Over at Salon24, the leading Polish group blog, are my thoughts on how relations between Poland and the USA (and UK) have evolved down the ages – scroll down for the original version in English. Thus: The point? Simply that things come and go over years and decades and centuries. […]
A colleague of mine from old FCO days has a droll self-immolatory story about Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the IMF who now faces serious criminal charges in New York. Years ago there was a tradition in the FCO that an Embassy would send short reports back to London if […]
You may not have noticed, but in the last few days/weeks/months/years (depending on how you look at it) Bosnia and Herzegovina has been teetering on the Brink of Disaster. Why? Oh, for all the familiar reasons. Key posts in the central government unfilled, general political deadlock stretching in all directions, […]
The Ayn Rand novel Atlas Shrugged depicts a ghastly world in which more and more US government regulation aimed at protecting corrupt special interests drags down creative people who eventually go on strike themselves. They thereby crash the system, which has (it turns out) relied on their passive acceptance of their […]
Baffled by the sluggish rate of NATO bombing of Gaddafi’s forces in Libya, and the fact that this business is dragging on so inconclusively? Read this fine piece by Stephen Saideman at McGill University on the underlying negotiation going on. Really, I could not have it better myself. Thus: Simply […]
If you want a scintillating, furious polemic on why the Yes to AV campaign lost so heavily, go no further than Liberal Vision: The YES campaign was eminently winnable. But it ended up being run by readers of the Guardian for readers of the Guardian. Readers of this newspaper are […]
Here is a strong example from Walter Russell Mead of elegant but tough foreign policy writing, this time on the increasingly dysunctional US/Pakistan relationship. Once upon a time India with its phony anti-Americanist ‘non-alignment’ as encouraged by massive Soviet penetration of the Indian establishment was the main reason for Washington to treat […]
Tim Worstall points us to what he accurately calls a doozy: a piece by Professor Morgan Kelly about the appalling plight facing an Ireland now impaled on assorted policy outcomes which lead straight to national disaster. It’s readable and unambiguous. Thus: Honohan’s miscalculation of the bank losses has turned out to […]
Most of the moral and legal burbling on whether it was right for the US special forces to shoot Bin Laden ("extrajudicial execution/killing" seems to be one the favourite phrases used) utterly misses the point. Which is that the whole operation depended on brave beyond belief soldiers walking into a […]
Here is my first-ever piece for a new website, The Commentator, looking at some of the tired and/or snide arguments against the US action against Osama Bin Laden which are now busily infiltrating the BBC and other parts of the British media. Including this passage, on where the Prime Minister hit […]
