25 March, 2026. Jonathan Powell is UK prime minister Sir Keir Starmer’s ‘National Security Adviser’, in practice more accurately described as his foreign policy adviser. He is well qualified to help get Trump out of the mess into which he has got himself over Iran, and it is quite possible that his services will be called upon, even if only indirectly.
31 January, 2026. My latest publication, called Ambassadors, Journalists and Spies: From ancient Greece to the present day, is now available from DiploFoundation. All earnings from its sales will go to this non-profit organization, created in 2002 by the governments of Malta and Switzerland, as an expression of my gratitude for its support for this website over many years. The simplest way for me to explain what the volume is about is to reproduce here the Preface to the volume.
27 January, 2026. I heard this phrase for the first time way back in the late 1960s in a report from a friend about a fiery seminar debate between political sociologists in which a visiting speaker accused someone who attacked him of having this disposition. Since then I have often had occasion to observe it, particularly on the part of politicians at extreme ends of the political spectrum. But why is ignorance likely to encourage arrogance, which seems counter-intuitive and is more often associated with expertise?
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’.
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 [...]
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.
7 December, 2015. Release of the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, November 2025, confirms that it’s the huge American Embassy in London that the Labour Government in the UK should be more worried about than the planned new Chinese Embassy.
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.
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 [...]
17 September, 2025 Britain should not be betting its prosperity and national security on payments to an extortionist.
25 May, 2025. Obviously, Trump should leave Ukraine and Gaza diplomacy to the experts.
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.
14 April, 2025. The survival of ‘British Steel’ at Scunthorpe – Chinese-owned, thanks to Boris Johnson – is on a knife-edge. For the future of the town and national security, everything possible should be done to keep its blast furnaces going.
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.
1 March, 2025. On 28 February, the televised ambush of President Zelenskyy in the White House by President Trump and his attack dog, J. D. Vance, vividly illustrates three fundamental lessons of diplomacy. First, leave negotiations to the professionals. Second, conduct these negotiations in private in order to minimise the risk of sabotage by interested outside parties. Third, if sufficiently important, employ heads of state and government to announce any agreement.
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.
23 February, 2025. In the chapter on secret intelligence in my Diplomacy: Theory and Practice I endorse the common assumption that international ‘liaisons’ and especially formal ‘alliances’ between intelligence agencies have the added value of discreetly supporting diplomatic relationships when these become strained. Unfortunately for NATO, the seismic political changes in Washington are probably undermining the Five Eyes’ alliance itself; this embraces the USA, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
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.
26 January 2025. The silver lining in any prolonged episode of shocking, large-scale violence such as the one being seen in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon at the moment is that it challenges long-fixed political positions and thereby offers hope for an eventual diplomatic solution. And it should be obvious to all impartial observers of the Israel-Palestine conflict that a solution must in due course be urgently sought.
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.
