Why can't Afghanistan be more like Sweden? It is insufferable that this miserable statelet can reject liberal democracy despite the efforts of 70,000 NATO and NGO staff kicking their heels in Kabul's dust for eight years. We have blown $230 billion of US and UK taxpayers' money and left

Diplomacy, your hour has come. There is no way soldiers will find an exit from Afghanistan. They can deliver defeat or they can deliver bloody stalemate. They cannot deliver victory and every observer knows it. This conflict will end only when the courage being daily demanded of soldiers is also...

Well done, America. Very well done, America. Friends of the United States have spent ten years tearing their hair in despair. We have been through a thousand cries of anguish, apologies, murmured curses and pleas that the White House of Bill Clinton and George Bush "is not all of America,...

America seems much in need of Roosevelt's maxim to stop fearing fear itself. Virtually all comment on the Mumbai massacre has mentioned 9/11 and al-Qaeda, and thus invited citizens to continue feeling afraid. No matter that Mumbai appears to have been primarily about Kashmir and the status of India's Muslims....

The world wept with joy on Tuesday night. Probably more such tears were shed than in all history. The reason was not that a Democrat had beaten a Republican or that the new man is young and has a gift for turning banality into rhetoric. But the emotion was due...

Sell Obamas now. They are overpriced and the forward market has gone crazy. If he becomes president in two days, the bubble will burst, I guess in the spring of next year.

From the moment four years ago when I first heard of Barack Obama and read his...

So the markets tumble again. Forgive me for asking, but where are the economists? As the world approaches recession, an entire profession seems to have vanished into the mist, like conmen stuffed with cash and thousands left destitute behind. They said recessions were over. They told politicians to leave things...

Economic sanctions are coward's war. They do not work but are a way in which rich elites feel they are "committed" to some distant struggle". As a form of aggression they enjoy lasting appeal to politicians because they cost them nothing and are rhetorically macho. They embody the spirit...

Robert Mugabe is making a mockery of liberal interventionism. He has become God's gift to cartoonists, politicians and commentators. He is depicted wielding clubs dripping in blood. He stands triumphant over a pile of skulls. He is Bokassa out of Idi Amin out of Charles Taylor. He is that old...

Nothing in recent American politics has been followed in Europe as obsessively as the Democratic primary. Barack Obama's victory has been universally greeted with the same gesture. Two hands are pointed together in prayer. Please, please let it be true, let him be president. Polls have yet to appear, but...

Two dictators faced two disasters, one in China, the other in Burma. One was an earthquake, the other a flood. Ten of thousands are dead and millions at risk. Being dictatorial, both regimes have responded in a manner heavy with the politics of sovereignty. In one case that helps people,...

Hello, this is democracy calling. Whatever you read in the coming months, the American primaries are not another transatlantic electoral fiasco. They are the opposite. They are a nation testing its potential leaders by openly arguing, wavering, splitting, befriending, feuding, cohering and ultimately validating. Would that other democracies did the...

The Pakistani senator gazed at the headline in despair. It read "US weighs new covert push in Pakistan". Washington was authorising "enhanced CIA activity" in the country while Democratic candidates declared they were all ready "to launch unilateral military strikes in [Pakistan] if they detected an imminent threat." Hillary Clinton...

Democracy is looking sick just now. At the start of 2008, Churchill's nostrum that it is the worst form of government "except for the others" is being tested close to destruction, assassinated in Pakistan, sabotaged in Kenya, massacred in Iraq, strangled in Russia, ridiculed in South Africa and purchased in...

Everyone says it to someone: "You will miss me when I'm gone." But they rarely say it to an entire nation. Will we miss Tony Blair? We may have hated him, we may have loved him, but we got to know him. Will we not miss him?

Like many commentators,...

We are to be overwhelmed. A tidal wave of epitaphs, eulogies and obsequies of Tony Blair is upon us. His era will crave definition. The flesh must be made word, and the word is Blairism. It hangs on the lips of friend and foe alike.

Let us get...