World

Monday

Owen Matthews

How the Ukraine conflict has changed the nature of war

Three years ago today, Russian tanks rolled over the Ukrainian border in a massive surprise attack. Russian unit commanders and soldiers were told to prepare for a three-day campaign – and indeed by the end of the day parachute units were fighting for control of the vital Hostomel military airport just a few miles from the centre of Kyiv. But over a thousand days later, many of the fundamentals of war and politics have been changed forever.  For one, Europe found its conscience. In the run-up to the full-scale Russian invasion, some European countries – including Britain – were training Ukrainian infantry units in scattered partisan warfare and supplying man-portable anti

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

What China’s planned mega-dam means for Asia

29 min listen

Just before the end of 2024, Chinese state media Xinhua slipped out an announcement – the long discussed mega-dam in Medog County, Tibet, has been greenlit. When built, it will generate three times more energy than China’s Three Gorges dam, currently the largest in the world. The Xinhua write-up gave few other details, but the news has caused reverberations across Asia as the river on which the dam would be built, the Yarlung Tsangpo, flows into both India and Bangladesh. The existence of the dam could, as we will hear in this episode, have extensive impact on these downriver countries. To break down the complicated water politics of the region,

David Christopher Kaufman

Hamas’s hostage shows evoke a haunting comparison

Another weekend, another grotesque spectacle in Gaza. Hamas released its latest handful of Israeli hostages as part of the fragile ceasefire agreement which is expected to expire next week. As on many Saturdays before, Hamas paraded a trio of Israelis – Omer Shem Tov, Omer Wenkert, and Eliya Cohen – onto makeshift platforms emblazoned with multilingual propaganda declarations and decorative nationalistic flags. The Hamas production feels like nothing less than a slave auction in America’s South As cheering crowds looked on, the trio were then forced onto the stage, made to smile and wave as heavily-armed militants milled about, before finally being led to freedom by the Red Cross officials

Constantin Eckner

Can Friedrich Merz fix Germany?

Sunday’s federal election in Germany was historic for more than one reason. After the collapse of the so-called ‘traffic light’ coalition under chancellor Olaf Scholz, it was only the fourth time a snap election had been held in post-war Germany. And just like in 1983 and 2005, a Christian Democrat will be taking over the chancellor’s office. Friedrich Merz and his alliance of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Christian Social Union (CSU) emerged as the winners with 28.5 per cent of the votes on Sunday. For Merz, it seems likely that his incredibly long wait to be chancellor is over. Over 20 years ago, he lost an internal battle

Elisabeth Dampier

Germans won’t get the right-wing government they voted for

Germany is still a divided country – at least when you look at its electoral map. After this weekend’s federal election, the east of the country is coloured in the light blue of the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), while the west is dominated by the black of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), with scattered green and red spots that show where the Greens and the Social Democratic party (SPD) have maintained their left-wing hold on the cities. One third of all voters were undecided just one week before the election. That shows how many voters felt dissatisfied with all the parties. As expected, the CDU did best in the

Irwin Stelzer

Does Trump really need Starmer’s bridge to Europe?

This week, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is heading to Washington to establish himself as a ‘bridge’ between the US and the EU, and to breathe new life into the Anglo-American Special Relationship. There is much to discuss between the historic allies. Starmer has announced that a ‘security guarantee’ from America is the only way there can be ‘a lasting peace agreement … the only way to effectively deter Russia from attacking Ukraine again.’ Trump is negotiating an agreement with Putin, and leaving it to the Europeans to defend the continent while America attends to other business in the Pacific, Greenland, Panama, the Middle East and any other places Trump

Sunday

Jacob Heilbrunn

The AfD will be a thorn in Merz’s side

Alice Weidel, the leader of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, didn’t mince her words. Speaking immediately after the German federal election on national television in Berlin on what’s known as ‘the leaders round’, she claimed that the mainstream conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) merely won a ‘pyrrhic victory’. Its head, Friedrich Merz, had no real choice, Weidel said, but to form a coalition with her radical right party (which scored over 20 per cent of the vote). A three- party coalition, she added, would be ‘a millstone around Merz’s neck’. The AfD will enjoy the luxury of being able to criticise any new government at will Merz was having none

Ido Vock

Is Friedrich Merz up to the task of fixing Germany?

