Keir Starmer's Labour Dystopia

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If the Labour Party won the United Kingdom’s July 2024 general election, promised Keir Starmer in June, it would “relight the fire” of optimism in Britain. Well, it went out. According to one recent poll, three-quarters of Britons think that the country is going in the wrong direction. According to another, 62 percent disapprove of the job the government is doing. Six months after Tony Blair had won a similarly lopsided parliamentary majority, in 1997, one poll found that 52 percent were satisfied with his government and 70 percent with Blair himself.

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To Kampuchea and Beyond →

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ean McMeekin is a historian perhaps best known for his revisionist accounts of the Russian Revolution and World War II. He’s not afraid of a challenge. Nevertheless, while his thought-provoking new book, To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism, is well worth reading, it does not quite deliver — presumably, in part, for reasons of space — on the immense promise implicit in its subtitle. Moreover, the second “rise” of communism (if that’s what it is) turns out to be far from its second coming, which would otherwise be a not inappropriate phrase to use. Even in the secular form it has taken since Karl Marx’s time, communism is a religion in all but name, and one with obvious millenarian overtones…

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The Disinformation Panic

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By giving online intermediaries a sizeable degree of immunity from liability for user content, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 combined a characteristically American defense of free expression with a determination to ensure that this promising new sector was not stifled by another American tradition, predatory litigation. The outcome, through blogs, social media, and countless other outlets, has been to open the public square to voices that once would never have been heard.

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Javier Milei Takes Up His Chain Saw

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I was in a large, packed room in the Hilton. A conference held in June by the Cato Institute and an Argentine free-market think tank, Libertad y Progreso, had entered its final hours. Elon Musk had just spoken — remotely. Now self-styled anarcho-capitalist Javier Milei, Argentina’s president since December, had turned up, clad in a suit, not his trademark leather jacket, and, considerably calmer than his reputation, was giving a speech…

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Chef's Surprise

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In 2006, Peter Pomerantsev, a British writer born in Soviet Ukraine (his parents emigrated shortly after his birth), moved to Moscow, wanting to work in television. As set out in his Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible (2014), most media programming there was organized to entertain, beguile, and distract, to preserve the illusion of freedom even as its remnants were being dismantled. His latest book, How to Win an Information War, revolves around the World War II activities of Sefton Delmer (1904–1979), a British propagandist dedicated not to preserving illusions but to whittling them away. His most remarkable project (probably) was using GSI, a “radio station” purportedly based in Germany (in reality in the south of England), not to win over his German listeners but to unsettle them in ways that the Nazis would not welcome.

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The Green Road to Serfdom

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Deciding who has been the worst British prime minister of the 21st century (so far) is tough, but Theresa May (2016–19) strengthened her strong claim to this title shortly ahead of her ignominious departure from office. Desperate to secure a “legacy,” she saw to it that Britain became the first major country to legally bind itself to reaching net-zero greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions by 2050. That is, the nation committed itself to releasing no more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than it removes. Quite how this ambition could be fulfilled or what fulfilling it would cost was unclear, but no matter: This potentially enormous commitment passed into law with support across the political spectrum, astonishingly little scrutiny, and a great deal of self-congratulation. The 2050 target date reflected a widely held view that this is what it would take to contain the increase in the average global temperature since pre-industrial times to a more or less bearable 1.5 degrees Celsius.

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The War on Growth

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The industrial revolution is not yet canceled, but it has become “problematic.” When delegates arrived in Glasgow, Scotland, for Conference of the Parties 26, the 2021 edition of the U.N.’s climate jamboree, Britain’s then–prime minister, Boris Johnson, welcomed them with a speech in which, after some by-the-numbers apocalypticism (crops withering, locusts swarming, wildfires, cyclones, Miami underwater), he turned his attention to the industrial revolution: “It was here in Glasgow, 250 years ago, that James Watt came up with a machine that was powered by steam, that was produced by burning coal. . . . We’ve brought you to the very place where the doomsday machine began to tick.”

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Putin’s Useable Past

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After Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutineers had taken control of Rostov-on-Don, Vladimir Putin appeared on television to appeal, above all, for unity. At a time when “Russia is waging a hard fight for its future,” the mutiny was “a stab in the back of our country and our people.” So far, so predictable, but what came next was less so…

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How Poland Sees the Ukraine War

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Poland is, as it was in 1920, on the West’s front line, even if this time the conflict — cyberattacks apart — is across its border and it has NATO at its side. Back then, Western assistance consisted mainly of some French matériel, a large detachment of French officers, and a smaller collection of Brits. Led by Józef Piłsudski, the father of a reborn Poland, Polish forces launched a counter-attack against the Bolshevik army that was nearing Warsaw. The result, named after the river running through the city, was the “Miracle on the Vistula.” The invaders were routed, Poland was saved, and the Red Army was stopped from spreading Lenin’s revolution to a dangerously fissile Germany.

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The EU's China Conundrum

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America’s support for Ukraine has removed any remaining doubts that the Cold War’s two leading adversaries are embarked on a new version of that contest. And Beijing is now in a very different position. After China’s break with the USSR in the early 1960s, the relationship between Moscow, Washington, and Beijing evolved into an intricate triangular dance in which the distance between the three vertices was always shifting.

Forty years on, the nature of that dance has changed, and not to America’s advantage. Thanks to its growing economic, technological, and military power, China has now emerged as America’s most formidable challenger…

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