This week twenty years ago, communism in Europe and China was at a crossroads. We have special reports this week from Beijing and Gdansk, and our editor Alistair Burnett explains in full over at The Editors. Please read on and leave any comments there.
It's time to focus (go on, just for a couple of minutes) on something called the Proliferation Security Initiative.
Why? Because it might lead to a nasty outbreak of hostilities in east Asia. And with nuclear North Korea in its current mood, that's not a pleasant thought.
This is how it goes: last Monday, North Korea carried out an underground nuclear weapons test. It was far more powerful - and, it seems, rather more successful - than the only previous one it had carried out in 2006.
South Korea, understandably enough, got another attack of the jitters, and announced that it intends to sign up to the Proliferation Security Initiative, which was launched in 2003 by President Bush to give states the right to stop ships and planes which are suspected of illicitly transporting nuclear or other weapons.
North Korea didn't much like that - the obvious implied threat was that South Korea might start trying to interdict North Korean vessels on the high seas - and it responded by announcing that it will no longer abide by the terms of the armistice agreement that ended the Korean war in 1953.
So far, you may think, little more than the usual Korean bellicose rhetoric. But when I asked one proliferation analyst last week if he thinks there is now a heightened risk of a new east Asian arms race, he responded: "No, the risk now is of a war."
Wars, as we know, sometimes start by mistake. Sometimes, one small miscalculation can lead to much bigger ones - and with the current state of the North Korean leadership in flux (Kim Jong Il is said to have suffered a serious stroke last year and did not look well in recent TV pictures), there are real fears about what decisions might be made in Pyongyang.
So, as the UN Security Council tries to find the right words for a condemnatory resolution that won't be vetoed by China, what are the options? Frankly, judging by the people I've been talking to over the past few days, not a lot.
Tougher sanctions seem to be a non-starter, both because China won't agree to them and because all the evidence suggests that sanctions don't influence the North Korean leadership. President Obama wants to engage - but it takes two to play that game, and for now, Pyongyang says it's not interested.
China has some influence, but can't dictate terms. It does not approve of Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions, and its main priority seems to be to keep North Korea from total melt-down, because the last thing they want in Beijing is millions of desperate North Koreans flooding across their border.
All of which suggests that the next few months will be tense, to say the least. Much will depend on what North Korea's dysfunctional leadership hope to gain from their latest nuclear test. If they wanted to gain the world's attention, well, they've done that. If they wanted to show their own people that they are still "strong", well, who knows? The truth is that North Korea remains one of the most isolated and enigmatic places on earth.
I'll be in Poland next week preparing for a special edition of The World Tonight on Thursday, live from Gdansk, on the 20th anniversary of the elections in which the Communist party was defeated, spelling the beginning of the end of Communist rule in eastern and central Europe, and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. We'll also be remembering the massacre in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, that same June day in 1989, and discussing the lasting significance of those events with a leading Chinese writer who was there. I do hope you'll be able to join us.
Back in 1991, President George H W Bush told Israel that he'd suspend US loan guarantees unless they stopped building settlements in the occupied West Bank. The then right-wing Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir was defeated in elections a short time later, Yitzhak Rabin took over, and in 1993, he signed the Oslo accords with Yasser Arafat.
Is Barack Obama about to try the same tactic? Edward Djerejian, who was Bush senior's Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs in 1991, thinks he might be. Click below to hear the interview.
(broadcast on The World Tonight, ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radio 4, 28 May 2009)
Four years after the Freedom of Information Act came into effect, what has its effect been? Would we have known about MPs' expenses claims if FOI campaigners hadn't started digging?
My colleague Jeremy Hayes, senior output editor at The World Tonight, has written a fascinating paper about how the Act has been used -- his conclusion might surprise you.
His study has been published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. You can read it .
Politicians, eh? Scoundrels, the lot of them. Crooked, dishonest liars, in it for what they can get out of it. No difference between any of them, if you ask me ... kick them all out, let's find a new lot.
