World

Tuesday

Ido Vock

Will Austria’s asylum seeker surveillance plan backfire?

Austria’s interior minister has announced plans for mass surveillance of Syrian and Afghan asylum seekers in response to a terrorist attack. The incident, which took place on Saturday, saw a Syrian allegedly stab one person to death and injure five others in Villach. According to police, the man –whose rampage was cut short by another Syrian man who intervened – was a legal resident in Austria and not known to authorities.  Gerhard Karner, known for his hard line on security, said ‘mass checks without cause’ of ‘asylum seekers with Syrian and Afghan backgrounds’ were needed to ensure public safety. He said that because the alleged attacker was unknown to authorities, there

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Is Trump’s hostile takeover of Ukraine a trap?

That Donald Trump’s vision of the presidency is less statesman and more CEO of USA Inc. is evident in the terms of the deal he tried to foist on Ukraine last week. As talks begin between the US and Russia in Saudi Arabia, a leak reveals that Trump wanted Kyiv to sign away much of its mineral resources to Washington. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has rejected this piece of blatant economic colonialism, but the Ukrainians expect further such demands to come. This is the essence of Trump’s brave new world The draft frames this as the establishment of a joint investment fund such that ‘hostile parties to the conflict do

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Why the Germans don’t do it better

Germany, not so very long ago, was the example of how to do it. Shiningly spotless and effortlessly efficient – the country where they’d got it right. Today, with its economy doom-spiralling and levels of internal unquiet that look likely to see the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) do very well in this Sunday’s federal election, alles is not looking quite so klar. We must resist the temptation to take any pleasure in German misfortunes. I’m sure they don’t ever smirk at our very similar troubles, and surely don’t even have a word for such a thing.  Germany is being bossed about – and frankly ignored – by the US and

Irwin Stelzer

Europe and the death of Pax Americana

If you are still reeling from the shock and awe created by Donald Trump’s foreign policy since taking office, ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet,’ as Ronald Reagan once put it. Trump doesn’t just want to reset trading relations with every country in the world. He wants the world to change its foreign policies to suit the end of Pax Americana – and its replacement with a muscular foreign policy that relies very little, if at all, on the kindness of strangers. It is not Trump who is surrendering to Putin, but Europe Start with the war in Ukraine. Trump’s negotiations with Vladimir Putin tell us less about the two men than

Monday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Rob Henderson on Musk, monogamy & meritocracy

36 min listen

Political commentator, and author of Troubled, Rob Henderson joins Freddy Gray from the ARC conference in London. They discuss the political reaction to the news that Elon Musk has allegedly had his 13th child – are there signs of a new, more permissive conservatism? They also discuss Trump’s administration so far – particularly his flurry of executive orders – with critics decrying them as the tactics of a populist, yet supporters approving of the speed of activity. What’s the psychology underpins these political viewpoints? Vice-President J.D. Vance’s speech in Munich over the weekend has also left many European leaders reeling – but should they really have been surprised? Produced by Natasha

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Who shot the world’s first openly gay imam?

Muhsin Hendricks, the world’s ‘first openly gay imam’, was shot dead in Bethelsdorp, South Africa, on Saturday. While the police are still probing the murder, Imam Hendricks had repeatedly cited death threats – including in the 2022 documentary The Radical – owing to radical Muslims finding his preaching, and officiating of same-sex marriages, as an affront to Islam. According to reports, he had recently performed the ceremony of a lesbian couple, and was on his way to officiating the wedding of a Muslim woman with a non-Muslim man, which too is deemed against Islamic teachings. In addition to sanctioning unorthodox marriages, Hendricks’s Al-Ghurbaah Foundation provided support to those marginalised on

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Why do Australian doctors want to kill Israeli patients?

