Cicero's Songs

In October 1956 Britain and France,with Israeli support, launched military strikes against Egypt.  The military operation was entirely successful, and within a matter of days it appeared that all the operational objectives would be achieved.  However, almost immediately, the United States put so much pressure on their allies that the operation became unsustainable. Nine days after the attack was launched the Eden government declared a ceasefire and within two months all of the British and French attacking forces were withdrawn, leaving Egypt the clear victor, Eden himself was forced from office in January 1957.  The point was that even the formerly equal wartime allies were compelled to recognize the power reality- the hostility of the United States to the operation could not be overcome. From then onward the United Kingdom generally aligned its policies with the United States. It is tempting to consider that any American attempt to seize Greenland might be met with simil...

 In 1989, the international norms that had held for decades. In the tumultuous autumn of 1989 the various governments of the Warsaw Pact fell in turn. "In Hungary it took six years, in Poland it took six months, In East Germany it took six weeks, in Czechoslovakia six days and in Romania it took six hours". Communism had collapsed under its own contradictions. As we read the headlines in January 2026, it is hard not to feel certain 1989 vibes. The end of Maduro in Venezuela, and now the explosion of unrest in the "Islamic Republic" of Iran. It is not easy to understand what is going on across the cities of Iran at this point, but one thing is very clear: the regime of the Mullahs is being shaken to its very foundations.  Tired of the casual brutality, corruption and incompetence of the clerical regime, the Iranian people are expressing a clear desire to end the broken system that has governed them for nearly fifty years. Meanwhile other authoritarian governments, in...

In the first decade of the twentieth century the relationship between the British and German Empires fell apart. Britain had tacitly supported the unification of Germany under Prussian leadership, to the point of sacrificing the Kingdom of Hanover in 1866. This friendly relationship reached its apogee with the short reign of Kaiser Friedrich III in 1888. Liberal, open minded and generally pro British, by virtue of his marriage to Queen Victoria's eldest daughter, Vicky, it seemed that Germany under the new Kaiser was poised to become a progressive ally of the British Empire that would spread democratic rule and liberal prosperity across Europe and the World. As we know, throat cancer put an end to Friedrich III after only a few months, and in the year of Three Emperors, Germany went from the military conservative rule of Wilhelm I to liberal Friedrich III to the unstable and expansionist Wilhelm II.  Within a matter of little more of a year the second new Kaiser turned German polit...

 No one is quite sure which Frenchman in the 1920s suggested that "the United States is the only country that has gone from barbarism to decadence, with out the usual interval of civilization". It may have been a right wing French newspaper, it may have been Georges Clemenceau, though in any event it was treated as more a witty riposte to some US policy than a serious description of the then burgeoning power of the USA. The point was that the election of Warren Harding in 1920 had upended American foreign policy. Instead of joining the League of Nations- a body actually proposed by the Americans under Woodrow Wilson- the United States lapsed into a distant neutrality. The US "return to normalcy", left European, indeed global security without the worlds largest economy, without the pre-eminent power of the US armed forces, so recently the source of the allied victory in the First World War.  With the hindsight of a century, the early 1920s have some significant paral...

Across the European Union- indeed world-wide- there are huge projects to develop high-speed rail systems. The pioneering days of the Japanese Shinkansen and the later French TGV network are now being followed by investments across the EU, and -especially- in China. Yet there is a problem. Railways may be more energy efficient once built, but they are hugely capital intensive- all of the components- track bed, signalling and rolling stock, must be built together and the project must be complete before it can operate.   The power of rail is in the network, and without such a network, it does not work to anything like peak performance.  Whereas road improvements can be made piecemeal and fit in with existing road infrastructure, high-speed rail lines are generally built from scratch. So the cost of such projects as HS2 in the UK or Rail Baltica (to link Tallinn with Warsaw) run into tens of billions of Euros. Even the Chinese are beginning to balk at the huge costs involved, ...

Living in the country with the freest Internet in the world opens up some interesting and surprising lines of discussion. Now that nearly 25% of the population choose to vote online, there are some very interesting implications that are coming out.  Firstly there are the short term implications of more e-voting. The fact of being able to vote, even if you live overseas, keeps the Estonian diaspora far more in touch with home. In the recent Lithuanian election, for example, where online voting does not happen, the nearly a million people who live overseas from Lithuania had to make a significant effort to register and to vote- the result was that of the 74,000 Lithuanian citizens estimated to be living in the UK, for example, less than 9,000 actually voted. Had more voted from overseas, it is quite likely that the Conservative-Liberal government would have been returned to office rather than the currently deadlocked situation based on the controversial Labour Party-Social-Democra...

