Blogoir: January

A most satisfactory and philosophically interesting week in the United States.

The startling Scott Brown victory in the Massachusetts election for the ex-Kennedy seat in the US Senate has prompted an avalanche of analysis. Obviously it was an unqualified calamity for the Democrats.

But what conclusions do Democrats and Republicans alike draw from the evident groundswell of voter anger at the complacent Big Government tendencies exhibited by both parties?

The Democrats, having heavy majorities in both House and Senate, have the harder task in working this out. Better to be even more radical before it is too late eg to cram through their vision of new healthcare reforms? Or a lot less radical?

Charles Krauthammer makes a good point about grassroots 'tea party' protesters:

You would think lefties could discern a proletarian vanguard when they see one.  

OK, Scott Brown's surge is unlikely to be sustained across the States. But what if it were?

Michael Barone runs some numbers. Any district which did not vote as strongly 64% for Obama could be vulnerable to falling to the Republicans. Which in turn means that some 155 of 256 House Democrats could be waving goodbye to their terms in office. This is tending to make them, hem, cautious about ploughing on with their unpopular healthcare agenda. 

Is a key lesson that in the USA a version of broad 'libertarian' thinking - socially liberal, fiscally conservative - is starting to lead independent opinion?

And that any party which taps into that is going to find its fortunes looking up? And that the establishment Democrats as currently constituted are so bogged down in the tar-pit of their leftish Huge Government instincts that they are unable to manoeuvre successfully? 

One can but hope so. More please, and some for us over here too.

Meanwhile non-US readers may have missed the powerful Supreme Court ruling which knocks away great slabs of legislation controlling freedom of speech, especially during election campaigns.

These laws, driven in good part by outright leftist opposition to business (which seems to disappear when politicians are being generously lobbied after they are elected) have spawned ridiculous and oppressive bureaucracy edging the USA towards some sort of banana republic approach to freedom :

The majority said that "Campaign finance regulations now impose 'unique and complex rules' on '71 distinct entities.' These entities are subject to separate rules for 33 different types of political speech. The FEC has adopted 568 pages of regulations, 1,278 pages of explanations and justifications for those regulations, and 1,771 advisory opinions since 1975. 

This excellent analysis at Future of Capitalism is well worth reading since it covers in some detail the arguments of the Supreme Court judges who ended up in the minority on this one. But even though President Obama is warning of a strong response to the Court's decision, it is hard not to agree with the majority:

These onerous restrictions thus function as the equivalent of prior restraint by giving the FEC power analogous to licensing laws implemented in 16th- and 17th-century England, laws and governmental practices of the sort that the First Amendment was drawn to prohibit.

Matt Welch wisely reminds us of the issue in the case concerned. A documentary film critical of Hillary Clinton was not allowed to be aired on TV!?

And he argues that the massed networked power of individuals is now more than enough counterweight to see off murky 'corporate interests':

It has never been easier for groups of citizens to swarm together and flow money through the Internet toward campaigns and candidates who excite them. Ask Ron Paul -- or more relevantly, Barack Obama -- what's more powerful: $10 million from Dr. Evil Industries, or $10 each from 1 million people who can actually vote?

Exactly.

Finally, the new moves proposed by President Obama to recalibrate risk-management by banks may have rattled stock markets round the world, but the President wins praise for his approach in the WSJ:

Quite right. Let's get rid of the too-big-to-fail approach.

If senior business people think that however outlandishly they behave, the taxpayer will foot the bill, are we more likely to get better or worse behaviour?

Yet beyond that is the definitive moral hazard in government itself: how to stop greedy and stupid politicians plundering taxpayers to bribe their friends?

Not easy.

But as Scott Brown's magnificent election shows, the threat of a tidal wave of voter anger may help a little.

Somehow my site has been linked to by this one: the New Shelton wet/dry. Namely my posting How to Start a Speech.

Check it out. It probably makes sense to people who read it regularly. It has all sorts of quirky and interesting material, such as this nice link to the Crayola Color Chart which shows how crayons have evolved over the past 100 years. 

And this one on how we see patterns in randomness, when maybe we should be looking for randomness in patterns. Especially when flipping a coin to get a Head or Tail outcome.

