When I went to Sandhurst in 1985, there was a palpable feeling among us officer cadets that we had missed out on the only chance we would ever have to fight in a real war with shooting. The Falklands conflict had taken place three years earlier and many of the training staff at the Academy had participated; we hung on their words like starstruck teenagers. For most of us, future prospects revolved around maintaining deterrence against the Soviets, enlivened by occasional tours in Northern Ireland. But we were wrong. As Gerald Knaus points out in his essay in Can Intervention Work? : ‘The last two decades have been an age of intervention.’

In their book, Rory Stewart, Conservative MP for Penrith and the Border and self-publicist extraordinaire, and
the American international-development specialist Knaus, erstwhile colleagues at the Kennedy School at Harvard, ask if intervention can work. Or rather they don’t, because that question is answered in the introduction: yes, intervention can work and