As Titanic-Mugabe steams urgently towards the rocks one asks oneself: what is really going on here? The key ‘deep’ point to remember in all this is that Zimbabwe leader Mugabe is not (like South Africa President Thabo Mbeki) a Communist, but rather an Africanist. The European Communist tradition stressing class struggle as […]
This Guardian piece by Professor Robert Service about NATO/Russia has been noted in Poland. One sentence caught my eye (highlighted): What is more, Russians, from their present and future Presidents downwards, can see no justification for the US to turn states on Russia’s borders into engines of American regional power. […]
The option of throwing the Bad Leader overboard of course is not the only one available to the Bad Leader’s nearest and dearest. They instead can strap the old villain to the wheel, aim the ship firmly at the rocks and scream "full steam ahead". The bland assurances of South […]
The Russian Duma has passed a resolution rejecting claims that the mass starvation in Ukraine in the 1930s amounted to genocide. This AP report on the resolution has been picked up widely. It quotes the resolution thus: There is no historical proof that the famine was organized along ethnic lines. Its […]
When Bad Leaders finally realise that their hold on power is slipping (as looks to be the case in Zimbabwe), various things happen. The ‘mood’ abruptly changes, from Maybe This Time We Can Bring Him Down to When He Goes… The immediate entourage round the Bad Leader are affected. Some […]
Anatole Kaletsky today gives us a lesson in how to be intimidated. His article describing why Russia is justified in opposing NATO enlargement is everything an Op-Ed should be: urbane, perceptive, even a dash or two of wisdom. It also is Wrong, or at least Unbalanced. He depicts NATO as […]
Mr Mugabe is still there, seemingly ducking and weaving – and haggling? From the point of view of diplomatic technique, this is another awkward Bad Leader moment. When a Bad Leader finally runs out of road, he (it is almost always a he) above all wants to save his own […]
Perhaps my finest career moment came late on Sunday 24 September 2000. I was in my office at the FCO waiting for the first results to arrive in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia’s elections, where we hoped to see Milosevic fall. My computer showed a first result from a tiny […]
This makes depressing but convincing reading. South Africa’s problem is that it is mainly a vast desert. Keeping the water and power systems working across a space that size requires amazing sharp-end engineering technique and sustained policy and operational discipline. And if top-end skills are undervalued or eroded by bungled government policy […]
The point of the Internet is that it is the World Wide Web, right? So that in principle everyone can get to see everything? Yes. That works because websites have common computer addresses within the single overall global ICANN system. But what if that stopped being the case, with rival regional Webs jostling […]
