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Simon Tisdall

Simon Tisdall

The Guardian

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Joe Biden’s last-gasp missile decision is momentous for Ukraine – but Putin will retaliate

US president Joe Biden’s last-gasp decision to permit Ukraine to fire western-made, long-range missiles at military targets deep inside Russian...

monday 20

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

Trump, Putin, Xi… Strongmen are at the gate but Europe’s leaders are too busy infighting to notice

Fiddling while Rome burns fairly describes the antics of party leaders in the European parliament last week. The EU is under siege from present-day...

16.11.2024 10

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

Contempt for human rights, trashing allies: the world’s populists are rubbing their hands with glee

Feelings are not the usual focus of a world dominated by macho strongmen, complex geopolitical challenges, wars and disasters. Yet every rule has...

09.11.2024 10

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

Donald Trump is a superspreader for a craziness that has split America in two

Is Donald Trump going mad? It depends how you define the word. But since he’s hoping to be elected US president on Tuesday, it would be handy to...

02.11.2024 90

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

Joe Biden’s big blunder: how the war in Ukraine became a global disaster

Reflecting the instincts of a cold war veteran, Joe Biden’s strategy was familiar: contain the conflict. When the US president spoke in Warsaw in...

26.10.2024 20

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

Netanyahu, the brutal chancer, will keep on bombing, but his brinkmanship may go too far

It’s blindingly obvious Benjamin Netanyahu does not want a ceasefire in Gaza or Lebanon or anywhere else – not yet, at least. The Biden...

22.10.2024 80

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

Kamala Harris has a problem with men. Will misogyny cost her the election?

Will the unsurprising yet significant fact that Kamala Harris is a woman decisively tip the knife-edge US election in Donald Trump’s favour?...

20.10.2024 10

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

A pause for peace is the best the world can hope for in the Middle East’s war without end

So it’s finally happening. The wider Middle East conflict that so many feared is igniting. Almost exactly a year after Hamas’s 7 October terrorist...

05.10.2024 10

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

Donald Trump meets ‘popular guy’ Keir Starmer – cartoon

28.09.2024 20

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

In their inhumanity, conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine offer a shared, brutal vision of the future of war

It’s a golden rule of politics that national leaders do not interfere in other countries’ elections. Tell that to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who jumped...

28.09.2024 60

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

Netanyahu’s lethal bombs will turn Lebanon into another Gaza. He must be brought down now

Benjamin Netanyahu must be stopped. The horror unfolding in Lebanon is another crime, to add to all the others. Are Britain, the US, the UN and...

24.09.2024 100

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

Autumn budget 2024: doom, gloom… and bloom – cartoon

21.09.2024 30

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

Xi Jinping’s ‘gunboat diplomacy’ risks driving his bullied neighbours into enemy hands

Whoever declared that in this world “nothing is certain except death and taxes” plainly led a sheltered life. Some authorities say Benjamin...

21.09.2024 10

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

The world should breathe a sigh of relief that Donald Trump wasn’t harmed in Florida

It’s worthwhile trying to imagine what might have happened had Donald Trump been shot and killed after playing the fifth hole at his Florida golf...

16.09.2024 20

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

In an unheroic age, Putin, Trump and Netanyahu are sick parodies of great men

The 19th-century idea that great men – exceptionally talented, courageous, charismatic individuals – direct and change the course of history by...

31.08.2024 30

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

With Israel’s attack on Lebanon, the prospect of peace is moving even further out of reach

The abrupt, deeply alarming weekend escalation in fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon is exactly what the US, France and Britain have...

25.08.2024 10

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

China’s deadly divide-and-rule tactics in Myanmar risk shock waves across region

Things fall apart, if you let them – and ethnically, religiously, ideologically fractured Myanmar, formerly Burma, has never been a model of...

25.08.2024 30

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

New wars, old wars, famine, panic everywhere. So much for a quiet August

August is the quietest month – to mangle TS Eliot’s verse – or so news editors used to think. Politicians go on holiday, governments shut down,...

10.08.2024 90

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

Israel has all but declared war in the Middle East – a conflict it cannot hope to win

Failure to halt the war in Gaza lies at the heart of the latest lethal savagery in the Middle East. The assassination in Tehran of Hamas’s political...

31.07.2024 80

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

Last Tango in Washington: how sad, sidelined Joe Biden may yet have the last laugh

Imagine an old man sitting by himself in a dingy all-night diner in downtown Washington. He has his back to the window, shoulders hunched, like the...

27.07.2024 10

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

The post-Biden era may be uncertain for the Democrats, but for Trump it will be utterly dismaying

To borrow from Shakespeare, “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.” Joe Biden might have clung on. He could, in his pain and pride,...

22.07.2024 50

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

Pity US voters their choice of leaders. Surely democracy is better than this?

What a shambles! What a shame! With less than four months to go, America’s presidential race, global democracy’s showpiece event, has boiled...

20.07.2024 10

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

Nato should stop seeking new foes and face its main enemy – Moscow

Was this the week Ukraine lost the war? Or to put it another way, the week the west lost Ukraine? Heroic battlefield resistance continued, Ukrainian...

13.07.2024 10

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

America’s big problem is not Biden, it’s the menace to democracy posed by Trump

It wasn’t so much what Joe Biden said, it was how he said it. His voice was weak and shaky, he lost his way, forgot what he was saying. He sounded...

29.06.2024 50

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

The Middle East is drifting leaderless to catastrophe. War is just an airstrike away

When Benjamin Netanyahu flies to Washington next month, he would be advised to avoid British airspace and airports. As a founding party of the...

