Blair: Obama will face a hard power moment in the Middle East at some point

Tony Blair is back in the news with the whole debate over the Iraq inquiry so I was intrigued to watch this interview of Blair by Graydon Carter, the notoriously anti-war, anti-Bush editor of Vanity Fair. It took place on Tuesday and what is striking about it is just how much more comfortable in his own skin than Brown, Blair is. Historians will puzzle over why the Labour party was so keen to jettison this triple election-winner and replace him with Brown. (Oddly, when Blair is asked what the best moment he spent with Brown was,...

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US intelligence rivalry flares over British connection 

The CIA station in London is at the center of a bitter fight between different branches of the US intelligence community in Washington DC.

For years, the CIA has had the right to appoint the station chief who runs US intelligence operations in London and liaises with MI6 and GCHQ. Now, the National Security Agency is arguing that they and not the CIA should run intelligence operations in the UK because they have more people on the ground and the work they do has far greater value to both countries.

NSA have found useful...

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Obama misses the problems behind the problems

Obama’s speech to the ‘Muslim world’ in Egypt was full of necessary fictions. But more substantively it set out what Obama sees as seven areas where progress must be made if tensions are to be eased: the fight against violent extremism, Israel / Palestine, Iran’s nuclear ambition, democracy, religious freedom, womens’ rights and economic development.

Missing from the speech was a clear appreciation that violent extremism comes out of an extremist ideology. Violent extremism cannot be defeated until the ideology that lies behind it is tackled. It was also, to my mind, a...

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Rules of war for cyberspace

The Obama administration is planning to rewrite the rulebook for warfare establishing new laws for war in cyberspace including a series of international agreements that will spell out just what actions are permissible and what will be considered an act of war. For the first time, countries like China, which launch millions of attacks every day will face the prospect of retaliatory action, including the use of a new arsenal of cyber weapons.

As this blog predicted, President Obama announced last week a series of major new initiatives designed to secure cyberspace from attack....

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Obama shouldn't let his speech to the 'Muslim world' be as much of a missed opportunity as his speech to Europe was

Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo next month is being hyped as a major part of his administration’s outreach to the ‘Muslim world’. One can only hope that it is a better, more realistic speech than the one Obama gave in Berlin last July setting out how trans-Atlantic relations could be improved. In that speech, Obama missed a huge opportunity to tell the Europeans that even he—a candidate who was favoured by European elites and publics by huge margins—thought they were shirking their responsibilities in Afghanistan. He should have made clear that America listening more would...

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