Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

John Jenkins

Why Iran is not Iraq

At the moment, a lot of people – notably including the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer – are comparing the current war with Iran with the Iraq invasion of 2003. Do they have a point? There are several common claims of comparison, some good, some bad. There is no use pretending that the decisions Starmer has made will not have vast and far-reaching consequences The principal claim is that what happened in Iraq means we should steer well clear of any further involvement anywhere. It reminds me of the final scene in that magnificent film, Chinatown. A private detective moves to intervene to stop a horror unfolding but one of

Jacob Heilbrunn

The Texas Republican revolt

Following last night’s primaries, Texas Democrats have a clear Senate candidate in James Talarico. Texas Republicans have a civil war. Ken Paxton and John Cornyn are headed for a nasty and expensive three-month runoff that will culminate in an election on May 26. Cornyn has made no secret of his disdain for Paxton, deeming him a “dead weight.” Are Texas Republicans facing an Alamo scenario, a last stand as the Democrats swarm over their defenses to reclaim the Lone Star state and the Senate majority? More than 2.4 million Texans cast ballots in the Democratic primary, the highest number in nearly two decades. The significance of Talarico’s victory over Jasmine

Andrew Cockburn

Does Trump even know why he invaded Iran?

Napoleon is supposed to have defined strategy as ‘on s’engage, et puis on voit’, loosely translated as ‘get stuck in and then see what happens’. Donald Trump is not normally deemed Napoleonic, yet in his approach to strategy he appears to have taken the great general’s precept to heart, launching initiatives without much forethought regarding consequences or further steps in the light of unexpected developments. When the consequences turn out to be unwelcome, he swiftly readjusts, discarding the initial scheme in favour of an alternative course of action, as often as not headlong retreat. Thus the swingeing Liberation Day tariff regime unveiled with much fanfare in April 2025 was swiftly suspended

Robert Skidelsky

What comes after America’s retreat?

What is happening to the ‘rules-based international order’ despairingly invoked by bewildered European leaders? The broad answer is that we are living through the retreat of American hegemony, masked by bluster and marked by contradictions. The retreat has two aspects, economic and geopolitical. Economists talk about Trump’s tariffs breaking up the free-trade order; geopoliticians about the Trump Corollary breaking up the Nato system. These are part of a single, reasonably coherent story. But the retreat is not as straightforward as it sounds. How does the bombing of Iran fit into it? What do people mean when they talk about a global ‘rules-based order’? The starting point must be the UN

Tuesday

Ben Clerkin

Did Israel bounce the US into war?

Operation Epic Fury has developed from a war to deprive Iran of nuclear weapons into a political war of blame. “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action,” Marco Rubio told reporters at the Capitol last night. “We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces. And we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them [Iran] before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.” The rationale came as a surprise to lawmakers. It sounded as though Israel had effectively bounced America into military action. Trump had told the American people from the outset that the war was to defang Iran of

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

The Middle East’s Muslims are cheering Khamenei’s death

The killing of ayatollah Ali Khamenei in US-Israeli strikes on Saturday was cheered by many Iranians who have suffered innumerable atrocities under his ruthless Islamist rule of the country. While the diaspora were vociferous in their jubilation over the death of Iran’s supreme leader, many in the country also braved violent crackdowns to rejoice in the streets. These Iranians chanted the slogan that has become a common anti-Khamenei refrain over the past four decades: “Death to the Islamic Republic.” The chant has echoed alongside others: “death to the dictator… death to Khamenei” of the 1999 student marches; the 2009 election protests; the 2019 agitation against economic policies; the 2022 demonstrations over

Monday

Freddy Gray

Will Iran descend into civil war?

33 min listen

Freddy is joined by historian and former diplomat Charlie Gammell. They discuss the situation in Iran, whether the US is heading for a decisive confrontation, and examine the regional consequences: proxy warfare, Gulf energy security, Pakistan’s delicate position, and migration pressures on Europe.

Charles Lipson

What Iran means for the world

The Israeli-American air campaign against Iran will have profound global repercussions. What those repercussions will be depends on two crucial factors. First, will the bombing campaign remove the Shi’ite Islamist regime from power? We do not yet know if the campaign can accomplish that ambitious goal without foreign troops on the ground. If the US and Israel can do that, it would be an unprecedented achievement. Second, if the Islamists are removed, will the successor regime be stable and effective? Will it be able to control the streets and countryside, prevent successful breakaway regional movements, and begin the arduous process of rebuilding the country? Can the factions currently opposing the

David Loyn

Chaos in Iran spells trouble for the Taliban

The US-Israeli attack on Iran presents an opportunity to get rid of the Taliban in Afghanistan. If there is a collapse of central authority in Iran, tens of thousands of Afghan former soldiers living in exile there could use the power vacuum to mobilize, return home and fight against the Taliban. There are several resistance groups who have advanced plans to fight but need a reliable haven outside the country to launch attacks inside Afghanistan. Iran, which has a 600-mile border with the country, could be the launchpad they need. This represents a unique opportunity for Afghanistan, as for the first time the country faces conflict on both sides. While

Roger Kimball

When will Kash Patel unleash epic fury on the FBI?

