Tom Stevenson
@TomFStevenson
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Foreign correspondent. Contributing Editor @LRB . tomfstevenson @gmail .com
Joined May 2009
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Pinned Tweet
In the new
@LRB
, I wrote about Nato, its local converts, and the US strategic position in Europe.
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In the new
@LRB
, I wrote about how Israel has replaced much of Gaza with an uneven igneous landscape of black-grey mounds.
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UK government buildings are going to fly the flag of an apartheid state that commits worse crimes than Hamas soldiers have ever dreamed. So naturally prominent British journalists are policing the small, already almost criminalised Palestine solidarity movement.
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The entirety of Western policy is organised to enable Israel to do what it's about to do to Gaza.
That fact contains within it the only question of importance for British and American citizens.
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In the new
@LRB
, I wrote about the war in Ethiopia, the indifference it inspired, and Abiy Ahmed's ambitions.
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The German greens: flying around the world dumping kerosene into the sea
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This is the cover image for the latest Military Review (the official US Army journal).
It's wild.
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For
@nytimes
, I wrote about how the US has shifted its strategy in Ukraine, and greatly increased the risk of escalation.
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The US military used to have reasonably friendly contacts with the Chinese military. US undersecretaries of defence would visit Beijing. They now travel to Taipei. The hotlines are quiet, the rules unclear.
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In the new
@LRB
, I wrote about the curious world of British foreign policy, and the passionate Atlanticism of the British defence intelligentsia.
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Exactly how many dead Palestinians are enough to avenge the Hamas attack? The position of the US, UK, and EU governments at the moment is: as many as Israel decides.
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“Where do you think so much of this stuff comes from? Magic?” - Not magic, but the Anglosphere project of global surveillance.
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Subliterate UK media personalities in the genocidaire clubhouse.
The real villain here is the UN, you see.
You can understand why the UN is worried about the tunnels since Hamas built them with UN money. UN agencies like this are now the PR arm of Hamas.
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Very interesting stuff from
@BrankoMilan
, despite the reliance on Maddison's 'data'. The conclusion (geography) is fairly obvious.
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In the new
@LRB
, I reported from Ankara during the elections, and wrote about the Cizre basement massacre and the recent history of Turkish nationalism.
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Napoleon got through 60 bottles of perfume a month.
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In the new
@LRB
, I wrote about the elections in Turkey, nationalism, and the sources of support for Erdoğan
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In the new
@LRB
, I wrote about the unique nature of US sanctions, and their evolution into the 'weapon of first resort' in American foreign policy.
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When the German media and political class has a psychotic break, how do you know?
If the ICJ rules that what Israel is doing in Gaza is genocide the German media and political class are going to have a psychotic break of epic proportions.
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In 2019, when Donald Trump wanted to withdraw American forces from Syria, Benjamin Netanyahu requested that the US retain its presence at al-Tanf.
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"To his detractors, Đukanović was a strongman who turned Montenegro into an authoritarian mafia state. Crime and corruption were rampant, nepotism ruled, critical journalists were attacked and even killed"
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British politics is shot through with enthusiastic support for war crimes - it's more uniform than in Israel. Parliament a genocidaire clubhouse.
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On the British army, the legacy of Iraq, and the persistence of Anglo-Saxon bellicosity
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In the new
@LRB
, I wrote about European diplomacy, CIA memoirs, and how to write a good dispatch.
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The official US war plan during the Cold War was to drop 3423 nuclear bombs on Soviet territory, Eastern Europe and China - even in the case of non-nuclear conflict in Europe alone.
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This has always been a terrible argument. An empire is not somehow morally obligated to take on additional protectorates. It's a bad joke.
There has always been a moral argument for expansion. What right have we to say no to countries that have suffered from Russian aggression—whether it was Poland and the Czech Republic and Hungary in the 1990s, or Ukraine now? They have a living memory of Russian aggression. 5/
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In the new
@LRB
, I wrote about Five Eyes, and the Anglosphere project of global surveillance
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It's genuinely remarkable that such an obvious case of massive war crimes against the general population of Gaza is -- still -- being covered over as a surgical operation against Hamas.
