World

Monday

Michael Evans

What Zelensky needs to do in Saudi Arabia

President Volodymyr Zelensky needs all the advice he can get, as he prepares for talks with American negotiators in Saudi Arabia tomorrow. A statement over the weekend from the Ukrainian presidential office disclosed that the latest western visitor to make the long train ride into Kyiv was Jonathan Powell, Sir Keir Starmer’s national security adviser and veteran crisis negotiator. The meeting between Powell and Andriy Yermak, the head of Zelensky’s office, provided further evidence that the UK is currently attempting to play an influential role in moderating what might seem, at present, to be a one-sided effort by the US to bludgeon the Ukrainian president into signing a deal to

Stephen Pollard

Why was Syria’s president ever treated like a centrist dad?

There’s an old journalistic maxim: If it bleeds, it leads. But some crucial words are missing from the end: If we can hold the Jews responsible. It’s not by chance that most news organisations have more correspondents in Israel than in the rest of the Middle East put together. True, that’s partly because Israel – unlike its neighbours – is a democracy which allows dissenting voices, and is home to and welcomes a cacophony of both homegrown and foreign media voices. If you want to cover the Middle East, you’ll likely base yourself in Israel. Al-Sharaa’s arrival as Syria’s de facto president was greeted not as the ascension to power

Jonathan Spyer

No one should be surprised about the Syrian massacres

Shock and outrage are appropriate, but no one really has an excuse for being surprised at the dreadful scenes that have emerged from Syria’s western coastal region in recent days. The civilian death toll is now thought to be somewhere above 750, with over 1,000 people killed in total (Alawi sources place the number much higher). Around 125 members of the Damascus regime’s security forces have also died. Video clips, many of them filmed by the perpetrators, show people in civilian clothes being summarily executed by Islamist gunmen; the humiliation of Syrian Alawi men and women; and the inevitable Sunni jihadi battle cries of ‘Allahu Akbar.’ The specifics of the

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

Will Trump cause a recession?

Donald Trump has refused to rule out an American recession. He ‘hates to predict things like this’, he said yesterday. When asked if a downturn was coming this year, the President responded that a ‘period of transition’ was on the cards. On Thursday last week the Atlanta Fed’s GDP ‘nowcast’ model was forecasting that America’s economy would shrink by 2.4 per cent in the first quarter of this year – a slight improvement on the 2.8 per cent contraction it had predicted three days earlier. If this reading for the first three months of 2025 proves to be true, and things don’t pick up shortly, could the USA be heading

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

What Reform can learn from France’s National Rally

The crisis currently ripping apart Reform is nothing new to Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party. Indeed, the reason her party is called the ‘National Rally’ is a result of her ‘dédiabolisation’ strategy, which aimed to soften the party’s image. Le Pen ditched its original moniker, the National Front, in early 2018, a few months after her comprehensive defeat to Emmanuel Macron in the presidential election run-off. Her father, Jean-Marie, who had co-founded the National Front in 1972, was furious, saying it was ‘totally absurd… a betrayal of the movement’s history’. It wasn’t the first time that father and daughter had fallen out over the party’s direction; in 2015 she

Jane Stannus

Mark Carney will be Canada’s Project Fear PM

Oh no, Canada. The maple smoke has floated up from the Liberal party’s headquarters, and the bad news is out: our new Prime Minister is Mark Carney, banker, Davos darling, and ruthless climate radical. It’s not even Canadians’ fault this time. Trudeau, admittedly, was. But Carney is a Liberal party pick, which sounds reasonable until you learn that the Liberal party didn’t require its members to hold Canadian citizenship – or even be an adult – to cast a ballot to replace Trudeau as leader. The vote took place online, and while around 400,000 people registered as party members, a glitch-ridden verification process meant only around 160,000 were cleared to vote. It’s

James Snell

The slogan that could doom Mark Carney

Mark Carney has won the Liberal party leadership contest by an enormous margin. He will soon be the prime minister of Canada. It’s a moment of triumph for the former governor of the Bank of England, the Governor of the Bank of Canada, a senior banker at Goldman Sachs based in the United States, Japan and Britain, for a former shapeshifting personage of the United Nations, for a Davos regular: for one of the most ambitious, globally ambitious, guys around. It’s a repudiation of the idea that a citizen of nowhere financier type educated at Harvard and Oxford could never rise to the top in our populist age. Things are

