Section: Prospect (The United Kingdom)
Trump’s calendar of global economic summits
©Van Tine Dennis/ABACA/ABACA USA/PA Images Mark your calendars for key events this year that will reveal the Trump administration’s vision to remake the world’s economic order. There will be early hints from a handful of incoming advisors who are in Davos this week and the picture will take shape slowly in speeches (and Tweets) as...
Books in brief: Who Lost Russia? By Peter Conradi
Who Lost Russia? By Peter Conradi (Oneworld, £18.99) The year 1991 was a turning point for global politics: it saw both the disbanding of the Warsaw Pact, as well as the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The narrative western politicians and intellectuals told at the time was a simple one: communism had failed and western liberal capitalism...
Banning the bomb: we’ll all go together
The mushroom cloud over Nagasaki, after the second atomic bomb was dropped there in 1945 ©Cultura/Rex/Shutterstock Barack Obama was a cautious president, given to the odd audacious speech. In 2009, he stood on a podium in Prague’s Hradcˇany Square and declared America’s commitment to a world free from nuclear weapons. “Human destiny...
The state of democracy: voting out
“I worry that a serious assault on the ballot box is coming” ©Teenbull, Mega/Pixel, Claire McAdams/Rex Shutterstock, Means/Getty Images A few days after 9/11, one of my more excitable friends said: “very soon, we’ll be discussing whether we can justify torture.” I put it down to one war film too many. But before long, it turned out he was...
Click for regime change
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There is still no proof that Putin hacked the US election
Did President-Elect Donald Trump benefit from Russian hacking? It’s probable—but not certain ©Van Tine Dennis/ABACA/ABACA/PA Images So, it’s official. Russia helped Donald Trump win the American presidential election by hacking into Democratic Party computers, stealing emails and feeding them to media outlets such as Wikileaks,...
Think hacking’s bad now? You ain’t seen nothing yet
President Barack Obama at the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC) in Arlington, Virginia, USA ©Pool/ABACA USA/PA Images Since the early 1990s, governments have been aware of cyberthreats and their potentially devastating consequences. But initially, they identified the threats in different ways. The American...
View from Estonia: flaky friends and a neighbour from hell
©Peter Kollany/Bloomberg Via Getty Images Hunched over the wheel of a night bus from Lithuania, our driver stares out at the icy roads that pass through Latvia and up to Estonia, lined on each side by forests and cabins. A drift of fog keeps him squinting through the darkness, left to guess what lies up ahead. The triumph of Donald Trump has left...
McDonald’s: outposts in a cultural empire
©Zuma Press inc./Alamy stock photo I know it’s become a dogma that McDonald’s is the fount of all ill-health, but I can’t help but remain a fan. I am very fond of a quarter-pounder with cheese. It once restored me from heat-stroke while reporting on a demonstration in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. There’s nothing more...
Europe in revolt
Marine Le Pen, leader of the Front National, addresses a Paris crowd. The poster depicts Joan of Arc and says: “No to Brussels, yes to France” ©Kenzo Tribouillard/Getty Images From the timeless cafés of Vienna, or from the trendy bars of Berlin and Amsterdam, it is easy to dismiss Brexit as a curiously British affair. Did Winston Churchill not...
