World

Limor Simhony Philpott

Violent settlers must be stopped

A crisis of authority now festers at the heart of Israel. A shrill, violent fringe of extremist settlers in the West Bank is not only terrorising Palestinians, but undermining the authority of the Israeli state, its security and diplomatic relations. This week, there have been reported attacks by settlers near Deir Istiya, near Nablus, and in Jaba, southwest of Bethlehem. These settlers’ growing impunity, and the government’s failure to rein them in, is no longer a side issue. Settler violence is emerging as a national security crisis. This is not hyperbole. These hilltop radicals act with a confidence that is backed by far-right politicians and suggests de facto immunity: arson, intimidation, physical violence, price‑tag attacks,

Owen Matthews

Zelensky cannot agree to the Witkoff peace deal

With Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s political authority already under grave assault in the wake of a major corruption scandal, he now faces a new challenge – this time from his erstwhile ally, the United States. A high-level US delegation led by army secretary Daniel Driscoll is meeting Zelensky in Kyiv today to present the latest version of a peace plan aimed at ending the war. The contents of the plan have not been officially revealed and so far it has not been publicly endorsed by Donald Trump. But two things are already clear. One is that there’s nothing new in it. And two, there’s nothing good in it for Zelensky.

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

The Ukraine peace proposal raises more questions than it answers

Volodymyr Zelensky is meeting US officials today for the first time since the news of a US-Russia peace plan for Ukraine emerged yesterday. The Ukrainian president, fresh from a trip to Turkey, is due to meet with the American army chiefs Dan Driscoll and General Randy George – the most senior Pentagon representatives to visit Ukraine since Donald Trump’s return to the White House – who are in the country on a ‘fact-finding’ mission. The purpose of the meeting is for Trump’s representatives to discuss ‘efforts to end the war’. While the agenda has not been made public, it is highly likely the trio will discuss the new 28-point peace plan,

Katja Hoyer Katja Hoyer

Why can’t Friedrich Merz just say sorry?

‘We live in one of the most beautiful countries in the world,’ began a seemingly innocuous speech by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz last week. The words that followed earned him the wrath of the largest state in South America. Just back from the Cop climate summit in Belem, Brazil, Merz declared that his delegation had been ‘glad to return from that place’. When he’d asked the accompanying journalists if anyone would like to stay, ‘nobody raised their hand’. Appearing to compare their country unfavourably to Germany, Merz’s remarks offended many of Brazil’s leaders. President Lula hit back by suggesting Merz should have gone out to a bar or dancing in Belem before passing judgment

Ukraine

Owen Matthews

Ukraine is on the verge of political collapse

Defeat, political implosion and civil war – those are the jeopardies that Volodymyr Zelensky faces as Ukraine heads into the most difficult and probably the last winter of the war. Evermore effective Russian strikes against Ukraine’s energy and transport infrastructure are likely to plunge swaths of the country into cold and darkness. Russian troops continue to push forwards slowly and bloodily in Donbas and, more dangerously, on the southern flank in Zaporizhzhia. Desertions from the Ukrainian army are up four times since last year and the number of deserters now matches the number of active fighters. The US has turned off the money taps and Europe struggles to produce the

George Llewelyn

Chernihiv is on the frontline of Russia’s cruellest winter campaign yet

First, the power went out in the bar. A few minutes later came the familiar low, concussive thud of an explosion nearby, the kind that makes the walls tremble and the glasses rattle on the shelves. Somewhere close, a few streets perhaps, a Russian drone had found its mark. Almost as quick as it came, the sound dissipates, leaving an ambivalent quietness in its wake. Inside, the waitress lights candles, which flicker as if battling to keep darkness at bay. From a phone sitting on the bar, she plays music, the sound, tinny and weak, fighting to drown out the silence. Outside, buses speed along the street, clamorous beacons of

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Will peace in Ukraine elude Trump?

28 min listen

With a Gaza ceasefire deal, President Trump’s attention has turned to ending the war in Ukraine. A meeting with Putin was suggested, before coming to nothing. Owen Matthews joins Freddy Gray to talk about the fundamental differences between Trump and Putin, the limits on Ukraine’s President Zelensky when it comes to negotiation and why the global west keeps misunderstanding Russia time and time again. Produced by Patrick Gibbons and Megan McElroy.

