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Roger Lucy
In an April 2016 interview with Der Spiegel, Iran's former foreign minister, Ali Akhbar Velayti, put the current conflict in Yemen into the context of a "2,000-year-old Iranian-Yemeni friendship" reminding his interviewer of a war that took place there 1,500 years ago, where Iran helped a local ruler defeat what he called “an Ethiopian invasion”. He predicted the Saudis would suffer a similar "complete defeat" there.
Roger Lucy
FIXING THE FOREIGN SERVICE PROMOTION SYSTEM - A Modest Proposal
We all know the promotion system is broke. For years efforts have been made to find a workable selection process based on the merit: all sorts of tinkering has gone on to find a way objectively to grade merit i.e. through appraisals, interviews, competencies, in-basket tests, etc. These do not even address the question of how one gets selected to an assignment that allows one to demonstrate ones merit. Maybe we should, instead, be looking at some of the selection, assignment and promotion models that have been used in the past - some quite successfully.
Roger Lucy
All Rhodes Lead to Rome - a Middle Power’s Course Through a Uni-polar World
The following is an object lesson to what happens to smaller states that wittingly or not ruffle the feathers of the super-power of the day.
In the mid-second century BC, the Greek historian Polybius, an enforced guest of the Romans, chronicled how, in the space of half a century, Rome came to dominate the Oekumenie, the known world.