Kim Jong-un surprised the world—once again—by making an unannounced trip to China earlier this week, and observers in the United States still haven’t come to any agreement on what it means. The North Korean leader traveled to Beijing by bulletproof train to meet with Chinese president Xi Jinping ahead of a planned meeting later this … Read more
“President Trump ordered the expulsion of 60 Russian officials from the United States and ordered the closure of the Russian consulate in Seattle, the White House announced Monday” was how NPR started its report on the surprise story that started the week in Washington, and most outlets followed suit. In this way, the press emphasised … Read more
It seems like only yesterday Donald Trump was buttering up Vladimir Putin. His congratulations on Putin’s victory and failure to mention the nerve agent attack in Salisbury sent the foreign policy establishment in Washington into high dudgeon. Now the administration has expelled 60 Russian diplomats and shuttered the Russian consulate in Seattle. This is only, top administration officials say, ‘the first step.’ The government could also go on to release nasty details about the financial holding that Putin has squirrelled away abroad, a move, incidentally, that could provoke retaliation against Trump by the Kremlin. What gives? No matter what Trump may tell Putin, and no matter what Trump may aspire to
The hysteria from the Left over Donald Trump’s appointment of John Bolton as National Security Advisor to replace Lt. General H. R. McMaster has been partly hilarious, partly alarming to behold. From The Guardian in this country to The New York Times, CNN, Slate, Salon, and beyond in the United States, we are presented with a scarecrow figure … Read more
Everyone wants to know what caused President Trump to dump national security adviser H.R. McMaster. Today’s papers are saying it was because McMaster, addressing the Munich Security Conference in February, said he had ‘incontrovertible’ evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump was quick to signal his disapproval. ‘General McMaster forgot to say that … Read more
Another massive America news blizzard yesterday: Trump lawyer quits, tariffs tariffs tariffs, stock-market slide, former alleged mistresses of the President speaking out, McMaster out (finally), Bolton in (finally). And then, as a night cap, the Senate approves a $1.3 trillion spending plan to prevent a government shutdown. The Bolton news has, so far, been the most headline grabbing, even if people in the know — and readers of Spectator USA — have known it was about to happen for some time. Donald Trump has rather sweetly let it be known that he has hired Bolton on the condition he didn’t start any wars: ‘now, now John, don’t you go nuking.’
Is the third time the charm? President Trump has already run through Mike Flynn, who enjoyed the shortest tenure in history of any national security adviser. Next came three-star General H.R. McMaster. Now John Bolton, the former George W. Bush ambassador to the United Nations who has been angling for the job ever since Trump … Read more
John Dowd, a personal attorney of Donald Trump, stepped down today from his role as head of the legal team representing the president in the special counsel’s investigation of possible collusion with Russia. The news came just as the House Intelligence Committee was set to vote on whether to release a report from Republicans in … Read more
From the outside it all looked haphazard and frenzied. A campaign that was skidding from scandal to crisis on its way to total defeat. That’s not how it felt inside the ‘Project Alamo’ offices in San Antonio, Texas where Trump’s digital division — led by Brad Parscale, who’d worked previously with Trump’s estate division setting up websites — was running one of the most sophisticated data-led election campaigns ever. Once Trump’s nomination was secured, the Republican Party heavyweights moved in, and so did seconded staff from Facebook and Google, there to help their well-paying clients best use their platforms to reach voters. Joining them were 13 employees from the UK-based
Throughout the course of the inquiry on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, White House lawyers have attempted to drill a message into the president’s head. It is a simple one: whatever you do, don’t go after Robert Mueller personally or suggest in any way that you will shut down the investigation. You … Read more
Boris Titov is running to be president of Russia, but he’s eager to talk himself out of the job. ‘I am not a good politician,’ he says, over breakfast at the Lanesborough hotel in Knightsbridge, London. ‘To be a president means you need to be wise, a big politician like Thatcher, Deng Xiaoping, Lee Kuan … Read more