Israel

Jonathan Sacerdoti

What Trump’s Gaza peace plan means for Israel

This may not be the conclusion Israel imagined when it launched its campaign in Gaza. Not all the hostage bodies are home. Hamas is bruised, but not broken. The region remains volatile. Yet even as combat continues, the United Nations Security Council, backed by an American administration long assumed to be ‘pro-Israel’, yesterday endorsed a resolution that places an armed international force in Gaza, sketches a vague pathway to Palestinian statehood, and outlines a governing arrangement in which neither Israel nor the Palestinian Authority is central. For Israel this is a moment of profound uncertainty – a reminder that military operations, however successful, do not automatically dictate the shape of

Jonathan Spyer

Why Israel fears Turkey’s involvement in Gaza

As the Gaza ceasefire struggles into its second month, a significant difference between the position of Israel and that of its chief ally, the United States, on the way forward is emerging. This difference reflects broader gaps in perception in Jerusalem and Washington regarding the nature and motivations of the current forces engaged in the Middle East. The subject of that difference is Turkey.   The Turks have expressed a desire to play a role in the ‘international stabilisation force’ (ISF), which, according to President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan, is supposed to take over ground security control of Gaza from the IDF (and Hamas) in the framework of the plan’s implementation.

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The looming threat to Israel

In the aftermath of war, a new front opens. Not in the ruins of Gaza’s cities, but in the corridors of diplomacy, where maps are redrawn with words and allegiances. Israel now finds itself encircled not by tanks but by treaties, resolutions, and incentives: a web of international manoeuvres that promises ‘stability’ while redefining the terms of its own strategic freedom. At the centre of this recalibration is the United States, whose post-conflict blueprint projects a pacified region steered by pragmatism, compromise, and multilateral oversight. But beneath the rhetoric of reconstruction lies a more perilous logic: one that treats deterrence as destabilising, ambiguity as maturity, and the survival instincts of

America

Europe

Jim Lawley

Spain’s post-Franco democracy is on the rocks

‘Fine weather in Malaga’ proclaimed the banner headline of a Spanish newspaper in 1974 – that was the day’s big story. There was nothing about the country’s social and economic problems or the Carnation Revolution bringing democracy to neighbouring Portugal. After almost four decades in charge, the dictator Francisco Franco had effectively depoliticised Spain. ‘A century and a half of parliamentary democracy,’ Franco said, ‘accompanied by the loss of immense territory, three civil wars, and the imminent danger of national  disintegration, add up to a disastrous balance sheet, sufficient to discredit parliamentary systems in the eyes of the Spanish people.’ Yet once Franco died – fifty years today ­– a

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Why did the Danish PM call for a ‘spiritual rearmament’?

22 min listen

Earlier this year, Denmark’s Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, stood before a group of university students and made a striking statement: ‘We will need a form of rearmament that is just as important [as the military one]. That is the spiritual one.’ This was all the more remarkable from the leader of the Social Democrats, and in a country which is amongst the most secular in the world. Danish journalist Iben Thranholm – who joins Damian Thompson for this episode of Holy Smoke – says that in some ways the welfare state had replaced the belief in god in Denmark. So to what extent is Frederiksen’s call to action a political

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

A decade after Bataclan, France is more divided than ever

Ten years ago today, Islamist terrorists massacred 130 people in a coordinated attack across Paris. It was the heaviest loss of life on French soil since the second world war, and those who perished – as well as the 350 who were wounded – will be remembered today in a series of commemorations. Emmanuel Macron will visit the six sites where the terrorists struck, among them the Stade de France and the Bataclan concert hall, and the president will also inaugurate a memorial garden at Place Saint-Gervais, opposite Paris City Hall. According to the Élysée Palace, the day will be an opportunity for the nation ‘to honour the memory of

Yesterday

Daniel Rey

Can ‘Bazball’ help England finally triumph Down Under in the Ashes?

