America

Thursday

James W. Carden

This is what liberal war fever looks like

In a private letter written in 1918, the recently deposed German chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg admitted that in the run-up to the Great War, ‘there were special circumstances that militated in favour of war, including those in which Germany in 1870-71 entered the circle of great powers’ and became ‘the object of vengeful envy on the part of the other Great Powers, largely though not entirely by her own fault’. Yet Bethmann saw another crucial factor at work: that of public opinion.’How else,’ he asked,'[to] explain the senseless and impassioned zeal which allowed countries like Italy, Rumania, and even America, not originally involved in the war, no rest until they too

Bryan Appleyard

A compelling, if flawed, example of the new American noir: Red Rocket reviewed

Mikey (Simon Rex) first appears striding down a road in utterly wrecked jeans and shirt. He is carrying nothing and seems to be going nowhere until he walks up the pathway to the house of the wife he abandoned and her venomously disapproving, chain-smoking mother. Sean Baker’s Red Rocket is a movie set in Texas City in Galveston County. It’s basically an oil town and almost all the action in this film takes place on the perimeter of a vast refinery. Everything is very grainy, especially the dark interiors. This is because the film is shot on 16mm film, a medium which, on the big screen, produces a lively, speckled

Wednesday

Angus Colwell

Why would the Saudis bail out Biden?

Is Saudi Arabia shunning Washington? Mohammed bin Salman has reportedly been refusing to phone Joe Biden, who wants the kingdom to turn on its oil taps as the West desperately seeks alternatives to the Russian energy market.  Riyadh – the world’s largest oil exporter – has so far failed to accommodate Washington’s pleas. Ahead of the Russian invasion in mid-February, the US asked the Opec+ cartel – of which Saudi Arabia is the most important member – to produce more oil to slow the already rising prices. Opec+ stood firm, and said they would increase production by 400,000 barrels a day in April, a rise agreed before the threat of a

Thursday

Douglas Murray

What the right gets wrong about Putin

A fracture on the international right may seem small fry given everything that is going on right now. But it is worth loitering over. Because in recent years an interesting divide has grown among conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic. On one side are the Cold War warriors and their successors who have continued to view Vladimir Putin’s Russia as a strategic threat. Meanwhile, a new generation has arrived at a different view. While the West has deranged itself with assaults on its own history, on biology and much more, an assortment of conservatives have come to see Putin as some kind of counterweight. A bulwark – even an

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Russia bombs Ukraine, MPs get a pay rise and Tube staff strike

Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, said of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia: ‘Never in all my study or memory of politics and international affairs have I seen so clear a distinction between right and wrong, between good and evil, between light and dark.’ He was speaking during a visit to the Ukrainian Catholic cathedral in London, where he lit a candle. He flew off to visit Poland and Estonia, and said he was worried that Vladimir Putin might ‘Grozny-fy’ Kiev, which would be ‘an unalterable moral humanitarian catastrophe’. Britain might take in 200,000 Ukrainian refugees after a scheme for close relatives of Ukrainians in the UK was widened

Tuesday

Joseph S. Nye, Jr.

Has Putin’s invasion changed the world order?

Is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine ‘a turning point in history’? Does it spell the end of the American era, and the beginning of a new Cold War between the West and a Russo-Chinese axis of authoritarians? Some invoke the image of 1939. After assuring the world that he was interested only in protecting his fellow Germans in the Sudetenland, Adolf Hitler annexed the rest of Czechoslovakia and then invaded Poland, setting off world war two. Are the Russians in the Donbass the modern equivalents of the Sudeten Germans? Where will Putin stop? Others draw an analogy to 1948 and Stalin’s drawing of an Iron Curtain across Eastern Europe, followed by

Thursday

James Walton

For all its absurdity, it delivers the goods: BBC2’s Louis Theroux’s Forbidden America reviewed

In the latest episode of Louis Theroux’s Forbidden America, Louis asked a rapper called Broke Baby if ‘it’s important to keep it real’. ‘You have to play your role,’ replied Broke by way of apparent agreement. Given how stoned he was, this neat paradox — that you keep it real by pretending to — mightn’t have been wholly intended. Either way, however, it was hard not to apply it to Louis himself. More than 20 years into his TV career, does anybody know for sure whether his familiar schtick is genuine or faked? Certainly not, I’d suggest, Louis — whose elaborate stage-English courtesy, wide-eyed bemusement and spectacular naivety are now

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

Would Trump have prevented the crisis in Ukraine?

