World

Tuesday

Owen Matthews

Putin is enjoying the Iran war

After Iran unleashed a torrent of missiles against its neighbors – including those with whom it had enjoyed friendly relations such as Turkey and Azerbaijan – few regional leaders are in the mood to congratulate the new Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei. Few, but not none. "At a time when Iran is confronting armed aggression, your work in this high office will undoubtedly require great courage and dedication," wrote Vladimir Putin in an official message of congratulation to Khamenei Junior. "I am confident that you will honorably continue your father’s legacy and unite the Iranian people in the face of these severe trials.

neocon
Scott McConnell

I spent 25 years fighting neocons. Then Trump became one

Like everyone, I’m glued to the news coming out of Iran. I’m experiencing some depression, as one might, upon realizing that much of what one has worked on for 25 years has suddenly gone up in smoke, destroyed when Donald Trump discovered he was pretty much a neocon after all. Like everyone else, I have no idea what will happen in Iran, whether Trump’s bombing and perhaps breaking apart a very unpopular regime will lead to something better, or just chaos, a failed state spitting out a cohort of embittered men.

el mencho
Jacob Shapiro

El Mencho is dead. What’s next for Mexico?

For as long as there has been a Mexico, there have been cartels. Geography is not always destiny, but in Mexico’s case it has been stubbornly close. For centuries, states have tried to impose order on Mexico’s northern frontier. None have succeeded. Power in Mesoamerica always radiated outward from the Valley of Mexico. The Aztecs built their empire there. The Spanish consolidated their rule there. The modern Mexican state governs from there. To the north lies a harsher landscape – arid, mountainous, thinly populated and historically resistant to centralized control. Deserts and mountains provide space. Space creates autonomy. Autonomy, in weakly governed regions, creates opportunity for dissent, for rebellion, for smuggling, for criminal enterprise.

Monday

Freddy Gray

Iran: is Trump’s ultimate target in this war China?

30 min listen

As the crisis in the Middle East has escalated, Donald Trump's posturing has led many to question his strategy – and if he even has one. Geoffrey Cain, former foreign correspondent, expert on authoritarian regimes – and the author of this week's cover piece in The Spectator, joins Freddy to explain why Trump's ultimate target in the war is China. From the Belt and Road development initiative to more tacit bilateral support, President Xi has been playing a game of chess, to try to check America's power. With Nicolás Maduro arrested and Ayatollah Khamenei assassinated, President Trump is showing his willingness to project American power, at whatever cost – so far. Cain raises questions for those who assume we're moving to a multipolar world.

iran
Constantin Eckner

Merz is feeling the pressure of Germany’s state elections

Amid growing uncertainty caused by the US-Israel offensive against Iran and surging gas prices, Germany had its first major election of the year yesterday, with the new state parliament of Baden-Württemberg elected. Forecasts indicate that the Greens, who have been governing the state for the past 15 years, will remain in control of the premier office in Stuttgart, while the Christian Democrats (the CDU) have come in as a close second. Over the past couple of months, it appeared as if the Christian Democrats, with their leading candidate Manuel Hagel, could win the election. But negative vibes from Berlin impacted Hagel's campaign, as promised reforms continue to stall and Friedrich Merz's CDU-led government faces record low approval ratings.

state germany
Une bouteille de beaujoulais nouveau à côté d'un repas McDonald's, France, 1994. (Photo by Robert DEYRAIL/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
Gavin Mortimer

European culture is being Americanized

Did Mariah Carey mime or not when she headlined the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Milan? That was the main takeaway from last month’s jamboree. Organizers have since suggested that the US singer did indeed lip-sync to Domenico Modugno’s “Nel Blu, dipinto di Blu” and the song that followed, her very own, “Nothing is Impossible.” “The technical, logistical and organizational complexities of an Olympic ceremony are not comparable to a live performance by a single artist,” said a spokesperson for the organizing committee.    Was there also a linguistic complexity in the decision? Perhaps Carey didn’t feel confident singing live in Italian in front of 75,000 spectators in the San Siro Stadium, plus the 9.

China Iran
Tom Switzer

Will the war in Iran really weaken China?

