A Polish friend draws my attention to this speech by FCO Minister of State David Lidington. It’s all about the European Union, delivered to a senior French audience earlier this week. Read the whole thing. To me as a speechwriting technician there’s something oddly ‘thin’ about it. It ticks the […]
Dear All, Sorry to have dropped from the Blogosphere. Too much going on in the world and in the Crawf household, and not enough to say. I had an interesting few days giving a Negotiation Skills masterclass at the IAEA in Vienna, then a shorter one-day version of the same […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
