Category: World

Long Read / Ukraine

 by Jaffa Levy

The Collapse of the Ukraine Narrative: How Western Media Pivoted from Triumph to Retreat

For two years Western governments and media promised victory in Ukraine, portraying Russia as weak and isolated. That narrative has collapsed. Sanctions failed, NATO’s industrial base faltered, and the battlefield turned. Europe faces de-industrialisation while Russia’s economy and army expand. The press that once sold triumph now prepares audiences for retreat, conditioning the public for a negotiated peace — one dictated on Moscow’s terms, not Washington’s.

World / China

 by Jaffa Levy

The Carbon Ledger: China Pollutes Less per Person Than America or Britain

China is often portrayed as the world’s leading polluter, yet the numbers tell another story. The United States and Europe burned through most of the planet’s carbon budget to industrialise and preserve their prosperity. An average American still uses almost three times more energy than a Chinese citizen. By any fair per-person and historical measure, the West remains the greatest emitter, and China’s industrialisation is occurring at a fraction of that cost.

Defence / Russia

 by Jaffa Levy

Russia’s Generals Declare the Tank Dead: Inside Moscow’s Vision of the Digital Battlefield

Russia’s senior military theorists now declare the age of the tank over. In a new doctrinal paper, General Yury Baluevsky and Ruslan Pukhov describe the Ukraine war as the first true “digital war,” dominated by drones, satellites, and computing power. They argue that dispersed micro-units, autonomous systems, and real-time networks will replace massed armour and artillery. Future supremacy, they warn, will belong to nations that control chips, data, and orbiting communications rather than steel.

Defence / China

 by Jaffa Levy

Fujian: The Carrier That Ends America’s Monopoly at Sea

China’s CV-18 Fujian has entered service as the world’s second electromagnetic-catapult carrier, ending decades of U.S. monopoly in carrier aviation.
It marks the moment China’s navy moved from coastal defence to blue-water power projection, fielding stealth fighters, early-warning aircraft, and an all-domestic strike group. The Fujian is more than a ship it is Beijing’s declaration that parity with the U.S. Navy has arrived.

World / United States

 by Jaffa Levy

Elections Without Consent

Markets soar, jobs shrink, and faith in the system collapses beneath the curve Democratic wins read as momentum on the surface. The deeper signal is institutional mistrust and a widening break between market outcomes...

World / China

 by Jaffa Levy

The British Press and the Uyghur Story It Wants You to Believe

British commentators often mistake sentiment for evidence when writing about China. Behind the emotion lies a more complex reality a multiethnic state balancing growth, control, and the legacy of violence it claims to have subdued. From mosque restorations to militant spillovers in Syria, the story of Xinjiang is not one of moral clarity but of power, order, and contested memory in an age of selective outrage.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) / China

 by Jaffa Levy

Beijing Writes the AI Rules While Washington Writes Press Releases

While Beijing executes a three-stage national plan that defines artificial intelligence as civilisational infrastructure, Washington and London are still improvising with memos and committees. China is aligning technology, governance and diplomacy into one machine. The West still debates ethics while Beijing writes the rules of the intelligent age.

World / Venezuela

 by Jaffa Levy

The Caribbean Standoff: Washington’s Warships and Venezuela’s Moment of Pressure

American and British warships massing off Venezuela mark not a prelude to invasion but a theatre of pressure fleets circling a crisis that looks like war yet stops short of it. With around ten thousand troops at sea, Washington appears to be testing leverage, not launching conquest. Maritime power is being used as policy: signalling, coercion and the threat of precision strikes dressed in the language of counternarcotics.

World / Argentina

 by Jaffa Levy

Javier Milei and the Triumph of Austrian Economics in Argentina

Javier Milei’s sweeping mid-term victory was more than a political win. It marked the first real-world test of Austrian economics the belief that free prices, hard money, and minimal state control can rebuild a nation from the ground up. After years of crisis, voters backed his radical plan to shrink government, balance the budget, and restore confidence in Argentina’s currency.

Opinion / Ukraine

 by Jaffa Levy

Europe’s Ukrainian war: When language replaced strategy, defeat became inevitable.

THE TELEGRAPH.COM LONG READ — Europe no longer wages war only on the battlefield. It wages it in language, in narrative, and in the stories it tells itself. A generation of leaders has replaced strategy with moral theatre, diplomacy with slogans, and truth with propaganda and now the bill for that self-deception is coming due.

South America / Venezuela

 by Jaffa Levy

America Returns to Gunboat Power in the Caribbean

In the span of two months, U.S. naval forces have turned the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific into a theatre of undeclared war launching at least fifteen lethal strikes on boats alleged to be drug carriers, leaving dozens dead and entire crews vanished at sea. Washington calls it counternarcotics. Caracas, Beijing and much of Latin America call it a return to gunboat power extrajudicial killings in peacetime waters under the flag of law enforcement.

Diplomacy / China

 by Jaffa Levy

The Scholar State in Global Competition: Wang Yi, Chinese Diplomacy and the Civilisational Divide

Chinese diplomacy cannot be understood through the language of ideology alone. Behind Wang Yi’s measured tone and deliberate cadence lies a civilisational grammar shaped by two millennia of scholar-official tradition and moral bureaucracy. Where Western diplomats see negotiation, Beijing performs continuity and legitimacy, a ritual of culture, hierarchy and virtue.

