Robin Simcox is a British policy analyst and expert on terrorism and national security. He contributed articles to The Weekly Standard covering UK politics, British military affairs, and Islamist extremism in Europe and abroad. He has served as a fellow at the Heritage Foundation and was appointed the UK government's Commissioner for Countering Extremism.
Not so long ago, ISIS held territory in Syria and Iraq equivalent to the size of the United Kingdom. Yet the U.S. and allied forces have slowly but systematically pried virtually all that real estate from its grip. ISIS will have to change tactics.
Tom Watson is going on a hunger strike. Writing in the Guardian, the deputy leader of the Labour Party announced that he was taking the action “in solidarity” with two hunger-striking detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Watson claims that they “are being slowly starved to death by President Trump.”
How best to defeat Islamist terrorism? Expel ISIS from Iraq and Syria? Crack down on domestic radicalization? Work with Muslim reformers to dismantle the ideological roots of Islamism? Each of these would, of course, be admirable pursuits. But none of them seems to spring first to mind among…
For most of America, there's only one election in 2016 that matters. But another one taking place over in the U.K. also bears watching. In May, London will elect its new mayor. And the story behind the frontrunner, Sadiq Khan, makes it worth briefly shifting attention from South Carolina to South…
London—Trying to return to Hackney, five minutes from the heart of the protests, from vacation on the night the rioting was at its fiercest provided an insight into the carnage engulfing London. The city had been transformed into a kind of Alan Moore dystopia. Sirens were deafening, with bright…
"I am not a naïve neoconservative who thinks you can drop democracy out of an aeroplane at 40,000 feet,” said British prime minister David Cameron last month. Like most of Europe’s political class, Cameron has a long track record of criticizing neoconservatism. What makes Cameron’s latest criticism…
London
European governments have long forgotten that their primary task is the defense of those they govern. The two most prominent European powers, France and Great Britain, spend only 2.3 percent and 2.4 percent, respectively, of their GDP on military spending – amounting to less than what Djibouti and…
London