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.
Donald Trump’s return as US president can’t match the shock of his ascent in 2016. But it does force a permanent change in historical perspective. In 2020, Joe Biden’s victory was treated by Trump’s domestic and international opponents as though it were deliverance from a bout of delirium. In 2024 it is Biden’s single term that looks like a Covid-induced...
For the last nine months, representatives from the United States, Israel, Egypt, Qatar and Hamas have ostensibly been negotiating a ceasefire in Gaza. The delegations have met more than a dozen times, though it’s hard to point to anything that would be different had they not. Over the months the talks have taken a predictable form. Negotiators are convened. Unnamed officials say that,...
Nato’s cheerleaders like to call it the most successful multinational alliance in history. Part of that is down to its longevity. It turned 75 this year, and has now overtaken the Delian League between Greek city-states, formed in 478 BCE, which survived for 74 years. The Egyptian-Hittite ‘eternal treaty’ was in place for longer, though it included just two states, where...
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. At private school and university in Massachusetts he learned to speak excellent Mandarin, and in the early 2000s worked as the Wall Street Journal’s correspondent in China (where he was once punched in...
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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