The latest stage of the Millennium depression is seeing political and financial leaders making one of the most dramatic policy mistakes yet. The Banking system is being forced to boost its capital ratios by a combination of international ( Basel III ) and individual government legislation. Nothing wrong with that, you may think: the crisis has already proven that bank capital was too small to fund the holes that resulted from the collapse of the property bubble. The problem is that global liquidity is already exceptionally tight: governments are seeking to tap the markets in order- among other things- to fund the banks that they have nationalized or to fund the European bail out fund, the EFSF . Of course those in the capital market that have liquidity are now exceptionally loath to invest it, unless in some haven deemed extra safe. Banks cannot be considered particularly safe in the light of the crisis. As a result, even the strongest banks are not getting the amounts that they ...

The majority of people in Scotland would subscribe to an idea of multiple identity. Being Scottish and British and European is something that a large number- probably the majority- of the people of Scotland accept as their identity. However the rise of the SNP has brought the central pillar of this identity- Britishness- sharply into focus. A significant number of people reject their British identity. Campaigning  at the last general election in the North East of Scotland, I found plenty of doors that said "I never vote for London based parties". Even when I pointed out that the Scottish Liberal Democrats were based in Edinburgh, it was plain enough what the message was: "independence-nothing less". Now, the SNP is rising in the polls for Westminster seats, while the Scottish Conservatives are actively deciding if they even have a future in their current form. Meanwhile, Alistair Darling's memoirs explains just how dysfunctional the Scottish Labour Party h...

The death of Osama bin Laden, the leader of the fanatical death cult of Al Qaida, has sparked celebrations across the United States, and well it might. I do not usually feel elation at the death of a human being, but today is different. Sure Al Qaida continues in various guises in various places: a hydra headed conspiracy that only a couple of days ago sent a 12 year old boy to blow himself up. What did that kid need virgins for? He was one himself. I felt a powerful surge of loathing for the villains who put him up to such a crime and hoped that they would shortly face an unpleasant fate themselves. Ultimately it was Osama bin Laden who was the author of such wickedness. The charge sheet for such a monster is long indeed- and it does not stop with the murder of thousands of innocents on September 11th 2001. So although, of course, the war continues, and may even be redoubled; yet the death of bin Laden is of more than symbolic significance. Eventually the Al Qaida conspiracy will be o...

As the potential Arab revolt rumbles on further, the events of last week in Russia have been forgotten by the media already. The "24 hour news agenda" by definition is not good at analysis or understanding. Yet the impact of the bomb at Domodedovo is still reverberating across the Russian body politic. It was a brutal and disgusting crime- and the bloody death toll and horrible injuries that the suicide bomber wreaked upon the innocent can only be condemned by any decent individual. There are no reasons and no excuses for the people responsible. Alas, that the failures of the Russian power structures have allowed the emergence of this kind of Al-Qaida inspired evil. As Wiki-Leaks revealed, the US assessment of Russia is that it is now entirely in the hands of contending, largely criminal, elites. A convenient simplification would be to say that power is divided up between different Mafia families, who have different interests in different industrial sectors and in different...

As the result of diplomatic pressure, we are told, the Ambassadors of perhaps 50 countries will not attend the award ceremony to give the Nobel peace prize to Liu Xiaobao. The Chinese are claiming something of a success. It is all rather disappointing, it means that China lines up with some of the very nastiest regimes on the planet. China has refused to let any close relative collect the prize, so for the first time since 1935, when the Nazis prevented Carl von Ossietzky from receiving the prize, the ceremony will not, in fact see the prize actually awarded. That is, in itself a pretty terrible state of affairs. What is even more bitter is the fact that the ideas that Liu Xiabao has been imprisoned for: democracy and pluralism, are actively discussed at the highest level in China- as we know from the recently published memoirs of the late Zhao Ziyang . The Chinese government is lying to its own people when it says that there is little international support for Mr. Liu. It is lying to...

