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.
A week into his second presidential term, Donald Trump issued Executive Order 14186: The Iron Dome for America, calling for ‘a next-generation missile defence shield’. By the time the US National Security Strategy was published last November, the name had changed, irresistibly, to ‘a Golden Dome for the American homeland’.
The United States brought the war on terror to practically every part of the world – landing military advisers on the Sulu archipelago in the Philippines, operating black sites in Poland and Romania, filling the cages of Guantánamo Bay. But the challenge to American power presented by the 11 September attacks came from a particular region: what Adam Garfinkle, a future...
Charles III’s state visit to the US occasioned a good deal of commentary either celebrating the ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the US or lamenting its deficiencies. The Financial Times editorial board clung to the deep ‘military, intelligence and security co-operation’ even if the political relationship has seen better days. The Telegraph saw regal diplomacy as evidence of a bond forged on a more rarefied plane than that of ‘petty politics’. In the Times, William Hague argued for accepting a gradual loss of intimacy but warned against becoming ‘pointlessly anti-American’. Abstract notions aside, the fact of practical British support for American empire remains an underexamined peculiarity of British foreign policy.
The attack launched on Iran by the US and Israel on 28 February was a textbook case of international aggression, justified in only the most cursory fashion by fictional Iranian threats and undertaken with no clear aims and no clear demands or terms. In announcing the war Donald Trump described it as a wholesale attack on both government and state. The US and Israel would ‘raze their...
No discussion in British defence and security circles gets very far without someone mentioning the post-Cold War ‘peace dividend’. The idea that the collapse of the Soviet Union bequeathed to Western Europe safe conditions that allowed for lower military spending and higher social spending has become commonplace.
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....
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.