Diplomacy

Tuesday

Daniel Korski

What were the SAS doing in the eastern desert?

When the official files are opened in 30 years time, we will see what series of decisions led the government to send a helicopter-born SAS team into eastern Libya when they could have sailed in on HMS Cumberland, disguised themselves as reporters or rung up Mustafa Abdel Jalil, Libya’s ex-justice minister who is said to head the “Transitional Government”. But it is easy to see how it happened. The perfectly sensible idea of sending a British emissary to Benghazi to make contacts must have clashed with bureaucratic protocol and the FCO’s duty of care arrangements. “What?” You can just imagine the officials exclaiming to the ministers. “You intend to send

Monday

Peter Hoskin

The politics of Prince Andrew

Uh-oh, the Prime Minster has “full confidence” in Prince Andrew as a UK trade envoy – the sort of endorsement that often means the direct opposite. In this case, though, I suspect that the line is more a hasty attempt to defuse some of the tension that has been building on this matter over the past few days. Only this morning, a Downing Street source told the Beeb that the Prince could be ejected from the role should any more revelations surface. Another suggested that “there won’t be many tears shed if he resigns.” And then there’s the senior Tory putting it about that “there appears to be no discernible

Saturday

Daniel Korski

A post-Tunisian Foreign Office

The Foreign Office has come in for a lot of criticism lately, following delays in getting Britons out Libya. Some argue that it is all William Hague’s fault. Others that the department is unfit for purpose. Both of these views seem a bit unfair. The FCO managed to help Britons in Tunisia and Egypt, and only came up short when the company they had used failed to take off for Libya. True, there should have been a better contract in place – which would give the FCO alternatives – but that hardly translates into systemic failure. True, ministerial divisions between Jeremy Browne, in charge of consular affairs, and Alistair Burt,

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

Corporatism is not an adequate foreign policy

The events of the last two weeks have demonstrated that David Cameron needs a revamped foreign policy. This is not, in itself, a surprise. Foreign policies sketched out in opposition seldom survive contact with reality. Remember Bush saying he did “not do nation-building”? And who can forget the ignominious fate of Robin Cook’s “ethical foreign policy”? David Cameron sought to distinguish himself from the adventuring, idealistic Blair with what he regarded as a ‘pragmatic’ foreign policy – that is, promoting British exporters.   But as I say in my News of the World column (£) today, this rebounded spectacularly last week when his tour of the Arab world was overshadowed

Monday

James Forsyth

Is David Cameron about to have one of his Garibaldi moments?

To date, this government has not had much of a foreign policy. Where there should have been grand strategy there has been trade promotion. But this appears to be changing. It is certainly striking that Cameron is the first western leader to visit post-Mubarak Egypt. Cameron himself is, normally, at the realist end of the foreign policy spectrum. But, as one close friend observes, one of the most important things to grasp in understanding the Prime Minister is that Garibaldi is one of his great heroes. As Cameron told Charles Moore, he admires Garibaldi’s ‘romantic nationalism‘. It is not difficult to imagine the Cameron who loves Garibaldi—a man who planned

Sunday

Daniel Korski

The Bahraini challenge

The debacle in Bahrain cuts close to the British bone. The Ministry of Defence has helped train at least 100 Bahraini officers and supplied a range of equipment to the Gulf state. Egypt was important because of its regional role and ties to the United States. But there was no link to London, anymore than there was one to Paris or Berlin. Bahrain is different. Only a few months ago, British officials were applauding the Khalifa dynasty for taking steps towards democracy. But the fact is simple: the steps were insufficient – not by British standards, but by Bahraini ones. It should serve as a wake-up call to the Foreign

Friday

James Forsyth

Eastern promises | 18 February 2011

Events in Bahrain are yet another reminder of why the supposed choice between stability and democracy is a false one. The idea that in the medium to long term backing a Sunni monarchy in a Shiite majority country is a recipe for stability is absurd. If this was not enough, by backing the minority monarchy the West is ensuring that, for obvious reasons, the opposition to it will become radicalised and anti-Western. The West is where it is. It, sadly, cannot start again from scratch in the Middle East. But it cannot allow itself to continue being the allies of those who brutally repress the aspirations of their own peoples

