World

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

Friday

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

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. Trump, who cannot legally exit NATO without Congress, will find ways to use his power as

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.

Thursday

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. On the left are a

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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

Wednesday

Nicholas Farrell

Italy is now stuck in the legal dark ages

Giorgia Meloni has suffered the first significant defeat of her three-and-a-half-year premiership. The Italians have roundly rejected her plans to reform Italy’s sclerotic judicial system – even though those plans were in the election manifesto that persuaded so many of them to vote for her. It is unlikely now that any Italian government will attempt such a reform for another generation. Italy is condemned to remain a country where the motto in every court in the peninsula – “La legge è uguale per tutti” (the law is equal for all) – is but a sick joke. Defeat is a big blow not just to Meloni but to all who dreamed

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Matthew Lynn

Donald Trump can’t simply talk down the price of oil

When the war against Iran started, President Trump could have justifiably felt confident that the price of oil could be controlled from the White House. America, after all, is the biggest oil producer in the world. It has the most refining capacity, and, separately, it has by far the world’s strongest military. And yet, over the last two days it has become alarmingly clear that America has lost its ability to cap the price of an oil barrel. Does big trouble lie ahead for both the President and the global economy? With a single Truth Social post Monday, President Trump managed to send the prices of both WTI crude oil,

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Ian O’Doherty

Kneecap’s breathtaking Cuban hypocrisy

While most Cold War cultural battlegrounds have long been paved over or turned into a theme park, Cuba has retained a place in the hearts and minds of the West’s luxury leftists. Beautiful weather, sandy beaches, famous cigars and, of course, a long-standing enmity with the US have all ensured the country remains perhaps the last stubborn redoubt of revolutionary, western hipsterism. So it made perfect sense that leading the charge in last weekend’s much trumpeted “aid flotilla” to the island nation was the Irish language-speaking novelty rap act, Kneecap.  Much like their contemporaries, Bob Vylan, they take delight in issuing inflammatory statements and then, when they receive the sought

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Arnout Nuijt

Why Belgium is sending in the army to defend its streets

It’s not uncommon to see camouflage on the high street in Belgium. It is a peculiarly Belgian reflex: when the state feels the strain, it reaches for the army. This week, the federal government has done so once more. Soldiers have been deployed to bolster security around Jewish sites and neighborhoods in Brussels and Antwerp, following a spate of clumsy but troubling attacks across Belgium and the Netherlands. Synagogues have been targeted with arson and a Jewish school struck by an explosion. Mercifully, no one has been injured and the damage has been minor. Yet the intent is clear, and the authorities have been quick to identify the incidents as

Tuesday

Freddy Gray

Podcast wars, Cuba and Corbyn – with Steven Crowder

33 min listen

Steven Crowder, host of Louder with Crowder, joins Freddy to discuss the warring factions in the podcast world, worsened since Charlie Kirk’s assassination; the global left-wing alliance promoting communism in Cuba, whether Trump was wrong to attack Iran and why the Mark Carney kowtowed to China.

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Yossi Melman

Is there a growing rift between the US and Israel?

Denials, contradictions, inflammatory statements and exaggerations have for years characterized the conduct of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump. It is therefore difficult to determine who, this time, is closer to the truth in the dispute that has developed between the two countries regarding attacks on Iran’s energy facilities. Israel’s political and military leadership believe that Trump was angry, but is playing a double game Twice during the war, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) has attacked Iran’s energy infrastructure. The first time was on the night of March 6 when about 30 fuel storage facilities in and around Tehran were struck. The depots were used by the Iranian

Monday

Doug Stokes

How Trump can ‘win’ in Iran

The United States is once again in a terrible predicament: a war where the definition of “victory” grows murkier by the day, against an adversary whose advantages lie in the tyranny of geography and its determination to fight. While the US and Israel enjoy overwhelming conventional superiority, a handful of cheap Iranian drones or weaponized IRGC dinghies have been able to take America’s Gulf oil allies offline and render the strategic Strait of Hormuz unnavigable. Donald Trump faces what we might call the “Corleone problem”: the don can end the war, but only if peace looks like a gift he’s granting, not a price he’s paying. America has been trapped

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Roger Kimball

Trump has given America back its heroes

This weekend, two statues were installed on the White House grounds. On the north side of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building stands a statue of Christopher Columbus. On the south side is “Freedom’s Charge,” a life-size portrayal by Chas Fagan of two soldiers in the Continental Army, one with a rifle, the other with a billowing Bunker Hill flag. In ordinary times, the temporary placement of such tokens of America history at the White House might pass without comment. These are not ordinary times. On the contrary, America is just now emerging from a destructive frenzy of woke self-loathing and iconoclasm.  Just a few years ago, no emblem of American achievement was

Christopher Columbus (Getty) heroes
Freddy Gray

Who is actually talking to the Iranians?

