Tom Stevenson

Rural fort soldiering is a classic imperial mode, so it isn’t unusual that the US does it in the Middle East, except that so many of the outposts in Syria and Iraq have become liabilities. So why haven’t they been shut down? 

The Red Sea is usually one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. Nearly 30 per cent of maritime container trade, and a significant quantity of oil, passes through the Suez Canal and the Bab al-Mandab. Or it used to, before the Houthis in Yemen began trying to shut it all down last month.

We are used to a thermonuclear dyad. For most of the Cold War, Washington and Moscow commanded massive arsenals far in excess of those of other nuclear-armed states. However pre-eminent the US may have been in other ways, in nuclear terms the world was bipolar. That picture still more or less holds true. But for how long?

Last month, Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee finally published a report on China on which it had been working, on and off, for almost four years. The main finding, reported approvingly across British media, was that China represents a threat to the UK because of Beijing’s ‘global ambition to become a technological and economic superpower’.

Countries that purport to hold democratic values do not like admitting that they run death squads and carry out night-raid executions. So instead they talk of special forces on ‘deliberate detention operations’. But there is a limit to the concealing power of language when you are flying helicopters into mud-brick villages and killing people in front of their families.