Esther Rantzen? Why not? Joanna Lumley? Yes, please. Gloria Hunniford? Sure. Martin Bell? Definitely.
We've all heard it - or something like it - over the past couple of weeks. But I used to report from Italy back in the old days, and I think I recognise something of what's going on. Because in Italy in the early 1990s, an entire political class was swept away on a tide of public disgust as a slew of corruption allegations became too much for voters to stomach.
Into the vacuum stepped a man untainted by politics, a man promising a new beginning, a new way of doing things, an impatience with traditional political structures. His name was Silvio Berlusconi. And according to an article in today: "If Parliament declines in popular esteem and party politics becomes a messy and corrupt battleground, the stage is set for a British version of the Berlusconi factor. In Italy the erosion of rights and strengthened power of the executive is backed by growing state power. Backstairs fascism is already happening in Italy; popular vigilance and public protest may not be enough to stem it."
The political commentator Andrew Rawnsley warned in at the weekend that the lesson from Italy is "to be careful what you wish for". A letter in from a Brit living in Italy drew the same parallel: "The expenses scandal is only the latest and most obvious symptom of the sickness of our system of unrepresentative government ... Britain comes to resemble more and more the political casino of Italy."
We need to be careful, of course. Britain isn't Italy, and the MPs' expenses saga comes nowhere near the level of institutionalised corruption that was swept away in Italy in Operation mani pulite (clean hands). The American newspaper the (now published only online) may have been overstating it when it reported: "Such is the extent of public anger and scale of the [expenses] controversy ... that Britain may soon face its own version of the "Clean Hands" corruption controversy which swept away Italy's postwar political establishment in the 1990s."
But no less an authority than former Conservative MP , now the mayor of London, has concluded that something far deeper than fiddled expenses has infected the British political system. "The real crime is not the expenses system," he wrote. "It takes place at 10pm on weekday evenings, when MPs arrive in the lobbies, taxi receipts in their pockets, lipstick on their collars, purple claret stains on their teeth."
The Oxford don Larry Siedentop, writing in the , seems to agree: "It is not just the mores of the political class but the political system as a whole that is in crisis ... A new constitutional settlement is imperative. It must include a British charter of rights, a parliament reformed by serious bicameralism (which would transform the party system and make executive control of the legislature far more difficult) and symmetrical devolution. The ancient constitution was a wonderful thing in its time. But its time is over."
So the political class is beating its breast and talking of root-and-branch reform, going far beyond tightening up on claims for moat cleaners and electric bulb changers. The Health Secretary says: "The inner workings of Parliament are just one aspect of the political system. We need to overhaul the engine, not just clean the upholstery." We discussed his ideas for voting reform on the programme last night. Click below to hear the discussion.
But is there, amid all the banner headlines, a risk of going too far the other way? Is there a risk that the glare of the spotlight shining on the miscreants may blind us to the fact that some MPs - quite a lot of them, in fact - seem to have been quietly getting on with their jobs without milking the system?
According to the novelist and journalist , whose partner is an MP: "People have been encouraged to believe that we are governed by a uniquely corrupt political class that requires condign punishment ... This is sanctimonious nonsense, but it feeds into a pre-existing and dangerous disillusionment with politicians."
It's not for me to draw conclusions. But I'd certainly be interested in your thoughts. Is it time for a radical reappraisal of the way we do politics in Britain? Or should we concentrate on weeding out the MPs who fiddled the system and let the rest of them get on with running the country?
Here's a really stupid question for you: Is there any big difference between George W Bush and Barack Obama?
This is how it looked to the New York Times columnist a couple of days ago, as she imagined a conversation between former vice-president Dick Cheney and former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld:
"You're running national security now and everyone knows it," Rummy says. "You got Obama to do an about-face on the torture photos. He's using our old line about how it would endanger the troops. He's keeping our military tribunals. His Justice Department invoked our state secrets privilege to try to get that lawsuit on torture and rendition dismissed. He's trying to stop any sort of truth commission, thank goodness. He's got his own surge going in Afghanistan. He's withdrawing from Iraq more slowly. He's extended our secret incursions over the Afghan border into Pakistan."
