World

What can we expect from the Iran negotiations?

The eyes of the world are on Pakistan’s capital Islamabad as it plays host to this weekend’s make or break negotiations between the United States and Iran. The Pakistanis, whose mediation efforts pushed the two warring countries to agree a fragile two-week ceasefire, are taking no chances. Security has been stepped up, with thousands of police officers and security forces patrolling the streets of the capital. Hope and trepidation are the order of the day when it comes to ending a Middle East war that has already cost thousands of lives and plunged the world into economic crisis. Any peace agreement will require a degree of conciliation and compromise –

Brendan O’Neill

The lies about Israel’s attack on Hezbollah

Imagine there was a virulently Francophobic militia on the doorstep of the French Republic. Imagine it had fired nearly a hundred thousand missiles into France these past three years. Imagine if the France-loathing maniacs had caused the deaths of hundreds of French people and forced almost half a million to flee their towns in terror. France would respond, right? It would take action, no? Why, then, does President Macron not extend the same right to fight to his supposed ally of Israel? Hezbollah has inflicted every one of those bloody horrors on Israel since October 7, 2023. I’ve scaled up the numbers to account for France’s population of 70 million,

Doug Stokes

What Trump gets wrong about NATO

The idea that the United States has been swindled by its NATO allies is not new. Robert Gates, in his valedictory address as secretary of defense in June 2011, warned bluntly that future American leaders might not consider the return on defense investment in Europe worthwhile. He spoke of a “two-tiered alliance… Between those willing and able to pay the price and bear the burdens of alliance commitments, and those who enjoy the benefits of NATO membership… but don’t want to share the risks and the costs.” Gates was no populist. He was a career intelligence officer and establishment Republican, and his warning carried real weight precisely because it came

Travis Aaroe

Hungary has become a tired gerontocracy

Hungary in 2026 is what most developed countries were probably on their way to becoming in the 1980s and early Nineties, had mass migration not intervened: a sleazy gerontocracy with occasional bouts of moral-majority politics and ethnic nationalism. With socialism dead, the opposition is made up of liberal parties led by equally sleazy modernizers. Crime has ceased to be an issue, partly because the population is aging. The people, like pandas, do not breed. There is boredom and ennui. There is nothing analogous to, say, the killing of Iryna Zarutska. Hungary has had a dreadful century and is now a tired sort of place Such has been the work of Viktor Orbán,

Alexander Kolyandr

Why Ukraine’s Russian oil strikes are backfiring

Every drone Ukraine fires at a Russian oil terminal is meant to defund Moscow’s war in Ukraine. Right now, each one may be doing the opposite. Ukraine’s strikes on Russian oil export infrastructure are intended to starve Moscow of the budget revenues that fund its war machine. The logic is straightforward: disrupt exports, reduce revenues, constrain the war effort. Kyiv has been explicit about this: Ukrainian officials consistently frame attacks on oil terminals as direct hits on Russia’s war chest, treating every barrel that cannot be shipped as a ruble that cannot be spent on missiles or mobilization. Reuters puts the scale of that disruption in stark terms – at least

Owen Matthews

Ukraine’s allies are falling away

As Ukraine emerges battered but unbowed from the third and most terrible winter of the war against Russia, its people have proved that they can survive and fight on even as Vladimir Putin’s troops destroy swaths of their country’s heating, transport and electricity infrastructure. But one thing that Ukraine cannot survive without is money – and that, the European Union seems critically unable to provide. On Thursday, a Council of Europe summit once again failed to remove a veto by Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, on a €90 billion ($104 billion) tranche of funding for Ukraine. That cash, in the form of a controversial loan raised collectively by the EU,

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

Jonathan Spyer

Will Iran give Benjamin Netanyahu a wartime boost?

