Last month, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves travelled to the United States to present Labour’s new economic policy strategy, dubbed “securonomics”. If you think it’s strange for a party to unveil its economic manifesto in front of a foreign audience rather …
South Africa’s infinite humiliation
Olive Schreiner, the South African author of The Story of an African Farm, surveyed her Edwardian society as an impoverished exile in London in a letter to a lifelong friend, John X Merriman. “A dead pall rests over the whole …
Why did USAID fund the Wuhan lab?
Dwight Eisenhower’s final public address as president is best-remembered for his warning about the rise of the military-industrial complex. But contained within his speech was another stark prophecy, one which has largely been forgotten yet remains just as significant. The …
The capitalists are revolting over China
After marshalling Europe in its proxy war against Russia, America is now determined to repeat this success against China. Here, the consequences for Europe could be even more significant than the economic shock of the past year. Yet, despite a …
What Xi can learn from Tsar Nicholas
As Europe was rocked by uprisings and revolutions during the 1830s and 1840s, one nation remained unaffected, secure in the grip of its authoritarian ruler. Russia’s Tsar Nicholas I watched while groups as disparate as English Chartists and Polish nobility …
Kissinger’s final warning
How one chooses to celebrate Kissinger’s Century depends on where you sit in the “Kissinger wars”. To his detractors, Henry Kissinger was an imperialist who pursued US global supremacy with unmatched ruthlessness and cynicism. To his supporters, he was a …
Germany’s car industry has a libido problem
Growing up as a German kid in Britain in the Seventies and Eighties, one of the things that left a lasting impression on me during our annual visit to my German grandparents was sitting in the back of their Mercedes …
Will America win from de-dollarisation?
The most important element in the debate over the utility of Western sanctions against Russia, is also the most ignored. The sanctions regime mostly comprises of restrictions that have been deployed before, such as export bans and the freezing of …
America’s empire is bankrupt
Let’s start with the basics. Roughly 5% of the human race currently live in the United States of America. That very small fraction of humanity, until quite recently, enjoyed about a third of the world’s energy resources and manufactured products …
The Dalai Lama’s greatest failure
Why does Buddhism get a free pass among religion’s cultured despisers? With the notable exception of the great Christopher Hitchens, who dished it out to all, most of the Western media hold Buddhism generally, and the Dalai Lama in particular, …
How Britain lost British Steel
In 1859, a north Lincolnshire landowner named Rowland Winn discovered that under his land lay a valuable commodity. After digging it up, he sold 500 tons of the stuff to a Barnsley ironmaster — and Scunthorpe’s die was cast. This …
The fall of America’s benevolent empire
Exactly 75 years ago, the foundation stone of the transatlantic relationship was laid. After the Marshall Plan was signed into law by President Harry S. Truman, the US would go on to send billions of dollars in economic assistance to …
America’s desperate dysfunction
In his short story A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, Ernest Hemingway describes a deaf old man who likes to sit in the terrace of his favourite cafe late into the evening drinking brandy, much to the frustration of a young waiter …
Elbridge Colby: China is more dangerous than Russia
Since writing Donald Trump’s National Defense Strategy in 2018, Elbridge Colby has become one of the most influential conservative defence thinkers in America. If a Republican wins the presidency in 2024 — whether Trump or DeSantis — he is likely …
Why China’s peace plan for Ukraine will fail
After Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine last year, Beijing’s faithful lieges in Europe were quick to declare that China, perhaps even Xi Jinping himself, was “the key” to ending the war. The truth could not be more different: in …
