This rather overexcited piece on the attack on the US Embassy in Belgrade is catching some attention. The author is one Stephen Schwartz, former Trotskyist-style Leftist who has undergone a metamorphosis into a sui generis new category of moderate US Muslim neocon. Nice niche marketing. One thing about Trotskyists (and it seems former […]
My former colleague from my South Africa days Roy Reeve is now leading a vast mission to export EU police and justice systems to Kosovo. This startlingly expensive exercise aimed at a fast-forward modernizing of Kosovo in a way a goose is forcibly fattened to produce foie gras will quickly come up against […]
How to assess the life and works of Fidel Castro? CNN has the line. Castro was a not too bad fellow who did good things for ‘social reform’ in Cuba and who was praised in some circles for standing up to the United States. Oh, and he was criticized for […]
I have been busy helping teach young diplomats some of the Darker Arts of diplomacy. Part of the course involved us all filling in a personality profile questionnaire, which purported to show what sort of person we were and how we might respond to problems in terms of the four categories above. My […]
The fine diplomatic art of briefing journalists badly. Or "How to be Clever – but not Wise".
This is a short sharp analysis of seemingly plummeting prospects of Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party race in the US Presidential elections. What will the markets say if she somehow recovers?
When I was Ambassador in Warsaw people often would ask me, "how many Poles are now in the UK?" Interesting question. Who is a Pole? And what does "in the UK" mean? Crudely speaking there are different categories of Poles now living in the UK. Thus: a small number of […]
Back in the early 1980s as a junior Second Sec Pol/Info at the Embassy in Belgrade I now and then would accompany the then Ambassador Edwin Bolland on his regional visits round the country. Edwin Bolland (later Sir Edwin) was a fascinating if complex senior colleague. On these long tours […]
How to make sense of the Kosovo/Kosova independence issue? Kosovo is diplomacy’s elephant’s graveyard, a bleak place where our best hopes and strategies and principles forlornly creep away to die. There is nothing uniquely special or principled or even self-evidently fair about the Kosovo Albanian majority’s demand that […]
On the subject of good drafting, this says everything that needs to be said about the Archbishop of Canterbury and today’s Chattering Classes. What a truly fine piece of work.
