World

Thursday

Eliot Wilson

Britain can no longer defend itself

When the Berlin Wall fell, the British Army had 152,800 soldiers. Tony Blair’s government cut this to 110,000; David Cameron’s reduced it to 87,000. Plans to let that number fall to 82,000 were accelerated by the former defence secretary Ben Wallace. It’s generally accepted that by next year numbers will have dropped to 72,500. That’s a generous estimate: there are credible reports the army could soon number just 67,800. This week the British Army is playing a leading part in Operation Steadfast Defender, the largest Nato exercise in peacetime history. Yet it is smaller than it has been at any point since the 1790s. More importantly, it’s far too small

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Labour struggles, unemployment falls and peers announced

Home Labour withdrew support from Azhar Ali, its candidate in the Rochdale by-election to be held on 29 February, after a recording was published of him claiming Israel had ‘allowed’ the deadly attack by Hamas gunmen on 7 October, which had given them ‘the green light to do whatever they bloody want’. He was suspended from the party pending an investigation, but electoral law made it impossible to remove his name and party from the ballot paper. At first Labour stood by him when he said he wished to ‘urgently apologise to Jewish leaders for my inexcusable comments’. The next day Labour suspended a former MP, Graham Jones, who was going

Max Jeffery Max Jeffery

Is Nato ready for a Russian invasion?

Tapa, Estonia In a pine forest two hours from Estonia’s border with Russia, preparation for war is under way. British, French, American and Estonian soldiers are rehearsing what Nato would do if Vladimir Putin invaded. They’ve brought Challenger II tanks, an F-16 fighter jet and Himars artillery systems – some of the best equipment the West has – for a fortnight of battle simulations. It means preparing for trench warfare, minefields, ambushes and mortar strikes in -20°C and a foot of snow. Not long ago, the idea of fighting a war against Russia was dismissed as a joke. When Mitt Romney ran for US president he said Moscow was a

Owen Matthews

Ukraine’s spirit isn’t even close to broken

Rome and Kyiv have one thing in common – the distinctive whine of motor-scooter engines in the night. The difference is that in Kyiv the high, Vespa-like noise does not rise from the streets but drifts down from among snow-laden clouds. It’s the unmistakable sound made by Iranian-designed Shahed-136 suicide drones, essentially modern-day doodlebugs armed with warheads big enough to collapse a medium-sized building. Kyivans nickname these sky-borne menaces ‘mopeds’. Shaheds are slow-moving, low altitude and easy to spot, so Russia fires them after dark. With a great deal of noise and spectacular flashes in the night sky, Ukrainian anti-aircraft and Patriot missile batteries usually blow most of them out

Wednesday

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Will the Tories be wiped out like the French Republicans?

Vote for me or you’ll end up with Keir Starmer. That was the threat from Rishi Sunak on Monday evening when in front of the GB News cameras he addressed voters in Country Durham. The Prime Minister warned that the general election will be a straightforward choice between the Conservatives and Labour. He then listed what was at stake: controlling spending, cutting taxes, boosting the economy, protecting borders and policing the streets. ‘All of those things that you care about, who is more likely to deliver them?’ Not the Tories, if the polls are to be believed. One poll last month predicted the party will be ‘wiped out’ in the

Benedict Rogers

Lionel Messi shouldn’t have been in Hong Kong in the first place

Football has turned messy in Hong Kong. Last Sunday, the beleaguered Hong Kong Chinese Communist party was hoping for a public relations boost after Inter Miami agreed to play a friendly in the city against the Hong Kong Team. Instead, the game was overshadowed by a furious row after Miami footballer Lionel Messi failed to come out on the pitch because of a groin injury. The Hong Kong government reacted with outrage, and fans booed the players and demanded refunds. Three days later Messi was well enough to play in Japan, adding insult to injury in the eyes of the CCP. The outcry has now spread to mainland China, with state