‘Bazball’ – England’s exhilarating and exasperating style of playing cricket – has reached its denouement. Starting tomorrow, England face Australia in five Ashes tests that will define the legacy of this controversial philosophy and the four-year tenure of coach Brendon ‘Baz’ McCullum. Bazball is a spirit of freedom. McCullum – who was a brilliant, daredevil captain for New Zealand – has rewired England to play cricket aggressively, and without ‘fear of failure’. Bold, and often brash, Bazball is a revolt against English cricketing orthodoxy – a stand for the cavaliers against the roundheads. It can be argued that this approach is needed most in Australia. Winning a series Down Under

Andreas Roth

The catastrophic dumbing down of German education

German teachers are a privileged species. Most of us enjoy the status of a Beamter, a tenured civil servant. We can be dismissed only after a serious criminal conviction, we are exempt from social insurance contributions, and even our mortgage rates are lower. Such comfort discourages dissent. Yet, after more than 25 years as a pampered Beamter, I find myself overwhelmed, not by the teaching load or the students, but by the accelerating erosion of academic standards. Having taught English, history and Latin at four different Gymnasien, the equivalent of a grammar school, I have learned that challenging students is frowned upon by both bureaucrats and politicians. Nearly all my

Douglas Murray

Trump’s Epstein gamble

It is always interesting to see who the American left claims are the leaders of the American right. There was a time during President Trump’s first term when Steve Bannon fitted the role – and relished playing it. Back then most days brought another media profile of the dark genius of the MAGA movement. The Guardian, New York Times and others were obsessed. Vanity Fair would send reporters to follow Bannon as he conquered America and, er, Europe. Documentary crews were perennially in tow. Indeed one documentary following Bannon around included a scene in which they followed him to the showing of another documentary about him from a crew who

Richard Dearlove

Britain’s national security must not be sacrificed to net zero

Those who, like myself, experienced life behind the Iron Curtain understand instinctively that centrally planned economies beholden to an ideology do not bring benefit to the majority of the population on whom they are imposed. A few top-level individuals prosper, but the citizen finds himself and his aspirations crushed by the diktats of central government. The state itself is similarly confined by a set of ideas which are presented as self-evident truths which constrain its policy–making and exclude challenge. That Iron Curtain model describes pretty accurately the UK’s energy policy, driven as it is by the ideological pursuit of net zero and the diktats required to implement it. Thus: I

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: an immigration overhaul, Budget chaos and doctors’ strikes

Home Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, proposed that refugees would only be granted a temporary right to stay and would be sent home if officials deemed their country safe to return to. They would not qualify for British citizenship for 20 years. To avoid drawn-out appeals, a new appeals body would be created. Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects migrants’ ‘right to family life’, would somehow be weakened. Digital ID was invoked for the enforcement of checks on status. Opponents seized upon the possibility that, to pay for accommodation, migrants’ jewellery would be confiscated. Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, offered her party’s support if the

Wednesday

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Zelensky must get a grip of his government

Vladimir Putin’s hopes of wearing Ukraine down in a war of attrition are no longer far-fetched. The country feels fragile, like it did in February 2022. Back then, Ukrainians rallied behind a president who stayed and shared a conviction that victory was possible. Today many are wondering whether defeat and the end of Ukraine’s statehood are drawing nearer than anyone would like to admit. A corruption scandal is engulfing Volodymyr Zelensky’s government. Russia is making gains on the battlefield. Ukraine’s tragedy is not only that Zelensky’s close associates were leeching off 15 per cent from contracts meant to fortify critical energy infrastructure, stealing from the country £76 million at the

Owen Matthews

Europe can’t fix Ukraine’s cash crisis

Who will pay for Ukraine’s war effort now the Trump administration has turned off the financial taps? European leaders have expressed themselves ready and willing to take up the burden, with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen affirming that ‘if we continue to believe that Ukraine is our first line of defence, we need to step up our assistance.’ Individual countries have come up with generous funding packages – most open-handed of all being Germany, which has recently pledged more than €3 billion in direct funding. But that’s just a drop in the ocean compared to what Ukraine says it needs. With more than 40 per cent of its

