‘War is a racket’: How Malta’s military boom echoes a 1935 warning
War is a racket, said U.S. Marine Major-General Smedley Butler in 1935, and ninety years later the phrase still reverberates through Valletta’s limestone alleys every time another arms fair sets up in the Mediterranean. Malta, officially neutral since 1980, likes to style itself as a “peace lab” that once brokered talks between Gaddafi and the…