Just when you were thinking that I am a lone voice among former British diplomats lamenting the plummet in intellectual coherence and standards within the New Labour FCO, here is another one.

He has sprung into action after seeing this strange article by David Miliband in the New Statesman in which the Foreign Secretary tries to put the Taliban in context by comparing them to the Vietcong:

The Vietcong were a broad, deeply rooted, popular movement tapping into nationalist feelings throughout the country and society, and their appeal and legitimacy ultimately proved superior to that of the South Vietnamese regime. The Taliban have limited appeal due to their ethnicity, geography and the recent memory of their brutal, reactionary misrule. Afghans fear their return...

Any normal person might agree that the Taliban are vicious and primitive, but note the carefully drafted, rather romantic if not lyrical way the Vietcong are portrayed, their 'appeal and legitimacy' being contrasted with the 'reactionary' Taliban. (Didn't Hitler lead a broad, deeply rooted, popular movement tapping into nationalist feelings throughout the country and society?)

And maybe my memory is a bit wobbly these days, but did not a large number of South Vietnamese 'fear' the Viet Cong-style communists and try to run away from them?

Luckily we have people around who know the answer.

Such as Derek Tonkin, British Ambassador to Vietnam 1980-82, who has been moved to submit a Comment:

David Miliband is seriously mistaken if he believes that the "Viet Cong", a pejorative name which the Americans gave to the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, either won the battle for the minds of the population of South Vietnam or played any serious role in the defeat of the South Vietnamese forces.

By the time the Americans had withdrawn their troops from Vietnam by the end of March 1973, the Viet Cong had effectively been neutralised to the point that they were no longer a serious military threat. South Vietnam was lost as a result of a premeditated invasion in violation of the 1973 Paris Agreements by regular North Vietnamese forces in which the Viet Cong played only a marginal role.

The reaction of the South Vietnamese population to the North Vietnamese invasion was one of general horror and despair, epitomised in the "Convoy of Tears" from the Central Highlands in March 1975 and the tens of thousands who in subsequent months sought to escape from South Vietnam by boat and of whom as many as one third are thought to have perished at sea...

That is pretty conclusive?

Of course as a little boy David Miliband soaked up his Marxist father's love for Vietnamese Communists and his opposition to the US military effort to stop them:

In 1967 he wrote in the Socialist Register that "the US has over...a period of years been engaged...in the wholesale slaughter of men, women and children, the maiming of many more" and that the United States' "catalogue of horrors" against the Vietnamese people was being done "in the name of an enormous lie.

Remember David Miliband's gushing tribute to Joe Slovo, another die-hard communist and Miliband family friend?

Dismal? Banal? Dishonest? I can't make up my mind.

Here is what is said to be (and looks like) extracts from an FCO memo warning of hard times ahead as Cuts come along:

We know that next year will be a lot tougher than this year. This is partly because we just have less money (like all Departments we have to make further efficiency savings next year). But it's mostly because the value of our budget is continuing to decline as sterling has dropped against other major currencies. Since we spend most of our money abroad in foreign currency, that means the pounds we have to allocate will buy less.

And here is the Guardian suggesting that a number of Embassies will be abolished:

More wretched Labour/Brown decisions starting to have Consequences. In this case a change of the way the FCO is funded.

The FCO incurs two sorts of costs. Those which it pays in sterling (all UK staff costs, and a lot of 'UK-based' Admin overheads), and those which it pays in foreign currencies. The latter costs as calculated in sterling of course vary all the time, as currencies move to and fro.

So insofar as the idea of Government Targets makes any sense at all, it makes sense to say that the job the FCO does is worth £x billion each year, with an arcane formula being found for the Treasury to cover any excessive overseas costs brought about by a decline in sterling, but also to claw back any windfall gains the FCO might have if sterling appreciates.

A couple of years back Labour/Brown/Miliband moved away from this sensible arrangement to one in which the FCO has to carry the cost of any sterling depreciation:

Edging back to normal life again after three days running around bewinter'd Poland. What a pleasure to be in a country able to cope sensibly with snow.

Far from snow is Haiti.

Ben Macintyre blames the French for brutalising Haiti into paying ruinous reparations for its temerity in wanting to espouse the Liberty part of the French Revolution. An interesting example of the Foreign Policy of Compound Interest - the wealth sucked out from Haiti over many decades has not had a chance to grow steadily to the local population's benefit.