A clever piece of satirical writing? Of course. But like all satire, maybe it also contains a kernel of truth. The former White House legal counsel David Rivkin told me last night that Obama has now "bought into" the view that some of the Guantanamo detainees have to be treated as enemy combatants and will have to be detained indefinitely.
That's not quite how the President put it in his typically eloquent at the National Archives Museum in Washington yesterday. ("The documents that we hold in this very hall -- the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights -- these are not simply words written into aging parchment. They are the foundation of liberty and justice in this country, and a light that shines for all who seek freedom, fairness, equality, and dignity around the world.")
But when you look at the options he laid out for how his administration proposes to deal with the 240 detainees still being held at Guantanamo (don't forget: many more than that have already been released by the Bush administration), they don't look very different from those adopted by Bush, admittedly under pressure from the US Supreme Court.
Some of the detainees will be tried in normal criminal courts; some will be tried by "military commissions" (although with greater rights for defendants and with no evidence admissible if it was obtained using "enhanced" interrogation methods); some will be released; some will be transferred to another country; and some, if they can't be prosecuted because evidence against them has been tainted in some way, will be subject to a new legal framework, as yet undefined, but understood to imply indefinite detention.
But there are a couple of big hurdles he still needs to jump over. Like who's going to take those detainees who are released? Members of Congress aren't at all keen on telling their constituents that a couple of dozen of ex-Guantanamo detainees are about to move into the neighbourhood - and other countries don't seem too keen either.
As with his U-turn over whether to release more photographs showing US soldiers abusing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, President Obama is coming up against the harsh reality of persuading the people he needs to persuade (military chiefs, members of Congress) to see things the same way he does. He prizes consensus, which is another word for compromise, but sometimes that means stopping quite a long way from where he'd hoped to get to.
So his supporters on the left are already disappointed. His critics on the right are suspicious, or dismissive, or both. There are already suggestions that he's preparing to water down some of his health care reform proposals in the hope of reducing some of the opposition from powerful vested interests. If those suggestions are true, stand by for more unhappy Obama-ites.
None of this means that he is a bad man, or a bad President. Nor does it mean that he will not succeed in at least some of his ambitious plans for changing America. But it does mean that as plenty of people warned him before the election, governing is a great deal more difficult than promising.
If you've been worrying about Pakistan, perhaps you should spare a moment to contemplate the election in India, where the Congress party of Nehru and the Gandhis has defied predictions and won a handsome .
India is good at defying predictions, and it seems to have excelled itself this time. In the 60-plus years since independence, there have been countless forecasts that it was about to fall apart, under the pressure of religious, ethnic and caste differences. Yet time and again it has somehow survived - and over the past 20 or so years, it has prospered.
And I suspect that prosperity, coupled with education, may be why Congress did so well. In the cities, where millions of Indians now live in middle class comfort, and in the rural areas, where a farmers' income programme has provided a minimum standard of living for millions more people who previously lived in abject poverty, the party has delivered real benefits.
No one would claim that India is a perfect democracy. Corruption is rife, and serious tensions remain. Yet the avowedly secular and non-caste Congress party has triumphed, winning a rare second term for prime minister .
I first visited India in 1984, shortly before the assassination of the then prime minister, Indira Gandhi, by two of her Sikh security guards. When I returned to the country after her death, I found Delhi in the midst of an anti-Sikh pogrom - as many as 3,000 may have been killed, and I still have vivid memories of visiting the city morgue where piles of bodies had been dumped in the courtyard.
I would not have predicted then that 25 years later one of the most admired politicians in the country, a man credited with guiding its economic miracle and steering it with a steady hand, would himself be a Sikh.
Yet behind Manmohan Singh are two powerful dynastic figures. The leader of the Congress party, Sonia Gandhi, Italian-born widow of Rajiv, son of Indira, who was himself assassinated by a Tamil Tiger suicide bomber in 1991, plays a major role behind the scenes, as does her son Rahul, who is said to have been instrumental in the Congress party's successful campaign in the country's most populous state, Uttar Pradesh.
