World

Thursday

James Snell

Israel is playing a dangerous game in Syria

As Donald Trump’s tariffs dominate the headlines, in the Middle East, Israel is stepping up its campaign against Syria. Israeli air strikes hit targets across the country, including the T4 airbase in Homs, last night. The latest campaign which has been conducted over the last few months – involving dozens of air strikes and the deployment of troops – is a big escalation. The strikes in Syria overnight were intended to deter Turkey from making use of bases inside the country. The bombings were to ‘convey a message to Turkey,’ an Israeli official told the Jerusalem Post. Turkey has made much of its closeness to the new leadership of Syria. It had an uneasy relationship with the now-dissolved

Philip Patrick

Japan has been stunned by the Trump tariffs

Virtually the whole world is waking up to the reality, not threat now, of President Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs, but in few places will the sense of shock and resultant anxiety be greater than Japan, where a whopping 24 per cent has been slapped on exports to the US. The Japanese, who have grown used to a decent relationship with successive American administrations and a whopping trade surplus, will have many sleepless nights ahead. The reaction here has not been one of anger or resentment – more stunned bemusement. Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, who did his best to cozy up to Trump on a recent summit in Washington (he presented Trump

Ian O’Doherty

The growing controversy over Ireland’s neutrality

As the war of words between Donald Trump and the EU continues to escalate, European countries have become increasingly concerned about their military reliance on the United States. As a result, the need to increase defence spending has become a major issue. Germany has abandoned its ‘debt lock’ as it seeks to raise more funds for its military, while Macron has repeatedly spoken of the need to gain more ‘strategic autonomy’ away from America. Now the debate has even spread to Ireland, the country on the furthest western edge of the EU. Traditionally, Ireland has prided itself on its neutrality or ‘military non-alignment’, while also enjoying a long-standing record of

Lawrence Osborne

The day Bangkok crumbled

Last Friday I was on my 15th-floor balcony with an early afternoon coffee, watching dogs play among the banana trees below. It was strangely quiet. Looking across the skyscrapers that form my horizon, I noticed the 137 Pillars – a luxury high-rise hotel famous for its rooftop pool perched 37 storeys above my own street. Down the tower great cascades of water, thousands of gallons, were pouring from that rooftop pool. I looked at the jungle plants on my balcony. They were moving back and forth, the blades of the rubber trees swaying as if issuing a warning, and I felt dizzy. Soon all the towers around me were exploding

Colin Freeman

‘Trump is a coward’: meet the US soldiers who served in Ukraine

The Ukrainians of Alabama are not the kind of lobbyists whose visits strike fear into pro-Trump politicians in Washington. They are an ad hoc campaign group of expats and refugees who do their best to put Kyiv’s case politely to representatives of Congress and Senate. They do, however, have a secret weapon, in the form of an ex-US soldier from the town of Tuscaloosa, whose backstory is the kind the Beltway finds hard to ignore. Alex Drueke, 42, is an Iraq veteran whose ancestors served in every major American war since the War of Independence. Appalled at Vladimir Putin’s invasion, he joined Ukraine’s International Legion, only to be captured on

Gavin Mortimer

How the French right can still win

Dixmont, Yonne It has been a terrible year for the Le Pen family. Jean-Marie died in the first week of January. He was the patriarch who in 1972 co-founded the National Front and grew it into a formidable political machine before handing over to his daughter. Marine took command in 2011 and, through a strategy of ‘de-demonisation’, transformed the rebranded National Rally into the biggest single party in the National Assembly with 125 seats. She has reached the second round of the last two presidential elections, but it won’t be third time lucky for Marine Le Pen. On Monday, a judge disqualified her from politics for five years for misusing

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Terrible Tuesday, W.H. Smith’s rebrand and no e-bikes on the Tube

Home For many, ‘Terrible Tuesday’ began ‘Awful April’ with increased bills for water, energy, council tax (to an average in England of £2,280), road tax, telephone charges, broadband, the television licence and stamp duty. Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, spoke to President Donald Trump of the US as makers of motor vehicles, Britain’s biggest export to the US, contemplated American tariffs of 20 per cent on car imports. Matthew Doyle resigned as Sir Keir’s communications director. Plans were afoot to ban cars from Hammersmith Bridge, which has been closed for repairs for six years, when it is reopened. Since there was a ‘draft bill due for imminent introduction that