The problem is that once a country ends up in too weak a state to prosper, all sorts of bad people flourish, and all sorts of clever people show up with ingenious schemes to make things better:

Before the earthquake, Haiti had 10,000 non-governmental organizations working there, the highest rate per capita in the world. In 2007, notes Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal, it had ten times as much foreign aid as investment.

If people are determined to blame Haiti’s problems on someone other than the Haitians, perhaps they could start by looking at the damage done by the foreign-aid industry.

Except that they won't.

Now the usual international or even national feuding is breaking out over who should do what to help the victims. Should the US Army get involved in directly helping people, or is that best left to 'assistance professionals'?

There was a classic case of this in Afghanistan where DFID demanded that some British Army local project-work be stopped because the work was insufficiently strategic.

They probably were right. Digging a well or putting a roof on a ruined school is not (on one way of looking at it) as strategic as more patiently identifying water and education plans for the region as a whole, preferably with 'full local participation' and 'due account paid to local gender issues and sensitivities' and so on.

Yet while that work trundles on there is no water from the well, and the school can't function.

Maybe the best or indeed only strategy is to get people in a position to start to do practical things for themselves, and then let them work out the strategies.

It reminds me of when Clare Short created DFID. The new Department's bureaucrats were full of themselves, keen to show new and above all strategic thought. So DFID support for the pioneering network of ad hoc local projects in Bosnia as previously run by the British Army soon stopped. Not strategic.

Clare Short herself came on a visit to Bosnia and we went to a small village where there had been a British plan to replace the electricty lines destroyed in the war; this very local scheme had been dropped by DFID as insufficiently 'strategic'.

The Bosnians told her that without power they could do nothing. Clare Short (being a domatic but practical Leftist) saw immediately that they were right and told her people to find the DFID funds to get the powerlines back up. 

A few large, slow, well thought-out, all-embracing, top-down plans?

Or many small, improvised, suck-it-and-see initiatives which together may add up to something - and which give the people who live in these places the chance to mobilise their own resources?

No right answer.

I am off to icy Poland for a few days.

If I find time to write here, I will. Otherwise browse back through the archives - plenty to read which you may have missed.

Other than that, behave yourselves. And read this - how the Gordon Brown Treasury has utterly messed up Everything.

I am available to help sort out the chaos if a weary nation calls.

Guido rightly lambasts the Fabian Society for their erstwhile adoration of the pseudo-science of Eugenics - the corrupt ideology beloved by snooty middle class intellectuals which was a sort of cross-breed of über-Darwinianism with Nietzschean/Germanic ideas of Supremacy.

See also the merciless analysis of this odious 'progressive' doctrine and its highbrow supporters in Liberal Fascism.

I mention this because I have downloaded the fab Stanza reading software on to my iPhone. And through it I have been busy piling up lots of free e-books, including various early works by P G Wodehouse (of course) but also essays and novels of G K Chesterton.

The Father Brown detective stories are strangely improbable yet a valiant effort to write clever mysteries with impeccable theological top-spin.

The Queer Feet is a witty one - a crafty robber turns up at a posh club dinner and tries to steal the valuable silverware, tricking the waiters by pretending to be a guest, and tricking the guests by pretending to be a waiter. Father Brown cracks the case by hearing his footsteps as he rushes jerkily from one mode to another. 

Here is an extended 1922 essay by Chesterton demolishing Eugenics once and for all. He seemed to think that the sobering effect of WW1 had ended its influence but of course it lasted in various forms well after that, with H G Wells famously calling for born again enlightened Nazism in a speech at the Oxford Union in 1932.

Anyway, get Stanza and get as many G K Chesterton free e-books as the various free e-book purveyors offer.

Sparkling uncompromising and profound writing, a bracing change from so much of the shifty post-modern 'theory' of our own dark times. 

Today a belated Seasons Greetings card made it to my door.

It came from 'all at Binani House'. It had been addressed to me at the Britsh Embassy in Belgrade. To judge by the envelope it indeed reached the Embassy and was processed in Security (zdravo Zorane!) then forwarded back to me in England. A carbon-intensive trip of some 2100 miles.

No-one had written anything in the card. And whoever sent it to me was going by a directory of some sort which is now at least five years' out of date.

