World

Wednesday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Why hasn’t Marco Rubio been announced as Trump’s Secretary of State yet? 

Rubio, Rubio, wherefore art thou Rubio? How Little Marco, as Donald Trump dubbed him in 2016, must be squirming. It was reported on Monday, with great confidence, that Trump had chosen Rubio as his Secretary of State, along with Congressman Mike Waltz as his National Security Adviser.  The news came as a relief to national security establishments across the West. There had been grave concerns in the foreign policy world that Trump would choose somebody antithetical to the interests of Nato. The elevation of Rubio and Waltz also served as further evidence of the growing power of Florida in Trump’s America – Waltz and Rubio are both politicians from the

Matthew Lynn Matthew Lynn

If anyone can fix America’s bloated state, it’s Elon Musk

Perhaps he will walk through the lobby of the Pentagon with a kitchen sink. Or fire the entire IT department at the Fed, shift the IRS to Mars, while replacing traffic police with fully autonomous Tesla robo-cops. No one has any real idea yet what Elon Musk, the entrepreneur behind Tesla and SpaceX, might come up with now he has been appointed by Donald Trump to head up a new Department of Government Efficiency (or ‘Doge’). One point is certain, however. There will be some spectacular fireworks. And it will throw down a challenge to bloated governments everywhere.  Nobody gets to amass a $300 billion fortune, working in manufacturing and

Ian O’Doherty

Ireland’s suicidal Trump Derangement Syndrome

Ireland has a problem with America. Irish politicians and the country’s establishment would, of course, deny this. They would point to the fact that 35 million Americans claim Irish descent, and that the Irish and American governments enjoy their own version of a ‘special relationship’, involving an annual presentation of a shamrock at the White House every St Patrick’s day. They would highlight the close cultural and economic ties between the two countries, particularly in the tech sector, which has seen 18 of the largest American tech giants, from Apple to Microsoft, make Ireland their European home, which has been a lifeline to the Irish economy. Ireland is under the new

Eugene Finkel

How Ukraine can survive Donald Trump

Donald Trump’s triumph in the US presidential election is seen as a tragedy for Ukraine. Trump and Ukraine certainly have a troubled history. During Trump’s first term, when he pressured president Zelensky to investigate Hunter Biden, this effort led to Trump’s first impeachment. Trump’s sympathy for, indeed admiration of, Vladimir Putin is well-known. Trump and vice president-elect JD Vance claim to have a plan to swiftly end the Russian–Ukrainian war, presumably by strong arming Kyiv to cede territory to Russia and abandon its bid for Nato membership. Is Ukraine doomed and headed toward defeat and subjugation by Russia? Putin prefers fighting to a ceasefire and will likely reject any Trump

Tuesday

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

How will progressives explain Amsterdam’s latest anti-semitic violence?

Since the scenes of Jews being hunted, beaten and kicked as they lay on the ground pleading for mercy in Amsterdam, antisemites have sought excuse, or that weaselly insinuator ‘context’, in the reported behaviour of a number of Maccabi Tel Aviv football hooligans, who are said to have attacked a taxi, tore down a Palestinian flag and sang anti-Arab chants. Video footage reportedly shows rioters chanting ‘kankerjoden’, Dutch for ‘Jewish cancer’ I wrote in the wake of those events that any Israeli fan who engaged in such yobbery is to be condemned but that their actions did not justify a modern-day pogrom that plunged Israelis and other Jews into a

Leon Mangasarian

Germany has a bleak future thanks to Olaf Scholz

The demise of chancellor Olaf Scholz’s lacklustre coalition of Social Democrats, Greens, and the liberal Free Democrats is unsurprising. The ideological blend fits Germany, as Stalin might have said, ‘like a saddle fits a cow.’ The election that may truly define Germany’s future will be held in 2029 Scholz seems almost to have modelled himself on Liz Truss; though it took him longer to damage the world’s third-largest economy, he has done a thorough job. Germany’s economy, Europe’s largest, is expected to contract for a second consecutive year in 2024. Ludwig Erhard, the architect of the West German economic miracle, must be spinning in his grave. The Bundestag is likely

