Donald trump

Tuesday

Lisa Haseldine

Russia has its eyes on Svalbard

Svalbard The quiet hillside by Longyearbyen’s church gives visitors to the capital of Norway’s Svalbard archipelago an austere but beautiful panorama of the bay that cradles the town. Tall, sharply steep mountains, blanketed with snow, collide with the blue-grey waters of the Arctic below. From that hillside, I watched the quiet bustle of Longyearbyen. Since Donald Trump threatened Nato with the biggest crisis in the alliance’s history by stating his desire to take control of Greenland in the name of US ‘national security’, Svalbard’s residents have been uneasily looking westward. The US President has repeatedly claimed that only he can prevent the island, which is just 185 miles from Svalbard,

Matthew Parris

Iran’s secret weapon of self-sacrifice

Much has been made of the adjective ‘asymmetric’ when discussing warfare in recent years. The word enjoys a renewed currency now that Israel and America are engaged in combat with enemies who, unable to match them with comparable armed forces, instead disperse, hide and strike at the soft underbelly of their foe. David and his sling, I suppose, when David met Goliath thousands of years ago, was a forerunner of this strategy. But I want to discuss another kind of asymmetry, and another Old Testament hero, Samson. Alone, captive and blinded, Samson reached for a secret weapon unavailable to his captors: the weapon of self-sacrifice. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps

Wednesday

Christopher Caldwell

The end of Trumpism is nigh

Having Donald Trump as your president probably resembles being a heroin addict: you undergo regular episodes of sweating terror and mortal danger, the end result of which is to get you – at best – back to normal. A year ago, the Liberation Day tariffs nearly caused the American economy to seize up, before China mercifully let the matter drop. Then came the even more reckless decision to join Israel in bombing Iran’s Fordow nuclear installation; Iran agreed to halt hostilities just as it was figuring out how to penetrate Israeli airspace with its missiles. But now the President has pressed his luck. He has joined Israel in a campaign

Rod Liddle

Trump should ditch the faux concern for the people of Iran

Live long enough and all your cherished memories of childhood will end up besmirched somehow. For many of us Boomers the 1970s are now nothing but a long, brownish and noisome stain. We might have expected Gary Glitter would be outed as a nonce and ditto the unequivocally foul Jimmy Savile. But come on, who would have thought there was a darker side to Benny Hill? His harmless and uplifting degradation of women was one of our regular delights, especially the bits where semi-naked babes chased him around parks, with a silly expression on his face, accompanied by fruity music. How we laughed. And so to find out now that

Ruaridh Nicoll

Inside blockaded Cuba, life is getting odder by the day

It’s nearly two months since Donald Trump signed an executive order imposing a total oil blockade on Cuba, and life is becoming odder. At the weekend, in a down-island town called Moron, teenage kids burnt down the local Communist party headquarters. Meanwhile, here in Havana, we’re awaiting the arrival of the Irish hip-hoppers Kneecap at the head of a humanitarian relief armada carrying solar panels. I live in a rooftop apartment. At night, it’s a good spot from which to look out over a city that once sent up music and light but is now as dark as a desert. The oil blockade, designed to either force the bankrupt Communist

Matthew Parris

Can the special relationship survive Trump?

Since this calamitous Iran war began, there’s been endless talk in Britain about our ‘special relationship’ (often capitalised) with the United States. People who declare this relationship to be important are almost always those who also believe that, come what may in the war, we British should stand shoulder to shoulder with Donald Trump. Those, on the other hand, who think we should distance ourselves from him, tend to disparage the special relationship as unimportant. This column therefore breaks new ground. I think the special relationship is very important. But I don’t believe we should stand shoulder to shoulder with this president. Our special relationship is with America. Mr Trump

Wednesday

The Spectator

The King is still our Trump card

George III has not been well remembered on either side of the Atlantic. Despite reigning for almost 60 years, in Britain he is known, if at all, for losing the Thirteen Colonies and his madness in his later life. But in America, he is the villain of the national story; in Thomas Jefferson’s phrasing, the ‘Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant’. The Declaration of Independence is a lurid list of his alleged crimes against his American subjects. But 250 years after that document was signed by the Founding Fathers, George III has been going through a renaissance. In recent biographies, Andrew Roberts

