World

Thursday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

The Democrats have a Joe Biden problem

The Democrats dare to hope that this week will be a study in contrasts. On their side stands President Joe Biden, the veteran statesman, using all his diplomatic experience to stop a third world war breaking out in the Middle East. On the other, in the dock in Manhattan, sits Donald Trump, facing 34 criminal counts in a case relating to porn stars, adultery and hush money. As Biden urges Israel to ‘think carefully’ as it considers how to respond to Iran’s attack last weekend, Trump is, as ever, ranting away about himself. This speaks to Biden’s 2024 re-election pitch: it’s democracy (him) vs chaos (you know who). Trump can

Michael Karam

The Lebanese always return home

Beirut You might have thought that the threat of the Gaza war spiralling into an all-out regional conflagration, along with breathless travel advice from western governments urging their nationals to leave the country, would have deterred Lebanon’s expats from flying home to celebrate Eid al-Fitr this year. Not one bit. Flights, hotels and restaurants were fully booked despite Iran’s drone strike. The Lebanese know that even if there is fighting (and in South Lebanon, there is on an almost daily basis), if it isn’t on your doorstep, there’s no reason to stop the party. The Lebanese know that even if there is fighting, if it isn’t on your doorstep, there’s

Wednesday

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Time is ticking to save Vladimir Kara-Murza

A year ago today, the Putin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza was jailed for 25 years – the longest sentence handed down to a political prisoner in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union over 30 years ago. For the last year, Kara-Murza has been held in a prison in Siberia, often in solitary confinement, with only occasional visits from his lawyer, a couple of books and hostile prison guards watching over him. Kara-Murza was arrested in April 2022 and held for over a year in pre-trial detention after being accused of treason and spreading ‘fake information’ about the Russian army. The most alarming aspect of the charges levelled against him

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Why is the mayor of Tehran welcome in Brussels but not Nigel Farage?

‘How do you think this looks to the rest of the world?’ asked Nigel Farage as police attempted to shut down the National Conservatism conference in Brussels on Tuesday. Belgian politicians won’t care what it looks like. This is the most undemocratic country in western Europe. And while the mayor who tried to ban the conference obsesses about what he calls ‘the far-right’, Islamism continues to thrive in Belgium’s left-wing eco-system. For a decade, France has regarded its neighbour as the ‘home of radical Islamists’, and nowhere more so than in Brussels, from where sprang the Islamist terror cell that murdered 130 Parisians in November 2015. ‘Molenbeekistan’ was how the

Tuesday

Terry Barnes

The Sydney church terror attack is a wake-up call for Australians

Sydney has been rocked by another stabbing rampage – just days after six people were murdered in a knife attack in the city’s Bondi Junction. A bishop of the Assyrian Orthodox Church, Mar Mari Emmanuel, was knifed at the altar during the incident yesterday afternoon in the working-class suburb of Wakeley. Several other parishioners were also injured as they sought to disarm the attacker. Police have arrested a teenager and are treating it as a terrorist attack. The horror was broadcast on the livestream of the Assyrian Christ The Good Shepherd Church, meaning that thousands of followers witnessed the attack. News of the stabbings spread fast among the local Assyrian

Monday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Was Marco Polo a ‘sexpat’?

25 min listen

When I recently came across a book review asking the question ‘was Marco Polo a “sexpat”?’, I knew I had to get its author on to, well, discuss this important question some more. The 13th century Venetian merchant Marco Polo’s account of China was one of the earliest and most popular travelogues written on the country. Polo spent years at the court of Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis, and whose family founded the Yuan dynasty in China. My guest today, and the author of that book review, is the historian Jeremiah Jenne. Jeremiah has lived in China for over two decades, and he is also the co-host of the fascinating podcast Barbarians

Alexander Downer

Is the Quad finished?

Since the late 1990s, Australian governments have been considering how to make their neighbourhood, the Indo-Pacific, a stable and peaceful region. Australia has articulated the need for a balance of power, between a rising China on the one hand and the liberal democracies of the region on the other.  Australia has been particularly concerned about the risk of the Indo-Pacific being dominated by China – it could impose a kind of Asian Monroe doctrine on the region. In this environment, China would not only be able to subjugate Hong Kong, assert its sovereignty over the whole of the South China Sea, and incorporate Taiwan into the People’s Republic of China.

