World View

A not very old folk saying: ‘‘When you’re up to your arse in alligators, it’s hard to remember that your original goal was to drain the swamp.’’

Asked on Wednesday if he would reconsider his decision to pull the United States out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato), Donald Trump said ‘‘it’s beyond reconsideration. I just think...

The Iranians know they have won, but President Trump doesn’t get it yet.

In Quebec the English-speaking minority used to call them ‘‘tongue-troopers’’: the government functionaries who come around to check that the French on signs in shops is in a typeface twice as big...

In 1953, Ray Bradbury, an American writer, published a book entitled simply Fahrenheit 451.

Donald Trump is caught in the trap that he helped to build, and he is starting to flail against his fate.

Donald Trump’s vision for how the war against Iran should end is simple: "Unconditional surrender."

The Trump/Netanyahu war in the Middle East will not spread any further, and nothing going on there threatens our collective existence.

Donald Trump is not just Benjamin Netanyahu’s glove puppet, but it is remarkable how much influence the Israeli prime minister has over the American president.

Every year at this time the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato), the world’s most powerful alliance for the past 77 years, holds a conference in Munich to examine its state of health.

Armies can be used against both foreigners abroad and citizens at home, but the two roles require quite different equipment and tactics.

The Iranian regime is brutal, fanatical and corrupt.

It is too early to be sure, but it seems likely that we have just seen "peak Trump".

In 1910, Henry Wilson, the British army officer charged with planning for a possible war with Germany, visited the French officer doing the same job in Paris, Ferdinand Foch.

After the Danish and Greenland foreign ministers came out of a meeting in Washington on January 14 convinced Donald Trump really intended to seize Greenland, things moved very fast.

The alarming events of the past couple of weeks have made it clear that not one but several crises are likely to occur in the relatively near future.