Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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Notes -
Also Litvinenko and Salisbury. Russia has attacked the UK with WMD twice - this makes "Russia is our enemy, so Russia's enemy is our friend" a much easier sell than in most other Western countries. Corbyn's apparent popularity ended with his pathetic response to Salisbury - suggesting that this attitude is bottom-up as well as top-down.
This is an interesting theory I hadn't really contemplated. Salisbury and Litvinenko aren't what comes up 'on the street' though - it's always "Putin is a tyrant and a bully and we know what happens when you try to appease those people; remember Munich?" so I'm skeptical that Salisbury is driving the difference.
IMO the difference comes from the fact that the mainland remembers wars on the continent as 'horrifying events they don't want to think about ever again' whereas Britain remembers war on the continent as 'hard but worthwhile and we always win'.
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