A good question. In fact really the only question in foreign affairs is this one: Does Bad Behaviour have Bad Consequences? Now we have one answer in the awesome ruling in the High Court yesterday that HM Government had been wrong in law in blocking corruption investigations under official pressure from […]
An article today in the unhappy New York Times purports to describe the Republican Party’s "fractious" divisions around John McCain’s foreign policy ideas. Pragmatists are locked in fierce battle with Neoconservatives, among them the "prominent neoconservative" Robert Kagan. Aaargh. This clumsy piece maybe explains why those NYT share prices have been […]
This Guardian piece by Professor Robert Service about NATO/Russia has been noted in Poland. One sentence caught my eye (highlighted): What is more, Russians, from their present and future Presidents downwards, can see no justification for the US to turn states on Russia’s borders into engines of American regional power. […]
The option of throwing the Bad Leader overboard of course is not the only one available to the Bad Leader’s nearest and dearest. They instead can strap the old villain to the wheel, aim the ship firmly at the rocks and scream "full steam ahead". The bland assurances of South […]
When Bad Leaders finally realise that their hold on power is slipping (as looks to be the case in Zimbabwe), various things happen. The ‘mood’ abruptly changes, from Maybe This Time We Can Bring Him Down to When He Goes… The immediate entourage round the Bad Leader are affected. Some […]
Anatole Kaletsky today gives us a lesson in how to be intimidated. His article describing why Russia is justified in opposing NATO enlargement is everything an Op-Ed should be: urbane, perceptive, even a dash or two of wisdom. It also is Wrong, or at least Unbalanced. He depicts NATO as […]
Mr Mugabe is still there, seemingly ducking and weaving – and haggling? From the point of view of diplomatic technique, this is another awkward Bad Leader moment. When a Bad Leader finally runs out of road, he (it is almost always a he) above all wants to save his own […]
Now this is a real Balkanic Eruption. We British used to take fierce criticism in the Bosniac media for our part in the international policy equivocations of the early 1990s which helped allow so much death and destruction across Bosnia. Yet whenever President Izetbegovic tried to make this point in our private […]
As I was saying, the 2005 British Presidency decided to help the EU emerge from the French/Dutch referenda debacles by pushing for a new EU Budget. Like everything which is amazingly complicated, this is in fact quite simple. All sides agreed that a bigger EU following the 2004 enlargement meant a […]
I met Michael Dobbs as he started his career in and around Yugoslavia when Tito died in 1980. He has had a glittering journalist’s life since then. He now is part of the Washington Post’s Fact Checker team. And has been busy checking the facts of Hillary Clinton’s visit to Bosnia […]
