Ben Clerkin

My dispatch from Kyiv: Can Zelensky surrender? Ukraine is weak on reserves - with 90% of conscripts failing to answer the call - but strong on spirit. Will that be enough if, as expected, the Trump peace deal is a fantasy? thespectator.com/topic/can-zele…

What I saw at the Montreal shooting Some of the people I am sheltering with might be dead if that police officer hadn’t put his life on the line. And what about my children? My wife? Men like him are the antidote to whatever drove that sad, twisted body I saw in the parking lot.

@AriHoffmanWrite Kids v shaken. They’re still locked in hotel but hopefully together v soon. They’ve asked me to grab the some challah rolls from the bakery I was evacuated to!

@benclerkin Awful- hope you and family are ok.

When a family vacation becomes a terror attack. As we checked out of our hotel in Montreal, a firefight erupted outside. Two cops were shot and also the terrorist.

Praying for the brave police officers who put their lives on the line.

A SWAT unit came to us and took us to another area they said was safer, a Jewish bakery, which is where we are now. (Doubtful, in my mind, that the fact this is a Jewish area is not relevant to this act of terror).

J.D. Vance didn’t call Benjamin Netanyahu out by name, but in sternly reprimanding the “Cabinet of the Israeli government” from the White House podium on Thursday, he sent Israel and its Prime Minister a very clear and ominously familiar message. In demanding more respect, raising the threat of severe consequences and ordering the country to get in line, the Vice President was echoing the public fight he picked with another world leader and one-time US ally: Volodymyr Zelensky. And just like that fiery chastisement last February, Vance went further than any other Trump Cabinet member has to date in his criticism. He was irritated with Israeli Cabinet members including Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich who have publicly attacked President Trump’s proto-peace deal. They say it will hand billions of dollars to Tehran and fail to guarantee Israeli security. Ben-Gvir says that Israel is not bound by it. ✍️ Ben Clerkin Article | spectator.com/article/for-j-… | @benclerkin

Cutting US military aid to Israel was once an impossible dream of the most extreme fringe of the Democratic party. Today axing the $3.8 billion annual package is a bipartisan issue being spearheaded by the GOP. The number of free US tax dollars that Israel would receive to spend on its military under a GOP plan being discussed by both governments would be reduced to zero. The brainchild of Marlin Stutzman, a staunch Israel ally and Republican congressman from Indiana, the proposed memorandum of understanding, which would come into effect when the current deal ends in 2028, now forms the basis of the negotiations and was endorsed by Benjamin Netanyahu. ✍️ Ben Clerkin Article | spectator.com/article/will-t… | @benclerkin

Congressional Republicans are also keen to express their concern that the Iran agreement might end up being weaker than Barack Obama’s JCPOA arrangement, which Trump tore up in his first term. Rather than blaming Trump for a bad deal, his pro-Israel supporters will tie its shortcomings to Vance, a well-known anti-interventionist. Some are already calling the MOU “the Vance deal.” On Fox this week, one pundit characterized the administration’s approach as “Hillbilly Obama” – a not-so-subtle reference to the title of the Vice-President’s memoir. Article | spectator.com/article/will-t… ✍️: @Freddygray31

Gen. Keith Kellogg’s warning in The Spectator that terrorists will target the US with drone attacks is proved accurate in a matter of days as five people are arrested for a plot to attack the White House UFC event with a swarm of drones. “The threat is already here. What happened on the battlefields of eastern Ukraine did not stay there.” @generalkellogg

The Iranians will now have to work very hard to keep the peace that stands between them and damnation. Much more is on the negotiating table now, with Iran and America each having no illusions about the other. The peace is complicated by its overlap with Israel’s ongoing efforts since the October 7 massacre to wipe out the terrorist organizations that have long harried the Jewish State. Whether Iran can rein in its proxies will be a test of the Islamic Republic’s competence as well as its will. President Trump has made clear to Benjamin Netanyahu that he expects Israel to cooperate with the peace deal, yet Israel isn’t a party to the deal and has its own national interests. Nevertheless, those interests include curtailing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and a deal between Trump and Iran offers the chance to do that. Israel has much at stake in Trump’s success. ✍️: @ToryAnarchist

Carole has swapped Cambridge Analytica in the 2010s for Palantir in the 2020s. It is the new big baddie in her strangely naive yet cynical worldview.

Anybody who read The Spectator’s last US cover piece saw this coming …

@A_SHEKH0VTS0V An excellent example of playing the man not the ball just in time for the World Cup!

The author of the piece attacks critics of Peter Thiel’s Palantir, dismissing them as “deranged”. Yet some relevant information about the author should have been disclosed before the article itself – the kind of disclosure one would expect from honest journalism: The author Michael Gibson co-ran the Thiel Fellowship from 2010 to 2015. He served as Vice President of Grants at the Thiel Foundation and helped launch the programme. Thiel backed Gibson's 1517 Fund, which Gibson co-founded in 2015 with Danielle Strachman after leaving the Thiel Fellowship.

The June 22 edition of The Spectator has gone to press, featuring: 🎮@William_Blake 🎮@roddreher 🎮@freyaindiaa 🎮@AllumBokhari 🎮@juliadyost 🎮@DouglasKMurray

When Donald Trump unveiled plans for a counter-drone installation on the roof of the new White House ballroom, critics called it theater. They may be right about the installation. But they are wrong about the threat. I have watched the character of warfare change faster in the past four years than in the previous forty. In Ukraine, a one-way attack drone that costs a few hundred dollars routinely destroys Russian armored vehicles worth millions. Both sides now field these systems by the hundreds of thousands. Entire stretches of the front are governed not by artillery or air superiority in the traditional sense, but by small, expendable aircraft that soldiers can carry in rucksacks and launch from tree lines. I have stood in Ukrainian production facilities and seen the pace of their innovation. We are well behind. ✍️: @generalkellogg

This morning at 5.53am, air raid sirens sounded across Tel Aviv. War-weary locals largely went about their business as usual unfazed by the eerie wail, while out of towners headed at speed to the nearest bomb shelter. The ballistic missile was fired from Yemen and intercepted by the IDF. At 7.02am, again, mobile phones buzzed with warnings to take shelter. Iran had fired a barrage of ballistic missiles. The beach volleyball game being played outside my hotel didn't stop. The missiles “disintegrated" or fell harmlessly. ✍️ Ben Clerkin Article | spectator.com/article/does-t…