On Friday night, Donald Trump announced that America was “very close to meeting our objectives as we consider winding down our great military efforts in the Middle East.”  He even pinned the announcement to the top of his Truth Social account to make sure everyone realized he meant it. That did little to settle the markets over the weekend, however, so this morning he took to Truth Social again to go further in ALL CAPS:  The lingering fear is that the truth may be more TCCO (Trump Can’t Chicken Out) I AM PLEASED TO REPORT THAT THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND THE COUNTRY OF IRAN, HAVE HAD, OVER THE LAST TWO DAYS,

Ross Clark

Has Trump averted an energy crisis?

Have markets and governments horribly underestimated the fallout from the Iran war, or is it the doomsters who have got it horribly wrong? President Trump’s announcement has rather caught the world off guard. This morning, he posted on Truth social saying that he is seeking a negotiated settlement with Iran and has postponed his planned attacks on energy infrastructure. Many expected a huge escalation in hostilities this week. Could this be yet another example of TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out), or was his threat to bomb energy infrastructure another crafted bluff – and that order to the global economy will be swiftly restored? At the end of this crisis, the

Sunday

Cockburn

Last waltz for Trump’s Hungarian friends?

Walking by Hungary’s immense neo-Gothic parliament building in Budapest’s Kossuth Square, one of Cockburn’s traveling companions sidles up to him. “For a certain kind of right-winger,” he grins, “Hungary is their Rojava.” ‘We were Trumpists before Trump,’ Orbán often says There’s something to this idea, for sure. Since 2010 the premiership of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has – like the proto-government of the Kurds in Syria – given certain groups in America a space to see their ideas implemented that they do not enjoy at home. The Orbán government is rebuilding Budapest in the traditional Baroque style, and there are generous cash payouts to mothers. Hungary has experienced virtually no immigration; the

Kabir Singh Bawa

Iran’s strike exposes the danger of the Chagos handover

In a sharp escalation, Iran attempted to strike the joint UK-US base Diego Garcia with two intermediate-range ballistic missiles. Both failed: one broke apart in flight and the other was targeted by an SM-3 interceptor from an American warship. The base was left untouched. The significance, however, lies less in the failure than in the fact that the attempt was made at all, which has expanded the scope of the existing conflict zone beyond all expectations. Diego Garcia forms part of the Chagos Archipelago – sovereign British territory – and is one of the most critical platforms for American power projection anywhere on earth. It functions as an unsinkable aircraft

Saturday

Nicholas Farrell

Has Giorgia Meloni really turned against Donald Trump?

I often think that the dissemination of news is like a game of Chinese Whispers. Giorgia Meloni, for instance, has not condemned the US-Israeli war on Iran. Yet such esteemed exponents of the noble craft of reportage as the Times of London and the Daily Beast are adamant that she has. Even Meloni – President Donald Trump’s favorite EU leader and closest European ally – has turned against the President, or so they are saying. Proclaimed the Times: “Giorgia Meloni comes out against Trump’s ‘illegal’ war on Iran.” Crowed the Daily Beast: “Trump humiliated as key right-wing ally slams his deadly war.” There was only one aspect of the war that Meloni condemned in

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Katarina Szulc

El Mencho’s last stand

Jalisco, Mexico No one seems to know exactly how El Mencho was killed. We are told the feared leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel was captured by the Mexican army during a firefight in late February, and subsequently died of his wounds. Beyond that, there is very little information. Why are the Mexican and US governments being so secretive about his death? El Mencho – real name Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes – was 59 when he died. He was Mexico’s most-wanted man; US authorities had offered a $15 million reward for information leading to his arrest. I decided I had to go to Jalisco, where El Mencho made his last