Instant Opinion: ‘How Boris Johnson could lead the UK into war’

The Week’s daily round-up highlights the five best opinion pieces from across the British and international media, with excerpts from each.

1. Paul Mason in the New Statesman

on the dangers of foreign policy bravado

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How Boris Johnson’s government could lead the UK into war with Iran

“There’s a lot to worry about with Johnson: his addiction to lying, his flippant racism, his laziness and tendency to commission large-scale spending projects from acquaintances in defiance of normal procurement rules. But the biggest worry has to be the neo-imperial fantasy that underpins the whole project of hard Brexit. It looks ludicrous to professionals in the security space, but to an electorate fed on tabloid fantasies of British greatness, and the perpetual celebration of past wars, it will sound plausible. Essentially, that section of the electorate who are dumb enough to countenance a chaotic exit from the EU are also dumb enough to think Britain’s navy, with its 19 surface combat ships, can still ‘rule the waves’. Egged on by the tabloids and by Trump, Johnson and his cronies are quite capable of celebrating the revival of their careers by pitching the UK into a hot war in the Persian Gulf as the hors d’oeuvre for a trade deal with the US.”

2. Jeremy Black in The Daily Telegraph

on chaos theory

From Walpole to Thatcher, chaos has been the making of many of our finest PMs

“Commentators are apt to forget that one of the purposes of government is to cope with chaos, and it is scarcely surprising that difficult situations recur. Margaret Thatcher no more faced a bed of roses than Stanley Baldwin. Division, even turmoil, is not all that unusual, historically speaking, especially when important matters are at stake. It may actually be healthy in that alternative courses of action are formulated and debated.”

3. Gail Collins in The New York Times

on Robert Mueller’s anti-climactic Senate hearing

How to Take Down Trump

“The nation is so divided on the subject of Donald Trump that it’s almost impossible to imagine anything would get him kicked out of office. If he got caught standing with a knife and a pile of murdered puppies, he’d claim that he had actually protected innocent children from a pack of small fuzzy sharks. And around a third of the country would shrug, while Senate Republicans muttered something about danger at the beaches. Looks like the Democrats are just going to have to run a strong presidential campaign about how to make the country better. If they do that, Donald Trump will not be in the White House in 2021. At which time, we can let the collusion and conspiracy indictments roll.”

4. Elle Hunt in The Guardian

on a never-ending heatwave

Britain is boiling, and ditching the duvet won't solve the problem

“We continue to build housing designed to keep heat in, creating ‘death traps in hot weather’, and leave cooling measures to those who can afford them. We privatise precious green spaces that help to reduce the impact of heat and we build with asphalt, brick, concrete and glass, which exacerbate it. We have learned to change our behaviour in response to rising temperatures – lingering in the frozen goods aisle of the supermarket, organising our lives around air conditioning – when what urgently needs to change is the structure of society. Not now – but yesterday.”

5. James Marriot in The Times

on dumbing down

How social media has coarsened our minds

“The modern urge to ‘cancel’ sinning celebrities, banishing them from public life, is connected to the prevalence of the ‘block’ function on social media apps. We’re used to the idea that if we don’t like someone we can simply remove them from our minds. As electronic media triumphs, traditional media such as books and newspapers are embattled. Figures published this year show that sales of novels are in steep decline. We’ve swapped a form of entertainment which by its very nature fosters empathy and deep thought, inserting us deep into other consciousnesses, for one that has been designed to make us hate each other.”