Here’s the full text of a letter I have sent to The Times on the idea that the Foreign Office budget be slashed by 25% or more. Published today. I don’t yet know how much they used – they’re paywalled! Sir, The values and institutions that have defined world order […]
Let’s look at President Putin’s UN speech, as given by the Kremlin website in English here. For public-speaking fanatics it’s interesting to compare the Kremlin English version with a version as it came through the interpreters – here. He quickly gets into his stride, explaining why the veto power of […]
Here is President Obama’s speech at the UN. Too long and in places even rambling, but it makes a broad cogent case for intelligent realism. On style, the speechwriters as ever strain for over-obvious rhetorical effect and drift into fatuous mixed metaphors. Look at these awful lines: Today, we see […]
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 […]
As Mark Steyn (and others) have noted, the future belongs to those who show up. For the next century or so, those people largely fall into two categories. Africans and Indians. With added Arabs. The UN’s Population Division churns out all sorts of numbers about global demographic trends. They used […]
As Twitter noted, this piece about ISIS and modernity appears to hit Peak Guardian: In the neoliberal fantasy of individualism, everyone was supposed to be an entrepreneur, retraining and repackaging themselves in a dynamic economy, perpetually alert to the latter’s technological revolutions. But capital continually moves across national boundaries in […]
My latest piece at DIPLOMAT has another gallop round some of the issues surrounding Mass and Velocity in diplomacy: The EU’s common foreign policy is particularly prone to piling on Mass but losing Velocity. Lots of European countries intoning the same policies, but struggling to take decisions to implement any […]
Here is a piece I have written for the Gatestone Institute on the basic message that we need to be sending Islamist extremists in general and ISIS/ISIL (or whatever their latest acronym is) in particular: Anything can be analysed indefinitely. Policy papers, strategy documents, roadmaps, risk management assessments, spreadsheets of […]
Sir John Sawers has given a significant speech at King’s College London on the Limits of Security. Here is the ‘official’ website version. And here is my piece for Daily Telegraph Comment mentioning it with (as you can see) my disclaimer mentioning that I worked with Sir John on his speech, his first after […]
+++ OMG! Stop the presses! +++ Michelle Obama did not wear a headscarf in Saudi Arabia! But wait? What does this mean? Some Saudis have Tweeted criticism, others praise. Elsewhere views similarly differ. Christine Odone in the Telegraph (paywalled these days): This gesture is being widely praised for sending a “bold […]