Adrian Wooldridge

Those who believe in liberalism must now fight for it

I’m conscious that, just as the easiest way to lose an argument is to mention Hitler, so the easiest way to lose journalistic credibility is to invoke the 1930s. Yet the similarities to our own dismal decade are now too numerous to ignore. There is the same collection of morbid symptoms: the rise of strongmen, the collapse of the political centre, the intellectual organisation of political hatreds. Even more worryingly, there is the same sense of hurtling towards global conflagration. The similarities begin with the disintegration of the international order. In the 1920s and 1930s, order collapsed because Britain no longer had the economic might to continue as the global

Wednesday

Tim Shipman

‘Whose side are you on?’: How Keir Starmer alienated Britain’s allies over Iran

The American-Israeli attacks on Iran were publicly called Epic Fury, but behind the scenes it is Britain’s handling of the war which provoked that reaction – not just from Donald Trump but from the UK’s allies in the Gulf. A Labour peer was in Washington when the first missiles slammed into Tehran on Friday evening and Keir Starmer refused to voice support. A member of the Trump administration told the peer: ‘Britain used to not contribute that much, but you were a good ally. Now you’re contributing nothing and you’re not even a good ally.’ A version of events has quickly become established: a Prime Minister with a near-religious belief

Freddy Gray

Operation Epic Fury is already tearing the MAGA movement apart

When President George W. Bush invaded Mesopotamia in 2003, everybody laughed at Comical Ali, the bespectacled Iraqi information minister who kept insisting that the American ‘rats’ were doomed as Saddam Hussein’s regime collapsed around him. The world moved on. Iran is not Iraq, as President Donald Trump’s supporters are so fond of saying, and Bush-era ‘forever wars’ are no more. Plus, these days the comedy communications come from the American Commander-in-Chief. At the weekend, as missiles rained across the Middle East, Trump’s cabinet officials mostly avoided attention-grabbing interviews. The boss, however, embarked on his own heroic PR campaign. Taking questions from just about any reporter who happened to call, he

Charles Moore

Tracey Emin should remake her bed

Sir Keir Starmer’s position on the US bombing of Iran is inglorious, but one should suspend disapproval to understand how he must have been thinking politically. His party had just lost the Gorton and Denton by-election to the Greens (backed by a strong Muslim vote). His leadership had never seemed weaker. So he calculated that he could not unequivocally back the actions of Israel and Donald Trump. He will have had the Iraq war in mind, particularly the role of the attorney general. Over Iraq, the then attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, was criticised for seeming to change his legal advice to Tony Blair in order to legitimise British participation in

Matthew Parris

Is this Starmer’s finest hour?

A friend met Mary Wilson on the Isles of Scilly, where she and her husband, Harold, had a home. She confided in him that Harold, now in the grip of senile dementia, was slipping away from her; and she felt the lonelier because in the eyes of the world his achievements as prime minister were slipping away as well. My friend rehearsed with her the list: the Open University, etc. Then he added this: there is a kind of achievement in high office which by its very nature is unlikely to burn brightly in the world’s imagination after a leader has gone, but is no less luminous for being forgotten.

Wednesday

Tim Shipman

Has it all gone wrong between Trump and Starmer?

