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foreign affairs in strategic context
Browsing All Posts published on »January, 2011«
Afghanistan, the Conservatives and the Special Relationship
Why does David Cameron support the war in Afghanistan? I have touched on this here and here, but one reason not yet addressed is the importance of the United States. Though not crucial to them, the Special Relationship is vital for us; and Hew Strachan believes this is the reason for our involvement in the […]
Hermit of Peking
January 20, 2011
Hugh Trevor-Roper is my favourite historian and he should be the model for budding academics. Much of my week has been spent on the sofa reading one of his few books, one of his best: a life of Sir Edmund Backhouse. It is not a familiar name today, arguably due to Trevor-Roper. Backhouse was a […]
Crispin Burke and Courtney Messerschmidt: Shi Lang!
January 19, 2011
The rise of China and its implication on security in East Asia is conspicuously missing from the blog, but this guest post by Crispin Burke and Courtney Messerschmidt begins to correct this. It puts concerns about Chinese military technology into a more critical perspective, especially its new aircraft carrier. Crispin is a US Army captain […]
Decontaminating Conservative foreign policy
January 8, 2011
I have had another small breakthrough with my work on Conservative foreign policy, triggered by making notes from Professor Tim Bale’s The Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron. He spends the last chapter of the book looking at David Cameron’s ‘brand decontamination’ strategy. The biggest problem the Party had between 1997 and 2005 was that […]
Afghanistan, the Conservatives and the national interest
January 5, 2011
That simple truth was reaffirmed last night: when in doubt, Hew Strachan. I had a breakthrough with my work on Afghanistan and the Conservative Party thanks again to his essay, ‘The Strategic Gap in British Defence Policy’. Since November, I have been struggling to write about the emphasis on the national interest in Conservative foreign […]
A peace to end all peace
January 3, 2011
The historian Margaret MacMillan wrote an interesting op-ed for The New York Times the other week, about reparations and the First World War. I stopped reading after a few paragraphs because it sounded like a load of balls, but I went back to it and the article has its merits. The thing I objected to […]
January 26, 2011
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