Thomas Meaney

Few terms​ in international politics appear so infirm, so doddering, yet so indomitable as ‘the West’. Attempts to replace it – ‘the developed world’, ‘the free world’, ‘the liberal international order’, ‘the global North’ – have only underscored its endurance. When Oswald Spengler leaped out of obscurity with the...

Anti-communist​ dandy, scourge of Ivy League administrators, magazine chieftain, amanuensis to Joe McCarthy, father-confessor of the Nixon White House, Ronald Reagan consigliere: is it any wonder that William F. Buckley is still the patron saint of the American right? For more than half a century, he supplied a gloss of coherence and glamour to a movement sorely lacking in both. With his...

The main​ outcome of the German federal election became clear shortly after the results were in: the Christian Democrats (CDU) would be slinking into power with the Social Democrats (SPD) in a grand coalition. Spurred on by the shocks of the Trump administration, and with opposition parties on the rise, the CDU and SPD seem determined to bypass or manipulate the constitutionally mandated...

The conquest​ of most of the North American continent by Anglophone settlers took roughly three hundred years, from the first stake at Jamestown to the last bullet at Wounded Knee. The Spanish had subdued a much vaster population of Indigenous peoples in Mexico and Peru in just under half a century and expected to repeat the formula, mobilising the Indigenous tributaries against the...