Joe Biden talks a lot about restoring America’s standing in the world. But the truth is that if he now has the chance to reshape America’s relationships for a new era, it’s because Donald Trump has already done the awkward stuff. The question is: can Biden and his team swallow their collective pride and build
‘We’re going to be back in the game,’ our presumptive and somewhat previous new president tells us. ‘It’s not America alone.’ But America was never out of the game under Donald Trump and never alone. Look who is also back in the game: Tony Blinken, Barack Obama’s deputy secretary of state, will be Biden’s secretary
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After the blowout, the blowback
There is, as our presumptive and somewhat presumptuous president Malaprop told us on Sunday, a time to plant and a time for the other thing. There is a time for healing, and a time for massing your advisers in a garden centre and taking your enemies to court for stealing the election. A time for
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The President cannot go quietly
It’s not over till the senile guy talks gibberish. It might not be over for days. The election may shift to the courts, to be contested like history’s most important parking ticket. Regardless of who wins — and the true professionals of prediction, the bookmakers, now have Donald Trump odds-on — Donald Trump has already
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Why American liberals blame the victims of terror
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It’s Austro-Hungarian all over again
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Notes on a New Orleans professor
There is nothing to see. In 2014, Hunter Biden joined the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma on a reported salary of $50,000 (£40,000) a month. Hunter knows nothing about the energy business, and he doesn’t seem to speak Ukrainian. ‘I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,’ Joe Biden
Dr John called James Booker ‘the best black, gay, one-eyed junkie piano genius New Orleans has ever produced’. Booker died in 1983 at 43, ruined by drugs, drink and madness. Though he appeared on plenty of other people’s records and stages — Dr John, Aretha Franklin, B.B. King — Booker recorded only three studio albums
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If not, why not?
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She entered politics the day she married Harry
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A swing and a miss
Is Donald Trump taking the Democrats’ line on Brexit and the Irish border? We might think so from the Financial Times. On Friday, the FT quoted Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s special envoy to Northern Ireland, saying that the Trump administration, the State Department and the US Congress ‘would all be aligned in the desire to see
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Talking policy, paradigms and turning Trump’s instincts into reality
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Mike Pompeo has guided Donald Trump’s foreign policy, and has been hailed with bringing the president’s ideology to life. In the latest US edition of the Spectator, Dominic Green interviews the secretary of state. Freddy Gray speaks to Dominic about Pompeo’s Middle East strategy, and the philosophy that guides his decisions.
Washington DC Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has warned that if Joe Biden wins the November elections, an incoming Democratic administration would revive the Iran Deal ‘on day one’ and ‘return what would amount to hundreds of billions of dollars to a theocratic, corrupt regime’. In an exclusive interview at the State Department, Pompeo also
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The Academy Awards are making America look stupid in front of the entire world
A leaked letter to the UN Security Council shows that the British government has rejected the US position on Iran’s nuclear and conventional weapons programs, is siding with France and Germany at the UN, and is risking a diplomatic confrontation with its closest ally. The letter, dated August 20, notifies the head of the UN
