Democratist replies to my earlier posting: I have a number of points to make about the following statements you made in "International Election Monitoring: Keeping Democracy Honest?" "The problem is that observers necessarily observe the observable, and only a tiny proportion of that." What about LTOs and the Core Team? They are […]
Over at DIPLOMAT magazine is my light-touch article looking at the whys and wherefores of ‘interfering in internal affairs’. My original draft was wittily called Where Diplomacy meets Gynaecology but for no obvious reason this web version is called Diplomacy Meets Affairs of the State, which alas makes little sense.
Being a serious former Ambassador Oliver Miles manages to give the lame FCO diplo-blogging genre the thrashing it richly deserves AND do so in an elegant Guardian article: Why do diplomats (and Whitaker’s article quotes some examples from Americans as well as the British) feel the need to let it […]
Most issues boil down to a simple number of questions: what’s the problem? what’s at stake for the various sides arguing about it? is any given outcome likely to be seen by all concerned as both fair (enough) and sustainable? And above all: who decides? Many key international disputes (Israel/Palestine, […]
Democratist is someone who follows the goings-on across the former Soviet Union in some depth. Here he takes up William Hague’s recent speech on UK foreign policy, and makes an interesting point about how the UK invests in foreign policy outcomes in that complicated region: OSCE election observation is about the best […]
Who did better from the spy swap? Some say the Americans: “I don’t think there’s any doubt — I think the U.S. won,” NBC National Security Producer Robert Windrem said Friday. He said the four freed by the Russians were coming "with real information and there’s no evidence the guys […]
Slowly but surely, I feel myself moving from happy to uncomfortable to annoyed with our squeaky clean new government. Not only is it hard to reconcile the ambitious pronouncements of William Hague for a "clear, focused and effective" foreign policy with the major cuts now looming for the FCO as […]
Is the US/Russian likely spy swap a good idea? Ron Radosh thinks not: Both the Putin government and the Obama administration, however, are signing on to this charade. The Russians get back their would-be sleeper agents, while the United States avoids an embarrassing trial that might turn U.S. public opinion […]
Now that Cuba has agreed to release – and exile – a goodly number of political prisoners, Spain expects the European Union to ‘respond’ and be more flexible. I have written here on various occasions about Cuba. Maybe the most astonishing thing about this run-down Cold War relic is not […]
Are we about to see a major ‘spy swap’? "Why waste time on all those tedious legal processes and prisons? We get our spies back, and so do you." Hard for me at least to see why the Russians would want to do this unless the illegals/sleepers rounded up in […]