Israel’s current war on two fronts shows few signs of wrapping up soon. In Lebanon, the indications are that the IDF is looking to establish an expanded buffer zone north of the border, with the intention of holding it for as long as the government in Beirut fails to fulfill its pledge to disarm Hezbollah. In Iran, Israeli air attacks continue daily, even as Tehran’s missiles and drones target Israel’s centers of civilian population. This year is an election year in Israel, with polls required by law to take place by October. So what impact, if any, are the conflicts having on the political debate inside Israel? Are they likely

Jonathan Spyer

Why Israel is pushing further into Lebanon

Israel launched a limited ground operation in southern Lebanon this week, intended to expand the de facto buffer zone which it has maintained along the border since the ceasefire of November 2024. At that time, Israel held control of five positions on the Lebanese side of the border. In response to Hezbollah’s decision to re-engage with Israel in the context of the current conflict between Jerusalem and Tehran, the IDF is pushing further into Lebanon. Israel is now bombing Hezbollah targets throughout the country. Ground forces, meanwhile, are cautiously pushing forward. According to Israeli media reports, the IDF’s goal is to establish 13 additional positions north of the border. Eight-hundred and eighty-six

Brendan O’Neill

War on Iran was not ‘unprovoked’

I’ve been thinking a lot about the phrase “unprovoked war.” It’s been rolling off leftist tongues since the explosion of hostilities in Iran. This week, Jeremy Corbyn, Zarah Sultana and scores of hoary peaceniks wrote a letter to the Guardian insisting Britain should have nothing to do with America and Israel’s “unprovoked war” in Iran. Trump’s noisy doubters and Israel’s legion haters are using language as a weapon Here’s my question: is the rape and murder of Jews not a provocation? Was the worst anti-Jewish atrocity since the Holocaust – 7 October – not a provocation? The tyrants of Tehran were the paymasters of the jihadist brutes who carried out

Jacob Heilbrunn

What will the Iran ceasefire cost Trump?

Jacob Heilbrunn

Why Trump is tempting 25th Amendment talk

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump has already checked out of NATO

Donald Trump, who will deliver an address from the Oval Office tonight, isn’t giving up on his aims for his war in the Middle East. This time his target isn’t Iran but NATO. “You don’t even have a navy,” he declared about Britain before going on to denounce the North Atlantic alliance. “I was never swayed by NATO. I always knew they were a paper tiger, and Putin knows that too, by the way,” Trump told Britain’s Daily Telegraph. There hasn’t been such a loony interview since Kaiser Wilhelm II created an international furor in 1908 in the same paper by denouncing the English as “mad, mad, mad as March

Mark Brolin

Denmark’s velvet trap has been exposed

Denmark is, by almost any measure, an extraordinary success. A nation of six million that has produced Novo Nordisk, Maersk, Vestas and Lego. Its GDP per capita is comfortably ahead of Sweden and Finland. Greater Copenhagen (including Swedish Lund and Malmö) is ranked among Europe’s top innovation clusters. Danish film culture – Bier, Vinterberg, the Borgen phenomenon – has convinced the world that Denmark has solved democracy, one subtitled thriller at a time. Copenhagen airport is the undisputed transport hub of the Nordic region. Denmark remains among the very happiest societies on earth, according to the latest World Happiness Report. Danish public debate has quietly narrowed to a short menu

Melanie McDonagh

The Church of England makes me grateful to be a Catholic

Granted, I was not the most obvious person to appreciate the installation of Sarah Mullally in Canterbury, even though I think her a splendid Christian pastor and indeed, an exemplary Christian. Her kind, homely face radiates charity and good will; the simplicity of her speech speaks of sincerity. But as a bolshie Catholic, it’s not possible to spend long in Canterbury cathedral during this very Anglican celebration without the subversive thought surfacing that this cathedral is, by rights, Catholic, the Reformation being an unfortunate blip in the great scheme of things. If Sarah Mullally counts, as she says she does, Thomas Becket as one of her predecessors (which I happen

