Open Dialogue Research Journal
It was a speech unhinged in millenarian zeal. It was unapologetically hysterical in urging war while claiming to protect peace. It was also delivered with a note of profound self-denial: the US administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy had belittled Europe’s efforts in terms of ensuring its own security, not least […]
The United Nations, in turning 80, has been berated, dismissed and libelled. In September, US President Donald Trump took a hearty swipe at the body’s alleged impotence. “What is the purpose of the United Nations?” he posed to gathered world leaders. All it seemed to do was “write a really […]
In one of his many cutting observations about the fallibility of politicians, H. L. Mencken had this to say about the practical sort: “It is his business to convince the mob (a) that it is confronted by some grave danger, some dreadful menace to its peace and security, and (b) […]
Pete Hegseth, the soap opera styled US Secretary of Defense, sports a questionable sanity. His behaviour before generals is the stuff of low comedy. His mania about sending narco-traffickers making passage on the sea from Venezuela to a watery grave has a millenarian zeal. But psychological coarseness and imperfection have […]
A ceasefire can be a strange thing. The assumption, generally speaking, is that the parties to it restrain themselves for a period of time, ordering their forces and disciplining their charges from straying. But straying happens, transgressions inevitable. Some are genuine enough: silly misunderstandings, hot headed confusion, a fear that […]
The authorities in Türkiye have hit their stride regarding international humanitarian law, a subject they are not always consistent about. The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the defence minister Israel Katz, and others, are facing arrest warrants for genocide from the Istanbul Criminal Court of Peace. This is plucky, assertive, […]
It began with a revelation in The Telegraph on November 3. The paper had seen an internal memo in the BBC pointing to editing on its October 2024 Panorama programme of two parts of US President Donald Trump’s speech in January 2021. The sin was not in the editing but […]
Why trust these gold seeking buffoons of questionable expertise? Overpaid as they are by gullible clients who really ought to know better, consultancy firms are now getting paid for work done by non-humans, conventionally called “generative artificial intelligence”. Occupying some kind of purgatorial space of amoral pursuit, these vague, private […]
Instead of satirising nuclear war – a possible if difficult thing to do – the time has come to satirise the laying off and furlough of those who solemnly monitor and maintain such machinery fit, not for preserving life so much as ending it at a fiery, radiated terminus. If […]
The October 20 performance saw few transgressions and many feats of compliance. As a guest in the White House, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was in no mood to be combative, and US President Donald Trump was accommodating. There was, however, an odd nervous glance shot at the host at […]
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