Daniel Korski

Pillars of Sand

The Middle East is set for renewed displays of public anger towards the region’s governments. Events in Bahrain are particularly worrying. Troops took control of the capital, killing at least four protesters in the worst violence in the Gulf kingdom in decades. The trouble in Bahrain, which houses the U.S. Navy’s 5th fleet and is home to a large U.S. military base, illustrates a point Ben Judah and I make in a new article: that the three pillars of US post-World War II power in the Middle East – commercial ties, military bases and client states – are crumbling: “A new Middle East is taking shape, buffeted by Pacific trade

Tuesday

Daniel Korski

Coffee House interview: Mark Sedwill

Diplomats are often seen as stuffy characters from a different century, men who often appear lost in today’s chaotic world. Nobody could be further from that caricature than Mark Sedwill, the former British ambassador in Kabul and outgoing NATO Senior Civilian Representative to Afghanistan. For more than a year, Sedwill has been, first, General Stanley McChrystal’s right-hand and, more recently, the civilian counterpart to General David Petraeus. Since he took up his ambassadorial post in Kabul, after a stint as Deputy High Commissioner in Pakistan, few Britons have had as much influence on NATO’s strategy as him. And there are now rumours that, having impressed several Tory ministers, Sedwill could

Tuesday

Daniel Korski

Hague joins Middle East protests…well, as good as

Foreign Secretary William Hague has arrived in Tunisia in order to support to the pro-democracy movement. Unlike his previous visit to Syria, which I think was poorly timed, this one is perfectly-timed. It could even end up looking like George Bush Snr’s visit to Poland in July 1989 when the US president publicly backed the revolutions sweeping across the European continent at the time and gave succour to the pro-democracy movements. Visits like this are so important to help the direction of travel. What people forget now is that in the Eastern Europe of 1989, the history of democracy was as limited as it is today in the Middle East.

Thursday

Carole Stone

Much more than a networking event

What’s the point of Davos? This is a question seldom addressed in the reports filed from the five-day “World Economic Forum” which ended on Sunday. Many speeches are made, many issues debated, but it is not a place where decisions are taken. It is not a G20. Manifestos are not launched there. It exists to serve a very particular function: every year for a short period of time it becomes the temporary capital of the globalised world. Top business and political leaders, distinguished academics and journalists – all committed to improving the state of the world – flock there to meet each other, swap ideas and then go home. This

Saturday

Daniel Korski

Hague hasn’t lost his mojo

There has been no shortage of depressing news for the Tories lately. But, the other day, Benedict Brogan wrote a lengthy post about William Hague that must have made particularly unpleasant in-flight reading for the Foreign Secretary as he jetted around the South Pacific. It argued that: “In his absence – and even when he is back in Britain – Mr Hague is the subject of a whispering campaign among his colleagues, who say that the spark of ambition has died in his heart, and with it his effectiveness as the front man for the nation’s diplomatic effort. The Foreign Office has got its mojo back, just when Mr Hague

Sunday

Daniel Korski

South Sudan set for difficult independence

Today, voters in the southern part of Sudan head to the polls in a referendum which will determine whether they should form their own state or remain part of Sudan, Africa’s largest country. Secession – the most likely outcome of the referendum, and called for in the 2005 peace agreement that ended 21 years of civil war between the country’s north and south – would mean that the government in Khartoum could lose not only territory, but also over 80 percent of the revenues it receives from oil exportation, as most of the oil is located in the would-be state of South Sudan. As a result, many fear that bloodshed

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Richard Holbrooke: Last of the Big Beasts?

