2 June, 2026. As in Trump’s first term as US president, so even more so in his second, the Department of State has been shorn of offices that were politically out of favour, bypassed elsewhere, and generally demoralised and run down. But it is not alone among foreign ministries, especially those of so-called ‘strongman’ states.
Zeki Kuneralp, Diplomatic Notebooks III, 1964–1966, The First London Years, ed. Sinan Kuneralp (The Isis Press: Istanbul, 2020); and Diplomatic Notebooks V, 1969–1972, The Second London Years, ed. Sinan Kuneralp (The Isis Press: Istanbul, 2025) Zeki Kuneralp, a career diplomat, was a major figure in the Turkish foreign service, whose most important postings other [...]
Jovan Kurbalija: History of Diplomacy and Technology: From smoke signals to artificial intelligence, 2nd edition (DiploFoundation: Geneva, 2025) Methodologically inspired by the French Annales School of historiography and determinedly reaching beyond Europe, the author of this book has nevertheless produced a work that has rarely sacrificed important detail to breadth of focus. Its general thesis [...]
2 February 2024. In the years after the incident in 2019 in which the wife of an intel officer on a US Embassy annex in central England killed a British motorcyclist by careless driving, I posted three blogs on its diplomatic consequences. This one distils their essence and adds more considered reflections.
Straw, Jack: The English Job: Understanding Iran and why it distrusts Britain (Biteback, 2019), pp. 390, incl. index, ISBN 978-1-78590-399-1 It was only by chance that I stumbled on this book, partly because from a marketing point of view the title is perfectly useless, and it’s hard to understand why the publisher agreed to [...]
