Swing by National Review Online to catch up on conservative views on President Obama’s visit to Israel and what do you find? Not much. In fact almost nothing. Which goes to show just how strikingly well Obama did in behaving warmly towards Israel. Yes, the ‘optics’ of Obama appearing under […]
Back from sharing with the Croatian Diplomatic Academy some training thoughts on Lobbying and Negotiating in the European Union. With the Cyprus drama helpfully unfolding before our startled eyes. These fiendishly complex financial/banking negotiations are impossible for normal people to follow, although anyone following my Twitter feed will have seen […]
This account by William J Dobson over at Slate of the miserable failure of Hugo Chavez is the best one I have read so far. It has some splendid lines: The political ideology Chávez left behind, Chavismo, was a demonstrable failure for the Venezuelan people, but it is not as […]
Remember this? … let’s also agree that we are at a technological and civilisational turning-point. For now these high-precision UAV/drones and their supporting networks are still controlled by a handful of states. Good. But the technology will leak and get cheaper and better. Not so good. In due course the […]
Over on Twitter I have been having some 140-character exchanges with erudite writer and thinker Bryan Appleyard @BryanAppleyard on the fascinating subject of how far if at all it is right to ‘gloat’ about the catastrophic plummet from grace of Chris Huhne. Bryan seemed to think that this was not […]
Over at Backbencher Lee Jenkins takes a look at some issues surrounding ‘international intervention’ from a libertarian-inclining standpoint: Yet international relations is a sphere refreshingly free of ideology. States are motivated less by values and ideals, and more by a narrow set of objectives and interests… Once you acknowledge what motivates a country’s […]
UPDATE: More fine examples added – see below Unless you have really been paying attention for a very long time, you will have missed my various attempts to share examples of diplomatic themes appearing in great rock lyrics. And the time has come for a former senior diplomatic practitioner (ie […]
I am gearing up to give a coaching/skills session next week at a school on the general theme of Difficult Conversations. Notably with other colleagues – but especially with parents. It turns out that I am not the only one sending a stream of idiotic and abusive emails to schools […]
My post about looking at terrorism in terms of both legitimacy of outcomes and legitimacy of process has prompted a friendly reply from Eddy Canfor-Dumas (Head of Secretariat to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Conflict Issues, of which John Alderdice is a Co-Chair): An interesting response to what I think […]
For no obvious reason the Browser is recycling a strange 2010 interview with Lord Alerdice, who played a significant part in negotiating the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland. The subject is about terrorism, causes of: For me it isn’t a moral term. In other words, I am not using terrorism to […]
