Daniel Hannan
CapX
United Kingdom
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Past articles by Daniel:
Let's not pretend sanctions can win this war – Putin will only be defeated on the battlefield
José María Aznar, the shrewdest and most effective of modern Spanish statesmen, once privately told Fidel Castro that his regime had survived the collapse of Communism in 1989 for only one reason: the US blockade. American sanctions, Aznar suggested, had allowed the comandante to blame his people’s squalor, not on socialism, but on the yanqui siege. […] → Read More
David Trimble made the case for peace in Northern Ireland and for unionism
The death of David Trimble, the Ulster Unionist leader who won the Nobel Peace Prize for agreeing to the power-sharing deal in Northern Ireland in 1998, is one of those moments when the parentheses close on an era of history. → Read More
A retreat from the Enlightenment and back into tribalism
The diagnosis is easy. America has divided into two hostile tribes, each willing to believe the most outlandish lies about the other, each keener on hunting heretics than on winning converts. But what is the prescription? Is the malady susceptible to treatment at all? → Read More
Roe's downfall is irrelevant in Britain, yet it's all anyone wants to talk about
The United Kingdom has spent two weeks convulsed in a frenzied debate over abortion law — not its own abortion law, but America’s. The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision led the news for days, sparking a culture war that bore no relation to Britain’s own situation. Once again, we are reminded of the… → Read More
The aftermath of a shooting is the worst time to settle policy
After the shock comes the aftershock. A young man massacres schoolchildren, and even as broken parents wait outside the police exclusion zone, politicians start arguing about guns. → Read More
Was Brexit an Oxford conspiracy?
The United Kingdom has had 15 prime ministers since the end of World War II. Three (Winston Churchill, James Callaghan, and John Major) did not go to college. One (Gordon Brown) studied history at Edinburgh University. The other 11 all went to Oxford. → Read More
Why are we so afraid of sex differences in education?
I’m struggling to keep up. → Read More
A vindictive EU is stirring trouble in Northern Ireland
The rest of the world has largely made up its mind about the Northern Ireland Protocol, the arrangement that the European Union demanded as the price of Brexit. The story, for most overseas observers, goes something like this: → Read More
Inflation has caught up with us all
We are all about to get a lot poorer — that much is baked in. The question is, who gets the blame? Will we take out our frustration on incumbent governments or attribute our fall in living standards to the global crisis? → Read More
What Ukraine has taught us about the West
Two months into the Ukrainian war, let’s assess how the West is doing. Have the democracies shown themselves tougher than their autocratic rivals imagined? Or are they losing their hegemony as the world slides into a more brutal and illiberal age? Perhaps the answer to both questions is “yes." → Read More
Vladimir Putin's kleptocracy will be his own undoing
Last month, members of Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, began to disappear. Espionage is, by its nature, an opaque business, but sources suggested that senior members of the FSB’s Fifth Service, essentially Russia’s overseas intelligence operation, were being arrested or confined to their… → Read More
Are we heading for nuclear obliteration?
If a rifle makes an appearance onstage in Act 1, observed Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, it will be fired before the end of Act 3. Which is, if you ask me, a pretty alarming thought in a world with nuclear weapons. → Read More
How could any American patriot back Putin?
Where does it come from, this Trumpy admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin? → Read More
As world openness retreats, you're about to get a lot poorer
Things are about to get a lot worse. A world made poorer and more protectionist by the pandemic is responding to the Ukrainian war by withdrawing further from globalization. The effect will last for decades. A lot of people will end up cold, hungry, and broke. → Read More
Why should Spain despise its greatest explorer?
Monuments to Christopher Columbus are regularly vandalized throughout the Americas, but Spain remains faithful to his memory. Last week, I visited Seville Cathedral, where his supposed remains are carried shoulder-high by massive statues representing the kings of Castille, Leon, Navarre, and Aragon. → Read More
The 'green jobs' fallacy
Everyone is at it — Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, the G-7, the United Nations. All are in the business of “creating” green jobs. Johnson wants 250,000 of them, to be “created” by clean energy technologies. Biden promises no fewer than 10 million. Everything, I guess, is bigger in America. → Read More
The musical chairs farce reveals a deeper truth about the EU
It was a funny yet telling moment. Two of the EU’s presidents, the Commission’s Ursula von der Leyen and the Council’s Charles Michel, turned up last week for a summit with the President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Spotting that there was only one armchair next to the Turkish leader’s, Michel didn’t hesitate: he accelerated […] → Read More
Why they will never cancel Foucault
Imagine if a political philosopher from outside the hard Left — John Rawls, say, or Karl Popper — was credibly alleged to have abused small boys. He would disappear from the curriculum, mainstream publishers would drop his books, and his ideas would circulate only in samizdat form. → Read More
The Pacific free-trade deal, revisited for the Biden era
“The Pacific Ocean,” prophesied William H Seward in 1852, “its shores, its islands and the vast regions beyond, will become the chief theatre of events in the world’s great hereafter.” → Read More
COVID-19 is destroying global freedom, and it may not rebound
The pre-COVID-19 order isn’t coming back, “for the former things are passed away.” → Read More