In Britain’s Military Deterrence Gaps, a report we released last week at our British-American think tank 878, Lord Richard Dannatt, Britain’s former Chief of the General Staff, accused his Government of “wishful thinking” and a failure to fund the nation’s defence, with serious ramifications for the United States. 

There is a street in Tbilisi named after George W. Bush. Count the capitals on earth with a street named for an American president. It will not take you long.

At an Arctic Council meeting in Rovaniemi, Finland, in May 2019, Mike Pompeo asked whether the world wanted the Arctic Ocean to become another South China Sea. Many Arctic specialists regarded the comparison as overwrought. China's visible presence amounted to one working icebreaker, a second still fitting out, and a research station on Svalbard. The idea of an impending Chinese challenge seemed premature, if not faintly ridiculous.

In November 1854, the young Leo Tolstoy traveled to Sevastopol to join the beleaguered Russian defense against British and French forces. Dispirited by the decadence of his aristocratic lifestyle, Tolstoy sought fulfilment among the patriotic peasants guarding the crucial port. “Long will Russia bear the imposing traces of this epic of Sevastopol,” Tolstoy wrote at the climax of the siege. “It is quite impossible for Sevastopol ever to be taken by the enemy.” Months later, the fortress fell, and the Crimean War concluded.