A Maduro on the Mediterranean

Visibly, and with very little pretence, Tunisia is sliding into tyranny. In the last two years, its president, Kais Saied, has frozen and dissolved the country’s parliament, and threatened its former members with prosecution. He has dismissed an errant prime minister. He has ruled by decree. He has quashed the high judicial body attempting to scrutinise his changes to the constitution, and replaced it with a new organisation filled with hand-picked appointees.

How Syria Became a Narco-State

There is a drug war brewing in the Middle East, and Syria is at its centre. The country has been destroyed by its eleven-year civil war, and in the ruins of what was once a prosperous country, an entirely different economy now takes shape. It’s an economy of poverty and privation, where food and energy prices are perpetually high, and supplies of basic commodities are uncertain.

The Macron Doctrine

Five years ago, Emmanuel Macron was elected president of France. He stood for office on a platform of radical change and a departure from the status quo.

He promised to reinvent the French state, revitalise its economy, and change the country in social terms. In foreign policy, Macron’s stated policy was no less bold.

Jordan’s Monarchy Still in Crisis

Last week, Hamzah bin Hussein, the son of King Hussein of Jordan and once heir to the throne, released a statement renouncing his princely title and status.

Fantasies of a Third World War

Some people are always telling you that the world is soon to end. In the old days many of them would wear sandwich boards describing near-term doom, and not wash. Now, their cousins in the environmental movement glue themselves to oil refineries and don’t shave. In each case, they drip with urgency. The oceans will boil, the land will burn. Your children will fry. Or, alternatively, the Lord will return and take only the righteous to their reward.

Russia’s African Empire

Last week, at roughly the time that photographs and stories began to filter out of liberated Bucha in Ukraine, the NGO Human Rights Watch published a report of similar massacres which took place contemporaneously in rural Mali. What linked the two was the identity of the perpetrators. In Ukraine and across Africa, these atrocities are committed by Russians.

Vladimir Zhirinovsky: Clown Prince of Russia’s Managed Opposition

The beginning of the year has not gone as well as it could have for Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Mostly because he is now dead, but also because Zhirinovsky, a Russian politician of the ‘managed’ (pro-Kremlin) opposition, predicted and vigorously supported Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. If Zhirinovsky were able to follow the campaign from his hospital bed, it could not have met his expectations. The imperial Russia of his imagination ought to have come into glorious existence, but its armed forces instead suffered reversal and humiliation.

Russia’s War on Non-Combatants

When Ukrainian forces retook Bucha, a neighbourhood in the Kyiv province, from the armed forces of Russia in early April, their cameras captured horrors. Civilians lying dead at the roadside. Mass graves. Dozens of those killed had their hands tied behind their backs.

Viktor Orban Remains a Thorn in Everyone’s Side

Viktor Orbán has just won another election. The Hungarian prime minister has secured a hefty majority in his country’s legislative elections, and in his victory speech, Orbán revealed once again that he is a thorn: in the side of Europe most obviously but, if need be, in the side of all.

Here’s to Crime

Actors, like artists, often reveal themselves in the jobs they take for the money – and in the projects that get away from them. Orson Welles is one of them. Enough has been written and said about a series of adverts he made in the latter half of his life already – enough to paint him forever as a drunken failure taking jobs cash in hand, drinking – a little too greedily – the free wine. An enemy of promise.