My latest piece for the Telegraph this morning has another look at Syria, and notes with gloomy satisfaction that my thoughts on this subject several years ago have been proven correct: I hate to say that I told you so. But I did. I said it in February 2012: The […]
Let’s look at President Putin’s UN speech, as given by the Kremlin website in English here. For public-speaking fanatics it’s interesting to compare the Kremlin English version with a version as it came through the interpreters – here. He quickly gets into his stride, explaining why the veto power of […]
Here is President Obama’s speech at the UN. Too long and in places even rambling, but it makes a broad cogent case for intelligent realism. On style, the speechwriters as ever strain for over-obvious rhetorical effect and drift into fatuous mixed metaphors. Look at these awful lines: Today, we see […]
Remember my piece at DIPLOMAT late last year? Once a state effectively loses control of some parts of its territory to local violent extremists, how long does it take for the mass of citizens to start to challenge state authority, if only because they fear for the results if the state […]
As Mark Steyn (and others) have noted, the future belongs to those who show up. For the next century or so, those people largely fall into two categories. Africans and Indians. With added Arabs. The UN’s Population Division churns out all sorts of numbers about global demographic trends. They used […]
Russia has decided once again to line itself up with absurd and offensive positions by vetoing the Srebrenica resolution in the UN Security Council. Here is what looks to be the final text. Most of it is the usual rather convoluted language of UN-speak recalling and noting earlier positions. I […]
The 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacres during the Bosnia conflict is prompting renewed interest in what happened and why. To mark the occasion the UK government has tabled a draft UN Security Council resolution on the issue. The current UK Ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Edward Ferguson, explains the […]
Over at Kurir in Serbia a few days they kindly ran an interview with me about current ex-Yugoslav goings-on. Here’s the original (Serbian). And Here’s the full transcript in English as I sent it to them. Note that the opening questions are getting to the assertion that the UK-sponsored UNSC resolution on […]
My latest piece at DIPLOMAT has another gallop round some of the issues surrounding Mass and Velocity in diplomacy: The EU’s common foreign policy is particularly prone to piling on Mass but losing Velocity. Lots of European countries intoning the same policies, but struggling to take decisions to implement any […]
So here I am, whirring away to devise a new one-day module on Diplomatic Crisis Management. Imagine my surprise to see that Buckingham University got there first, with a full module on this very subject: Module outline The nature of Conflicts and Crises Non-Diplomatic Tools of Conflict Resolution: Arbitration; Humanitarian […]
