Tom Stevenson is a contributing editor at the LRB. His collection of essays, Someone Else’s Empire: British Illusions and American Hegemony, many of which first appeared in the paper, was published in 2023.
In 2019, a group of scientists led by Owen Toon, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, modelled the climatic effects of a nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan in 2025. The hypothetical scenario was a militant attack on the Indian parliament, leading to mobilisation along the Line of Control. Skirmishes in Kashmir escalate and the Indian army crosses into Pakistan, prompting a nuclear war.
The Trump court is a royal progress that moves between Palm Beach and the White House, for the most part in private planes. But the interests of the US government require that at least some of its members be willing to travel farther afield than Florida. Trump talks of putting the US economy behind a great tariff wall, but he also wants deals, which means he needs dealers. America’s official chief diplomat is the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, but so far his activities have been fairly limited. Instead, the role of principal US emissary is currently filled by the unlikely figure of the property developer Steve Witkoff.
Decipherments of ancient scripts are often attributed, and sometimes misattributed, to individual scholars: Jean-Jacques Barthélemy and the Phoenician alphabet, Champollion and Egyptian hieroglyphs, Magnus Celsius and Staveless Runes, Michael Ventris and Linear B, Edward Hincks and Akkadian cuneiform, Yuri Knorozov and Maya glyphs. These were undeniable intellectual achievements. They...
The history of Hamas is unintelligible without reference to the remarkable life of its founder, Ahmed Yassin. He was born in 1936, the year of the Great Revolt against the British, and his life followed a trajectory which in many ways reflected that of Palestine itself. In 1948 the village of his birth, near Ashkelon, was ethnically cleansed by Israeli forces and his family was driven into...
Part of the reason for Assad’s rapid collapse is that his international backers – Russia, Iran, Hizbullah – were all at the same moment distracted or weakened. But that doesn’t explain why the regime had been unable to strengthen itself in the preceding lull. Since 2020, the intensity of the civil war had declined. The half-hearted attempt by the US and its allies to fell Assad was in the past. The armed opposition was for the most part contained in Idlib, and the Syrian Kurdish forces remained in the north-east. Under those conditions the regime might have consolidated its hold over the areas still under its control. It is now evident that it did not. Perhaps US sanctions, which came into effect in 2020 and doubled the number of Syrians without enough to eat, played some part. But clearly the Assad system of minority rule by brutal repression was also exhausted.
Tom Stevenson talks to Thomas Jones about the situation in Ukraine, the effectiveness of some of the weapons in use, from anti-tank missiles to economic sanctions, and the risk of nuclear escalation.
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