Global Politics

In the tribute he wrote in 1954 for Robert Jackson, his friend and Supreme Court colleague, Justice Felix Frankfurter explained the profound effect that the experience of prosecuting the Nazi leadership at Nuremberg had on Jackson’s endeavour to understand the human condition. “An essentially good-natured, an even innocently unsophisticated temperament, was there made to realise […]

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Hilary Benn MP, Chair of the Commons Brexit committee, has always been a great performer in Parliament. Here, he lays into the UK Government’s Brexit strategy, likening it to disembarking from a liner into a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean.        

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CC Image courtesy of Rareclass This piece was also published in Huffington Post on 23rd June 2016 Something we in Scotland learned the hard way in 2014 is that referendum questions are dangerous because they make both choices on the ballot paper seem equally plausible. By giving the people a choice we somehow assume that […]

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George Orwell famously wrote that “Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Having lived through the Scottish independence referendum, it is hard to believe that less than two years on from that experience the people of the UK are […]

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I sat down with the U.S. Deputy Chief of Mission for the U.K., Minister Elizabeth Dibble, to discuss the Obama visit, the Middle East and the complex Iran-Saudi relationship. The Obama Visit to the U.K. D.M.: You touched on President Obama’s visit in your talk and what he said about the EU referendum. What for […]

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Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is clearly starting to believe his own (Turkish) press, which is increasingly unlikely to tell him anything he doesn’t want to hear. Foreign Policy magazine reports here on the German satire show that has got Erdogan so worked up. The video shows footage of Erdogan’s most absurd public moments, intercut with crackdowns […]

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QZ reports that “Confessions of a Republican” has been making a comeback online. Watching this, one can possibly feel sympathy for the memory of Senator Barry Goldwater, who was an intellectual titan compared to Trump. Nevertheless, this Johnson campaign video will doubtless hit home with many Republicans  today in the same way. A great piece of American political […]

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The shooting of journalist Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward live on breakfast television in Virginia was unimaginably horrific. Sadly, even the harrowing screams of Ms Parker in her last seconds are unlikely to change the U.S. debate about guns, but they should. These TV journalists were not operating in certain parts of Syria, Iraq, or Libya where they […]

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This article was originally published by The Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in Carnegie Ethics Online on 17 August 2015. In Klaus Harpprecht’s 1995 biography of Thomas Mann, he highlights a statement which Mann wrote in 1947, which, as Harpprecht puts it, “one reads with a distinct shiver half a century later”: In […]

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This article was first published in The Huffington Post on 3rd March 2015. One of the defining precepts of the American Republic from its earliest days to today has been that the president of the United States represents the country in its dealings with the world. It is a view which the Supreme Court unambiguously […]

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Last year I criticized some of the hawk-like voices, including that of David Brooks of the NYT, which were calling for Barack Obama to increase the fear factor in dealing with Vladimir Putin over Ukraine. I should point out that I am decidedly not a fan of Putin, whose actions in Crimea and Ukraine have been reprehensible. However, we need […]

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This isn’t a new video but in the aftermath of Charlie Hebdo and the standard rush to judgement on the nature of Islam, Reza Aslan is worth listening to.  

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I haven’t been wildly impressed by how Angela Merkel has handled the eurozone crisis, but this speech to the German people shows why (for my money) she’s easily the most impressive political leader in Europe, if not the world, right now. At a time when too many UK politicians have been pandering to extreme tendencies in a craven attempt […]

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After the brave new world rhetoric and the endless claims about social justice from the SNP, I’m unclear how any of the Party’s new membership intake can be encouraged by the treatment of prospective SNP parliamentary candidate and former UK ambassador, Craig Murray. Read here for Murray’s reasoned and eloquent account of his treatment by the SNP […]

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Will Hutton has probably been the most influential writer on the British constitutional state over the last two decades. Last night he issued a call to arms arguing that the party leaders at Westminster have just 10 days to announce a constitutional settlement to ‘save the Union’. Personally I think it’s a bit late in the day for […]

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Post by Better Together.   A friend of mine in St Andrews who owns a legendary bar in the town (as well as being a legend himself), and who is supporting independence, voiced what I regard as a very honourable position on Scotland’s right to self-determination, even though I disagree with it: How come every […]

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This piece was originally published in Huffington Post on 20 February 2014 Apart from 2014 being the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn, the year Glasgow hosts the Commonwealth Games, and that Scotland plays host to the Ryder Cup, the vote on Scottish independence is also being held 100 years after the outbreak of […]

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The futility and danger of nuclear weapons in the post-9/11 world is indisputable The 2003 Oscar-Winning documentary The Fog of War, containing Robert McNamara’s post-Vietnam mea culpa, also highlighted one of the former US Defence Secretary’s greatest concerns – nuclear weapons. “The indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will destroy nations,” McNamara maintained. […]

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How religion, culture and crude politics sustain America’s support for the Jewish state. We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people ─ the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world. Herman Melville, 1850 Anyone taking even a passing interest in Middle East politics over the past year might be […]

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