World

Wednesday

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 hares" for their alleged hostility to Germany.

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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 recognize most of them. It was on our journey back to the Abu Dhabi port that things changed.

Daniel DePetris

Europe is in mutiny against Trump

The longer the war in Iran churns on, the President Trump’s frustration grows. On Tuesday, Trump was lambasting Washington’s European allies on Truth Social for sitting on their hands and refusing to lift a finger to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf chokepoint through which around 20 percent of the world’s crude oil passes. Calling out the United Kingdom specifically, Trump went on to scold the allies much as a parent would tell a lazy 28 year-old to get out of the house. “You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the USA won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us,” Trump wrote.

Tuesday

Freddy Gray

Is this the end of America’s empire?

Freddy Gray is joined by Jacob Heilbrunn, Americano regular and editor of the National Interest. They discuss the Strait of Hormuz, rising energy prices and whether the US can extricate itself from a conflict it may not be able to win – and whether we're watching the end of Trumpism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Andrew Tettenborn

The Chagos deal is unraveling

We don’t know what the end of the Chagos affair will be, but it is rapidly spinning into farce. The latest brickbat is an immensely awkward judgment delivered today by Justice Lewis KC, Chief Justice of the British Indian Ocean Territory (as well as the Falklands and the British Antarctic Territory). The judgment finds that a 2004 administrative order passed by Tony Blair's British government to take away the native Chagossians’ right of abode could not do that. It also found that the government’s consistent practice since then of simply denying the Chagossians’ right to land on their own homeland is illegal.

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Jane Stannus

Canada wants to make quoting the Bible illegal

Easter is almost here – and Canada’s Liberal government has chosen this sacred season to display its utter contempt for Christianity. It is currently forcing through the outrageous Bill C-9, which could make it a hate crime to quote from sections of the Bible. The Liberal government has laid the foundations for religious persecutions More than 40 civil and religious groups had asked that for the Bill’s language be clarified and its scope more carefully defined so that religious texts would not be subject to hate crime legislation. But all in vain. After a hot debate in the House of Commons, the Liberals highhandedly ended a Conservative filibuster and fast-tracked the bill.

Stephen Daisley

Israel needs to rethink its relationship with Christians

Sometimes it’s a wonder Israel can stand with all the self-inflicted gunshot wounds in its feet. Israeli police placed their country in the eye of a diplomatic and religious storm by accosting their most senior Catholic clergymen as they made their way to pray at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Religious gatherings have been restricted during the ongoing war with Iran, which has repeatedly targeted built-up civilian areas including Jerusalem. Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, and Father Francesco Ielpo, Custos of the Holy Land, were prevented from accessing the Holy Sepulchre on Palm Sunday, the day when Christians mark Jesus Christ’s entry into Jerusalem.

Matthew Lynn

The markets have stopped listening to Donald Trump

Over the last 24 hours, President Trump has come up with a bewildering series of "solutions" to the global oil crisis triggered by his war with Iran. He might seize all of the country's oil wells. He may send the marines in to capture its main exporting hub, Kharg Island. He has threatened to bomb the country back to the Stone Age if it doesn’t re-open the Straits of Hormuz, while at the same time – apparently – he is very close to a "fantastic deal" that will settle the entire conflict. But will these threats work? Can Trump keep a lid on the unfolding crisis? Crucially, the markets are not listening to him anymore – and the price of oil keeps rising.

Monday

Marcus Solarz Hendriks

The three options facing Trump in Iran

As Trump contemplates a ground operation in Iran, he will be reckoning with the ghosts of previous western "excursions" in the region, as he recently labeled this war. History suggests three endgames for his intervention in Iran are plausible. First, a hasty deal on terms that aggrandize and empower Iran, creating an American equivalent to Britain’s Suez Crisis. Second, a protracted struggle which becomes structurally reminiscent of the Iraq War. Third, a dramatic escalation which achieves Iranian surrender quickly and cleanly. The bad news for Trump is that the outcome he seeks, number three, is the one without real precedent. In the first scenario, Trump makes a deal on terms that flatter Iran.

Sunday

Matthew Ford

Why smartphones warp war

The Secretary of War is the face of America’s campaign against Iran. "War is hell, and always will be," Pete Hegseth said recently. He is relentlessly focused on lethality, and decimating the Iranian military. His critics correctly point out that this isn’t strategic thinking, this is a strategy of tactics. Hegseth’s metrics of success appear to be counting sorties flown, ordnance dropped and missiles destroyed. This criticism has been leveled at American strategy makers throughout modern history. During the Vietnam war, the metric of choice was body count. During the global war on terror it was Taliban commanders killed. The difference this time is that these decisions are being made in a hyperconnected battlefield.

