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.
The presidential election held in Turkey on 14 May was marked by heightened excitement, both among the domestic opposition and abroad, that the end of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s presidency might be imminent. Erdoğan and his supporters assured the country he was still the right man, at the right time – Doğru Zaman, Doğru Adam – to lead the republic into its second...
Empires are supposed to be a thing of the past, yet in some ways the empires we knew are still with us. The great powers of the present were the great continental empires of the 18th and 19th centuries. The borders of Russia today are similar to those of the Russian empire in the 1750s. The territory of modern China largely resembles that of the Qing empire in 1760, the main difference...
The current US government has tried to tie its domestic political projects to a confrontation with China. As Scipio Nasica said of Rome’s relations with Carthage, the existence of an official enemy can have a stimulatory effect on the home state. But the risks are too high. The US military used to have reasonably friendly contacts with the Chinese military. US undersecretaries of defence would visit Beijing. They now travel to Taipei. The hotlines are quiet, the rules unclear. Without a framework for managing Sino-American relations, too much depends on the personal moderation of a few leaders.
You can’t escape the heat by dodging between patches of shade. It’s more a case of driving between climate-controlled buildings, and better not to move around at all. Around the Persian Gulf, fifty-degree days are no longer aberrations. In Iraq and Kuwait they have become routine.
There is a tendency to view the UK-Saudi relationship in purely commercial terms, as though arms industry profits were the main point. Orders from Saudi Arabia are some of the most significant for British weapons manufacturers. But they do not account for the vehemence of the British commitment to the war in Yemen. The enthusiastic support British politicians have for Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf monarchies suggests more than an amoral exercise in profit-seeking.
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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