International politics

Wednesday

Daniel Korski

This year’s biggest story

This year was so rich in stories – Expensesgate, the election and historic coalition, the Icelandic volcano, General McChrystal’s dismissal, the Pakistani floods, Haiti’s earthquake, Greece’s near-collapse, the Will n’ Kate engagement, Wikileaks, the Chilean miners and so on – that it is hard to pick just one story. Looking back over the year, however, I think two stories stand out – because they may herald a seismic change.  The first is, of course, the establishment of coalition. By now, the novelty of government by cross-party compromise has worn off. But, despite the gossipy complaints of a few Lib Dem ministers, a new kind of politics is being forged. It may not

Friday

Daniel Korski

Obama STARTs anew

Barack Obama has had a great couple of weeks. First DADT was repealed and then START was ratified by the Senate, safeguarding a major Obama foreign policy initiative In truth, both issues are peripheral to voter concerns. To them, the jobless recovery is what matters. New figures show that the unemployment rate in the US has jumped to a seven-month high of 9.8 per cent. Nor did the White House get all it wanted from Congress recently. As the Senate was debating DADT, the House of Representatives killed a provision in a defence bill to transfer detainees from Guantanamo to the US. But in politics having momentum – the Big Mo

Wednesday

Daniel Korski

Grim parallels with Germany for Nick Clegg?

Germany is one of the few countries that Nick Clegg has been able to look to for tips on how to be a successful Liberal party in coalition with a larger Conservative party. In 2006, Guido Westerwelle even took a delegation of Free Democrats to a Lib Dem frontbench meeting. Coffee House once predicted that, if the AV referendum was won, Clegg could one day become Britain’s Hans-Dietrich Genscher, a permanent powerbroker. The parties are of course different in many ways. The Free Democrats are decidedly more pro-market and pro-business than the Liberal Democrats. They also have a lot more experience of government. Before the last election, the Free Democrats

Tuesday

Daniel Korski

DfID’s role put to the test

At a speech to the Royal Defence Academy earlier in the year, Andrew Mitchell outlined the costs of overseas conflict to Britain and offered a number of lessons for the future. The most important, he argued, was the need to help prevent wars before they start, starting with being “better at identifying the potential for conflict.” The Cabinet’s only ex-soldier, Mitchell has seen up close the cost of conflict, burns with anger about the Rwandan genocide and knows that development funds will forever be wasted if people are mired in violent conflict. The thesis he has brought to DfID – that there can be no development in conditions of conflict

Tuesday

Daniel Korski

Rome smoulders

I’m visiting a stylish but tense Rome today, just as the Italian legislature has voted down a non-confidence vote in Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s mogul-cum-leader. “Rome is at war” my taxi driver told me and numerous demonstrations are going on. Ill Cavaliere, as Berlusconi is sometimes known, put in a strong defence of his record in the Senate and managed to coax, cajole and, some claim, bribe enough parliamentarians in the Chamber of Deputies to secure a small victory. He pulled not a Full Monty but a “Full Andreotti”, using every trick and tactic in the book (and some scribbled in the margin too). For now, Berlusconi survives and can resume

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

James Forsyth

Controlling the message

Shane Warne’s statement on his separation from his wife, which makes no mention of his alleged affair with Liz Hurley, is a classic example of how difficult it is for celebrities—or politicians—to both engage online and control a message. The first comment from a Greg Quinn says, ‘thanks shane for sticking it up the poms’. One imagines this was not the tone that Warne was planning to strike. The second is from someone calling himself Denis Angeleri and is a full-on assault on Warne’s character which includes the allegation that Warne pursued this man’s wife. Angeleri writes, ‘It is sad that all the comments are a bi product of people

Daniel Korski

US Middle East initiative takes early holiday

When the Obama administration started its latest Middle East initiative, it was amid great fanfare. I blogged – sceptically — about the optimism exuding from the State Department at the time. Now, however, the US government has given up its push for a freeze in Jewish settlement construction as quietly as possible. As Martin Indyk of the Brookings Institution puts it: “The Middle East peace process just died, but nobody seems to be in mourning. Twenty months of U.S. efforts to freeze Israeli settlement activity to create a conducive environment for negotiations have produced only deadlock.” Keen for the demise of the latest US effort to be seen favourably, Hillary

Saturday

Daniel Korski

Laughing Mohammad Larijani, the Comical Ali of Iran

In the week when the Iranian regime forced Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani to goulishly re-enact the murder of her husband on TV, it is worth reading Newsweek’s interview with Mohammad Javad Larijani, a regime insider. His answers call to mind Comical Ali, whose delusional denials of the US advance in Iraq made everyone realise how detached from reality Saddam Hussein’s regime really was. First on the matter of torture, routinely said by the UN, former prisoners and defectors to be used by Iranian officials: “Torture is forbidden by the Constitution. Any law officer who tortures civilians will meet a very harsh punishment.” Of course, he admits, the Iranian system could “need

