If you haven't had the time (or the inclination?) to absorb all the Obama 100 days stuff, here's everything you need to know in just 100 seconds. I promise you'll enjoy it -- and surely you can spare 1 minute 40 seconds?
(created by 大象传媒 World Service producer Becky Lipscombe, with a little help from Frederic Chopin. Broadcast on Newshour, 大象传媒 World Service, and The World Tonight, 大象传媒 Radio 4, 29 April 2009)
If you were giving Barack Obama a grade for his first 100 days in office, what would it be? Stephen Sestanovich of the Council on Foreign Relations gives him an A+; Dan Twining of the German Marshall Fund of the United States no more than a bare Pass.
has asked 35 Washington-based foreign affairs pundits for their assessments: the President ends up with 11 As, 16 Bs, 7 Cs, and a D.
Now it's your turn. Grades, and reasons please ...
I was going to keep quiet about this - but now that has admitted that today he's notching up 20 years in the Channel 4 News hot seat, I may as well confess: this month also marked my 20th anniversary at The World Tonight.
I find it hard to believe, if only because I still often feel that I'm only now beginning to get the hang of it. I clearly remember my first day, walking up Regent Street from Oxford Circus Tube station (will we ever return to the bright lights of the West End from our current White City desert?) and suddenly I was rooted to the spot. I had never presented a live radio programme in my life - and I was about to make my debut on Radio 4. Terrified doesn't begin to describe my emotions.
Those were the days when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, half of Europe was behind the Iron Curtain, and we used tape recorders with giant spools of magnetic tape. We had no internet, no mobile phones, no Google and no Wikipedia. If we wanted some background information, we phoned the 大象传媒 News Information library (Newsinf to its devotees) and waited patiently for a messenger to deliver a bulging envelope stuffed with photocopied press cuttings.
I couldn't have chosen a better time to start on a programme that then as now paid special attention to news from overseas. Within months, central and eastern Europe emerged from decades of Communist rule, and by November, the Berlin Wall was coming down. The following year, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and soon I was part of an ambitious experiment known as Scud FM, officially Radio 4 News FM, devoted only to news of the war from the Gulf.
Next year, The World Tonight will celebrate its 40th birthday, which means that I'll have been presenting it for more than half of its life. If my editors will let me - and if you don't mind - I'd still like to carry on just a bit longer. As I say, I think I'm beginning to get the hang of it.
Raise your hand if you remember triangulation. Now lower it again if you think I'm talking about mathematics.
No, what I'm thinking of is the technique introduced by Bill Clinton, and then enthusiastically adopted by Tony Blair, of deciding on a political posture by reference to the two extreme positions. They called it the Middle Way, or the Third Way, and for a time, it served them well.
The reason I ask is that I've begun to wonder if Barack Obama might be a secret triangulator. Yes, Mr No-Drama Obama, Mr 脺ber-Cool - could he be?
Consider his position on what to do about the authorisation and use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" by the Bush administration on alleged terrorism suspects.
First, it was clear enough: "I regard what happened as illegal and immoral, but I want to look forward not back, so I am not in favour of prosecuting anyone who might have been involved." (I paraphrase.)
Then came a wobble: "I am not in favour of prosecuting any CIA official who may have been involved in actually using the 'enhanced' techniques, but I leave open the question of prosecuting former administration officials who authorised their use, which is something for the attorney-general to decide." (I paraphrase again.)
(By the way, if you've been wondering which officials exactly might have been involved, US Senate documents released this week suggest they include former vice-president Dick Cheney, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, and White House counsel Alberto Gonzales.)
And then last night, another wobble, from the attorney-general, Eric Holder: "I will not permit the criminalisation of policy differences. However, it is my responsibility as Attorney General to enforce the law." (A direct quote this time.)
Which leaves things unclearer than ever. So what's going on? Are we observing the return of the triangulator? Is Mr Obama trying to find a middle way between his Democratic Party colleagues in Congress (who are themselves split on how to handle this issue), and the Republicans who are already accusing him of selling out the country's intelligence services?
Like all Democrats, Mr Obama knows that his right-wing critics are just waiting to pounce on any suggestion that he might be "soft on national security". But he needs to keep his colleagues on Capitol Hill happy as well, because he's going to need them big time when it comes to voting through proposals on health care reform.
The President likes to portray himself as a uniter rather than a divider. Throughout his campaign, and since his inauguration, he has tried to emphasise what Americans agree on, not what they disagree on.
