Us politics

When President George W. Bush invaded Mesopotamia in 2003, everybody laughed at Comical Ali, the bespectacled Iraqi information minister who kept insisting that the American “rats” were doomed as Saddam Hussein’s regime collapsed around him. The world moved on. Iran is not Iraq, as President Donald Trump’s supporters are so fond of saying, and Bush-era “forever wars” are no more. Plus, these days the comedy communications come directly from the Commander-in-Chief. At the weekend, as missiles rained across the Middle East, Trump’s cabinet officials mostly avoided attention-grabbing interviews. The boss, however, embarked on his own heroic PR campaign. Taking questions from just about any reporter who happened to call, he

For the Democrats, the mounting furor over forcibly separating children from their parents at the border offers a golden opportunity before the midterm elections to tar Donald Trump as a heartless autocrat, a modern-day Baron Bomburst ruling over Vulgaria with his very own Child Catcher. Do a Caratacus Potts and Truly Scrumptious lurk in the wings to liberate the imprisoned children? Or will Trump continue to lock ‘em up? Both Republicans and Democrats are protesting the policy. Family values has been at the core of the GOP, particularly for its evangelical wing. This represents a repudiation of it. Franklin Graham thus denounced Trump’s move on the Christian Broadcasting Network as

The reviews are coming in for Donald Trump’s performance in Singapore and they aren’t pretty. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times says Trump was ‘hoodwinked’. Ari Fleischer, the former press spokesman for George W. Bush, says ‘This feels like the Agreed Framework of the 90s all over again. NK gave its word to abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons. They never intended to keep their word. And then they broke it.’ And Bruce Klingner, a former CIA analyst now at the Heritage Foundation, says ‘This is very disappointing. Each of the four main points was in previous documents with NK, some in a stronger, more encompassing way. The denuke

Donald Trump is following through on his threat—or promise, as his voters see it—to impose steep tariffs on foreign goods in the name of supporting American industry, starting with levies of 25 per cent on steel and 10 per cent on aluminium imports. Allies and neighbors that had been granted temporary exemptions are now set to feel the brunt of the tariffs: Canada is America’s leading source of foreign steel, and Mexico and the European Union will also feel the pain. They’re all threatening to retaliate, and the press is calling this a trade war. If this is a war, it’s one the United States will win. The thing to

So much for the “World Peace” that Donald Trump bragged he would create at the June 12 Singapore summit. In a wildly inappropriate letter that veered between a bullying and lachrymose tone, Trump bowed to the inevitable in canceling the summit with Kim Jong-un. He had to do it before Kim did. Already Kim had the upper hand. Trump’s impetuous decision gave the Supreme Leader, as the administration had taken to calling him, the validation the regime was seeking for decades. Now it will not be back to the future. South Korea isn’t going to readopt a tough posture of “maximum pressure” toward the North. Score one for Kim. But

In a culture war you can’t be too picky about who your friends are, even less your celebrities.  The stars never come out for President Donald Trump, not during his campaign and certainly not at his inauguration. Where President Obama danced an elegant waltz while Beyoncé sang At Last and Stevie Wonder, Puff Daddy and Sting looked on, Trump’s big moment was accompanied by the crooning of Erin Boehme (me neither).  Suddenly, things have changed. Kanye West – the rapper whose global celebrity is still juggernaut-sized despite not having released any decent music since 2007 – has done the previously unthinkable: he’s started tweeting pro-Trump messages.  Unsurprisingly, West’s tweets – which have included a picture of himself wearing a Make America Great Again cap personally signed by the

Celebrity apologies are all the rage. Such is the power of Twitter, that stars without round-the-clock PR surveillance and teams of media advisors will often find themselves in hot water. This week, it’s pop-country singer Shania Twain who has fallen foul of the perpetually offended. Why? Twain had the audacity to talk about supporting Trump in an interview with the Guardian. “I would have voted for him because, even though he was offensive, he seemed honest”, she said. “Do you want straight or polite? Not that you shouldn’t be able to have both. If I were voting, I just don’t want bullshit. I would have voted for a feeling that it

‘The whole of the Balkans,’ Otto von Bismarck said, ‘is not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.’ He was right, until he was wrong. Times changed, and so did the map. In 1914, with Bismarck gone and no one to restrain the Kaiser, terrorism in the Balkans sparked a world war. How much of Iraq was worth the bones of the thousands of Americans who died in Iraq? Only in the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq did the United States turn an enemy state into an ally. How much of Syria is worth the bones of a single US Marine? None of it, because time and the map

In his inimitable fashion, President Trump has put Russia on notice that the era of playing kissy-face with the Kremlin has come to an abrupt halt. “Get ready Russia,” he announced. It’s bombs away for the Trump administration. The Bolton doctrine has now become the Trump doctrine. Trump’s tweet is being decried as taunting Vladimir Putin but that is what he does best. Trump is turning foreign policy into a game show, complete with real warfare. Maybe he will conduct Twitter polls asking where he should bomb next. Putin, you could say, has run into his doppelgänger and then some. None of this should really come as a surprise. Trump

The Syrian civil war is in its endgame, and the ‘political solution’ that the leaders of the Western democracy talk about is in sight. That is one meaning of the appalling images from the chemical weapons attack on Eastern Ghouta. In 2011, Western intelligence agencies unanimously declared that Bashar al-Assad was finished, and that it was only a matter of time before he fell. Today, Assad, with massive Russian and Iranian support, has regained control over most of Syria. After the chemical attack on Eastern Ghouta, Arab news sites claimed that the Jaish-el-Islam militia had announced that it was willing to negotiate a ceasefire. This is another meaning to be

Oh America, what have you done to your kids? Consider David Hogg, the 17-year-old survivor of last month’s massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida and now omnipresent media agitator for tighter gun-control laws in the US. That young Mr Hogg’s instant reaction to being criticised by a news anchor was to whip up a virtual mob to try to have her sacked is a terrifying testament to the new intolerance among America’s young. We are starting to see what the cult of self-esteem and the ideology of the Safe Space have wrought: a new generation that cannot handle criticism; which is positively allergic to divergent views;

Another massive America news blizzard yesterday: Trump lawyer quits, tariffs tariffs tariffs, stock-market slide, former alleged mistresses of the President speaking out, McMaster out (finally), Bolton in (finally). And then, as a night cap, the Senate approves a $1.3 trillion spending plan to prevent a government shutdown. The Bolton news has, so far, been the most headline grabbing, even if people in the know — and readers of Spectator USA — have known it was about to happen for some time. Donald Trump has rather sweetly let it be known that he has hired Bolton on the condition he didn’t start any wars: ‘now, now John, don’t you go nuking.’