World

Sunday

Kevin Toolis

The impossibility of escaping from Assad

‘The mullahs are moody,’ said Aisha, a female university student, explaining her daily nail varnish run in with the aging female crones who guard the entrance to Tehran’s University of Arts.  All female students had to pass through a daily ‘modesty’ check to reach their classes. But the line on what was acceptable – nail varnish colour, make-up, a tuft of exposed hair peaking beyond the compulsory scarf and hijab – varied daily on the whim of the mullahs fighting for power in Iran’s closed theocracy. Some days red nail varnish was okay and other days the same colour was forbidden and Aisha was barred from attending her classes. The only

Ian Williams Ian Williams

China is getting ready to take on Trump

By one estimate, Chinese military exercises close to Taiwan this week were the largest since 1996, when Beijing attempted unsuccessfully to disrupt the island’s first fully democratic presidential election. Up to 100 warships were estimated to have taken part in what Taiwanese officials described as a ‘significant security challenge’, while Russian warships were also spotted close to Japan and South Korea. The danger for the CCP is that it stands to lose more than the US from any intensified trade war The drills were far more ambitious than those held earlier this year, which were focused on blockading Taiwan. They covered a vast swathe of sea north of the island

Robin Ashenden

Only another Bill Clinton can save the Democrats now

In the weeks since Donald Trump won the US election, Democrat supporters, amidst much gnashing of teeth, have offered up a range of post-mortems. While The View host Sunny Hostin and MSNBC presenter Joy Reid have blamed Kamala’ Harris’s defeat, predictably enough, on American ‘racism’ and ‘misogyny’, others have been more constructive. Last week, onetime Obama strategist Steve Schale said in an op-ed that the party – ‘a shell of itself’ – had turned off groups like Hispanics with ‘socialism talk’ and special-interest issues irrelevant to their lives. Democrat veteran Bernie Sanders echoed him, calling out his party for becoming one of ‘identity politics’ rather than trying to appeal to

David Christopher Kaufman

Will Vogue apologise for calling Asma al-Assad ‘A Rose in the Desert’?

Back in 2020, Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour issued a rare public mea culpa in which she apologised for the magazine not finding ‘enough ways to elevate and give space to Black editors, writers, photographers, designers and other creators’. The magazine, Wintour added, had ‘made mistakes…publishing images or stories that have been hurtful or intolerant. I take full responsibility for those mistakes’. More than four years on, the question must now be asked – will Wintour expressly apologise for the mistakes she made against the people of Syria, as well? In 2011, Vogue breathlessly celebrated the country’s former First Lady Asma al-Assad in a glossy profile. After all, while Black staffers were distinctly disadvantaged

Saturday

Edward Howell

Yoon’s impeachment won’t end South Korea’s political chaos

For those who loathed him, it was second time lucky – but only just. With South Korea’s national assembly passing the motion to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol today (with 204 votes in favour and 85 against), the stage is set for the country’s constitutional court to determine the president’s fate: whether to oust him from office or restore his powers. The streets of Seoul are filled with scenes of jubilation accompanied by fireworks and K-pop songs. But these same streets are also occupied by pro-Yoon protesters, outraged at his impeachment. The road ahead is long. And whilst in the wake of the result, Yoon announced that he would be

James Heale James Heale

Would Brexit voters really accept the return of freedom of movement?

19 min listen

New research this week suggested that a majority of Brexit voters would accept the return of freedom of movement in exchange for access to the EU single market. The poll, conducted by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), found that 54% of Brexit voters – and 68% of all respondents – would accept this. Facing their own changing domestic concerns, how close can the UK and EU governments really get? Could Defence hold the key for collaboration? And how much is this driven by a more volatile geopolitical landscape ahead of Trump’s return as US president? James Heale speaks to Anand Menon, director of the think-tank UK in a

James Bessant Davies

The Syrians who can’t go home

In a waiting room in Beirut’s Adlieh district, with harsh fluorescent lighting glaring down on us, the handcuffed prisoners, we took turns to rotate between the floor and the splintered wood of a short bench. On the wall, someone had scrawled a life-sized drawing of an AK-47, its muzzle inscribed with the words ‘Pew! Pew!’ Royal blue fingerprints, remnants of the admission process, smudged the plasterboard. Names and dates were scratched into the walls, a record of how long people had been held – days, weeks or months. This was my introduction to Lebanon’s detention centres. In August, I was bundled into the back of a pickup while working with a charity supporting Syrian