Analogies in international politics are tricky and easily abused, yet they remain irresistible because they can illuminate patterns that are otherwise hard to see. Consider the present moment.  Just as Ukraine has become a growing burden for Washington and its Western allies, Iran is now a strategic burden for Moscow and Beijing. The US, particularly under the Trump administration, appears to be placing less emphasis on supporting Ukraine. Something similar may be happening in reverse with Iran.  Moscow continues to provide Tehran with assistance – most notably intelligence on US military targets – but the broader pattern suggests caution rather than deep commitment.

Sam Leith

Trump is heading for a hard reckoning over Iran

The social media video with which the White House has promoted its attack on Iran is, even by the standards we’ve come to expect from the Trump administration, grotesque on a level that still manages to be flabbergasting. Prefaced in the usual block capitals “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY”, with a flag and flame emoji of the sort favored by pubescent boys rather than, usually, government agencies, it’s three quarters of a minute of pure brainrot. It isn’t a sign of Trump Derangement Syndrome to consider this video obscene It begins with Tony Stark in front of a bank of computers saying “Wake up. Daddy’s home.

Sunday

Isabel Oakeshott

I love Dubai. Get over it

I am in Dubai where we are doing our best to keep calm and carry on. Granted, the sudden instruction to "seek immediate shelter' in the early hours of Sunday morning was unnerving, but with the exception of excitable "influencers," few people are cowering in their basements. On Saturday evening, I’d hotfooted it to the Palm Jumeirah. When my kids told me the Fairmont hotel had been hit, I didn’t believe them. The idea that the mad mullahs would start lashing out in this direction seemed completely absurd. Though the Emiratis take a far dimmer view of Islamic extremism than our own craven British government, they are careful not to upset "brotherly" neighbors. The UAE has prospered precisely because of this strategic restraint. Surely some mistake?

Saturday

Rod Liddle

Won’t someone please think of Dubai’s influencers?

The human spirit is incredibly resilient really. Even in the depth of our concern over the Israeli-American war against Iran, the worry about what might come next, we can still find time to feel a warm and comforting sense of schadenfreude over the large number of British women with stapled-on lips who are cowering in their Dubai apartments as the Iranian shells come raining down. The name under which these women collectively labor is "influencer," a term which, like "content creator" is close to meaningless and both could be usefully replaced by "shitgibbon" or "unemployable." We laugh at their sense of entitlement, their shock that the real world has intruded upon their private Idaho You do not know these people, any of them, I suspect.

dubai
energy
Spectator Editorial

The Iran war has exacerbated the failure of European energy policies

The history of the global trading system is a story of narrow and vulnerable waterways: the Suez and Panama Canals, the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Straits of Dover and the Skagerrak, which defends the entrance to the Baltic. But none has the power to seize up the global economy as much as the Strait of Hormuz. Barely 30 miles wide at the narrowest point and bounded on one side by the state of Iran, this passage is used for a quarter of the world’s oil supplies and a fifth of its liquified natural gas (LNG).

Friday

Sam Olsen

Trump isn’t the greatest threat to the Special Relationship

Britain’s refusal to fully back the United States over strikes on Iran has triggered an unusually public transatlantic row. It has also revived an old question about the future of the so-called "Special Relationship." When Donald Trump returned to the White House last year, many in Westminster doubted Keir Starmer could build a workable relationship with him. The two men could hardly be more different in temperament or politics, and predictions of an early rupture were widespread. For a time, however, Starmer appeared to defy those expectations. Britain weathered Trump’s latest tariff wars better than most countries, and the Prime Minister seemed to have found a cautious way of managing Washington’s unpredictability.

special relationship
Michael Karam

Israel wants to destroy Hezbollah once and for all

At around 2:30 a.m. on March 2, Israel bombed Beirut’s mostly Shia southern suburbs in response to a Hezbollah rocket attack on northern Israel. The road heading into Beirut from South Lebanon and the city’s southern suburbs was jammed with cars filled with Lebanese fleeing further reprisals. Some 52 civilians were killed and 154 injured, a hefty butcher’s bill even in this part of the world. Most Lebanese are happy Hezbollah has been defanged, even if they wish it wasn’t thanks to Israel Hezbollah’s actions were a demonstration of their ongoing support for Iran, but goading Israel was a cataclysmic miscalculation.

