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Europe’s Inner Demons

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 …

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Dealing With Foreigners …

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 …

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A Clash Of Symbols

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 …

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I Don’t Want this Sunak: Don’t You Have a Better Model?

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 …

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Peter Pan goes to Ukraine

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 …

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The Age of Amorality

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 …

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Renowned Russian Academic Karaganov: China Is The Main External Resource For Our Internal Development, An Ally And Partner For The Foreseeable Future

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 …

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Southern Comfort in the Middle East

Emerging countries in the “global South” are resisting Western narratives on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which isn’t such a bad thing. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva created controversy last Sunday, while attending the African Union summit, when he stated, “What’s happening in the Gaza Strip isn’t a war, it’s …

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Iran’s Difficult Choices

As Tehran moves toward consolidating its regional power, will it agree to ultimately disarm its Arab allies? Can it afford not to? Reports in recent weeks as the Gaza war continues indicate that Iran has asked its allies throughout the Middle East to pause their attacks against U.S. forces, fearing …

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War is Bad for You…and the Economy

Joe Biden wants you to believe that spending money on weapons is good for the economy. That tired old myth — regularly repeated by the political leaders of both parties — could help create an even more militarized economy that could threaten our peace and prosperity for decades to come. …

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