Friday

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Why there will be no Christmas truce in Ukraine

On Christmas Eve 1914, British and German soldiers laid down their arms and crossed trenches to exchange gifts, bury the fallen and even play football – a brief, poignant truce amid the horrors of the first world war. This week, Hungary’s Viktor Orban has tried to emulate that spirit of goodwill by proposing a symbolic Christmas ceasefire and a prisoner exchange between Russia and Ukraine. He called Vladimir Putin, talked to him for an hour, and then teamed up with the Kremlin to pin the blame on Volodymyr Zelensky for rejecting a Christmas truce. So, what really happened? A ceasefire is the last thing Putin wants right now A heated

Michael Evans

Bombing Syria in 2013 would not have toppled Assad

In hindsight, did the US, UK and France fail to seize the chance to topple President Bashar al-Assad in 2013? This is the question that convinced Wes Streeting, the health secretary, to attack his colleague, Ed Miliband, the energy secretary and former Labour leader. Miliband orchestrated the vote that threw out the proposal by David Cameron’s government to join the US and France in airstrikes against Damascus in retaliation for chemical atrocities on the Syrian people. Streeting concluded that if Labour in opposition had supported the vote for airstrikes, Assad’s regime would have fallen, thus bringing relief and liberation for the Syrian population. Speaking on BBC’s Question Time on Thursday,

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

What Ed Miliband got right on Syria

It’s not every day I spring to the defence of Ed Miliband, Secretary for Environment, Net Zero and all the rest of it. But for him to be taken to task for not backing the bombing of Syria back in 2013, as Wes Streeting cautiously does today, is actually to criticise him for his most statesmanlike act during his entire period as Leader of the Opposition. Miliband was given a rough ride by Nick Robinson on the BBC Today programme about it: would he be able to look the relatives of the unfortunate people murdered in the dictator’s prison in the eye and say that he does not regret not bombing

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Is the end of Christendom nigh? with A.N. Wilson

25 min listen

Thousands of Brits will be attending Christmas and carol services throughout December. Yet festive attendance masks the reality that church congregations just aren’t holding up. The most optimistic of estimates suggest that regular church attendance has almost halved in the UK since 2009. This is just one of the factors that has led the historian and writer A.N. Wilson, in the Christmas edition of The Spectator this week, to declare that the end of Christendom is nigh. On this episode of Holy Smoke, A.N. Wilson joins Damian Thompson to discuss his thesis. Like Platonism, is Christianity doomed to become extinct in practice? When was the last time England was truly, and fervently,

Eliot Wilson

France’s defence spending debacle will infuriate Donald Trump

Donald Trump is right that some of Nato’s European members are essentially freeloaders. That these countries are holding talks about increasing the alliance’s target for defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP at its annual summit next June comes too little, too late. Countries like Germany and France have consistently underspent on defence, leaving Europe reliant on the United States as an ultimate guarantor of the continent’s security. When he takes office in January, Trump won’t stand for this. The political chaos in France is unlikely to reassure the president elect that Europe has got its act together when it comes to defence spending. The fall of Michel Barnier’s

Jonathan Spyer

What al-Jolani’s past can reveal about Syria’s future

In late February 2012 I was travelling through Syria’s Idleb province. I stayed for a few days in a town called Binnish, not far from the province’s capital. It was, at that time, under the tentative control of the newly hatched insurgency against the regime of Bashar Assad.   The young host of the place I was staying – I’ll call him ‘D’ – was connected to the fledgling structures of what at that time was widely known as the ‘Free Syrian Army’. But through a cousin of his he also had links to another group of fighters just getting organised in the town. These men were a little older than the FSA members,

Thursday

William Moore William Moore

Christmas Special 2024 with Rod Liddle, Lionel Shriver, Matthew Parris and Mary Wakefield