Manmohan Singh is now 76, and he may well hand over power during his next term of office. Who better to inherit than Rahul, son of Rajiv and Sonia, grandson of Indira, and great-grandson of Jawarhalal Nehru? He was just 14 when he stood beside his grandmother's funeral pyre, and even then he was being talked of as a future leader.
Can you have a dynastic democracy? Ask the Americans, who in their time have elected two Adams (John and and his son John Quincy), two Harrisons (William and his grandson Benjamin), two Roosevelts (Theodore and his cousin Franklin D), and two Bushes (George and his son George W). There are democratic dynasties elsewhere, of course - in Kenya, the sons of independence era leaders Jomo Kenyatta and Oginga Odinga are both major figures; in Bangladesh, the prime minister Sheikh Hasina Wased is the daughter of the country's first president, and her arch-rival Khaleda Zia is the widow of another ex-president; and in Argentina, wives have sometimes succeeded husbands into the presidential palace (Juan and Eva Peron, and Nestor and Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner).
So maybe you can combine democracies and dynasties. And it may be, as the London-based economist Lord Desai , that Indian politics are heading for a sea-change after decades of weak and fractious government coalitions.
You will have noticed, I think, if you've been anywhere near the British media this past week, that the rest of the world has pretty much ceased to exist. The truly bizarre spectacle of our MPs' expenses claims being exposed in their full glory to public gaze has left virtually no space for anything else.
I propose to leave it to others to add more words to what has already been said, except simply to ask this: if the rules state, as they do, that for expenses to be properly reclaimable, they must be incurred "wholly, exclusively and necessarily" for the performance of parliamentary duties, how can it be within those rules to claim for swimming pool cleaning, light bulb changing or dog food? I merely ask ...
So perhaps it might be useful if I bring you up to date with what else has been happening out there in the big wide world, while you've been concentrating on the minutiae of MPs' domestic financial arrangements. (Oh yes, and one other thing: if some MPs with constituencies far from London manage to perform their duties without claiming thousands of pounds for furniture and fittings, mortgages and moats, why can't the others? Again, I merely ask ...)
Have you noticed, by the way, what's been happening in Pakistan? Something approaching a million people have fled their homes to escape from a full-scale army offensive against the Taleban in the Swat Valley region of North-West Frontier Province. That's apparently the biggest movement of humankind since the genocide in Rwanda 15 years ago - and there is growing international concern about the effect it could have on the already shaky stability of the country.
Have you been keeping up with the bloody end game being played out in north-eastern Sri Lanka? The army is continuing to pound away at the remnants of the Tamil Tiger rebels, with tens of thousands of civilians still caught in the cross-fire with little access to medical help or food and shelter. The Red Cross says its staff in the area are witnessing an "unimaginable humanitarian catastrophe". The rest of the world seems unable, or unwilling, to intervene.
You may have missed the sudden flare-up of violence in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, where an estimated 25,000 people are reported to have fled as Islamist militia groups have been battling it out with government troops. Again, there seems to be no one outside Somalia with the power - or the political will - to do much to help, in a country that has had no effective government for well over 15 years.
And did you notice that the European Union signed an energy agreement with Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey and Egypt aimed at developing a "southern corridor" for gas supplies which would bypass Russia? It could turn out to be a hugely significant step, given the uncertainties of relying on Moscow's good will for guaranteed gas supplies.
In Afghanistan, there have been three suicide bomb attacks in as many days, and violence is now said to have surged to its highest level since the overthrow of the Taleban more than seven years ago. Maybe that's one reason why President Obama has now decided he doesn't after all want more photographs published showing the abuse of prisoners by US soldiers.
You get the point, don't you? The global village and the Westminster village aren't quite the same thing. Of course, they both matter - which is why we'll do what we can to keep you abreast of what's going on in both neighbourhoods.
