Yemen’s Houthi rebels, also known as Ansar Allah, have been defying the United States, Saudi Arabia and Israel ever since they first emerged as a military force in 2004, protesting against the US invasion of Iraq and the Israeli occupation of (…) →

The United Nations is an institution that is having to take a crash diet. The world organisation is struggling with a severe financial crisis as the Trump administration has withheld almost all US (…) →

In February this year President Emmanuel Macron unveiled a new stage in France’s national AI strategy – a €109bn private investment plan blending UAE sovereign wealth, Canadian pension money, American private equity and French household names (Iliad, Orange, Thales). These last all run on Blackwell GPUs from US giant Nvidia, maker of the most widely used semiconductors in the AI sector and one (…) →

Theodore Roosevelt, an advocate of ‘big stick diplomacy’, viewed Latin America as the United States’ backyard – a place where it could intervene at will. At the slightest threat to American interests, he would send in the marines – to Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Cuba. In 1903 Washington sponsored a separatist movement in Panama, then a province of Colombia, to secure control of the future canal. Three years later, having been (…) →

Today, the modern American military is a much weaker and more debilitated force than Trump’s braggadocio and the defence department’s gargantuan spending might suggest. The US has either failed to achieve its stated aims in, or outright lost, every major war it has waged since 1945 – with the arguable exception of the Gulf war – and seems to be getting less effective as defence expenditure (…) →

As the cold war ended, US hawks seized the moment to push for NATO expansion. European powers feared a humiliated Russia might one day lash out, but could do nothing to alter Washington’s course. →