I have never in these pages given you an (almost) full account of the expulsion from Moscow of a number of British diplomats back in May 1996 for – the Russians said – spying. This was the first major spy row between Moscow and a ‘Western’ country following the end […]
The Daily Express warns us that a new massive figure is set to take over Europe – just like the Holy Roman Emperor! And Napoleon! The UK will be scrapped! A covert group of EU foreign ministers has drawn up plans for merging the jobs currently done by Herman Van Rompuy, […]
Update That one didn’t take long. Chen has left the Embassy with the US Ambassador, heading for a medical facility. It obviously suited both sides to cut some sort of quick deal, including the Chinese expressing strong dissatisfaction with the US willingness to take Chen in, and (according to the […]
While our political elite descends into fevered squabbling about who did what to which newspaper and vice versa, the United States and China are slugging it out in a battle for psychological (and military and commercial) dominance in the Pacific and South China Sea. Knowing next to nothing about that part of […]
News that Chinese democracy supporter Chen Guangcheng has sought asylum in the US Embassy in Beijing prompts me to link again to a piece I write for DIPLOMAT magazine about famed episodes of Embassies sheltering people fleeing from their own government. Not forgetting the diplomacy of Wonder Woman: This theme features […]
Back to Vienna today to give a course on Advanced Negotiation to a distinguished international organisation. Away all this week, so blogging may well be light. One of the points I make is that issues are like Shrek – they have layers. So part of any negotiation is working out […]
Here is my latest Telegraph blog piece, this time on the dilemmas in negotiating with a country such as North Korea where the usual options of Persuasion, Carrot or Stick seem to make little impact: Many humans (and even some governments) aren’t donkeys. So another layer of analysis applies. As […]
Here is a scary piece at the Telegraph bewailing the supposed decline in British diplomats’ foreign language skills. Which draws on some information extracted from the FCO by a Parliamentary Question. And quotes me: Charles Crawford, the former British ambassador to Poland and a speaker of Serbian, Russian, Afrikaans and French has […]
Here’s a fine example of how high-level foreign language skills come in handy when the interpreter deliberately doesn’t translate what has been said to protect her boss from his own impatience: After Bosnia’s first post-conflict elections in 1996, the Contact Group Ambassadors led by High Representative Carl Bildt had to […]
A gush of media reporting on the start of the conflict in Bosnia back in 1992. This one by Tim Judah (who knows his Balkans) is smart but maybe too optimistic. Yes, the likelihood of horrible inter-ethnic fighting has subsided. But is what we have now really good enough and, […]
