Professor Anatol Lieven gets over-excited: A fraction of the trillion and a half dollars now spent on rescuing western economies from the consequences of their elites’ greed and recklessness would have been enough to have greatly reduced African misery, stabilised Pakistan and other Muslim states – or put a human […]
The Mumbai massacres tell us a lot about the way power works (and doesn’t) these days. This is not a classic terrorist atrocity, but rather a fairly sophisticated military attack: The Mumbai attack is something different. Foreign assault teams that likely trained and originated from outside the country infiltrated a […]
It is always a pleasure to see a leading Singaporean politician in top form. See this elegant and ideas-rich speech to the Asia Society on 11 November by Singapore Senior Minister Mr Goh Chok Tong. Several lively judgements: For the last two hundred years or so, the international system has […]
The BBC wonders whether a picture of North Korea’s Dear Leader Kim has been faked. Surely the much more pertinent question is, why is he wearing that ridiculous anorak when visiting troops? Are he and Dick Cheney by some chance related? I was at the Auschwitz commemoration in 2005 and […]
Back from my Negotiations seminar with those perky young diplomats. If you can force X to do something, no need to negotiate. If you can persuade X to do something by your eloquence, ditto. But if those options fail, you have two choices. Negotiate. Or give up the whole idea […]
Here is a neatly turned speech in Boston by the British Ambassador to the UN, Sir John Sawers, marking UN Day. He recalls how Artur Rubinstein defiantly played the Polish anthem back in 1945 to show his contempt for the exclusion of a democratic Poland at the establishment of the UN. And […]
Daniel Finkelstein eloquently spells out the already eccentric view that the honest way to describe a Disaster is not to proclaim a Triumph: There is room for plenty of argument about whether the crisis could have been averted by better management. But this is almost beside the point. What matters […]
Can this stuff be for real? Or is it a spoof site trying to make North Korea look ridiculous by emitting spoof communistic nonsense, a sort of uber-Commie Postmodern Generator putting Marxist phrases in random order and thereby making no difference to the senselessness of the outcome? Thus: Pyongyang, October 13 […]
While doing some Googling on the subject of Diplomatic Leaks for a forthcoming article, I found this: Have you ever wanted to spy on a foreign government? The DEranged Security website published the addresses and passwords of 100 email accounts from embassies and governments around the world. Those nations involved […]
Reader Willie Garvin asks (via my previous post): How many of the 47 states that have recognised Kosovo as independent have done so for reasons other that the belief it was the right thing to do for the region and international relations in general? I mean, how many Croatias are […]
