New Left Review

1 week ago | newleftreview.org | Corey Robin

Tariff, Donald Trump has said, ‘is the most beautiful word in the dictionary’. He won’t be pleased to learn that it comes from Arabic. Ta‘rīf is a notification; ‘arrafa means to make known. Despite his many notifications, Trump hasn’t really made known why he’s imposing the tariffs – or why, as of Wednesday, he has put a pause on them. Trumpologists believe they know. Trump hates the rules-based international order. He loves the masculinity of manufacturing.

1 month ago | newleftreview.org | Tom Hazeldine

The Trump Administration’s high-handed behaviour towards NATO allies has dismayed liberal Atlanticists. But whereas Scholz and Trudeau were already for the chop, and Macron is a lame duck, the falling out between the White House and Europe over Ukraine has boosted the domestic standing of Keir Starmer to record heights within the Westminster bubble. In its first six months the new Labour government was universally derided, at home more vociferously than abroad.

1 month ago | newleftreview.org | Loren Balhorn

With a couple of weeks of hindsight, the biggest surprise in the German federal elections was that the political mainstream ended up doing as well as it did. Granted, the traditional parties of the centre-right and -left faced historically low returns, with the Social Democrats (SPD) scraping together some 16.4%, their lowest result since 1887, and their Christian Democratic (CDU) counterparts 28.5% – not quite as bad as last time around, but still their second-worst result in history.

1 month ago | newleftreview.org | John Clegg

The history of Atlantic slavery poses fundamental questions about the origins of the present age. What is the relation between the toppling of British, French and Spanish colonial empires in the Americas, during the great revolutionary wave of 1776–1824, and the abolition of the slave plantations they had nurtured? Why did the three surviving slave systems—in the us, Cuba and Brazil—then experience a second lease of life in the 19th century?

2 months ago | newleftreview.org | Leo Robson

Dylan hasn’t always been a legend. Or at least not consistently. Joan Baez, in her poison-pen love-letter ‘Diamonds and Rust’, sang that he burst on the scene ‘already’ one. Born Robert Zimmerman in Minnesota, he travelled east in January 1961 to meet his ailing hero Woody Guthrie.