‘I know Vladimir Putin very well,’ said Donald Trump yesterday, speaking of the Ukraine crisis, ‘he would have never done during the Trump administration what he is doing now.’ As with a lot of Trump utterances, that statement is at once arrogant, preposterous — and probably true. Maybe it is a coincidence — or Trump’s often-cited luck — that the last major crisis over Ukraine was back in 2014, after Viktor Yanukovych was ousted and Putin annexed Crimea. Or perhaps not. Putin, as a slightly comic alpha male authoritarian, saw in Trump something he recognised Back then Barack Obama led the free world and, busy as he was, he offloaded

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

Our monetary bubble is about to burst

OK, I finally watched Netflix’s Don’t Look Up. Surprisingly, I enjoyed it — especially before its effective subtitle for us thickos, THIS IS A METAPHOR FOR CLIMATE CHANGE, YOU F-ING MORONS. Otherwise, the film might have playfully dramatised the more general phenom of fiddling with celebrity bodices while Rome burns. The comet at which I’m looking up could arrive far more immediately than perilous global warming. Money is in trouble. I’m not only referring to a cost-of-living crisis. Money itself is in trouble. Let’s contemplate, to coin a phrase, a basket of deplorables. US inflation just hit 7.5 per cent, the highest in 40 years. UK inflation, now 5.5 per

Tuesday

The Spectator

P.J. O’Rourke 1947–2022

The great American journalist and satirist P J O’Rourke has died. He contributed a number of articles to The Spectator over the years. This diary from December 2010 was the last piece he wrote for our London edition. RIP. — New Hampshire Just back from London, 40 years to the week since my first visit. It was a wonderful city then, in a cold- rooms, dark-streets, early-pub-closing, single-TV-channel way. And the food… I ordered a steak, it arrived boiled. But London was more polite and intelligent than America. The language was full of manners. If one didn’t like a person, one could say, ‘One quite likes him.’ One could use the politely

Monday

Robert Peston

The Ukraine crisis has united the West

There has been a subtle change of tone from Joe Biden and Boris Johnson about the likelihood of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. It has gone from ‘highly likely’ to ‘there may be a diplomatic solution’ — or from ‘almost all hope lost’ to ‘chink of hope’. So from where does that hope emanate? Largely, I am told, from noises out of Ukraine that its government is moving towards a public statement that although it retains the right to join the Nato western defence alliance, it will commit to not consider applying for at least ten years. The US president and UK prime minister are keen to encourage, through diplomatic channels, such

Sunday

Michael Shellenberger

San Francisco is decaying

During the pandemic, a growing number of people in floridly psychotic states screamed obscenities at invisible enemies, or at my colleagues and me on the streets of San Francisco. One morning, a young man came up to me as I was unlocking our front door and coughed in my unmasked face. Another threatened to assault a colleague. In both cases our mistake appears to have been looking at the men. Many of the problems stemmed from Covid-19. California’s prisons, jails and homeless shelters were under orders to reduce their occupancy. But none of these problems started with the pandemic. Between 2008 and 2019, about 18,000 companies, including Toyota, Charles Schwab

Friday

James Forsyth

Ukraine’s plight paints a bleak vision of Europe’s future

It is tempting to view Vladimir Putin as a Cold War relic: a former KGB officer who hasn’t got over the fall of the Soviet Union, which he called the ‘greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.’ But, as I say in the Times today, what is happening on Ukraine’s border isn’t a throwback to the Cold War. Rather, it is a preview of Europe’s future. Since Nato’s creation, European security has rested on America’s involvement. But Europe is now a secondary concern for the US; Asia and competition with China is the most important challenge facing Washington now. The horribly messy US withdrawal from Afghanistan was justified on the basis that it would

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

Is Britain heading for an opioid crisis?

