Britain can help defeat the Houthis
In a lightning series of advances in the past week, the Houthis have captured Hanish and Zuqar Islands, the port…
Al Qaeda haven’t gone away, you know
‘They haven’t gone away, you know.” Gerry Adams’s chilling words, uttered during the peace process, to remind everyone that the IRA…
What is the point of the new ‘Muslim NATO?’
Pakistan’s defense minister, Khawaja Asif, rather excitedly proclaimed a new defense agreement – the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement – between…
Are we edging closer to peace in Ukraine?
When he came to write of 1942-3 in his magisterial, if idiosyncratic, “History of the Second World War,” Winston Churchill…
The trouble with the Ministry of Defence
In a telling exchange on Radio 4 last week, during the furore following John Healey’s resignation, Debbie Abrahams, the Labour…
Britain is facing an Islamist insurgency
The recent horrific attack in Golders Green has generated much anger and despair at this latest in a series of…
What is Putin’s game?
What happens when you boil a frog? It doesn’t notice the warming water until it is too late. According to…
China’s parade spells trouble for Taiwan
The massive military parade in Beijing today definitively marks the end of the post-World War Two era. Nominally, the 80th Anniversary…
How Britain ended up in the Afghan asylum mess
The Afghan data leak has generated a mass of lurid headlines and, no doubt, there is still much analysis, pointing…
How the UK failed the army interpreters stranded in Afghanistan
We lost. Whatever hope we had that we could help Afghanistan crawl out of its misery has been shattered. The…
We need to act now to save the army’s Afghan interpreters
In July 2010, near the end of my two-year tour as defence attaché in Kabul, I was phoned by the…