Jonathan Spyer

Iran’s attack was just a taste of what could be to come

The Iranian drone and missile attacks of 13 April brought less drama for many in Jerusalem than one might have imagined. War brings with it the disappearance of expectations of daily continuity, or of a reasonable and logical sequence of events.  It has been wartime for six months now here in Jerusalem; in another way it has been wartime for the last 75 years. If one insists on drawing out the camera range still further, it has been war, or a state of emergency for Jewish people for as long as history can remember. Next week, after all, Jews worldwide will gather to read and recite a nearly 2,000 year old text

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Thwarting Iran’s attack was not a ‘win’ for Israel

‘You got a win. Take the win.’ This is reportedly what US President Joe Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a phone call following the thwarting of Iran’s Saturday night aerial barrage by Israel and a US-led coalition including Jordan and the United Kingdom. Tehran launched 170 drones, 120 ballistic missiles and 30 cruise missiles. While 99 per cent were intercepted, five missiles struck Nevatim Airbase in the Negev and a fragment from a projectile injured Amina Hassouna, a seven-year-old Bedouin girl, in Al Fura. As analysts from the Institute for the Study of War point out, this ‘strike package’ is identical to those routinely deployed against Ukraine

Jason M. Brodsky

American weakness made the Iran attack possible

This weekend, the Islamic Republic of Iran launched an unprecedented attack against Israel. For the first time since 1979, Iran’s leadership launched strikes from Iranian territory at Israel proper using more than 300 drones and missiles, with the vast majority shot down. In the handful of cases where Biden has responded militarily, it has been mostly aimed at Iran’s proxies and dispensable facilities in the region These strikes took place ahead of Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s 85th birthday on April 19. His regime is deeply unpopular at home and planning for succession. Yet Khamenei has demonstrated a surprising willingness to take risks in his old age. His strategy towards Israel

Limor Simhony Philpott

How will Israel hit back against Iran?

Iran’s attack on Israel signals a new era. For the first time, Iran targeted Israel directly, not only through proxies – and not in a way that leaves room for deniability in order to limit Israeli reprisal. The attack on Saturday night, in response to the killing of two Iranian generals in Damascus by Israel, included 185 explosive drones, 110 ballistic missiles and 36 cruise missiles launched from Iran, Iraq and Yemen. Israel, alongside allies that include American, British and Jordanian forces, managed to shoot down 99 per cent of the munitions aimed at Israel and avoid the death and destruction that would have ensued. The question is what happens

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

France and Britain have both shamefully neglected the white working class

Emmanuel Macron told a communist newspaper earlier this year that he didn’t consider Marine le Pen’s National Rally part of the ‘Republican arc’. By extension, the French president presumably thinks the same of the 13,288,686 million men and women who voted for Le Pen in the second round of the 2022 presidential election. In the event of a war with Russia, or another hostile state, would the president therefore consider Le Pen voters unworthy of serving in the Republic’s military? The average Le Pen supporter has much in common with Britain’s Red Wall voter; they tend not to have gone to university, to have been hit hard by deindustrialisation and

Sunday

David B. Green

Netanyahu’s political survival is his top priority

On Sunday morning, Israelis – those who hadn’t already spent part of the night in bomb shelters or safe rooms, unable to sleep – woke up to the good news that nearly all of the approximately 300 missiles and drones fired from Iran hours earlier had been destroyed before crossing into Israeli airspace. One Israeli was injured in the attack, but no one was killed. As has been the case since the 7 October disaster that marked the start of the war in Gaza, Israel’s military and technological prowess had performed successfully and efficiently. No less impressive than the military feat of keeping these weapons from hitting their targets in

