Usa

Tuesday

Daniel Korski

The G-men or the Granola Army

In the last stretch of political campaigns, things tend to get ugly as the real cost of winning and losing becomes clear. This one is no different, with its suggestions of tactical voting and disagreements about tactical weapons. The latter has become particularly viscious with a former spymaster, an ex-general and a former CT chief calling into question the securty and defence policies Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats. In their defence, the Lib Dems have positioned their biggest weapon, Paddy Ashdown, who fired a volley against Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, saying that “things had changed since he supplied intelligence to Tony Blair about Iraq and WMD”.

Saturday

Michael Burleigh

The map turns red

Norman Stone forsook the chair of modern history at Oxford university for Ankara after realising that the ‘conversation at high tables would generally have made the exchanges in the bus- stop in the rain outside seem exhilarating’. Norman Stone forsook the chair of modern history at Oxford university for Ankara after realising that the ‘conversation at high tables would generally have made the exchanges in the bus- stop in the rain outside seem exhilarating’. Dur- ing an earlier incarnation at Cambridge, Stone taught a galaxy of historians. His protégés include David Blackbourn, Harald James and Richard Overy, followed by Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts, all bar two now working at

Saturday

Alan Judd

Serving God and Mammon

People have written books about America long before the United States declared itself, and we may be forgiven for asking if we really need another. Doesn’t America already loom large enough in our world; hasn’t it all been said before? Well, yes and no. There’s a sense in which we’re all Americans now because that country is ourselves writ large or — as America might see it — set free. And although much of what is said here may have been said before, it’s rarely been said as concisely and well. Nor have the paradoxes that divide, and unite, that great country been so carefully and sympathetically delineated. Tristram Riley-Smith

Saturday

Ferdinand Mount

Refusing to play the game

What sort of person would you expect to be bringing out a life of J. D. Salinger two months after his death, bearing in mind that Salinger was more obsessive about his privacy than any other writer in human history and fought the publication of the last biography all the way to the US Supreme Court? You might not expect the answer to be Kenneth Slawenski. Who, you may ask, is he? Well, he is a pretty private person too. I pummelled the web and the only meagre intelligence I could extract is that he was born and raised in New Jersey and has worked in computers. This may be

Saturday

David Sexton

The whirlwind and the saint

Dave Eggers is the very model of the engaged writer. Since publishing his first book, the memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, he has branched out into all kinds of philanthropic literary activity. His organisation, McSweeney’s, has become a major imprint, championing emerging writers. In San Francisco, he has set up a community writing project, called 826 Valencia, which now has branches in six other cities. In 2004, he created Voice of Witness, ‘a series of books that use oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world’. In one project, people talked about their experiences in Hurricane Katrina and that was where he first read the story

James Mather

Annals of war

‘I was not an enthusiast about getting US forces and going into Iraq,’ Dick Cheney said in 1997, looking back on the First Gulf War. ‘I was not an enthusiast about getting US forces and going into Iraq,’ Dick Cheney said in 1997, looking back on the First Gulf War. ‘I felt there was a real danger that you would get bogged down in a long drawn-out conflict, that this was a dangerous, difficult part of the world.’ How, half a decade later, was that prescience brushed aside by governments on both sides of the Atlantic in the rush for regime change? The Chilcot Inquiry, whose committee of the great

Monday

Daniel Korski

Yanukovych – Ukraine’s Nixon?

It is easy to paint Ukraine’s new leader, Viktor Yanukovych, as a pantomime monster, Russian stooge and businessman’s puppet. Last month I suggested his electoral victory over namesake Victor Yushchenko may not be as bad as people think. Now Andrew Wilson, Britain’s foremost Ukraine expert, argues the same. In a briefing paper, he notes that elections in Ukraine open up new opportunities for the EU: ‘Paradoxically, Yanukovych’s quest for good relations with Russia could also make it easier for EU member states to reach a consensus about how to deal with Ukraine. Too often in the past, the EU has been unable to develop a coherent policy on Ukraine because

Saturday

Daniel Korski

Germany, where art thou?