Wednesday

April 8, 2026

Matthew Lynn

We’re stuck at the worst possible oil price

A ceasefire has been agreed with Iran. The Straits of Hormuz will reopen. And the oil market will get back to normal very quickly. By Wednesday morning, it looked as if the energy crisis was over. Finance ministers will be breathing a sigh of relief as the crisis abates. But hold on. In reality, the truce is fragile, and huge amounts of supply have been taken out of the market. So long as that remains true, the price of oil, and with it the global economy, will remain stuck. The average price of $90 to $100 a barrel is not what anyone really thinks a barrel of oil is worth

Jonathan Spyer

The winners and losers of the Iran ceasefire deal

The abrupt announcement of a two-week ceasefire in the war between the US, Israel and Iran resolves none of the issues which caused the conflict. Beyond an agreement to cease attacks, the arrangements that will hold during the two-week period appear themselves unclear. Each side in the last hours seemed to commit to different versions of the ceasefire in key areas. Iran remains an aggressive and dangerous power, with the ambition of expelling the US from the region, dominating the Gulf states and destroying Israel From Israel’s point of view, the bottom line is clear. The Iranian regime has been significantly weakened in its capacities in a number of key

Paul Wood

Trump’s fantasy of victory

Among the many gifts the Watergate scandal gave us was Nixon’s White House press secretary declaring: “This is the operative statement. The others are inoperative.” That was after months of sticking to increasingly threadbare denials. In Donald Trump’s White House, operative statements become inoperative from one day to the next. That’s especially true of Iran. In 24 hours, from Tuesday to Wednesday this week, Trump went from “a whole civilization will die tonight” to “this could be the Golden Age of the Middle East!!!” TACO: Trump Always Chickens Out, as the meme has it. The two-week ceasefire agreed this week with Iran is a lesson that you can win every

Daniel DePetris

Why Trump stepped back from the brink

At 5 p.m. ET speculation was rife that a deal between the United States and Iran was in the works. Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Shehbaz Sharif pleaded for President Trump to extend his 8 p.m. Tuesday deadline – before he destroyed every bridge and power plant in Iran – by another two weeks in order to give diplomacy more time to work. Yet the New York Times reported that Iranian officials cut off direct contact with their American counterparts. And the White House wasn’t offering definitive answers about whether Trump was leaning toward escalation or a ceasefire. The ceasefire couldn’t have come at a better time for both sides Finally, less than an hour and

Tuesday

April 7, 2026

Charlie Gammell

Why Iran thinks it’s winning

President Trump has what he so dearly craves; the attention of the global media and the world hanging on his every word. As time ticks down to Donald’s deadline, after which he is threatening to commit war crimes on an unprecedented scale against the Iranian people, the gap for negotiations narrows and the likelihood of a US ground invasion into Iran widens. We should be honest about the talks’ chances of success: very low. At present it is likely that negotiators are seeking only to find common ground, however thin, from which a pause in fighting can be agreed upon. We are talking here about the foothills of a framework

Monday

April 6, 2026

Natasha Feroze

What can Artemis II tell us about the wonders of the Moon?

Artemis II departed on the most ambitious mission yet, something which has not been tried for 50 years. Four astronauts were launched into the air on a ten-day expedition with the aim of traveling 5,000 miles past the far side of the Moon. Natasha Feroze is joined by David Whitehouse, astroscientist and writer to discuss the difficulty involved in the mission, how little we think about the significance of the Moon and whether the US will beat China in its quest to have footsteps back on the Moon.

Sunday

April 5, 2026

Nicholas Hopton

Iran has offered Trump an olive branch

There are few figures in Iranian politics as simultaneously familiar and enigmatic as Javad Zarif. To some in Washington he remains the smooth-talking apologist of the Islamic Republic; to hardliners in Tehran, he is still the man who gave too much away in the nuclear negotiations. When such a figure publishes the necessary elements for a new US-Iran deal that will end the Third Gulf War, it is worth paying attention. Zarif’s recent article in Foreign Affairs, framed as a set of reciprocal steps between Tehran and Washington, is best understood as a sort of olive branch. In diplomatic parlance, he is “flying a kite”: testing how far the wind