Michael Taube

Mark Carney won’t be much different to Justin Trudeau

As widely expected, Mark Carney has become the new Liberal party of Canada leader – and will become Canada’s next prime minister.  The former Bank of England and Bank of Canada governor won by an overwhelming margin on Sunday, taking 85.9 per cent of the vote. Former Liberal deputy prime minister and finance minister Chrystia Freeland finished a distant second with 8 per cent. Carney will now meet with outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to set a timetable for the transition of power. The fact that Carney won isn’t a surprise. What is surprising is many Liberals have put their faith in someone who doesn’t have any political experience. Carney has never

Sunday

James Snell

How horror returned to Syria

Once again there is horror on the Syrian coast. The fighting began on Thursday, in the new government’s telling, after a broad uprising was launched by remnants of the old regime and allied militias. In a coordinated series of moves along Syria’s coastal areas and inland, dozens of checkpoints and bases of the new authorities were attacked all at once. Some coastal towns were set ablaze. Overexcited commentators said this was the revenge of Bashar al-Assad, that a counter-revolution was in full swing, and that a new civil war, this time with a different outcome, was beginning. The Syrian coast has a significant Alawi population — the sect from which

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Is Trump going to rip up the US security alliance with Japan?

Another day, another Trumpian bombshell, this one aimed at the country he says he loves: Japan. Trump told reporters this week that the US-Japan security alliance which has bound the two countries together militarily since 1952 and offered military guarantees to Japan since 1960 was ‘interesting’ but unequal as it obliged the US to defend Japan but not vice-versa. Trump added that the Japanese ‘make a fortune with us economically’ a reference to Japan’s trade surplus with the US. Trump was speaking ahead of a visit by Japan’s trade minister who will reportedly ask (perhaps beg) for an exemption from pending US tariffs on steel and aluminium (25 per cent

Alexander Kolyandr

Why won’t the West use frozen Russian assets to help Ukraine?

Since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago, there has been a great deal of temptation to seize Russian sovereign assets frozen in the West. There is, after all, an urgent need and moral imperative to make the aggressor pay and use Russia’s money for Ukraine’s cause. But the reality is that unless European governments show urgent determination, Russian money is unlikely to be used to support Ukraine in its totality any time soon.  Amid the spat between Volodymyr Zelensky and Donald Trump last week, which resulted in the US stopping military aid to Ukraine, the issue of financial support for Kyiv has never been more critical.

Robert Service

It makes perfect sense for Putin to befriend America

Would it really be strange if Vladimir Putin started playing off America against China in geopolitics? If he had greater vision, he would have been doing this in all those years when he fulminated against the US as the global Satan. I wrote about this in 2019 in my book Kremlin Winter as evidence of his long-term ineptitude. But Russian policymakers long ago ceased to offer Putin ideas for a more flexible foreign and security outlook, and his aggressive paranoia dragged Russia into a needless and barbaric war in 2022. Donald Trump was the one American leader whom he always exempted from his tirades. They continue to get on famously. Now Trump,

Saturday

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Why Russia has shrugged off Trump’s sanctions threat

While Donald Trump may be threatening Moscow with major new sanctions, as it continues to hammer Ukraine with drones and missiles, the Russians seem unfazed. They assume this is just rhetorical for now – and they are probably right. This week has seen the US progressively cutting off its support for Ukraine, first suspending arms shipments, then pausing intelligence sharing and even access to the satellite imagery used to help target Russian bases and arms depots far from the frontline. The Russian business press has largely ignored Trump’s sanctions threat The Russians, far from resting on their laurels, have responded with an escalated campaign of drone and missile strikes –

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Who cares if Elon Musk has fourteen kids?

