Title editorialised for impact - there are conceivable scenarios where it *doesn’t* really backfire - but thought the points warranted an airing (and even better in the US Edition, where the more thoughtful stripe of US reader might see it…) Link here: spectator.com/article/warnin…

I have an article on the US Govt’s latest salvo in its (erstwhile?) allies’ direction in the @spectator this week… BLUF: it’s true that the Western ‘middle powers’ are a disparate bunch. But the more the US coerces them, the more it incentivises them to align away.

Easy to breezily assert that injecting a bit of tokenistic Western bombing into a bitter civil war would’ve somehow made everything better, but in fact, as @PatPorter76 argued a decade ago, the case for not wading into yet another intractable Middle Eastern mire was compelling…

Not going to spend time restating @PatPorter76’s argument, but his @WarOnTheRocks link’s here: warontherocks.com/a-proud-da…

P.P.P.P.S. As @PatPorter76 remarks, the better - and much more basic - critique of the ‘League of Middle Powers’ (or whatever we’re calling it) is that the states in question are too disparate to achieve real alliance coherence: in size, interest, and (crucially) location.