Thanks to @arisroussinos.bsky.social for engaging so extensively with my book in this @unherd.com piece. Agree strongly with his final point on the vital connection between domestic stability and external policy. This is important for the current debate on a potential 🇬🇧🇫🇷 peacekeeping force in 🇺🇦

ROK defense industrial base model is probably something every traditionally US-aligned middle power is going to want to look at from here on out, tbh. Invent everything twice, first with US stuff if needed, then a totally indigenous version they can't veto once you've built industrial proficiency.

This is often framed as France losing influence in its former African colonies. There's truth in that, but the sentence itself makes the underlying problem self-evident.

In truth, these states have done France a favor by forcing it to do what it was unwilling to do before now.

Baa, humbug.

In the end, Russia and the Axis of Resistance stood down, accepting Syria’s political transition. Now the most dangerous threats to the country’s sovereignty and stability come from within America’s notional order: unherd.com/2024/12/how-...

Donald Trump’s nomination of Keith Kellogg as Special Envoy for Ukraine and Russia raises the likelihood of an initial “escalate-to-deescalate” approach as part of the U.S. strategy to pressure Russia into negotiations. However, whether this will ultimately define the strategy remains to be seen.

Ardoyne, Belfast

Oof. An incredibly tough read. Hard to find many parts to disagree with unfortunately.

There’s a lesson here for Democrats who found themselves to be the hapless defenders of an international order that isn’t really progressive or very popular.

unherd.com/2024/11/welc...

On Trump and the mythical, and actually existing, 1945 orders: unherd.com/2024/11/welc...

Apropos of questions about who could be the left's Joe Rogan: Here @podsaveamerica.bsky.social’s @danpfeiffer.bsky.social notes that if Harris had gone on with organically popular left analogues for Rogan like Hasan Piker, she would have had to answer Gaza questions: crooked.com/podcast/how-...

The World At War would be impossible to make now, just when we need its sober clarity most. Me on the 50th anniversary of the greatest documentary series ever made: unherd.com/2023/10/the-...

This is a very good piece by @arisroussinos.bsky.social

The Israel-Palestine conflict should have ceased to be an issue for British politics since precisely Midnight on May 14th 1948. Instead, its political salience in 2023 sadly tells us much about modern Britain: unherd.com/2023/10/isra...

Visions of Anglofuturist Britain

Reading a lot of 1940s novels, resonant of a world of sudden, sharply-declining living standards and a great global convulsion experienced on the home front as normality, only bleaker and more depressing, as in Patrick Hamilton’s characterisation of the war as “petty pilferer.”

Like Roman titles after the withdrawal of the legions, NATO may yet outlast the empire: unherd.com/2023/09/what...

Liberal idealists on Ukraine are hard-nosed Realists on Karabakh (and often, vice versa)