22.06.2024 10

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

Putin and Kim are the odd couple with a dual mission – cementing a new world order

They make an odd couple. One is smiley-faced and chubby. The other is thin-lipped and scowls a lot. Both are dictators, sinister, brutal and...

19.06.2024 30

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

Rising violence against politicians is an attack on democracy itself

The response of Mette Frederiksen, Denmark’s centre-left prime minister, to being physically assaulted in a Copenhagen street was dignified and very...

15.06.2024 90

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

In thrall to Viktor Orbán and the hard right, Europe is facing its moment of truth

Viktor Orbán was his usual poisonous self, spouting toxic twaddle in true Boris Johnson/Nigel Farage style. Hungary’s hard-right prime minister and...

09.06.2024 40

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

Whatever happens next, the Donald Trump effect will continue to stain politics the world over

As Americans stared at their TV screens early on Thursday evening, listening to the 34 Donald Trump “guilty” court verdicts rolling out one by one...

01.06.2024 90

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

By attacking and undermining the ICC, Israel has proved again it is a state gone rogue

Israel’s international isolation, triggered by revulsion over the large-scale illegal killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, will only deepen...

29.05.2024 100

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

Call to prosecute Netanyahu for war crimes exposes the west’s moral doublethink

Indignant protests by Israeli and US leaders over last week’s decision by the prosecutor of the international criminal court (ICC) to seek Benjamin...

25.05.2024 100

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

Nato’s failure to save Ukraine raises an existential question: what on earth is it for?

Nato’s grand 75th birthday celebration in Washington in July will ring hollow in Kyiv. The alliance has miserably failed its biggest post-cold...

18.05.2024 60

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

There’s one thing standing in the way of a ceasefire: Netanyahu’s refusal to compromise

The latest twists and turns in negotiations to end the war in Gaza appear labyrinthine and confusing. But it’s really not that complicated. Benjamin...

07.05.2024 70

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

Giorgia Meloni and Ursula von der Leyen, the double act that is steering the EU ever rightwards

It’s rare that an Italian prime minister tops the table in Europe. But with Germany’s Olaf Scholz and France’s Emmanuel Macron facing red cards...

04.05.2024 40

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

Civil War is a terrifying film, but Trump: The Sequel will be a real-life horror show

Director, cast and critics all agree: Civil War, the movie depicting America tearing itself to bloody bits while a cowardly, authoritarian president...

27.04.2024 20

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

In breaking their fragile truce, Israel and Iran have opened a Pandora’s box

Israel’s retaliation, when it came, was surprisingly limited. Iran minimised the significance of Friday’s air attacks on a military base near...

20.04.2024 6

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

After Iran’s drone attack on Israel, the world must act: this is a crisis that threatens us all

The missiles and drones that rained destruction on Israel in the early hours of Sunday morning have given Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin...

14.04.2024 90

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

A nagging doubt plagues world leaders wooing India: whose side is Narendra Modi really on?

Suddenly, everyone loves India. But it’s an affair, not a marriage. Whether it lasts depends on the consequences of this week’s watershed...

13.04.2024 20

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

Middle East crisis live Once a relic of the cold war, political assassins are back with a licence to kill

In today’s lawless world, political assassination is the new growth industry – and anyone, famous or not, is a potential victim....

06.04.2024 30

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

Isolated abroad, torn apart at home, Israel must face the future it dreads: a Palestinian state

The catastrophic collapse of the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore was shocking. Local people expressed dismay at the sudden disintegration of a...

30.03.2024 10

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

Putin’s lethally negligent failure can’t be covered up. The Moscow attack leaves him weaker than ever

Each time Vladimir Putin messes up, the same question is asked: will it make any difference? Last week’s terrorist attack on the Crocus City concert...

25.03.2024 70

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

Observer comment cartoon Rishi Sunak ‘bounces back’ – cartoon

24.03.2024 10

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

Lies, ideology and repression: China seals Hong Kong’s failed-state fate

So farewell, Hong Kong. The vibrant, pulsating city-state that grew, under British rule, into one of the world’s great financial, business, cultural...

23.03.2024 10

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

The pope’s white flag was pitiful, but just how will the war in Ukraine end?

Pope Francis’s suggestion that Ukraine’s leaders should admit defeat, find “the courage to raise the white flag” and negotiate a halt to the...

16.03.2024 10

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

The manifesto Britain needs The global outlook is perilous. But here are three things Labour can do to make the world a safer place

An incoming Labour government will face a daunting array of foreign and defence policy challenges, many of which are beyond the ability of any one...

12.03.2024 10

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

Germany’s reputation for decisive leadership is in tatters when Europe needs it most

National stereotypes are unfair, insulting – and strangely reassuring. It’s somehow good to know in an unpredictable, fast-changing world that...

09.03.2024 30

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

The US as defender of democracy won’t win votes. Donald Trump gets it, but Joe Biden doesn’t

If Joe Biden believes his record as a world leader will help him get re-elected in November, he may have another think coming. His term began with...

02.03.2024 20

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

A failing British nuclear arsenal reliant on the goodwill of Donald Trump? It’s a terrifying thought

Donald Trump and nuclear weapons are a scary mix. As president, he greatly expanded the US nuclear arsenal, scrapped arms control treaties and...

25.02.2024 90

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

Observer comment cartoon Jeremy Hunt leads Rishi Sunak towards electoral extinction – cartoon

18.02.2024 40

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

Poland is again threatened by a tyrant. This time, Europe must not look away

Recent panicky talk of a third world war seems a tad overblown. Yet the specific threat posed by Russia’s aggressive, revisionist regime to eastern...

17.02.2024 40

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

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