Dan Hannan
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Articles by Dan Hannan
Trump has killed the American-led world order
This was the week that the United States joined Russia in dismembering Ukraine, a nation that both superpowers had promised to protect in 1994 in exchange for the surrender of its nuclear arsenal. MAGA sophists and apologists variously claim that this is either about bringing a speedy peace or about withdrawing the U.S. from an ungrateful Europe.
If Britain has no right to the Falklands, the US has no right to half its territory
Brick by brick, the Western alliance is being dismantled. Alliances work when countries stand by their friends, even when their own interests are not engaged. Britain, Canada, and Denmark joined the U.S. operation in Afghanistan, not because they had been attacked, but because they saw 9/11 as an assault on the free world, and rushed to help their ally. Canada has been rewarded with a tariff war, Denmark with the threatened annexation of its territory. And the United Kingdom?
Where do you want to find your immigrants?
“Import the Third World, become the Third World”. It was a slogan used by the Trump War Room in the 2024 election, and it has since become a catchphrase for postliberals, national conservatives, and the wider MAGA movement. My own country, Britain, is often held up as the reification of that slogan, a real-world example of a nation sliding into Third World status as a result of demographic change. It is true that second-generation immigrants are over-represented in British terrorist attacks.
Tolkien receives England’s supreme literary accolade
In the south transept of Westminster Abbey, touched by the jeweled light of a rose window, is Poets’ Corner. Geoffrey Chaucer was buried here in 1400 — not because he wrote The Canterbury Tales, but because he was a royal official. Two centuries later, the great Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser asked to be interred next to the father of English literature, and so began the tradition. Forty famous writers lie beneath the worn flagstones, and another 70 are commemorated in marble, bronze, and slate.
Why Israel is losing its friends
Is West Bank settler violence the hill that Israel’s friends want to die on? I ask as a lifelong admirer of the Jewish state. I marvel at the achievement of maintaining an open society in a lawless region.
Have voters lost their self-respect?
Dogs bark, ducks quack, and populists offer free stuff. Enrique Pena Nieto dispensed around 10 million TV sets to low-income Mexican households. Hugo Chavez gave Venezuelans steeply discounted refrigerators, air conditioning units, and, again, TV sets. In Argentina, Evita Peron would personally hand out children’s toys, sewing machines, clothes, and kitchenware.
Trump’s predatory grab for Venezuela
It emerged this week that the Dutch government has moved a large chunk of its gold reserves from the United States to the Bank of England. Some 86 tons were shipped out of North America between March and August. Central bankers are generally dull in their language, and the Dutch are no exception. “Combining the processes of buying and selling and physical transport has allowed us to spread the risks associated with such a complex physical gold relocation,” they announced.
Canada will win this trade war
On Thursday, the White House put out an image of a bald eagle pinning a Canada goose under its talons and added a statement that managed at once to be obsequious, vulgar, and untrue. “President Trump said it best: ‘Canada is easily the most difficult and unreasonable.
America is heading for bankruptcy
The story should be leading every bulletin. The national debt has just risen to $40 trillion. Trump’s predatory grab for Venezuela EXCLUSIVE: How 1,800 local tradespeople are powering Pennsylvania’s ultimate energy and data innovation campus Does progress in Iran help Trump? That sum is unimaginable, for the same reason that intergalactic and subatomic distances are unimaginable. Our brains are not configured to compute on such scales.
JD Vance’s awful book
You start by arguing against “market fundamentalism,” “neoliberalism,” and “extreme libertarianism,” and you end by arguing against economics. Vice President JD Vance is the latest postliberal to embrace what is now, for all intents and purposes, an anti-growth position. In his latest book, Communion, Vance inveighs against those perennial straw men, the GDP-obsessed economists.
