In the debate last week on the foreign policy success or otherwise of President Obama, I made the point that he had offered Cuba the normalisation of diplomatic relations without pressing for anything (even rhetorically) in return. Why not use this high-profile move to make the case strongly for a […]
The Hillary Clinton Ship of Destiny sails on, despite gaping Emailgate holes appearing above and below the waterline. Back in August last year I wrote about her already ghastly email problems: So for me the very fact that Hillary Clinton set up a parallel substantive private email arrangement for much […]
Here is a bizarre article by one Sławomir Sierakowski over at Project Syndicate, who ought to know better. It gets off to a flying start with the title: The Polish Threat to Europe. Not, you note, A Polish Threat to Europe or even A Polish Threat to Europe? No, it’s the definite […]
Here for MLK Day 2016 is my new piece for Diplomatic Courier, looking at a less well-known speech by Martin Luther King back in 1957 He deftly juxtaposes extreme optimism with extreme pessimism: The extreme optimist and the extreme pessimist have at least one thing in common: they both agree that […]
My previous post linked to the new gloomy piece by Robert Kaplan for the WSJ, in which he ponders the possibility of Europe reverting to deep historical fault-lines: The sturdy core of modern Europe approximates in large measure the Carolingian Empire founded by Charlemagne in the ninth century. The first […]
Dr Lee Rotherham of the Taxpayers Alliance has written a lively paper about the practical options for the UK should it leave the UK, with the underlying theme of calibrating the ‘national interest’. It gets a bit complicated here and there: The arithmetic is set out below. f1+f2+f3 s1 w […]
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 […]
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 […]
My latest piece for DIPLOMAT tackles the morality of the #Eurozone crisis. What happy days they were, when that was all the EU had to fret about! Thus: When the Cold War ended and the eurozone was set up as a massive stride forward in European integration, one of the […]
Remember my piece at DIPLOMAT late last year? Once a state effectively loses control of some parts of its territory to local violent extremists, how long does it take for the mass of citizens to start to challenge state authority, if only because they fear for the results if the state […]
