The 19th century French writer Victor Hugo wrote that “We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present.” We have so much more information at our fingertips today that it’s increasingly difficult to see the wood for the trees.
The Labour leadership is preparing itself for the external challenges of the future with a suite of foreign policies endorsed at the National Policy Forum and outlined in speeches by David Lammy and John Healey. However, we also need to nurture more informed thinking about foreign and security policy in
Tony Benn divided politicians into the Signposts and the Weathercocks. The Signpost constantly says: “This is the way we should go” while “the Weathercock hasn’t got an opinion until they’ve looked at the polls, talked to the focus groups, discussed it with the spin doctors.” This grossly caricatures the dilemmas
Napoleon said that “to know a nation’s geography is to know its foreign policy” and this holds true for the Baltic nation of Estonia. Its strategically vital place on the map explains both why aggressive neighbours inflicted misery on it in the 20thcentury and why it is now a keen
Labour should not count its chickens before any general election and especially one that will take place in highly dangerous international conditions where various vultures are preying on weaker states and making the UK vulnerable. Jeremy Cliffe rightly says we face “…a febrile and multipolar world in which the US
Useful idiots who supported Soviet invasions, or “fraternal assistance” in the Orwellian lingo of the day, were rightly damned as “tankies.” Progressives now back genuine assistance to Ukraine including heavy metal military kit. We are all tankies now, perhaps.Russian aggression has triggered a steep learning curve on defence and foreign policy. Neutral Finland and
The Labour Government’s success in securing the Belfast Agreement 25 years ago was a huge transnational effort that required close collaboration with the Irish Government, the USA, the EU, and senior international figures. It was also bipartisan. Labour pursued the work of Tony Blair’s predecessor, John Major, who advanced the
In 1991 a largely neglected intervention in Iraq prevented genocide and boosted freedom. That year up to two million Iraqi Kurds had fled to the freezing mountains and their deaths and suffering filled our television screens. They understandably feared a repeat of Saddam Hussein’s genocide with chemical weapons in the
The 43 year old Iranian regime’s lethal rampages round its neighbourhood have increased of late and reek of desperation. It has, for instance, again bombed exiled Iranian Kurdish camps in Iraqi Kurdistan. It destroyed the house – comically described as an Israeli drone base – of a Kurdish company chief,
