnham obviously resembles is not British at all – it is Joe Biden. Just like Biden, Andy Burnham’s self-image is based on the idea that those on the left are the tribunes of ordinary working people, not progressive elites. Like Joe Biden, Andy Burnham is a provincial throwback to an earlier time, just from the North West, not the Midwest. Just like Biden, Burnham rails against the "neoliberal" changes of the 1980s, which he blames for the economic problems of today.

Tuesday

Freddy Gray

Will the ‘anti-Trump playbook’ work in Britain?

Commentators were so busy fulminating against Trump’s FIFA shenanigans yesterday they mostly missed his intervention in the big story now roiling British politics. "They’re Running the 2024 Anti-Trump Playbook on Nigel Farage," the President posted on Truth Social, linking to an article on the National Pulse, an American media site founded by Farage’s old mucker Raheem Kassam. The point, now being repeated by Reform’s talking heads on TV, is clear. "They" – the SW1 elite – are trying to stop Nigel Farage, just as the Washington establishment mounted a ridiculously elaborate lawfare campaign to try to stop Donald Trump.

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Owen Matthews

What Trump and Erdoğan want from each other

Donald Trump has made it clear that he’s attending this year's NATO summit in Ankara for one reason only: “respect for President Erdoğan.” Trump told NATO’s Secretary General Mark Rutte last month that if it hadn’t been for the veteran Turkish President’s invitation, “I don't think I would have gone to it.” NATO’s summit will, therefore, be dominated by the alliance’s two most militarily powerful and at the same time most problematic members. Trump seems set on pursuing his long-held goal of making Europe pay for its own defense, while Erdoğan is determined to leverage his strategic relationship with the US, Russia and Ukraine to scrap restrictions on Turkish purchases of US military hardware.

Monday

Klaus Dodds

Trump reveals the limits of American power

Donald Trump’s quest for regime change in Iran has backfired horribly. The President misunderstood the resilience of the 47-year-old Islamic Republic of Iran, the strategic calculations of one-time ally Israel and the physical and political geography of the Strait of Hormuz. Vice President J.D. Vance appears now to be positioned as the public face of failure. The decision to launch the assault on Iran was underpinned by Israeli confidence that Iran’s leadership could be toppled and that the United States’ overwhelming firepower would produce shock and awe. It came in the immediate aftermath of plans to acquire Greenland, incorporate Canada, assert dominance over the Panama Canal and topple the then Venezuelan government. Cuba is no doubt next on Trump's list.

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Anthony Scaramucci on Trump, Corruption & America at 250
Freddy Gray

Anthony Scaramucci on Trump, Corruption and America at 250

37 min listen

To mark the 250th anniversary of the 1776 Declaration of Independence, Anthony Scaramucci joins The Spectator to provide his assessment of the health of the nation. As we approach the halfway point of the second Trump presidency, what's his impact been on America's reputation? Will the Democrats' attempts to emulate Trump help or hinder them? And why are American conservatives so obsessed with Britain – or rather, Britain's supposed decline? Declaring Trump "an aging queen" under whom "the spirit of hypocrisy lives on" in America, the former White House communications director joins Freddy Gray and Tim Shipman for this special Coffee House Shots/Americano crossover to mark the Fourth of July. Produced by Patrick Gibbons and Natasha Feroze. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Henry Donovan

Germany is quietly falling apart

In Germany, the trains have stopped running on time, bridges have been shut over safety fears, and the country's largest carmaker, Volkswagen, is cutting a sixth of its workforce. The government's response amounts to a shrug, dressed up as reform. It seems like Germany is on a bad streak – and the AfD looks set to reap the rewards. Why does a country that still thinks of itself as Europe's engine room seem to have lost the ability to fix its own bridges? Take the railways, the infamous Deutsche Bahn. A few weeks ago, they ground to a total halt. Every train in the country stood still, because the radio system that lets drivers talk to signal boxes – a system that appears to date, in spirit if not in silicon, from the Kaiserreich – simply stopped working.

Saturday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump’s America is losing its mojo

The heat is on. The R&B group Kool and the Gang may be co-headlining the historic "A Capitol Fourth 250th Weekend Celebration," but that isn’t doing anything to cool the flaring political tempers in Washington during a record heatwave. Instead, the two-week-long "Great American State Fair" on the National Mall to celebrate American emancipation from British tyranny has turned into the birthday party gone wrong. The first sign that things were going awry for the party planners came a few weeks ago with the clumps of algae that began clotting the reflecting pool in central DC, which President Trump had tasked a company called Green Water Solutions to renovate. The company was true to its name. Green Water produced green water.

