When it gathered in Strasbourg on Tuesday to condemn “the extensive and often virulent attacks on the rights of LGBTI people”, the Council of Europe singled out a small collection of the most inhospitable countries. It contained the usual suspects …
How the EU betrayed Ukraine
Cast your mind back to February 2014 — and the dramatic conclusion to the Euromaidan protests in Kyiv. Given the choice between alignment with Brussels or Moscow, there was no doubt as to where the crowd’s sympathies lay.
On the …
How Biden can defeat China
In 1930, John Dos Passos wrote that America is many things: it is a “slice of a continent”, “the world’s greatest river valley”, and “a set of bigmouthed officials with too many bank accounts”. “But mostly,” he wrote in The …
How Macron manipulates Europe
France — in reality, Emmanuel Macron — has taken up the presidency of the EU, or “our Europe”, as he calls it. He set the scene with a typically magniloquent speech to the European parliament, meeting symbolically (as the French …
Inside the surreal Dutch lockdown
Amsterdam
Sitting respectfully in our ‘pews’, we put our hands together… and clap. This is not a service but a comedy night. And Amsterdam’s newest ‘church’ is really a theatre for debate and cultural centre in disguise. Incensed by the …
The impotence of the French Left
The Communist candidate in the French presidential elections is a calm, likeable man called Fabien Roussel. Last week, he made an unremarkable statement: “A good wine, a good piece of meat, a good cheese; that’s what French Gastronomy is all …
Europe is blind to the next jihadi threat
It’s been a while since Isis staged a major attack on the West. Occasionally the group’s degraded propaganda organs will try and claim one, but even that is less common nowadays. Still, just because Isis central isn’t orchestrating mass murder …
Ernst Jünger: our prophet of anarchy
With its modern themes of detachment and alienation, the recent revival of Ernst Jünger’s early work by the internet dissident Right is an understandable urge. When I was a younger man, Jünger’s Storm of Steel, his hallucinatory account of …