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Despite all the rhetoric, much of it contradictory on the American side, surrounding the causes and goals of the present war in Iran, it's clear that Teheran's ambitions to have their own nuclear programme has long been the critical issue that divides the combatants. The Iranians insist this programme is for pacific civilian use, the West broadly (led aggressively at the present time by Israel and the US) believes they want to make their own atomic bombs and should be stopped

One of the more singular aspects of what I would call loosely the standard or traditional British narrative of the First World War has been its sombre focus on casualty rates and, more particularly, on those killed or missing in action - the war dead. Any visitor to the Western Front today cannot fail to note the acres of beautifully laid out tombstones, in graveyards big and small, devoted to the hundreds of thousands of British military personnel who gave their lives in th

A Final Word About the Ukraine War: An Historical Perspective It's hard to see how this bitter conflict will end. The present stalemate on the battlefield reveals an unwillingness on both sides to compromise on their most cherished aims. Kyiv wants to remove all invading Russian forces from its sovereign territory. Moscow, the aggressor, continues to demand Ukrainian territory, which it seems increasingly unlikely to conquer. If we look at the two world wars of the 20th centu

Today marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day. What's memorialised here is what we have become used to calling 'The Holocaust', by which is meant the deliberate extermination of some six million European Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Second World War. But this very particular term (with its emphatic 'The' prefix and capital H) has only really been around since the 1970s and '80s, which was when it first entered public discourse, having been until

On January 11, 2026, it was reported that the full-scale war in Ukraine had now lasted 1,418 days - matching the duration of the German-Soviet war on the eastern front that began with Hitler's invasion of the USSR on June 22, 1941. It's worth adding that in less than 150 days time, therefore, the Ukrainian conflict will have lasted as long as the First World War (1,569 days). None of this will be any comfort to the long-suffering victims of this seemingly intractable struggl

Eighty-three years ago - to be precise, between November 8 and November 16, 1942 - the first joint Anglo-American amphibious beach landings of the Second World War were launched. This also marked the first major blooding of the Americans in combat against the Axis powers - not in Europe but in the Vichy French-occupied North African territories of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. The landings were codenamed Operation Torch and, though a vast flotilla of ships and landing craf

One of the key narratives of the current Ukraine war is the staggering scale of Russian losses on the battlefield, not just of their troops but their military hardware as well. Losses, moreover, for very little gain, territorially or otherwise. How and why this has occurred is an interesting question but it's not my primary focus here. Rather I want to say a word about these losses in the context of other Russian wars in the modern era. It's been calculated (in a recent repor

As the United Nations assembles in New York this week, eight decades after its founding in 1945, all the signs are that the organisation...

August 1944, 81 years ago, saw a terrible tragedy played out on the banks of the Vistula during what we know today as the Warsaw...

As we approach the 80th anniversary of Victory Over Japan (VJ) Day on 15 August, the exact manner of, and motivation for, Japan's...

As we bask in (or seek the shade from) Europe's recurrent heatwaves this summer, I am reminded of an earlier summer - to be more precise,...

Today bombing has a very different form from even the quite recent past. In the Russia-Ukraine war, and now in the very recent conflict...

Given the prominence today of China as a global power, it's a surprise to learn that the country was not admitted to the UN and the...

On May 9, in Moscow's Red Square, military parades marked VE Day for the Russians. But how come when the Germans actually surrendered on...

Today (25 April) marks Elbe Day, the date in 1945 when American and Red Army soldiers met each other for the first time on the banks of...

The Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, a tiny territory that is home to Russia's Baltic fleet and a nuclear-capable missile force, has long...

The mass deportations of illegal immigrants currently under way in Trump's America - a process that seems both brutal and carelessly...

Is America really as weak as the Trumpian MAGA rhetoric proclaims. History tells a very different story.

Trump's apparent appeasement of Putin in the Ukraine peace talks is less Munich 1938 than Moscow 1939.

As we approach Holocaust Day and the 80th anniversary of the Red Army's liberation of the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, a few...