Make Do and Mend in the Royal Navy
An interesting pair of posts popped up in my reader almost simultaneously. The first is from Naval Gazing, on the logistics workup early on in the Falklands War: In a meeting on March 31st, two days...
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Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: A Review
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers is one of those magisterial overviews of five centuries of world history. Paul Kennedy does a very good job and takes a quasi-Marxian approach to this, in that...
View ArticleTo What End?
In the New York Times, C.J. Chivers has published an excerpt from his upcoming The Fighters: Americans in Combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, an absolutely blistering condemnation of our present forever...
View ArticleSanctions and Financial Warfare in the 21st Century
In July of this year, China’s first regiment of S-400 surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems was delivered by Russia and accepted into PLA service. The following month, Russia confirmed that the last 10...
View ArticleChina and Ecuadorean Oil
In an ongoing attempt to sketch the borders of China’s challenge to the Left, some brief thoughts/quotes on Ecuador and resource extraction. Patrick Iber in Dissent on the “Pink Tide” in Latin America:...
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Quick Thoughts on INF
Another treaty – this time, the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) – slain by John Bolton, the unilateralest man alive. It will come as no shock that I find this move misguided, executed in bad faith,...
View ArticleThe Global Crisis of Legitimacy
The main thrust of John Robb’s thesis in Brave New War – and the focus of much of his writing at Global Guerrillas – was the globalization of terrorism and the proliferation of tactics and “best...
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No Need for Ideological Kinship
Further proving the point of my last post, the protests in Hong Kong are now seeing some…interesting visitors, as reported by @HongKongHermit: Huge warning about some protest tourists who have just...
View ArticleChinese Tourism “Exports”
Timothy Taylor, referencing a recent IMF report on China’s account surplus, writes that China’s trade surplus has essentially vanished, in large part due to huge increases in outbound tourism: Clearly,...
View ArticleThe Distance to Tehran
In one of my previous jobs, I was tasked with revising a severely outdated briefing on Iran, to serve as the intelligence estimate for a planners’ training course. I did a good job but found the whole...
View ArticleTacitus and the Decline of Republics
Tacitus, the Roman historian, is considered one of the great chroniclers of Rome’s descent into decadence and collapse. In a recent War on the Rocks post, Iskander Rehman likens his descriptions of the...
View ArticleThe Shelves Are Stuffed (and Ikea’s Not Selling Extras)
I have a piece out in War on the Rocks, on the limitations of “enhancing” the U.S. forward presence in the Western Pacific. In short: putting additional forces at our existing (and vulnerable) bases...
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