This is not peace research. Bobbitt expects war to retain its central role. Yet, he should be essential reading for peace researchers. By combining insights from studies of military strategy and international law, he has written an original, massively important treatise. It contains two 'books', one dealing with epochal wars, the other with international orders, derived from peace treaties. Both 'books' combine strategic and legal insights.
It is a fitting tribute to the strength, vitality, contradictions and controversies of Anglo-American relations that their 400-year span can this year be bookended on one side by the Mayflower pilgrimage and, on the other, BREXIT and the closure of US President Donald Trump's (first?) administration. Trump has periodically been as popular and politically toxic in Britain as was King George III to the Founders of the American Republic. At the same time BREXIT reflects a continuing British reflexive Atlanticism and, reciprocally, unparalleled American fascination with the British Royal family suggests an ongoing popular interest in the 'motherland'. Indeed, the marriage of Prince Harry to biracial American divorcee Meghan Markle constitutes a thoroughly modern twist upon the familial hands across the water imagery invoked often by Winston Churchill through his Anglo-American parentage. One of the most remarkable features within this tale of two nations is how their relationship has transitioned many times over through what in retrospect appears to be a continual bilateral dialogue spanning politics, culture, economics, identity, law, philosophy and so on. In the same way that the 'othering' of Britain was a key component of early American identity construction, so recognition of a shared Anglo-Saxonism was a central plank in the later Great Rapprochement. 1 That British and American elites have so often found their interpretations of world events more alike than with any other country owes much to what Dobson has claimed to be a distinctive Anglo-American political tradition rooted in their interpretation and practice of
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