The voting is over; the counting has begun. And while you're waiting for the result, do take a look at this stunning put together by my colleagues Ritula Shah, Helen Towner and Lee Chaundy on their recent reporting trip.
You may have missed it, but the Czech Senate voted this week to approve the EU Lisbon treaty. (Remember the Lisbon Treaty? It's the one that replaced the proposed EU constitution, the one to which the French and the Dutch said No.)
That leaves Ireland as the only one of the 27 member states still holding out. (Well, to be strictly accurate, both the Czech Republic and Poland still need presidential signatures for ratification, and those won't be forthcoming, it seems, until after the Irish have said Yes.)
So Ireland looks set for a Lisbon referendum. Again. They tried last year, but Irish voters said No thanks. And if you're wondering which bit of the answer No the EU doesn't understand, here's what the European commission president Jose Manuel Barroso told me: "When we believe something, we should not give up. Of course we always have to respect democratic decisions, but I don't change my opinion just because there is a majority opinion that is different from mine."
You can hear him by clicking below.
(broadcast on The World Tonight, ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radio 4, 6 May 2009)
I've had another one of my strange dreams (or should that be nightmares?). I was on the bus, and I discovered a plain brown envelope lying on the seat beside me. Inside was a sheet of paper with a memo on it, unsigned and undated. This is what it said:
"Alan: You asked for my thoughts about all the Leadership speculation. Given what seems to happen to emails these days, I'm doing this the old-fashioned way, and will have it hand delivered to your home.
1. You are ideally positioned. Everyone thinks you'd be good to take over if (when?) Gordon decides to go. You need to say nothing and do nothing that looks as if you are campaigning.
2. Your appeal is who you are and where you come from, not what your policies are. In this respect, you have what I call the Obama factor. So your strategy must be to say little but to act natural. Emphasise that you can empathise. (Not like some, huh?) But we'll need to come up with a position for you on the Post Office thing.
3. If (when?) Gordon goes, you will face competition from at least Harriet, Ed Balls, David Miliband, plus maybe Purnell and Burnham. Hattie is the only serious contender.
4. Your appeal to party members should be simply: Who'll get the vote out at the general election? Hattie, closely identified with Gordon and not naturally voter-friendly, or you? No contest ... This is nothing like the deputy leadership election: this one matters.
5. When the time comes, we should encourage media coverage highlighting your own life story. We could get someone to do a "compare and contrast" between you and Boris. "A Tale of Two Johnsons", you get the idea. (Orphan, council flat, Tesco's, postman vs Eton, Balliol, Classics. By the way, do you have some good childhood pictures?)
6. Your campaign should be based on the simple idea: "Alan Johnson's Labour party: back where we belong." You need to draw a clear line between you and Gordon. Something like the new London Evening Standard campaign? "Sorry for losing touch".
7. Get Hazel on board, once she's cleared up this expenses stuff. She may have to do a bit of grovelling. Authenticity is key: a bit rough around the edges is good. (Warning: former Telegraph editor Charles Moore has been touting Johnson/Blears as a dream ticket since last year. This is not helpful, so we should not draw attention to it.)
8. On the subject of the , you will have to come clean about expenses. So far, they seem to have nothing on you, but if there is anything - anything - that anyone can make mischief with, let's get it out in the open now. And I mean, now.
9. Timing: the party conference is the ideal time to go for a leadership election. Hustings at conference, at which you say that if elected, you will immediately ask for the dissolution of parliament and go for a snap election in late October. Campaign slogan: Alan Johnson's Labour: back in touch with the real Britain.
10. Tell Straw, Mandelson and Darling to stay out of the way. No one who could ever be called smooth should be allowed anywhere near you ...
11. You apologise for past mistakes (ie Gordon!), you say you know Labour needs to start again - and you go for the Tories' jugular on cuts, cuts, cuts. "Who would you rather trust with our schools and hospitals? Johnson's Labour, or Cameron's Conservatives?" It will be essential to hammer home that Johnson's Labour is not Brown's Labour (or Blair's Labour!). But we must not encourage comparisons with John Major.
