It’s great news that two high-profile Libyan Ambassadors have leaped screaming from the burning deck of fast-sinking Libyan diplomacy. Isn’t it?
It’s great news that two high-profile Libyan Ambassadors have leaped screaming from the burning deck of fast-sinking Libyan diplomacy. Isn’t it?
What drivel is gushing out now from assorted progressives, variously blaming Tony Blair, the Blair Doctrine and his ‘hypocrisy’ for propping up Gaddafi. See this embarrassment posted by Channel 4 by self-styled Gurublog. And this even worse posting at Liberal Conspiracy by Claude Carpentieri: Imagine if you had a quid each time […]
A long post. Go and grab a coffee. Right at the very very start of this blog in January 2008, I wrote about one of most vivid pieces of work in the FCO, my paper about MTS and Non-MTS back from 1984 in Belgrade. Here’s the link. The idea was […]
David Cameron made a businesslike case in the Observer today for his Big Society initiative: The first objection is that it is too vague. I reject that. True, it doesn’t follow some grand plan or central design. But that’s because the whole approach of building a bigger, stronger, more active […]
Trite (and tritely wrong) comparisons are being drawn between what is happening in different Arab countries and the collpase of European communism. My thoughts: Egypt‘s Berlin Wall Moment? Back in 1990/91 first the Warsaw Pact then the Soviet Union keeled over and died. In the arc of decadent national socialist […]
Attentive readers recall that a year ago I joined a group of former British Ambassadors in setting up ADRg Ambassadors, a new panel selling professional diplomatic consulting, training and mediation skills to support ‘corporate diplomacy’. Here is what I wrote at the time. Since then we have been busy ‘building the brand’ to […]
I remember a senior American diplomat arriving at the FCO in 1992 and describing just how busy he was helping get US food aid to a Russia left reeling after the abrupt collapse of communism. We genteel Brits were startled when he described himself as ‘drinkin’ from a pressure-hose’. The imagery! Still, […]
Egypt faces more or less spontaneous mass unrest aimed at toppling President Mubarak, who has been in power too long for anyone’s good. Great swathes of Egypt’s Internet access has been shut down. James Cowie is following: This is a completely different situation from the modest Internet manipulation that took place in […]
Is delivered to Glenn Reynolds by Michael Yon, who knows a thing or two about military work at the sharp-end: What I can say is that it sounds like the US Marines are waging death and destruction on the Taliban in a way the Taliban are not used to. Average […]
Unsated by Steampunk Palin, you want more buxom feisty American women transforming the world against evil men? Swing by this Guardian analysis by Madeleine Bunting of Hillary Clinton’s feminist foreign policy: On countless occasions since arriving at the state department, Clinton has asserted that the rights of women and girls are now […]
