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 Syrian civil war lasted twelve long years, but ended in twelve days. The speed of the rebel advance that brought down the regime of Bashar al-Assad was remarkable. On 27 November, the coalition of opposition forces based in Idlib province and known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) announced their first major operation for years. Within days they had swept through Aleppo, Hama and Homs,...
The British defence intelligentsia has an endorheic quality. As a whole it forms a permanent constituency in support of excessive military responses. This is inbuilt in the discipline: there isn’t much point in a defence intellectual without an army. The think tanks will welcome Liz Truss’s policy of drastically raising military spending, with the aim of reaching 3 per cent of GDP by 2030. In the US there is detailed public debate about foreign policy, admittedly within a limited ideological range. In the British media there usually isn’t. The influence of the Royal United Services Institute and other similar institutions in the media and on the professional class as a whole is partly responsible: supposed technocratic expertise is too often accepted on its own terms. The British security establishment experienced the Brexit vote as a mild shock but soon fell back into its old patterns. Lawrence Freedman imagined that leaving the EU might lead to an introspective retirement from international posturing, but there has been no move in that direction.
Sea power isn’t just a matter of building a bigger navy. Nor is it reducible to the skill of admirals. Even the best ships with the ablest captains will struggle without conveniently located ports and the infrastructure they provide. Without secure access to the relevant seas a large navy is just a lot of metal to clean. The best summation of the importance of naval position was given in 1904 by the British admiral John Fisher: ‘Five keys lock up the world! Singapore, the Cape, Alexandria, Gibraltar, Dover. These five keys belong to England.’ But if you leave strategic bases aside, it is often the show of naval force, rather than its application, that has proved most potent. The modern tool of naval power projection is the aircraft carrier. The biggest of them, which belong to the US Navy, are 333 metres end to end (longer than the Shard would be if it were laid horizontal) and displace 100,000 tonnes of water with their bulk.
Talk of Iran and nuclear weapons has long since taken on the structure of an old joke: Iran has supposedly been weeks away from terrible advances for the last thirty years. The joke gets told nonetheless. When Joe Biden visited Jerusalem in June, he spoke of his commitment to stopping Iran from getting the bomb, even though the US government’s own assessment two months earlier was that Iran ‘is not currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons-development activities’.
On 18 May, Finland and Sweden applied to join Nato. There are very few countries in the world that can plausibly claim to have tried to conduct a principled form of foreign policy. Two of them are now seeking to join a military alliance composed of states with long histories of aggression and war crimes. If completed, the Nordic expansion of Nato would leave only three states of any size – Ireland, Austria and Switzerland – to keep up the tradition of European neutrality.
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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