World

Thursday

Charles Parton

The China threat our politicians don’t seem to have noticed

The Chinese Communist party can congratulate itself on another sign of its rise: for the first time it has become a factor in deciding the fate of British politics. During Monday’s televised leadership debates, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak tried to appeal to Tory members by outdoing each other on their commitment to protect our national security, economic prosperity, data privacy and values from the CCP. They both referred to Chinese theft of our science and technology, but the problem is much, much wider than that. What is more serious is our blithe willingness to import Chinese control into the most sensitive areas of our economy and society. Neither aspiring

Aidan Hartley

There are almost no animals left – but we’ve been here before

Laikipia You know things are bad when the zebras are thin. Even during most droughts, zebras are like matrons at the gym in stripey spandex stretched around plump buttocks. Pastures vanished long ago and our plains resemble Sudan’s Batn-el-Hajar – the Belly of Stones desert – so that I cannot even recall what they were like when they were last thick with green grass. The zebra foals are dying, the elephants are thin, while the buffalo disappeared a while back. The dry has killed quite mature trees which now shudder with the sound of termites and crash to the ground. To the north of us, horned skulls and dried carcasses

Sam Ashworth-Hayes Sam Ashworth-Hayes

Biden’s word play can’t save the United States from a recession

Some denials are more worrying than their absence. A company insisting that its director will be vindicated by the forensic auditors is unlikely to succeed in calming investors; a sports team insisting it has total confidence in its coach is likely to receive a flurry of speculative applications; and a president insisting that ‘we’re not gonna be in a recession in my view’ is unlikely to do consumer confidence a great deal of good. The major difference here is that the White House has the advantage of being able to mark its own homework. No matter what today’s GDP data shows, Biden’s team will be able to claim the US

Sam Ashworth-Hayes Sam Ashworth-Hayes

Biden’s word play can’t save the United States from a recession

Some denials are more worrying than their absence. A company insisting that its director will be vindicated by the forensic auditors is unlikely to succeed in calming investors; a sports team insisting it has total confidence in its coach is likely to receive a flurry of speculative applications; and a president insisting that ‘we’re not gonna be in a recession in my view’ is unlikely to do consumer confidence a great deal of good. The major difference here is that the White House has the advantage of being able to mark its own homework. No matter what today’s GDP data shows, Biden’s team will be able to claim the US

Wednesday

Matt Ridley

Has the lab leak theory really been disproved?

The BBC carried a story this week with the headline ‘Covid origin studies say evidence points to Wuhan market’. Bizarrely the paper in Science they are referring to, by Michael Worobey and colleagues, says no such thing. It says: ‘the observation that the preponderance of early cases were linked to the Huanan market does not establish that the pandemic originated there’. All three of the scientists quoted in the BBC story have been highly dismissive about even discussing the possibility that the pandemic began as an accident in a Wuhan laboratory. Their vested interest is clear: they worry that the reputation of their field of virology would be threatened by

Ian Williams Ian Williams

The UK is just waking up to the scale of Chinese espionage

The scene could have come straight out of a spy novel. An ornate Chinese garden with temples and pavilions, built at one of the highest points in Washington DC – a gift from the Chinese government. At its heart, a 70-foot high white pagoda – perfectly positioned and equipped to eavesdrop on communications at the heart of the American government below. China offered to spend $100 million to build the garden at the National Arboretum. But the project never got off the drawing board. It was quietly killed off by US counter-intelligence after they discovered that Chinese officials wanted to build the pagoda with materials shipped to the US in

Amber Athey

Mr Trump goes back to Washington

Former president Donald Trump returned to Washington, DC for the first time since leaving office last night. He did not like what he saw. During his keynote address at the America First Agenda Summit held at the Marriott Marquis, Trump derided the filthy homeless encampments that have popped up throughout the city and called for a return to ‘law and order’. These tent cities, Trump said, are ‘all over some of, I think, the most beautiful public spaces in the world’. Indeed, if you drive through downtown DC or catch a train out of Union Station, you will encounter the haphazard tents and the desperate drug-addicted and mentally unwell folk

