How Britain Broke the World: War, Greed and Blunders from Kosovo to Afghanistan, 1997-2022

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Even as he gags, no one’s going to ask him any awkward questions about recent events at the Cenotaph. In 2022, the Middle East is racked by civil war, aggressive nationalistic autocracies in China and Russia are poised to invade sovereign democracies (Taiwan and Ukraine), and the biggest nations cannot co-operate on vital issues such as climate change.

Between 2003 and 2018, the number of automatic-roller car washes (that is, robots washing your car) declined by 50 percent, while the number of hand car washes (that is, men with buckets) increased by 50 percent,” the economist commentator Duncan Weldon told me in an interview for my podcast, Plain English. Despite the failures in Iraq and the ongoing challenges in Afghanistan, when as part of the Arab spring uprising rebels openly challenged the rule of a newly rehabilitated Colonel Gaddafi, the then prime minister David Cameron was quick to advocate for airstrikes to protect the rebels from advancing government forces, convincing a reluctant President Barack Obama to agree. But when Syria came along Parliament voted not to intervene, which ‘killed’ Obama’s plan for a Congressional vote and resulted in an unenforced ‘red line’ (Assad using chemical weapons) despite it being ‘crossed, and re-crossed, many times.It's funny that Alastair Campbell has reignited his career recently with that podcast with Rory Stewart, making fun of Boris. The Conservatives remained in power for the next 13 years, from October 1951 until October 1964, first under Churchill—who presided over the accession of the new monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, on February 6, 1952, but was forced to resign on account of age and health on April 5, 1955—and then under Churchill’s longtime lieutenant and foreign secretary, Anthony Eden. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights seems pretty good to me, though arguably it come from a liberal, western perspective so perhaps I would?

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Cameron was brought down by the new ideology of Brexit, itself in at least some way driven by the migration crisis caused by the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen. By 1945, however, colonies were an expensive liability for Clement Attlee's newly elected Labour government. This book is essentially a catalogue of the UK governments diplomatic screw-ups over the last quarter century.His first book, upon which tonight’s talk is based, is How Britain Broke the World (Canberry Press, 2022).