Jacob Heilbrunn

Donald Trump doesn’t want to talk about Epstein

The contrast could hardly have been starker. As Donald Trump palled around with Mohammed bin Salman in the newly gilded Oval Office, Congress was voting on a transparency act that would further expose Jeffrey Epstein’s grave misdeeds. Trump, who had worked overtime to try and quash the vote, was in his element with the Saudi crown prince. Transparency? Not a bit of it. Trump proclaimed that the crown prince ‘knew nothing’ about the death of Jamal Khashoggi who was, after all, ‘extremely controversial,’ the term that he often deploys to describe anyone he dislikes or finds nettlesome. The hero, or, to put it more precisely, heroine, of the day was Marjorie Taylor Greene. Greene is a profile in courage. She stood up for Epstein’s victims

Tuesday

Dean Godson

Europe’s leaders are finally waking up on immigration – but is it too late?

The impressive shift in the terms of trade of the immigration debate in the last 24 hours proves one unlikely proposition: that the British political marketplace actually works. Giorgia Meloni is the only leader of a major European country in these times who seems successfully to have united the grievances of losers and winners in a viable political coalition Nigel Farage was correct this morning to assert that the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood would not have spoken as she did but for Reform successfully conditioning the terms of trade in this Parliament. However, he in turn was forced to concede that her rhetoric, at least, deserved serious consideration – even as

Tom Slater Tom Slater

No, Shabana Mahmood isn’t far right

We’ve become grimly accustomed to people throwing around the phrase ‘far right’. But seeing it flung at Labour home secretary Shabana Mahmood’s asylum reforms has felt particularly barmy – a new low from the liberal-left midwits who we all hoped couldn’t sink any lower. Mahmood’s punchy announcements this week, in which she laid out plans to fix our ‘broken’ asylum system, has gone down exactly as you might expect Mahmood’s punchy announcements this week, in which she laid out plans to fix our ‘broken’ asylum system, have gone down exactly as you might expect. The Guardian has accused her of entering into a ‘damaging arms race with the far right’. ‘Straight out of the

Mark Cancian and Chris Park

How Trump could attack Venezuela

President Trump has assembled the largest naval force in the Caribbean since the Cold War. How will it be used? Is he considering an attack on Venezuela to overthrow the Maduro regime? Will he pursue the drug cartels by attacking them in Venezuela? Or will the President simply continue America’s counterdrug operations at sea? With all of these possibilities there is the hope that the Maduro regime will collapse under the pressure of America’s military might. The arrival of the Gerald R Ford seems to signal some sort of direct action against Venezuela At present, the United States is countering the flow of illegal drugs by sinking suspected drug-carrying boats off the

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Did the Louvre robbers want to get caught?

It is more than a month since thieves stole the crown jewels from the Louvre and the chances of recovering the loot, worth an estimated €88 million, diminish with every passing day. The robbery was initially dubbed the ‘heist of the century’, a brazen theft in broad daylight as visitors strolled through the world’s most famous museum. They were up and down the ladder and in out of the museum in seven minutes, giving the impression that this was the work of villains well-versed in daring robberies. Are the alleged perpetrators of the Louvre heist happy to go to prison for a few years knowing that when they get out

Sunday

Sam Meadows

Chile flirts with a rightward turn

A border ‘ditch’ may prove to be the thing that brings the right back to power in Chile. Although the communist-affiliated candidate Jeannette Jara leads the polls going into this weekend’s election, a second-round run-off seems almost certain, with a consolidated right-wing alliance – running on a platform to cut illegal immigration – likely to win the final showdown. Jose Antonio Kast, the leading right-wing candidate, is a hardliner who admires both Donald Trump and El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele. He has promised to rule with ‘mano dura’ (an iron fist). He says drug dealers will be held in in solitary confinement and has pledged to construct a series of

Friday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The Jewish blood libel is back. Its return should trouble us all

It’s back. The lie that led to the slaughter of so many Jews has returned to public life. The calumny that caused so much anti-Jewish persecution, expulsion and bloodshed has stirred, zombie-like, from its historic slumber. Jews drain the blood of Christians and use it to make bread – incredibly, unconscionably, this most appalling falsehood has returned. It is obscene that such words are being uttered on a university campus in 2025 At University College London (UCL) this week, a lecture was given in which it was allegedly suggested that Jews murder Gentiles and use their blood in perverse rituals. The comments were made by Samar Maqusi, a US academic.