As I write, the Washington Post is carrying an obituary about the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – or maybe it is about Santa Claus? You tell me. “With his bushy white beard and easy smile,” the Democracy Dies in Darkness paper told its readers,  “Ayatollah Khamenei cut a more avuncular figure in public than his perpetually scowling but much more revered mentor [Khomenei], and he was known to be fond of Persian poetry and classic western novels, especially Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables… Some Iranians who knew Ayatollah Khamenei before he became supreme leader described him as a ‘closet moderate.’” Did they now? Many other Iranians, some say about 250,000, did not have a chance

Saturday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Is this Trump’s Sarajevo moment?

Here we go again. Switch out Saddam Hussein for the Ayatollah Khamenei and Ahmed Chalabi for Reza Pahlavi and you have a fresh war for regime change in the Middle East, this time with Israel as America’s sidekick. With Operation Epic Fury, the American and Israeli bombing of Iran and push for regime change, the self-proclaimed “President of Peace” runs the risk not only of triggering wider upheaval in the Middle East, but also globally. Is this a new Sarajevo moment? With Trump’s own generals having warned him that attacking Iran could be a debacle, he may have torched his own presidency Unlike George W. Bush in 2003, who worked

Daniel DePetris

It’s unclear what threat Iran actually poses

Donald Trump has urged Iranians to “take over” their government after the United States and Israel struck targets across the country. A multitude of Iranian military and government targets were hit by missiles in what is turning out to be a joint operation far more comprehensive than the 12-day air campaign last June. Back then, Trump’s objectives were limited: degrade Iran’s three largest nuclear facilities. This time, Trump’s eyes are on a bigger prize – a full-scale decapitation of the Iranian leadership and a degradation of Tehran’s military power. Trump has just rolled the dice and plunged the United States into yet another war in the Middle East “We are

Thursday

Cockburn

Lauren Boebert’s sneaky texts derail Hillary’s Epstein deposition

Hillary Clinton and her husband Bill austerely complied with a House Oversight Committee subpoena in order to explain their ties to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. Yet Hillary’s testimony today didn’t exactly go to plan. Proceedings were halted after a breach of the hearing’s protocols – by a member of the committee. Congresswoman Lauren Boebert took two surreptitious photos of the closed-door hearing… and sent them to conservative influencer Benny Johnson. Johnson, in turn, plastered his watermark all over them and posted them on X. The Clintons had agreed to testify in a gambit to demonstrate that presidents and cabinet secretaries are not above congressional scrutiny – to put pressure on

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Ed West

Britain’s Green party is playing with fire

A good quiz question in the year 2050 will go something like this: “True or false, the ‘green’ in the ‘Green Party’ originally referred to the environment.” By this point, the etymological origins of Britain’s sectional Islamic party will be as obscure as the relationship between British Conservatives and 17th century Irish bandits. A key milestone, our mid-century quiz regular will inform his teammates, was the 2026 Gorton and Denton by-election in which the Greens stood neck and neck in a three-way race with Labour and Reform before voting opened. If decades of generous immigration policies have created constituencies where people vote along religious lines, there is nothing to stop someone

Edward Howell

North Korea’s boundless nuclear ambition

North Korea’s ninth party congress, held this week, was little more than a rubber-stamping exercise. That much was clear when the Chinese premier Xi Jinping congratulated Kim Jong-un on his re-election as the general secretary of the Workers’ party of Korea. But we would be wrong to dismiss this gathering as merely symbolic. The last time North Korea held such a congress, in January 2021, Kim outlined a shopping list of desired weapons and missiles. Since then, North Korea has tested or obtained each item. All this week’s congress did was cement North Korea’s self-perceived status as a nuclear-armed state. While Kim underscored how North Korea’s nuclear weapons will never