Almost everyone here that I’ve spoken to about it assumes that the opioid crisis in the United States won’t ever come to the UK. Yes, the problem there is accelerating. Drug overdose deaths in America are now at more than 100,000 a year. A few days ago the Lancet predicted 1.2 million dead by 2029 but… it couldn’t happen here. We hold up those three sacred letters — NHS — like a talisman to ward off the evil. We tut about Big Pharma and its undue influence in Washington, we remove the Sackler name from galleries and museums, and then we get back to watching America overdose on TV. The

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

Kamala Harris and the problem of affirmative action

In lauding Joe Biden’s promise to fill the upcoming vacancy on the US Supreme Court with a black woman, last week the commentator Jonathan Capehart effused on PBS NewsHour that any black woman was bound to duplicate the retiring Justice Stephen Breyer’s famous pragmatism, because ‘there is no more pragmatic people in the world, of necessity, than a black woman (sic)’. With no other knowledge of the prospective nominee beyond her race and sex, Capehart trotted out confidently that she will ‘probably be more impressive, have more qualifications, be more brilliant than the folks who have come in before her, because people used her race to downgrade and belittle and

Monday

Freddy Gray

Are Kamala Harris’s days as Veep numbered?

President Joe Biden promised last week to nominate the first black woman to the Supreme Court. ‘Long overdue,’ he says. When it comes to elevating African-American females to high office, Biden has form. He chose Kamala Harris, remember, to be the first woman US Vice President of colour. But what if Biden elected to choose the same woman — namely, Vice President Kamala Harris — for the Supreme Court? Wouldn’t that be so unimaginative and tokenistic, as to be quite racist? Even a leader as error-prone as Biden wouldn’t do that, would he? Yet in Washington, there are whispers of a cunning plan to shunt Kamala on to the Supreme

Thursday

Tucker Carlson

Read: Tucker Carlson on Ukraine, ethno-nationalism and M&Ms

This week, Tucker Carlson spoke to Freddy Gray on the latest episode of Spectator TV. You can watch their conversation here, or read it below: Freddy Gray: It’s a great honour to be joined by Tucker Carlson, who is the host of Tucker Carlson Tonight, which is a show on Fox News, but it’s also available in the UK or through the Fox News app. We’re going to continue to be talking about Ukraine. And Tucker, I think it’s fair to say you’ve encountered quite a lot of criticism in recent days because as far as I can figure out, you are the only mainstream host who is sceptical of

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

No one should celebrate the decline of America

Where is America? Like an old friend who hasn’t been in touch for years, you wonder if its silence is lost interest or if it just got too busy. America used to be everywhere, the dominant voice in world affairs, a desirable friend and a much-feared enemy. It intervened (and, yes, interfered) whenever it felt its interests or values were threatened. Often its involvement was unwanted and sometimes it didn’t improve matters, but there was a reliable solidity to it, a sturdiness born of military might, prosperity and national self-belief. It could be admired or reviled, but it had to be reckoned with. America shies away from it all now.

Owen Matthews

The phoney war: what’s really going on between Boris and Putin

What a lucky coincidence. At the start of a week that could see the ignominious collapse of Boris Johnson’s premiership, an opportunity to go fully Churchillian has appeared out of the blue. In an unprecedentedly detailed and direct memorandum, the British Foreign Office announced that it had exposed Russian plans to mount a coup in Kiev. Johnson was quick to back the alarming news with a grave warning to Vladimir Putin. ‘The intelligence is very clear that there are 60 Russian battle groups on the borders of Ukraine, the plan for a lightning war that could take out Kiev is one that everybody can see,’ Johnson told reporters on Monday.

Douglas Murray

This government’s greatest failure is economic

‘The main job of a government is to ensure that the economics don’t go wrong.’ So argued an economist friend of mine to me many years back. And I must admit that my first response was uncommonly cynical. ‘Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?’ I replied. ‘You’re a political economist.’ It is to be expected. In the same way a military-defence type might say that the most vital job of government is to be able to defend these islands and project military force. Or Lulu Lytle might explain that the most important thing in government is to get the interiors right. But as the years have gone by, I