The latest developments on the Torture issue – the speech by MI5 chief Jonathan Evans and then the High Court decision in favour of release of secret US material concerning Binyam Mohamed – are (in their different ways) further important steps towards clarifying how if at all we deal with […]
I previously linked to analysis of Russia’s startlingly bad health statistics. Last night I was down at Eton College addressing the school’s busy Slavonic Society on the Psychology of Bigness, with special reference to Russia. I used one graph from this piece to show just how grim Russia’s situation is from a […]
I have been mulling over the EU-sponsored Report on the Georgia/Russia conflict which, being a very European document, spreads blame around with great punctilitude. An interesting yarn. This remarkable passage caught my eye: … international law does not recognise a right to unilaterally create a new state based on the […]
More on that self-proclaimed independent EU-sponsored Report on the 2008 Georgia conflict. Points of interest from it, as they come: The Mission had no access to intelligence reports: a serious setback, I’d say. Not least since the whole business was launched because of what Georgia + Washington ‘really’ thought Moscow […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Polish Government has showed its displeasure at the US missile defence decision by playing the protocol card: Prime Minister Tusk refused to take a telephone-call from Hillary Clinton, steering her to talk to her opposite number (ie Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski). Tusk eventually talked to President Obama after […]
