Tom Stevenson

Part of the reason for Assad’s rapid collapse is that his international backers – Russia, Iran, Hizbullah – were all at the same moment distracted or weakened. But that doesn’t explain why the regime had been unable to strengthen itself in the preceding lull. Since 2020, the intensity of the civil war had declined. The half-hearted attempt by the US and its allies to fell Assad was in the past. The armed opposition was for the most part contained in Idlib, and the Syrian Kurdish forces remained in the north-east. Under those conditions the regime might have consolidated its hold over the areas still under its control. It is now evident that it did not. Perhaps US sanctions, which came into effect in 2020 and doubled the number of Syrians without enough to eat, played some part. But clearly the Assad system of minority rule by brutal repression was also exhausted.

Advocates of even higher British military spending like to talk about Russia and other supposed ‘peer adversaries’. But Britain’s actual role in present military engagements is a less popular topic. The evils of China and Russia are common themes. The fact that US and European support for Israel’s assault on Gaza is basically run from British bases in Cyprus goes unmentioned.

The number of Trump administration officials who could be called ‘very competent’ is small, but the former deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger is one of them. A private school boy from Massachusetts who learned to speak excellent Mandarin, Pottinger was once the Wall Street Journal’s correspondent in China (where he was punched in the face in a café by someone he described as a ‘government goon’).

The military protection of Saudi Arabia has been the centrepiece of US power in the world’s major hydrocarbon-producing region for decades. For most of that time the US has also committed itself to the protection and support of Israel. American strategic planners have usually managed this balancing act without trouble, but on occasion it has posed problems.

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.

‘If we can perturb an asteroid out of impact trajectory,’ Sagan and Ostro wrote, ‘it follows that we can also transform one on a benign trajectory into an Earth-impactor.’