Articles

“The Tories, in their terror, have elevated a cavorting charlatan to the steps of Downing Street.” Those are the words of Sir Max Hastings, writing in the Guardian on June 24. Hastings is the former editor of the Daily Telegraph, the conservative British newspaper that has loyally backed the Tory party for generations. Like many other …

Boris Johnson isn’t the cause of Britain’s unseriousness. He’s the product of it. Read More »

Russian scorn for liberal democracy has a long history, and a certain kind of Russian disdain for the West is nothing new. As far back as 1920, Lenin declared that parliaments were “historically obsolete” and predicted that it was just a matter of time before they disappeared. In 1956, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev famously …

Putin’s attack on Western values was familiar. The American reaction was not. Read More »

Five years after the Chernobyl disaster, in the summer of 1991, the last summer the Soviet Union was still in existence, I visited Ukraine. I trekked out to the 20-mile exclusion zone — it had been cleared of all people after the accident — together with some local environmental activists. We brought Geiger counters, which …

Unlearning the lessons from Chernobyl Read More »

Imagine there was a completely secret, perfectly legal way to bribe a government official. Well, let’s not say “bribe”: Let’s imagine that you could channel money to this official — large amounts of money — and never have to reveal your name. Imagine that this official could accept this money, and then use it to …

Want to secretly, legally send money to Jared Kushner? Here’s how to do it. Read More »

I spent part of the D-Day anniversary this year in London — not at the celebration in Portsmouth, England, but at the Royal United Services Institute’s (RUSI) annual Land Warfare Conference, an equally fitting venue. There were no heads of state, no veterans, no ships; this was, instead, a modern incarnation of the alliance that …

If someone like Trump had been president in 1944, D-Day never would have happened Read More »

Britain is in the grip of an unprecedented political meltdown, a crisis on a scale that was unthinkable even six months ago. The prime minister has resigned and is leaving office within days. Support for the two historic political parties, Labour and Conservative, is at an all-time low. In hastily planned European Parliament elections last …

Britain is in crisis. So why is President Trump coming to visit? Read More »

Elections are always a Rorschach test — people look at the results and see what they want to see. But the European parliamentary elections that took place over the past several days provided an unusually large set of results, upon which an unusually large number of people are placing their conclusions. Those who wanted to …

Amid fractures, Europe is becoming a single political space Read More »

And, just like that, she’s gone. Theresa May, the least successful British prime minister in living memory, has resigned. So much agonizing, so much plotting, so many secret plans to get rid of her over so many months have failed. But following a European parliamentary election that saw her Conservative Party crash to historic lows, …

There’s no point in wishing luck to Theresa May’s successor Read More »

I’ve written a lot, it’s true, about the new far-right parties in Europe in recent months, including their use of the Internet to amplify anger, the conspiracy theories they rely upon and their Russian connections — all of which helps to explain why they may score a big victory in this week’s European Parliament elections. …

Yes, Europe’s far right is gaining strength. But so is the resistance. Read More »

Was it an invitation to cocktails or the start of a far-right conspiracy? In Europe, these days, it can be hard to tell. But this week Austrian media are reporting that the links between Martin Sellner and Brenton Tarrant were rather more extensive. Sellner is the clean-cut leader of the Austrian Identitarian Movement; Tarrant is …

How Europe’s ‘Identitarians’ are mainstreaming racism Read More »