Benedict Kiely

1 month ago | thespectator.com | Owen Matthews |Martin Vander Weyer |Paul Wood |Benedict Kiely

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have very different negotiating styles. Trump lines up his offer in advance, browbeating everyone on his side into compliance before slapping his bottom line on the table. Putin, by contrast, is a haggler. He loads his proposals with excess demands that he intends to discard during the negotiation process to get to a final deal. Put simply, what Putin says he wants and what he realistically expects to get are two different things.

1 month ago | thespectator.com | Martin Vander Weyer |Benedict Kiely |Teresa Mull |Charles Lipson

“Don’t stress over short-term stock market swings” is a maxim on which Donald Trump and I might agree, even if he is keen to take credit for upward rallies. The shakedown of the past few days is a natural reaction to the wild six-week ride of Trump’s tariff and foreign policy gambits and the realization that if he keeps it up, he’s far more likely to harm the economy than boost it. But with a mad king surrounded by madder courtiers anything can happen, including ever more eccentric reversals.

1 month ago | thespectator.com | Paul Wood |Benedict Kiely |Charlie Gammell |Daniel DePetris

Imagine you’re MbS, newly installed as Saudi Arabia’s authoritarian ruler thanks to cunning and ruthlessness. You arrest a few of the most obvious thieves at court and hang them by their thumbs to find out where they hid the loot. You order your henchmen to grab critics of the royal family who fled abroad and bring them home to silence them. But one of those critics is cut into pieces with a bone saw in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, and the Turks go public.

1 month ago | thespectator.com | Benedict Kiely |Charles Lipson |John MacArthur |Christopher Caldwell

David Lammy, the UK Foreign Secretary, and Marco Rubio had rather tellingly different responses to the latest wave of violence in Syria. Lammy deplored the “horrific violence” but failed to address where that violence was coming from. Rubio, by contrast, stated clearly that “radical Islamist terrorists” were targeting minorities in Syria, including Alawites, Christians and Druze. Rubio is right.

Dec 2, 2024 | thecatholicthing.org | Benedict Kiely

Cast off the DarknessTo begin Advent in darkness, both physical and metaphorical, seems very appropriate. It is a gloomy time of year, the nights are drawing in early, the atmosphere is cloudy and damp: gloomy is the right description. From the Old English for darkness, we know it can describe despondency and a lack of hope, a sense which approaches despair.