At last, some students in the West are campaigning for freedom and democracy. Following years of supposedly rad students banning pop songs about sex, and force-fielding their campuses against offensive speakers, and even expelling certain newspapers from their common rooms as if they were heretical abominations, a group of students has emerged to demand more liberty, not less. They’re Chinese students, studying in Western universities, and the target of their youthful liberal ire is Chinese President Xi Jinping. This week, Xi convinced the annual sitting of China’s parliament, the National People’s Congress, to scrap the two-term limit on presidency. They didn’t take much convincing, by the looks of things. Out
The Trump administration’s foreign-policy team is beginning to look a lot like a Marco Rubio foreign policy team. It’s not hard to imagine a generally hawkish Republican like Mike Pompeo serving as Secretary of State under Little Marco, and John Bolton – widely tipped to replace H.R. McMaster as national security adviser – would have … Read more
When Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, went to Moscow in 2006, she did all the usual tourist things: walked around Red Square, visited the Kremlin… sat in Vladimir Putin’s private chair. At least she did according to Trump’s broker and business partner Felix Sater. ‘I arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putins private chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin,’ Sater said in an email, which was later leaked. Ivanka put out a statement more or less confirming this, saying that she ‘might have’ sat in Putin’s chair, but couldn’t exactly recall. The rest of Sater’s emails were more important as they gave details of his efforts to fix
Donald Trump today called it a ‘very sad situation.’ The ‘it’ in question is of course the chemical weapons attack in Salisbury, a fresh indicator, if one were needed, of malign Russian intentions toward the West. Even as Theresa May plays, or tries to play, Margaret Thatcher, Trump has been no Ronald Reagan. He doesn’t want anyone ‘Russian to judgment’, as the joke has it. Instead, when it comes to Moscow, he’s been missing in action, no friend of the United Kingdom. He’s sounded in fact more like the equivocating Jeremy Corbyn than anyone else when it comes to the brouhaha over Salisbury. So the announcement this morning that the
For Donald Trump, yesterday was a bad day to bury good news. While Rex Tillerson’s resignation as Secretary of State dominated the headlines, the biggest and most important story of the day came from Devin Nunes and the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee. Their news was good for Trump, and very bad indeed for … Read more
The surprising thing isn’t that Donald Trump fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. It is that it took this long. Tillerson, a hapless manager who decapitated much of the senior ranks of the State Department, has finally suffered his own decapitation at the he hands of Trump. His replacement by CIA Director Mike Pompeo signals a much bolder and more activist Trump foreign policy. At the most basic level Pompeo will work to restore the depleted ranks of the foreign service. His close ties to Trump—he has visited him daily at the White House—means that he will not be at the receiving end of Trump’s barbs as was Tillerson. He
Donald Trump’s acceptance of Kim Jong-un’s invitation to meet is a master stroke. It’s exactly the kind of thing Ronald Reagan liked to do. Reagan, you may recall, announced his pursuit of a missile defence system in March 1983 on national television without alerting his advisors beforehand. Liberals went crazy. Then he decided to end the Cold War by reaching out to Mikhail Gorbachev. Conservatives went bonkers. Reagan, we were told, had become a useful idiot. Today he is hailed as a visionary by all and sundry. Whether Trump’s move will work depends in part on how eager the North Korean regime is to escape the increasingly draconian sanctions that have
Not many world leaders can claim to be on friendly personal terms with Donald Trump. There are fewer still who would regard a visit to this particular president’s White House as a crowning achievement, and one which would increase their popularity at home rather than being seen as a moral failing. So the lesson of Benjamin Netanyahu’s triumphant meeting with the US president deserves particular scrutiny for having jumped all these hurdles. Admittedly, it helps to be a right wing Israeli Prime Minister at a time of Republican ascendancy. Netanyahu’s relationship with Barack Obama was famously abrasive. Any successor was bound to be an improvement, even if the strong US-Israel
Has Donald Trump sparked off a trade war? His plans for a 25 percent tariff on steel imports and 10 percent tariff on aluminum have shocked friend and foe alike. China is outraged; so are Canada, Japan, and South Korea—allies that in fact export more steel to the U.S. than China does. They stand to be hurt worst if they aren’t granted exemptions or cut special deals by the president. Trump accuses the Chinese of ‘dumping’ steel into the American market, while the legal grounds for his new tariffs rest in the idea that strategically critical manufacturing is endangered by a diminished U.S. metals industry. But if the tariffs inflict