Limor Simhony Philpott

Israel has to invade Rafah if it wants to destroy Hamas

When news broke that Israel planned to start an offensive in the city of Rafah, in the southern part of the Gaza Strip, it was faced with a barrage of warnings and condemnations, including from its allies. Foreign Secretary David Cameron urged Israel to ‘think seriously’ before it launched a large-scale operation in the city. US President Biden called on Israel to halt the offensive. The EU representative for foreign affairs and security, Joseph Borrell, urged Israel’s allies to stop arming it, and Egypt threatened to suspend the peace deal over the planned offensive. Rafah sits close to the border with Egypt. Originally home to about 250,000 people, it’s where

Monday

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

The sinister transformation of Greta Thunberg

Greta Thunberg spent her weekend in France supporting two environmental campaigns. On Sunday she appeared at a rally in Bordeaux against an oil drilling project; 24 hours earlier the 21-year-old Swede was further east, adding her voice to those activists opposed to the construction of a new stretch of motorway between Toulouse and Castres. ‘We are here in solidarity with those who are resisting this project and this madness’, said Thunberg in English, her now familiar keffiyeh round her neck. Some French media described Thunberg as an ‘anti-global warming icon’ and the ‘figurehead in the fight to protect the planet’. She might have been once. Now, however, in her ubiquitous keffiyeh, appearing to chant ‘Crush

Greta Thunberg
Sean Rayment

The battle for Rafah could turn into a bloodbath

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu views the conflict in Gaza as a zero-sum game – with Israel either destroying Hamas or losing the war. Given that is his strategy, the assault on the city of Rafah in the southernmost part of Gaza, where the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) believe up to four battalions of Hamas terrorists are holed-up, makes perfect sense, at least to him. On Saturday, in the face of growing international concern about the forthcoming operation, Netanyahu announced: ‘Those who say that under no circumstances should we enter Rafah are basically saying lose the war, keep Hamas there.’ During the night, Israel began a missile bombardment of the city.

Sunday

Jason M. Brodsky

Why is President Biden scared of Iran?

The Biden administration often appears more afraid of Iran than Iran is of the Biden administration. That is a very dangerous dynamic for the United States. While the military action President Joe Biden has ordered this week to counter the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its axis of resistance is degrading Iran’s capacity, it is not deterring its will. President Biden often appears uncomfortable speaking about Iran. Throughout his presidency, he has never delivered substantive, formal remarks outlining his Iran policy. This is unusual for a regime that poses a significant threat to American interests and values. On January 30, when the president was asked about his response to Iran’s axis

Robin Ashenden

Russia’s ‘Red Ripper’ Andrei Chikatilo was a uniquely Soviet serial killer

In the wake of Vladimir Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, as atrocities like the killings at Bucha and Irpin came to light, there were repeated internet posts comparing Russia’s president to another figure from the country’s history. This wasn’t some expansionist empire-builder of the past, but Andrei Chikatilo, the mass-murderer and cannibal from Russia’s Rostov region. He was convicted of 52 murders in 1992 (most of them children or minors) and executed a couple of years later. I first caught sight of Chikatilo in 1992 in a British TV news report on his crimes. Caged in a Rostov-on-Don courtroom, the accused, shaven-headed and crazed-looking, was a figure from a nightmare;

Saturday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

How bad is the border crisis?

33 min listen

Freddy is joined by Todd Bensman, fellow at the Centre for Immigration Studies and author of Overrun: how Joe Biden unleashed the greatest border crisis in US history. They discuss how to solve what is perhaps the issue of our time, why meaningful reform doesn’t seem to happen on immigration, and the extent of Biden’s physical and mental frailty after a week of public gaffes. 

George Magnus

How the Chinese markets lost faith in the CCP

Ahead of the Chinese new year holiday, Beijing has been intervening to prop up the country’s stock markets. Regulators have tightened market trading conditions, and this week the head of the China Securities Regulatory Commission, Yi Huiman, was fired abruptly, presumably as the fall-guy for the relentless decline in the markets, which have lost about $6 trillion in value since the end of 2021. There is a palpable concern about financial instability in China that travels all the way up to Xi Jinping Chinese equity prices have touched their lowest levels since 2018, and are not far from the lows reached in the 2015-16 financial crisis. Mr Yi’s two predecessors were also fired