It is more than 100 days since Guido Westerwelle became Germany’s foreign minister and the questions about Germany’s diplomatic introspection remain. They may have even grown and are becoming problematic for Berlin’s allies.   Chancellor Schröder appeared to follow a Sonderweg, a philosophy that saw Berlin move away from old notions of peacemaking and away from old alliances, such as that with the United States. At times, he seemed to want a new axis between Paris, Berlin, and Moscow, making Germany a go-between between East and West, a kind of post-modern Tito. Angela Merkel’s first term addressed the worst excesses of the Schröder years, but the vagaries of coalition government

Thursday

Daniel Korski

Hague’s modern Realism

In a splurge of activity, William Hague gave both an interview to the FT and another foreign policy speech at RUSI outlining the views of a Conservative government. It was time for an update on Tory thinking, not least because David Cameron’s description of his policy as “liberal conservatism” and his unwillingness to march into a “massive euro bust-up” has had little effect. That is because a struggle over how to engage with the world continues to run beneath the party leader’s message of party unity. Four main schools of diplomatic thought exist in the party: the modern Realists, the Neo-Conservatives, the anti-Europeans (not the same as the Euroskeptics, which

Tuesday

Daniel Korski

NATO – with or without the US?

Over on Foreign Policy magazine, Andrew J Bacevich and I are going at each other. Topic: the nature of the transatlantic relationship. In the slipstream of US Defence Secretary Robert Gates’ lament about Europeans’ pacifist leanings, Professor Bacevich wrote a delightfully provocative piece arguing the US should leave NATO: “If NATO has a future, it will find that future back where the alliance began: in Europe. NATO’s founding mission of guaranteeing the security of European democracies has lost none of its relevance. Although the Soviet threat has vanished, Russia remains. And Russia, even if no longer a military superpower, does not exactly qualify as a status quo country. The Kremlin

Monday

Daniel Korski

Wanted: The Hague Doctrine

Out of the conference hall, and back on to the campaign trail, it would nice to see the Tories talking about the things which make them ready for government.  In particular, William Hague should make a foreign policy speech setting out what ideas he has, and which would merit him being referred to as the likely “greatest foreign secretary in a generation” by David Cameron. Hague’s past foreign policy speeches have been solid, but unspectacular. He ticks off the likely issues, talks about global trends and looks knowledgeable about the crises that could emerge. But there is no overaching concept, such David Miliband’s idea of Britain as a “global hub”.

Saturday

Stephen Bates

A narrow escape

For once, I felt sorry for Bill Clinton. It was January 1998, and the press reported that the President had had an intimate relationship with one Monica Lewinsky. In Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s office, where I worked, we had evidence that Clinton had sought to hide his dalliance through perjury and obstruction of justice. But that didn’t matter anymore. No president could survive the public revelation of sex (however defined) with a White House intern. Clinton was about to be driven from office over fellatio rather than felonies. I started thinking about a conciliatory statement Starr might release when the President resigned. Our judgment, as Ken Gormley observes in

Byron Rogers

Method in his madness

The car manufacturer Henry Ford dominates this remarkable book, managing, like Falstaff, to be its tragic hero, villain, and comic relief all at the same time. A gaunt, pacing figure, he conducted interviews while standing, believed in the values of small Main Street America (though his methods of industrial mass production destroyed these), and in pacifism, fitting out a ship to sail to Europe in an attempt to stop the Great War (though later he made billions out of armaments, and had machine-guns mounted on his factories while his paid thugs shot down hunger-marchers). He believed in many things, in the soy bean, wholemeal bread and unpolished rice; he hated