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"It should by now be a truism that wars begin with talk of high technology and end with the drudgery of infantry pushes."
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There's no global empire, but the US seizes Iranian oil tankers heading to China and redirects them to the US.
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On poisons, assassinations, and nerve agents.
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In 2022, South Korea exported more goods to the US than to China - first time in almost two decades.
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'Not least among the reasons for the gradual stagnation of the architectural and urbanist imagination in the West since the end of the 1980s is that the Soviets were no longer there to steal from.'
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In the new
@LRB
, I wrote about the coup in Tunisia, and the revolutionary decade that preceded it.
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In the new
@LRB
, I wrote about thermonuclear weapons, the balance of forces between the US and China, and false alarms caused by migrating geese.
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In the new
@LRB
, I wrote about 'free seas', the history of sea power, and the naval balance between the US and China.
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Nordic Nato and the arsenal of military dictatorship
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The Weather in the Persian Gulf (plus the Stele of Vultures, Gilgamesh, and the tentacled butterfly ray)
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US national security advisor Jake Sullivan yesterday explicitly called the end of the neoliberal era. Will parochial British elites even notice? (No mention in major papers).
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In the new
@LRB
, I wrote about the Age of the Superstate, and historic leaps in the size of empires.
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Important point by
@antloewenstein
: Five Eyes countries are directly implicated in Israel's destruction of Gaza through signals intelligence provision.
Antony Loewenstein: Israel Is Testing New Weapons on Gaza as Arms Dealers Profit from Gaza War
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On war crimes by British special forces
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Capitalism is supposed to have almost eradicated extreme poverty, but 30% of Indian children are stunted.
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'European states lack the material and imaginative resources for a counter-hegemonic project... Europeans are wide awake, smiling and cheering, exulting in their ‘strategic autonomy’ as they are frogmarched towards the next global conflict for us primacy.'
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The war in Ukraine and the food crisis it has compounded will result in growing poverty and privation.
The longer the war continues, the greater the hunger.
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'We heard a publisher who was asked, “What is literary fiction?” respond, “Not commercial. Might win a prize.”'
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So much reporting on Gaza is operating in alternate reality.
Has Israel 'achieved its war aims'? It's a question with no possible answer. From the beginning the attack on Gaza has been about collective punishment by retributive, orgiastic violence.
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Our Friend and Ally
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On piratical humanitarian intervention in the Red Sea
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'The Soviet Union had started out as a dictatorship of the proletariat run by intellectuals; what it had become, in the eyes of the children of those intellectuals, was the dictatorship of the former proletarians who remained culturally proletarian'
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The three laws of thermodynamics:
First law: You can’t win, you can only break even.
Second law: You can only break even at absolute zero.
Third law: You can’t reach absolute zero.
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'For such young men, the First World War came like a gift from heaven. Karl Marx had wondered whether Achilles was possible in an age of powder and lead. It was now time to find out!'
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Kissinger in Western Sahara
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On rare earth metals, the power of transnational commodity traders, and the extractive assault on indigenous peoples.
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Drone operators do not know what they are shooting at.
From grainy footage, they mistake cotton gins for ammonium nitrate.
There's a straight line between talk of ‘precision’ air weaponry and airstrikes in civilian areas.
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I wrote about Military Review's unhinged China issue, the Taiwan question, and American writing about China
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In this morning's
@FT
news briefing the Houthis are a 'rebel military group' and 'a rebel movement'. They've been running Sanaa for nine years.
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After 600 BCE there was always an empire controlling at least 2.5 million square kilometres. After 1600 CE there was always an empire or state covering at least 10 million square kilometres: about the size of the US and China today.
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First issue of Granta under Thomas Meaney
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Could developing the ability to deflect asteroids increase the probability of an asteroid striking the Earth?
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"Europe must step up to a war footing says leading ammunition group"
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Ursula von der Leyen: “In the mid- and long-term, geopolitically, Ukraine belongs to us.”
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Neutrality was defensive necessity. NATO membership is an indulgence.
