President Obama’s much-praised message of friendship to Iran got a dusty public response from the Iranians, including some nice imagery: The new US president sends us a Persian New Year greeting message but in the same accuses us again to support terrorism and to be after nuclear weapons," the supreme […]
A reader sends me this striking quote from Coningsby by Benjamin Disraeli, spoken in the novel by Sindonia, the brilliant Sephardic Jew: I always look upon Diplomatists as the Hebrews of politics; without country, political creeds, popular convictions, that strong reality of existence which pervades the career of an eminent citizen […]
As I have previously noted, Diplomatic Blogging by serving diplomats is fraught with complications: The point is that under the way our democracy functions British diplomats can’t work like that. Nor do they. Anything close to being critical or tendentious or spikey or provocative is likely to annoy either a host government […]
Some rather disobliging words have been written by former Foreign Office Minister Chris Mullins in his memoirs about an allegedly garrulous senior British diplomat : ‘a fifty-something, chain-smoking (what is it about ambassadors in this part of the world) woman’ who is ‘oh, so noisy’. So, of course, the media have been busy tracking […]
Here is an eloquent article in Standpoint about claims that back in 1950 a youthful Milan Kundera gave a statement to the communist regime which caused others opposed to it immense suffering. The article has prompted some revealing comments. Here is one asserting that ‘context is everything: … It is further […]
Remember the fuss about the oppressive and unworkable FCO rules on what former diplomats might or might not say in public? We now have new rules! And they are actually sensible. They put the emphasis on intelligent people using their Judgement: The FCO relies on former officials to exercise their […]
Rummaging through the Internet I hit upon this excellent claim made in the French media, dating back to 1810: This is the custom of the British Cabinet – to give their diplomatic missions to the most foolish and senseless persons the nation produces. The English diplomatic corps is the only […]
Here is a reasonable-sounding assessment by Jonathan Freedland of the early days of the Obama Administration’s foreign policy: That same official explained it to me like this yesterday: "The Bush administration hindered its own efforts by tying one hand behind its back. Diplomacy is a tool, but they viewed it […]
Yes. The FCO has taken no action to amend the absurd spelling error on its Promote a low carbon, high growth, global economy webpage. The FCO is still hard at work Proteccting Asia’s rain forest (sic). The page also invites readers to link to latest case studies on our work on […]
Should the USA and its Western allies talk to ‘moderate elements in the Taleban’? President Obama’s musing about this publicly necessarily has various effects. Above all, it rewards Afghanistan extremism and demoralises ‘normal’ people there who have been trying to build a normal life with our support. Why should they make the […]