Friday

April 3, 2026

Jonathan Aitken

The UAE and Oman could be the big winners from the Iran war

Sixty years ago, I first gazed out on the Strait of Hormuz from the Musandam peninsula of Oman. I was there as private secretary to my godfather, Selwyn Lloyd, who had been Britain’s foreign secretary during the Suez Crisis. The previous evening our host, Sultan Said bin Taimur, the ruler of Oman for nearly 40 years, commented gloomily: “When two fish are fighting in these waters, the British are behind it.” I estimate that I must have made at least 250 visits to the Gulf States in the intervening six decades. The key question which would surely now be asked by the ghosts of my former Middle East interlocutors –

Gus Carter

Trump falls back on ‘you’re fired!’ as midterms loom

Pam Bondi’s departure as attorney general has prompted the usual Kremlinologist speculation. One theory has it that Donald Trump was furious that she may have warned Democrat Eric Swalwell about a planned FBI release of documents detailing his past relationship with a Chinese spy. Bondi’s replacement, Todd Blanche, dismissed these claims as false. Another theory is that the President had finally had enough of her errors over the handling of the Epstein files, given Bondi was recently subpoenaed in a bipartisan effort by the House. And Trump is widely reported to be frustrated at her failure to indict his archenemies, former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General

Irwin Stelzer

This is what Trump means by ‘victory’ in Iran

President Trump has now told us something very important about the war with Iran. Ponder his address to the nation this week and you discover how he defines victory. Nothing that happens from here on out will change that. As Trump sees it, he is the winner, having achieved all his goals. He has accomplished regime change in Iran by eliminating the men who led the regime when the war started. America has so damaged the country’s military infrastructure that it will not be able to produce or deliver a nuclear weapon for at least a decade, by which time it will be up to a future American president to

Roger Kimball

Ignore the propaganda war

Prediction: by the time you read this, the joint US-Israeli operation in Iran will be all but over. In fact, it had mostly ended by the start of April. The Kool-Aid-dispensing press has been telling us since the conflict began that Iran was winning. They wanted it so badly to be true. Being adept at magical thinking, they also believe that what they wanted to be the case would suddenly, hey presto, become the case. A cover story in the Economist declared “Advantage Iran.” “A month of bombing Iran,” that once-sober publication announced, “has achieved nothing… For now, at least, the advantage lies with the Islamic Republic.” Not to be

Jacob Heilbrunn

Donald Trump is going on a firing spree

The surprising thing isn’t that Donald Trump fired his attorney general Pam Bondi and appointed Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche her temporary successor. It’s that he waited as long as he did. After exercising what is for him unusual restraint – his cabinet was in a state of perpetual upheaval during his first term as president – Trump is going on a firing spree. “He’s very angry, and he’s going to be moving people,” one top administration official told Politico yesterday. Next on the chopping block could be a host of Trump loyalists – Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-Remer, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Director of National

Geoffrey Cain

How the West is empowering China’s war machine

The West’s technology brains and universities are arming China. A few of them are potentially breaking the law to do it, but most of them don’t need to. The front door has been open for years, and nobody in London or Washington has thought to close it. According to a federal indictment unsealed in Manhattan last month, on December 18, 2025, in a warehouse somewhere in Southeast Asia, a team of men used a hair dryer to peel serial-number labels off genuine server boxes and press them onto fakes. The real servers, loaded with some of America’s most restricted artificial intelligence hardware, are alleged to have long since been shipped

Thursday

April 2, 2026

Cockburn

Bondi out: is Trump culling the beautiful women from his cabinet?