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Some British pilot flew 8 hours through the night to drop a precision guided bomb on a farmhouse in *Hajjah*.
Geolocation of RAF strike on a Houthi site used to launch reconnaissance and attack drones.
16°01'00.3"N 43°01'50.5"E
Some small changes in the fields between Google Earth imagery and the RAF video. Can be seen more clearly in Sentinal HUB EOD browser.
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'Chileans will be asked to choose between a far-right Pinochet apologist and a social democrat – not, as outlets like the Economist and FT have claimed, between ‘two extremists’ offering different variants of populism.'
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Anglophone newspapers have published a string of stories advancing Chinese technology scares.
Military journals and the State Department present fantasies of Chinese world conquest.
And war over Taiwan is said to be critical to US security.
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The longer the war, the greater the compounded chance of nuclear use.
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Valuable account of the negotiations between Ukraine and Russia in spring 2022 by
@scharap
and
@DrRadchenko
. (Given the level of detail, I was a little surprised they don't discuss what on earth happened with Denis Kiryev.)
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'The Grenadiers of Savoy arrived at Ametsegna Washa with a hundred artillery shells filled with arsine, a tear gas–like compound, and twelve jerry cans containing over two hundred kilograms of mustard gas'
@FWehrey
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Starvation as a Method of Warfare
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Meanwhile Benny Morris is agitating for a full war with Iran:
"The timing will never be better than it is now; Joe Biden is the most pro-Israel U.S. president since Bill Clinton. It is possible that such an attack... would even please Washington."
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The New Yorker's
@WrightR
claims that in Hezbollah, Iraqi militias, etc, Iran has “created its own mini NATO in the Middle East”. Very revealing of how the US establishment sees actual NATO.
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This is correct. Europe-Russia energy ties are a (poorly understood) topological feature of world politics. Not immutable, but also not easily overridden.
Quick thread on
#Europe
#EnergySecurity
given the context of today's events. 1. It is HIGHLY UNLIKELY that there will be a major interruption of Russian gas supplies to Europe because Russia and Europe are energy *interdependent* 1/x
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In Someone Else's Empire I argued that one of the ways Britain has made itself useful to American power is through residual imperial possessions for military convenience.
The British base at Akrotiri is now in constant use supplying Israel.
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So much contemporary political analysis is discredited by ignorance of nuclear weapons.
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Chaima Issa, Jaouhar Ben Mbarek, Khayam Turki, Rachid Ghannouchi, and many others should be released.
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Anchor tells Gaza correspondent Wael Dahdouh to get to safety.
"There is no place safer than any other."
غارات عنيفة بالقرب من مكان تواجد مراسل الجزيرة وائل الدحدوح في قطاع #غزة
#الأخبار #حرب_غزة
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This is why the strikes represent 'flailing violence'. Taken in absence of any expected results, or any reckoning with years of criminal policy in Yemen, which also failed in its own terms.
Haven't seen any media mention the UK is the UNSC penholder on Yemen and has been since 2011. (Meaning we were meant to lead international conflict resolution efforts in country). The fact we have to resort to air strikes shows what an utter failure that has been.
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The Three Bomb problem
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This is absolutely correct. The idea that Britain's foreign policy is an irrelevance, nothing to see here, is inane. It is conveniently retreated to only in the case of Gaza.
On the now increasingly common argument that official British political stances on Gaza are pointless because we have no sway
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“In August alone, Saudi Arabia executed an average of four people per week"
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"Welcome to the world of strategic analysis, where we program weapons that don’t work to meet threats that don’t exist."
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@policytensor
@cremieuxrecueil
Isn't it notable how attached people are to the story? Almost as though it strikes at something ideologically vital.
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Acemoğlu on UBI: “it leaves the underlying power distribution the same. It elevates people who are earning, and gives others the crumbs. It makes the system more hierarchical in some sense.”
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"Disappeared people are difficult to find, by design, but you learn some tricks. Always look in the well. Dig where the soil appears to be two different colours, on the line between the two"
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One of the World Bank's dodgy reports met its demise. There are others.
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Updates from the Hundred Years' War against bacteria.
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