Imagine the uproar if a white Christian doctor refused to treat a Muslim Arab patient – or worse, boasted of killing them under their care. The public would be outraged, not only at the cruelty but at the sheer incongruity of such malice from a profession defined by care and a faith defined by compassion. Yet when two Australian nurses – Ahmad Rashad Nadir and Sarah Abu Lebdeh – publicly declared their willingness to kill Israeli patients, the horror was accompanied by something more chilling than shock: recognition. Their depravity felt like an affirmation of the darkest fears about imported hatreds and their place within our institutions. The video that

Owen Matthews

British troops won’t help Ukraine

Sir Keir Starmer’s proposal to put British troops on the ground as part of a peacekeeping force in Ukraine is a principled and politically bold move. But the sad reality is that Britain is in no position to act as Ukraine’s peacekeeper. Starmer is playing with an empty deck and singing from obsolete songbook.  Starmer has few options left other than gesture politics Starmer’s offer to put British troops on the ground is, in practical military terms, a very small promise. As former British Army chief Lord Dannatt pointed out last night, the UK’s armed forces are ‘so run down’ that we could not lead any future peacekeeping mission in

John Keiger John Keiger

Starmer must protect Britain’s defence industry

When David Frost led UK negotiations with the EU on a free trade agreement five years ago, he was supported by a 100-strong Cabinet Office team. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s ‘EU reset unit’, also based in the Cabinet Office, is 100-strong too, including two permanent secretaries. Given Labour’s insistence that it is not seeking to renegotiate Brexit, but merely to improve relations with the EU, why appoint such a large, high-powered unit? Setting aside the harsher criticism that the ‘EU surrender unit’ is a machine to reverse Brexit, government ministers and the PM remain tight-lipped about the officially titled ‘European Union relations secretariat’. It does not appear on the Cabinet

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Europe should listen to America’s uncomfortable truths

The response in Europe to J.D Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference last Friday was one of predictable outrage. Media outlets described it as a ‘rant’ or a ‘sermon’, and politicians and diplomats queued up to criticise the vice-president of America. Kaja Kallas, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, accused the Trump administration of ‘try[ing] to pick a fight with us, and we don’t want to a pick a fight with our friends’. Apparently, there were ‘dry laughs’ from some of the audience when Vance talked about ‘shared’ values. European diplomats have laughed at Trump before, notably in 2018 at the UN General Assembly, when

John Foreman

Europe cannot be surprised by Trump’s approach to Ukraine

There’s something about Donald Trump that sends Europeans mad. The President and Vladimir Putin agreed last week to commence talks about ending Russia’s war in Ukraine. From the hysterical reaction, you would have thought Trump had handed Putin the keys to Kyiv. Shrill cries of surrender, betrayal and appeasement are premature; extremely difficult negotiations lie ahead, involving Ukraine, on the precise terms of any deal. And Putin himself has blinked by abandoning many of his pre-conditions for talks set out last year. The mood among European security panjandrums at this weekend’s Munich Security Conference was fraught. European leaders claim to have been blindsided by Trump’s move, and shocked by the

Sunday

Julius Strauss

What Putin wants and what America will do

If I had a penny for every time I have been told that Russian President Vladimir Putin only wants respect. Or that he is only interested in eastern Ukraine. Or that if Kyiv is only denied NATO membership then he will call off the tanks. Well, in the last seven days US President Donald Trump has given Putin all this and more. And, though it is still early days, so far the war is showing no sign of slowing. And what has the man who wrote The Art of the Deal asked for in exchange for all this diplomatic largesse? Absolutely nothing. In fact, the only substantive demand Trump has

Iain Macwhirter

Elon Musk is America’s Trotsky

I never imagined that I would see a real revolution, at least not in the West. Sure, when I was a student, I fantasised, along with a number of my Edinburgh University lecturers, about a socialist revolution in the UK. Expropriate the expropriators! Ban the bosses! Nationalise everything and abolish money. But, of course, nothing so dramatic ever happens in mature liberal democracies. Except that it just has. Okay, the Trump takeover of the US government is hardly a communist revolution, and Elon Musk is not immediately obvious as a reincarnation of Leon Trotsky, but what is happening right now is revolutionary – just not quite in the way my

