How Britain Broke the World

Why is the world so dangerous now? In a piercing analysis, former senior British diplomat Arthur Snell reveals the role the United Kingdom has played in raising tension and creating flashpoints around the world in the 21st Century. With decades of service in the Foreign Office, Snell, an Arabic speaker who has worked with UK intelligence, looks at British interventions from Kosovo to Iraq to Afghanistan, along with the UK policy towards Russia, Saudi Arabia and China. He concludes that the UK has played a significant role in breaking the post-WW2 settlement that fostered the growth of liberal states around the world from the 1980s to the early 2000s, to the instability today. In 2022, the Middle East is racked by civil war, aggressive nationalistic autocracies in China and Russia are poised to invade sovereign democracies (Taiwan and Ukraine), and the biggest nations cannot co-operate on vital issues such as climate change. Far from being a minor player, Snell argues, the UK has often been decisive in world affairs, for instance by supplying the dodgy intelligence that justified America's invasion of Iraq and providing money-laundering services for the Russian elite in London. Without the UK's marginal but key role, he argues convincingly, the wars in Kosovo, Iraq, and Libya would not have happened and our world today would be safer. The book reveals the underlying politics and real concerns of major countries.