Charles Moore

Trump is giving us a taste of our own medicine

It seems the US State Department sees an impediment to free speech as an impediment to free trade with Britain. It cites the recent incident in which a woman, Livia Tossici-Bolt, was arrested for holding up a sign as she prayed alone and silently near a Bournemouth abortion clinic. It says it is ‘monitoring’ the case. Many here will dismiss this intrusion as a typically loopy product of the Trump era. In a sense, it is. It is also a spurious justification for American tariffs which are happening anyway. But it should teach us something about how others see us. It is commonplace for British governments of both parties to

Wednesday

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Sadiq Khan's Eid message is a disgrace

London’s Muslim mayor Sadiq Khan published a video online earlier this week to mark the Muslim festival of Eid. Released under the guise of seasonal goodwill, this glib social media greeting is not merely problematic – it is an outright disgrace. Cloaked in the warm language of unity and peace, the Mayor of London delivered a politicised monologue that whitewashes terrorism, stokes division, and fundamentally misrepresents the moral landscape of the Israel–Palestinian conflict. This is not the conduct of a responsible leader. It is the conduct of a man either wilfully blind to barbarity or all too willing to exploit a religious holiday for ideological gain. ‘More than 50,000 Palestinians

Michael Evans

Israel is gambling that military action can end the war in Gaza

The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) is to launch a large-scale expansion of its military operations to seize and occupy more territory. This is to exploit what the Israeli government sees as growing antipathy towards Hamas among Palestinians in Gaza. It’s the biggest gamble taken by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, since the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas was agreed on January 17. Outlining the military plan, Israel Katz, the defence minister, announced that large areas of the Strip would be seized, with Rafah and Khan Yunis in the south appearing to be the principal targets. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who had made their way back to their

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Why Israel is ramping up its war on terror

The war in Gaza has entered a more consequential and unforgiving phase. Early this morning, Palestinian sources reported that Israeli tanks had begun advancing into central Rafah, following a night of intense airstrikes across the southern Gaza Strip. This military escalation came after Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz announced the expansion of Operation ‘Oz veCherev’ (‘Strength and Sword’), aimed at dismantling terror infrastructure, neutralising Hamas operatives, and securing areas of Gaza to be integrated into Israel’s defensive perimeter. The underlying reality remains: no state can allow a terrorist group to operate with impunity from its borders while holding its civilians hostage The campaign, described by Israeli officials as an effort

James Tidmarsh

Marine Le Pen is in a race against the clock

Marine Le Pen is fighting back, launching an all-out counterattack against a Paris court’s decision to suspend her from politics. ‘We won’t let the French people’s election be stolen,’ she declared at an RN meeting the morning after her conviction, calling the ruling a ‘nuclear bomb’ dropped because ‘we’re about to win’ the presidency. Time, though, is her real enemy. The presidential election’s first round is set for April 2027, with candidates due to declare by early January. Le Pen has just 21 months to overturn her conviction, but French criminal appeals typically take 18 to 24 months – too long unless the court fast-tracks it or it’s scheduled with political

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump's tariffs are coming back to bite him

Liberation Day? Pshaw. President Trump may be gloating about imposing sweeping tariffs on America’s allies and adversaries abroad, but he is beginning to face blowback at home for his strange farrago of policies that are upending the federal government and threatening to plunge America into a self-induced recession. First Senator Cory Booker raised the flagging spirits of Democrats by holding a 25-hour speech denouncing all things Trump, thereby setting a record for the longest floor speech in Senate history. Next, in two key special congressional races in Florida, Democrats did not win but narrowed the gap sufficiently in red districts to cause palpitations among Republican politicians heading into the midterm

Mark Galeotti

Are Western companies heading back to Russia?

