Here at Project Syndicate is Poland’s Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski: Ten years later, it is clear that the fanatics behind those attacks miscalculated in two central respects. They regarded Western democracies as weak – unwilling or unable to respond to their evil extremism. And they expected Muslim communities and countries […]
My latest DIPLOMAT piece is up: The UK’s Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) has an imposing suite of UK-based and e-learning training courses for British diplomats. Some aim at improving skills (Diversity; One Team, Many Cultures; Communication and Assertiveness; Performance Management; First Aid); others look at thematic policy questions (Advanced […]
There were 249 reported terrorist attacks in EU member states in 2010. Quite a lot. Who carried them out? Not who you might think (my emphasis): Islamist terrorists carried out three attacks on EU territory. Separatist groups, on the other hand, were responsible for 160 attacks, while left-wing and anarchist groups […]
Over at Commentator is my latest piece on UK engagement with Libya, in which I argue that what happened in recent years was principled, smart and mainly effective. Take that, you chattering classes: there are only two basic choices available to democracies when it comes to dealing with odious regimes: […]
Soon after the US-led attack on Saddam Hussein began, the rattled Gaddafi regime sent an urgent message to London asking to meet a top MI6 officer. The rest is now history. This encounter set in train a series of top-level diplomatic manoeuvres leading to Gaddafi/Libya renouncing its weapons of mass destruction. […]
Here is the later part of my Commentator piece this morning on Libya, featuring some thoughts on chess and politics – and why the usual clever moaners are wrong again: … slowly and surely and with a lot of pain the capacity of the Gaddafi loyalists to hold out was […]
Andrzej Lepper, turbulent leader of Poland’s left-populist Self-Defence party, yesterday was found dead. Apparently by hanging himself in his party office in Warsaw Where to start? The English Wikipedia page gives the basics of his lively career, describing how he came from a modest rural family background and with little formal education […]
So much going on in the world. Most of it unambiguously bad. Tension in Kosovo. Tension in the Turkish army. Libya duly quagmired. Famine in Africa. Something or other going in and around North Korea. And so on. Yet bigger even than those problems, each of which is capable of […]
The Commentator has published a piece of mine – Torture versus terror – a tale of two resignations – which is intended to bring out in 100% unambiguous terms what practical and ethical/policy dilemmas a blanket extension of the idea of ‘complicity in torture’ might produce. It takes a dramatic imaginary scene some years […]
Ha ha ha! Serbia has been shoved to the top of the diplomatic rubbish-heap by the Russian Foreign Ministry when it comes to issuing extra money for hardship postings! This piece by RFE/RL notes that Serbia with Kosovo (sic) is now in the same category as Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Georgia, […]
