The police were searching the home of a Libyan terror suspect, Abu Anas al-Liby, in Manchester when they came across an al-Qaeda handbook. The year was 2000, and the handbook — later dubbed the “Manchester Manual” — laid out the …
Trump could be good for Europe
Europe should not be insouciant about the prospect of a second Trump term. As many have pointed out, he would be more radical than the first time round. Everything that has happened since 2020 will have confirmed Trump’s instinct that …
What pandas teach us about sex
One of my favourite childhood toys was a fuzzy little panda, with grippy arms that would cling to a curtain or bedpost. What I didn’t realise back then, as I doodled World Wildlife Fund-style pandas on my schoolbooks, was how …
Gaza will change the future of war
Peter Drucker, the Austrian-American management guru, once said: “The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence — it’s acting with yesterday’s logic.” The unfolding events in Israel are a sharp reminder that we keep making our future …
Liberalism’s sin was born in the Cold War
If the contemporary political scene is strewn with wreckage, it is clearer than ever that “neoconservatism” and “neoliberalism” did much of the damage. More than any other, these two ideologies have afflicted both the centre-right and centre-left, fostering the sense …
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, …
Why we can’t tell the truth
The idea of truth has fallen out of favour in recent years. For one thing, it’s less politically important than it used to be. In the era of the Cold War, what beliefs you held to be true counted for …
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 …
German conscription doesn’t make sense
During his time as a conscript in a West German artillery unit, my father recalls having to clean the barracks toilet with a toothbrush. This was the early Sixties; he had just graduated from a Gymnasium, the equivalent of grammar …
Capitalist radicals will shatter the world
“We are back to the enigmatic pulse-beat of the messianic,” wrote the literary critic George Steiner a few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall. “No economist-pundit, no geopolitical strategist, no ‘Kremlinologist’ or socio-economic analyst foresaw what we are …
The truth about Germany’s levelling up
Whenever Britain starts talking about decentralisation, Germany is reliably trotted out as a shining example of how to do it right. In 2004, for instance, the Guardian’s Matthew Tempest called Germany “perhaps the most advanced example of decentralised government”. And …
Has East Germany given up on the West?
When I started working at Berliner Zeitung two years ago, the staff were putting together a dossier on the East-German experience to commemorate the 30th anniversary of reunification. It seemed like the natural thing to do: the newspaper had been …
Vladimir Putin’s failed strategy
As the first 250 days of Russia’s war in Ukraine have proved again, the logic of strategy is paradoxical. It has never been linear, as in the Roman Si vis pacem para bellum: if you want peace prepare for war. …
Who will stop Putin from going nuclear?
In the early hours of 26 September 1983, Stanislav Petrov, a 44-year-old Lieutenant Colonel in a Soviet Air Defence command centre outside of Moscow, was covering for a sick colleague when an alarm when off. According to Soviet satellites, five …
Why Russia rewrote Lord of the Rings
“Here, our only way is to withstand the onslaught of Mordor,” declared the Ukrainian Minister of Defence in early March. “The area is free of orcs,” another Ukrainian official reported some months later. Meanwhile, President Zelenskyy pleaded that Ukraine not …