Who or what is Binani House?

Hard to tell from the Internet. Various Import and Export agents appear to reside at that address in St Johns (sic) Wood in London, including Metal Distributors UK Ltd.

Hi there, Binani House wellwishers! You may remove me from your lists.

As the UK general election hoves into view, here's a free tip to would-be MPs.

Do not sit in the warm and make disobliging remarks about a rival candidate who is outside in the cold, busy shaking hands with voters.

The more so if you seem to disparage the area's iconic sports stadium in the process.

Really. It's just not a good idea.

Leading communications expert Max Atkinson points up the value of adding memorable or lively touches in a speech, eg by finding a noteworthy link to past events:

... occasionally a quick search can yield a fantastic dividend. When the Challenger shuttle disaster prompted Ronald Reagan to scrap his 1986 state of the union address in favour of a televised speech to the nation, speechwriter Peggy Noonan must have been surprised and delighted to discover that it was exactly 390 years since Sir Francis Drake died at sea - which provided for an apt and powerful contrast between the two events...

Like anything else, this sort of thing needs to be done judiciously, so that the example 'flows' from the speech and the speaker. Do not give the impression that your speech-writer rummaged around to drag up some history by way of aimless disjointed unoriginal padding:

...the opening passages are clunky. An attempt by a speech-writer who knows little of Poland to rummage around and find a few historical examples by way of 'filler'. The examples used cast no light of insight on what follows, and might as well have been omitted. It is striking that there is no reference to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact by name in this its 70th anniversary year.

Max's example is the TV address by Ronald Reagan soon after the space shuttle Challenger exploded on take-off.

Peggy Noonan drafted it. It has been rated as one of the ten best US politicasl speeches of the twentieth century.

Another speech-writing ploy - if not a cliche - is to use a quote from someone else to illustrate a point. It works well when the right quote is chosen and perfectly matches the occasion on different levels simultaneously.

Here President Reagan concludes with lines from the soaring, optimistic poem by John Magee, a British-American airman who died in 1941 at the age of 19 flying a Spitfire in a mid-air collision over Lincolnshire.

Spare a few minutes and watch the whole address again. Do your hardest to stay unmoved - and fail.

l.

Most societies have some sort of organised physical and psychological reserves ready to help them through disasters.

Haiti is an exception, a place impoverished financially and institutionally for reasons going back deep into history (notably French history).

Only a massive military-style humanitarian intervention can make a difference in Haiti, and only the Americans have the resources and generosity to make that difference. Well done the Obama administration.

There also are contingency plans in place as led by the United Nations to try to coordinate international efforts in such ghastly circumstances, so that resources are not wasted in 'unnecessary duplication'. 'Clusters' of assistance forms are set up. 

The problem they are trying to solve is that in real life some forms of assistance can be delivered faster than others, for either reasons of geography or available supplies.

Yet it makes no sense to ship in (say) huge numbers of tents and bags of food if there is no way to get those supplies distributed; those piles of assistance in the few available storage centres themselves can start to block more essential supplies which have taken longer to arrive. Getting relief supplies into a country is the easy bit - distributing them sensibly and with minimal fairness thereafter is always far harder.

And it's all made worse if the local authorities are unable to cope at the best of times - who from outside leads the operations and takes moral and legal responsibility when things go wrong, as they invariably will?

In short, terrible confusion reigns, and many more people die.

Development expert Chris McDowell is one way in to the complicated world of clusters and how the relief effort in this case can be followed online. 

Welcome Iain Dale readers

I was helping someone the other day with some well-chosen words for a senior private occasion of some 100 people.

The task? Suggesting ideas for the seemingly simple task of opening the proceedings and introducing the main speaker(s).

Of course ... not so simple. The words had to be both effective and touching (given the occasion).

So we worked up some pithy phrases, saying several Big Things in a few words, and with a personal touch.

On the night, a huge success. Three loud bursts of spontaneous applause from the distinguished audience in a four minute opening.

The main speakers too were both excellent , drawing on personal anecdotes to convey a sense of warmth, appreciation and admiration just right for the occasion.

So, folks, if you are out there grappling with the scary task of having to make a speech and finding your bowels tightening (or otherwise) with nerves, think about telling a story, then linking that story to the point of the gathering. The more unobvious the story is when it starts, the better.