Eliot Wilson

RAF chief puts pressure on Starmer over Storm Shadows

I don’t know what the Ukrainian for ‘Well, duh’ is, but it might well have been heard in Kyiv yesterday. Speaking at the Royal United Services Institute, the Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, observed that Ukrainian forces resisting the Russian invaders needed to be able to strike at their enemies well behind the border. ‘Ukraine cannot put up a shield to protect themselves against the 30,000 glide bombs lobbed into the Kursk oblast. Instead, what they need – and what we would need – is the ability to strike the aircraft launching these bombs on the ground.’  When he was asked to respond, the prime minister was

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

The Marsh family and the sad spectacle of Trump-bashing Brits

There is something slightly uncanny about the musical Marsh family of Faversham in Kent, who recently gathered millions of YouTube views with ‘Gimme Hope Kamala’, their rewrite of Eddy Grant’s ‘Gimme Hope Jo’Anna’. They are a combination of two big fads of the 70s, The Partridge Family and Jonestown. Mad Ma Marsh in particular has the shining eyes of someone appearing in a slightly different kind of video, containing the words ‘My captors are treating me very well and I now fully support their valiant armed struggle’. If you really did believe fascism was returning, dropping a comic song on the internet would probably not be your first action The musical endeavours

John Keiger John Keiger

The irony of Starmer’s Armistice Day visit to France

Yesterday morning, the British Prime Minister travelled to Paris at the invitation of the French President to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe. Sir Keir Starmer was the first UK leader to attend an Armistice Day ceremony in Paris since Winston Churchill did so alongside General de Gaulle in 1944. Yet there is a degree of irony in these displays of Franco-British unity marking the war’s end. Despite having fought side-by-side for the conflict’s duration, and notwithstanding the integration of their economies to an unprecedented degree, at the war’s end the two countries reverted to traditional rivalry. One of the areas where

Monday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Why Beijing is wary of a Russo-North Korean alliance

56 min listen

There have been reports that some 11,000 North Korean troops are present in Russia and preparing to take part in the Russian invasion. While not acknowledged by either country, if true, this would mark a historic milestone: the first East Asian state to send troops to Europe since the Mongol Empire.  And yet, both countries’ most powerful neighbour and ally – China – has remained suspiciously quiet about this new development. Beijing’s silence may well express a deep distrust and unease that actually characterises China’s relationship with its so-called allies. To get into the recent developments and what we can learn from the history of the relationship between these three countries, the

Raquel Rosario Sánchez

How Trump won over Latino voters

A huge surge of support from the Latino community helped Donald Trump to victory in the US election. I could never envision myself voting for Donald Trump. But my aunt in New York, who became a citizen many years ago did just that: last week she cast a ballot for the Republican candidate. So why did she, and so many other Latinos, turn to Trump? There has been an outpouring of racism and xenophobia from liberal circles aimed at the Latino community for choosing to back Trump. Jokes about mass deportation and accusations of how ignorant, uneducated or misogynist the community is for voting Republican are thriving. But my aunt isn’t a stupid woman who doesn’t know

James Snell

Why was Europe not ready for Trump?

Donald Trump has won his third presidential election and across Europe heads are exploding. This should not be the case. Many European leaders were briefed earlier this year that a Trump victory was more likely than not. But wishful thinking appears to have defeated grim experience in many minds and many civil service buildings. To hear the Europeans tell it, they are now confronted with a unique threat. The last time Trump was in office, Ukraine had been fighting Russia since 2014, but its survival was not hanging by a thread. It was not seriously likely that Russia would invade Moldova, Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania, as now seems possible. Finland

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

How did pollsters get Trump’s victory so wrong?

Was Donald Trump’s win unexpected? Not if you followed the betting markets, which had Trump at a two-thirds chance of winning days out from the election. The polls, on the other hand, told a different story. Analysis of polls carried out in 15 competitive states in the three weeks before last Tuesday’s election shows that whatever the method of polling used, there was a clear and consistent bias in favour of the Democrats. Pollsters spent an estimated half a billion dollars (£388 million) on this election, but most polling methods were still biased towards Kamala Harris by around three percentage points. One method – recruiting participants by mail – managed

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Keir Starmer’s pointless meeting with Emmanuel Macron

