Let’s look at President Putin’s UN speech, as given by the Kremlin website in English here. For public-speaking fanatics it’s interesting to compare the Kremlin English version with a version as it came through the interpreters – here. He quickly gets into his stride, explaining why the veto power of […]
Here is President Obama’s speech at the UN. Too long and in places even rambling, but it makes a broad cogent case for intelligent realism. On style, the speechwriters as ever strain for over-obvious rhetorical effect and drift into fatuous mixed metaphors. Look at these awful lines: Today, we see […]
My latest piece for DIPLOMAT tackles the morality of the #Eurozone crisis. What happy days they were, when that was all the EU had to fret about! Thus: When the Cold War ended and the eurozone was set up as a massive stride forward in European integration, one of the […]
Remember my piece at DIPLOMAT late last year? Once a state effectively loses control of some parts of its territory to local violent extremists, how long does it take for the mass of citizens to start to challenge state authority, if only because they fear for the results if the state […]
UPDATE: More! * * * * * How to explain the fact that Hillary Clinton is still afloat politically? Or not in jail? This is a handy round-up (my emphasis added) of her accelerating woes over her private email server that she used for much of her work (most of […]
As Mark Steyn (and others) have noted, the future belongs to those who show up. For the next century or so, those people largely fall into two categories. Africans and Indians. With added Arabs. The UN’s Population Division churns out all sorts of numbers about global demographic trends. They used […]
As Twitter noted, this piece about ISIS and modernity appears to hit Peak Guardian: In the neoliberal fantasy of individualism, everyone was supposed to be an entrepreneur, retraining and repackaging themselves in a dynamic economy, perpetually alert to the latter’s technological revolutions. But capital continually moves across national boundaries in […]
Russia has decided once again to line itself up with absurd and offensive positions by vetoing the Srebrenica resolution in the UN Security Council. Here is what looks to be the final text. Most of it is the usual rather convoluted language of UN-speak recalling and noting earlier positions. I […]
My latest piece for DIPLOMAT magazine, this time on diplomatic training. What exactly do up-and-coming diplomats need to know? In May, I joined international experts pondering such questions at the seventeenth Dubrovnik Diplomatic Forum. Professor Joseph Mifsud of the London Academy of Diplomacy wisely reminded us all of The Ambassadors, […]
The 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacres during the Bosnia conflict is prompting renewed interest in what happened and why. To mark the occasion the UK government has tabled a draft UN Security Council resolution on the issue. The current UK Ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Edward Ferguson, explains the […]
