Latest from Coffee House

Latest from Coffee House

All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories

Tuesday

Robert Skidelsky

What comes after America’s retreat?

What is happening to the "rules-based international order" despairingly invoked by bewildered European leaders? The broad answer is that we are living through the retreat of American hegemony, masked by bluster and marked by contradictions. The retreat has two aspects, economic and geopolitical. Economists talk about Trump’s tariffs breaking up the free-trade order; geopoliticians about the Trump Corollary breaking up the NATO system. These are part of a single, reasonably coherent story. But the retreat is not as straightforward as it sounds. How does the bombing of Iran fit into it? What do people mean when they talk about a global "rules-based order"?

Ben Clerkin

Did Israel bounce the US into war?

Operation Epic Fury has developed from a war to deprive Iran of nuclear weapons into a political war of blame. “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action,” Marco Rubio told reporters at the Capitol last night. “We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces. And we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them [Iran] before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.” The rationale came as a surprise to lawmakers. It sounded as though Israel had effectively bounced America into military action. Trump had told the American people from the outset that the war was to defang Iran of its nuclear weapons program as well as its ballistic missile capability. Regime change was optional.

Gavin Mortimer

Why Europe is terrified of standing up to Iran

America’s war on Iran has revealed much about its allies. Israel is as steadfast as ever, as secretary of war Pete Hegseth pointed out on Monday. Australia and Canada have also made clear their unequivocal support for the military action.  Russia, for all its malevolence, does not have the means to stoke civil unrest in western Europe. The Islamic Republic of Iran does In Europe, however, the response has been lackluster. Hegseth regretted the faintheartedness of "traditional partners who wring their hands and clutch their pearls, humming and hawing about the use of force." Step forward Keir Starmer, who has "disappointed" President Trump by his reluctance to throw Britain’s weight behind America.

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

The Middle East’s Muslims are cheering Khamenei’s death

The killing of ayatollah Ali Khamenei in US-Israeli strikes on Saturday was cheered by many Iranians who have suffered innumerable atrocities under his ruthless Islamist rule of the country. While the diaspora were vociferous in their jubilation over the death of Iran’s supreme leader, many in the country also braved violent crackdowns to rejoice in the streets. These Iranians chanted the slogan that has become a common anti-Khamenei refrain over the past four decades: "Death to the Islamic Republic.

Monday

Charles Lipson

What Iran means for the world

The Israeli-American air campaign against Iran will have profound global repercussions. What those repercussions will be depends on two crucial factors. First, will the bombing campaign remove the Shi’ite Islamist regime from power? We do not yet know if the campaign can accomplish that ambitious goal without foreign troops on the ground. If the US and Israel can do that, it would be an unprecedented achievement. Second, if the Islamists are removed, will the successor regime be stable and effective? Will it be able to control the streets and countryside, prevent successful breakaway regional movements, and begin the arduous process of rebuilding the country? Can the factions currently opposing the old regime join in supporting a new one or will they fracture?

Sunday

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 what no other US president would do, and that the evil Iranian regime could never be allowed to have weapons of mass destruction. But for now, nadda.

Jason M. Brodsky

Who will lead Iran now?

The longest-serving autocrat in the Middle East, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is dead. This is a historic moment for the Iranian people, the region, America, and US allies and partners around the world. Given the unprecedented nature of this US and Israeli military operation, it remains hard to predict events in Iran. But several developments give us clues about Iran's direction of travel in the near-term. Khamenei was a brutal ruler who not only abused his people and fomented terror around the world but was also a tyrant to his own family. His estranged sister Badri Khamenei once recounted how Qassem, a good friend of her brother, was murdered by the Iranian regime in the early years of the Islamic Revolution.

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 set about killing its way out of nationwide protests.

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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Jacob Heilbrunn

Is this Trump’s Sarajevo moment?

Here we go again. Switch out Saddam Hussein for the Ayatollah Khamenei and Ahmed Chalabi for Reza Pahlavi and you have a fresh war for regime change in the Middle East, this time with Israel as America’s sidekick. With Operation Epic Fury, the American and Israeli bombing of Iran and push for regime change, the self-proclaimed “President of Peace” runs the risk not only of triggering wider upheaval in the Middle East, but also globally. Is this a new Sarajevo moment? With Trump’s own generals having warned him that attacking Iran could be a debacle, he may have torched his own presidency Unlike George W. Bush in 2003, who worked to bolster domestic and international support for attacking Iraq, Donald Trump has disdained the slightest effort to justify his war publicly.

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.

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 be uranium enrichment sites or Iran's ballistic missile capabilities.

iran

Friday

Freddy Gray

How careful is Trump being on Iran?

Every Friday, it seems, words spills from Washington that Donald Trump has ordered an imminent strike against Iran. He likes to initiate dramatic military action in the weekend early hours, when markets are closed and the media-consuming public can wake up to big news.  So far, despite the presence of significant US military assets in the region, Trump has resisted the urge to bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran – preferring instead to pursue a diplomatic settlement with the regime in Tehran.   This weekend could be different. This morning, the US Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, sent an email to his staff saying those who wanted to leave "should do so TODAY." The path of diplomacy has, it seems, reached an impasse.

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 in Lyon, allegedly by a far-left mob.

Ed West

Britain’s Green party is playing with fire

A good quiz question in the year 2050 will go something like this: "True or false, the 'green' in the 'Green Party' originally referred to the environment." By this point, the etymological origins of Britain’s sectional Islamic party will be as obscure as the relationship between British Conservatives and 17th century Irish bandits. A key milestone, our mid-century quiz regular will inform his teammates, was the 2026 Gorton and Denton by-election in which the Greens stood neck and neck in a three-way race with Labour and Reform before voting opened. If decades of generous immigration policies have created constituencies where people vote along religious lines, there is nothing to stop someone appealing to that market.

