2010 article for National Review Shawcross described Britain as a "mere piece of the bland but increasingly oppressive Bambiland of the E.U., promoting such PC global issues as gay rights (except in Muslim lands) and man-made climate change." He also criticised "postmodernism"; defining it as "disastrous creed that there is no objective truth and that everything is relative" and likened it to a form of appeasement. In the same article, Shawcross described Labour's "'multicultural' ideology" as a "catastrophe" and implied that Labour's immigration policy was designed to "dilute Britishness". In his 2012 book Justice and the Enemy, Shawcross defended the use of torture and waterboarding at Guantánamo Bay as a natural "response to the most urgent problems" of terrorism. In November 2018 he appeared to walk back his 1979 criticism of Henry Kissinger in Sideshow; in an argument that Kissinger should be allowed to speak at New York University, Shawcross noted "regret" for the "tone" of his prior criticism of Kissinger, which he minimised as "a policy disagreement over Cambodia", as opposed to "a moral crusade", and he concluded that Kissinger "is an extraordinary man who deserves respect." In November 2019 he came out in support of Britain's exit from the European Union, on the basis of the EU's problematic nature and approach, writing in The Spectator that "there are risks in proceeding with Brexit. But there are far greater risks in abandoning it." The change over time in Shawcross's politics has been compared to the political shifts of his father Sir Hartley Shawcross, Paul Johnson, and Christopher Hitchens. While noting speculation about other reasons for the shift, American journalist James Traub speculated that "it's more instructive to consider the possibility that Shawcross has remained true to his principles, but that a morally driven foreign policy looks very different after 9/11 than it did before." Selected books Dubcek (1970, revised 1990) Shawcross's first published book was a biography of Alexander Dubček, the leader of Czechoslovakia during the 1968 Prague Spring whose "socialism with a human face" briefly brought freedom into the Soviet Bloc. According to the introduction to the 1990 edition, the book's genesis was in Shawcross's travels to Czechoslovakia as a 22-year-old recent college graduate in 1968–69, when he witnessed the Prague Spring and its aftermath. In April 1969, as his first assignment, The Times sent Shawcross to Prague to report on Dubcek's deposition from power, which led him