It’s normal to hear NATO described as an “internationalist project” in Western Europe. Even the centre-left has long stood by the Atlantic alliance. Britain was signed up to NATO by the post-war Labour government. By contrast, France withdrew from NATO under the leadership of Charles de Gaulle as part of his politics of grandeur. Yet the NATO project may not have been so lost in the Cold War as it is today. (More…)
The United States has always approached political Islam in a contradictory manner. Since the 1950s, when Washington first made common cause with anti-Communist religious leaders, US policy towards the Mideast has been characterized by a disconnect between rhetoric and politics, particularly in matters concerning Islamist mobilization. (More…)
Farah is a young woman living in Syria’s capital city, where she faces the daily struggles of trying to maintain a normal social and professional life in a country being ripped apart by war. (More…)
As President Obama headed to the UN headquarters in New York on Thursday, his last planned visit in his current capacity as head of state, he was highly cognizant of the meeting’s significance. (More…)
Make no mistake about it, the best man won. It’s difficult to imagine the agony of those who oppose Jeremy Corbyn. It must be like a nightmare on the scale of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Imagine it, constant wailing and writhing by defenceless Smith supporters as they are tormented by hordes of demons. That may be just how the Labour Right sees Momentum in particular and the Corbyn base in general. But this twisted fantasy was not enough. (More…)
Der dritte oder der vierte Mensch, by the German sociologist Alfred Weber, hardly qualifies as a classic of the literature. It was published in 1953 as the first phase of the Cold War was winding down and much of the value that it retains is due to the way that it reflects the mindset of a particular moment in history. (More…)
Once you’ve seen the original photograph, this exercise in “Photoshopping” is understandable. But my first-year university students, trying to make sense of Claudia Rankine’s brilliant book Citizen have not. To them, it’s just a perplexing image of white people from long ago, turning around to look at the camera in front of the dark shape of a tree looming against an even darker sky. (More…)
It is a leisurely five-minute walk from where I lived to the Gymnasia on Tel Aviv’s Jabotinsky street, and many long years since I dropped out in disgrace at the age of fifteen and a half. (More…)
Islamic State’s retreat from the Turkish border, and the arrest of multiple suicide bombers trying to cross over to hit Turkish targets this weekend, shows that the group’s strategy is changing rapidly. With Turkey still a source of illegal funds and recruits, ISIS nonetheless appears much less concerned with maintaining a “live and let live” approach with the security forces. (More…)
As the Syrian government and its allied militias evacuate mostly Sunni populations from rebel-held areas, sectarian narratives are filling the vacuum. (More…)
In his latest speech, President Jean-Claude Juncker talked up the necessity of the EU creating its own military headquarters and work towards a common military force. Juncker claimed this new force would be complementary to NATO. He clearly wanted to reassure the Americans that the EU does not wish to usurp them. Yet its hard not to see the potential for a realignment here. (More…)
In his first edition of Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy, Yale’s Michael H. Hunt hoped that in describing the primacy of ideological assumptions in foreign policymaking, he could contribute to the post-Vietnam critique of American overreach in world affairs (More…)