It’s hard to work out what exactly Iran’s President Rouhani said in the USA about Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions (or not) and/or the Holocaust. We Brits see these events through the filter of our media bias. Luckily we have Press TV to explain what is happening: Although the reports of […]
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 […]
My piece for Telegraph Blogs this morning: Days ago Washington was gearing up to hit hard at the Assad regime because of its crimes against humanity in using chemical weapons. An almost impossible political case to sell (why will it make anything any better?) but at least it drew on […]
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 […]
This astounding and inspiring piece by James Lileks from 2003 gives a view of the 9/11 attacks that always bears repeating as the anniversary comes round again: Two years later I take a certain grim comfort in some people’s disinterest in the war; if you’d told me two years ago […]
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 […]
My Commentator piece about the notable developments last night in Parliament, noting three reasons why all is not (yet) lost: First and foremost, we risked ending up helping President Obama wriggle off an embarrassing immediate hook (the Syria regime boldly stepping across his own half-hearted ‘red line’) but without really […]
Here’s my piece at PunditWire in honour of THAT speech. I thought I’d not say much about the speech as it speaks for itself, but instead look at the legal background to it. Notably Plessy v Ferguson, a case with far-reaching bad outcomes decided by the US Supreme Court in […]