Tuesday

Jack Smith

Germany’s gas crisis goes from bad to worse

Europe’s gas situation has now gone from bad to worse. Gazprom will cut volumes through Nord Stream 1 in half, from 40 per cent of capacity to about 20 per cent from tomorrow onwards, pushing Germany into further danger ahead of winter. The German government will probably have to move into the highest level of its security of supply protocol. This is a state of emergency, and means rationing could be on the horizon. The EU will also need to work out how it will respond, as member states push back against the European Commission’s previous measures. It adds up to an extremely difficult picture economically, socially, and politically for

Francis Buckley

January 6 has turned Trump fans into NeverTrumpers

The 6 January hearings are a bit of a kangaroo court, since no one is trying to poke holes in the witnesses, as a barrister would do. Still, the picture that has emerged of a rage-filled narcissist in the White House is so devastating that it’s made Never Trumpers out of former Trump supporters. That might seem to hurt the Republicans, but it would be to the party’s advantage if it keeps Trump out of a 2024 race that he would probably lose. The hearings might thus end up biting the Democrats. The hearings have also had the unintended effect of making heroes out of the Republicans who’ve stood up

Monday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Putin has Europe where he wants it

Have we reached the endgame of Vladimir Putin’s energy war against the West, the point at which he turns off the gas for good? This afternoon, Gazprom announced that from Wednesday morning it will cut the quantity of gas flowing through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline to Germany to 33 cubic metres per day. This will halve the current flow of 67 million cubic metres and is just 20 per cent of the 167 million cubic metres which flowed through the pipeline before the Ukraine invasion. Ostensibly, the cut is for reasons of ‘maintenance’. That is unlikely to wash. Nord Stream 1 relies on a compressor station powered by six

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Viktor Orbán won’t save conservatism

It’s always the ones you most expect. Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, nationalist strongman and post-liberal poster-boy gave a speech over the weekend on the evils of race-mixing. He was speaking on Saturday to attendees at Tusványos summer university in Băile Tușnad, Transylvania, previously an annual forum for Hungarian-Romanian dialogue but now an intellectual pep rally for the ultranationalist Fidesz party. According to the Budapest Times, he told his co-ideologues the West was ‘split in two’ between European nations and those in which Europeans and non-Europeans lived together. He declared: ‘Those countries are no longer nations.’ This is also how the Daily News Hungary and Hungary Today characterised Orbán’s remarks.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Is the US thinking straight about Taiwan?

As the Tory leadership candidates tussle over China, it is well worth reading this essay by the US strategist Hal Brands, who says that contrary to the common perception, the first world war did not happen by accident. Rather it was a product of ‘a determined but anxious Germany… willing to take risks to achieve goals it could not attain through peaceful means.’ The obvious parallel today is with China. It is a peaking power and it may well choose to take risks sooner rather than later. The US, at the moment, is in danger of sending the wrong signals. Last week’s suggestion that Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House,

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Is China’s property market about to go bust?

29 min listen

China’s property market accounts for something between 20 and 29 per cent of the country’s total GDP. The seemingly never-ending rise of residential blocks were how ordinary people like my family could see and touch China’s miraculous economic growth. Home ownership was to be expected, especially for young men looking to marry and start a family. Across the country, 70 per cent of household wealth is held in real estate. But in recent months, China’s property hasn’t been so hot. The sector has shrunk 7 per cent year on year. Developers have run out of money to complete complexes that they’ve already sold; while consumers across dozens of cities are refusing

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Why Macron would prefer Rishi Sunak as PM

France and Britain have been bickering again, this time about the chaos at the ferry ports over the weekend. The ‘clown’, as Emmanuel Macron reportedly dubbed Boris Johnson, may be on his way out, but there seems no end in sight to the circus that Anglo-French relations have become. Might that change with a new ringmaster in No. 10? Maybe, if Rishi Sunak wins the contest to become prime minister. Sunak and Macron are similar in many ways beyond their background in finance; presentable and polished but, so say their detractors, ideologically shallow. In this week’s Spectator Douglas Murray describes Sunak as resembling ‘someone who has floated to the top

