American foreign policy

America is having its Golden Age, Iran is about to get blasted into the Stone Age… and Elbridge Colby wants to go back to the Late Middle Ages? According to a Free Press report by Mattia Ferraresi, the Under Secretary of War for Policy summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Vatican’s then-ambassador to the US, to a meeting in which the Avignon Papacy was invoked. (For those of you who didn’t go to Catholic school: in the 1300s the king of France had Pope Boniface VIII captured and beaten after the pope excommunicated him; a few years later the papacy moved to Avignon amid continued threats from the French crown and instability in Rome.)  During this meeting, Pentagon officials allegedly picked apart Pope Leo XIV’s “state of the world” address. This was the

As The Spectator goes to press, a great fleet of American war machines is whirring through the skies toward the Middle East. More than 50 fighter jets, plus stealth bombers and support aircraft, are joining what Donald Trump called an “armada” of US naval forces in the Arabian seas. The White House continues to say that it is pursuing a diplomatic solution with Iran. It’s possible that this latest military escalation is another of President Trump’s elaborate bluffs, designed to pressure the Iranian regime into accepting American and Israeli demands. But the President has been unusually mute about the situation on Truth Social. It’s fair to assume that the movement

The Iranian regime remains firmly in the crosshairs of American bombers. As President Trump mulls whether to strike, Turkey is using every available channel to halt a military intervention. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has personally offered to mediate between Tehran and Washington. At the same time, Turkish authorities have tightened their grip on exiled Iranian opposition figures. Turkey’s sudden support for Iran is not born of friendship. Over the past two decades, the two countries have repeatedly found themselves on opposing sides. In the Syrian civil war, Iran sent Shi’a proxies to prop up the dictator Bashar al-Assad, while Turkey armed and trained Sunni rebel groups. Ankara’s push for dialogue

Last week was one of realpolitik, Trump-style. Greenland was sorted, the “New Gaza” unveiled, and all that was left was Ukraine and Russia. Donald Trump went from Davos back to the US but ordered his special envoys to Abu Dhabi, armed with the president’s formula for ending the war in Europe, to get a deal to stop the killing and destruction. As the envoys from the US, Russia and Ukraine opened the talks on Friday in the capital of the United Arab Emirates, none of the pre-signaling indicated that a breakthrough was in the offing. Two days were allotted for the meetings, in the expectation that it wouldn’t just be

Donald Trump’s strangely artificial Board of Peace event in Davos on Thursday looked like a Hollywood rendering of an international summit. Everything was too slick, faintly uncanny. Like an AI-generated image, it was photo-real yet failed the most basic human glance test. Too perfect. No wabi-sabi. The first tell was visual: the set, complete with a crisp new institutional logo: a globe on a shield, flanked by olive branches. It carried the unmistakable whiff of Grok or ChatGPT, but the strangeness went deeper than design. The speeches themselves were weirdly messianic and utopian. The most peculiar part was the show-within-a-show: a piece of political meta-theater featuring Marco Rubio, Steve Witkoff,