Mugabe is worse than the white supremacist leader, Ian Smith, who he overthrew. He has murdered more black Africans than the apartheid villains Hendrik Verwoerd, John Forster and P W Botha. Reading this I come away with a clear view that Peter Tatchell disapproves of Presidents Mugabe and Mbeki. Is […]
The British Government’s approach on the BAE/Saudi corruption problem (see below) in a deeper way is all about how a country pursues its interests. Part of getting what you want is projecting a sense of Power and Purpose, so that when a negotiation starts others feel cowed by your self-confidence. You establish up-front […]
A good question. In fact really the only question in foreign affairs is this one: Does Bad Behaviour have Bad Consequences? Now we have one answer in the awesome ruling in the High Court yesterday that HM Government had been wrong in law in blocking corruption investigations under official pressure from […]
An article today in the unhappy New York Times purports to describe the Republican Party’s "fractious" divisions around John McCain’s foreign policy ideas. Pragmatists are locked in fierce battle with Neoconservatives, among them the "prominent neoconservative" Robert Kagan. Aaargh. This clumsy piece maybe explains why those NYT share prices have been […]
Anatole Kaletsky today gives us a lesson in how to be intimidated. His article describing why Russia is justified in opposing NATO enlargement is everything an Op-Ed should be: urbane, perceptive, even a dash or two of wisdom. It also is Wrong, or at least Unbalanced. He depicts NATO as […]
Now this is a real Balkanic Eruption. We British used to take fierce criticism in the Bosniac media for our part in the international policy equivocations of the early 1990s which helped allow so much death and destruction across Bosnia. Yet whenever President Izetbegovic tried to make this point in our private […]
As I was saying, the 2005 British Presidency decided to help the EU emerge from the French/Dutch referenda debacles by pushing for a new EU Budget. Like everything which is amazingly complicated, this is in fact quite simple. All sides agreed that a bigger EU following the 2004 enlargement meant a […]
I have been reading General Rupert Smith’s much praised book The Utility of Force and mulling over the review by former colleague Oliver Miles of Jonathan Steele’s book Defeat about the ‘doomed occupation of Iraq’. Doomed? Hmm. Maybe it depends how you do it..?
I have been busy helping teach young diplomats some of the Darker Arts of diplomacy. Part of the course involved us all filling in a personality profile questionnaire, which purported to show what sort of person we were and how we might respond to problems in terms of the four categories above. My […]
How to make sense of the Kosovo/Kosova independence issue? Kosovo is diplomacy’s elephant’s graveyard, a bleak place where our best hopes and strategies and principles forlornly creep away to die. There is nothing uniquely special or principled or even self-evidently fair about the Kosovo Albanian majority’s demand that […]
