World

Lisa Haseldine

Tomorrow belongs to the AfD

‘The firewall has fallen!’ Alice Weidel, co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), posted on X, barely able to contain her excitement. The firewall (‘Brandmauer’) refers to the agreement by Germany’s establishment parties never to endorse or collaborate with the AfD. Last week, it was breached – for the first time in the history of the federal German parliament, a motion was passed with the AfD’s help. The person responsible was the man tipped to be Germany’s next chancellor: Christian Democratic Union (CDU) leader Friedrich Merz. Merz’s motion called on the government to reintroduce permanent border controls, block all attempts to enter the country illegally and prioritise the arrest

Freddy Gray

Will Trump make Gaza great again?

20 min listen

When Netanyahu visited the White House, Donald Trump said in a press conference that the US could take over the Gaza Strip and suggested the permanent resettlement of its 1.8 million residents to neighbouring Arab countries. It has sparked global condemnation raising questions about where the Gaza citizens could be resettled to, and how this could impact the hostage negotiations. To discuss this and the conflict more widely, Freddy Gray is joined by former Israel spokesperson Eylon Levy.

Freddy Gray

Is Jared Kushner behind Trump’s ‘Riviera of the Middle East’ plan?

Who knew that America First had such global ambitions? Who knew that, when Donald Trump promised ‘mass deportations’, he also might have been thinking about using America’s might to extract Palestinian people out of Gaza to give them a ‘lasting home’ in Jordan or Egypt? Donald Trump promised ‘peace through strength’ on the campaign trail. The president never quite said that could mean deploying US funds and troops to remake Gaza into, as he now puts, a ‘Riviera of the Middle East’. ‘Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable,’ Jared Kushner has said Standing with Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington yesterday, Trump said: ‘The US will take over

Michael Simmons

Record Channel crossings expose Starmer’s failure to ‘smash the gangs’

More migrants have illegally crossed the English Channel since 1 January than in any previous year for this period. So far in 2025, 1,344 migrants were detected crossing the Channel in small boats between 1 January and 4 February, beating the previous record of 1,339 in 2022. The figures published by Border Force – and tracked daily by The Spectator’s data hub – put paid to Keir Starmer’s promise to ‘smash the gangs’. A key part of Labour’s manifesto – and one of Starmer’s ‘first steps’ – was to ‘create a fair system and stop the small boat crossings’. Since Starmer took office last July, there have been 24,586 migrant crossings. The news comes despite

The audacity of Trump’s Gaza plan

Some moments in history demand recognition, not just for their weight in the present but for the seismic shifts they herald. The Trump-Netanyahu press conference was one such moment – not a perfunctory diplomatic exercise, nor a routine reaffirmation of alliance, but an unambiguous declaration of intent. It was a disruption of long-entrenched, failed orthodoxies and the unveiling of a vision that dares to reimagine the Middle East in starkly different terms. For decades, world leaders have clung to exhausted formulas – peace processes built on illusion, agreements predicated on fantasy, and a wilful refusal to acknowledge the fundamental realities of Palestinian rejectionism and terror. That era is now over. Standing together,

What Trump’s tariff ‘opening salvo’ will teach him

Mexico and Canada have been given a last-minute reprieve from Donald Trump’s tariffs. China has offered only the most half-hearted response to them. At this rate, even the European Union may be off the hook. Equity markets have rallied strongly as the trade war which seems about to crash the global economy appears to have been averted. But has it really? Investors are kidding themselves if they think the crisis is over.  Trump is clearly a leader who likes to get his own way In the end, it turned out not to be a re-run of the Great Depression, at least not for now. After President Trump slapped punishing 25

Ian Williams

Trump’s tariff war with China is just getting started

Over the weekend, Donald Trump described his sweeping 10 per cent tariffs against Chinese goods as an ‘opening salvo’. Within minutes of them taking effect at midnight last night, Beijing retaliated with targeted tariffs of its own against US coal, liquified natural gas (LNG), farm equipment and cars. It also announced export controls on a string of critical minerals to ‘safeguard national security’, and what it described as an ‘anti-trust’ investigation into Google. Like most Western internet and social media firms, Google is already banned from China, but earns money from Chinese businesses advertising abroad. The US President has described tariffs as ‘the most beautiful word’ In spite of the

Kate Andrews

What does Donald Trump want from a trade war with China?