Thursday

David Blackburn

How British: a tea party

Don’t you think that ‘The Ship Money Movement’ is a more appropriate name for a British anti-tax forum? You know, given the connotations of ‘Tea Party’ in these climes? Titles are instructive, and, as James wrote yesterday, the British right has a growing fascination with its American counterpart. Perhaps I’m over doing it, but it seems a testament to the State’s dominance in post-war Britain that the country’s libertarian tradition, extending back through Burke, Bolingbroke, Locke, Milton and to Hampden himself, is no longer the right’s primary inspiration. Putting my slightly absurd ruminations aside, the coming of the Tea Party Movement to Britain is significant. Dan Hannan will address the

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Worse off than you were in 2005

The obsession of British politicians – and political journalists – with American politics is often mocked. But there’s a clarity to American political messages that is often missing in this country. So it is good to see George Osborne borrowing a line from the Reagan playbook, and pointing out that people are now worse off than they were at the last election. The Tories desperately need to shift the focus of the campaign back onto Labour’s failures and this is a start to that process. Osborne is delivering the Mais lecture tonight, one of the prestige dates in the British economic calendar. He’s the first shadow Chancellor to deliver it,

Saturday

Sam Leith

Not ‘a boy-crazed trollop’

For someone who barely left the house, Emily Dickinson didn’t half cause a lot of trouble. For someone who barely left the house, Emily Dickinson didn’t half cause a lot of trouble. Lives Like Loaded Guns — which combines biographical material, critical readings, and an assessment of the history of her reputation — tells a completely hair-raising story. The Dickinsons were one of the first families of respectable Amherst. Emily and her sister Lavinia — ‘Vinnie’ — lived in one house, Homestead, right next door to her brother Austin, the head of the family, and his wife Sue. Susan Dickinson was a highly intelligent and sensitive woman, bosom friend to

David Davis

The great bailout

Hank Paulson’s new book is called On the Brink, but it could well have been entitled Over the Edge. Hank Paulson’s new book is called On the Brink, but it could well have been entitled Over the Edge. The story of his role as US Treasury Secretary throughout the great banking crash of 2008–9 gives an impression of people being swept along by a swirling chaos of unexpected events, often completely out of control. ‘This is the economic equivalent of war,’ Paulson said in the middle of the financial crisis in 2008, scrambling to find a resolution for AIG before the insurance behemoth brought down the entire economy. Warfare is

Thursday

David Blackburn

The White House is bluffing

The Atlantic reports that the White House is considering altering intelligence sharing agreements with Britain in the light of the Binyam Mohamed case. White House spokesman Ben LaBolt briefed: “The United States government made its strongly held views known throughout this process. We appreciate that the UK Government stood by the principle of protecting foreign government intelligence in its court filings. We’re deeply disappointed with the court’s judgment today, because we shared this information in confidence and with certain expectations.” I detect a bluff. Britain and the US share information on an hourly basis, providing an essential understanding in the combined operation against al Qaeda. The US would never compromise

Saturday

Hugh Brogan

Adventure with a difference

Probably my opinion of this bold book is worthless. Peter Carey, having decided to write a novel about Alexis de Tocqueville’s visit to the United States in 1831-2, read, among many other works, my biography of Tocqueville, which was published two years ago in, he says, ‘the nick of time’. He is kind enough to call it ‘delightful’, and has plundered it assiduously. What I myself find delightful is the way in which Carey has picked up the signals. I never expected such a close, intelligent reader, and I’m glad to think my work has been of use to him. But this does not make me a dispassionate reviewer. And

Saturday

Nicholas Haslam

What a difference a gay makes

Edmund White is among the most admired of living authors, his oeuvre consisting of 20-odd books of various forms — novels, stories, essays and biographies — though each one is imbued with his preferred subject, homosexuality. Edmund White is among the most admired of living authors, his oeuvre consisting of 20-odd books of various forms — novels, stories, essays and biographies — though each one is imbued with his preferred subject, homosexuality. Now he is most famous for what could be termed his boy-ographies, a regular series of volumes about his passions, practices, predilections and peccadildos, beginning, in 1975, with The Joy of Gay Sex. Next came States of Desire: