We had the privilege last week of joining a small private dinner in London in honour of Baroness Thatcher. I took the opportunity to congratulate her on her unswerving insistence on Honest Money. See eg this speech in 1984: Today we have the lowest rate of inflation since the 1960s. […]
David Miliband’s protocol problems in India (the risk or otherwise of annoying senior Indian interlocutors by being too ‘familiar’) raise an interesting operational point. What is the role of the in-country Ambassador in such circumstances? In particular, how far should he/she go to brief the visiting Minister on how to […]
I have not added anything on this important subject, as my earlier posting in December said more or less all I have to say on it. This time the Russians have played hardball, actually letting people all over the place get very cold by turning off gas supplies. The accounting […]
The Turkey/Armenia relationship still grapples with the scale and definition of the huge numbers of killings of Armenians in 1915. A new and bold initiative in Turkey aims at collecting signatures of apology, albeit not using the word ‘genocide’. Meanwhile the Polish media have picked up on work done by […]
Professor Anatol Lieven gets over-excited: A fraction of the trillion and a half dollars now spent on rescuing western economies from the consequences of their elites’ greed and recklessness would have been enough to have greatly reduced African misery, stabilised Pakistan and other Muslim states – or put a human […]
As world leaders grapple with rival ideas for tackling the global financial crisis, keep an aghast eye on what the EU under France is up to in redefining European security. President Sarkozy and President Medvedev have come up with a proposal to hold a major OSCE summit in mid-2009 aimed at […]
Russia, says the Guardian, is opting for a charm offensive to try to see off the deployment of sophisticated US missile defence systems in Poland and Czech Republic. It did not take long for the Obama team to encounter the complexities of Poland and points East: President-elect Obama has spoken […]
The BBC wonders whether a picture of North Korea’s Dear Leader Kim has been faked. Surely the much more pertinent question is, why is he wearing that ridiculous anorak when visiting troops? Are he and Dick Cheney by some chance related? I was at the Auschwitz commemoration in 2005 and […]
Here is a neatly turned speech in Boston by the British Ambassador to the UN, Sir John Sawers, marking UN Day. He recalls how Artur Rubinstein defiantly played the Polish anthem back in 1945 to show his contempt for the exclusion of a democratic Poland at the establishment of the UN. And […]
Far from accepting the defeatist idea of different and inevitably rival ‘spheres of influence’ in Europe, the EU should use its one true serious advantage vis-a-vis Russia, namely far greater wealth and a far better example. Andrew Wilson captures it well: The most effective way of dealing with a newly-assertive […]
