World

Saturday

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

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Christoph Heusgen is just another arrogant boomer

Historians will look back on the tears of Christoph Heusgen as a defining moment of the early 21st century. When the German began blubbing as he wrapped up the Munich Security Conference last Sunday, he wasn’t just crying for himself but for all his generation who believed that the collapse of Communism had marked the ‘end of history’. The phrase was coined by the American political scientist, Francis Fukuyama, in his 1992 book of that name. He claimed that the end of the Cold War was the ‘end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’. Fukuyama is a Baby Boomer,

Thursday

Jim Lawley

Luis Rubiales and Spain’s war on machismo

Luis Rubiales kissed player Jenni Hermoso on the lips during the medal ceremony after Spain won the Women’s World Cup in August 2023. Rubiales, at the time president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation, said the kiss was consensual but Hermoso said it wasn’t and filed a criminal complaint. Rubiales has now been found guilty of sexual assault and fined €10,800 (£8,945). He was also ordered to pay a portion of the costs and compensation of €3,000 (£2,484) to Hermoso. Rubiales has ten days to appeal the sentence. He and three ex-colleagues were acquitted on a separate charge of attempting to coerce Hermoso into changing her story. Spanish feminists are outraged by the judge’s

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Is Trump right about Ukraine?

24 min listen

Donald Trump attacked the Ukrainian President overnight, describing him as a ‘dictator’ and saying he’s done a ‘terrible job.’ In return, Zelensky has accused Trump of ‘living in a disinformation space.’ The West has invested a huge amount of capital in the fight against Russia – and failed to secure peace. Is Trump using these offensive and odious methods in order to secure an end to the conflict? Is he the only person with the power to do so? Freddy Gray discusses with The Spectator’s Russia correspondent Owen Matthews, and Sergey Radchenko, historian and author.

William Moore William Moore

New world disorder, cholesterol pseudoscience vs scepticism & the magic of Dickens

48 min listen

This week: the world needs a realist reset Donald Trump’s presidency is the harbinger of many things, writes The Spectator’s editor Michael Gove, one of which is a return to a more pitiless world landscape. The ideal of a rules-based international order has proved to be a false hope. Britain must accept that if we are to earn the respect of others and the right to determine the future, we need a realist reset. What are the consequences of this new world order? And is the Trump administration reversing the tide of decline, or simply refusing to accept the inevitable? Michael Gove joined the podcast alongside the geopolitical theorist Robert Kaplan,

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

The cruellest thing about Trump vs Zelensky? Trump’s right

And just like that, we are back in 2017. Donald Trump, the President of the United States, is posting ridiculous hyperbole on his socials and mouthing off from Mar-a-Lago, as he always has. In the last 24 hours, however, the global political and media classes have gone back to gnashing their teeth and wailing in the way they did in Trump’s first term. It’s disgraceful! It’s sub-literate! He’s Vladimir Putin’s puppet! He’s reckless and utterly out of control! And that, of course, is the point. Trump’s re-election proved that he is no aberration, so in 2025 the liberal, western world order has tried to come to terms with him. Western

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Putin is watching Trump attack Zelensky with glee

Britain might not even be close to putting boots on the ground, but proposals by Keir Starmer to send UK troops to Ukraine have already been rejected by the Kremlin. Put forward by the Prime Minister as part of a plan to send a 30,000-strong European peace-keeping force to the country in the event of a ceasefire with Russia, this idea is ‘unacceptable’, the Kremlin has said. Reacting to plans reportedly being prepared by Prime Minister Keir Starmer with leaders on the continent (some of whom have already refused to involve their countries in), Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said such a proposal was ‘a matter of concern’ as it would

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Holy War and Antichrist: The rise of extremist rhetoric inside the Russian Orthodox Church

35 min listen

The subject of Ukraine shattered the unity of Eastern Orthodoxy long before Russia’s full-scale invasion began. In 2018 the Ukrainian Orthodox Church declared independence from Moscow with the approval of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. In response, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow broke off all relations with Constantinople, creating arguably the greatest schism in Orthodoxy for 1,000 years. There are now two main Ukrainian Orthodox Churches: one that supports independence and one still loyal to Moscow. As The Spectator’s Ukraine correspondent Svitlana Morenets points out, Ukrainians who previously didn’t care which church they attended now have to decide which to attend. Meanwhile, Dr Yuri Stoyanov, a fellow at SOAS, describes the alarming

James Hanson

Can Britain defend itself and have a welfare state?