The last six months have seen an extraordinary change in the political direction of Belarus- sometimes known as the "last dictatorship in Europe". Alas, while "Transnistria", Azerbaijan, Armenia and even Russia are considered European, then Belarus' claim to fame is not as unique as all that. Nevertheless the eccentric rule of Oleksander Lukashenka has continued. His fairly brutal security police continues to be called the KGB, and the flag of the country remains essentially that of the Soviet Republic. Yet, despite the extremely close relationship with Russia, including participating in the "Russian-Belarusian State Union", the country has managed to maintain its independence, despite continuing predictions of full union under the Kremlin. Historically the dictator has been extremely loyal, not to say slavish, to the Russian government. It is the relationship between Mi'nsk and Moscow that has changed, rather than any great opening up of democra...

Somalia is one of the most benighted places on the planet. Staggeringly violent, desperately poor, it regularly comes last in any ranking of the nations of the Earth. Since the collapse of the Somali state, nearly twenty years ago, the country has become a extremely dangerous anarchy. The capital Mogadishu, once known as the Pearl of the Indian Ocean, now stands in ruins. Somalia is the number one example of a failed state. It has no government. In the face of this breakdown, it is worth considering that the state of Somalia, created in 1960, rests on two historic foundations: the former colonies of Italian Somalia and British Somaliland. Under the repressive regime of Said Barre, the two were forced into one. The fall of his regime, and the subsequent collapse of the state led to the emergence of a separate government in the former British Somaliland. It is by no means a utopian state: it remains extremely poor and undeveloped. However, compared to the rest of former Somalia, Somalila...

Britain was once the biggest economy in the world. Britons invented a spectacular array of the most important inventions of the nineteenth and twentieth century. From the steam railway to television; telephones to the jet engine, British creativity provided the foundation for enormous economic power. On the back of this, the country rose to become by far the most powerful state the world has ever seen. Amassing an empire that comprises one sixth of the planet's land and resources and one quarter of its people, it nevertheless took most pride in a democratic system that was substantially in advance of virtually all of its contemporaries. While the United States had bitter arguments over slavery that led to a vicious civil war in 1861, the British Empire had already abolished all slavery a generation before, and on the British mainland it is arguable as to whether slavery had ever legally existed at all. The disparate citizens of the Empire were united in a common purpose, a manifes...

The Obama administration has sometimes taken a direct approach to enacting its policies: the determination to ram through its domestic health care policies irrespective of the lack of political consensus has shown that the cautious and academic persona of the president also has a ruthless side. He has under certain circumstances been prepared to cut the Gordian knot and go straight to the point. In other areas the President has been far more circumspect. In much foreign policy, he has devolved the spotlight- if not the ultimate power- to his globetrotting Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, this week attending the donors conference in Afghanistan. Yet even in foreign policy, the administration has also demonstrated substantial ruthlessness. However such ruthlessness has been deployed at the expense of America's allies no less than towards its foes. The abandonment of the missile defence agreements with Poland and the Czech Republic, which the US had asked from those governments ...

The coming week is likely to be a highly turbulent one in the European markets, following the withdrawal of an IMF mission to Hungary. The failure of the mission means that implied IMF and wider international support for Hungary will not be put into place. Essentially it means that the supra-national bodies do not believe that the Hungarian government has the policies or even the will to tackle the widening deficits and increasing debt burden that it faces. It is a pretty serious slap on the wrist for Hungary. However it is not just an expression of no confidence in the new government of Viktor Orban . It also reflects the fact that Hungarian politics generally has become increasingly disconnected from economic reality over the course of the last decade. Famously the previous Hungarian Prime Minister, Ferenc Gyurcsany , admitted that his Socialist government had lied completely about the economic position of the country , however such candour was not refreshing: it only underlined ...

Apologies for the hiatus in blogging- caused by total lack of time. To restart the thread I wanted to move away from UK politics- I have much to say, but I am still considering the best way to express my thoughts on the future direction of the Liberal Democrats. In any event the coalition is running smoothly for the time being, and there are more urgent issues to address overseas. Political upheaval in the newly independent states of Central Asia do seem to make much impact in the minds of Western newspaper readers, but occasionally, the five Republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan do make occasional news, albeit in a rather tangential way. The average person may have heard of Kazakhstan, if only because Sacha Baron Cohen chose to make his generic East European a Kazakh- even though most Kazakhs are not European, but rather east Asian in appearance. Perhaps others may have heard of Uzbekistan because of the campaigns of Craig Murray who, when Brit...