Henry Donovan

Why German conscription should worry Britain

For years, Germany, like Britain, has drifted through history as though nothing could ever again disturb its peace. The world outside was assumed to be orderly, rational, restrained. Conflict was something that happened elsewhere. The Bundeswehr, neglected to the point of embarrassment, became a case study in strategic complacency. Germany’s political class preferred moral posturing to the dull, necessary business of national defence. Some fear that conscription is merely a prelude to sending Germany’s youth into war And as long as Russia was merely grumbling at its neighbours rather than invading them, Berlin convinced itself it could go on like this forever. Those days are over. And Germany, finally –

Patrick Gibbons

Is South Korea bracing for a third Trump-Kim summit?

Donald Trump’s meeting with President Xi was the standout moment of this month’s Asia-Pacific leaders’ summit in South Korea. Yet almost as much attention focused on the rumours that Trump’s gaze had turned once again to North Korea. Addressing suggestions he would meet Kim, the American President told reporters, ‘I’d be open 100 per cent. I get along very well with Kim Jong Un.’ A meeting never materialised, but speculation – and tension – has only grown since.  Days after Trump’s departure, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth arrived as part of his own tour of Asia. In Seoul, he became the first defence secretary in nearly eight years to visit

Thursday

Jacob Heilbrunn

The Epstein files continue to haunt Donald Trump

The main thing that has made the Epstein files seem politically (as opposed to morally) significant is that Donald Trump remains obsessed with preventing them from seeing the light of day. He thus devoted much of Wednesday to importuning Republicans such as Colorado Congresswoman Lauren Boebert not to back their release. ‘Only a very bad, or stupid, Republican,’ Trump declared, ‘would fall into that trap.’ But senior Republicans are expecting mass vote defections in the coming week as legislators prepare to vote for a disclosure bill sponsored by Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie. Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene says that releasing the files is ‘not only the right thing

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Why does the American right take itself so seriously?

The American right has a problem: it can’t stop talking about itself. Commentators, academics and journalists of what used to be called a ‘conservative’ persuasion all tend to think that their ideas are tremendously interesting. And, in the way a difficult child becomes argumentative when he or she isn’t getting attention, they fight. They fear irrelevance and so they fall out with each other and take sides in order to prove to themselves that they have something worth saying. Things become messy and nasty and everybody gets carried away – usually in the hope of grabbing their own slice of an all-too easily distracted online audience. (Why else am I

Edward Howell

Why Taiwan matters to Japan

It was only a matter of time before Japan’s Iron Lady would be targeted by China. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi mentioned how Tokyo might resort to force were Beijing to take military action over Taiwan: ‘If there are battleships and the use of force, no matter how you think about it, it could constitute a survival-threatening situation,’ she said. In response, China’s consul-general in Osaka, Xue Jian, threatened, on Monday, to ‘cut off’ the Japanese prime minister’s ‘filthy neck…without a moment’s hesitation’. Xue’s vitriolic online reaction, which he subsequently deleted from his X account, underscores how China’s wolf-warrior diplomacy has anything but abated. Yet, the incident highlights a more important

Matt Ridley

America thinks Britain is finished

‘What’s missing?’ the tech titan Peter Thiel asks me, over lunch on the hummingbird-infested patio of his house in the Hollywood Hills. He gestures at the city of Los Angeles laid out in the haze below us. ‘Cranes!’ he explains. Thiel has argued for years that America has done most of its innovation in digital ‘bits’ instead of physical ‘atoms’, because bureaucracy, regulation and environmentalism have got in the way of the latter. While software has exploded, transport and infrastructure have stagnated. But over the next few days in Austin, Texas, and around San Francisco Bay, I see evidence this is changing. Travelling with the upbeat co-founders of the Rational