Take a look at my previous thoughts on Syria and diplomacy. Quite a lot of them. Every pessimistic prediction has been borne out and worse. Remember the long list of Hillary, Obama, Cameron and others who faux-toughly intoned that Assad must go! They’ve gone. He’s still there. This proclamation, BTW, is […]
Remember this one about President Obama’s speech on Syria in 2013? Thus: The real risk in President Obama’s new approach is this. The protracted painstaking negotiation needed to set up a credible international monitoring and destruction regime for Syria’s CW stocks will give Assad and his state apparatus a massive […]
The parable of the chicken and the pig: Question In a bacon-and-egg breakfast, what’s the difference between the Chicken and the Pig? Answer The Chicken is involved. The Pig is committed. Thus Syria. The West in general and Europe in particular is somewhere between ‘implicated’ and ‘involved’, if only by being […]
How to destroy Syria’s CW stocks, now that OPCW experts say that they have demolished Syria’s CW-making facilities? Not so easy to do this within Syria with a passing civil war raging on. So take the CW stocks to somewhere safe and do it nicely there. Hmm. But where? Albania […]
My latest piece for DIPLOMAT is up, this one on Syria. A subject about which I know nothing at all, not that that stops me saying something about it, and failing that Yugoslavia: Back in 1980 I attended my first event at Wilton Park, the FCO country house conference centre […]
It’s a very rare honour to be quoted by Mark Steyn. But it can happen: This is what happens when you elect someone because he looks cool standing next to Jay-Z. Putin is cool mainly in the sense that Yakutsk in February is. In American pop-culture terms, he is a […]
Here is a really good WSJ piece on the foreign policy issues surrounding Syria. Really good for its grasp of the wider Big Picture, and despite the fact that I am mentioned in it: It is Barack Obama’s impulse to make himself and whatever is in his head the center […]
How was President Obama’s latest Syria speech for you? Here it is. Points to note. He attempts to make the case that by failing to act against the use of CW in Syria now new risks for us will appear down the line: If we fail to act, the Assad […]
My piece at Telegraph Blogs boldly asserts that yesterday was the worst-ever day for Western diplomacy: Think about what will happen if the Russian initiative starts to fly. Chemical weapons are relatively easy to make and store (and fire), but much harder to dismantle safely. The chemicals themselves are fiendishly […]
A well turned piece from John O’Sullivan at National Review on Syria: As the debate on Syria ricochets along, I am struck by a contrast between the internal conservative debate on the crisis and the wider political, diplomatic, and media debates. By and large the conservative debate is both civil […]