People will not remember extended courtesies and flowery language. In fact, they probably won't even listen to them, waiting instead for something interesting to be said.

They will remember - and more important enjoy - words which appear to come from deep in you.

Words which tell a story which (even if it sounds corny when you look at it on the page) means something to you or the occasion.

The story need not even be true - you can use the story motif to pretend to tell a true story but which leads into a roundabout joke which links back to the occasion. The one of the multilingual dog applying for a job always works in all contexts. 

"Ladies and Gentlemen - you probably were expecting me to give you a speech. But I am no good at public speaking. So you'll be pleased to hear that I am going to tell you a story instead.

What's more, it's a true story...no, it really is"

Within seconds you'll have them all hanging on your every word. Agog, wanting you to keep going, not to shut up and sit down.

Can't miss.

Update

When I say that 'the story need not be true', I do not mean telling lies.

Rather speak from the start using ideas and imagery grounded in real-life events (or apparently real-life events) rather than animated abstractions. That can be done by drawing on episodes which have happened to you, or on funny stories/jokes which have a real-life feel to them.

A speech is an artificial event, in that the speaker has to try to engage as if personally with a large group of people, many of whom s/he has never met and may be quite some distance away in the room - even harder outside.

So to avoid their attentions drifting out of the window, catch their attention right from the start, maybe by asking a question:

"Do you know what I saw yesterday?"

"I was delighted to get the invitation to come here today. Let me tell you why..."

"This morning I sat down to prepare this speech. After two hours' work, I ripped it all up. This is why I found it so difficult..."

Any of these openings and many more like them will quickly get the audience tending to like you - and wanting More...

Jonah Goldberg in a jovial frame of mind as Scott Brown makes the Massachusettes (sic) Democrats nervous:

The Democratic party is panicking like brothel patrons with the cops at the door. They’re dropping shock troops of muckety-mucks, hacks, spinners, and door-knockers into Boston like Rangers into Normandy.

Meanwhile, the liberal press establishment is in near-total denial. Yes, the race is getting a lot of attention, but Coakley’s problems are being chalked up to the fact that she is a bad campaigner and this is a bad “climate” for the Democrats.

They use “climate” to suggest that things are bad for Democrats for reasons beyond their control (ironically, they don’t talk about the climate that way when it comes to global warming). Orange growers in Florida can’t be blamed for a bad crop if the climate won’t cooperate, and Democrats can’t be held accountable for their crop failure now.

It’s the economy! It’s the obstructionism of the Republicans and that satanic whatchamacallit, the filibuster.

Jupiter is aligned with Mars, NutraSweet has poisoned the water supply, Lost has been on hiatus too long, Mongo likes candy: It’s the climate, you see, the horrible, horrible climate! Democrats didn’t do anything wrong!

Except they did...

As he goes on to explain.

Peggy Noonan is a bit haughty. But she writes a handy op-ed, such as this one on President Obama becoming disonnected:

Something for our own politicians to mull over as they gear up for the election?

I have been asked by the FCO to give a talk there later in January to a group of foreign visitors about Using Democracy for Peace. Or maybe it was Using Peace for Democracy.

I forget. One or the other.

As always the Balkans is/are a laboratory for cutting-edge research on such scientific issues.

Take Bosnia and Herzegovina. Here is Baroness Ashton at her European Parliament hearings:

... noting that there is no other choice but for the differing communities to live together.

At her parliamentary hearing in front of MEPs Ashton noted that: “They can have as many referendums as they like but at the end this is about one country coming together''.

... she expressed Brussels’ concern about the political situation in the country and said Brussels needs an “effective strategy to overcome the political stalemate in Bosnia-Herzegovina”.

She said she will have regular contact with High Representative Valnetine Inzko in an attempt to find a strategy to overcome the current situation. “The prospect of EU membership is the glue'' that holds the country together, she said.

That (I assume) ad-libbed statement - “They can have as many referendums as they like but at the end this is about one country coming together'' - is remarkable.

Here is Baroness Ashton on the subject of referenda in a different context:

On practically every question ever put to the British public on any subject, when asked if they would like a referendum on that subject, they have said that of course they would. I think that that is a measure of a healthy and thriving democracy.