But sometimes, it looks as if his instincts don't serve him too well. During his election campaign, when he was engulfed in controversy over remarks by his Chicago pastor, Jeremiah Wright, he thought at first that some soft soothing words would make it all go away. They didn't. So he had to toughen up his response and disown Mr Wright.
Similarly the row over bonuses paid to the insurance giant AIG after it had been bailed out by US tax-payers. At first he thought the bonuses weren't a serious issue. But they were - so again, he had to toughen up his response.
Being cool is fine when everyone is happy with you being cool. But sometimes voters like to see their leaders getting tough on issues they care about. I'm not sure President Obama has quite decided yet how tough voters want him to be on "enhanced interrogation techniques".
Nevertheless, I very much doubt that there will be any prosecutions. I also doubt that there'll be a formal commission of inquiry, although some senior Democrats are pressing for one. On Wednesday night's programme, Josh Gerstein of the political news website told me that what the argument is really about is who will make the decision that there won't be any prosecutions. Click below to hear the interview.
(Broadcast on The World Tonight, 大象传媒 Radio 4, 22 April 2009)
The Sri Lankan high commissioner in London, Nichal Jayasinghe, has told me there's no need for government forces to heed calls for a ceasefire because they aren't firing anyway. But the Red Cross says the situation in the no-fire zone where tens of thousands of civilians are still trapped between the army and Tamil Tiger rebels is "nothing short of catastrophic". Click below to hear what the High Commissioner said.
(broadcast on The World Tonight, 大象传媒 Radio 4, 21 April 2009)
Why did many major powers back independence for the Kosovo Albanians but not for the Sri Lankan Tamils? Why did Russia back independence for Abhkazia and South Ossetia, but not for Kosovo?
Who decides when a group of people who want to break away from the country of which they are a part can do so? If Kosovo, why not Tibet? If Abkhazia, why not Chechnya?
These are more than merely academic questions. Thousands of people have died because we seem to have no clear answers. So at the London-based foreign policy think-tank on Monday, The World Tonight, together with the journal , organised a conference to try to work out what the rules say about when a country can be dismembered against its will.
The keynote speaker was the Foreign Minister of Slovakia, Miroslav Lajcak, who in a previous life represented the EU in both Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzogovina. So he knows quite a bit about the many different ways in which countries can fall apart or be split up. Here's how he categorised them:
飦 The Czechoslovak way when it split in two: peaceful, by mutual agreement, in accordance with international law and without any assistance from the international community.
飦 The Montenegrin way when it separated from Serbia: peaceful, constitutional, by mutual agreement, in accordance with international law, but also with decisive assistance from the international community.
飦 The Slovene, Croatian, Bosnian way: on the basis of a democratic referendum but without mutual agreement, leading to war. Their independence was recognised internationally and they were accepted as members of the United Nations.
飦 The Kosovan way: a unilateral parliamentary declaration of independence without the agreement of Serbia and in conflict with certain principles of international law. Independence recognised so far by 57 countries; not accepted as a member of the UN.
飦 The Abkhaz and South Ossetian way: declarations of independence with no agreement of Georgia, in "gross violation of the right to respect for sovereignty and integrity of a state" and recognised only by Russia, Nicaragua and each other.
So why the differences? And what does international law say about when it is legal for a people to break away, thus contravening the principle that all existing, recognised states are entitled to have their territorial integrity respected? Among our speakers was the international lawyer Ralph Wilde of University College, London, whom I spoke to for last night's programme. Click below to hear the interview.
The reality seems to be that for a claim to self-determination to be successful, it needs to be backed by a powerful external state (eg the US in Kosovo; or Russia in Abkhazia and South Ossetia). So it's bad luck for the Tamils, the Tibetans, the Sahrawis of Western Sahara and the Kurds. The working assumption among governments in the developed world is in favour of the status quo. One speaker at our conference called it "strategic hypocrisy" - we'll back your right to self-determination only if it suits us (or if the violations of human rights are so egregious that they simply cannot be ignored).
But self-determination need not - indeed does not - always imply full independence. A recognition of minority rights, with substantial autonomy where appropriate, may often be sufficient to guarantee a minority's right to decide its own political status.
Among other speakers at our conference were the former US ambassador William Montgomery, Oksana Antonenko of the and David Clark of the . Although the conference itself was off the record, they agreed to reconvene at the end of the day to record a discussion for broadcast. Click below to hear it, and then I'd be interested in your thoughts.