More like Pam Gone-di! President Trump this afternoon confirmed that Attorney General Pam Bondi would be moving on to pastures new. In a Truth Social post announcing her dismissal, Trump called Bondi a “Great American Patriot and a loyal friend” who “did a tremendous job overseeing a massive crackdown in Crime across our Country, with Murders plummeting to their lowest level since 1900.” “We love Pam,” wrote Trump. Deputy AG Todd Blanche, who Trump dubbed, “a very talented and respected Legal Mind,” will serve as Acting Attorney General. Bondi was Trump’s second choice as AG after his attempt to nominate Matt Gaetz failed. She will now “be transitioning to a

Rod Liddle

The real reason the left hates Israel

“Listen to what the man on the left of the camera has to say about Israel, the man who is addressed as Nick,” a radical Corbynista friend suggested to me the other day in a social media message designed to change my mind about the Middle East. It’s part of a sustained campaign on his part which dates back at least ten years and is usually conducted with good grace, if never accord. So I listened to what this chap Nick had to say, with growing hilarity. Not because of what he said – which was what you might expect from a rank anti-Semite, but because of who he was.

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump’s rambling Iran address was full of wishful thinking

In his nationwide address on Wednesday, Donald Trump could not have been clearer about the course of the Iran war. It’s not ending any time soon and there will be no deescalation of military force. Instead, channeling his inner General Curtis LeMay, Trump announced, “We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We’re going to bring them back to the stone ages where they belong.” No, they don’t. It was a jarring reference to an ancient and proud Persian civilization that has been commandeered by a gang of thugs. Apart from the dubious morality of luxuriating in the prospect of annihilating an entire country, the practical problem is this: the “Bomb Them Back to the Stone Age” strategy didn’t work in

Roger Kimball

Trump touts the successes of his war for peace

“Ceasefire!” Some people worried that President Trump was taking to the air waves tonight in order to declare a ceasefire with Iran. That, clearly, was what Masoud Pezeshkian, the President of Iran hoped for in his careful, lengthy and mendacious “Letter to the American People” today. Pezeshkian said that “portraying Iran as a threat is neither consistent with historical reality nor with present-day observable facts.” Tell that to the hundreds of American victims of Iranian aggression. Tell it to the thousands of victims of Iran’s proxies like Hezbollah and Hamas. President Trump was having none of it. Operation Epic Fury, he said, was all about targeting the world’s leading sponsor of state terror and preventing

Wednesday

April 1, 2026

Sam Olsen

Donald Trump would regret leaving NATO

Donald Trump has yet again raised the prospect of the United States leaving NATO. The President called the alliance a “paper tiger” and said he “was never swayed by NATO.” It is tempting to dismiss it as political theater. But this time feels different. Trump’s frustration with European allies has sharpened, particularly over their reluctance to back his approach to Iran, where the absence of a clear political end-state has made support difficult to sustain. That hesitation has deepened transatlantic irritation. Combined with tensions over Greenland and Denmark, this is no longer an abstract complaint about burden-sharing but an accumulation of grievances. What once sounded like brinkmanship now carries the

Stephen Bayley

Trump’s presidential library is predictably crass

Maybe a tad prematurely for a term that ends only in 2029, the Trump Organization has released a short video on Truth Social revealing, with a dizzying CGI fly-throughs, proposals for the Donald J. Trump presidential library. Any great memorial should be both surprising and inevitable. The Donald J. Trump presidential library is neither, being woefully predictable in its crassness and feeble as a design It’s not about Making America Literate Again: there’s not a book in sight. I could not even see a reference to Trump’s own great contribution to world literature: The Art of the Deal. By contrast, the Ptolemies’ great library in Alexandria had perhaps 700,000 papyrus

Christopher Kennedy-Barnard

War and fishing in the Strait of Hormuz

On February 28, I jumped on a fishing charter with some friends and headed out into the Strait of Hormuz. There was barely any wind. The sea shimmered in the heat of the Gulf sunshine. On the very first drop of our lines, something hit my metal jig and went off like a rocket. After a couple more brief runs, a very stout, double-figure grouper rose through the water column, which I guided safely into the waiting net. It was a personal-best hamour (The Arab word for grouper), weighing between 10 and 12 pounds. I went on to catch a few interesting tropical fish, including a snapper, but I didn’t