Cambridge has destroyed itself through DEI
He was surely a plant, some kind of agent. Professor Jason Arday, who at 36 became the youngest black professor at Cambridge University, could only have been working for a secret cabal of meritocrats whose mission was to destroy diversity, equity, and inclusion. No one else has done half as much to expose the fools, frauds, and fanatics who run higher education. Arday’s story was, in every sense, incredible. Born in London to Ghanaian immigrants, he was diagnosed as autistic and dyslexic.
We are closer to nuclear war than at any time since 1962
It is extraordinary how few countries can build nuclear weapons. Eighty-one years have passed, almost to the day, since the bombing of Hiroshima. Yet, of the 195 states recognized by the United Nations, 186 are technologically unable to make warheads. Beyond the original five nuclear states — that is, the five countries that sit on the U.N. Security Council — only four have unofficially acquired the capability: India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea. That’s it.
Make these millionaires pay more
These “Patriotic Millionaires” are surely the most insufferable people on the planet. They regularly take out adverts, sign letters, and sponsor campaigns urging their governments to tax them more, thus indulging in a uniquely hideous blend of conspicuous consumption and virtue-signaling. “Look at me! I am both very rich and a public-spirited soul!” Like so many movements, good and bad, this one started in the United States and spread to the rest of the Anglosphere.
Soccer symbolizes Trump’s destructive effect
It was FIFA’s corruption that stunned people, not President Donald Trump’s. The chief executive’s contempt for rules is now taken for granted. What astonished the world was that soccer’s global governing body crumbled in the face of his pressure. To recap, the American striker Folarin Balogun was sent off for jumping on the ankle of a Bosnian player. Under FIFA rules, a player who gets a red card is banned from playing in the following game.
Donald Trump is a Third Worldist at heart
America at 250 has never been wealthier or more powerful. It has grown two-thirds faster than Western Europe over the past 20 years. Rival ideologies from Chinese authoritarianism to Islamism look deeply unappealing. There is a reason so many people are hammering at the republic’s borders. Yet, at the same time, the U.S. is starting to behave like some of the tinpot autocracies from which those migrants want to escape. The best way I can describe it is as Third Worldery.
Ordinary British voters deserve the blame
Britain has just dispatched its sixth prime minister in a decade, and is about to get its seventh. The country that used to be held up as a model of grown-up political stability is suddenly looking rather Mediterranean.
Things in Britain are bad, but not that bad
One of the toughest things in politics is trying to explain that, yes, things are bad, but no, they are not quite as bad as you think. I have yet to find a way to make that argument without it being misunderstood or caricatured. It is an argument that almost every British conservative now finds himself having with American rightists. Yes, things are bad. We have no First Amendment. We had a needless surge of immigration, much of it illegal and involving some seriously bad hombres.
Pure equality requires labor camps and gulags
Whatever else they are, they are not economists. Joseph Stiglitz, Thomas Piketty, and the other 350 signatories of an anti-poverty manifesto have given up on any claim to that name. An economist is someone who studies the production and distribution of goods and services, someone who analyzes the voluntary transactions we make in pursuit of happiness. These campaigners are not interested in “growth” (which they made a point of putting in scare-quotes in their launch article last week.
The War of Independence was won by Brits
The American Museum in Bath, England, is one of my favorite places. Housed in a handsome 18th-century manor house, honey-colored like most Cotswold buildings, it perches on a hillside on the edge of town, commanding views that make visiting Americans feel a stab of British patriotism. Like the rest of Britain, it is in celebratory mode, cheering the 250th birthday of the world’s greatest republic.
Donald Trump’s tariffs hurt his favorite companies
David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage is counterintuitive, and a lot of people struggle with it. Most of us can see why free trade works in the interest of competitive countries. How, though, can it be in the interest of less efficient places? Why wouldn’t all the jobs go to the more productive trading partner? For years, I struggled to convince skeptics of the theory, which relies on a bit of math. Then I stumbled upon a short sketch by the comedian Dave Chappelle.
