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Simon TisdallThe Guardian |
US president Joe Biden’s last-gasp decision to permit Ukraine to fire western-made, long-range missiles at military targets deep inside Russian...
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...
Feelings are not the usual focus of a world dominated by macho strongmen, complex geopolitical challenges, wars and disasters. Yet every rule has...
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...
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...
It’s blindingly obvious Benjamin Netanyahu does not want a ceasefire in Gaza or Lebanon or anywhere else – not yet, at least. The Biden...
Will the unsurprising yet significant fact that Kamala Harris is a woman decisively tip the knife-edge US election in Donald Trump’s favour?...
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...
It’s a golden rule of politics that national leaders do not interfere in other countries’ elections. Tell that to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who jumped...
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...
Whoever declared that in this world “nothing is certain except death and taxes” plainly led a sheltered life. Some authorities say Benjamin...
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...
The 19th-century idea that great men – exceptionally talented, courageous, charismatic individuals – direct and change the course of history by...
The abrupt, deeply alarming weekend escalation in fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon is exactly what the US, France and Britain have...
Things fall apart, if you let them – and ethnically, religiously, ideologically fractured Myanmar, formerly Burma, has never been a model of...
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,...
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...
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...
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,...
What a shambles! What a shame! With less than four months to go, America’s presidential race, global democracy’s showpiece event, has boiled...
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...
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...
When Benjamin Netanyahu flies to Washington next month, he would be advised to avoid British airspace and airports. As a founding party of the...
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...
The response of Mette Frederiksen, Denmark’s centre-left prime minister, to being physically assaulted in a Copenhagen street was dignified and very...
Viktor Orbán was his usual poisonous self, spouting toxic twaddle in true Boris Johnson/Nigel Farage style. Hungary’s hard-right prime minister and...
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...
Israel’s international isolation, triggered by revulsion over the large-scale illegal killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, will only deepen...
Indignant protests by Israeli and US leaders over last week’s decision by the prosecutor of the international criminal court (ICC) to seek Benjamin...
Nato’s grand 75th birthday celebration in Washington in July will ring hollow in Kyiv. The alliance has miserably failed its biggest post-cold...
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...
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...
Director, cast and critics all agree: Civil War, the movie depicting America tearing itself to bloody bits while a cowardly, authoritarian president...
Israel’s retaliation, when it came, was surprisingly limited. Iran minimised the significance of Friday’s air attacks on a military base near...
The missiles and drones that rained destruction on Israel in the early hours of Sunday morning have given Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin...
Suddenly, everyone loves India. But it’s an affair, not a marriage. Whether it lasts depends on the consequences of this week’s watershed...
In today’s lawless world, political assassination is the new growth industry – and anyone, famous or not, is a potential victim....
The catastrophic collapse of the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore was shocking. Local people expressed dismay at the sudden disintegration of a...
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...
So farewell, Hong Kong. The vibrant, pulsating city-state that grew, under British rule, into one of the world’s great financial, business, cultural...
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...
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...
National stereotypes are unfair, insulting – and strangely reassuring. It’s somehow good to know in an unpredictable, fast-changing world that...
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...
Donald Trump and nuclear weapons are a scary mix. As president, he greatly expanded the US nuclear arsenal, scrapped arms control treaties and...
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...