Jim Lawley

Is it wise for Spain to goad Donald Trump?

Spain’s refusal to allow the United States to use its military bases at Morón de la Frontera (Seville) and Rota (Cádiz) for its war on Iran, arguing that the US-Israeli attacks are "unilateral military actions outside the United Nations charter" has brought the simmering conflict between Pedro Sanchez, Spain’s socialist Prime Minister and President Trump to a head.   Sanchez’s carefully calculated strategy has been to position himself as one of Trump’s leading opponents on the world stage On Wednesday Sanchez followed up by delivering a stunning rebuke to Trump. Speaking for ten minutes on national television, he said that his government's position could be summed up in four words: "No a la guerra" (No to war).

Thursday

Freddy Gray

Why Iran marks the end of neoconservatism

45 min listen

Spectator columnist and Heritage Foundation fellow Daniel McCarthy joins Freddy to explain how Trump's war with Iran could mark the end of an era, that of neoconservatism. For Daniel, there is no contradiction between Trump's "America First" policy and its overseas interventions: Trump is pursuing a version of hegemony that will reduce the need for future interventions. If all goes to plan, this could mark an ideological watershed that stretches back to the first Gulf War in the early 1990s – but it's a big "if." What if the conflict spirals out of control? To what extent was this driven by Trump, or by Netanyahu? And what are the dynamics at play between the leadership figures in MAGA? Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

Eliot Wilson

Does Trump really have ‘whatever it takes’ to win in Iran?

With Operation Epic Fury in its sixth day, it is hard to tell how long the current United States military campaign against Iran will last. It may not be swift; yesterday, the Senate rejected a resolution to halt further action. Meanwhile, President Trump has been alarmingly indifferent to the question: Whatever the time is, it’s OK, whatever it takes. Right from the beginning we projected four to five weeks, but we have the capability to go far longer than that. We’ll do it. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth struck a different note with reporters: "This is not Iraq, this is not endless." Yet he has refused to rule out deploying ground forces to Iran and later said, "We have only just begun to fight.

iran
Toby Young

Why I’m a proud Zionist

The bomb shelter reserved for ‘volunteers’ at Kibbutz Dafna near the town of Kiryat Shmona in northern Israel was definitely substandard. It was damp and smelly, more like a lavatory than a fortified bunker, and not considered fit for the kibbutzniks: a pampered species compared to us. But when the Soviet-built ordnance started raining down on us, it did its job. We emerged, unharmed, the following morning, blinking into the dawn light. The terrorists had not succeeded in hitting the kibbutz with a single Katyusha rocket. No, I’m not embedded with the Israel Defense Forces on the Lebanese border, although the area surrounding Kiryat Shmona was under fire from Hezbollah earlier this week. This was in 1981 and I was just 17.

Fabian Hoffmann

Who’s winning the missile war?

In the early hours of February 28, 2026, Operation Epic Fury commenced with large-scale American and Israeli air strikes against Iranian military, command, missile and infrastructure targets. Since then, the United States and Israel have conducted extensive operations against Iran, while Iran has retaliated with missile strikes against US bases, Israel and its regional neighbors. This is an initial assessment of the missile war, which has defined the early stages of this conflict. Over the past two nights, Iranian ballistic missile usage appears to have decreased sharply The central military dynamic between Israel and the United States on the one hand, and Iran on the other, can be understood as a race to the bottom.

John Jenkins

Why Iran is not Iraq

At the moment, a lot of people – notably including the British Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer – are comparing the current war with Iran with the Iraq invasion of 2003. Do they have a point? There are several common claims of comparison, some good, some bad. When Saddam fell, there was little appetite in Iraq for a western-aligned replacement The principal claim, in Starmer's case, is that what happened in Iraq means the UK should steer well clear of any further involvement anywhere. It reminds me of the final scene in that magnificent film, Chinatown. A private detective moves to intervene to stop a horror unfolding but one of his associates holds him back, saying, “Leave it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.” In this reading, the Middle East is Chinatown.

Freddy Gray

Inside MAGA’s meltdown over Iran

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 directly from the 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.