World / Europe

 by Jaffa Levy

Locked Out of Power: The Price of Germany’s Refusal to Work With the AfD

A decade after the Union parties vowed never to work with the AfD, Germany’s political geometry has hardened into paralysis. The exclusion that was meant to contain the right now keeps the left in power and strengthens the very movement it tried to suppress.

World / Europe

 by Jaffa Levy

Flashpoint Poland: The Eastern Flank’s Ticking Clock

Poland has become NATO’s most anxious frontier a country caught between vigilance and hysteria. A string of drone and airspace incidents along the eastern flank has pushed the alliance toward a posture where accidents can look like acts of war. As Warsaw re-arms and Europe rehearses deterrence, President Karol Nawrocki faces a narrowing choice: keep Poland a shield, or watch it become the spark.

Opinion / World

 by Jaffa Levy

From Weimar to Brussels: How the West Replaced Democracy with Control

The spectre of the 1930s has returned not through mobs or uniforms, but through manufactured crisis and political decrees. Europe’s political elites, convinced they defend democracy, are reproducing its decay. The West’s has birthed a bureaucratic form of fascism, administered by committees controlled by global finance and Oligarchs controlling online platforms.

World / China

 by Jaffa Levy

China high speed rail wheels the real story of self reliance

The real story is industrial rather than conspiratorial. Faced with the vulnerability of foreign supply, China spent the past decade mastering the metallurgy, forging and testing of high speed rail wheels.

Diplomacy / China / World

 by Jaffa Levy

New Chinese Embassy London and Secret Spy Tunnels

Britain’s argument over China’s new embassy has become a mirror held up to its own insecurities. Commentators and newspapers now claim that Beijing plans to build spy rooms and tunnels under London to intercept...

Iran / World

 by Jaffa Levy

Iran’s Su-35 Gamble: From MiG-29 Lifeline to High-Value Bet on Russian Arms

Leaked Russian export tables suggest Tehran has signed a €6 billion deal for 48 Su-35 fighters, with component deliveries set for 2024–26 and aircraft in 2026–28. Meanwhile, Moscow quietly rushed frontline MiG-29s to Iran as a stopgap. If real, the pact deepens Tehran’s strategic dependence on Russia — and complicates the balance of power across the Middle East.

World / Palestine

 by Jaffa Levy

The Reconstruction of Gaza: Who Pays?

Each time Gaza is reduced to rubble, the same cycle repeats: Israel destroys, donors rebuild, and the bill lands on the world’s desk. From the airport it bombed to the power plant it crippled, the price of reconstruction—now exceeding $50 billion—will again be paid by everyone except the perpetrator.

World / Palestine

 by Jaffa Levy

Dughmush and Hamas clash in a Frenzy of Retribution

Hours after the ceasefire, Gaza City saw fierce fighting between Hamas units and the Dughmush clan. At least twenty-seven people were reported killed, including a prominent local journalist, exposing the power struggle now shaping post-war Gaza.

World / Defence / Israel

 by Jaffa Levy

The Next War: Why Israel May Strike Iran Before Winter.

Israel faces a narrowing window for war with Iran as U.S. naval forces and refuelling tankers reposition across the Middle East. With the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier group on station and regional skies soon to close with winter weather, pressure is building on Tel Aviv to decide whether to strike now or stand down until spring.

World / Russia

 by Jaffa Levy

Putin’s Red Light Strategy: How Oreshnik and Tomahawk Define the New Architecture of Escalation

At Valdai, Vladimir Putin’s joke about “Oreshnik” masked a serious message. Russia and the United States are both trapped in an era where escalation depends on infrastructure, not intent. Every modern weapon now travels with its own network of satellites, planners, and launchers — and building that network is the new act of war.

World / Europe

 by Jaffa Levy

The End of the Umbrella: Europe’s Lesson in Dependency

For eight decades Europe nestled under America’s triple canopy, military, technological, psychological. It was a seductive bargain. Washington’s shield let Europe skimp on tanks, pour billions into cradle to grave welfare, and sermonize about liberal values without the gritty cost of standing alone. The Ukraine war tore that illusion to shreds.

Burkina Faso / Africa / World

 by Jaffa Levy

Aid, Espionage, and Extraction: The Hidden Machinery That Looted Burkina Faso

Burkina Faso’s recent arrests of foreign aid workers are not an outburst of paranoia but the culmination of decades of exploitation disguised as partnership. For generations, Western governments, mining conglomerates, and their affiliated NGOs extracted the country’s wealth—first its gold, now its data—under the language of development. What the world calls repression in Ouagadougou may instead be the long-delayed assertion of a people’s right to control their own resources and their own narrative.

World / Britain

 by Jaffa Levy

The Tiger That Wasn’t There: A Story of Media and the Ghosts of Empire

When a leading London broadsheet claimed that North Koreans were “hunting tigers for food,” it exposed more than journalistic sloppiness. It revealed the desperation of Britain’s old media class to preserve a moral hierarchy that no longer exists. This essay traces how a false story about famine and wildlife became a metaphor for imperial nostalgia — and why the West’s fading press can no longer distinguish narrative from truth.

World / Britain / Germany / United States

 by Jaffa Levy

 New Nationalism: From Dresden to Doncaster to Dallas

Populist energy has moved from the street into the state. Alice Weidel in Germany and Nigel Farage in Britain are converting discontent into parliamentary power, while Tommy Robinson’s crowds still march without machinery. The same sentiment frustration with distant rule and collapsing trust now runs from Saxony to small-town England and deep into the American South.