For the European Union, controlling the accelerating flow of migration from the Global South is a headache that just will not go away. The recent chaotic scenes on the Italian island of Lampedusa, just off the coast of North Africa, where more than 10,000 migrants from West Africa landed over the past week (dwarfing its 6,000 population), have now stoked a pan-European crisis. 

Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, who came to power vowing to halt the migrant flow, has instead found herself presiding over twice as many arrivals as last year — 127,000 so far in 2023. While most migrants intend to move on to the richer countries of Northern Europe, Germany has already announced that it will refuse to accept arrivals from Italy, followed by France’s Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, who observed that while Europe has an obligation to host genuine refugees, the current flow of economic migrants from countries such as Guinea, Gambia and Côte d’Ivoire is a different matter entirely.  ...  Continue reading

For American policymakers, distracted by Ukraine, the past week’s tribal uprising in Syria’s eastern Deir ez-Zor province against the Kurdish-led AANES administration must have felt like the return of an unwelcome ghost. The war against Isis was won four years ago, with the eastern half of the province pacified by inclusion into the AANES autonomous region — yet its US-backed SDF security forces have always been barely tolerated there, viewed as ethnic outsiders by the local Arab tribes who also oppose the evangelising social liberalism central to the AANES worldview.

Split both politically and geographically by the Euphrates river, with Assad’s Damascus government holding the western bank and regional capital, and the AANES administration holding the rural eastern bank stretching to the Iraqi border, this provincial corner of Syria is hotly contested. Iran, Russia, the US and Turkey all compete for influence among the fractious and divided local Arab tribes.  ...  Continue reading

After weeks of uncharacteristically gnomic silence, the latest video from Russian warlord and brief coup protagonist Yevgeny Progozhin is worthy of note. Standing in a Sahelian landscape (presumably Mali, judging from recent flight data), he promises to win Moscow new frontiers of glory in Africa. 

The recent crop of West African coups has won Russia some new allies in a region of negligible interest to the United States but of strategic significance to Europe. The publicity boost of African publics waving Russian flags is welcome to Moscow in refuting narratives of isolation, while privileged access to the region’s mineral resources is just as attractive. Yet the threatened intervention in Niger by regional ECOWAS powers, and the corresponding pledge to defend the country’s new junta by its allied military regimes in Mali and Burkina Faso, suggests that Russia may have bitten off more than it can comfortably chew. ...  Continue reading

The Conservative Party’s unexpected victory in the Uxbridge by-election last week, perceived as a referendum on Sadiq Khan’s expanded Ulez zone, highlights a political law obvious to everyone but the London Mayor: in a democratic society, no one votes to make themselves poorer. 

For Rishi Sunak, the result offers a means to recover electoral ground, by campaigning against the same Net Zero policies Boris Johnson airily introduced. For Keir Starmer, publicly dressing down Khan, the result may lead to a screeching halt on the ambitious Green Growth plans his party has floated (and already watered down). But beyond British politics, Labour’s panicked response to Uxbridge highlights the central, increasingly rancorous debate within climate politics: between pursuing green growth through massive investment in decarbonisation, or strangling consumption through eco-austerity. ...  Continue reading

The story of Western assistance to Ukraine throughout the war so far has followed a familiar pattern. The Ukrainians demand more powerful weapons systems than Washington feels comfortable delivering and eventually — through a combination of battlefield success, desperate need and appeals to Western sympathy — erode red lines that once seemed absolute. From Western armour to F-16 jets, moral pressure from Ukraine and its most hawkish Nato supporters has so far managed to win out over Joe Biden’s instinctive caution at embroiling America too deeply in an open confrontation with Russia.

But with Nato membership, Ukraine seems to have hit Biden’s absolute red line. While affirming that “Ukraine’s future is in Nato”, the eventual communiqué from the Vilnius summit offered Ukraine only vague and uncertain prospects of joining the Alliance, far from the confirmed and accelerated pathway for which Zelenskyy was publicly hoping. He responded furiously, declaring in a tweet which has reportedly angered the Biden administration that “it’s unprecedented and absurd when time frame is not set neither for the invitation nor for Ukraine’s membership. While at the same time vague wording about ‘conditions’ is added even for inviting Ukraine.” ...  Continue reading

While France’s week of violent riots at first seems a retread of the banlieue uprising of 2005, in one respect it has displayed a new development, under-discussed in Anglophone media, which was absent a generation ago. Namely, the first evidence of a Right-wing counter-mobilisation against the rioters. In provincial cities like Lyon, Angers and Chambéry, groups of masked and hooded youths have appeared, dressed in black and armed with batons and pepper spray, to confront the rioters and the Left-wing demonstrators supporting them.

In Angers earlier this week, violent daytime clashes took place between Right-wing youths and Left-wing demonstrators in the city centre. Over successive evenings, there were further melees outside the Angers hub of the local Rassemblement Étudiant de Droite (RED), or Right-wing student rally, in opposition to rioters from the suburbs. RED is a rebranding of the revolutionary nationalist Alvarium centre — banned by France’s Interior Ministry in 2021 — and one of a network of Identitarian spaces operating in France, inspired by the “autonomous nationalist” examples of Italy’s postmodern-fascist CasaPound organisation and Ukraine’s Azov movement.  ...  Continue reading

Exactly seven years ago today, time stopped: when the Brexit vote came in, heartbroken British liberals and exultant Brexiteers both preserved for their warring purposes an image of the European Union forever frozen in time on an eternal 23rd June 2016. But history moves on, and eventually even the British comment class notices. As a perceptive recent Telegraph piece noted, the political polarities attached to Britain’s relationship with the EU are almost certain to shift, as European leaders become increasingly receptive to their voters’ demands to radically limit immigration, and British liberals become more deeply enmeshed in the utopian dreams of American liberalism. ...  Continue reading

If you’ve forgotten all about the war against Isis in Syria, then you’re not alone. European governments, thousands of whose expatriate jihadists are being held in squalid and overcrowded jails in Northeastern Syria, have been happy to ignore the issue of their captive citizens until now. For that exact reason, after four years of pleading for European aid, the region’s Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration, or AANES, has announced that it will begin mass trials of the Isis suspects within days.

As an AANES statement released over the weekend declared, since 2019 “AANES appealed and repeated its calling on the international community to fulfil its responsibilities in finding solutions to the issue of Isis elements in its custody,” to no avail. Consequently the AANES will begin “public, fair and transparent trials in conformity with international and domestic laws on terrorism” while “we call on the international community to respond to our demands for the formation of an international court.”  ...  Continue reading