(broadcast on The World Tonight, 大象传媒 Radio 4, 21 April 2009)
What does President Sarkozy of France really think of President Obama? He's "very clever, very charismatic, but not always up to standard on decision-making." Spanish prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero: "Perhaps not very clever." German chancellor Angela Merkel: "She took a while to understand the seriousness of the crisis facing her country's banks and car industry, but when she did, she had no choice but to come round to my position."
All as reported in the French press, and picked up -- of course -- elsewhere. So where does it leave the state of European diplomacy? Here are the thoughts of former UK ambassador Sir Christopher Meyer. (WARNING: He's not a big fan of M. Sarkozy.)
(Broadcast on The World Tonight, 大象传媒 Radio 4, 17 April 2009
I imagine that, like me, you're glad that you don't have to deal with the contents of Barack Obama's in-tray.
Think about it: right at the top, two over-excited daughters, constantly squabbling over whose turn it is to take the new puppy for a run. And a wife who - even if she doesn't say it out loud is certainly thinking it: "Don't look at me ... you're the one who promised them a dog if we made it to the White House, so now you can deal with it."
And then, when both the daughters and the dog are finally asleep, there's the nearly as tricky question of what Iran and North Korea are up to at their various nuclear sites. And Iraq and Afghanistan, of course. Oh yes, and climate change. Did someone mention the economy?
And now, the people at the US State Department are telling you that you need to focus on Sri Lanka. They put out a last night: "The United States government is deeply concerned about the current danger to civilian lives and the dire humanitarian situation created by the fighting in the Mullaittivu area in Sri Lanka. We call upon the government and military of Sri Lanka, and the Tamil Tigers, to immediately stop hostilities until the more than 140,000 civilians in the conflict area are safely out."
On Wednesday, the British and French governments on the Sri Lankan government to continue its 48-hour ceasefire, while also criticising the Tamil Tiger rebels for preventing civilians from leaving the conflict area.
So what's happening in Sri Lanka? Here's the brief history: for the last 25 years, on and off, the Tamil Tigers have been fighting for an independent Tamil state in the north and east of Sri Lanka. At least 70,000 - I'll repeat that, 70,000 - people have died in the conflict.
Now, after several months of heavy fighting, government forces seem to be on the verge of a military victory. The rebels control only a tiny sliver of land, but well over 100,000 civilians are trapped there. Many are dying, either as a result of military action or from diseases for which no treatment is available.
I spoke to the Red Cross earlier this week: they told me they have managed to get thousands of people out, but many thousands more are still stuck. Very few got out during the government ceasefire on Monday and Tuesday, either because the Tigers wouldn't let them leave, or because they were too frightened to.
You haven't seen or heard much about all this, have you? The reason is simple enough: the authorities won't let journalists anywhere near the conflict zone. So the Red Cross are just about the only people who know what's really happening.
And so far, all the international appeals for pauses, negotiations and the rest of it have fallen on deaf ears in Colombo. The government and the army are convinced that they are about to win this war once and for all. They are in no mood to stop now.
But those statements from Washington, London and Paris mean something. They mean there is real and growing international concern about the terrible cost in civilian lives of this military end-game. India is the traditional power broker in Sri Lanka, but India has just entered a month-long election process.
President Obama has just arrived in Mexico on his way to a Summit of the Americas in Trinidad. He has drug wars, arms smuggling, illegal immigration and relations with Latin America on his mind.
I can't help wondering how much attention he's paying to Sri Lanka.
Amid ugly scenes on the streets of Bangkok, I spoke to both the former Thai prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, and the current prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva.
First I asked Mr Thaksin, who is living in self-imposed exile, if he is organising the anti-government protests himself. Here's the interview:
Then I asked Mr Abhisit if he gave the order to soldiers confronting the protesters to use live ammunition to disperse them.
(Broadcast on Newshour, 大象传媒 World Service, 13 April 2009)
I've been thinking about something an American pundit said to me when we were discussing Barack Obama's election last November. "Just because we've changed presidents," she said, "doesn't mean that the rest of the world has changed as well."
I wonder if Mr Obama is thinking something similar as he ponders the results of his travels. Because he may be feeling that he doesn't have a great deal to show for all his glad-handing and speechifying.