In a sense, Richard Holbrooke is one of the few American foreign policy hands of recent years whom one can mention in the same league as the Big Beasts that prowled through the Cold War and the Vietnam disaster (Holbrooke was there too: he wrote one volume of the Pentagon Papers). His death – as Brother Korski says – is a great loss for American diplomacy and the Afghan effort. Holbrooke’s last words (as reported by his family) were “You’ve got to stop this war in Afghanistan” have occasioned much comment. Blake Hounshell, for instance, considers Holbrooke’s views on Afghanistan and asks if, latterly, Dick Holbrooke had discovered a dovish

Daniel Korski

Holbrooke’s war ends

He was known as brash and abrasive. A gale force wind. The “bulldozer” some called him based on his time bullying Slobodan Milosevic during the Dayton negotiations to end the Bosnian War in the 1990s. However, veteran US diplomat Richard Holbrooke, who died last night, had a far greater register. When he visited London before assuming his latest post, as President Obama’s AfPak envoy, he surprised the US embassy staff by travelling alone, with no bag-carrying entourage, and exhibiting none of the airs he was expected to have. His first experience of the Balkans was not as the all-mighty diplomatic trouble-shooter, but as a normal citizen eager to highlight the

Monday

Daniel Korski

Will the US become more isolationist in the years to come?

Isolationist sentiment seems to be on the rise in the United States. At an annual foreign policy event in Halifax in Canada, US Senator Lindsay Graham warned about the risk of an “unholy alliance” developing between the far left and far right that calls for greater US retrenchment from the world – and, potentially, a new era of isolationism. Or neo-isolationism. Such an inward focus is likely sound meet with the approval of an increasingly domestically-occupied public. Last year, 49 percent of Americans told Pew Research that they believed the US should “mind its own business” and let other nations get along on their own.  That was up from 30

Saturday

The Spectator

Leader: Less heat, more light

We have heard surprisingly little about the climate change jamboree currently underway in Cancun. Before last year’s Copenhagen summit, there was much hullaballoo. Gordon Brown told us that we had ‘fewer than 50 days to set the course of the next 50 years’. Yet he and 100 of his political counterparts could not stop the conference from collapsing under the weight of its contradictions. This year, only two dozen world leaders are likely to make the carbon-consuming trek to the Mexican coast. David Cameron, to his credit, will not be one of them. He will not miss much. One paper prepared for the Cancun summit, by Prof Kevin Anderson of

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

China’s spy network

We are at war online – and we are losing Almost exactly two years ago, an American army officer found a memory stick in a car park in the Middle East and, out of curiosity, inserted it into his military laptop. It seemed to be empty, but there are a million ways of disguising a Trojan computer virus. Instantly, a malicious software code uploaded onto the US Central Command military computer network and embedded itself in the system. And there it lay undetected for weeks, able to send back all manner of classified information. In the words of the deputy US defence secretary, William J. Lynn III, it was ‘poised

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Of course diplomats are frank in private – but not, I fear, for much longer

It can be a diplomat’s duty to be undiplomatic. It can be a diplomat’s duty to be undiplomatic. When asked for a candid assessment by senior colleagues or by his political masters, the murmured ambiguity and the Ferrero Rocher are for the birds. Diplomacy is for dealing publicly with the other side, not privately with your own. Within weeks of joining the Foreign Office as a young man, I learned that senior diplomats are routinely breathtakingly candid with each other in their confidential assessments of people, nations and situations. We should expect no less of them. Senior diplomats — American no less than British — express themselves undiplomatically when they

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

Pakistan’s double game comes under the spotlight once again

The leak that keeps on leaking has one or two embarrassing titbits about our domestic policymakers this morning. Yet far more noteworthy are the documents on Pakistan. While they don’t tell us too much that is surprising – being mostly about the duplicitous game that country is playing with the West – they do highlight some potentially worrying trends. Chief among them is the growing influence of General Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani, the head of Pakistan’s army. His name is littered generously throughout the US briefings, and it is often connected with dangerous conspiracy and double-dealing. One document, for instance, suggests that Kiyani was prepared to overthrow the Pakistani President, Asif