Reader Willie Garvin has sent in several thoughtful contributions in response to my request for personal experiences of donor/military cooperation (or not) on the ground in different hotspots. His basic point is that Western ‘interventions’ in conflict-ridden or fragile states are doomed to fail because the underlying objectives are invariably […]
Chris Bryant, the new Foreign Office minister, who is gay, has started writing personal letters of congratulations to British diplomats who show public support for gay rights. He is praising them for such support even if it draws anger from national governments or local homophobic groups… In a letter to […]
Diplomatic manoeuvrings go on as London and EU partners ponder how best to respond to the Iranians’ bullying of British Embassy locally employed staff: European Union governments summoned Iranian ambassadors to protest against the detentions. An EU official told the BBC that, in addition, visas for Iranians holding Iranian diplomatic […]
e-Diplomacy in action? Or e-Diplomacy inaction? Here is a version of the piece I wrote for the latest issue of DIPLOMAT magazine on how I invented e-Diplomacy and tried to put it into effect in a nervous FCO, too many years ahead of my time… e-Diplomacy: Who Isn’t My Neighbour? Where Julius […]
A pertinent comment from Spy Blog (Watching Them, Watching Us) on my posting below, asking about diplomatic gossip about expellees and asking whether the absence of names of expelled diplomats ‘taints’ others who might be leaving normally. First, gossip. You can’t and shouldn’t and won’t stop gossip. But it’s not […]
A reader writes re my posting on Locally Employed Embassy Staff: Yes, but you are rather glossing over the fact that a brutal regime can be far more brutal to its own nationals than it can to foreign diplomats. Indeed protection from brutality is the origin of the convention of […]
Stephen Robinson in the Evening Standard looks at the Iranian Embassy in London and the capacious UK Embassy in Tehran, with a rather gloomy assessment of the current Iranian Ambassador: Shortly after Ahmadinejad’s electoral victory, Hossein Adeli was recalled and replaced with His Excellency Rasoul Movahedian Attar, who the Foreign […]
The UK’s diplomatic problems with Iran have featured mutual expulsions of diplomats: Britain is to expel two Iranian diplomats as a tit-for-tat response after Iran forced the same number of British diplomats to leave, Gordon Brown revealed this afternoon. "It is with regret that I should inform the House that […]
I am tasked to prepare some ideas on the problems which may arise between civilian and military ‘cultures’ in trying to help fragile or failed states. See the Center for Global Development on the subject. The basic problem is that things are what they are. Fragile states are fragile, because […]
The BBC website picks up the musty tone of David Miliband’s recent speech on Europe in a headline which strongly suggests a direct quote from something or someone: Iran ‘must free UK Embassy staff’ The ensuing piece about an EU Foreign Ministers statement on the arrest by Iranian police of […]
