In a few weeks the Syrian civil war will reach another grim milestone. In March it will be five years since that war began. Back then, in 2011, the uprising against the dictatorship of the Assad dynasty seemed as though it could herald a moment of hope. Indeed the whole region appeared to be showing […]
Perhaps the only thing worse than knowing no history at all is to know only one piece of it. The coinciding this week of Holocaust Memorial Day with the ongoing European migration crisis provided a fine example of this. In a matter of days the European media seized on a number of stories that suggested that Europe was […]
It was always going to be the case that Sir Robert Owen’s inquiry into the death of the Russian exile and former spy Alexander Litvinenko, in London in 2006, was going to be controversial. But few could have imagined a dramatic outcome of the kind seen this week. It is one thing for the masses to have believed […]
One of the parts of HJS that we are proudest of is our extraordinary programme of events which run every week in the heart of Westminster. For members of the public and members of the Houses of Parliament these events provide a terrific facility for bringing voices and ideas into the heart of our democracy which may otherwise not […]
This has not been a good year. From the start of January when gunmen walked into the offices of Charlie Hebdo to last month when suicide bombers walked into a concert hall in the same city, the terror and bloodshed may have returned to France but in the meantime it circled the entire globe. From […]
At the year’s end there could hardly be a more resonant or tragic story than the loss of the Afghan town of Sangin to the Taliban. Contrary to the media’s many critics, the news cycle, like human nature, favours good news stories. It favours things getting steadily better, whether that is medical advances or political […]
Every day’s news now is about distraction. What is the latest outrageous thing somebody has said? What is the latest outrageous thing somebody has done? Something happens and everybody is forced into having an opinion about it. Yet all the while real things go on in the real world often unnoticed. The situation in Afghanistan […]
Anyone needing to be reminded of the unintended consequences of military intervention might consider this week a tutorial. Anyone could foresee a certain complexity in the skies above Syria, but the direction from which that complexity comes is nevertheless always surprising. The lack of unity in international action in Syria was obviously, and long before […]
The Islamic State (IS) presently controls significant amounts of land throughout Iraq and Syria. However, its ambitions are not restricted to this territory. Within days of announcing its ‘Caliphate’, the self-appointed ‘Caliph’ Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi vowed that IS would eventually “conquer Rome”. IS precursor groups and the individuals which have trained alongside them have displayed […]
Even before this week it was clear that the only real beneficiary of the events pre-emptively described as the ‘Arab Spring’ looked likely to be Iran. This week that grim realisation became clearer still. Firstly of course there is the realisation that Iran looks likely to ‘win’ in Syria. The fact that Russia has now […]
The Syrian conflict has taken many unpredictable turns over its terrible four years. But the developments this week are some of the most concerning so far. Syria has always been not only a domestic civil war but also a place where regional powers have struggled with each other to promote and prop up their own […]
Drone-strikes are the nearest thing possible to a pacifist’s ideal weapon. They pose no risk to one side in an engagement, and the studies that exist show that on the ground the ration of unintended casualty rates are lower than in any other form of military engagement. When people complain about ‘collateral’ damage caused by […]
The most extraordinary aspect of the refugee crisis gripping Europe’s newspapers right now is that everyone is fixated on the symptom of the problem – mass migration – rather than the cause. While economic migration has always been a pull factor for those leaving the developing world for the developed, this has been exacerbated by […]
This latest policy paper by Centre for the New Middle East at the Henry Jackson Society, A Flawed Deal: An Assessment Of The Iranian Nuclear Agreement, undertakes one of the most comprehensive and exhaustive assessments of the Iran agreement to date. The centre’s study reveals the key nuclear and non-nuclear flaws of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action […]
Permanent instability appears to be the order of the day in Europe. The announcement by the Greek Prime Minister Alex Tsipras that he is stepping down and calling new elections comes as a surprise to no one. The Tsipras era has been no less volatile than that of his recent predecessors. The immediate cause of […]