Here is my piece in the Telegraph (newspaper and website hurrah) on the glum state of the UK’s foreign policy machinery: What does it mean for a nation to exert “influence”? Partly it’s about attitude: the confidence and determination to push hard and long for national objectives. But it’s also […]
Here’s my latest piece on Russia over at the Daily Telegraph: Back in 1902, future mass murderer Vladimir Ilyich Lenin published his pamphlet “What Is To Be Done?” (Что делать?) about the selfish reluctance of the working classes to rise up against capitalism. Now 114 years later, some Western governments ponder what needs […]
Question. You somehow stumble on Batman’s secret identity. You conclude that you’d like to profit from this situation. How best to get a good result for yourself? How might this work from the point of view of negotiation technique? Here is one approach. It does not end well. The text of […]
South Africa has a mighty tradition of Defying Reality. Some might say that that was what apartheid was all about: its pernickety, cruel, insane attempt to draft laws defining useless racial distinctions, then building a whole society around those distinctions. But before that came the startling Xhosa Cattle Killings in 1856-57, […]
So here I was in hot Abu Dhabi explaining some finer points of public speaking technique to the excellent colleagues of the Emirates Diplomatic Academy: Nice body language, intensity and eye contact haha. The chart behind me is intended to convey the Core Idea of my approach. In looking at […]
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 […]
Back again from my sundry peregrinations of recent weeks, from Vienna to Gdansk to Warsaw to Prague to Dushanbe to Abu Dhabi to Zvolen (Slovakia), with odd groggy moments at home in between. This has been the longest gap in postings here since the blog started. But somehow I just […]
Former UK ambassador Craig Murray too has a sharp new website look. He goes from strength to strength despite some sad family news, and credit is definitely due: We seem to be hitting peak Craig Murray. Before the hiatus of the last month or so, 40,000 people were regularly reading […]
I volunteer to give a talk at Crawf Minima’s school on International Organisations and suchlike. Which takes us towards a familiar theme here: Integration v Disintegration – what happens when international borders melt? It turns out that European borders have melted and re-formed and then re-melted and re-formed quite a […]
DIPLOMAT magazine has a snappy new website, and as if by magic my latest piece makes the front page. It looks at diplomacy in the Age of Big Data: Back then, industrial scale betrayal took commitment and discipline, lasting for years. The betrayer needed to take some interest in individual […]
