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‘Who would want to be a diplomat now?’

9 January 2017 ‘Who would want to be a diplomat now? Civil servants are judged as though they are reality TV contestants, while reality TV stars have inherited the Earth.’ So writes one of the Guardian’s sharpest columnists,

Donald Trump and the Death of Summitry

9 November 2016 There is sometimes a silver lining to the darkest of clouds, and a case in point in connection with Donald Trump’s election victory might well be the injection of a virus into that sometimes useful but now out-of-control mode of diplomacy, summitry.

Why bother with an Index?

17 April 2015, with 2020 post script Is it a waste of time producing an index for a book when lengthy works are appearing more and more in searchable electronic format?

Road maps for careful diplomats

27 January 2014 The ‘road map’ metaphor in important international negotiations, on which I dwelt at some length in the chapter called ‘Diplomatic Momentum’ in my textbook, is alive and well, and why not?

‘Soft power’ is nothing more than influence

17 January 2014 The term soft power (and its siblings hard power and smart power), employed to embrace a particular category of resources of potential power, originated in the stable of Joseph S. Nye, Jnr.,

Embassy attics and roofs

11 November 2013 The revelations by Edward Snowden, supplemented by aerial photography, have merely highlighted what has long been known to some

Expeditionary diplomacy

13 January 2013 A lot was beginning to be heard about ‘expeditionary diplomacy’ before the disaster at US ‘Special Mission Benghazi’ on 11 September 2012, somewhat less since.

Five best books on diplomacy

25 July 2010 On 5 July 2010, at the beginning of a week devoted to ‘Diplomacy’ by the ‘Five Best Books on Everything’ site, I was interviewed on my own choice of the five best books on this subject.

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