Even before the conspicuous absence of weapons of mass destruction shattered the pretext for the Iraq War, it was haunted by black gold. Whether oil motivated George W. Bush and his advisers’ decision to invade was part of the bitter …
Black gold fuelled the Iraq War
Even before the conspicuous absence of weapons of mass destruction shattered the pretext for the Iraq War, it was haunted by black gold. Whether oil motivated George W. Bush and his advisers’ decision to invade was part of the bitter …
Will we ever solve the mystery of MH370?
On March 8, 2014, at around 1:20am, Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 vanished from radar screens just off the coast of Malaysia, never to be seen again. Nine years later, the Boeing 777’s disappearance remains the most astonishing, and terrifying, mystery …
The ghost of Ancient Rome haunts America
The death of Ancient Rome wasn’t so much a collapse as a slow, interminable decay: between the second and sixth centuries AD, its population declined from a million people to just 30,000. Since then, 15 centuries have passed and thousands …
The battle to control America’s mind
“How can a man in a cave out-communicate the world’s leading communications society?” wondered Richard Holbrooke, the dean of the American Diplomatic Corps, in the aftermath of 9/11. What startled Holbrooke, and presumably many of the readers of his Washington …
The myth of China’s military might
The day after Li Keqiang, China’s departing Prime Minister and the last of Beijing’s moderates, called for more market liberalisation to reach this year’s 5% growth target, Xi Jinping responded by announcing a muscle-flexing 7.2% increase in China’s defence spending. …
The corruption of California
I backed into a spot where I could watch both entrances of the Papa Johns Pizza parking lot, punctual for my rendezvous. To be safe, I had first taken a slow cruise through the lot, on the lookout for the …
The martyring of Scott Adams
Picture this: it is 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts, and the Witchfinder General is patrolling the area in search of accused witches. The bodies of the women most recently found guilty are still hanging by their necks from the gallows; tensions …
‘Absolute victory over Russia isn’t possible’
Few people better understand the West’s fraught relationship with Russia than Fiona Hill. Born in Bishop Auckland, she went on to study History and Russian at St Andrews before a scholarship at Harvard took her to America. From there, Hill …
Is the West escalating the Ukraine war?
Barely a day had gone by from Ukraine’s successful request for German Leopard-2 tanks when the government in Kyiv called on Nato countries to yet again prove their solidarity by supplying it with US-made F-16 fighter jets. While military experts …
The fairy-tale allure of conspiracies
On June 28 2001, the notorious conspiracy writer and broadcaster Milton William Cooper gave a broadcast from his hilltop Arizona studio. “Can you believe what you’re seeing on CNN today, ladies and gentlemen?” he asked.
Wasn’t it strange, he suggested, …
How to stop China’s spy balloons
Two things are clear about the four aerostats (“balloons”) that have penetrated the skies above US and Canadian territory in recent days. First, that the US authorities knew almost from the start they were Chinese because they intercepted transmissions of …
Will a Trumpian party destroy the GOP?
Former president Donald Trump has again raised the spectre of a schism in the Republican Party. Last Thursday, he told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that he wouldn’t commit to backing the party’s nominee. This will strike many observers as …
Is Liz Truss really the next Barry Goldwater?
When I last interviewed Liz Truss — in early 2022, when she was just Foreign Secretary — I spotted a copy of Rick Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge on her shelf. The book explores the links between the post-war administrations of …
Maus and the repressive power of Jewish trauma
There was a great three-panel comic that the artist Art Spiegelman did for The Virginia Quarterly Review a while back that neatly encapsulates the dubious if nearly universal centrality of the Holocaust in American Jewish life. In the strip, the …