Ever since Donald Trump’s now-infamous phone conversation with Vladimir Putin last month, Russia has been buzzing with speculation that Western companies which left the country after the 2022 invasion, especially US ones, will be returning. For some, this is a dream, for others a nightmare. Either way, it seems to be an overblown prospect fuelled by a refusal to accept just how toxic the Russian market will be for the foreseeable future. Under the headline ‘Now Hello Again? How American Companies Will Return to Russia,’ the popular tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets yesterday confidently asserted that ‘American business wants to return to Russia, but now the game will be played by Russian rules’.

Tuesday

James Snell

Why the West doesn’t understand Burma

The earthquake that struck Burma and its neighbouring countries on Friday has caused an immense human tragedy. Centring on Mandalay, destruction radiates outwards. Structurally unsound buildings collapsed on those inside them. Shoddily-build neighbourhoods fell in on their residents. Thousands are already officially declared dead. Many times that number are missing. The overall picture will take some time to grasp, as is often the case with disasters of this kind. The true death count will never be known, bodies vanishing beneath wrecked structures, never to be found and identified. An event like this might be expected to have put on hold Burma’s civil war, which has been going in full swing

Michael Evans

America’s involvement in Ukraine is finally being revealed

The US-led coalition to help Ukraine was always more than just a production line of arms deliveries to the Kyiv government. Much of what has been going on over the last three years has been secret: a covert collaboration between Ukraine and the West involving commanders at the highest level, and special forces out of uniform. Now the full extent of the extraordinary partnership between Ukraine and the West has been revealed after a year-long investigation by Adam Entous, a reporter at the New York Times. While the sheer detail of the covert meetings and level of high-powered cooperation provides an insight for the first time into the extent of the

Matthew Lynn

Starmer's costly failure to get a Trump tariff carve-out

The UK should have been doing everything possible to secure an exemption from Trump’s tariffs. We could have scrapped the digital services tax that is largely levied on the American tech giants. We could have opened our agricultural markets – even to chlorinated chicken. Heck, we could have offered President Trump his own apartment in Buckingham Palace, given how much he loves the royal family. This was the opportunity of the decade – but the Starmer government has already blown it. We will find out the full extent of the tariffs Trump plans to levy on all of America’s main trading partners tomorrow on what he has oddly termed ‘Liberation

James Tidmarsh

The hypocrisy behind Le Pen’s disqualification

‘Every single political group, every single national delegation, has violated the same rule that Ms. Le Pen did – the employment of staff to work on non-EP related affairs.’ That was the reaction of Connor Allen, a former Parliamentary Assistant in the European Parliament, following Marine Le Pen’s disqualification from the French presidential race. Allen is no fringe partisan. He’s worked for multiple MEPs across the aisle and was recently named in Politico’s ‘Power 40 – Brussels Class of 2023.’ His comment lifts the lid on something Brussels insiders have always known: that the rule Le Pen has been convicted under isn’t just bureaucratic – it’s universally ignored.  Let’s be clear:

Monday

Alexander Kolyandr

Why Putin needs sanctions lifted on Russia

Just hours after the US announced last week that it had reached an agreement between Russia and Ukraine to stop the conflict in the Black Sea, Moscow presented its conditions for this partial truce. Moscow said it would comply with the truce only when these stipulations are met. This list of demands Russia presented to the US is a classic example of the delay tactics the Kremlin likes to use. But it also provides a helpful glimpse at Russian decision-making and Putin’s world view. The agreement, as hashed out between the US and Russia, is pretty hollow. America insisted Russia agreed to ensure safe navigation in the Black Sea, eliminate

Gavin Mortimer

Marine Le Pen's downfall is a gift to the National Rally

Marine Le Pen’s political career ended this morning when a Paris judge found her guilty of misusing EU funds. She was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment, two of which are suspended and two will be served under an ankle bracelet. She was also fined €100,000 (£84,000) and disbarred from politics for five years. Few anticipated such a severe sentence – it is one that will send shockwaves not just through France but across Europe. Also convicted alongside the leader of the National Rally were 24 other party members – including eight MEPs – all found guilty of channelling €2.9 million (£2.4 million) of EU money to their own party’s coffers.