No one can say we weren’t warned. As early as 1971 America was warning that it could reduce its defence commitment to Europe, when the Democratic Senator Mike Mansfield proposed halving the number of US troops stationed on the continent. The Senate defeated that particular resolution, but the sentiment never went away. In 2016, Barack Obama lambasted European countries as ‘free-riders’ complacently sheltering under America’s security umbrella and throughout his first term Donald Trump was crystal clear that other Nato members needed to drastically increase their defence budgets. So when JD Vance put the message in blunter terms at the Munich Security Conference last week, no one should have been

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Trump’s Ukraine posturing is odious and immoral

As happens with every issue, the world is now neatly polarised about Mr Trump. There are those who refer to him as a Nazi, a dictator, a fascist, a rapist and could not possibly discern anything beneficial about his regime even if he announced he was both joining Hamas and transitioning. And then there are those who believe his every action is wonderful and those who disagree are cucks, snowflakes, lefty scum. I have been slightly closer to the latter category. But Trump’s posturing over Ukraine – no matter how much you may have agreed with the substance of J. D. Vance’s marvellous speech – is odious, immoral and based

Sergey Radchenko

Donald Trump’s shameful betrayal of Ukraine

The American President has pioneered a new form of diplomacy: betrayal by tweet. The mean-spirited, autocrat-indulging Donald J. Trump has in a Truth Social post called President Volodymyr Zelensky a ‘dictator’, falsely accused him of scamming America out of billions dollars of military aid, and demanded that he ‘better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left.’ By ‘moving fast,’ the US President presumably means Zelensky’s immediate agreement to the recently leaked plan that would hand the United States a $500 billion stake in Ukraine’s rare earth minerals. Zelensky has so far refused to accept a plan that would amount to a colonial sacking of Ukraine,

Terry Barnes

Meet Clive Palmer – Australia’s answer to Donald Trump

Imagine Screaming Lord Sutch with hundreds of millions of pounds to spend. That probably best sums up the flamboyant Australian mining billionaire and serial election candidate, Clive Palmer. Palmer is best known internationally as the entrepreneur who promised to build the ‘Titanic II’– a full-scale replica of the original Titanic. That project was launched ten years ago and work still hasn’t begun on the supposed ship, although Palmer has promised to secure a shipyard this year. When it comes to his electoral efforts, it’s a similar story. Having fallen out with the National party, the junior partner in Australia’s conservative coalition, in 2013 Palmer founded the Palmer United party, which is

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

The Nigerian drug mafia is heading for Britain

It’s an established fact that most of Britain’s drug trade is controlled by Albanians. There is some competition from Turks and Pakistanis but Albanians dominate the industry with their ‘business-like’ methods. They may soon have another partner in crime. Nigerian gangs are increasingly making their presence felt in Europe: this week they were among 27 people arrested in coordinated police raids in Italy, Spain and Albania. According to Italy’s Carabinieri, the arrests encompassed two drug trafficking gangs, one of which was a Nigerian operation in which they used their young compatriots seeking a new life in Europe to traffic marijuana across the continent. Their base was the bus terminal near

Owen Matthews

The Trump-Zelensky train wreck will cost Ukraine dearly

Where did it all go wrong between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky? Just a week ago, Zelensky was speaking of his ‘respect’ and ‘friendship’ for Trump and of his hope that the new US administration would ‘stand by Ukraine … to make a just and lasting peace’. Yet in the course of just 24 hours, the Trump-Zelensky relationship spiralled into a nose-dive before definitively crashing and burning with a devastatingly vicious post by the US President on his Truth Social media platform. In an incoherent and error-filled statement, Trump blasted Zelensky as ‘a dictator without elections’, a ‘modestly successful comedian’ who had ‘talked the United States of America into spending

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Does Trump want to strike an Arctic oil deal with Putin?

The decision by Donald Trump to hold peace talks with Russia on ending the Ukraine war – without Ukraine actually being present – is starting to look even more disgraceful. It transpires that the war was not the only item on the agenda in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday. A significant part of the day’s business seems to have been discussing oil deals in the Arctic. According to Kirill Dmitriev, who heads the Russian Direct Investment Fund, the Russian and US delegations took the opportunity to talk about reviving joint exploratory operations such as that between Rosneft and Exxon Mobil, which was called off in 2018 following the imposition of sanctions

Hugh Schofield

Why is there no campaign to free novelist Boualem Sansal?

Paris What possible crime has the award-winning novelist Boualem Sansal committed that merits being locked away for three months now by the Algerian police? Listen to the Algerian government – and its cheerleaders on social media – and theanswer appears to be that he is at best a stooge for the French far right, at worst an outright traitor. Friends of the man paint another picture: a gently spoken free-thinker with the courage to speak his mind. Sansal, who is 80 and suffers from cancer, was arrested at Algiers airport on 16 November as he got off a plane from Paris. He has been in an Algiers prison ever since,

Julian Glover

In the footsteps of Cecil Rhodes

In a scrubby paddock on the edge of Bulawayo, I walked up to a half-broken leatherwood tree growing in a tangle of old barbed wire. It looked no different to a million tough trees across Zimbabwe, the still-beautiful, still-friendly country which remains the most wonderful place in Africa. But this tree is exceptional: it is listed as a national monument. Beneath it, in October 1888, a concession was agreed which led Lobengula Khumalo, King of the Ndebele, to lose his lands to a consortium led by Cecil Rhodes. It’s disputed what Lobengula thought he was agreeing to when he made his mark on the treaty. ‘I thought you came to