Owen Matthews

How Silicon Valley is calling the shots on the battlefields of Ukraine

Sometime in the late morning of February 4, somebody at SpaceX headquarters pressed a computer key. A command line was beamed to Starlink’s 9,600 satellites in low Earth orbit. Their onboard processors, circling 550 kilometers above the Earth, instantly obeyed the command and fractionally changed their operational settings. Back down on the frozen ground, in the trenches, bunkers and ruined cities of Russian-occupied Ukraine, hundreds of Starlink terminals lost internet connectivity. As another freezing night set in, the Russian army’s drones and tactical comms went dark. “We are left without communication!” complained a frontline Russian military officer in a video posted on the Telegram channel “Voenkory Russian Spring.” “Virtually on

Wednesday

Gavin Rice

MAGA-nomics is working

Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, the longest in history, served as a reminder of the relentless will and unstoppable energy he brings to the office of the presidency. In a coup de grâce he humiliated congressional Democrats, securing footage of them remaining seated en masse as they refused to accept that the role of the government is to prioritize American citizens. He gently chastised the Supreme Court judges, assembled in the front row, for declaring his tariff program unlawful last Friday. Our political right should take heed: for all its roughness, this agenda isn’t going away The President’s opponents may be celebrating the judgment, but the Donald is

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Philip Patrick

Japan is refusing to tiptoe around the Taiwan issue

One of the most serious issues in the well-filled in-tray of freshly endorsed Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi is Taiwan, which China claims as its own sovereign territory, and the lamentable state of Sino-Japanese relations. Takaichi provoked fury with comments in the Japanese parliament in November when she stated that were China to attack Taiwan, it would be interpreted as a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, implying a military response could follow. Under the terms of its constitution, Japan is severely limited in its military options but Takaichi appeared to be preparing more solid ground with her phrasing. A 2015 law changed the constitution allowing Japan to retaliate if the country

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Tim Shipman

Is the Trump-Starmer bromance over?

“The Special Relationship only exists when the Americans want something,” a former Downing Street aide observed after Donald Trump rejected the Chagos Islands deal. There are profound differences between London and Washington over military action against Iran while the fourth anniversary of the war in Ukraine this week has exposed further fault lines. The result is that Anglo-American relations are at their worst point since the general election. Keir Starmer’s team argues he should not be ousted at a time of huge international instability. But the reality of the Anglo-American relationship raises three questions. Where did things go wrong? Does the PM still have some kind of relationship with Trump?

Ian Maxwell

My sister Ghislaine became a prop in the theater of global online outrage

My family name has become a byword for scandal. My father, Robert, went from press baron to tabloid monster within weeks of his death in 1991. My sister Ghislaine, convicted in New York three decades later for sex-trafficking offenses linked to Jeffrey Epstein, became the algorithmically optimized villain of the online age. Last week’s arrest of the former Prince Andrew shows how fully a newer system has taken hold: one in which guilt is first declared on the homepage and only later, if at all, tested in court. Law is meant to cool passions. The modern content economy is designed to inflame them Old protections – the presumption of innocence,

Paul Wood

Inside the daring plan to reclaim the Chagos Islands

Peros Banhos on the Chagos archipelago looks like your basic tropical island paradise: turquoise waters and golden sands, waves lapping on a palm-fringed beach. But step off the strip of sand into the wall of green behind, and you’re enveloped by mosquitoes. The old well you were counting on for water is a shallow puddle. And the silver fish between your feet dart past a net, despite not having seen one in 50 years. The jungle has grown over the old British colonial buildings, and the jungle is a harsh place. Four Chagos Islanders have been here more than a week, along with the man who brought them, Adam Holloway

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Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump’s reality-show State of the Union speech

Donald Trump may have celebrated Team USA for winning the gold at the Olympics in hockey, but he was not in a puckish mood during his State of the Union speech. Instead, Trump stuck to his tried-and-true script of denouncing Democrats as “sick,” mocking concerns about affordability and cooing over Melania as a great new movie star. Far from nobody ever seeing anything like it, Trump delivered what everybody has already seen. Ever the salesman, he was not shy with the superlatives, declaring that America is the “hottest” country in the world – “bigger, better, richer, stronger than ever before.” If there was one thing that was longer than ever,

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Roger Kimball

What Trump got right in his State of the Union address

Watching Donald Trump’s State of the Union Address tonight, I thought of two homely things. One was something that a friend used to say to her young daughter: “Don’t forget to have an attitude of gratitude,” she would remind her preteen when that attitude was absent. The second thing I thought about was a fact I recently learned about Ulysses S. Grant. He was a great general, yes, and he was also a great, if generally under-appreciated, president. One sign of his greatness came posthumously. At his funeral, two of Grant’s pallbearers were Confederate generals. Grant had won the civil war, defeating the Confederacy, saving the Union. But in death he underscored his