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.

lauren boebert
Tim Shipman

Is the Trump-Starmer bromance over?

"The Special Relationship only exists when the Americans want something," a former Downing Street aide observed after Donald Trump rejected the Chagos Islands deal. There are profound differences between London and Washington over military action against Iran while the fourth anniversary of the war in Ukraine this week has exposed further fault lines. The result is that Anglo-American relations are at their worst point since the general election. Keir Starmer’s team argues he should not be ousted at a time of huge international instability. But the reality of the Anglo-American relationship raises three questions. Where did things go wrong? Does the PM still have some kind of relationship with Trump?

starmer
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 be up for grabs, he did not rule out the prospect of talks with the United States – albeit with a caveat.

Bridget Phetasy

The Epstein files and the new Satanic Panic

I’ve spent the last few years building an audience of skeptics and – let’s be honest – more than a few conspiracy theorists who turned out to be right about some pretty big things. We saw #MeToo devolve into a moral panic where accusation equaled guilt and due process was something only rape apologists cared about. We watched Covid turn half the country into snitches who, drunk on their own righteousness, ratted out neighbors for having a barbecue. We talked endlessly on podcasts about groupthink, social contagion and mobs. And on some of the biggest questions – the lab leak, institutional corruption, “gender-affirming care” and the machinery of public manipulation – the conspiracy theorists were vindicated.

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 faced a "life-threatening" situation.

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 self-preservation.

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.

MAGAnomics
Gareth Roberts

The BAFTAs N-word scandal has been very revealing

At the BAFTAs on Sunday night, John Davidson – whose story of living with Tourette’s syndrome is dramatized in the (very good) film I Swear – shouted out the N-word when black actors Delroy Lindo and Michael B. Jordan were on stage to present an award. You’d hope that by now people might understand the mechanics of Tourette’s symptoms – that the tics are totally involuntary, and consist of erupting with the worst possible things at the worst possible times; the imp of the perverse dialed up to 11. But no. The cruel and ideological politics of identity still have a grip on the mediocrities of the creative industries This was another one of the increasing number of events in this century that feel almost comically demonstrative.

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump’s reality-show State of the Union speech

Donald Trump may have celebrated Team USA for winning the gold at the Olympics in hockey, but he was not in a puckish mood during his State of the Union speech. Instead, Trump stuck to his tried-and-true script of denouncing Democrats as “sick,” mocking concerns about affordability and cooing over Melania as a great new movie star. Far from nobody ever seeing anything like it, Trump delivered what everybody has already seen. Ever the salesman, he was not shy with the superlatives, declaring that America is the “hottest” country in the world – “bigger, better, richer, stronger than ever before.” If there was one thing that was longer than ever, it was Trump’s own address, which set a record length of 108 minutes.

Trump
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 ultimate purpose: to unite the country.

sotu address

Tuesday

Ben Clerkin

Release the Gonzales files

We know the terrible details of how congressional staffer Regina Santos-Aviles, 35, died. She poured gasoline on herself and then flicked the flame on a lighter – a mad decision she instantly regretted. "Please send help. It hurts so bad," she screamed at the 911 dispatcher. "Oh my God, I don't want to die.” She tried to smother the flames by rolling on the ground of her backyard in Texas and crawling to a faucet to extinguish them with water. But it was too late. A medical examiner found that the only part of her body not scorched by flames were the soles of her feet.  Thanks to a police report we know these terrible details of her death last year.

Tony Gonzales
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.

State of the Union
Charles Lipson

What will Trump say in the State of the Union address?

When President Trump speaks to Congress and the nation Tuesday night he will follow several familiar tropes. Like a long line of presidents before him, Trump will say the state of the union is great and take full credit for it. They all say that, unless we are in a recession or at war. They typically add that everything is getting better, too, thanks to their wise policies. In a nod to the next election, they warn voters that the only thing stopping our country from reaching even greater heights is the mule-headed opposition of the opposing party and a few Supreme Court Justices. What differs each year are the specifics.

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.

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.

Monday

Michael Simmons

Former UK ambassador Peter Mandelson arrested

Peter Mandelson, Britain's short-lived ambassador to the US, has been arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office.  In a statement to journalists, London's Metropolitan Police said: Officers have arrested a 72-year-old man on suspicion of misconduct in public office. He was arrested at an address in Camden on Monday, 23 February and has been taken to a London police station for interview. This follows search warrants at two addresses in the Wiltshire and Camden areas. Moments before the Met’s statement, Mandelson was photographed being led out of his house by police. The move comes days after the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, also under suspicion of misconduct in public office.

mandelson
ukraine love
Maria Botcharova

Wartime love is not for the faint-hearted in Kyiv

People say love develops more quickly in war – because in a world where anything can happen, what is there to lose? Single and in Kyiv for a while, I decide to swallow my distaste for dating apps and start swiping. The first thing I notice is how many men are from Turkey and based a thousand miles away. How would this work? I decide to focus on the local ones and start chatting to a couple of guys. One seems reasonable if a little forward. He suggests meeting pretty quickly, then calls to chat. I don't really know Ukrainian norms but frankly, hearing someone's voice gives me faith that they are real. Dima is a lawyer. We arrange to meet at a metro station at seven the next evening. He has made peach ice cream and is going to bring some. A meeting feels like a good start.

cartel
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.