Arieh Kovler

Netanyahu can’t ignore the scale of Iran’s attack

Today was supposed to be the day we sent our kids back to nursery. For two weeks, my toddler and baby have been home with a nasty stomach bug that turned out to be shigella, a bacterium that causes dysentery and that has been ripping through Israeli troops in Gaza. Then, on Saturday night, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, spokesperson for the IDF, announced that schools and nurseries would be closed nationwide today, due to the Iranian threat.  The parents’ WhatsApp groups grumbled that this, alone, was a disproportionate response by Iran, throwing Israel into turmoil the week before Passover. But then the news reports became starker: we should expect a drone

Paul Mason

Israel has a chance to de-escalate after Iran’s failed attack

Iran’s strike on Israel yesterday is, simultaneously, a moment for alarm and calm. Alarm because, by unleashing more than 300 drones, cruise and ballistic missiles in response to Israel’s attack on its Damascus consulate at the start of the month, Iran is basically saying: we can do this every time Israel or its allies cross a line. Calm because not only did Israel repel the attack, it did so thanks to collaboration from its Western allies and friendly Arab states, with both Saudi Arabia and Jordan opening their skies to US combat aircraft. Israel has the right to defend itself, and will doubtless respond militarily. But its allies have a

Ian Williams Ian Williams

The rusting Philippine ship raising US-China tensions

The rusting and disintegrating hulk of a former Second World War landing ship has become an unlikely but dangerous flashpoint in US-China relations. The Sierra Madre, built for the US navy to land tanks, has for several decades been stranded on a shoal in the South China Sea. But now it has become a symbol of Beijing’s growing aggression in the region and its disdain for international law. The Philippines, which bought the ship in 1976, intentionally grounded her on the largely submerged Second Thomas Shoal in the Spratly islands in 1999 to defend their claim to the territory. There she has remained to this day as a lonely symbol of sovereignty and home to a small contingent of Philippine marines. For many years,

Sean Rayment

Despite their failed attack, Iran should not be underestimated

Iran’s overnight mass drone attack on Israel was supposed to be payback for the assassination of Iranian Republican Guard Corps commander General Mohammad Reza Zahedi. In truth, though, it was a tepid, face-saving response which the ayatollahs in Tehran knew would fail. In the early hours of this morning, the Iranian army described what it called ‘Operation Honest Promise’ – the drone and missile attack on Israel – as a complete success. But in reality, the attack had minimal tactical impact, despite the highly orchestrated flag waving jubilation in Tehran’s Palestine Square. Iran’s military would have made certain that both Israel and the US, knew what was coming Former MI6 Chief Sir

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

What Iran’s failed attack says about Israel

Some 300 missiles and drones were dispatched by Iran towards Israel last night, the largest such assault in history. The IDF say 99 per cent of them were shot down by the air forces of Israel, the UK, US and Jordan. So rather than weaken Israel, Iran’s attack has ended up convening showcasing an extraordinary military alliance – with Arabs, Israelis, Americans and British acting as one to neutralise the assault.  Not a single one of the 200 drones or cruise missiles made it into Israel. Only some faster-moving ballistic missiles hit their target and even they inflicted only light damage to the Nevatim air base. The only reported casualty

Ian O’Doherty

The real reason Ireland is going to recognise Palestine

When the Irish foreign minister Micheal Martin recently stood up and announced to the Dail that Ireland would officially recognise a Palestinian state ‘within a matter of weeks’, there were no sharp intakes of breath or fits of fainting in the chamber. Irish political parties have long been relatively united in their calls for full recognition of a Palestinian state. But this was the first time there had been an explicit statement of intent, and within a specific timeline. Relations between Ireland and Israel have traditionally been poor since diplomatic ties were established in 1975. But events since October 7 (which many Irish politicians seem to have conveniently forgotten) have

Saturday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Iran has struck back – but is it war?

When Israel assassinated a top commander in Iran’s Quds Force in Damascus a fortnight ago, it knew that Tehran would have to respond with a direct attack. So news this evening – that Iran has sent a swarm of kamikaze drones that will take nine hours to reach Israel – is in line with those expectations. Israel had already called up reserve units for its air defence: tonight’s dispatch of about 50 Shahed drones (used regularly in Ukraine) was the minimum of what was expected. Israel says it will try to take them out as they fly over Iraq (they have already been filmed en route). The question is whether Iran will later reinforce