World

Wednesday

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

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

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Michael Gove

Britain’s Miliband supremacy

Labour MPs who want Wes Streeting to be their leader have, apparently, one great fear. If their man triggers a contest, they are terrified it will lead to Ed Miliband entering the race to stop the Health Secretary – and coming out on top. A Miliband premiership would, they worry, be the death of Labour. I’ve got news for them: we are already governed by Ed Miliband. This is now his administration. And they, and the rest of us, had better get used to it. Keir Starmer is no longer really in charge of this government – if he ever really was. He is Prime Minister in name only. His

Friday

Freddy Gray

Iran and America’s new protection racket

“Whoever rules the waves rules the world” – Alfred Thayer Mahan. Would Donald Trump have attacked Iran on February 28 if the Supreme Court had not ruled against his tariffs on February 20? The two issues may seem unrelated. Yet, as a fascinating piece by Captain John Konrad has pointed out, a closer inspection of Trump’s international agenda reveals his administration’s intense focus on trade, energy and maritime control – and that might help explain the otherwise inexplicable folly of the situation in the Strait of Hormuz.  Trump is determined to bring about an American Golden Age. That involves controlling gas and oil, aggressively reducing China’s expanding control of shipping lanes, and

Strait of Hormuz
Jonathan Spyer

Israel can’t assassinate its way to victory over Iran

The killing of the Iranian senior security official Ali Larijani this week is the most significant “targeted assassination” undertaken since Israel’s killing (in cooperation with the US) of supreme leader Ali Khamenei on the opening day of the war. These two very high-level hits have been accompanied by a long list of killings of less well-known senior Iranian officials. These have included Islamic Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) commander Mohammad Pakpour, intelligence minister Esmail Khatib, armed forces chief of staff Abdolrahim Mousavi, defense minister Aziz Nasirzadeh, military intelligence chief Saleh Asadi and many others. Around 30 officials in all have met their deaths at the hands of this campaign. The borders between conventional

Lionel Shriver

Another interview goes awry…

Twenty minutes into what seemed a routine softball literary interview for Bloomberg TV in London last month, the conversation took a prickly turn. My interviewer had tripped across some remark in one of my podcast appearances that set her off. So much for talking about my new novel. For the following 20 minutes, leaning over the table and poking at the air between us, she proceeded to hector me about why I seemed to discuss Muslims in general terms rather than as individuals. I objected that she was being disingenuous. Journalists regularly address issues involving groups of people in general terms. (For an opinion piece, I’m to interview all 2

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John R. MacArthur

The outrageous cynicism of the Democrats on Iran

Given my longstanding disgust with America’s lawlessly interventionist and self-destructive foreign policy, I should be outraged by Donald Trump’s cavalier remarks justifying – and weirdly minimizing – his surprise attack against Iran in collaboration with Israel. After all, a president stupid enough to mock the new Supreme Leader as “damaged” and only “alive in some form” – while simultaneously urging sitting-duck oil tanker captains to “show some guts” by running the Iranian blockade of the Strait of Hormuz – is someone who logically should be rebuked in the firmest possible terms. But this wildly unstable solipsist is very different from other politicians. Moreover, I can still find the President, in

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Thursday

Freddy Gray

How Iran will hasten the end of MAGA

31 min listen

The attack on Iran is so wildly inconsistent with the wishes of Trump’s base that it is likely to mark the end of Trumpism as a project. Freddy Gray is joined by Spectator columnist Christopher Caldwell to discuss Trumpism, J.D. Vance vs Marco Rubio, what’s left of the Republican party after Trump and the competing ambitions of Israel and Iran.

Lynne O’Donnell

Why the Afghanistan-Pakistan war matters

More than a decade ago, during a tense visit to Islamabad as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton gave Pakistan’s leaders a warning: “You can’t keep snakes in your backyard and expect them only to bite your neighbors.” She was referring to the Taliban and other militant groups that Islamabad had long tolerated as part of its “strategic depth” policy aimed at countering India’s regional dominance. Now, as Pakistan’s jets strike targets inside Afghanistan and the Taliban mobilize forces along the border, that warning seems like a prophecy. Pakistan is at war with the militant networks it once cultivated for regional power Pakistan is at war with the militant networks it