A busy few days for old-fashioned diplomacy, with China taking no obvious notice of British and other pleas for clemency in the case of Akmal Shaikh, and the Tehran regime hauling in the British Ambassador Simon Gass to issue dire warnings about a ‘slap in the face’ from Iran. Some thoughts. First, […]
The popular rising in Iran against its revolting regime is gaining momentum. But will that be enough? A good WSJ piece on the Big Picture: Much has been written about the fact that Iran’s democratic movement today combines the three characteristics of a velvet revolution—nonviolent, nonutopian and populist in nature—with […]
As the myriad delgates wend their various snowy ways from the Copenhagen Global Warming Summit, what is the overall assessment? Not UN, but UM. Unambiguous Mess. Key aspects of the whole thing were a priori perverse from a Basic Diplomatic Technique point of view. Let’s audaciously and even hopefully assume that the science is […]
A reader points me to this delicious YouTube conversations between two gushy American women gushing profusely over the just oh-so-wonderful way Cuba has adapted its energy needs to the end of all those Soviet subsidies, including by organic gardening: I gave up after the first few minutes, when they had […]
The Climate Summit is in disarray wails the Guardian, all because of a leaked position paper which suggests an attempted rich country stitch-up, or something like that. Points to note: this is above all a Negotiation on a vast and therefore ultimately simple scale Poor countries say: Rich countries caused the problem, […]
Since Classic Communism (more or less) ended nearly twenty years ago, which country has done better, China or Russia? And why? Big Questions Big answers.
More on European Foreign Policy – and Physics (or maybe Maths). Take two tennis balls, A and B. A is twice the size of B. By which I mean that the diameter of A is twice the diameter length (the straight line across the widest part of the inside of the ball) of […]
As readers of this website know only too well, the Kosovo case is fascinating and stunningly difficult on multiple levels simultaneously. Political, moral, precedental, timescale, ethnic, existential. The territory of Kosovo itself is smallish by international standards, ranking at 168th out of 249 countries listed in the CIA World Factbook – […]
The Advisory Opinion hearings at the International Court of Justice on the Serbia/Kosovo question have started. The curious thing about this one is the actual question which the ICJ is tasked by the UN General Assembly to address: Is the unilateral declaration of independence by the Provisional Institutions of Self-Government […]
President Obama’s sagging ratings are causing many people to wonder what is going on. Mark Steyn of course is no fan of the President bowing to kings and emperors, and calls the President the Superbower: Along with his choreographic gaucherie goes his peculiar belief that all of human history is […]
