Craig’s made a big effort to change his website. Here’s the result. Definitely a cleaner, sharper ‘look’, although some might wonder about his self-description: Former Ambassador, Human Rights Activist The experts in such matters always say that it’s best to brand yourself in terms of what you do now and […]
Max Atkinson has been inviting readers to submit draft speeches for Doomed Dictators. Here are the seven entries, with three distinguished judges having to work out who wins. Of course it all depends quite how doomed the dictator thinks he (and it is usually a ‘he’) thinks he is. If […]
Here is Poland’s Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski yesterday in Washington: Events in the Middle East show that we are fast entering a new phase in the spread of democracy, or at least a new pluralism. People living under dictatorships are finding out who they are. They are realising that the […]
There was I thinking that Venezuela’s President Chavez was a crazed lumpen Leftist. And now he goes and confounds me by surpassing evil Wisconsin governor Scott Walker by handing out exemplary brutality to brave working-class Venezuelan trades-unionists. Hurrah.
Is right here. Behold the bewilderment, bemusement and sheer baffledness of Professor Mike Gonzalez at positions taken by sundry Latin American leaders on the general subject of Col Gadaffi’s career prospects: Yet the response to the Libyan events from Latin America’s radicals has been perplexing and disturbing. Chávez himself has […]
Update: welcome Guido readers Imagine you are William Hague or Hillary Clinton, pressed with a real sense of wanting to Do Something to help the Libyan masses. You draw a noisy stick across the bars of the FCO/State Department cage to rouse the bemused and sulky inmates, and demand ideas for action. […]
The Government have made a deft, swift and successful power-play to send in armed aircraft and special forces personnel to rescue Britons from the more remote parts of Libya. The planning that will have gone into pulling off this one must have been first-class. Well done MOD/FCO and everyone involved. […]
On the one hand, we have one-man band Dr Gene Sharp (my emphasis): His central message is that the power of dictatorships comes from the willing obedience of the people they govern – and that if the people can develop techniques of withholding their consent, a regime will crumble. For decades now, […]
Trite (and tritely wrong) comparisons are being drawn between what is happening in different Arab countries and the collpase of European communism. My thoughts: Egypt‘s Berlin Wall Moment? Back in 1990/91 first the Warsaw Pact then the Soviet Union keeled over and died. In the arc of decadent national socialist […]
I remember a senior American diplomat arriving at the FCO in 1992 and describing just how busy he was helping get US food aid to a Russia left reeling after the abrupt collapse of communism. We genteel Brits were startled when he described himself as ‘drinkin’ from a pressure-hose’. The imagery! Still, […]
