Churchill's First Greatest Work

At Full Flow: Winston Churchill’s The River War Restored, Finest Hour, No. 193, Third Quarter 2021, pp. 42-45 (not available online). "This definitive edition is a contribution of monumental significance to the preservation and understanding of Churchill’s life and work. No praise is too great for Professor Muller, St. Augustine’s Press, and the International Churchill Society for their labors in the production of these remarkable volumes. The patience many subscribers have shown in waiting for thesevolumes has been vindicated."

Cowling Redux

Fearful Levity, review of Robert Crowcroft, The End is Nigh: British Politics, Power, and the Road to the Second World War, Finest Hour, Number 184, Spring 2019.

The Problem Isn't Us, It's Them

Review of Phil Haun, Coercion, Survival, and War: Why Weak States Resist the United States (Stanford University Press, 2015), Cercles, February 25, 2016. "The United States is the greatest power in the world. Why, therefore, doesn’t it simply threaten its enemies until they give it what it wants? After all, provided that what the U.S. demands is less costly for its adversary than fighting, and likely losing, a war, the U.S.’s adversaries should always, if they are rational, submit rather than fight. But yet, on occasion, U.S. demands are indeed resisted, sometimes successfully. That failure of coercion is the paradox that Phil Haun, adjunct Professor of Aerospace Studies at Yale University, and a former A-10 pilot for the U.S. Air Force, sets out to explain."

Review of Addison on Post-War Britain

Review of No Turning Back: The Peacetime Revolutions of Post-War Britain, by Paul Addison (Oxford University Press, 2010), in Labour History, vol. 53, no. 4 (2012). Not available online.

My Book Recommendation for New Year's Day

34 Books You’ll Want to Read in 2015, Daily Signal, including contribution by Bromund, January 1, 2015. "A blockbuster history of the war from the other side, as vast as it is readable. Without minimizing the atrocities committed by the Central Powers, it emphasizes that there is no easy connection between those crimes and Hitler’s far more vast crimes before and during the Second World War. It does not sympathize with the sufferings of the German and Austro-Hungarian peoples, but it does, by making them clear, empathize with them. And by relating the vast mobilization efforts of Germany, in particular, it reveals just how much was at stake in the war. And in spite of the many errors of the Allies and the frequent tactical brilliance of the Germans, it shows just how badly led the autocratic Central Powers ultimately were and so offers a lesson in the comparative, competitive advantage of democracy in war."

Summer Reading on World War I

How Does Freedom Work? Read These, Newsday, August 21, 2014. "This summer marks the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War. The historical literature on the war is vast, rivaled only by the U.S. Civil War and the Second World War. The Great War's lessons, in the end, are what you make of them. But if you want to know more about the war, here are a few of my personal favorites."

Review of Peter Clarke, Last Thousand Days of the British Empire

The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire (Allen Lane, 2007), Volume 21, Issue 2 (2008), Cambridge Review of International Affairs.

"The British Empire, according to Peter Clarke, made Britain a great power. It was also a major cause of the Second World War, in that its magnificence tempted other powers to attack it, and Britain fought the resulting 'unsuccessful imperialist war' (xvii) for the Empire. The architect of this defeat, which left the British people feeling cheated by the fall, was Winston Churchill. Churchill, so the narrative goes, deluded both himself and his people into trusting the United States (US), which was in reality fighting the war to bring the Empire to an end and to enlist it as a 'yes-man' in a new American empire. This is an angry and unbalanced book. . . ."

The full review is not available on-line except to paid subscribers.

Review of Marc Plattner and Larry Diamond

Freedom Agenda, April 2008, Commentary.

Walter Russell Mead on Anglo-Americanism

Review of Walter Russell Mead, God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World (2007), October 24, 2007, Contentions.