Simon Hunt

Europe is ruling itself out of the AI race

I recently reported on a major partnership signed by a German tech startup. Or so I thought. Not long after publication, I got a message from the company: ‘You have wrongly said we were founded in Germany. In fact, we were founded in California. Please correct this.’  That’s strange, I thought. Everyone I spoke to sounded pretty German – and indeed the person I emailed was based at the firm’s Berlin offices. But they were adamant: this was a California-based business. The perception is that America has strong innovation, and Europe has strong regulation I did some digging and discovered the company had been registered in Germany at least a

Saturday

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Israelis and Palestinians will be here again, and again, and again

‘When the Lord returned the captives to Zion,’ Psalm 126 goes, ‘we were like dreamers. Our mouths were filled with laughter and our tongues with songs of joy.’ Watching the images of Alexander Troufanov, Sagui Dekel-Chen, and Iair Horn paraded by their captors after almost 500 days of torment, there was no laughter and not a hint of joy. That the three Israelis have been reunited with their families will bring immense relief to those who know and love them, but it cannot give this nightmare the illusion of a dream. These captives have been returned, but others remain. Iair’s brother Eitan is still in Palestinian hands. Their mother Ruti

James Tidmarsh

France’s churches are burning – and no one seems to care

France’s churches are under attack, yet the media and political establishment are pretending not to notice. Last year, we saw blazes at historic churches in Rouen, Saint-Omer and Poitiers – each one another grim statistic in an escalating crisis. For years, we’ve seen Christian places of worship targeted in acts of arson and vandalism. Yet, until now, official confirmation of the scale of the problem has been curiously absent. That has changed. The French territorial intelligence service has reported a 30 per cent increase in criminal church fires in 2024. That’s not a handful of isolated incidents – it’s a surge. And a deeply troubling one at that. In 2023, there

Sergey Maidukov

Could Ukraine descend into civil war?

US President Donald Trump has announced that peace talks with Putin are set to begin ‘immediately’. While Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says that he has not yet seen a ready US plan for ending the war, it seems that we are moving towards the final stages of the conflict. At some point the guns will fall silent, and the leaders of Ukraine and Russia will sign a peace agreement. But what happens then? Opinions vary, and not everyone is optimistic about how the war will wrap up. In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Polish President Andrzej Duda warned that the war’s end could trigger a surge in international

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

How seriously will Putin take Ukraine negotiations?

We have no idea whether Vladimir Putin is serious about peace negotiations with Ukraine. He may simply be going through the motions while enjoying the spectacle of the West engaging in mutual recrimination and performative outrage, or he may genuinely feel there are grounds for some kind of agreement. More likely, given his track record as a tactician rather than a strategist, he is simply seeing what opportunities emerge. Nonetheless, his choices of format, venue and representatives may give us some sense of his intentions. His lead negotiator at abortive talks in Istanbul in 2022, for example, was Vladimir Medinsky. A former minister of culture, his main claim to fame

Friday

Gwythian Prins

Donald Trump has blown apart America’s failing status quo

Political science uses anaemic jargon. The ‘Overton Window’ frames all topics that at any given moment are deemed to be politically respectable. It moves. However, since Trump’s inauguration on 20 January we need more robust imagery. Potus47 – Mr Trump – is the captain of an ice-bound ship and he has been dynamiting the pack ice to get it free. Sequenced, linked charges have been exploded to create open water leads. The shock waves have global importance. Tariff threats were one stick of dynamite that detonated, particularly those levied on China to push back its gaming of the era of globalisation since the PRC was admitted to the WTO in 2001.

James Heale James Heale

The UK’s balancing act over Trump’s ‘Ukraine peace plan’

13 min listen

Leaders from around the world are gathering at the Munich Security Conference, with the UK represented by Foreign Secretary David Lammy. All attention has turned to Ukraine, given statements this week by President Trump that he had spoken to Putin (and later Zelensky) about ending the Russia-Ukraine war. Trump’s statements, for example that NATO membership should be off the table, put him at odds with European allies. The UK signed a joint statement with leaders from France, Germany and others, that Ukraine’s independence and territorial integrity are unconditional. Is the UK walking a tight-rope between the US and Europe? Where does this leave the NATO alliance? And, with a strategic