‘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. 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? And

Tuesday

Jonathan Boff

Learning from history requires sophistication and skill

If you reckon you have an understanding of international politics today, you probably haven’t been listening properly. Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump are making history too fast for most of us to keep up. Odd Arne Westad’s The Coming Storm seeks to make sense of the current geopolitical chaos by drawing parallels between now and the years before 1914. If you don’t find those comparisons reassuring, you aren’t supposed to. The point being stressed is that, unless we are careful, we risk sleepwalking into a Great Power conflict as terrible as, or worse than, the first world war. Westad is a leading Cold War historian from

Wednesday

Sam Kriss

The art of conspiracy

If you lived anywhere near Kilburn half a decade ago, you might have noticed the messages one of our neighbours kept spray-painting over our walls and bridges. They’d appear overnight across a fairly wide swathe of north-west London, always in an immediately recognisable loopy handwriting, and the content was always recognisably loopy too. This person was trying to communicate something, but it was hard to tell exactly what. The messages said things like ‘STAND UP TO BLACK MASSES’ and ‘MERCY FROM DR HACK’ and ‘TAKE MERCY UNTO ME TAKE IT OUT OF IT’. Every few days for about a year, I would come across another one of these messages, and

Wednesday

Piers Morgan

What Trump told me in my hour of need

‘The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom,’ espoused German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Having spent the past fortnight in the grip of both, after fracturing my femur so disastrously it necessitated a total hip replacement, I can confirm he’s correct. And given I did it tripping in a hotel restaurant, I would add ‘shame’ to the list. The pain was excruciating; the shame even worse. (History will record that the Free Solo daredevil Alex Honnold successfully climbed the 508-metre Taipei 101 tower, without safety ropes, in the same week I failed to navigate a six-inch step.) But the boredom’s been stupefying. If I had a plan how best

Tuesday

Ian Thomson

Forgetting was the best defence for the Kindertransport refugees

Michael Moritz, one of Silicon Valley’s most successful venture capitalists, really has got it in for Donald Trump. America is currently in a ‘dark age’ of authoritarian governance, he claims, which spurns legality and liberal do-gooders everywhere. As a lifelong Democrat, Moritz was appalled when, in 2017, Trump failed to denounce the alt-right protestors who chanted ‘Jews will not replace us!’ at a torchlit rally in Virginia. Understandably, Moritz is alarmed by the tide of anti-Semitism today. His Jewish parents narrowly escaped death in Hitler’s Germany when they came to the UK on the Kindertransport. The 71-year-old Moritz now asks the question: how long before the iron-studded jackboot returns to

Wednesday

Martin Vander Weyer

Where have all the graduate jobs gone?

It’s a relief not to have been pressganged into joining the Prime Minister’s plane-load of business chiefs and reporters bound for Beijing this week. With Sir Keir Starmer are leaders of the likes of Astra-Zeneca, BP, HSBC, JLR and Rolls-Royce, and some billion-pound deals will no doubt be announced while they’re there – agreed in advance on the condition that Downing Street gave the green light for China’s Royal Mint Court mega-embassy-cum-listening-post on the edge of the City. The Chancellor is on the trip too, perhaps carrying a nice set of hunting prints as a housewarming gift for London ambassador Zheng Zeguang’s new office. But as is routine for senior

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Jenrick sacked, Chinese super-embassy approved and Trump makes a grab for Greenland

Home President Donald Trump of the United States made Britain and other countries dance to his tune. Sir Keir Starmer, telephoning him about Greenland, said: ‘Applying tariffs on allies for pursuing the collective security of Nato allies is wrong.’ Mr Trump had said he would impose tariffs on Britain, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden until ‘such time as a Deal is reached for [the US’s] Complete and Total purchase of Greenland’. Then Mr Trump posted remarks on social media saying Britain’s gift to Mauritius of the Chagos Islands, including the base at Diego Garcia, was ‘an act of GREAT STUPIDITY’. He added: ‘China and Russia have

Paul Wood

Arctic role: what does Trump really want from Greenland?

Donald Trump has probably not read Machiavelli, even the short one, The Prince. Machiavelli’s most famous advice was that it’s better for a prince to be feared than loved. But above all, he said, a ruler should strive not to be hated. Nobody likes a bully. The US President, however, clearly doesn’t care about any of this in his attempt to intimidate Denmark into handing over Greenland.  Why does Trump want Greenland? A clue lay in his meeting at the White House last week with the Florida Panthers ice hockey team. The team lined up for a photo: red ties and muscle-bound torsos bursting out of suit jackets, Trump in