Here is an astonishing mistake by President Obama – he today signed the Westminster Abbey guest-book using the wrong year. This is much more embarrassing than ex-President Clinton getting his Balkan Ms in a twist earlier this week. Thank goodness these fine leaders are not G W Bush, otherwise we’d all […]
My recent piece about the Amazing Vanishing Referendm in Republika Srpska was picked up by RFE/RL (in Serbian/Bosnian) and so got a rather wider Balkan readership than it otherwise might have done. Any normal person reading it might have thought that it (albeit in perhaps a sardonic and annoying way) […]
What with nearly conking out and all last week, I have not been able to post comments from readers as quickly as I usually do. Now back to what purports to be normal. Apologies to anyone whose thoughts were not shared with the world as promptly as might have been […]
Sorry to have been quiet, folks. Last week late on Tuesday night I found myself having a sprain-like pain in my shoulder, which then spread and spread to the point where it was clear even to a crusty old doctor-avoider like myself that something was Not Right. So we called […]
A powerful article by Yale law professor Jeb Rubenfeld spelling out for the purely foolish the legal issues (such as they are) surrounding the death of Osama Bin Laden. See especially this: The opportunity to surrender is a cherished, civilized and valuable part of warfare. But accepting an enemy’s white flag in […]
Poland’s Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski last week bcame the first Western Foreign Minister to visit Benghazi and meet the anti-Gaddafi leadership. Here at Project Syndicate are some of his conclusions: Peoples in transition from authoritarian rule – peaceful in Poland in 1989, bloody in Libya today – grapple with decisions […]
My latest piece over at DIPLOMAT magazine looks at the policy and practice of ‘international interventions’ (or not): ‘The more precisely the position [of an electron] is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known, and conversely’. This, as all clever Diplomat readers will know, is the classic formulation by […]
A colleague of mine from old FCO days has a droll self-immolatory story about Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the IMF who now faces serious criminal charges in New York. Years ago there was a tradition in the FCO that an Embassy would send short reports back to London if […]
Horror! On the day this year’s FA Cup Final took place, other football matches were played. According to Iain Dale, this was a "great shame", nay "appalling". Really?
Over at Salon24, the leading Polish group blog, are my thoughts on how relations between Poland and the USA (and UK) have evolved down the ages – scroll down for the original version in English. Thus: The point? Simply that things come and go over years and decades and centuries. […]
