Open Dialogue Research Journal
US Bases are Vulnerable to Drone Attacks On October 4th the US pulled its 12 B-1 strategic bombers out of Fairford, UK and returned them to the United States. Reports say the planes returned to Ellsworth Air Force Base in Rapid City, South Dakota. The bombers were pulled out when […]
Andy Burnham built his premiership’s early identity around a single, emotionally resonant promise: not to manage rough sleeping, not to reduce it, but to end it. This week he put money behind that pledge – £442 million for a national drive modeled on the pandemic-era effort to get people off […]
The evacuation of a dozen B-1B bombers of the US Air Force from the RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire is another instalment in the latest rippling of the Iran war that began as a pre-emptive, illegal assault by the US and Israel on the Islamic Republic in late February. This, arguably, […]
US Infrastructure and Personnel in the UK Are At Risk The British Police say that the five men arrested in connection with a suspected bomb plot targeting RAF Fairford are all British nationals. Nothing has yet been said officially about who was behind the plot. The risk to US assets […]
Shavkat Mirziyoyev and Tony Blair have met three times now—most recently in April 2025. The first two were in Dubai and Baku, during COP summits. Sherzod Asadov, Uzbekistan’s presidential press secretary, says the cooperation with Blair’s institute is “systematic“. Tashkent frames it as a push for investors, digitalisation, and clean […]
Nigel Farage’s pitch to “hijack” Tom Homan and bring him to Britain “to secure our borders” was delivered as a joke at a US event. But the specific person Farage chose to praise, and the political moment in which he chose to praise him, make the remark worth taking seriously […]
Christine Lagarde doesn’t typically frame central bank speeches around geopolitical vulnerability, but her address in Vienna this week did exactly that. The European Central Bank president argued that Europe’s growing reliance on American and Chinese artificial intelligence isn’t just a competitiveness gap – it’s a strategic exposure that could hand […]
Europe is looking for insurance. After 2022, American guarantees no longer look ironclad, and northern capitals began searching for a substitute closer to home. On 2 March 2026, at the Île Longue submarine base, Emmanuel Macron announced the most significant shift in French nuclear doctrine in three decades. For the […]
In the unpardonable ecosystem of graft, favours and corruption that is defence contracting, defence conferencing and all matters tanking over the thinking – in short, the world of defence – the convenient delusion will always have truck over the inconvenient empirical. Phantoms are elevated and celebrated; bogeymen are treasured by […]
When the Brexit withdrawal agreement set up a residence scheme for British nationals already living across the EU, the design assumed a baseline of fairness: reasonable deadlines, flexibility for people who missed them, and proportionality when weighing an individual’s circumstances against procedural failure. Four years on, the country where that […]
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