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.
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?
What are the major wars of our time? Ukraine and Gaza, of course. But what about Syria, Yemen, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Sudan? Most of these are civil wars with very large numbers of fatalities. But they inspire much less interest than Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine or Israel’s attack on Gaza. The war in Syria received years of diligent consideration, if only because the...
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?
If one were designing an international system from scratch, it wouldn’t feature enclaves or exclaves. States are violent institutions at the best of times, given to feuds and to border disputes launched over the smallest provocation. Nesting part of the territory of one state inside another seems like an excellent way to increase the chances of things going wrong. But the existing...
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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