A lovely English cartoon summing up the X Y Z Affair, a famous row between the new United States and revolutionary France. Basically, the French Foreign Minister Talleyrand demanded a big fat private bung as a condition for serious bilateral negotiations. And, of course, the principled Americans turned him down flat. […]
My latest Ukraine/Russia piece for Telegraph Comment today must have been good – it has smoked out an unusually nasty set of Russian trolls. Here it is: Negotiation is often presented as a choice between carrot and stick: what can one side do to affect the positive or negative incentives […]
+++ OMG! Stop the presses! +++ Michelle Obama did not wear a headscarf in Saudi Arabia! But wait? What does this mean? Some Saudis have Tweeted criticism, others praise. Elsewhere views similarly differ. Christine Odone in the Telegraph (paywalled these days): This gesture is being widely praised for sending a “bold […]
I’ve been scrutinising public speaking disasters in preparing for a forthcoming online course that I am running for the UN on Drafting Talking-Points and Speechwriting. I found this handy list of horrors compiled a while back by Scott Berkun, with help from his readers. This one is good: Moscow, 1997. […]
A question about top-end public speaking technique. Say you’re President of France. You are visiting Bosnia a few months after the US President was there. He made a winning, moving keynote speech. You want to do the same. Or, ideally, do much better. How to set about this task? You […]
My latest piece for Commentator, co-authored with Pratik Chougule, describes in broad terms how we might do some good solid work to build on the Obama Administration move to start normalising US relations with Cuba, by actively but sensibly doing the spadework needed to help Cuba get ready for the day a […]
Here’s a question. If country X grows its economy 1% faster than country Y over ten years, what’s the difference in outcomes? I previously looked at Serbia and Zimbabwe in this sense, trying to calculate the True Costs of Stupidity: Thus the Cost of Milosevic(ism) can be accurately measured. It is […]
The magnificent, consistently funny blaxploitation spoof movie Black Dynamite is an unexpected source of sophisticated public speaking insight. The hero of the film is Black Dynamite himself, a laconic unstoppable African-American kung fu master who is enraged when hard drugs even get into the orphanage – yes, the orphanage – […]
Here’s my latest piece at PunditWire, looking at President Obama’s UN speech (both substance and technique) and what it says about negotiating: Even the President of the United States drifts into the tritest clichés on such occasions: We come together at a crossroads between war and peace; between disorder and […]
A reader has sent me this fascinating email with many points of historical interest (reproduced with his permission) on the general subject of ‘diplomatic asylum’ (and the Assange case): Dear Charles I’m a retired DS officer, who follows your website with interest. I enjoy what you say and how you […]
