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Now I'm almost through John Charmley's Churchill's Grand Alliance: The Anglo-American Special Relationship 1940-1957. A rather caustic, realist appraisal of the attempt by Winston Churchill to preserve Britain's fortunes with US support. Charmley portrays Churchill has naive and out-of-touch with the reality of international relations, perhaps blinded by racial delusions about the community of interests of the English-speaking peoples.

It's decent, the way realist works are, at depicting the strategic blunders and hypocrisies of the main players. But since it isn't informed by any sense of justice (beyond the mewling hypocrisies of liberalism I mean), it attempts to portray Anthony Eden's preservation of Western interests in the Middle East as a good thing.

The plundering of finite resources and the maintenance of unrepresentative figurehead rulers is never going to be a winning program with the relevant subjective peoples.