As was widely predicted, Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) has won Germany’s federal elections with around 28 per cent of the vote. For the first time since the formation of the Federal Republic in 1949, a far-right party – the Alternative for Germany (AfD) – has come second in a national election, winning an unprecedented fifth of the vote. The AfD surge seen tonight will dominate politics for the next four years. The party has pulled off an historic upset in the face of near-universal hostility from other parties and the media. The far right benefited hugely from a campaign largely focused on migration, its core issue. A series of terror attacks

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Friedrich Merz on track to win German federal election

After two torturous months of campaigning, the wait is over. Friedrich Merz, leader of the conservative CDU party, is on track to win Germany’s federal election. According to the official exit poll, published at 5pm UK time, his party has won 28.9 per cent of the vote. This means they are set to become the largest party in Berlin’s new parliament. Hot on the heels of the CDU is the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, which has achieved 19.7 per cent of the vote. While it is its highest ever result in a federal election, their projected vote share suggests the far-right party will be just shy of the

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Will Macron get tough on Algeria over the French knife attack?

Emmanuel Macron will hold talks with Donald Trump on Monday at which the President of France will attempt to ‘make Europe’s voice heard’. Still seething about being excluded from America’s peace negotiations with Russia, Macron wants to reassert the continent’s authority Stateside.  It will be a forlorn exercise. One of the reasons America – not just Trump’s administration but the one that preceded it – no longer attaches much importance to the EU is because they can see how weak it’s become. The world understands that Macron talks the talk but never walks the walk It’s timidity towards Algeria is a prime example. On Saturday, an Algerian man was arrested

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

What to look out for in Germany’s federal election

After two long months of campaigning, Germany heads to the polls today for its federal election. Approximately 60 million voters across the country’s 16 states will elect the new government. Will incumbent SPD chancellor Olaf Scholz’s party be punished for his three years in power? Will the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) cruise to its highest ever federal result? Will Friedrich Merz’s conservative CDU do well enough to only need one partner to form a coalition? This is what to watch out for tonight. To enter the Bundestag, the parties need to win at least 5 per cent of the national vote. The German proportional representation system means that everyone gets

Jonathan Spyer

Isis is filling the vacuum in Syria

‘Isis is taking huge advantage of the current situation in Syria,’ Ilham Ahmed told me, when we met in the north Syrian city of Hasakeh in mid January. ‘In the recent time, there have been many attacks on checkpoints of the SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces). They are most active in the al Badiya area. There’s no security control there, and we have confirmed intelligence information of plans for an attack on the Al Hol camp to liberate the families there.’ Ahmed chairs the foreign relations department of the Autonomous Administration of North East Syria (AANES). This is the Kurdish-dominated de facto government with which the US and its allies aligned

Matthew Lynn

How France killed its start-up culture

It would encourage digitally savvy entrepreneurs. It would be a hub for artificial intelligence. And it would encourage a wave of new companies, replacing the ageing giants of French industry. When Emmanuel Macron became president, turning the country into ‘le start-up’ nation was central to his mission to modernise the economy. In fairness, he had some success. And yet with one of the world’s most punishing wealth taxes passed by the National Assembly last week it is about to be killed stone-dead. It was always slightly implausible for a country best known for its long lunches, short working week, endless holidays, and generous early retirement ages, but Macron was determined

Saturday

Alex Klaushofer

What Lebanon’s energy crisis can teach us in Britain

“See that?” my friend pointed to a pylon on the hill opposite the window. “That’s the dawla.” The dawla (pronounced “dowleh”) is Arabic for state, and my hostess was telling me about an essential feature of life in contemporary Lebanon: the ability to understand when there is electricity and who is providing it. If the light on the pylon was orange, I would know that power was coming from the national grid. If, like good Net Zero citizens, we eschew gas, it could also mean no heating, hot meals or hot showers It was my first trip to Lebanon for almost fifteen years. In the early 2000s, I went repeatedly

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Who is responsible for the BBC’s Gaza documentary debacle?

