America

Today

George Young

The French sculptors building the new Statue of Liberty

At a miserable-looking rally for the centre-left Place Publique in mid-March, its co-president, MEP Raphaël Glucksmann, made international headlines calling for the Trump administration to return the Statue of Liberty, gifted by the French in 1886 to commemorate the Declaration of Independence: ‘It was our gift to you. But apparently you despise her. So she will be happy here with us.’ The predictably sensationalist headlines dissipated in a flurry of Republican outrage against ‘the low-level French politician’ as quickly as they had arrived. But Glucksmann’s demand – sincere or not – caught the attention of a group of sculptors who, in their words, have ‘taken up the dream of civilisation’

Thursday

Douglas Murray

What else could Israel do?

Over the past few days British readers have been able to enjoy a number of hot takes on the situation in the Middle East. First, there have been all the politicians, such as the Scottish First Minister John Swinney, who have called for our government to step in and ‘de-escalate’ the conflict between Israel and Iran. But even leaving aside whether the mullahs in Tehran can be swayed by Britain or Scotland, ‘de-escalation’ is the only surefire way to ensure that they continue to pursue a nuclear capability. Elsewhere, the BBC has been playing a blinder. When the conflict began, it decided that its audience would be well served by

Toby Young Toby Young

Has Trump been taking inspiration from the royals?

One of the objections to the military parade in Washington, DC last Saturday – supposedly to mark the 250th birthday of the US Army – is that it was a breach of democratic norms. The real reason it took place, say Donald Trump’s critics, was because he wanted to celebrate his 79th birthday with a display of military might – which is ‘what dictators do’, according to a general who advised him against it. Trump’s opponents gleefully pointed out that the number of attendees – around 200,000 – was dwarfed by the millions who took part in simultaneous ‘No Kings’ protests in dozens of American cities, a reference to his

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

Has deporting illegals become illegal?

The circus around Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia – whose full name the New York Times likes to trot out as if citing an old-school English aristocrat – speaks volumes about the immigration battle roiling the US. Our friend Kilmar is what we fuddy-duddies insist on calling an illegal immigrant. The Salvadoran crossed clandestinely into the US in 2012. As for what he’s done since, that depends on whom you ask. According to his GoFundMe page, Kilmar is a ‘husband, union worker and father of a disabled five-year-old’. Left-wing media portray ‘the Maryland man’ – a tag akin to Axel Rudakubana’s ‘a Welshman’ – as an industrious metalworker devoted to his

Douglas Murray

How to ruin a city

Why would you choose to make a city crappy? Plenty of cities don’t have much going for them. But when they do, it takes a certain amount of skill to actively wreck them. Take London, for instance. Anyone in charge of our capital needed only to maintain it, if not improve it. Yet in almost a decade as mayor, Sadiq Khan has overseen a decline which is obvious to any resident or visitor. That first sign of rot – the tolerance of minor crime – is everywhere. It might be graffiti on the Tube. Or it might be the fact that it is risky to hold a mobile phone in

Tuesday

Owen Matthews

Who started the Cold War?

Over a few short months after the defeat of Nazism in May 1945, the ‘valiant Russians’ who had fought alongside Britain and America had ‘transformed from gallant allies into barbarians at the gates of western civilisation’. So begins Vladislav Zubok’s thorough and timely study of the history of the Cold War – or, as he nearly entitled the book, the first Cold War. For the themes that underpinned and drove that decades-long global conflict – fear, honour and interest, in Thucydides’s formulation – are now very contemporary questions. ‘The world has become perilous again,’ writes Zubok, a Soviet-born historian who has spent three decades in the West: Diplomacy ceases to

Thursday

Bernard Cornwell

Is the Pope a Marxist?