Friday

Cyril Davydenko

In praise of the American Loyalists

As the United States marks 250 years since the country's unilateral declaration of independence, most of the Fourth of July celebrations have focused on the rebels. But Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson have hogged the limelight for too long. What about the American Loyalists, those who defied the intense social pressure and stayed loyal to the British Crown? Loyalists were often bad writers who simply lacked the flair of radicals such as Thomas Paine In popular imagination, the American Revolution was a contest between the Americans and the British. In reality, however, only about 40 percent to 45 percent of the colonial population joined the rebellion. Around a fifth stayed loyal. The rest backed neither side.

America 250 loyalists

Thursday

Alexander Kolyandr

Can the Kremlin afford to fix Russia’s oil crisis?

For a country that pumps roughly nine million barrels of oil a day – the third highest of any country in the world – Russia has managed to achieve something genuinely remarkable: it cannot keep its own gas stations stocked. More than half of its regions are now reporting shortages, the consequence of a Ukrainian drone campaign that has struck with increasing frequency and precision at the refinery infrastructure on which the country's civilian economy depends. The sometimes hours-long lines that have appeared – even in Moscow, for what may be the first time in the war – carry a symbolic weight that no amount of official reassurance from the Kremlin has managed to dispel. How this has come about is obvious enough.

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Douglas Murray

The confessions of J.D. Vance

There were many reasons why 2016 was a strange year. One of them was the halfhearted effort by people on both sides of the Atlantic to try to understand why voters had voted the "wrong" way in the Brexit referendum and the US presidential election. The book that was touted as an explainer for all of this was Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir by someone called J.D. Vance about his upbringing in rural Ohio. After the election of Donald Trump, Vance’s description of family breakdown, de-industrialization, poverty and drug abuse was said to explain why so many Americans had voted for Trump. There was much that was patronizing about all this – mirrored in France by the attention paid to Didier Eribon’s Returning to Reims.

Wednesday

Ed West

How Brand Scotland conquered America

In his highly entertaining history of alcohol and the British, Empire of Booze, Henry Jeffreys observed how one effect of the Napoleonic Wars was to make Scotland a popular destination for English holiday makers. What with the continent being isolated and everything, there weren’t many more exotic places for the richer, more adventurous traveler to visit. I’m a huge admirer of how the Scots put national identity to its most benevolent and noble purpose: using it to milk wealthy Americans of their money The country was until then largely unknown to many people south of the border, something also true of its trademark drink.

Tuesday

Freddy Gray

The truth about Gavin Newsom

Gavin Newsom has spent the last two years building a national profile for himself beyond his controversial governorship of California. But does he have what it takes for a presidential run in 2028, something that would take him far outside the left-wing political bubble of the Golden State? Freddy speaks to Christopher Rufo, author of the Christopher Rufo Substack and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, about the real Gavin Newsom and the decay of California under his watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx-gXQQfkqA&pp=0gcJCU4LAYcqIYzv Learn how to earn yield on gold, paid in gold, at Monetary-Metals.com/Americano.

The truth about Gavin Newsom

Monday

Freddy Gray

Why is America’s radical left winning?

After success in the New York Democratic primaries for far-left candidates, President Trump says "the game is on. Enjoy Watching." Freddy speaks to Spectator columnist, Roger Kimball, about how Trump plans to deal with the radical left, the lawlessness of New York under Zohran Mamdani and how artificial intelligence is changing politics. Learn how to earn yield on gold, paid in gold, at Monetary-Metals.

Why is America’s radical left winning?
vikings
Gavin Mortimer

Why is the New York Times celebrating the slave-trading Vikings?

Norway plays the Ivory Coast tomorrow afternoon in the first knockout phase of the soccer World Cup, and one suspects the New York Times will be backing the Norsemen. The Gray Lady has gone gaga for Norway’s "Viking Row," a synchronized routine where fans mime the rowing of a Viking longboat to the bang of a drum. It’s caught on among the Norwegian players as well as politicians back in Norway, who performed the row in parliament last week. For the last two weeks the NYT has been publishing breathless pieces about the zany Norwegians and their Viking antics. “The 'Viking Row' is in full flow” was one headline on June 18; five days later they described how it "has taken the World Cup by storm." And their editorial office from the sound of things.

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Paul Wood

The Iran war is Trump’s Suez crisis

Clarissa Eden famously declared that "in the past few weeks I have really felt as if the Suez Canal was flowing through my drawing-room." Does Melania Trump feel the same about the Strait of Hormuz? Or perhaps Donald will be reminded of the strait every time he hits one over the water at Bedminster. He ought to be. The Iran war will define his presidency. It is his legacy – just not in the way he imagined. In 1956, a British prime minister discovered that we were no longer a great power. It was an end to illusions. We liked to think we had the best navy in the world, but that was irrelevant to whether we could keep a canal in Egypt.