In 2007, the BBC was engulfed in scandal for an embarrassing – if relatively trivial – misrepresentation of Queen Elizabeth II. A promotional clip for a documentary, A Year with the Queen, was edited to suggest the monarch stormed out of a photoshoot in a huff, when in reality, the sequence had been misleadingly spliced together. The outcry was immediate. Within hours, the BBC issued an apology. By the following day, an internal investigation had been launched. The corporation treated the matter with the utmost urgency, leading to resignations, extensive inquiries, and a near-existential crisis over editorial ethics. Fast-forward to 2025, and the BBC has once again been caught red-handed with

Julian Brazier

Britain’s waters are not safe

John Foreman’s recent article on the Yantar incident highlighted the Russian threat to Britain’s economically vital data cables. Data cables are, however, only part of a disturbing picture. The UK is almost the only large country whose critical national infrastructure is so heavily coastal or underwater. All of our gas comes by sea, either through pipelines from Europe, from the North and Irish Sea, or through delivery of LNG to our ports. Most of the rest of our electricity sources are coastal too: undersea cables bring offshore wind and carry power from the Continent, and every British nuclear power station has a vulnerable outflow to the sea. Yet few ports have been designated as strategic

Yascha Mounk

Europe must be stronger, or it will die

Over the last weeks, the words and actions of the Trump administration have caused the biggest rift between the United States and Europe since the end of the Cold War. Relations between the longstanding partners are more strained now than they were in the run-up to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq or in the aftermath of Trump’s 2018 joint press conference with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. Over the last few weeks, European officials were horrified that Trump pressured the prime minister of Denmark, a longtime ally, to cede parts of its national territory to the United States. They took umbrage at a speech at the Munich Security Conference in

Friday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Hamas’s final torment of the Bibas family

So Hamas has committed yet another act of depravity against the Bibas family. It said Shiri Bibas was in one of those four coffins it put on grim display in Gaza yesterday before handing them over to the Red Cross. But she wasn’t. It was the remains of some unknown person that Hamas passed off as the mother-of-two whose return the whole of Israel has been crying out for. Truly, is there no end to the cynicism and savagery of these terrorists? Israel says forensic testing has confirmed that two of the coffins contained the bodies of the Bibas children: Ariel, who was four when he was kidnapped, and Kfir,

Hugh Schofield

Hugh Schofield, Igor Toronyi-Lalic & Michael Simmons, Lisa Haseldine, Alice Loxton and Aidan Hartley

37 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Hugh Schofield asks why there is no campaign to free the novelist Boualem Sansal (1:26); The Spectator’s arts editor, Igor Toronyi-Lalic, reacts to the magazine’s campaign against frivolous funding and, continuing the campaign, Michael Simmons wonders if Britain is funding organisations that wish us harm (8:00); Lisa Haseldine reflects on whether the AfD’s rise could mean ‘Weimar 2.0’ for Germany (17:08); reviewing Thou Savage Woman: Female Killers in Early Modern Britain, by Blessin Adams, Alice Loxton explores the gruesome ways in which women killed (25:05); and, from Kenya, Aidan Hartley reflects on how a secret half-brother impacted his relationship with his father (35:13).  Produced and presented

Sam Olsen

Why Trump doesn’t see Putin as a real threat

It turns out that Harold Wilson’s famous quote, ‘A week is a long time in politics’, is equally applicable to changes to the world order. So far this week, President Trump has extended a hand to Russia, savaged Ukraine and upended a transatlantic alliance eight decades old. In doing so, not only has he performed a 180 degree turn on established US foreign policy, but he has forced the UK and its European allies onto a new trajectory that will have ramifications for decades, if not longer. Trump’s outreach to Putin was not unexpected. During his election campaign he repeatedly stated he could bring the war in Ukraine to a