Us politics

Monday

Daniel DePetris

The EU’s desperate bid to keep the Iran deal alive isn’t working

The European Union finds itself in a bind. Donald Trump’s reintroduction of sanctions against Iran has left European diplomats desperately scrambling to salvage twelve years of nuclear diplomacy. On Friday, Jean-Claude Juncker underlined the EU’s commitment to keeping the deal alive, saying that ‘Europeans must keep their word and not give in to a change of mood, just because others are doing so’. The EU has its work cut out, but is using every tool in its arsenal to prevent Trump from undoing its efforts. A blocking statute previously levied in the 1990s has been updated and re-initiated, allowing European companies doing business with Iran to recover damages in court. Last month, Brussels

Daniel McCarthy

Brett Kavanaugh and the death of white liberalism

This article was originally published on Spectator USA. With the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court has a solidly conservative majority for the first time since the New Deal. Just how conservative this new majority is remains to be seen: Chief Justice John Roberts disappointed the Republican right when he voted to uphold the legality of Obamacare in 2012. But if Roberts is no Antonin Scalia (the paragon of what most conservatives look for in a justice), he is no Anthony Kennedy, either. And with two of the four liberal justices on the court in their 80s, the prospect of a 6-3 or even 7-2 conservative majority is not

D Reilly

Is Taylor Swift the Democrats’ answer to Trump?

I understand how America’s Republican teens will be feeling this morning, which is to say very hurt indeed. Taylor Swift has revealed herself to be a Democrat and the news will take some getting over. For years the singer had been the slam dunk winner in any argument about the impossibility of being both culturally relevant and right-leaning in modern America. Yes, the Dems have pretty much every star of stage and screen behind their cause, but the right had Swift, the biggest star on the planet, the ace in the pack, on theirs. Take that, libs! Why did the right think Swift was on their side? Well, because back

Monday

Ross Clark

Why Trump’s new trade deal shouldn’t be a surprise

The news that the US, Canada and Mexico have agreed a new trade deal, USMCA, may have caused a little surprise this morning among Trump critics. Isn’t the US President supposed to be leading the world into a new dark age of protectionism, sparking a 1930s-style depression as he puts the interests of a few blue collar workers in rustbelt industries above the health of the US and global economies as a whole? Yet for anyone who has been following Trump’s methodology the news shouldn’t really have caught them unawares. Trump, it is true, was elected thanks in part to promises to protect US workers from unfair foreign competition. Yet

Friday

Dominic Green

Republicans must drop Kavanaugh before it’s too late

Remember how the Democrats tried to block Neil Gorsuch’s nomination to the Supreme Court by dredging up accusations of sexual assault? You don’t, because they didn’t. The Democrats played dirty politics against Gorsuch, but there were no allegations of sexual assault about Gorsuch, because there was no smoke from which to fan a fire. So Democratic attempts to block Gorsuch’s nomination turned on his judicial record. Now consider the considerable amount of smoke summoned by Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination. I reckon I might have been the first and only voice in a right-of-centre publication to say that Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations against Kavanaugh had enough of the ring of truth to render Kavanaugh

Saturday

Steerpike

Watch: Siblings turn on congressman in brutal attack ad

In recent weeks, Westminster has given Washington a run for its money when it comes to unpredictability in politics. However, there are some areas in which the US still leads the way in suprises – namely attack ads. A political advert to support the campaign of Democrat David Brill running for Congress in Arizona has gone viral thanks to a plot twist at the end. In it, six speakers explain why they are unhappy with the sitting congressman, the Republican Paul Gosar: ‘If he actually cared about people in rural Arizona, I bet he’d be fighting for social security, for better access to healthcare,’ says ‘Jennifer, medical interpreter’.   The twist?

Thursday

Douglas Murray

What happens when Steve Bannon is given a platform?