Ben Sasse, I want you to read your obituary while you can
Sasse is giving the rest of us a masterclass in meeting our end with grace, courage, and dignity. As with every chapter of his life, he is buzzing with original observations, combining gallows humor with religious faith. As he keeps telling us, we are all on the clock; he just has a clearer idea of the timing. Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., on March 3, 2021.
When Charles III meets King Donald
For the extraordinary truth is that the Founders did not simply bestow upon the presidency powers equivalent to those of the British Crown. They gave it the powers that they wrongly imagined the Crown to possess. Consider some of the uses that Trump has made of his executive powers: altering the definition of qualification for national citizenship; imposing tariffs across the board; declaring emergencies and deploying troops internally; bypassing congressional spending limits.
The Iran war has already failed
The consensus is clear. President Donald Trump, the pundits say, has trapped himself in a pointless war in Iran. He is, we are told, thrashing about blindly and blaming everyone but himself. At least Israel has war aims, even if they differ from America’s. The United States, by contrast, is shooting in the dark. I would amend that narrative in only one way. There was a war aim. The problem is that it has failed.
The main losers from Britain’s ‘Islamophobia’ code? Muslims
Britain’s Labour government is defining Islamophobia in law. Not, it rushes to assure everyone, that there will be the slightest risk to free speech. All it is doing is codifying guidelines. Well, it took all of 45 minutes after the publication of the new definition for an MP to demand that it be used to silence his critics. Iqbal Mohamed, elected as a “pro-Gaza independent,” wanted “sanctions” against the “escalating hostility” of what MPs said about Muslims.
Trump’s Caligulan grab for Greenland
Twenty years ago, I spent a couple of weeks in Afghanistan with Britain’s Royal Marines. Operating largely under British command in Helmand was a Danish contingent made up largely of special forces. The Marines had nothing but praise for their Danish allies, who were in some of the toughest firefights and who suffered the highest per capita rate of fatalities after the United States. Why were they there at all? What made Denmark send 750 men to those remote mountains? There was only one explanation.
Britain has become a warning to Americans
Any Brits reading will know that, until recently, we had a good thing going in the United States. We were widely held to be smarter, politer, and more refined than we really were. In truth, British people are earthy and Hogarthian, more prone to drunkenness and profanity than Americans. But, for whatever reason, our American cousins insisted on seeing us as the epitome of courtliness. Well, not anymore.
Britain has become a warning to Americans
Any Brits reading will know that, until recently, we had a good thing going in the United States. We were widely held to be smarter, politer, and more refined than we really were. In truth, British people are earthy and Hogarthian, more prone to drunkenness and profanity than Americans. But, for whatever reason, our American cousins insisted on seeing us as the epitome of courtliness. Well, not anymore.
Not all immigrants are equal
Minnesota may be the single largest source of funds for the Somali terrorist organization al Shabaab. An investigation by Ryan Thorpe and Christopher F. Rufo of the Manhattan Institute found that schemes established in the state to provide healthcare, children’s services, and food distribution have been subjected to such gargantuan fraud that Minnesotan taxpayers may, in effect, be simultaneously funding several sides in Somalia’s civil war. This is a reminder that not all cultures are equal.
It is dangerous to be an American ally
President Donald Trump is cutting U.S. tariffs on China by 10% while raising them against Canada by the same amount. Once again, the message goes out that it is more expensive to be America’s friend than its opponent. Canadians know it. After a year of annexation threats and aggressive tariffs, 46% say they see the United States as a “potential threat” or an “enemy.” Only 34% say the same about China. Other U.S. allies are going through a similar recalibration.
Post-Kirk authoritarianism reaches England
The Trump vibe shift was so powerful that its tremors have toppled the president-elect of the Oxford Union. The Anglosphere was a cultural and political continuum even before Elon Musk began to fret about free speech in the United Kingdom. Just as Britain caught the diversity, equity, and inclusion virus from the United States, it’s now getting the cure, though it has some nasty side effects.
