Foreign Policy
Ambitious, bold and confusing: BBC4’s Corridors of Power – Should America Police the World? reviewed
Narrated by Meryl Streep, Corridors of Power: Should America Police the World? announced the scale of its ambition straight away.…
The West cannot do business with Iran
Salman Rushdie’s would-be assassin might have been a lone wolf. He might have had no contact with military or intelligence…
Has Putin resurrected the West?
I think Putin will have been surprised. I mean: I was surprised. Weren’t you? Not, necessarily, that Ukraine should have…
Two reasons Putin thinks he can weather sanctions
The nature of the Russian attack on Ukraine, striking across the country and not just concentrating on the territory claimed…
Putin must look at the West and laugh
Whatever the West’s response to Russia’s attack on Ukraine’s sovereignty, the crisis demonstrates the limitations of western politics and policy…
Putin may yet resist a full-on invasion
The west is still in the dark on what Vladimir Putin will do next. The Russian military build-up on the…
Ukraine's plight paints a bleak vision of Europe's future
It is tempting to view Vladimir Putin as a Cold War relic: a former KGB officer who hasn’t got over the…
No one should celebrate the decline of America
Where is America? Like an old friend who hasn’t been in touch for years, you wonder if its silence is…
Does the world want America ‘back’?
American foreign-policy strategists used to promulgate doctrines. Now they dream up slogans. ‘America is back’ is the jingle under which…
China is right to laugh at the west
Signs of the enervating weakness of the west’s governing elites aren’t that hard to find but the case of the…
Joe Biden is making the world a more dangerous place
Less than a year into the Biden presidency the world suddenly is a very chaotic place. The hasty and botched…
Biden and Putin have left Britain out in the cold
It would probably be wrong to say that Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin got on like a house on fire.…
MPs question Johnson's plan for Global Britain
Boris Johnson still has a journalist’s ear for snappy phrases — levelling up, an oven-ready Brexit, Global Britain. The PM…
Brexit is about renewal, not just leaving the EU. And there’s no time to waste
None of us can predict the potential fallout from Brexit, good and bad. What began as a vote of confidence…
The great EU power trap
What British ‘influence’ and EU ‘power’ really mean
Why leaving the EU wouldn’t make Britain any more free
‘Out’ campaigners picture leaving the EU as a liberation. It wouldn’t be
Donald Trump's angry America
Welcome to Trump’s America, where greed is great and viciousness beautiful
George Osborne’s epic kowtow to China
Cameron and Osborne have a very clear China policy: do whatever China wants
‘Money, money, money: where is morality?’: the Dalai Lama on David Cameron’s China policy
The Dalai Lama on Cameron’s China policy
Calling all British tourists — Ukraine needs you!
Kiev ‘What the hell’s going to happen to your poor country?’ I ask the man in the flea market not…
It’s Nato that’s empire-building, not Putin
For Nato and the EU as much as for Putin, Ukraine is a question not of virtue but of power and land
Shelling, militiamen and shattered villages: welcome to eastern Ukraine’s ceasefire
Ukraine’s war goes on – in some places now, and soon everywhere
Europeans no longer fear Germany. But do the Germans still fear themselves?
Germans are beginning to recognise that they will not always be able to stay out of military conflicts
Violence, fear, confusion: this is what comes into a leadership vacuum
The old cliché that ‘nothing happens in August’ has again been brutally disproved. From the centenary of the outbreak of…
Sanctions won’t tame Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Talking might
Sanctions won’t help. One thing might