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the interesting question of whether or not the former chief strategist to the President of the United States is too fringe a figure to be allowed to speak in public. A lot of very prominent people seem to think that Steve Bannon shouldn’t be given a platform. And among two venues to have recently invited him, the New Yorker promptly disinvited him from their festival under fire from political heavyweights including former ‘funny man’ Jim Carrey. By contrast, the Economist managed to hold firm, surviving the withdrawal of a British blogger and going ahead as planned with their live interview. The video

Christopher Buskirk

Donald Trump is a free trade hero

President Trump has stated on numerous occasions that he wants to increase trade. Under his wise rule, he assures us, American trade will thrive. It will be Yuge! Why would anyone doubt that desire? He’s a businessman and businessmen want to do more business not less. In pursuit of this, Trump has also said that that he favours a low or no tariff world, but that it must be based on reciprocity – an easily understandable form of fairness but one which has earned Trump scorn from right, left, and centre. The subject came up at a dinner I attended recently. It was mostly populated by right of centre journalists

Wednesday

Christopher Buskirk

Donald Trump is a free trade hero | 19 September 2018

President Trump has stated on numerous occasions that he wants to increase trade. Under his wise rule, he assures us, American trade will thrive. It will be Yuge! Why would anyone doubt that desire? He’s a businessman and businessmen want to do more business not less. In pursuit of this, Trump has also said that that he favours a low or no tariff world, but that it must be based on reciprocity – an easily understandable form of fairness but one which has earned Trump scorn from right, left, and centre. The subject came up at a dinner I attended recently. It was mostly populated by right of centre journalists

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

What happens when Steve Bannon is given a platform? | 18 September 2018

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the interesting question of whether or not the former chief strategist to the President of the United States is too fringe a figure to be allowed to speak in public. A lot of very prominent people seem to think that Steve Bannon shouldn’t be given a platform. And among two venues to have recently invited him, the New Yorker promptly disinvited him from their festival under fire from political heavyweights including former ‘funny man’ Jim Carrey. By contrast, the Economist managed to hold firm, surviving the withdrawal of a British blogger and going ahead as planned with their live interview. The video

Tuesday

Brendan O’Neill

Steve Bannon and the sanitisation of public life

Well done, New Yorker, you have just empowered the mob. You have boosted the moral standing and arrogance of those 21st-century offence-takers who believe certain people should not be allowed to speak in public. In disinviting Steve Bannon from your ideas festival at the behest of irate tweeters and arrogant celebs, you have sent a depressing message to society: that it is always worth agitating for censorship because eventually you will succeed. Eventually the targets of your censorious ire will cave in and give you what you want: a sanitised public sphere in which there won’t be so much as a peep from people whose ideas we find difficult or

Friday

Ross Clark

Donald Trump’s WTO threat shows he is becoming predictable

The obvious reaction to Donald Trump’s threat to withdraw the US from the World Trade Organisation (WTO) is that it isn’t exactly going to help the Brexiteers’ cause. For months they have been arguing that everything will be okay in the event of a ‘no deal’ Brexit – we will simply trade under WTO rules. And then comes along the leader of the world’s largest economy and says he wants out of that organisation, threatening its existence, or at least its position as the undisputed arbiter of global trade. But then another thought springs to mind, with even more severe repercussions for the world: Donald Trump is becoming predictable. We

Sunday

Freddy Gray

WATCH AGAIN: John McCain’s brilliant concession speech in 2008

I didn’t much like John McCain’s politics. He never saw a military intervention he didn’t like. He was bi-partisan in all the wrong ways. He was a hothead, well-suited to hawkish Republican Washington, but not to 21st-century America. His admirers elevated his heroics as a war veteran to distract from his failings as a statesman. But McCain, who has just died after a long battle with brain cancer, had honour and grace. He stood against torture despite his instinctive ruthlessness in foreign policy. He could also be insightful and funny. Perhaps his greatest moment, for me, was his concession speech after losing to Barack Obama in 2008. His audience booed

Thursday

Sam Leith

Books Podcast: How the 2008 crash changed the world

In this week’s Books Podcast, I’m joined by the economic historian Adam Tooze, author of the new book Crashed: How A Decade of Financial Crises Changed The World. How are the subprime collapse in the US and the Eurozone crisis that came after linked? Why did a cartel of mega-wealthy businessmen do a good job at rescuing the US from disaster, and a group of well-intentioned political technocrats make such a hash of it in Europe? And how is the Balance of Financial Terror between the US and China holding up these days? Here’s some stuff you won’t learn from Michael Lewis… 