The point there, where she argues against the British people having a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, is that she appears to be assuming that such a referendum would have full democratic legitimacy, but that in this case it is for Parliament and not a referendum to decide.

Yet in Bosnia referenda are relegated by her to miserable, second-class, irrelevant affairs of no consequence.

That can't be right, if only because it makes no sense for the EU to organise elections in BH then expect politicians to ignore their electorates.

A Bosnian referendum on an issue which shows a strong public mood in favour of Option X duly empowers Bosnian leaders to insist on Option X, whether the EU likes it or not.

And what if a referendum result eg in Republika Srpska one day says that the voters there do not want the country as covered in EU glue to 'come together'?

That said, even though Republika Srpska keeps threatening referenda on this and that does not mean that they are going to hold them: the threat of doing so may help win handy concessions:

For months, the Bosnian Serbs had prevented the country's authorities from extending the contracts of international judges and prosecutors working in Bosnia's highest court – now numbering just 11. The last contract was to expire on Tuesday (15 December). Inzko explained to Ashton, and also to diplomats from the countries that oversee the OHR's work, that he would have to impose an extension...

But Inzko was told that imposing an extension of the judges' contracts was out of the question because nobody had the appetite for a confrontation with Dodik. (It turned out that Canada, Japan and Turkey did – but that was of little interest to the EU.) The international judges and prosecutors working on organised crime and corruption cases in Bosnia would lose their jobs on 15 December – and they did. Inzko was allowed to extend only the contracts of international judges and prosecutors working on war crimes, an issue that is of far less personal interest to Dodik and other Bosnian politicians.

... Dodik announced that the decision to extend the war-crimes judges' contracts carried no weight and might be subject to a referendum in the Republika Srpska.

For the second time in as many months, the EU, together with the US, had tried to appease Dodik, only to find him unappeasable. There could hardly have been a less auspicious start to Ashton's term of office.

Roger Boyes is pessimistic:

The country is bubbling with hatred and it is clear that the Dayton agreement has failed in its central aim of creating a new state capable of forging bonds with its citizens. The old multi-ethnic Bosnian culture, the Balkan melting pot, no longer exists. It has been replaced by a weak state hovering on the brink of collapse.

If Richard Holbrooke still considers Dayton to be a successful model for nation-building, then God help Afghanistan.

How does that help me writing my FCO presentation?

Conflict within a country over who rules it can be managed (more or less) through Democracy.

Conflict within a country over whether that country should exist in its current form is far less manageable - you may get a majority for a continuation of the status quo, but what do you do about the large minority who demanded something different, and who keep using democratic rights to block national integration?

An ever-alert reader moves on from the wonders of Ask Imam to a British website for what I take to be Fairly Militant Muslims, notably this analysis of the difference between a lion and a lioness:

Back in Moscow in 1994 or thereabouts I asked a top Russian foreign policy pundit what would happen to Ukraine, then languishing in a deacying post-communist stupor.

"We'll just buy it," came the sardonic reply.

But what about less obvious places, such as Nauru, which has just recognised Abkhazia and S Ossetia as independent states, fulfilling a key Nauru foreign policy priority namely for its vote to be up for sale?

Thus:

A new player has emerged in the roiling political theater of the Caucasus: the tiny, destitute Pacific island nation of Nauru, which on Tuesday became the fourth country to formally establish diplomatic relations with Abkhazia, effectively recognizing its sovereignty...

Nauru, an eight-square-mile rock in the South Pacific with about 11,000 inhabitants, was no pushover, according to the influential Russian daily newspaper Kommersant. In talks with Russian officials, Nauru requested $50 million for “urgent social and economic projects,” the newspaper reported, citing unnamed Russian diplomats.

When in doubt on such issues turn to Mark Steyn, who unlike me knows a high percentage of the population of Nauru and eruditely links this subject to various musicals:

In the early Nineties, I met a couple of bigwigs from the capital, Yaren, in London when the Nauruan government, in the wake of Cats and Les Miserables and Phantom Of The Opera, decided to invest in a British musical about Leonardo written by a couple of guys whose only hit song was the long ago Number One “Concrete And Clay”. Oh, come on. You must remember:

Which was literally the situation the bird-pooped-out Nauruans found themselves in.

