An exhausting week of historic top-level Summiting in the USA. We had President Obama’s historic speech to the UN General Assembly, followed by assorted other speeches of varying distinction. We had an historic UN Security Council vote on nuclear weapons: . Then a probably historic G20 Summit in Pittsburgh, complete with […]
Former President Zelaya has made it back into Honduras and is basing himself at the Embassy of Brazil. Since there is no obvious prospect of his being restored to power by lawful or normal political means, he evidently plans to try a popular power push of some sort. Which, one […]
Wrinkled Weasel asks: My line of late has tended towards the very position you are critical of – the concerns of Russians about "encirclement" Can you explain to me why the USA, which has far more form when it comes to "encirclement" than Russia has had in the last 50 […]
A reader writes: I have been hoping for your comment on the recent move by EULEX concerning the border between Kosovo and Serbia which seems to have equally upset both sides. I think he means this: The EU rule-of-law mission in Kosovo and Serbia have signed the policing protocol, despite strong opposition from […]
Chekov at Three Thousand Versts generously takes up my posting on the psychology of Russia’s foreign policy, and responds: In addition, we can agree that insensitivity to Russia’s concerns, from Nato and other western structures, caused Russian disillusionment which effects ‘cooperation’ to this day. Nato’s support for Albanian separatists in […]
Some good comments from readers on my (too) long piece about the US Missile Defence decision. Two take a different view, arguing that Putin’s Russian government is not motivated by crude nationalism, and that if one stacks up various decisions taken in recent years by the USA/West it is not […]
Last year I wrote some pieces about How to Negotiate. These and other pieces with an implicit or explicit Negotiation theme are linked here. Such as this one: It does not follow that being bloody-minded or even threatening force actually works. So much depends on context, the objective balance of […]
President Obama has cancelled a plan to build US anti-missile defence radar facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic. This move has been hailed by Russia’s President Medvedev as a "wise decision". Which, of course, prompts the ignoble thought that if the Russians like it so much, something must be […]
Here (h/t Skeptical Bureaucrat) is an interesting report about apparent self-censorship among US diplomats going back some years: One diplomat told The Washington Times that he has decided to resign in part because of frustration with "rampant self-censorship" by Foreign Service officers and their superiors that has gone so far […]
Florence Hartmann, former ICTY spokesperson, has been fined for leaking ICTY documents improperly. It looks as if the Serbian authorities in Belgrade handed over the documents to ICTY on condition that they were used only for the war crimes trial of Slobodan Milosevic, and not passed on to the International […]
