Opinion / Communism, Fascism and Other Extremes

Back to South Africa

Madam Crawf and I have been back to South Africa (where I was posted in the final years of apartheid). This time we spent ten days in and around the Kruger Park. The first and most striking thing we found was that things are startlingly cheap. Back in the late […]

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Turkey v Russia

My latest piece for the Telegraph on the shooting down by Turkey of a Russian bomber. A belligerent set of comments, mostly feuding with each other to no helpful purpose and having nothing to do with my piece if anyone actually read it. Russia ‘of course’ will respond. But it’s […]

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Jay Pollard Leaves Prison

Hurrah. Jay Pollard has been released on parole on strict conditions after a full 30 years in a US prison. In 1986 he was sentenced to life imprisonment in the USA for spying for Israel. He has served his full term, despite the generally close US/Israel relationship and numerous public and […]

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France, Terrorism (2): NATO Article 5

Separately on Twitter I have been sparring with Phillip Blond of ResPublica on an interesting issue or two: is ISIS effectively a state for international law purposes, and if so does that make it easier for France to mobilise effective military action under NATO’s famous Article Five? You’ll have to […]

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France, Terrorism (1): Surveillance Works?

My latest DIPLOMAT article on migration and refugees had this dismally prescient passage (emphasis added here): According to the Office of The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), in 2014 on average some 40,000 people a day were driven from their homes by conflict or persecution and compelled to find […]

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Poland Gets a New Government

I have not posted here until now a link to my Telegraph piece about the Polish elections that ended up giving the Law and Justice Party an overall majority – the first time that this has happened since communism ended. Here it is. Complete with a wily reference to one of […]

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Refugees, Migrants, Borders

My latest piece for DIPLOMAT magazine, on the EU and its refugee/migrant crisis: Who exactly is a citizen of state X? And what rights (if any) does a person who is not a citizen of state X have (a) to enter state X and (b) to stay there? The answer? […]

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Hillary Email: Blair and Gaddafi

Thanks to the WSJ, we can search the ever-growing database of Hillary Clinton emails. Here is the one from Feb 2011 where news of Tony Blair’s discussion with Gaddafi is described, as the doomed dictator (Gaddafi, not Blair or Hillary) wriggled to survive. If you have a safe place to […]

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Assad Stays! Realism!

My latest piece for the Telegraph this morning has another look at Syria, and notes with gloomy satisfaction that my thoughts on this subject several years ago have been proven correct: I hate to say that I told you so. But I did. I said it in February 2012: The […]

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Cheshire Cat Diplomacy

Here’s the full text of a letter I have sent to The Times on the idea that the Foreign Office budget be slashed by 25% or more. Published today. I don’t yet know how much they used – they’re paywalled! Sir, The values and institutions that have defined world order […]

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