Charleston, South Carolina H.L. Mencken, long a hero of mine, wrote: ‘Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.’ That surely explains the apparent surge of Americans who have been enquiring into the possibility of emigrating to Britain. I wish them well. I have no wish to leave America myself, but fully understand the motivation causing this surge. It is, of course, because the common people wanted and are receiving Donald Trump good and hard. Years from now, probably when I am gone, a fortunate historian will describe the Trump era in the detail and with the skill

Thursday

Matthew Parris

Kemi shouldn’t play the Trump card

I doubt I’m alone among Spectator readers in feeling a certain slight but nagging discomfort when I hear those on the left in British politics tearing into the present President of the United States. Why so? one asks oneself. Have I a shred of sympathy with this monster? No. Can I do other than deplore the attitudes and personal behaviour of this moral toad? Of course not. Do I for a minute agree with the way he’s handling the presidency – that machine-gun fire of executive orders and constitutional improprieties?’ By no means. Could I by any stretch of the imagination endorse the preposterous policy goals Donald Trump is wont

Thursday

Catriona Olding

My high-speed bus chase

My youngest daughter and her husband moved to New York last October. Three days after they arrived, she tripped on a step and broke her ankle. ‘So annoying, I was wearing such a good outfit, Mumma.’ They didn’t know anyone. In a boot and on crutches she tackled umpteen flights of stairs in search of permanent accommodation, avoided crazy people in the street and faced up to taciturn bank and phone-shop employees. The unfriendliness of the city upset her more than the pain and inconvenience of the break. I couldn’t afford to visit then – so when a friend, American Cathy, who’s got a second home near me in Provence,

Thursday

Henry Hill

Conservatives all over the Anglosphere are paying the price for Trump

It is the great good fortune of Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand to be united by a common language, and a misfortune of even greater magnitude that they share that language with the United States. America is a very different country to the four Commonwealth realms sometimes brigaded together under the ugly acronym ‘Canzuk’. It has a different constitution, a different culture and a very different history. Where for many years the four were partners (if hardly equal partners) in the common project of the Empire, the United States was, from its foundation, a determined and eventually successful enemy of the same. For Conservatives who tend to dream of

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

No one wants American cars

The weekend’s Scunthorpe drama was a distraction from endless chatter about Donald Trump and his tariffs. Perhaps Downing Street’s spinners stage-managed it with that in mind. Or perhaps the heroic tale of shop stewards confronting villainous Chinese managers while rescue teams scoured the horizon for emergency shipments of iron ore and coking coal was a different kind of smokescreen – to hide the fact that British steelmaking has been doomed for decades and what just happened is a job-saving nationalisation that will be a massive drain on public funds for as long as it takes to admit that the last British blast furnaces belong to history. I’m sorry to take

Toby Young Toby Young

Can Trump keep me on side?

I’m in danger of falling out of love with Donald Trump. I was ecstatic when he beat Kamala Harris, delighted with his flurry of executive orders, particularly the one entitled ‘Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports’, and thrilled by his appointment of Elon Musk as head of the Department of Government Efficiency. But his flip-flopping over tariffs and the resulting market turmoil has led to a smidgen of buyer’s remorse. At the end of last week, my pension pot was worth 10 per cent less than it had been a couple of weeks earlier. But then he does something that reminds me of what it is that I like about

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Trump’s tariffs, a theme park for Bedford and a big bill for Big Macs

Home In response to President Donald Trump’s global tariffs, Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, said: ‘This is not just a short-term tactical exercise. It is the beginning of a new era.’ He wrote in the Sunday Telegraph: ‘We stand ready to use industrial policy to help shelter British business from the storm.’ The FTSE100 fell by 4.9 per cent in a day, its biggest such fall since 27 March 2020. The government published a 417-page list of US products upon which Britain could impose retaliatory tariffs after 1 May. Figures from the Office for National Statistics showed that, although in 2023 the UK imported £57.9 billion of goods from

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

Trump shock: is there method behind the madness?