I don't want to sound mean-spirited, so let's deal with the positives first. Yes, he was well received - even rapturously received - pretty much wherever he went. He spoke well, he seemed to be listening as well - and he said many of the things his hosts hoped to hear from him. And, if it matters, the First Lady was a great success too.
From the London summit to the NATO summit, from the Prague speech on nuclear disarmament to the speech to the Turkish parliament, the verdict of the punditocracy was that he didn't put a foot wrong.
But did his fellow world leaders in London accept his idea for a globally-agreed fiscal stimulus package? No. Did European leaders in NATO agree to send thousands more troops to Afghanistan to join the US in its counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism operations? Only in a very limited, and temporary, way.
And as for that briefest of touch-downs in Iraq, he arrived just a day after a co-ordinated series of bombings in Baghdad that cost nearly 40 lives. The suspicion is that restive Sunni militiamen are flexing their muscles as the (Shia) Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki tries to rein them in.
Mr Obama would like us to think that Iraq is no longer a major problem. He'd much rather we focussed on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran. But I fear that Iraq is in fact still a major problem, or at least that it has the potential to be one. (Yesterday was the sixth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad to US forces, and it was marked by a huge demonstration calling for the US to get out now.)
It has long been acknowledged by military strategists that withdrawals are uniquely risky undertakings. Soldiers are never so vulnerable as when they are packing their bags and preparing to fly home. What's more, they inevitably leave a hole, which others want to fill for them after they have gone.
Here's what I'd be worrying about if I were contingency planning. First, the Sunni fighters of the Awakening Councils, whose anti-al Qaeda operations were a crucial element in reducing the levels of violence. Can Mr Maliki be persuaded to treat them with a degree of respect and understanding which until now he has seemed unprepared to show?
Second, the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, and the flashpoint city of Mosul. Both are tinder-boxes, and both have the potential to erupt at any time. The top US commander in Iraq, General Ray Odierno, is quoted in today as saying that trouble in Kirkuk and/or Mosul could result in US combat troops staying in Iraq beyond the Obama-imposed deadline of 30 June next year.
(By the way, the number of US military deaths in Iraq last month was nine, the first time it has been in single figures since the invasion six years ago. The total number of US military deaths is put at 4,266.)
[UPDATE: Five American soldiers and two members of the Iraqi security forces were killed in a on Friday near the headquarters of the Iraqi national police in the northern city of Mosul, according to a US military spokesman.]
Don't forget: President Obama is now committed to a major escalation of US military involvement in Afghanistan. The last thing he wants is for things to get worse again in Iraq - but he can't be sure that won't happen.
And my sense is that if things do get worse, he won't get much help from US allies, however much they may have applauded his speeches over the past week. The prevailing view seems to be: "You lot got us into this mess, so you can get us out again." Not pretty, maybe, but hard times breed hard politics.
Any journalist who dares to write about expenses claims needs to do so with a hefty dollop of humility and caution. We are not exactly renowned for our probity in such matters.
Certainly, in my days as a foreign correspondent, I knew of many colleagues who, shall we say, used their considerable creative skills when submitting expenses claims. (On one occasion, when a colleague was asked by his office to account for $25,000 in advances, a group of hacks simply got together and inflated their own expenses claims so that they could help him pay back the money owed.)
But these days it's all very different, as MPs are discovering to their great embarrassment. What was acceptable once - at Westminster as in Fleet Street - is acceptable no more.
So here are some guiding principles for them:
1. Claim only what you would not have spent had you not been required to be at Westminster and if your constituency home is not within commuting distance (20 miles?).
2. When deciding whether to claim for eg a bathplug, use the taxman's "wholly and exclusively" test. Is the item being used wholly and exclusively to further your business? Would you have bought the bathplug had you not been an MP? (For example, journalists are not allowed to claim what they pay for newspapers on expenses, because the taxman takes the view that we would have bought them anyway, whether or not we were journalists.)
3. Apply the "Private Eye" test: how will this look if it appears in Private Eye?
If we, the voters, are MPs' employers, they are entitled to expect us to pay for all reasonable expenses that they would not have incurred had they not been working for us. (So, yes, we should pay for their travel and accommodation while they're at Westminster, but no, we shouldn't pick up their bar bills.)
Maybe the simplest would be to offer MPs a set payment per day, and then tell them it's their choice how they use it - a sister's back bedroom, or a room at the Ritz. But don't regard inflating expenses as a way to make up for "inadequate" basic rates of pay.
