This is so grisly an analysis of how President Obama is whittling the Clintons down to very little, it might almost be true. Hence Hillary Clinton’s tentative responses on North Korea?
This is so grisly an analysis of how President Obama is whittling the Clintons down to very little, it might almost be true. Hence Hillary Clinton’s tentative responses on North Korea?
Does the very presence of US forces in South Korea encourage South Korean complacency and North Koream truculence, a version of the moral hazard problem? Some pertinent thoughts from Johnathan Pearce at Samizdata on this subject, plus some excellent comments from Subotai Bahadur (my emphasis): There is the additional possibility, […]
The goings-on in and around North Korea and its nuclear ambitions takes us back to our old friend Negotiation. See eg this early piece I wrote in April last year about Power and Purpose: Part of getting what you want is projecting a sense of Power and Purpose, so that when […]
Danny Finkelstein argues well in the Times that politics are getting more fragmented and less controlled: In his book The Long Tail Chris Anderson points out how the market for, say, books has in the past been constrained by the shop shelf space available to display. Online shopping has abolished this […]
My guess? As much as anyone else. Here is a description of Arabs themselves discussing their problems: “We Arabs are at the bottom of everything — at the bottom of every index: literacy, capitalism, the rights of women. Everything. In our countries, we have cults of personality, dictatorships, dynasties . . . Where is […]
Most mornings I have to take out Lilly the Dog for a bracing walk in the British ountryside. As I trudge through the fields I muse on the transience of things. These fields near where we are were once were part of a large estate, which in the past century […]
The EU has not sat idly by as British democracy reels under the weight of its own loathsome misbehaviour. On 7 May the EU launched its new Eastern Partnership – an attempt to set up a new sort of structured relationship with the obviously (more or less) ‘European’ parts of the […]
Here is a fine article by Richard Fernandez on the T-word. He takes up an article by Jeff Jacoby which points up the moral dilemmas in all this: Suppose the CIA had been denied permission to use brutal interrogation tactics, and Al Qaeda had consequently gone on to murder thousands […]
Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the Guardian writes about the Impotence of Might: There are few more startling illustrations of this impotence of might than the pirates, or the country they come from. A hundred years ago, any one of half a dozen imperial powers could have conquered Somalia in a matter […]
President Obama has called for a world free of nuclear weapons. But he accepts that it might not happen in his lifetime. Why it is so difficult to scale back these systems once they are there? Basically, nuclear weapons are ghastly because they can not be used on any scale […]