It’s extremely difficult to imagine that today’s meeting between Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron produced anything substantive beyond a photo opportunity at the Arc de Triomphe to mark the 106th anniversary of the 1918 armistice. This year is also the 120th anniversary of the Entente Cordiale and it suits both Starmer and Macron to big up the idea of Franco-British friendship, not that there has been much substance to it of late. Various bromides will certainly appear in the read-outs of the meeting but in substance nothing will have been achieved Downing Street briefed before today’s meeting that the agenda would cover the victory of Trump, and his threatened tariffs, and

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Why Farage should – and shouldn’t – be UK ambassador to Trump

It is very kind of Nigel Farage to offer his services as a kind of intermediary between our government and the new American president. Keir Starmer certainly needs one, because protest though he might, nobody believes the line that Donald Trump is hugely impressed with the Labour government or that JD Vance has a new best friend in the magnificently dim David Lammy. I fear that Farage’s yearning to be in Washington DC rather than the agreeable Thames-side resort of Clacton-on-Sea spells trouble for Reform For eight years, Labour has behaved abominably towards Trump, flinging at him every conceivable insult, a number of its MPs demanding he not be allowed

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Ukraine will be worried if Trump has called Putin

When Donald Trump won the US presidential election last Wednesday, one leader’s message of congratulation was conspicuously absent. It took the Russian president Vladimir Putin more than 24 hours to pass comment on Trump’s win. He eventually praised the President-elect as ‘courageous’ and stated he had ‘nothing against’ Trump trying to resume contact with him. Putin, however, wouldn’t be calling him. Many in Ukraine have been concerned that Trump might seek to do a deal with Moscow over Kyiv’s head Well now it appears Trump may well have made the call. It has been reported that last Thursday, the President-elect picked up the phone to Putin, warning him ‘not to

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Peanut the squirrel shows Elon Musk is wrong about the mainstream media

Was it Peanut wot won it? One of the stranger and more incendiary aspects of the run-up to the recent US election was a Twitter/ X howl-round about Peanut the squirrel. The house where Peanut lived was raided, and this blameless rescue-rodent euthanised, after a complaint was apparently filed to a government agency by a neighbour. And Peanut’s story went super-viral.  The shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later approach to ‘news’ can leave any or all of us riddled with bullets. Just ask Peanut Rather than seeing it as a local hard-luck story, many social media users supposed this to be a paradigmatic instance of what was at stake in the election. This wasn’t human

Sunday

John Keiger John Keiger

What the First World War can teach us about the Third

It is our duty on Remembrance Sunday to honour the fallen. But to do justice to their sacrifice, we should also remember why the world descended into war in 1914. The history of the Great War has captivated and divided historians since Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip fired that fateful shot at Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914. Only later did we come to realise the full significance of that date. British military historian of the First World War and Conservative cabinet minister, Alan Clark, recorded the moment in his diary on Tuesday, 28 June 1983, with characteristic wit: ‘Today is the sixty-ninth anniversary of the assassination of the

David Christopher Kaufman

Trump’s plan to make America safe again

Donald Trump’s critics like to paint his supporters as hardcore right-wingers. The truth is rather plainer: many of those who voted for Trump are refugees from the conservative establishment desperate for a leader unafraid to speak their truth.  We Americans are scared. Literally  Shamed by the elites, mocked for their beliefs – sidelined by rising ‘wokeness’ and DEI-culture for being white or straight or male – they saw in Trump a man-of-action sympathetic to their back-to-basics worldview. Tired of being told what to say and how to feel, Trump’s supporters were ready to reclaim their voices in the safest space possible: the ballot box. The anti-elitist populism that swept Trump

Matthew Lynn Matthew Lynn

Elon Musk’s support for Donald Trump is a masterstroke

Elon Musk contributed huge sums of money. He campaigned relentlessly. And his social media network X provided a platform for the candidate. Of all the architects of Donald Trump’s return to the White House this week, arguably none was more influential than Musk, and certainly none were playing for such high stakes. If he had lost, the X owner would have faced a furious regulatory backlash. As it happens, however, the election has been a triumph for Musk – and will make him more powerful than ever. Even from this side of the pond, it was hard to escape Musk’s presence during the US election. The entrepreneur behind Tesla and