When Bad Leaders finally realise that their hold on power is slipping (as looks to be the case in Zimbabwe), various things happen. The ‘mood’ abruptly changes, from Maybe This Time We Can Bring Him Down to When He Goes… The immediate entourage round the Bad Leader are affected. Some […]
Poor Zimbabwe. According to the BBC it has been ‘plagued’ (origin of said plagues not described) by the world’s highest inflation, as well as acute food and fuel shortages. Newsflash: These phenomena are not caused by ‘plagues’. They are caused both in general and in Zimbabwe’s case in particular by truly stunning and […]
Anatole Kaletsky today gives us a lesson in how to be intimidated. His article describing why Russia is justified in opposing NATO enlargement is everything an Op-Ed should be: urbane, perceptive, even a dash or two of wisdom. It also is Wrong, or at least Unbalanced. He depicts NATO as […]
Mr Mugabe is still there, seemingly ducking and weaving – and haggling? From the point of view of diplomatic technique, this is another awkward Bad Leader moment. When a Bad Leader finally runs out of road, he (it is almost always a he) above all wants to save his own […]
As I was saying, the 2005 British Presidency decided to help the EU emerge from the French/Dutch referenda debacles by pushing for a new EU Budget. Like everything which is amazingly complicated, this is in fact quite simple. All sides agreed that a bigger EU following the 2004 enlargement meant a […]
Now this is a real Balkanic Eruption. We British used to take fierce criticism in the Bosniac media for our part in the international policy equivocations of the early 1990s which helped allow so much death and destruction across Bosnia. Yet whenever President Izetbegovic tried to make this point in our private […]
Perhaps my finest career moment came late on Sunday 24 September 2000. I was in my office at the FCO waiting for the first results to arrive in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia’s elections, where we hoped to see Milosevic fall. My computer showed a first result from a tiny […]
The point of the Internet is that it is the World Wide Web, right? So that in principle everyone can get to see everything? Yes. That works because websites have common computer addresses within the single overall global ICANN system. But what if that stopped being the case, with rival regional Webs jostling […]
Andrew Kenny bluntly wonders where Barack Obama would fit into South Africa’s racial profiling legislation.
This makes depressing but convincing reading. South Africa’s problem is that it is mainly a vast desert. Keeping the water and power systems working across a space that size requires amazing sharp-end engineering technique and sustained policy and operational discipline. And if top-end skills are undervalued or eroded by bungled government policy […]
