Daily Archive

Sky reports:

Police in Iran are reported to have taken 14 squirrels into custody - because they are suspected of spying.

The rodents were found near the Iranian border allegedly equipped with eavesdropping devices…

The UK response to the allegations was swift:

…A Foreign Office source told Sky News: “The story is nuts.”…

Sometimes, you gotta love the Foreign Office.

The BBC reports:

A change of emphasis in British foreign policy has been signalled by the International Development Secretary, Douglas Alexander…

That’s what the BBC believes it means? Let’s see if it actually is what the BBC thinks it is: “a change of emphasis” — but emphasizing Mr Alexander’s words, not the BBC’s various interpretations of them.

…In his speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, Mr Alexander said isolationism “simply does not work in an interdependent world”.

“In the 20th century a country’s might was too often measured in what they could destroy. In the 21st century strength should be measured by what we can build together,” he said.

“And so we must form new alliances, based on common values, ones not just to protect us from the world, but ones which reach out to the world.

“There is no security or prosperity at home unless we deal with the global challenges of security, globalisation, climate change, disease and poverty.

“We must recognise these challenges and champion an internationalist approach - seeking shared solutions to the problems we face…

All that is supposedly new?

…”We must be driven by core values, not special interests. Our place in the world depends on us making choices based on values - values like opportunity, responsibility, justice.”

Mr Alexander said winning support for this approach “is not easy” and work must be done to make them “the accepted norm”…

You mean it was primarily about state power in the 20th century? That there was little “internationalism” beyond the narrow self-interest? That there were few wider concerns about global development and battling poverty?

That’s news to most of us out here. So just how Mr Alexander’s speech constitutes a call for some new “approach” that is substantively “a change in emphasis” from what both countries have been trying to achieve since 1941 through the likes of the Atlantic Charter, Bretton Woods and Dumbarton Oaks (to name merely three), only Mr Alexander and BBC correspondents apparently readily understand. Such being the case, it would be helpful if they’d let the rest of us in on what precisely they mean in generally claiming a dire need to make all that “the accepted norm“, given that most of us already thought all that long had been precisely that.

Oh, and speaking of “climate change”, which was largely unheard of until just as the 21st century dawned. Why did Mr Alexander have to fly to Washington to deliver that speech?

Yes, we know the secretary likely “carbon offsets” all of his vital development travels. Still, why does one have to go to that trouble in this instance, when a speech of that sort could certainly have been handled via video conference. Would doing that have not truly”signalled” (to use the BBC’s word) a real 21st century “new emphasis” in making the environment a bigger priority, rather than continuing to employ grandiose, wasteful, trans-Atlantic, jet-setting 20th century diplomacy?

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UPDATE: Mr Alexander’s odd take on the 20th century is one matter. But what’s the BBC’s excuse? Yet that the Beeb appears sadly out of their depth on that speech can hardly be considered surprising . . . given that the BBC also has trouble editing even a brief video of Her Majesty.

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UPDATE 2: The wires are loose. We are told this afternoon by Reuters:

Prime Minister Gordon Brown denied on Friday a shift in foreign policy away from the United States after one of his ministers told an audience there that a country’s strength depended on alliances not military might…

…A spokesman for Brown denied the speech marked any turnaround in policy and said the interpretation put on Alexander’s words by the media was “quite extraordinary”…

“Quite extraordinary” is indeed one way of putting it. Another way is that it apparently never dawned on media that Mr Alexander, in moving to make what he considered a cutting edge observation on the essential nature of state/global relationships in the 20th century as supposedly being markedly different from what they are now in the 21st, was . . . guess what? Wrong.