There’s a lot of it about now. The FCO has a goodly bunch, albeit with tone of unrelenting ‘corporate’ cheeriness, eschewing anything controversial/awkward in policy or philosphical terms. When I was in Warsaw the FCO timidly experimented with some blogs for internal FCO consumption only, allowing some of us a […]
Now and again you see something that lifts the standard for us all. Here is a superb analysis by Jason Lee Steorts at NRO of the foreign policy process and Iraq – looked at through the eyes of a poker player – which gives us numerous insights into how things work […]
Russia’s gloomy demographic trends are a fascinating subject. For years now Russia has been losing some 750,000 people per year. Poor birth rates, high death rates: horrible abortion, HIV, accident and TB statistics, the accumulation of decades of communist mal-investment and then studied unwillingness by successive post-communist administrations to face […]
Remember this posting on the Cost of Stupidity? My conclusions: Small sustained differences in performance mean big differences in absolute outcomes. • •The steady and quite rich get steadily quite a lot richer. The poor have to be more than steady to start to close the gap. • The stupid […]
I have mentioned Dick Holbrooke several times. See eg this early posting about his sheer physical presence. And this later one when Radovan Karadzic was arrested. Now he has been appointed by President Obama to lead US policy on Pakistan and Afghanistan. That lot should keep him busy. I attended […]
UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband is having a thin time of it. His visit to India featured several apparent misjudgements (wrong tone on terrorism, ill-judged observations on Kashmir and an inappropriately Nu Labour matey conversational style with senior Indian interlocutors). See this vivid demolition job. Plus there is a claim […]
A sturdy piece by Harry Phibbs who got to the point about David Miliband’s misplaced informality and linked it to Blairish ‘anti-stuffiness’ before I did: In a triumph of style over substance, Blair declared a moral crusade against stuffiness in our domestic affairs. Not being addressed as Prime Minister was […]
Trundling across Poland’s snowy steppes on the train from Warsaw to Krakow yesterday, I missed the Inauguration. As for George W Bush, Christopher Hitchens’ assessment is good enough for me: … it is the events of Sept. 11, 2001, that explain the transformation of George Bush from a rather lazy […]
Samizdata folk are having a lively exchange over Perry de Havilland’s ringing call for Disunity in conservative ranks. His core demand: I am not calling for the ‘libertarianisation’ of the Republican party along the lines I would actually like, just for the party’s rationalisation. I am in essence calling for […]
The BBC notes that the legacy of the Cuban socialist miracle is ‘complex’. This is just what Serbian Communist leader Draza Markovic used to say about the problems in Kosovo in the early 1980s: "the situation is still complicated, even complex!" The BBC on Cuba: Fifty years on, the legacy […]
