Question. You somehow stumble on Batman’s secret identity. You conclude that you’d like to profit from this situation. How best to get a good result for yourself? How might this work from the point of view of negotiation technique? Here is one approach. It does not end well. The text of […]
South Africa has a mighty tradition of Defying Reality. Some might say that that was what apartheid was all about: its pernickety, cruel, insane attempt to draft laws defining useless racial distinctions, then building a whole society around those distinctions. But before that came the startling Xhosa Cattle Killings in 1856-57, […]
The parable of the chicken and the pig: Question In a bacon-and-egg breakfast, what’s the difference between the Chicken and the Pig? Answer The Chicken is involved. The Pig is committed. Thus Syria. The West in general and Europe in particular is somewhere between ‘implicated’ and ‘involved’, if only by being […]
Former UK ambassador Craig Murray too has a sharp new website look. He goes from strength to strength despite some sad family news, and credit is definitely due: We seem to be hitting peak Craig Murray. Before the hiatus of the last month or so, 40,000 people were regularly reading […]
I volunteer to give a talk at Crawf Minima’s school on International Organisations and suchlike. Which takes us towards a familiar theme here: Integration v Disintegration – what happens when international borders melt? It turns out that European borders have melted and re-formed and then re-melted and re-formed quite a […]
DIPLOMAT magazine has a snappy new website, and as if by magic my latest piece makes the front page. It looks at diplomacy in the Age of Big Data: Back then, industrial scale betrayal took commitment and discipline, lasting for years. The betrayer needed to take some interest in individual […]
One of the things I urge wannabe speechwriters to consider is this: what is the ‘official’ version of any serious speech? It turns out that this is not so easy to answer as you might think. The classic answer is ‘the version on the website – that’s what they want […]
Watch Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn refuse to say whether he would abide by one of the UK’s (and one the world’s) key treaty relationships, namely the North Atlantic Treaty that created NATO: The generally understood key idea of the North Atlantic Treaty is that ‘an attack on one is an […]
The UK’s Labour leadership between Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith contest threw up this interesting exchange. Should involve anyone from so-called Islamic State be involved in Middle East peace negotiations? Yes? Or no? A classic ‘closed question’ that leaves almost no room for waffling. Or so you might think. But look carefully […]
Remember the magnificent ambassador scene from 300. Superb on so many instructive levels simultaneously: First, it’s a masterclass in bad diplomatic negotiation technique by the arrogant ambassador of King Xerxes, who makes scarcely veiled threats in demanding just a small ‘token of submission’ instead of patiently exploring King Leonidas’ interests and […]
