Long Reads

Sitting in one of the Middle Eastern cafes that have sprung up in Birmingham over the last decade, Maan quietly tells his story. He was a 14-year-old school student, the son of a farmer in Daraa, an agricultural town in southern Syria, when the uprising started. “A group of teenagers were arrested for putting anti-government slogans on a wall. When the kids were not returned, the parents protested and the army shot them.” The uprising rapidly escalated into a full-blown military assault on the citizens of the town and its surrounding villages. Maan lost an uncle and four other relatives. With his mother and younger brother, he eventually fled to Jordan. After two years working illegally in cafes and restaurants, he realised he had no future there. “I dreamed of going to the UK to study business management. They respect humanity in the UK. The language, you can use it anywhere in the world. And the degrees are better.”He went to the UK embassy in Amman. “They treated me in a rough way. They told me there was no asylum here. They don’t accept applications.” It was the same at the French and German embassy. So with family savings he flew to Algeria; paid $1,500 and was trafficked through Tunisia to Libya; spent 11 days in a house with no mattresses and little food; then at four in the morning he was taken with 900 others in a rickety boat across the Mediterranean. He feared for his life on the journey with water coming in. “Fortunately, the Italian military picked us up or we would all have drowned.” It took 20 hours for the Red Cross to check them all in – a mixture of west and east Africans, Afghanis, Syrians. And then he made his way through Europe – Catania, Milan, Nice and Paris to Calais. “I spent 27 days in Calais, climbing the fences, clinging underneath lorries, getting caught and returning to try again. I broke my leg climbing; was taken to hospital; then went back to trying to get onto a lorry.”  More

Donald Trump’s decision to fire Defence Secretary Mark Esper on Tuesday removed one of the final barriers between the president and his ability to launch the US arsenal of nuclear missiles on his own authority without consultation and perhaps even without warning. The US president is required to consult with his defence secretary before making a decision to fire nuclear weapons. But if the defence secretary objects he can be over-ruled. The president retains ultimate and sole control because he can sack the defence secretary in the event of disagreement.The only other person who could prevent the president from ordering a nuclear attack would be Vice President Mike Pence, through the indirect means of declaring Trump to be insane and removing him from office. Section four of the 25th amendment to the US constitution would allow Pence to do this, but he would require the unanimous support of the cabinet. Nobody thinks that Pence would defy Trump in this way. And the Trump cabinet has an overwhelming majority of his supporters, apparently selected more for their personal loyalty to him than their expertise or backbone.The departure of Esper, originally brought into the cabinet as yet another loyalist – he had previously worked as a lobbyist for arms manufacturers – and the relative lack of standing of his replacement, Christopher C Miller, means that the last hurdle between Trump and the doomsday command has been removed. More

When you replay the speech now, it feels like an age ago. And yet what still rings through, as clear and stridently as it did then, was that Donald Trump’s foreign policy would be about promoting what he saw as the interests of his allies, and supporters, and his nation. It would be a foreign policy that very clearly put America first.“I will return us to a timeless principle. Always put the interest of the American people and American security above all else,” Trump said at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington DC, where Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak was among the foreign diplomats listening.“[I will] develop a new foreign policy direction for our country, one that replaces randomness with purpose, ideology with strategy, and chaos with peace.” More

Students taking exams in modern history in coming decades are likely to be asked about the nature and importance of Donald Trump’s years in office. Among the questions those future students may have to answer, there is likely to be one along the following lines: “President Trump promised when elected in 2016 to make America great again. How far did he succeed in doing so and, if he did not, why not?”This should be an easy question for the students to answer because they can truthfully give a categorical black-and-white response: the US is demonstrably weaker as a world power than it was in 2016 because, as a nation, it is more deeply divided than at any time since the Civil War, a century-and-a-half ago. This multifaceted division is not going to disappear, regardless of whether Trump or Joe Biden win the presidential election, and it may well be exacerbated by the result.American hegemony was originally based on its economic might and by victory in the Second World War, enhanced by the collapse of the Soviet Union, its only rival, in 1991. Its economic dominance has been challenged by China and the EU, though it remains the sole financial superpower. Its military superiority is sustained by vast expenditure but has been dented by its failure to win wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. More

Blink and you could have missed it. The President of Ukraine and his wife have just spent two days on an official visit to the UK, and almost no one noticed – which was a pity.The president of where, you ask. Ukraine – you remember, the country we made such a fuss about a few years ago when Moscow lopped off its Crimean peninsula and attached it to Russia, claiming it belonged there all along? And who is the president exactly? Well, you must remember something about the guy everyone called a comedian who played a fictional president in a television series and then won an election for real? Well, that’s who. Volodymyr Zelensky is now President Zelensky, he has a wife called Olena, and they were in London on 7 and 8 October.  The First Couple (though I don’t think they particularly embrace American-style titles) took tea at Buckingham Palace with William and Kate, the first event to be held at the reopened palace. And the president signed a voluminous agreement on all sorts of bilateral cooperation with Boris Johnson. There was no public welcome at the door of No 10, however, and no joint press conference either. More

Suppose a grave-looking man, after approaching you on the sidewalk, announced that the government had contingency plans to annihilate the bulk of humanity and most large non-human species to boot. Odds are you would offer a nervous grin or grimace and pick up your pace. Imagine this same man kept track and informed you he had once served in the highest reaches of the national-security bureaucracy as a nuclear war expert when such plans were being hatched, and not much has changed since then. At this point you might search for a convenient storefront or cafe to make your prompt escape. But what if your unwelcome interlocutor then grabbed you by your cuff and warned of “a catastrophe waiting to happen!” What then?It is an uncomfortable hypothetical, although not as uncomfortable as the fact that someone like this man does exist, and everything he has to say is credible. His name is Daniel Ellsberg. In the introduction to The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, the historic whistleblower of Pentagon Papers fame cuts to the chase: “The hidden reality I aim to expose is that for over 50 years, all-out thermonuclear war — an irreversible, unprecedented, and almost unimaginable calamity for civilisation and most life on Earth — has been, like the disasters of Chernobyl, Katrina, the Gulf oil spill, Fukushima Daiichi, and before these, World War One, a catastrophe waiting to happen, on a scale infinitely greater than any of these. And this is still true today.” More