US politics

US politics

We had a target set locked and loaded of infrastructure, bridges, power plants. This is a terror regime, military regime, they fund their military and terror camps.

For a nation whose founding symbols were carefully engineered around the balance of peace and war, that omission is hard to read as accidental. Dropping the olive branch from the dime isn't just a design choice: it's a cultural signal.

The US's clear military and economic dominance of the postwar world gave it an obvious claim to seniority; however, there was also a strong strain within English conservatism at the time that saw itself as Greeks in this American empire, in the words of former Tory prime minister Harold Macmillan. In other words, even if the Americans were to be the new Romans, extending their dominion over every corner of the globe, without the intellectual, cultural and political guidance of their wise old mother country they would quickly fall into ruin.

In perhaps a vain attempt to prove themselves moderate, the Democratic lawmakers helped override Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper's vetoes. Voters responded with the kind of ballot-box fury that should serve as a lesson to other incumbents. It wasn't just a case that the incumbents lost. They were buried, with several of them getting trounced by margins of 40 points or more.

We all remember the mistakes of Iraq, and we have learned those lessons. Any UK actions must always have a lawful basis, and a viable thought-through plan. That is the principle that I applied to the decisions that I made over the weekend.

What I was not prepared to do on Saturday was for the UK to join a war, unless I was satisfied there was a lawful basis and a viable thought-through plan.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge's Political Psychology Lab tracked shifts in Americans' views across nearly four decades and found that divisions were broadly stable through the 1990s and early 2000s, before rising steadily from 2008 onward. Using more than 35,000 responses from the American National Election Studies between 1988 and 2024, they estimate that issue polarization has increased 64% since the late 1980s, with almost all of that change occurring after 2008.

Trump said on the eve of the hastily arranged White House meeting set to begin at 11am that he was weighing sending a second US armada to the Middle East to pressure Tehran to reach a nuclear deal. But Netanyahu, making his sixth visit to the United States since Trump took office, will also be urging the US leader to take a harder line on Iran's ballistic missile program.

Rather than exposing the powerful men who participated in the sexual trafficking of children and apparently escaped accountability, the dump of thousands of decontextualized pages created something closer to a controlled obscurement. The method was almost elegant: hide it in plain sight, all of it, at once, with no index, no context, and no map. Technically public. Practically unreadable. Volume becomes its own fog.