71 min listen

Welcome to a special festive episode of The Edition podcast, where we will be taking you through the pages of The Spectator’s Christmas triple issue. Up first: our review of the year – and what a year it has been. At the start of 2024, the outcome of the US election looked very different, the UK had a different Prime Minister, and The Spectator had a different editor! Luckily, The Spectator’s regular columnists are on hand to declare what they got right – and wrong – throughout the year, and whether they’re optimistic for 2025. Rod Liddle, Matthew Parris, Mary Wakefield and Lionel Shriver take us through everything from Trump to trans (03:24). Next: ‘Good riddance

Edward Howell

Pyongyang is keeping strangely silent on South Korea’s turmoil

North Korea has long been infamous for its hyperbolic rhetoric. While there are some subjects – such as the locations of its nuclear facilities – that it has so far managed to keep quiet on, the ongoing calls to oust South Korean President, Yoon Suk Yeol, following his botched attempt to impose martial law last week has proved too irresistible for Pyongyang to hold back on for long. After all, in North Korea’s eyes, any attempt to delegitimise South Korea is one worth taking. North Korea’s week-long silence following Yoon’s bizarre invocation and revocation of martial law in the South last week was unusual. Pyongyang did not even conduct any missile

Nigel Jones

Have Syria’s rebels really reformed?

There were two scenes from Syria last night screened by the BBC and Channel 4 News that should give the Panglossian optimists hailing the birth of a ‘new Syria’ a pause for thought. In one, filmed at the Assad family mausoleum in Qardaha, near the port of Latakia, armed members of the Islamist HTS who now control most of the country were joyfully burning the coffins of Hafez al-Assad, the ruthless dictator who ruled Syria from 1970 until his death in 2000, and that of his elder son and heir apparent Bassil, whose death in a car crash in 1994 opened the way for the second Assad son Bashar’s rise

Ali Kefford

Christmas on patrol with the Royal Navy’s submariners

This Christmas, a Royal Navy Trident submarine will be quietly prowling the seas as part of the Continuous At Sea Deterrent mission. She will have slipped out of HM Naval Base Clyde in Scotland in late August. Her location is a secret, known only to a handful of officers aboard. Even the highest ranks of the navy, such as the Chief of Defence Staff and the First Sea Lord, remain unaware of where their ‘bomber’ is. For the rest of the crew, the submarine’s whereabouts are a mystery, with only the temperature of the water against the hull offering them a vague sense of geography. One captain opened a present

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Negroni inflation is out of control

Forty years ago this Christmas I visited Hong Kong for the first time – a few days after the signing in Beijing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration that sealed the former colony’s transfer to mainland rule in 1997. It was a moment of apprehension, but at least the timetable had been set. And how lucky I was to have experienced that extraordinary outpost as it was then, in such contrast to what China’s masters have made it now. The Christmas Day service in St John’s Cathedral, overhead fans stirring the turbid air, was a poignant glimpse of Hong Kong’s past. Norman Foster’s Hongkong Bank building, the most expensive in the

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Why did South Korea’s President Yoon declare martial law?

The aftershocks of last Tuesday’s declaration, and then cancellation, of martial law by President Yoon Suk Yeol continue to be felt by South Korea’s ruling elite. Every day brings a new development and fresh revelations in this shocking and somewhat bizarre episode, along with evidence of the deep fissures in what had seemed a stable and relatively harmonious society. Yoon survived an impeachment vote on 7 December, but will likely face another on Saturday. He is under police investigation and two attempts have reportedly been made to raid his parliamentary office. There have been protests and strikes (by metalworkers at Kia plants) in a push for his exit. He has

Neve Gordon

Israel must leave Syria

As I walked through Vienna last weekend, I happened upon several protests organised by Syrian refugees celebrating the downfall of Bashar al-Assad, the butcher from Damascus. People were singing, some even crying, as they rejoiced the end of the father-and-son al-Assad dictatorship, which had lasted 53 years.   The protestors had not yet seen the images of tens of thousands of released political prisoners, the slaughterhouses, or the underground torture chambers, but they had already seen enough. They were among the 12 million people who were displaced during the Syrian civil war and many of them undoubtedly had family members or close friends who had been among the over half million