Daniel Korski

Time for jaw-jaw

Today I joined number of leading Afghan experts, from Ahmed Rashid to Gilles Dorronsoro, in calling on President Obama to change the American strategy in Afghanistan. Based on our work in and on Afghanistan, we wanted to make a number of points just as the White House begins reviewing its strategy: First, that the cost of the war is now over $120 billion per year for the United States alone. This is unsustainable in the long run. Second, despite these huge costs, the situation on the ground is much worse than a year ago because the Taliban insurgency has made progress across the country. The military campaign is suppressing, locally and temporarily, the symptoms of the

Friday

Daniel Korski

Serbia’s Nobel U-turn

Yesterday, I blogged that Serbia’s decision not to attend the Nobel Prize ceremony because of Chinese pressure was a shameful stance for the Balkan would-be EU member to take. Many others felt the same. Now, feeling the international pressure, it seems that Serbia’s government has decided that the country’s Ombudsman, Sasa Jankovic, will attend the event as special representative of Prime Minister Mirko Cvetkovic. A good outcome, and a sensible decision, which will hopefully be followed by a reprimand to Serbia’s calculating Foreign Minister, Vuk Jeremić, who originally decided that Serbia would not attend the ceremony.

Thursday

Daniel Korski

China’s new BFF: Serbia

China is doing what it can do to scupper the forthcoming Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo. Their Foreign Ministry has now said that countries who decided to attend event would be showing disrespect to China: “We hope those countries that have received the invitation can tell right from wrong,” the ministry’s spokeswoman told journalists. Many of the world’s human-rights abusers have been only too happy to oblige, including Pakistan, Iran and so on. They want to keep friendly with China and share Beijing’s anti-democratic agenda. But, oddly enough, Serbia, a would-be EU member, is said to have chosen to boycott the Norwegian event. Keen to get Chinese financial assistance

Wednesday

Daniel Korski

Time for an Afghan Inquiry

The Iraq Inquiry had been conspicuously silent, but now John Chilcot’s team has called Tony Blair to give evidence again. It’s expected that our former PM will make the trip to the Queen Elizabeth II centre early next year. That would push the expected deadline for the inquiry’s work finishing – at the end of this year – into 2011. Few people, however, expect the inquiry to say anything novel or get Tony Blair to say anything different than before. Its well-phrased final report may change policy in the margins – but in the security establishment there is little question of what needs doing. RUSI has published reams of reports

Monday

Daniel Korski

Wiki-danger

Now the Wikileaks are beginning to become dangerous. Before, the leaks contained high-level tittle-tattle, confirmation of existing analyses and embarrassingly accurate portraits of world leaders. I still thought it wrong to regurgitate this data, as it will lead to more secrecy, bilateral problems and potentially even conflicts – the things that Julian Assange claims he is seeking to avoid. Yet I told NPR that the idea of prosecuting the Wikileaks founder for treason was far-fetched; he is not a US citizen and it was not clear to me what kind of charges could be brought against him in the US courts. Now, however, with the publication of data which will

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

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

Tuesday

Daniel Korski

Brit-free EU diplomacy takes shape

After months of behind-the-scenes work, the shape of the European External Action Service – the EU’s diplomatic corps – is now coming into view. The Bruxelles2 blog has obtained a version of its structure with some of the key names penciled in. You can find it here.      The top three jobs in the EU’s diplomatic headquarters will go to a Frenchman, a Pole and a German. The only senior UK official, besides Catherine Ashton (and her personal aides) is long-serving diplomat and geo-strategist Robert Cooper. But his name, rather mysteriously, is followed by a question mark. Of the EU “ambassadors” that have been appointed until now, there is

David Blackburn

Chinese burns

The latest cache of Wikileaks has done America no end of good. The Saudis urged the US to bomb Iran – a sign that the Arab world can make common cause with the States and Israel. It has also emerged that North Korea has sold the Iranians long range rockets – Moscow, Berlin and Istanbul are all within the Ayatollah’s range. But the most important revelation is that China has tired of North Korea’s lunatic machinations, recognising that the rogue state is an impediment to global and regional security. China is also convinced that the country will not survive Kim Jung-il’s death and favours a union of the two Koreas,

Monday

Fraser Nelson

Tax cuts: a Swedish recession remedy

I travelled in from frozen Stockholm this morning. My colleague Mary Wakefield set out from County Durham. No prizes for guessing whose journey took more time due to snow. When my £38 norewgian.com flight arrived at Gatwick, the captain said: “Sorry, we’re going to be delayed. They can’t seem to find people to open the gate, they say they are short staffed.” The Swedes on the flight burst out laughing: welcome to Britain. Mary’s £107 train was two hours late arriving to the station, and spent a further two hours stuck in the snow. That the Swedes do better at us in the snow is no great surprise, but it’s

James Forsyth James Forsyth

What’s with the Wiki-fuss?

The whole Wikileaks scandal reminds me of a recent conversation I had, at his request, with a member of a foreign diplomatic service. The country he represented is a long-standing British ally and I saw no harm in talking to him as I didn’t say anything which I hadn’t said, or wouldn’t say, in print. Most of the chat was the usual stuff: what are Cameron’s prospects, what does he believe, will the Lib Dems last out five years, who are the real powers in Downing Street, what will happen to Andy Coulson, who are the new MPs worth watching etc. I suspect that what we discussed, along with many