Wednesday

Paul Wood

Trumpworld is spinning out of control

Donald Trump’s Twitter feed was oddly silent as the news came that his former campaign manager and his former lawyer were going to jail. Perhaps his staff have finally seized control of his android phone. Perhaps his lawyers have convinced him that every time he reaches for it to tweet on anything relating to the Russia investigation, he is dancing on the edge of a precipice, with Robert Mueller just waiting to push him off. Whatever the reason, this was the equivalent of Trump entering a stunned, catatonic state, while his world spins out of control around him. The President merely tweeted to note that he was going to a

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

The sordid reality of the Trump presidency

‘How ya like me now?’ tweeted Stormy Daniels last night — and, whatever else you might think about a porn star using her alleged extra-marital affair with a president to get rich, it’s hard to deny that her question has a point. She hasn’t been vindicated, exactly, but it’s no longer possible for even Donald Trump’s admirers to dismiss her story as the baseless claims of a fame hungry whore. Yesterday, Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, pleaded guilty to buying the silence of two women through illegal payments that violated campaign finance laws. He told the judge at the United States District Court in Manhattan that the payments were made

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump’s presidency has imploded – in less than two years | 22 August 2018

This is the beginning of the end of the Donald Trump presidency. The double whammy of Michael Cohen, his former fixer, pleading guilty on eight counts, including illegal hush money payments, or, to put it more precisely, campaign contributions, to two women at Trump’s personal direction for ‘the purpose of influencing the election,’ coupled with the conviction of his former campaign manager Paul Manafort on eight counts, constitute a mortal blow to his already tottering presidency. It is also likely to administer the coup de grace to Republican hopes for the November midterm elections and to complicate the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh. The calculations of Senate majority leader

Thursday

Daniel DePetris

Angela Merkel prepares for a rematch with Vladimir Putin

German chancellor Angela Merkel has a lot on her plate. In addition to keeping her rabble-rouser junior coalition partners in the tent, constantly looking over her shoulder for the increasingly renegade Horst Seehofer, and trying to come up with a European solution to the headache that is illegal migration, Merkel will be sitting down with Russian president Vladimir Putin this weekend to talk state business at the Meseberg. Merkel and Putin have a lot to discuss. The war in Ukraine’s Donbas region continues at a steady clip, notwithstanding the short-term ceasefires that usually collapse after a few hours or (if one is lucky) days. Bashar al-Assad, Moscow’s man in Damascus, is

Tuesday

Daniel DePetris

Has Donald Trump finally met a European leader he can work with?

Donald Trump has finally met a European leader he can stand for more than a moment: Italy’s bookish new premier, Giuseppe Conte. The former law professor, who was plucked out of obscurity by 5Star’s Luigi Di Maio and the League’s Matteo Salvini to be the nominal consensus pick of Rome’s anti-establishment government, is the kind of European Trump can do business with. Or at least that is Trump’s hope. For the brash billionaire, Europe has been nothing but a nuisance. Despite his proclamations of having a terrific relationship with Germany’s Angela Merkel and a kinship with France’s Emmanuel Macron, it is not difficult to see through the facade. Relations between

Wednesday

Daniel DePetris

How May, Macron and Merkel failed to tame Trump

To conclude that relations between the United States and the Europeans are in quite a chaotic and unpredictable state is like saying German Chancellor Angela Merkel misses the good old days of Barack Obama and John Kerry. It’s so obvious that it doesn’t need repeating. There are a whole slew of foreign policy and economic issues that have shaken the U.S.-European relationship out of its traditional complacency. Steel and aluminum tariffs, Europe’s anaemic defense spending, the Iran nuclear deal, Brexit, trade imbalances, and Trump’s style of undiplomatic diplomacy have all thrown the continent for a loop. Trump appears to take pleasure in berating America’s European allies and watching them squirm;