Ed Husain

In defense of Dubai

As the Islamist regime in Iran attacks Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Bahrain and Kuwait with drones and missiles, some in the west are quietly happy to see the Gulf’s skyscrapers lose their shine. "Dubai has no culture or history," say the armchair critics. When it comes to measures of wealth preservation, attracting millionaires, rule of law, social safety, artificial intelligence adaptation and combating Islamist radicalism, the UAE comes out far ahead of many western countries. But we can’t acknowledge this, so we insinuate our snootiness is about culture, history, risks and future stability. The snobs are wrong.  We insinuate our snootiness towards Dubai is about culture, history, risks and future stability.

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.

Saturday

Jason Brodsky

Meet the men now running Iran

Since the launch of Operations Midnight Hammer and Epic Fury, Israeli and US strikes have thinned out Tehran’s political, military and security elite with a series of decapitation strikes. As the Trump administration seeks to explore diplomacy with the remnants of the Iranian regime, a core group of hardened men remain. The new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has been injured and hasn’t appeared in public. Surrounding him are a group of influential Islamic Republic loyalists. They include parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf; the new secretary of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr; military advisor to the Supreme Leader Mohsen Rezaei, and commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Ahmad Vahidi.

Friday

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.

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Freddy Gray

Will Trump strike a ‘final blow’ on Iran?

Will America’s ground invasion of Iran begin in the early hours of tomorrow? Everybody knows, by now, that Trump likes to initiate action late on Fridays, after the markets close. And late last night, the so-called Pentagon Pizza Watch channel – which monitors late-night food orders from the Pentagon for evidence that something big is afoot – reported a surge of activity, leading to all sorts of prediction-market bets that a new military operation would start this weekend. Of course, with so much money to be made on war gambling – there’s now a Polymarket "situation room" bar in Washington, DC – the odds of someone trying to dupe the markets are short.

Irwin Stelzer

Will NATO regret snubbing Donald Trump?

On April 4, NATO will be 77 years old. The chance that America will be counted among the celebrants when the birthday celebrations roll around is somewhere between nil and zero. President Trump had long predicted that if America needed help, NATO would not come to its aid, even though, as he sees it, the United States has spent billions of dollars over decades defending Europe from Russian aggression. And when America did need help in the war against Iran – a few mine sweepers, please, sirs – the answer "no" came back in several languages.

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump’s delusion of omnipotence

Donald Trump likes to use the phrase “go big or go home” to describe his political strategy. It looks as though the US President is about to stress test its efficacy as he weighs dispatching another 10,000 troops to the Middle East, a move that would further embroil him in the widely unpopular war in Iran. According to a recent Quinnipiac poll, 74 percent of Americans are opposed to a ground war against Iran. Small wonder. The prospect of an American Gallipoli is hardly going to inspire support for a war of choice in the Middle East, one that Trump embarked upon without inspiring any backing in the first place. Instead, he sailed into it without congressional approval. Now he’s running aground.

Thursday

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 40 percent of Russia's crude export capacity, roughly 2 million barrels per day, is currently offline.

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James Lewisohn

How the Danish election backfired for the left

In the aftermath of the bitterly contested 2000 US presidential election, Bill Clinton famously commented: "the American people have spoken; but it’s going to take a little while to determine exactly what they said." That election ultimately took over a month plus a Supreme Court decision to finalize and remains hotly debated to this day. Pity the poor Danes, then, who now face a similar period of extreme uncertainty. The snap Danish general election produced a polarized and atomized result for its smorgasbord of 12 political parties, with no party gaining more than 22 percent of the vote, and no overall majority in Denmark’s 179-seat parliament.

republicans Steve Hilton
Ben Clerkin

Steve Hilton on running to be California governor: ‘I don’t want this state that I love to become the country I left’

“I don’t want this state that I love to become the country I left,” Steve Hilton tells the lunch meeting of South­ern California Republican Women. Knives and forks rattle on porcelain as the perfectly coiffured ladies down cutlery to clap. Remarkably, Hilton, director of strategy under former British prime minister David Cameron, has topped virtually every poll for governor of California since he launched his campaign in April last year. Hilton has leant into the West Coast aesthetic and spirit. Once the rebel of Downing Street in T-shirts and stockinged feet, today he sports a tech-bro beard, more bracelets and beads on his wrists than Prince Harry, and has the top three buttons of his white shirt undone. British by birth, he has renounced his citizenship and become an American.