Historically, the richest and poorest men on the planet tend to father a lot more children than the men in the middle. With the former, its because there’s so much for the spawn to inherit, hence all the aristocratic Fitzes; the latter, because so many offspring die in infancy. The men in the middle tend to look disapprovingly – not without reason, as they pay so much of the taxes the other two dodge – at both. It comes as no surprise then that plenty of people have poured scorn on the announcement by Elon Musk’s partner Shivon Zilis that the pair have welcomed the tech billionaire’s fourteenth child. A

Owen Matthews

Russian spying has become a pathetic, amateurish business

Make no mistake: whatever higher moral authority they may have invoked in their defence, Soviet and Russian spies have never been good or honourable people. Kim Philby, the suave Martini-sipping traitor sent dozens of brave anti-Communist volunteers to their deaths. Konon Molody – alias Gordon Lonsdale, Canadian vending machine salesman and kingpin of the Portland Spy Ring – did not balk at blackmailing and threatening his hapless sub-agents into doing the KGB’s dirty work. But as the sordid revelations about the latest crop of Russian spies convicted yesterday in the Old Bailey’s Courtroom Seven reveal, the major difference between Moscow’s agents of yore and those of today is how lowbrow,

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

‘Low-cost’ jihadists are Europe’s new danger

There is a new Islamist terror threat in Europe that the French describe as ‘low-cost terrorism’. The expression was deployed in a television interview at the start of this week by Bruno Retailleau, the Minister of the Interior. Warning France that Islamic State is ‘reconstituting themselves in Africa and elsewhere’, Retailleau said that the other menace was the individual extremist acting on his own initiative. Unskilled in bomb-making and with no access to firearms, these ‘low-cost’ Islamists kill with knives or behind the wheel of a car. One of these ‘low-cost’ extremists was last week jailed for life by a French court. In October 2020, Tunisian Brahim Aouissaoui murdered three

Jethro Norman

Why Mogadishu has better mobile phone reception than Manchester

While the UK government struggles to deliver reliable mobile coverage across some rural communities, Somalia – a country that hasn’t had a functioning central government for three decades – has built one of Africa’s most resilient telecommunications networks. As a British researcher who conducts fieldwork in Somalia, I’m often struck by an ironic reality: I can find more reliable mobile coverage in hard-to-reach Somali villages than in certain parts of Manchester, where I’m from. This connectivity paradox highlights how necessity can drive innovation in unexpected places. Upon arriving in a new town or village in Somalia, I’ve grown accustomed to an intriguing sight: elders – the traditional authorities in Somali

Friday

Harry Cole

Harry Cole, Zoe Strimpel, Michael Simmons, Nigel Warburton and Justin Marozzi

30 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Having returned from Washington D.C., Harry Cole reads his diary for the week (1:16); Zoe Strimpel reports on the Gen Z fliers obsessed with maximalising their air miles (5:37); Michael Simmons argues that Scotland is the worst when it comes to government waste (12:00); reviewing Quentin Skinner’s Liberty as Independence, Nigel Warburton examines what it means to be free (17:45); and, Justin Marozzi provides his notes on possum (25:02).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Damien Phillips

Egypt’s Gaza peace plan will never work

Another week, another peace plan for a seemingly intractable conflict. This time it’s Gaza’s turn, with the launch of a new peace and reconstruction plan for the rubble-strewn Strip. The proposal, created by Egypt and endorsed by the Arab League (a 22-strong group of Arab states) at a summit in Cairo, provides an alternative to President Trump’s ‘Gaza Riviera’ model. Trump’s idea to place Gaza under US control, depopulate it to redevelop the enclave, and decant its residents to nearby Egypt and Jordan was rejected out of hand by the Arab states. The US has signalled that it is open to hearing what an Arab plan for Gaza’s post-war reconstruction

Edward Howell

President Yoon’s trial is tearing South Korea apart

It is now only a matter of days before the 52 million-strong population in South Korea will know the fate of their suspended president, Yoon Suk Yeol. Since his first impeachment hearing at the end of 2024, after which he was arrested and indicted on charges of insurrection, the President has continued to defend his initial decision to impose martial law on the evening of 3 December. But with less than a week to go before the country’s constitutional court rules on his destiny, a central court in Seoul today ordered Yoon’s release from jail, a month after his initial detention. While this is a small victory for Yoon and