Were he magically granted the power of time travel, would it be a moral obligation for David Lammy to kill the baby Trump in his cradle? He did after all describe America’s President-elect as “a racist KKK and Nazi sympathiser” …
Hurricane Helene is America’s Chernobyl moment
Hurricane Katrina looms large in American cultural consciousness. As one of the defining events during George W. Bush’s second term as president, the scale of the devastation that struck Louisiana — combined with the inadequacy of the relief effort — …
China is winning the battle for the Red Sea
Hardly for the first time, remote Arab tribesmen are reshaping the world. Piratical attacks on international shipping by Yemen-based Houthi rebels have created a significant security crisis in the Red Sea. The world’s largest shipping lines have been forced to …
The world should fear 2024
When asked in 2020 to envisage the world after Covid, Michel Houellebecq proclaimed, accurately enough, that “it will be the same, just a bit worse”. As this year slams to a bloody close, it does not take a soothsayer to …
The cursed outposts of America’s empire
There is a distinct literary genre associated with imperial peripheries. In Britain, it is known as Greeneland, the world of Graham Greene — those dusty forgotten outposts where morality is suspended, the political illusions of the metropole are laid bare, …
Will America share Rome’s fate?
The similar destinies of the United States and Rome can at times seem eerie. The three Punic Wars fought between the middle of the third century BC and the middle of the second century BC, constituted the great world wars …
The end of dollar supremacy
In January 1999, in a Washington of bustling bars and soaring stock markets, Bill Clinton rose to deliver his State of the Union address. America was so untroubled by threat or misfortune that it had spent the previous year debating …
The myth of America’s imperial decline
With a New World Order lurking on the horizon, will America play nothing more than a supporting role? That is certainly the impression given by recent reports in the US and beyond. While the Ukraine crisis has helped to renew …