Should there be a UK referendum on our EU membership? If so, when? The answers these days divide neatly: Yes! Now! Maybe. But if we do, let’s choose the right moment and the right question! That latter view of course enrages anyone inclined to the former view as a piece […]
Two years ago I mulled over the different ways in which World War Three might start: Maybe it all gets just too complicated. Too many things go wrong at the same time. The capacity of the world’s leaders and institutions to respond in a coherent and authoritative way on several […]
American generosity in the form of the Marshall Plan transformed Western Europe after WW2. Hurrah. Everyone knows that. But what did that Plan do or not do? Precisely what did it do? Why did it work? How might any lessons from that initiative be applied to (say) Greece today? Good […]
Here is my latest Telegraph Blog piece about the striking success of young Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic, who has beaten a senior Lithuanian colleague to become chair of the UN General Assembly in 2012/2013: The position had been uncontested since 1991, the different regional groupings deciding for themselves in […]
Here are the answers I have given to some questions about Russia, over on the Russia Insights website: What are 3 positive things you would say about Russia? Russia’s sense of itself – a quite different idea of scale, and what that means both for national policy and in historical and […]
As you know, this blog takes the view that in a globalised world a terrorist threat to the networks that support modern life are a threat to us all. And that international law doctrines of self-defence and ‘national sovereignty’ need to be redefined accordingly: if a state wants the benefit of modern […]
My mind turns to Myanmar/Burma (Burma hereinafter, as it’s shorter). A faraway country of which I know nothing. Burma is larger than Ukraine in geographical terms and (with some 50 million people) than Spain in population terms. So comfortably towards the top of global country rankings on both counts. But […]
This is another adroit piece of analysis on the Eurozone’s misery, written by Michael Pettis of the Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management – what a change of civilisations we see as such analysis is written from China – in language most of us can think we understand. It focuses on […]
More strange things going on in the USA about President Obama’s origins and identity. As you know, all sorts of crazed Republicans ran the claim that Obama was not qualified to be US President as he had not been born in the USA, whereas (as any fule kno) he was […]
Update That one didn’t take long. Chen has left the Embassy with the US Ambassador, heading for a medical facility. It obviously suited both sides to cut some sort of quick deal, including the Chinese expressing strong dissatisfaction with the US willingness to take Chen in, and (according to the […]