A ‘black swan event’, as defined by the risk analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb in 2007, is a surprise occurrence that has a major impact on the global financial system and is rationalised after the fact as something that ought to have been expected all along. The 9/11 terror attacks are one example, the Covid pandemic another – shocks that rocked the world and made us wonder if freedom works. Since Wednesday last week, however, the gods of the marketplace have been wrestling with a new and more mind-boggling creature: the ‘orange swan’, a cataclysmic Donald Trump-induced happening that is at once entirely predictable and baffling, an event that is rationalised

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Britain needs a Rearmament Isa

The City’s self-styled ‘cheerleader in chief’, Lord Mayor Alastair King, on a recent visit to Beijing and Shanghai found leading Chinese banks keen to expand in London. What with Chinese diplomats also keen to establish a fortress-embassy at Royal Mint Court on the City’s eastern edge, that may ring alarm bells with those who regard Xi Jinping’s neo-Maoist regime as anything but friendly. But as King also observes, ‘the tectonic plates are shifting’. All geopolitical relationships are up for review – though what follows is my own analysis, not the Lord Mayor’s. A previous British visitor to Shanghai, chancellor George Osborne in 2015, declared an urge to be ‘China’s best

The Spectator

Letters: Where to find Britain’s best dripping

Open arms Sir: The latest magazine (29 March) has two references to American military capabilities, from Rod Liddle and Francis Pike. Mr Liddle suggests that the prevalent attitude over there is that we ‘Yerpeans’ should have contributed more to the recent strike on Yemen (‘America first, Europe last’). He may not have known it was RAF tankers which enabled the US fast jets to attack. (This also escaped the Signal group chat.) Mr Pike suggests that the US navy’s carriers are suddenly vulnerable to modern weapons (‘Carriers of bad news’). As an excellent historian, he will concede that commentators have been writing off naval carriers’ effectiveness for decades. He is

Bruce Anderson

The paradox of West Virginia

West Virginia. There is a paradox. A state of natural beauty, glorified by mountains and watered by rivers – including the Shenandoah (surely the most beautiful word in American) – carved out of reluctant nature by hard human labour, then divided by slavery and war, but ending on the Union side – it ought to be an honoured political jurisdiction. But the West Virginians broke away from the rest of Virginia. In its early days, it was governed by cultivated gentlemen, who filled their cellars with fine wine and their libraries with fine books. Yet the way of life which managed this transplant of European civilisation was sustained by slave

Thursday

Douglas Murray

JFK conspiracy theories won’t die

One of the most controversial things that can happen at any American table is to start talking about the JFK assassination and then say: ‘I think Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.’ Thanks to decades of theories, counter-theories and Hollywood movies, a majority of the American public have for many years believed that there was a conspiracy to kill the 35th president. In their view, even if Lee Harvey Oswald was the gunman (which some dispute) then he must have been acting as part of a larger plot involving the CIA, FBI, LBJ, KGB, KKK or KFC. OK, I threw in the last one to check you were still with me.

Nick Newman

How Dr Seuss took on American isolationism

A cartoon is doing the rounds online, critiquing American isolationism and the reluctance to engage with the war in Europe. It lampoons the head-in-the-sand myopia of the America First movement – and feels highly relevant today. But this cartoon isn’t new; it is from 1941. And its targets aren’t Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, but Charles Lindbergh and Joseph Kennedy. The cartoon, while acerbic, has a cosy, familiar quality reminiscent of children’s books – for good reason. It was drawn by Dr Seuss.   He was particularly critical of Lindbergh – an aviator hero, appeaser and possible Nazi sympathiser Long before the Cat donned his Hat and the Grinch stole Christmas,

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Has the Assisted Dying Bill been killed off?

The reported decision to postpone the implementation of the Assisted Dying Bill until 2029 might, one must pray, turn out to be a form of legislative euthanasia. MPs, looking at the process, began to resemble a patient who, having first of all declared his wish to end it all, then begins to worry that it will not be as simple or painless as he had been led to expect. It is one thing to express a fervent wish to release people from unbearable suffering and quite another to frame safe procedures which involve the state, the judiciary and the medical profession in helping people kill themselves. It was a bad