We appear to be witnessing the emergence of a united front against Washington that extends from the Baltic Sea to the Persian Gulf. There are many reasons why Russia and Iran are not formal allies. Their rulers don’t trust one another; they compete with each other on energy markets; and …

Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani has a wide-ranging agenda on his first state visit to Paris. Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani arrived in Paris Tuesday for his first state visit to France, where he is expected to discuss the Gaza war with President Emmanuel …

I’ve written a lot over the last couple of years about the bizarre complaisance of the western political classes and the Professional and Managerial Caste that serves them, in the face of the disastrous development of the crisis in Ukraine. I’ve cited it as an aspect of their inability to …

If you take a tram out of Vienna and climb to the top of the Leopoldsberg, you can see a series of memorials to the successful defence of Vienna in 1683 against the invading Ottomans. Looking out over the Danube to the East, you can see an awful lot of …

I was going to write about something quite different this week, but I got distracted by a number of stories criticising the diplomacy of the US and the EU, especially towards China. I was also struck by several people expressing scepticism about my comment that in 2014 Merkel and Hollande …

Living through the Cold War wasn’t without its moments of anxiety, and even fear: there were times when you went to bed wondering if you would wake up a radioactive crisp in the morning. Yet for all the angst and the serial crises, there was actually something quite comforting about …

People often talk about the current political crisis in the West in antiseptic and impersonal terms: the end of the Tory Party, the decline of neoliberalism, the strengthening of the extreme Right, and so on. But ideologies, parties and tendencies don’t have agency: people have agency. So let’s look at …

The infantilisation of western culture over the last generation or so is an accepted and frequently-discussed reality. But I believe that it has had much more of an impact on western politics than we realise, and that it explains a good part of the Ukraine shambles. Here’s why. A Saturday …

Can America Save the Liberal Order Through Illiberal Means? “How much evil we must do in order to do good,” the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1946. “This, I think, is a very succinct statement of the human situation.” Niebuhr was writing after one global war had forced the victors …

On February 21, 2024, renowned Russian academic Sergey Karaganov published an analysis, titled “An Age of Wars? Article Two. What Is to be Done,” which is the second part of an article published a month earlier in the same media outlet, Russia in Global Affairs.[1] In the following analysis, Karaganov …