It’s hard to work out what exactly Iran’s President Rouhani said in the USA about Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions (or not) and/or the Holocaust. We Brits see these events through the filter of our media bias. Luckily we have Press TV to explain what is happening: Although the reports of […]
It’s a very rare honour to be quoted by Mark Steyn. But it can happen: This is what happens when you elect someone because he looks cool standing next to Jay-Z. Putin is cool mainly in the sense that Yakutsk in February is. In American pop-culture terms, he is a […]
Here is a really good WSJ piece on the foreign policy issues surrounding Syria. Really good for its grasp of the wider Big Picture, and despite the fact that I am mentioned in it: It is Barack Obama’s impulse to make himself and whatever is in his head the center […]
I appeared on LBC radio this morning on the always interesting subject of abuses of diplomatic immunity by foreign diplomats in the UK. LBC has done some digging and found that the number of crimes committed or alleged to have been committed by foreign diplomats based in the UK has […]
My piece for Telegraph Blogs this morning: Days ago Washington was gearing up to hit hard at the Assad regime because of its crimes against humanity in using chemical weapons. An almost impossible political case to sell (why will it make anything any better?) but at least it drew on […]
Here on the BBC Football web pages is a video of former footballer Pat Nevin waffling on about the correlation between the size of a soccer pitch and the likelihood of goals being scored as a game draws towards the end: BBC Sport’s Pat Nevin explains how a variation of […]
How was President Obama’s latest Syria speech for you? Here it is. Points to note. He attempts to make the case that by failing to act against the use of CW in Syria now new risks for us will appear down the line: If we fail to act, the Assad […]
This astounding and inspiring piece by James Lileks from 2003 gives a view of the 9/11 attacks that always bears repeating as the anniversary comes round again: Two years later I take a certain grim comfort in some people’s disinterest in the war; if you’d told me two years ago […]
My piece at Telegraph Blogs boldly asserts that yesterday was the worst-ever day for Western diplomacy: Think about what will happen if the Russian initiative starts to fly. Chemical weapons are relatively easy to make and store (and fire), but much harder to dismantle safely. The chemicals themselves are fiendishly […]
Here is a major piece I have written for Aeon on the way states emerge or de-emerge, and the specific case of Kosovo/Serbia. Thus: Miloševi? had some good points, but his willingness to use violence against his neighbouring republics repulsed those Western nations that might have accepted his logic. In […]