But there is also this:

First, Russia’s imperialist ambitions are an issue that resonates far beyond Russia’s backyard. Australia has been concerned for some time about a China/Taiwan competition to, in effect, buy up hastily decolonized Commonwealth territories in the Pacific. It will have a terribly corrupting effect on the region’s politics if Russia is determined on a piece of the action.

Secondly, we underestimate the importance of sub-jurisdictions. Nauru is sovereign but not quite independent:  Its Appellate Court rulings can be overturned by the High Court of Australia, a country to which Nauru also contracts its national defense. Why would they object to Abkhazia entering into similar relations with Russia?

But look at the other side, too: Poti sits on the eastern coast of the Black Sea, and Georgia has just sold a 51 per cent stake in the port to Ras Al Khaimah, one of the United Arab Emirates, to run it as a “free industrial zone”.  Like the bankrupt Dubai, Ras Al Khaimah is also a sub-national jurisdiction. These are cross-currents in the undertow of the Big Pond: Arab money, Russian ambition, Chinese subversion, and emerging statelets susceptible to all three.

You’ll notice who seems largely irrelevant to all of the above: us. America and its allies. In a globalized world, the west defers increasingly to the transnational institutions, without apparently even noticing the destabilization by key players at sub-national level.

Foreign Policy in the twenty-first century: stop me and buy one...

“The concrete and the clay beneath my feet begins to crumble…”

We all have lots of questions, often about our own most detailed bodily processes:

And they sure need answering.

Luckily for us South Africa's Mufti Ebrahim Desai is our online fatwa resource and raring to go.

Especially on everything (and I mean everything) of interest to Women and their religious requirements.

Hmm.

Derek Tonkin, former British Ambassador to Thailand, Vietnam and Laos, knows a few things about that part of the world.

Hence it is good to see him helping with this lively site, Network Myanmar.

See for example this page with a long list of handy links to articles about Myanmar and other regional issues.

Here is Derek himself in the Independent arguing the case that being too tough on the successive military juntas who have run Burma/Myanmar for nearly 50 years(!) is just counterproductive:

Helping the present regime to break out of this vicious cycle will require time and patience. The generals who rule Burma have little or no experience of the outside world. To expect them to hand over power without guarantees for their personal future or the stability of the country is simply not on the cards.

Attempts by Western powers to force a transition to democracy through sanctions have been an unmitigated failure because of a simple fact: Burma's regional neighbours have not joined in. As a result, Western countries have surrendered influence to China, Russia and other Asian countries, with nothing to show in return.

Another example of the problems to dealing with Bad Leaders who are too strong to be toppled, and too Bad to be part of any reasonable outcome.

Engaging with Bad Leaders merely empowers them against their own victims, which is why sanctions look attractive to Western do-something politicians even when said sanctions usually harm the victims more than the targeted BL(s).

OK, each situation is very different. And, of course, some Bad Leaders' badness is deemed to be handy for our purposes, especially when their countries are heavy oil-exporters.

In Myanmar's case, other Asian powers rally round to give effective cover to Myanmar against 'Western' sanctions, not because they care tuppence about Myanmar but because they want to see our manoeuvrings in their back yard thwarted.

The EU countries leading the charge on this subject including HMG have not worked out what to to about this. Supporting Nobel peace prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi looks an easier path forward than engaging with the military junta who are, hem, less photogenic:

Hence a dreary deadlock.

One way or the other, it is striking how no government, including our own, seems to take a thematic policy view of this central Bad Leaders problem at the heart of foreign policy?

Memo to next Government:

Get some heavyweight thinking done about how in today's networked messy world British diplomatic weight can best be focused. What has worked where, and why? What new options present themselves?

The usual howls of outrage against bank bonuses, especially against those paid out by banks supported by the taxpayer in the UK and USA.

But, duh:

Banks with government guarantees take the biggest risks, make the most money, and pay the highest bonuses!

Simple way to stop all this?

Try capitalism. Re-privatise responsibility:

There is only one way to resolve the bonus problem. We should continue to let shareholders pay their managers whatever and however they want. But we must get out of the business of guaranteeing against failure.

The bankers and the shareholders who enjoy the rewards of risk-taking should be made to act like real capitalists: They should be required to assume the risks that go along with the banks' business activities.