Donald Trump says Nato faces a “very bad future” if America’s allies fail to help secure the Strait of Hormuz. The US president – who has appealed to China, France, Japan, South Korea and the UK to help “police” the waterway – argues it is “only appropriate” that those who benefit from the flow of oil help “make sure that nothing bad happens”. A sixth-former and a university student have died of invasive meningitis in Canterbury, with 11 others seriously ill in hospital in an outbreak thought to be linked to a nightclub. The UK Health Security Agency is in contact with more than 30,000 people deemed to be at risk, and offering precautionary antibiotics to close contacts of the infected. Jessie Buckley won best actress at the Oscars last night for her role in Hamnet. The black comedy action-thriller One Battle After Another won best film, and best actor went to Michael B Jordan, who played twins in the Southern Gothic horror Sinners. Click here for the full list of winners.

The easiest way to lose journalistic credibility, says Adrian Wooldridge in The Spectator, is to “invoke the 1930s”. But the parallels with our own decade are now “too numerous to ignore”. A century ago, order collapsed because Britain no longer had the economic muscle to continue as the “global liberal hegemon”; today, the US is retreating from the same role through choice. On trade, America’s 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariffs set off a tit-for-tat cycle that shrank the global economy; today, Donald Trump is repeating the mistake. But perhaps the most acute parallel is the “multiplication of strongmen”. After Lenin established his “dictatorship of the proletariat” in 1917 and Mussolini marched on Rome in 1922, much of Europe rapidly turned to tough-guy leaders. Since Vladimir Putin “slithered into power” in 2000, strongmen have multiplied again: not just in Chechnya, Belarus and Kazakhstan, but also in vast democracies like India, Turkey, Brazil and, most recently, America.

These leaders, who share a taste for “displays of strength and violence”, profit from a combination of political polarisation and a fashion for illiberal ideas. In 1930, Spanish writer José Ortega y Gasset worried about the arrival of a “raving, exorbitant style of politics that claims to replace all knowledge”. Using this style, Trump came to power in a system specifically designed to prevent strongmen, a trick Jordan Bardella and Marine Le Pen may repeat in France next year. Mussolini declared the liberal state “destined to perish” and said “all the political experiments of our day are anti-liberal”. Today, we must remember that extremism can only be countered by the “vigorous application” of liberalism, and a “muscular defence” of fundamental values. “We all know what happened last time that liberals dithered while strongmen had their way.”

Dubai airport temporarily suspended operations this morning after a drone attack, says Agnes Helou in Breaking Defense – not that you’d know it from the UAE’s defence ministry. In the first 10 days of the war, the Gulf state released a detailed daily breakdown of how many Iranian missiles and drones had been intercepted and how many had got through. But last week – the day after The Wall Street Journal noted that the interception success rate was going down – the UAE government changed tack. Now it only reveals how many drones and missiles it has “engaged”.

The Instagram account Rate My Chives has racked up more than 93,000 followers by becoming the “number one authority on chives”, says Yvonne Lam in The Guardian. Every day, top-end chefs and home cooks submit photos of their efforts to be rated by the account’s anonymous founder, a UK chef who started it in 2022 after noticing that poorly chopped chives at a restaurant were a “herby harbinger of a bad meal”. He scores on “consistency and thinness”, docking points for entries that are bruised, crushed, oval or square. “To get a 10,” he says, “you need a knife like a razor.” Submit yours here.

Politicians of all stripes are urging the government to help people out with rising energy bills, says Matthew Syed in The Sunday Times. Ed Davey has demanded that the prime minister “personally get a grip” on the problem; a Labour backbencher told a radio phone-in it wouldn’t be fair for “ordinary people” to pay higher bills. What tosh. “There must be no energy bailout.” When you fund “compassion” by borrowing – as all governments have done for the past two decades – the consequences down the line are economically crippling. We already spend more each year on government debt interest than on defence and policing combined. We have to offer investors higher risk premiums than Germany, Holland, Spain, Sweden, Ireland, Belgium and many others. “This isn’t compassion; it’s national lunacy.”

Rachel Reeves, who has somehow already found £53m to help vulnerable people with heating bills, is a chancellor who would be “out of depth in a puddle”. But she is far from alone. Nigel Farage’s so-called “contract” with voters, Rishi Sunak’s “quadruple lock”, Davey’s down-the-rabbithole proposals – they’re all the same “buy now, pay later” fantasies. I’m sick of it. Not just because of the self-deception and the virtue-signalling. But because the worse our finances get, the harder it will be to borrow when we really do need it – if World War Three does eventually happen, we are likely to face an “instant sovereign debt crisis”. During the 1973 energy shock, which was far more brutal than this one is likely to be, West Germany’s left-wing leader Willy Brandt rejected the temptation to offer a vast bailout. “We’ll have to get dressed a little more warmly this winter,” he said. “But we aren’t going to starve.” That’s not cruelty. “It’s something else. Leadership.”

Rich Americans are spending more and more of their hard-earned cash on fancy aquariums, says Robyn Friedman in The Wall Street Journal. Saltwater tanks are especially in vogue, since sea-species’ colours are more vibrant. Artificial reefs are not uncommon, and inhabitants include pufferfish, golden moray eel and sharks. Top-of-the-range tanks require a twice-weekly visit from a professional and a monthly clean by a scuba diver. LA aquarium-maker Nic Tiemens, who sells models ranging from $75,000 up to $1m, says that since Covid he’s seen a “tremendous increase” in sales. “Art budgets have now become aquarium budgets.”

When Flight Sergeant Harry Winter, who has died aged 103, was deemed fit enough to travel after being shot down over Germany in 1943, says The Daily Telegraph, a young German medical orderly called Gunther Arf escorted the Englishman on a train to a Luftwaffe interrogation centre. En route, Winter was threatened by an armed soldier but Arf grabbed a senior soldier to apprehend the assailant, almost certainly saving Winter’s life. Winter gave his German rescuer his name and address, and after the war, when both were married with children, the pair struck up an enduring friendship, enjoying many family holidays together.

It’s a jumper made using textured Jacquard stitches to “recreate the feel of a pub carpet”, says Rob Davies in The Guardian, yours for just £1,295. The pricey pullover is part of a 17-piece collaboration between Guinness and the luxury brand JW Anderson, with other gimmicky garments including a £200 T-shirt echoing the brand’s vintage bottle tops, shorts that look like a beer towel (£440), and an Irish wool top bearing the Guinness harp logo (£850). The tie-in, unveiled in time for St Patrick’s Day tomorrow, is the latest sign of the black stuff’s transformation from “unfashionable pub staple to social media status symbol”.