Now Trump destabilizes politics in the Nordic world
President Donald Trump has thrown the European Union a lifeline. I am sure he did not mean to. He makes no secret of his disdain for the EU, which he sees, with good reason, as anti-democratic, inimical to national sovereignty, and implicitly hostile to the United States. Yet he is about to give it a major victory, pushing a wealthy and successful Western state into its arms. Brexit should have marked the end of EU expansion.
Why is free trade good for Gaza but bad for the US?
It hit me last week that almost no one in the administration truly believes in tariffs. Not, at any rate, as a serious policy. The only real enthusiast for them is President Donald Trump, and he plainly does not understand how they work. Everyone else goes along with him for reasons of cowardice or careerism, but we can see from his officials’ revealed preferences that they know it is nonsense. Exhibit A: Tariffs on movies.
All 50 states are now richer than Britain
Is the United Kingdom really poorer than Mississippi? Have the Brits truly sunk to the point where, if they were to join the United States, they would be the 51st state out of 51? Douglas Carswell, director of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, first made this claim in 2023. A Conservative and then UK Independence Party member of Parliament, Carswell was so horrified by the severity of the lockdown in Britain that, in 2021, he emigrated to Jackson.
Reactions to the Charlie Kirk assassination reveal a nation on the brink
What is the greatest threat to American democracy? Easy: hyperpartisanship. Seeing your opponents as enemies. Defining corruption as “holding opinions I dislike”. All these things were on hideous display in the aftermath of the murder of Charlie Kirk. At the time of writing, it is not clear who pulled the trigger or why, so let me start somewhere else, with the removal of Britain’s slippery and sybaritic ambassador to Washington, Peter Mandelson.
MAGA’s disgusting admiration for Putin
As I write this, Ukrainians are pulling corpses from the rubble in Kyiv. A massive Russian aerial attack killed at least 19 civilians, four of them children. It was a major escalation, with 629 missiles and drones aimed at the Ukrainian capital. The British Council building was targeted, as was the European Union mission. Let me make a firm prediction. By the time you read this column, there will have been no U.S. retaliation.
America is developing a free speech problem
Britain, as every American knows, has a free speech problem. As a Brit, though, I am starting to wonder whether the United States might be developing a free speech problem of its own. The question occurred to me in an immigration line as I checked my devices for memes that might be deemed anti-MAGA.
Trump leads, think tanks follow
Ed Feulner, who died on July 18, was a big man in every sense. Tall and bulky, he had a largeness of spirit, a generosity of soul, and his ambitions were commensurately vast. When he started running the Heritage Foundation in the early 1970s, it had nine employees. Now it has 300, half a million registered supporters and a nine-figure budget. If Feulner was bothered by Heritage’s swing to MAGA isolationism after 2020, he was too discreet to say so.
The third-party breakthrough already happened — under Trump - Washington Examiner
Third parties don’t win. It is perhaps the last of the old rules that still holds. As President Donald Trump put it in response to Elon Musk’s launch of the America Party, “I am saddened to watch Elon Musk go completely ‘off the rails,’ essentially becoming a TRAIN WRECK over the past five weeks. He even wants to start a Third Political Party, despite the fact that they have never succeeded in the United States.” The Donald has a point.
Pick one: MAGA or states’ rights
After being disobliging to President Donald Trump many times on this page, let me acknowledge that he is getting some things right. For example, he is right to prioritize removing illegal immigrants from the country. I have never understood why this is even controversial. The clue is in “illegal.” He is right to call time on the excesses of diversity, equity, and inclusion, including the bizarre idea of gender self-assignment. He is right, too, to be a realist on energy policy.
Did Tea Partiers ever actually mean it?
Where is the Tea Party when we need it? President Donald Trump is lining up with the far Left, declaring that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is right to want to scrap the debt ceiling. “Let’s get together, Republican and Democrat, and DO THIS!” Trump declared last week. The Tea Party was founded in 2007 as a reaction against excessive spending. Its members raged against former President Barack Obama when he lifted the debt ceiling.
