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.
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.
The Syrian government’s effort to take full control of the north-east clearly has the approval of the United States. After meeting with al-Sharaa and the Syrian Democratic Forces commander, Mazloum Abdi, the US special envoy to Syria (and ambassador to Turkey), Tom Barrack, said the SDF had outlived its usefulness. Its future, he said, ‘lies in the post-Assad transition under the new government led by President Ahmed al-Sharaa’.
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...
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’.
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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