The problem for MPs is that until now, they have simply asked the parliamentary authorities "Is it OK if I claim for this, or that, or the other?" and when the answer was Yes, they just bunged in the claim and thought no more of it. They certainly didn't think we'd all be having a good look at what they were claiming for.
So how would you reform the system (the current rules are )?
President Obama has set out his vision of how he thinks he can embark on a path which will lead to a nuclear-free world. "The existence of thousands of nuclear weapons is the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War ... Today the Cold War has disappeared but thousands of those weapons have not."
We previewed his non-proliferation ideas a couple of months ago -- I blogged about it here.
We also discussed the arguments with the Russian analyst Roland Timerbaev, who's one of the world's leading experts on nuclear non-proliferation, and one of the founding fathers of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and with Ken Adelman, former director of the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency under President Reagan.
And I asked the British foreign secretary David Miliband what this all might mean for the UK Trident nuclear programme. You can hear the interview here.
(broadcast on The World Tonight, 29 January 2009)
I'm going to keep this as simple as I can, mainly because it's the only hope I have of understanding any of it. So here's my take on the London summit ...
Did it change anything? A bit. Will it make a difference? A bit. Does it mean the crisis will end sooner rather than later? No idea.
The first thing you need to do is ignore the headlines. All that stuff about "a historic meeting", and "a new world order" - that's just to keep the headline-writers happy.
And as for the trillion dollars, well, thanks to the , I can do a bit of deconstructing for you. Half of it is made up of supposedly "new money" for the International Monetary Fund: $100 billion from Japan (announced last November), $75 billion from the EU (announced last month), $40 billion from China. Then there's another $250 billion in Special Drawing Rights, which isn't real money at all, but can be used as if it is - it's the IMF's version of "quantitative easing", or, if you prefer, printing money.
Add in another $250 billion on trade finance guarantees (that's the insurance policies that governments offer to exporters so that if they don't get paid, they get their money anyway) - but like all insurance policies, the assumption is that they won't have to pay out, and in any case, according to the FT, only $3-4 billion of new money has been committed.
And then there's an extra $100 billion available for lending from multi-national development banks, much of which will in fact be borrowed from elsewhere.
In the words of the FT: "When all the sums are added together, rather than $1,100 billion, the new commitments appear to be below $100 billion, and most of those were in train without the G20 summit."
So let's get back to basics for a moment. This whole mess started when we discovered that our banks had lent out far too much money to people who couldn't pay it back. They did this because they had gazillions of dollars swishing about in their vaults, thanks to the mega-surpluses built up by China, which has been selling us everything from computer chips to cameras.
Then the banks panicked, stopped lending anything to anyone, so we stopped buying, which meant that manufacturers couldn't sell anything, which meant they either went out of business or started laying off staff. Meanwhile, we couldn't get mortgages to buy houses with, so property prices stopped rising, so we stopped feeling richer.
Did the London summit change any of that? Er, not a lot. The banks are still spooked, because they still don't know how much nasty stuff is lurking on their books - and the summiteers simply didn't dare shine a spotlight.
All they could come up with was: "We are committed to take all necessary actions to restore the normal flow of credit through the financial system and ensure the soundness of systemically important institutions." Which sounds uncannily like what I exclusively predicted a week ago: "We reaffirm our commitment to work together to encourage a rapid end to the current crisis ... and we reaffirm our faith in the power of motherhood and apple pie."
Finally, an answer to a pub quiz question of the future: Why is there no photograph of all the summit leaders together? Answer: because the first time they tried, the Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper was otherwise engaged; and the second time, they couldn't find the Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.
Sixteen families are grieving in Scotland today, after a helicopter carrying oil rig workers crashed into the sea yesterday and all on board were feared lost.
Just a few days earlier, in the Mediterranean, more than 200 people - perhaps more than 300 -- are feared to have drowned. More than 100 bodies have already been recovered. But you very possibly never heard about it.
They were African migrants, on their way in grossly overloaded rubber dinghies from the coast of Libya, heading for Europe. We don't know their names; their families will probably never know for sure what happened to them.
Why do they do it? They know the risks - they know that over the past decade, thousands have died, trying to make the crossing. Yet still they come.
Listen below to my interview with a migrant from Eritrea, who managed to make the crossing successfully.
(broadcast on Newshour, 大象传媒 World Service, 31 March 2009)
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