Dominique Moisi is a clever and agreeable French intellectual. I met him once over lunch. Here he is, bewailing what he sees as the professional limitations of diplomats who fail to see convulsions coming: In the name of “realism,” diplomats and foreign-policy strategists are naturally conservative. Indeed, it is no […]
Just back from being interviewed by BBC TV for the News at 2200 tonight (and for the BBC News Channel) on the Libyan drama, and in particular what options exist for Western policy-makers. The BBC had picked up my piece here yesterday giving a range of policy options. My formal claim […]
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. […]
I have previously written here about the FCO’s approach to ‘consular’ work (ie helping British nationals overseas). See eg here: The media love to pounce on allegations of FCO staff being unkind or inefficient when they find British citizens overseas who have hit trouble. For every hundred people who write in to you […]
How has the FCO managed the Libya and other emergency situations? The only true test of how well the FCO has done is, of course, the absence or otherwise of shrill and ignorant moaning from the Daily Mail. So the FCO clearly passed the Tunisia and Egypt hurdles quite well. What, […]
I previously offered some operational ideas for Doing Something about Libya. One of them was this: expert support for opening of all Libyan regime secret police and other archives asap – let the dirty chips lie where they fall (mainly in Moscow?) The more I think about it, the more […]
(Apologies to Iain Dale’s readers and other readers – an earlier version got garbled) Ed West at the Telegraph puts the issue with commendable boldness: No Arab country has ever produced a democracy, or at least a lasting democracy; none of the 22 member states of the Arab League are classified […]
The idiom ‘shooting fish in a barrel’ describes an easy job – you just can’t miss. Mythbusters helpfully experiment with different sorts of guns and containers to show what works best. (Advisory: best not to watch if you are a sensitive fish): But that is a hard task indeed compared […]
Most people seem to think that Gaddafi’s long ‘speech’ last night set a new record for oratorical appallingness: "I am a fighter, a revolutionary from tents … I will die as a martyr at the end," he said. "Muammar Gaddafi is the leader of the revolution, I am not a president […]
Here is an eloquent look at Gaddafi’s wretched legacy across Africa from the Woyingi Blog: You can compare Libya’s Gaddafi to Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Egypt’s Mubarak but for those of you who are “anti-imperialists” there is a particularly disturbing lesson here because Gaddafi was supposed to be “one of the good […]
