When Kim Seungeun first visited North Korea, he saw a barren land devastated by famine, its trees stripped by people desperate to heat their homes. He can still picture the corpses floating down the Tumen River on its border with …
Some Good Things Happened Today – #NewWorldNextWeek
This week on the New World Next Week: Xi meets Biden at the Dynasty house as San Fran gets cleaned out; the EU unveils its new digital ID; and some good things happened this week, too!
The post Some Good …
America and China should kiss and make up
If Presidents Xi and Biden have one thing in common, it’s that both desperately need a historic win. In the 23 years since Bill Clinton welcomed China into the World Trade Organization, the aura of the two nations’ relationship has …
Will Israel-Hamas cause a world war?
As Israel continues to mourn and Gaza continues to be turned into rubble, many in the Middle East are coming to a grim realisation: that things could soon become much, much worse. Huge tectonic shifts now threaten to rupture the …
The colonial hypocrisy of Japan
Because the first half of the 20th century is thought of in the West as an era of imperial decline, it’s easy to forget that, in these decades, there was one nation whose empire was fast expanding. Japan was on …
The week Hamas reinvented horror
Israel and Gaza are a Pathé newsreel of violence. Atrocity mounts upon atrocity. Blood smeared on gristle. Festivals mottled with corpses. Women dragged off to be raped and killed. And, now, perhaps the ultimate taboo. “This is the most difficult …
The myth of Chinese imperialism
When President Xi Jinping first announced his plan to revive the ancient “silk road” between Europe and China in a speech in Kazakhstan 10 years ago, Western leaders paid little notice. There was no indication that the man on stage …
Joe Biden’s billion-dollar oil mistake
One of the many ironies of the Just Stop Oil movement is that, for the past year, their protests have been positively correlated with the price of oil. If you were tempted to indulge in a little schadenfreude, you might …
Will we execute the Russian oligarchs?
As the war was starting in the early hours of February 24, 2022, when the CIA was forecasting Kyiv’s imminent fall and a quick victory for Moscow, a wealthy Russian friend mailed me for my views. His own were conveyed …
The paranoia behind China’s spy war
The revelation that a parliamentary researcher was arrested in March on suspicion of being a Chinese spy has sent Westminster “reeling” and left the British political establishment in “shock”. Or that, at least, is the impression offered by London’s news …
China isn’t as strong as you think
You wouldn’t have guessed from Narendra Modi’s beaming smile after the G20 last weekend that the global economy was running out of steam. The latest IMF forecast projects it to expand by 3% this year, down from the 3.5% anticipated …
An Arctic war is coming
In a land of extremes, nowhere in the Arctic does the temperature oscillate more wildly than the tiny settlement of Fort Yukon in north-eastern Alaska. This village — of a few hundred residents belonging to the indigenous Gwich’in community, and …
The dismantling of the Chinese mind
When retired spy Peter Wright announced the existence of Spycatcher, his astoundingly indiscreet MI5 expose, in 1985, Margaret Thatcher’s government tried to block its publication in Australia. When that failed, it banned English newspapers from reporting on Wright’s allegations, including …
The dawn of the Brics World Order
Last week’s Brics summit was supposed to herald the dawn of a new world order. It would announce the end of the American era and the rise of another, this time belonging to developing nations. It would even, according to …
Anarchy ended our imperial dream
It’s 1994 and Robert D. Kaplan is in China’s Xinjiang Province, home to 11 million Turkic Uyghur Muslims whom the world now knows as the Uyghurs. He soon learns they are “trapped in a grip of surveillance and brutal repression …
