Economic sanctions are coward's war. They do not work but are a way in which rich elites feel they are "committed" to some distant struggle". As a form of aggression they enjoy lasting appeal to politicians because they cost them nothing and are rhetorically macho. They embody the spirit...

Robert Mugabe is making a mockery of liberal interventionism. He has become God's gift to cartoonists, politicians and commentators. He is depicted wielding clubs dripping in blood. He stands triumphant over a pile of skulls. He is Bokassa out of Idi Amin out of Charles Taylor. He is that old...

Nothing in recent American politics has been followed in Europe as obsessively as the Democratic primary. Barack Obama's victory has been universally greeted with the same gesture. Two hands are pointed together in prayer. Please, please let it be true, let him be president. Polls have yet to appear, but...

Two dictators faced two disasters, one in China, the other in Burma. One was an earthquake, the other a flood. Ten of thousands are dead and millions at risk. Being dictatorial, both regimes have responded in a manner heavy with the politics of sovereignty. In one case that helps people,...

Hello, this is democracy calling. Whatever you read in the coming months, the American primaries are not another transatlantic electoral fiasco. They are the opposite. They are a nation testing its potential leaders by openly arguing, wavering, splitting, befriending, feuding, cohering and ultimately validating. Would that other democracies did the...

The Pakistani senator gazed at the headline in despair. It read "US weighs new covert push in Pakistan". Washington was authorising "enhanced CIA activity" in the country while Democratic candidates declared they were all ready "to launch unilateral military strikes in [Pakistan] if they detected an imminent threat." Hillary Clinton...

Democracy is looking sick just now. At the start of 2008, Churchill's nostrum that it is the worst form of government "except for the others" is being tested close to destruction, assassinated in Pakistan, sabotaged in Kenya, massacred in Iraq, strangled in Russia, ridiculed in South Africa and purchased in...

Everyone says it to someone: "You will miss me when I'm gone." But they rarely say it to an entire nation. Will we miss Tony Blair? We may have hated him, we may have loved him, but we got to know him. Will we not miss him?

Like many commentators,...

We are to be overwhelmed. A tidal wave of epitaphs, eulogies and obsequies of Tony Blair is upon us. His era will crave definition. The flesh must be made word, and the word is Blairism. It hangs on the lips of friend and foe alike.

Let us get...

We are bid to celebrate the fourth birthday of a lie. In 2003 they lied about Iraq's weapons arsenal. They lied about Saddam Hussein's "imminent threat" to Britain. Some of them lied that he was involved in 9/11. Today, steeped in the psychology of denial, they lie that things are...

Last week Nato defence ministers met in Seville to review the coming spring offensive in Afghanistan. It was like Great War generals dining in Versailles to discuss the state of the trenches. The new head of Nato, the US general John Craddock, asked for just 2,000 more troops. Just one...

This is to be the week, we are told, when George Bush announces positively the last military assault on insurgency in Baghdad before losing patience and quitting. The so-called surge will supposedly correct the error of last year's similar Operation Together Forward II. Without order in the capital the physical...

A celebrated New Yorker cartoon of the 1950s showed a plane crashing on a runway. As everyone rushed to rescue the crew a solitary scientist walked in the opposite direction. He sighed, "Oh well, back to the drawing board."

As the George Bush's Iraq adventure smoulders on the...

New York -- So what happened? In October 2001, a month after 9/11, the New York City comptroller's office produced a report sunk in doom. It was the answer to Osama bin Laden's prayer, portaying a city devastated not by the collapse of the twin towers but by the resulting...

The ugly American mark two is dead. Overnight six years of glib European identification of "American" with right-wing fundamentalism is over. The gun-toting, pre-Darwinian Bushite, the Tomahawk-wielding, Halliburton-loving, Beltway neo-con, damning abortion as murder and torturing Islamo-fascists has been lain to rest, and by a decision of the American people....

America thinks itself good at war and is bad at it. America thinks itself bad at democracy and is good at it, very good.

Every time I visit America at election time I am left exhilarated by the sheer, pulverising potency of its democracy. Nowhere on earth are...

Eerie place, American this week. Three years ago any European visitor who dared be skeptical over Iraq had to run for cover. Even normally hospitable New Yorkers gave "surrender monkeys" a wide berth. And forget the French. One thing only redeemed visiting Britons and that was the sainted Tony Blair....

As the jets slammed into the Twin Towers this day five years ago I immediate felt a visceral surge of sympathy for the city where I lived as a boy and which I visit every year. I have always regarded New York as London's blood brother.

I wrote that...