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

The left can’t stand France’s new culture minister

France’s new minister of culture has promised to put an end to the creeping cancel culture that is threatening the country. ‘Today wokeism has become a policy of censorship,’ said Rachida Dati, who was appointed to her post last month. ‘I am in favour of the freedom of art, the freedom of creation, and I am not in favour of censorship’. She explained that she will launch her campaign next week, summoning the great and the good of the cultural world to ‘ensure that we support creative freedom and do not support these new censors.’ Dati might have had in mind the 1,200 poets, editors, publishers, booksellers and actors, who

Leon Mangasarian

Germany’s rustbelt is reviving – but voters are still flocking to the AfD

West Germany’s first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, hated eastern Germany and said – possibly apocryphally – that Asia begins at the east bank of the Elbe River. When people visit my forest in what’s long been Brandenburg’s rustbelt, I caution that Asiatic Germany isn’t Adenauer’s bucolic Rhineland, let alone Munich or Hamburg. Yet the ‘rustbelt’ moniker no longer suits a region that, while down and out for decades, is rebounding, powered by new industry and proximity to booming Berlin, the capital’s new airport and a Tesla factory. Even low-tech forestry is making money after having been on life-support five years ago. But there are also levels of anger I have never

Friday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Joe Biden isn’t working

Joe Biden isn’t working. That much has been clear to anyone who has followed American politics for the past four years. The 81-year-old often has no idea what he is saying or where he is. Yet it’s only now, months away from his possible re-election, that the Department of Justice, apparently in an attempt to exonerate him for committing a crime Donald Trump is accused of, has admitted the obvious: he’s not really in charge of himself, let alone the country.  After interrogating Biden about his hoarding of classified documents, Special Counsel Robert K. Hur reported: We have also considered that, at trial, Mr Biden would likely present himself to

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

What Tucker Carlson should have asked Vladimir Putin

Vladimir Putin relished being interviewed by American journalist Tucker Carlson, who doesn’t seem to know much about Russia, Ukraine or the war. The old autocrat turned a two-hour interview into a monologue and spent most of it talking about a fictionalised history of Ukraine. In one of the rare moments when Carlson dared to interrupt Putin and ask about the war, Putin said he didn’t start it. ‘This is an attempt to stop it. We have not achieved our aims yet, because one of them is denazification,’ he said, and then continued to talk about neo-Nazi Ukrainians. Putin said he didn’t start the war Maybe, that was ‘the truth’ Carlson

Sergey Radchenko

Tucker Carlson failed Putin’s history class

They say that he who sups with the devil should have a long spoon. But, driven by vanity and unconstrained by any understanding of Russia’s history or politics, Tucker Carlson slurped up the intoxicating broth of Vladimir Putin’s falsifications this week in his interview with the Russian president. Carlson took to Moscow well. His Russian hosts rolled out the red carpet, fawning over him with an admiration and servility that betrayed their sense of exasperation at being long shunned by the West. They saw him as a glittering American Prometheus who might just be gullible enough to take the fire of Russian disinformation back home. It was not the first

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Taylor Swift can’t save the EU

The EU hopes that Taylor Swift and other pop starlets will come to its rescue in June’s European elections. With pollsters predicting significant gains for the right, Brussels’ ruling elite is preparing to turn to ‘famous artists, actors, athletes and other stars for help’. Their ambition is to persuade these personalities to encourage their young fans to vote in the elections – and to vote for them, the ruling centrist elite.   ‘No one can mobilise young people better than young people, that’s how it works,’ said Margaritis Schinas, the EU Commissioner for Promoting the European Way of Life, recently. ‘That works better than commissioners speaking from the press room.’ A generation ago,

Steerpike Steerpike

Biden branded ‘well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory’

Special Counsel Robert K. Hur submitted his report on the confidential documents found in President Biden’s Delaware garage — and Mr S can confirm, it’s a doozy.  The report is brutal in its characterisation of Biden’s acuity. It says that Biden ‘did not remember when he was vice president’ Hur found that Biden wilfully concealed the fact that he held confidential documents, citing a recorded interview with his ghostwriter from 2017 where he claimed to have ‘stumbled upon classified documents.’ Amazingly, in 2023, Biden claimed not to have any recollection of this. In what CNN calls a ‘searing report’, Hur said, ‘We have also considered that, at trial, Mr Biden would likely