Blog

23 January, 2026. Since rightly being denied the Nobel Peace Prize, President Trump has childishly avowed a greater interest in the exciting use of military power, most recently and idiotically in regard to the proposed annexation of Ice … sorry, Greenland, where the USA already has treaty rights to create bases. Perhaps thinking he might need to re-balance and simultaneously come up with another way of keeping the world’s attention, he has launched a ‘Board of Peace’.

10 December, 2025. As a long time supporter of the Arsenal, I’d been toying with this idea for some time. It became a firm decision after reading in The Guardian that football is on a rising tide of popularity in the USA and that the electrifying Zohran Mamdani, democratic socialist mayor-elect of New York, is a fellow supporter of the Gunners.

4 November, 2025. There has been so much going wrong in international diplomacy since Trump2.0 was inaugurated that I have been driven into silence for want of knowing where to start commenting. However, having learned what happened at a recent IMO meeting I can maintain this Trappist posture no longer.

17 September, 2025 Britain should not be betting its prosperity and national security on payments to an extortionist.

17 April, 2025. Trump’s America is a hostile environment for foreign students. Those wishing to study for a degree in an English-speaking country should look at universities in the UK, Canada or Australia.

30 March, 2025. With US-South Africa relations already at a low ebb, on 26 March 2025 the Trump administration announced the appointment of a ridiculously unsuited individual as the new American ambassador to Pretoria. It was widely assumed in the press that this merely needed Senate confirmation, but it might not be as straightforward as that, and certainly should not be.

27 February, 2025. The spin coming out of Moscow that Trump is 'restoring' diplomatic contacts with Russia is rubbish. They might be expanding in personnel terms but they were never broken off.

19 February, 2025. Prenegotiations are so-called because they are procedural and therefore generally come before the first stage of substantive negotiations; unless, of course, the lead negotiator of one of the parties is a self-confessed genius, has a conception of diplomacy that is entirely theatrical and is in a hurry. Thus the publicized phone call by Trump to Putin immediately preceding the US-Russian talks about talks on Ukraine (and other matters) at foreign minister level in Riyadh on 18 February 2025.

25 January 2025. I was not surprised to learn that, despite continuing stiff opposition from London’s Tower Hamlet’s borough council, the new Labour government in the UK recently made clear that – subject to minor changes – it would support the long delayed building of China’s massive new embassy near Tower Bridge, thereby no doubt allowing the stalled plan for the badly needed re-building of the UK’s own embassy in Beijing to proceed.

2 October, 2024. Security Council reform was one of the subjects dealt with in the UN’s ‘Pact for the Future’ that was comfortably adopted by consensus in the General Assembly on 22 September 2024. The Pact had been promoted by the Organization’s leadership, nurtured by diplomacy ‘facilitated’ by Germany and Namibia, and had easily overcome last-minute Russian opposition. Even one of the usual suspects happy to stand to attention when Moscow snaps its fingers – or at least adopt a posture of friendly neutrality – misbehaved.