As Britain prepares to host the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow next month, it is pursuing two contradictory policies that undermine its chances of success. On the one hand, it is seeking a unified global response to the climate crisis with nations agreeing to targets for the reduction of their coal and petroleum emissions. But... Read More

The singer Justin Bieber is promoting pre-rolled cannabis joints that he calls “Peaches”, the name of a song from an album. He is doing so in association with a Los Angeles-based company, Palms Partners, that specialises in selling seven-joint packs for $32 (£24) in California and Nevada. “I’m a fan of Palms and what they... Read More

Three years ago, on 2 October 2018, a team of Saudi officials murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The purpose of the killing was to silence Khashoggi and to frighten critics of the Saudi regime by showing that it would pursue and punish them as though they were agents of a... Read More

Isaiah Berlin once denounced somebody for being “that rare thing – a genuine charlatan”. He pointed out that few people, even quacks and imposters, deceive and manipulate all the time. Boris Johnson is a prime example of Berlin’s rare breed, who does just that with his boosterism, false promises and lying. This is attested to... Read More

Trumpism was never quite what it seemed to the rest of the world when it came to America’s actions as opposed to his words. The tone was always belligerent, but Trump went out of his way not to start any wars. As for the slogan “America First”, this was not so much about an isolationist... Read More

Two decades after 9/11, the role of Saudi Arabia in the attack remains in dispute despite unrelenting efforts by the US and Saudi governments to neutralise it as a live political issue. The Saudi Arabia embassy in Washington this week issued a statement detailing its anti-terrorist activities and ongoing hostility to Al-Qaeda. This was briskly... Read More

Two decades after 9/11, the role of Saudi Arabia in the attack remains in dispute despite unrelenting efforts by the US and Saudi governments to neutralise it as a live political issue. The Saudi Arabia embassy in Washington this week issued a statement detailing its anti-terrorist activities and ongoing hostility to Al-Qaeda. This was briskly... Read More

An ill-judged attempt to find out who is to blame for failing to predict the swift victory of the Taliban and the disintegration of Afghan government forces is masking the most significant strategic lessons of the Afghan war. Turning points in history usually come by surprise because, if the powers-that-be of the day could see... Read More

The slaughter of at least 79 Afghan civilians and 13 American servicemen at Kabul airport has propelled the Afghan offshoot of Isis to the top of the news agenda, as it was intended to do. The movement showed with one ferocious assault, at a time and place guaranteeing maximum publicity, that it intends to be... Read More

In 2001 the Taliban blew up the giant 1,500-year-old Buddhist statues in Bamiyan, central Afghanistan to show their defiance of the world and their contempt for all religious beliefs aside from their own fanatical version of Sunni Islam. Another motive was to demonstrate the Taliban’s power over the Shia minority in Afghanistan, mostly members of... Read More

The American way of dealing with a lost war is to withdraw its forces. The Afghan way of dealing with it is to change sides as quickly as possible. The Afghan way of war has created confusion among foreign political and military leaders in the past 20 years, but never more so than during the... Read More

As Taliban fighters enter Kabul, everybody from the US government to local policemen seeks to reach a deal with the new rulers of Afghanistan. Alternatively, they want to flee the country as soon as possible. The Afghan government agreed at the weekend on a transitional government, which will avoid a direct Taliban military assault on... Read More

“Do you remember the tomorrow that never came?” asked a sad piece of street graffiti in Cairo, referring to the fate of the Arab Spring that once promised to overthrow the brutal autocracies that rule the Middle East. That tomorrow moved even further into the future this week when a coup displaced the last surviving... Read More

Boris Johnson turns out to have privately yearned to adopt the same approach as Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro who publicly favoured allowing Covid-19 to rip through his nation. “Stop all this fussing and whining,” Bolsonaro told Brazilians, some 543,000 of whom have died in the epidemic. “How long are you going to go on crying?”... Read More

Over the last week, I have been watching the Taliban sweep across the map of northern Afghanistan, capturing places that I first visited in 2001 at the beginning of the US-backed war. Taliban fighters have seized the main bridge to Tajikistan on the Amu Darya, a river that I crossed on an unwieldy raft a... Read More

Matt Hancock’s bungling effort to conceal his affair with Gina Coladangelo may give hope to some that all government attempts to keep information from the public will be equally futile. Unfortunately, the government has launched a carefully targeted multi-front offensive to hide its activities more effectively. Among measures being considered or already under way are... Read More

“A ruthless little b******,” was President Richard Nixon’s verdict on Donald Rumsfeld as recorded by the Watergate tapes – and everything in his career, supremely successful until the Iraq war, confirmed that Nixon had read him correctly. Rumsfeld relished such tributes to his toughness, but he was above all else a skilful bureaucratic warrior in... Read More

The G7 meeting focused attention on many challenges facing the world, but it did not address the most dangerous threat of them all, which is the transformation of the Republican Party in the US into a fascist movement. When Donald Trump was in the White House there was much debate about whether or not he... Read More

Israel and Hamas have ended their 11-day “war”, but even before the shooting stopped it had transformed the political landscape. The Israel/Palestinian confrontation has shifted away from focusing solely on Gaza to multiple fronts – Jerusalem, the West Bank, Israel itself– and an upsurge in any one of them could start a new round of... Read More

When I first visited Israel in 1976 after spending three years in Northern Ireland working on my second degree, I was struck by the similarities between the situations in the two countries. It is therefore entirely appropriate that on the same day that the Israeli-Palestinian crisis was exploding this week, an inquest in Belfast was... Read More

During the first Cold War between the West and the Soviet Union injustice and human rights increasingly became a central issue. This ought to have been a positive development, but it was devalued by partisan use and the issue turned into an instrument of propaganda. The essence of such propaganda is not lies or even... Read More

I used to meet businessmen in the Middle East who were in a state of high anxiety about their chances of winning a government contract. They were naturally reluctant to spell out the details, but they hinted that their chief worry was whether or not the official they had bribed to get them a contract... Read More

The government is back to its well-tried Inspector Clouseau mode with a public inquiry intended to discredit accusations of institutional racism that has done the exact opposite. This bit of self-inflicted foot-shooting came soon after half-baked efforts to suppress a protest on Clapham Common that guaranteed it worldwide publicity. The twin debacles have significant features... Read More

Asked what he would do if the British army invaded Germany, Bismarck said that he would tell the police to arrest them. In the wake of the latest British defence review, cutting the size of the conventional armed forces, many contemporary world leaders may respond with similar derision to any future threat of British military... Read More

Great dollops of hypocrisy invariably accompany expressions of concern by outside powers for the wellbeing of the Syrian people. But even by these low standards, a new record for self-serving dishonesty is being set by the Caesar Civilian Protection Act, the new US law imposing the harshest sanctions in the world on Syria and bringing... Read More