The mass psychosis of Black Lives Matter
What was the most demented moment of the Black Lives Matter summer of 2020? For me, it was when 1,200 public health officials declared that, although meeting other people was a health risk, especially if you were protesting the lockdowns, demonstrating in support of BLM was fine. Few dared speak out against this obvious madness.
Keir's EU deal 'will open door' to millions more as Brussels...
SIR Keir Starmer’s EU “surrender deal” will “open the door” to millions of new migrants, fuming MPs warned today. Fury at the PM’s new Brexit deal hit boiling point as it emerged that Brussels has not only demanded free movement for under-35s but also wants “youth” to be able to bring their family members to live in the UK too.
England’s disappearing pubs signal its demographic transformation
Even during the lockdown, my village pub was the heart of the community. Banned by law from opening its doors, it sold fish and chips through a hatch. When the rules on meeting outdoors were relaxed a little, it organized markets in its beer garden where villagers could buy homemade cakes and jams and, above all, talk to one another. Now it stands derelict, one of 80 each month to call “last orders” for the last time. It was part of the history of these Hampshire chalk downs.
India and Pakistan are our future
India and Pakistan are sliding toward war. Perhaps we should not be surprised. There has been bad blood between the two kindred nations since they came semi-conjoined into existence in 1947. Indeed, the sanguinary circumstances of their birth defined their future enmity. What with everything else going on, we have been slow to wake up to the danger of conflict between the two nuclear states. They have fought at least three, arguably four, wars before, but never with the Bomb.
Trump is going full Latin American
How can anyone, after April 9’s U-turn on tariffs, argue that President Donald Trump is following some brilliant strategy? The readiness of conservative commentators and politicians, almost all of them free traders before Trump altered their career incentives, to pretend to see genius in the president’s repeated contradictions is starting to scare me. Trump is forever pulling the rug from under his apologists.
Trump’s trade war: The world will get poorer - and the US especially
The United States is about to plunge into recession, pulling much of the world down with it. The tariffs announced by President Donald Trump on April 2 will reverse decades of rising wealth based on specialization and exchange, based on little more than his unfocused feelings. Announcing his new rates, the president claimed they were reciprocal. But the tariffs supposedly levied by foreign countries were invented.
Trump is causing a global leftist revival
MEXICO CITY — President Donald Trump likes foreign leaders to say, “Thank you.” And, to be fair, plenty of heads of government owe him thanks. Russian President Vladimir Putin is, of course, at the head of the line. He has gotten everything he could have wanted from Trump, not just in Ukraine but in United Nations votes and, best of all, in NATO, where the United States is picking fights with Denmark and Canada — quite an achievement.
Maybe, given how fast-moving all this is, it’s worth trying to get online early?
Was President Donald Trump a Russian asset all along? Does Russian President Vladimir Putin, as anti-Trumpers allege, have some kind of kompromat on him? Does Trump simply prefer dictators to Democrats? Or has he borne a grudge against Volodymyr Zelensky since attempting to coerce the Ukrainian president into investigating then-presidential candidate Joe Biden in 2019? It could be any of the above or all or none. After the events of the past week, frankly, who cares?
Why immigration and free speech are incompatible
A man was murdered in Sweden last week by Islamists. What was the response of the authorities? To make it harder for people such as him to get on the wrong side of the extremists in the first place. Salwan Momika, an Iraqi Christian asylum-seeker, was shot in an apartment in Stockholm after he burned a copy of the Koran.
Instead of threatening Canada, Trump should offer an Anglosphere Union
The first act of the newly constituted Continental Army in 1775 was to invade Canada. An odd priority, you might think, until you remember how furious the revolutionaries were about the British Crown’s recognition of the rights of Catholics in Quebec. The United States had another go in 1812, but was repelled by British regulars and Native American militiamen (Canadians sometimes call it their “War of Independence”).
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