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.
Xi Jinping has been at the top of China’s political system for thirteen years. In that time he has consolidated control over the apparatus of the Chinese state and personalised power to a degree unseen since the death of Mao. Like Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin before him, Xi is general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, chairman of the Central Military Commission and head of state....
The US desire to annex Greenland is traceable to at least 1867 and the ambitions of the secretary of state William H. Seward, who negotiated the Alaska purchase that same year. Whatever the motivation – fancy cannot be dismissed – Trump has a vision of Greenland as a second Alaska.
In its open aggression and territoriality, Trump’s second National Security Strategy is less duplicitous about US actions around the world than past official documents. But there is plenty of dissembling. Trump’s government, which has bombed Iran, conducted drone assassinations in northern Syria, bombed Yemen and waged a global trade war is said to have a ‘predisposition to non-interventionism’.
For four decades El Salvador was known for death squads and civil war, and then for gang violence. But now, under President Nayib Bukele, the gangs that carved up the country have been routed. The members of the pandillas – the two main gangs were Mara Salvatrucha (or MS-13) and Barrio 18 (split into two factions, the Revolucionarios and Sureños) – have been imprisoned or...
On 2 June the British government finally published its Strategic Defence Review on the state of the UK armed forces. When it was commissioned, in July 2024, Keir Starmer described it as ‘first of its kind’ and ‘root and branch’ – a clear indication that it would be nothing of the sort. This was the fourth defence review in the past five years, with two more...
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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