Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Sunday, February 14, 2010

UK Blog Posts Part Of It's Strategic Defense Review, Seeks Comments

By Steve Hynd


This is how you do transparency and consultation in the internet age.



This website is part of the debate following the publication of the Defence Green Paper, �Adaptability and Partnership: Issues for a Strategic Defence Review� (Cm 7794), which is the first part of the process leading to a future Strategic Defence Review (SDR). Whilst we welcome any general comments on the paper, we are specifically seeking views on the following questions:



  • Given that domestic security cannot be separated from international security, where should we set the balance between focusing on our territory and region and engaging threats at a distance?
  • What approach should we take if we employ the Armed Forces to address threats at distance?
  • What contribution should the Armed Forces make in ensuring security and contributing to resilience within the UK?
  • How could we more effectively employ the Armed Forces in support of wider efforts to prevent conflict and strengthen international stability?
  • Do our current international defence and security relationships require rebalancing in the longer term?
  • Should we further integrate our forces with those of key allies and partners?
  • Given our current major commitment in Afghanistan, the Review will also have to decide:
  • To what extent and in what areas should we continue to refocus our current efforts on Afghanistan?


The comment areas for these questions can be found under �Key Strategic Questions�  by following this link or in the left hand navigation pane.


The links to documents on the left hand �Chapters� pane lists will take you to the individual chapters of the Green Paper. The chapter sections are intended to give you some background on the questions. Whilst we welcome comments on these chapters, the main focus of the discussion should be our Key Strategic Questions.


Obama administration, take note.


Alex Harrowell at Fistful of Euros has some worth-reading commentary on Chapter One: The Context for the Future Strategic Defence Review: Uncertainty and Affordability .



Going through that little list of horrors under trends, there�s an interesting point that is missing. The rise of new world powers is not a matter of debate, but what about the corollary? Arguably, the UK and France remain medium powers; but the big change is surely that the status of the US as sole superpower is on the way out. It�s not yet clear how much of this change is accounted for by Chinese or Indian success and how much by American decline, in so far as �decline� is a useful concept, nor how fast and how far it will go. But that it exists is indeniable.


Surely �Coping with US relative decline� ought to be high on the UK�s political to-do list?


...a key problem here is what happens if the bilateral special relationship and the multilateral institutions conflict. Since the second world war, it�s been a central assumption of policy that there is no conflict - the US is supportive of the institutions, it benefits from them, and therefore there is no problem. Relax this constraint, however, and the compass starts to spin crazily. What if the US wants to tear up the UN Charter, split NATO, commit a gaggle of war crimes? And we have to relax the constraint - not only do we have the example of Iraq, but we admit that the role of the US is itself changing and its relative power declining.


The answer is surely that a major aim of policy is to maximise our ability to say �no�.


Good stuff.



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