Comment is Freed

To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire, and where they make a desert, they call it peace. Tacitus, The Agricola Theorists of peace negotiations have described a ‘hurting stalemate’ as setting conditions for an agreement. The term is self explanatory – both sides are suffering from a continuing conflict which neither can win.

Politics, policy analysis, and foreign affairs from Sam and Lawrence Freedman Over 92,000 subscribers By subscribing, you agree Substack's Terms of Use, and acknowledge its Information Collection Notice and Privacy Policy. “I love the taste of crunchy policy analysis in the morning, and nobody does it better than the Freedmans.”...” “Come for Lawry, who'll make you feel smart about the idiocies of war; stay for Sam, who'll make you feel smart about the idiocies of British politics.

Politics, policy analysis, and foreign affairs from Sam and Lawrence Freedman Over 92,000 subscribers By subscribing, you agree Substack's Terms of Use, and acknowledge its Information Collection Notice and Privacy Policy. “I love the taste of crunchy policy analysis in the morning, and nobody does it better than the Freedmans.”...” “Come for Lawry, who'll make you feel smart about the idiocies of war; stay for Sam, who'll make you feel smart about the idiocies of British politics.

Politics, policy analysis, and foreign affairs from Sam and Lawrence Freedman Over 92,000 subscribers By subscribing, you agree Substack's Terms of Use, and acknowledge its Information Collection Notice and Privacy Policy. “I love the taste of crunchy policy analysis in the morning, and nobody does it better than the Freedmans.”...” “Come for Lawry, who'll make you feel smart about the idiocies of war; stay for Sam, who'll make you feel smart about the idiocies of British politics.

I remarked to Sam that Donald Trump’s war with Iran seemed to be the stupidest war ever and he challenged me to back it up. I couldn’t because history is full of stupid wars. In any case, how does one measure stupidity to allow comparisons to be made?

Last week Reform’s treasury spokesman Robert Jenrick set out proposals to cut welfare spending on working age adults in half. There are, to put it politely, some highly questionable assumptions in the analysis and costing (see footnote).1 But what really caught my eye was a piece Jenrick wrote for the Sunday Telegraph to launch his plan in which he criticised the current arrangements as an example of “suicidal empathy”.

Thank you for lots of great questions. Sam posted his answers earlier in the week - covering topics from whether they’ll be an early election, to why Burnham isn’t talking much about climate change, and whether Reform has “peaked”. These are my answers. There were a number on China which I have not dealt with here but will try to look at in a separate post.

Politics, policy analysis, and foreign affairs from Sam and Lawrence Freedman Over 91,000 subscribers By subscribing, you agree Substack's Terms of Use, and acknowledge its Information Collection Notice and Privacy Policy. “I love the taste of crunchy policy analysis in the morning, and nobody does it better than the Freedmans.”...” “Come for Lawry, who'll make you feel smart about the idiocies of war; stay for Sam, who'll make you feel smart about the idiocies of British politics.

I have been involved in two projects looking at the impact of AI on contemporary conflict. One was Reimagining the AI Arms Race, a new anthology from the AI & Geopolitics Project (AIxGEO) at the University of Cambridge’s Bennett School of Public Policy, led by Verity Harding (a past contributor to Comment is Freed and now with her own substack).

In the standard telling of postwar British politics 1979 is the pivot. Before then, so the story goes, there is a broad consensus between Labour and Conservative governments around Keynesian economic policy, active industrial strategy and keeping unemployment as low as possible. This approach falters in the 1970s as inflation becomes unmanageable and relations between trade unions and government deteriorate.