The fiasco of the 2013 Syria votes: decline and denial in British foreign policy
研究了2013年英国议会否决对叙利亚动武提案后，政策制定者如何将此事定性为惨败并归咎个人，从而回避了外交政策中两党共识破裂、公众对情报和武力效用怀疑等深层问题。
On 29 August 2013, the British parliament voted against two motions to censure the Syrian government which were expected to lead to military action. The result was a shock to external commentators and quickly interpreted as a fiasco. This article charts the construction of the severity and agency involved in this fiasco and notes the extremely personal nature of efforts to attribute blame for the outcome. It argues that this process enabled policy-makers to ignore underlying trends impacting on foreign policy, including the breakdown of bipartisanship, increasing public scepticism about government use of intelligence and the utility of force, severe reductions in Britain's capacity to act, as well as a deeper identity crisis about what kind of actor Britain should be in the world. Constructing this event as a fiasco can be seen as a form of denial of Britain's loss of agency in global affairs.