Sunday

Peter Wood

The two Americas: California vs. Florida

What is America? The answer to that simple question can get you into a lot of trouble. Or it can propel you to the Oval Office. You can try to run away from the question with adverbs. ‘Well, historically, America was the name a European mapmaker slapped on the unexplored continents across the Atlantic.’ Maybe Amerigo Vespucci, that mapmaker, had Florida in mind, though Vespucci would have struggled to imagine a future figure such as the 46th governor of the state, Ron DeSantis. Or, ‘Linguistically, America is an abbreviated form of the United States of America, a political union that traces itself to a local rebellion of thirteen British colonies

Sasha Lensky

The tide is turning in Russia’s war on Ukraine

Could Russia triumph? There’s a growing sense that, as the months wear on, Ukraine’s resistance is faltering. The West is losing interest in the conflict and the unthinkable is being said: Putin is winning the war on and off the battlefield. The image of countless hordes of Russian troops grinding down the Ukrainian defences with a 3-to-1 advantage in artillery is at first glance quite convincing. Meanwhile, off the battlefield, the ruble rate is sky high, and sanctions seem to have no discernible effect on the war. Putin’s fiercest opponent Boris Johnson is leaving office, and the energy-dependency of Europe seems to play right into Russia’s hands. Putin now occupies nearly

Seb Kennedy

Putin could come to regret his gas game with Europe

Russian president Vladimir Putin has always enjoyed trolling European leaders. As relations between Moscow and Berlin deteriorate over reduced natural gas supplies and Ukraine-related sanctions, Putin is now brazenly gaslighting his German counterpart, chancellor Olaf Scholz. But it’s a move he could come to regret. Putin suggested this week that Germany should give the shelved Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline the go ahead to restore gas flows to normal levels. The amount of Russian gas flowing into Germany along the operational Nord Stream 1 pipeline under the Baltic Sea is capped at 67 million cubic metres per day (MMcm/d), or about 40 per cent of its technical capacity. Russia claims this is

Saturday

Katja Hoyer Katja Hoyer

Germany is caught in Putin’s trap

A collective sigh of relief went through Berlin this week as Russia resumed its gas deliveries through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline after a scheduled ten-day maintenance break. But even with the immediate crisis averted, Germany remains palpably jittery: it is unclear whether it will have enough gas to get through the winter. Threats from Vladimir Putin to curb or even stop energy supplies to Europe altogether have been part of the Russian war strategy right from the beginning. Shortly before the invasion of Ukraine in February, when the German chancellor Olaf Scholz announced a halt to the controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev sneered: ‘Well. Welcome to

Friday

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Ukraine and Russia sign grain deal – what next?

This afternoon Kyiv and Moscow signed a UN-backed agreement to free up at least 20 million tons of grain from blocked ports. Ukraine said it would not sign a deal with Russia directly, only with Turkey and the UN. As Wolfgang Münchau noted this morning, it marks the first successful mediation between the two sides since the start of the war. This deal will complicate Vladimir Putin’s efforts to strangle the Ukrainian economy. But the Russian leader needs to show countries that are neutral – or more inclined towards Russia (in Africa and Asia) – that he saved them from hunger and rising food prices. Otherwise, Algeria could increase gas

Charles Moore Charles Moore

A rather funny story about Ivana Trump

The death of Ivana Trump last week reminded me of a story I had always meant to check. I rang its central figure, Sir Humphry Wakefield, who was forthcoming. In the late 1980s, Ivana, then married to the man she called ‘the Donald’, was doing up the Plaza Hotel in New York, which her husband owned. She decided to name the Plaza’s 12 top suites after great British country houses – Chatsworth, Wilton, Floors etc. So she commissioned Humphry, whose company specialises in the perfect reproduction of important furniture, to install copies of relevant objects from the houses in the appropriate suite. This involved Humphry meeting the couple, although Donald