My latest DIPLOMAT piece is up: The UK’s Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) has an imposing suite of UK-based and e-learning training courses for British diplomats. Some aim at improving skills (Diversity; One Team, Many Cultures; Communication and Assertiveness; Performance Management; First Aid); others look at thematic policy questions (Advanced […]
Over at Commentator is my latest piece on UK engagement with Libya, in which I argue that what happened in recent years was principled, smart and mainly effective. Take that, you chattering classes: there are only two basic choices available to democracies when it comes to dealing with odious regimes: […]
One of the greatest passages in the Bible: Then the Lord said to Cain, "Where is your brother Abel?""I know not," he replied. "Am I my brother’s keeper?" When – and to what extent – is X responsible for Y? German President Christian Wulff might be expected with his first […]
My latest piece over at Dale & Co looks at a possible spiral down into the next global conflagration: In short, the planet’s legal and moral order looks and feels weak. For the first time in centuries the USA and Europe are increasingly unable to define, let alone set the […]
Another sharp piece by Tim Worstall, this time over at Forbes: For labour and product market protectionism, decent public sector wages and benefits, are the “European Model”. And what’s being said here is that you can either have the European Model or you can have the European Currency. His article […]
Many of my loyal readers will not follow cricket. Nor do I, tuning into it fleetingly every few years when England manage to do something better than hopeless. But now, armed with Sky HD TV, a fiery England side and nothing else to do, I am enthralled by this England v […]
So much going on in the world. Most of it unambiguously bad. Tension in Kosovo. Tension in the Turkish army. Libya duly quagmired. Famine in Africa. Something or other going in and around North Korea. And so on. Yet bigger even than those problems, each of which is capable of […]
Ha ha ha! Serbia has been shoved to the top of the diplomatic rubbish-heap by the Russian Foreign Ministry when it comes to issuing extra money for hardship postings! This piece by RFE/RL notes that Serbia with Kosovo (sic) is now in the same category as Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Georgia, […]
Autonomous Mind kindly gave a link and supporting comments to my recent piece about Negotiation Training. And, via Twitter, he asked for More on the Carrot/Stick negotiating paradigm. So, here it is. The psychology of diplomatic negotiating is a vast, interesting and almost unanalysed subject. A couple of years ago […]
This is a brisk piece of work from Guy Sorman, a French economist philosopher who looks at global energy issues with a beady eye. He concludes that the main victim of the Japanese nuclear disaster after the tsunami will be not nuclear power but Green Ideology, at least in its luxuriant […]