What are the real intentions of Donald Trump’s trade war? Does he really believe tariffs work to boost economic growth domestically? Does he see them as tools to prop up American businesses, as his Vice President does? Or, as in his first term, are threats of import levies almost purely about leverage – and if so, what does he want? Last-ditch efforts to pause 25 per cent tariffs on Canadian and Mexican goods seem to have worked, with both countries pledging to better police illegal immigration and drug trafficking across the borders. Trump has suspended the implementation of tariffs for 30 days to see if both countries can move towards

Starmer may come to regret his EU defence pact

Sir Keir Starmer has been on another overseas visit. On his 18th trip in seven months as prime minister, he travelled to Brussels yesterday to talk to European Union leaders about defence and security, an area on which he is keen to expand cooperation. His mission was both practical and symbolic: he is pursuing a defence agreement with the EU, but he is also desperate to show that he has ‘reset’ the United Kingdom’s relationship with Europe and has been welcomed into the club by the leaders of the 27 member states. As well as EU leaders, including the new president of the European Council, António Costa, Starmer met Mark

Canada’s tariff reprieve isn’t a victory for Trudeau 

US President Donald Trump’s long-standing threat to enact 25 per cent tariffs on Canada and Mexico didn’t materialise yesterday. Both countries were granted 30-day reprieves on Monday after they agreed to Trump’s demands to stop the flow of illegal immigration and illicit drugs like fentanyl across the American border. Discussions related to tariffs and trade will be conducted during this time, too. ‘I just had a good call with President Trump,’ Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wrote in a post on X. ‘Canada is implementing our $1.3 billion border plan – reinforcing the border with new choppers, technology and personnel, enhanced coordination with our American partners, and increased resources to stop the flow of

Julie Burchill

Rory Stewart is no match for JD Vance

I was highly amused to see that JD Vance has administered a right old ‘fagging’ – or whatever public school boys call it – to the ghastly Rory Stewart. Better known in some quarters as ‘Florence of Belgravia’, Stewart has developed a habit of dashing about in a dish-dash in search of broadcasting dosh, pouting all the while like an ambitious member of an all-boy fifth-form drama club determined to play Portia. Thanks to his inability to avoid spouting off, Stewart has embroiled himself in a spat on X with the new vice president of the US, JD Vance. In an interview with Fox News last week, Vance said: It’s so

Gavin Mortimer

Why is Spain so anti-Trump?

Spain has been receiving some lavish praise of late in the British press. ‘Booming Spain is on track to a new age of prosperity’ was the headline in the Times last week, a response to the news that its GDP is forecast to grow by 2.5 per cent this year. The Financial Times was similarly effusive about Spain’s economy in a piece last October, in which it quoted the country’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez. ‘I can say that Spain is living an extraordinary moment. Our country is experiencing great success.’ The Times explained that Spain is growing at three times the rate of the Eurozone for three reasons: immigration, tourism and lower energy prices. Since 2022,

Freddy Gray

Are Trump’s tariffs really that bad?

34 min listen

The Spectator’s economics editor Kate Andrews and Social Democratic Party leader William Clouston join Freddy Gray to try and make sense of Donald Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China. He has since threatened the European Union, and has warned the UK. Is this a negotiation tactic or something more? What political philosophy underpins the decision? And what will the impact be? Produced by Patrick Gibbons and Megan McElroy.

Ross Clark

Starmer is falling into the EU’s trap 

No doubt Keir Starmer wants us to think he is being ‘grown up’ in accepting an invitation to dinner at an EU summit. But it is actually the reverse: he is behaving like a toddler in danger of being enticed into a stranger’s car by a bag of sweets dangled out of the window. As the Times reports this morning, Emmanuel Macron views him as a supplicant who is desperate to beg to be allowed partly to re-join the EU because Brexit has failed and immiserated the UK economy. The French president intends to take every advantage and to finish the job that wasn’t quite finished during the Brexit negotiations: to try

Gavin Mortimer

Europe is feeling the strain of mass immigration

Britain can’t cope, that was the response of Nigel Farage to last week’s disclosure by the Office for National Statistics that the population will hit 72.5 million in 2032. The leader of Reform said that Britain has already reached saturation point at 67.6 million, adding: ‘Our quality of life for all of us is diminishing directly as a result of the population explosion.’ The French feel the same, and examples abound of the strain being placed on the country as a result of mass immigration. The Friday before last a class of schoolchildren in Paris were having a PE lesson when it came to an abrupt halt. City Council officials arrived

Why Donald Trump should care about Georgia

President Trump hasn’t just inherited the problem of Russia’s war in Ukraine. Somewhere in the handover is a memo on Georgia, another troubled country on Russia’s border. Georgians who cherish their freedom have for over two months been protesting on the streets, infuriated by their government’s decision to suspend accession talks with the EU. And they’ve paid a price. Hundreds have been detained, many of them suffering injuries in custody. Others have been beaten by government-affiliated thugs on their own doorsteps. But they continue to chant ‘Russian slaves’, for they are under no doubt whose interests the Georgian authorities now serve. Georgia became a victim of Russian aggression before Russia’s

Should the West be worried about DeepSeek’s ‘Sputnik moment’?

My late mother proudly possessed a curious object: a tea cosy decorated with the image of a Sputnik. In 1957, when Russia launched the world’s first satellite, this item would have been a charmingly incongruous mix of old and new technology. But today, younger readers might struggle to identify the functions of both a tea cosy and the shiny, spiked silver ball that was Sputnik 1.  Back in the day, the world was shocked by the news that the Soviets had beat the West in the race to space. The New York Times mentioned the satellite in 279 articles in October 1957, the month of its launch. So profound was