What a difference a day (or a week) makes. What a difference the mere translation of a word makes. As the war against Japan in the Pacific began to close, the Potsdam Conference, which decided to call for Japan’s unconditional surrender, began on July 17, 1945. On the day before,

In 2004, Russia’s President Putin said the collapse of the Soviet Union “was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” This was picked up by our hawks as a Moscow wish for more Cold War. They should have waited for the rest of the sentence: ’Tens of millions of our

With much less drama than its famous 1971 Pentagon Papers, the New York Times has disclosed three documents confirming that Russia and Ukraine were close to war-ending agreements in the first half of 2022, shortly after Moscow began its so-called ‘special operation’ attack on Ukraine, February 24, 2022. The newspaper

The BBC has a loose bolt somewhere. It has now begun a strange campaign saying it is dedicated to non-spin reporting. The slogan is ‘Absolutely no spin.’ It says it will deliver us to an ‘unspun world.’ To which I would say ‘if only that were true.’ But at times

The Kremlin needs a new PR agent. Moscow would have us believe it is fighting a life and death struggle in the muddy trenches of Donbas. But what do we get to see on the inauguration of its president? Glittering gold chambers and goose-stepping soldiers.  No doubt there is some

On February 28, 2022, four days after Russia had attacked into Ukraine, Moscow and Kiev began peace talks. The Russian attack had aimed to force Kiev to promise neutrality – i.e. not to join NATO. It also aimed to put an end to eight years of neo-NAZI and other militant

How can it happen that a person who probably no longer exists can keep an entire nation, North Korea, in poverty for more than twenty years, and the rest of us under prolonged nuclear threat? The story is complicated. In 2001 Tokyo sent a senior foreign ministry official to North

For eight years Ukraine’s military and ultra-nationalists militias have felt free to try to ravage the two Donbas hold-outs, beginning with the total destruction of a large modern airport of Donetsk. It is a well-known saying: In war the first casualty is the truth. Maybe that can now be changed:

As we approach the tenth anniversary of the 2014 disappearance of flight 370, Malaysian Airlines, we are getting the usual barrage of media speculation about the alleged mystery and its possible causes. Yet for me at the time, as a contributor to an Asian news service, there was no mystery.

Slovakia is the poor relation created when the former Czechoslovakia divided in 1993 into the Czech and Slovak Republics. The Czech Republic has hewn closely to EU and NATO policies over Ukraine. But despite NATO membership the Slovak Republic has decided to go its own way. It will halt military

Between years 2000 and 2018 the North Korea and South Korea governments issued three joint declarations all promising South Korean economic aid to North Korea and North Korean moves to denuclearisation. Year 2002 saw the Japanese-inspired Pyongyang Declaration promising even more of the same. But each time subsequent conservative governments

Where fear of China is involved there is no conscience for the mistakes of the past. Nor can we expect any sensibility in the plans for the future. As we move into the new year, two foreign policy mistakes need to be corrected. First is the idea that Israel needs