12. Did you know that Mike Smithson of is offering 7/4 that Brown will be be first of the three party leaders to go; 10/1 that you will be his successor, and has a 20/1 bet that you'll be PM on 31 December?
I say: Go for it. But one last question: Are you sure you want it?"
Then I woke up and there was no memo, and no brown envelope. Even so ...
Why is it that there are so few democracies in the Arab world? Would there be more of them if powerful Western nations weren't quite so keen on backing brutal dictatorships with no democratic legitimacy?
Ask Arab pro-democracy campaigners those questions, and they'll tell you that all the West really cares about is guaranteed access to oil, and supporting Israel. Now, a new book about the West's dealings with the Arab world argues that although in the short term backing dictatorships might seem to be in the West's interests, in the long term it encourages jihadist radicalism and increases anti-Western sentiment.
The book is called "Last Chance - The Middle East in the balance". Click below to me discussing its thesis with the author, David Gardner of the Financial Times, and the former Egyptian foreign minister Ahmed Maher al Sayed.
(broadcast on The World Tonight, 1 May 2009)
Power is a funny thing, isn't it? You can't see it, touch it, or smell it - but you know soon enough if it's not there.
So does Gordon Brown have power? In theory, of course he does. He's the Prime Minister. But just look at what he's been forced into over the past few days.
Settlement rules for Gurkhas? Defeated. New plan for MPs' attendance allowances? Deferred. Titan super-prisons? Abandoned. National database? Ditto.
There was a terrible moment on Wednesday, right at the end of Prime Minister's Questions. It had been a rough old session, and the PM couldn't wait to get out of the chamber. As soon as it was over, he bundled up his papers and headed for the exit.
Then the Speaker announced: "Statement on Afghanistan: the Prime Minister." To jeers from the opposition, Mr Brown turned on his heels and made his way back to the dispatch box. He'd clean forgotten that he had more business to attend to.
So let's take it as read that, in the elegantly understated words of Peter Mandelson, "it's been a bit of a week." David Blunkett said as much this morning: his message to the government, put blunty, was: "Pull yourselves together."
But the question is this: Is it simply one of those Westminster squalls, that gets everyone in the village all over-excited and shiny-eyed? Or are we witnessing the slow but now certain disintegration of the Brown premiership?
I'll leave the prognosticating to the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s estimable political editor Nick Robinson and his Westminster colleagues. But I have been thinking back a bit.
Who remembers Alec Douglas-Home? He took over as Prime Minister when Harold Macmillan resigned in October 1963, and was defeated in the general election of October 1964.
James Callaghan? Took over when Harold Wilson resigned in April 1976, defeated in the general election of May 1979.
John Major? Ah yes, John Major. Took over when Margaret Thatcher resigned in November 1990, won a general election in 1992, and stayed in office until he was defeated by Tony Blair in May 1997.
So Mr Major was the exception, even if his 1992 election victory seemed both at the time and thereafter to be an aberration. For much of the following five years, he gave the impression, in the words of his one-time chancellor Norman Lamont, of being in office but not in power.
Gordon Brown knows his history. He knows all this much better than I do. That's why, I suspect, he was so tempted to call an election in the autumn of 2007. He knew that with a mandate of his own, he'd have real, lasting authority. But he bottled it.
So his backbenchers no longer do his bidding. The chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life ignores his wishes. The president of Pakistan cancels a joint press conference with him.
In June, there are local and European parliament elections. I do not expect joyous results for the Labour party. In July, the full details of MPs' expense claims will be published, and the Westminster rumour mill is already churning red-hot with talk of forced resignations and by-elections.
On the other hand ... there are some little green shoots appearing across the Atlantic. US consumer spending was up 2.2 per cent in the first three months of this year; savings were up as well, and prices rose by 2.9 per cent year on year. In the current economic climate, that all counts as good news.
And if the US recession is bottoming out, it may just be that we won't be far behind.
Even so, if you were to ask me to bet on Mr Brown still being Prime Minister this time next year, I think I'd plead extreme poverty and head for the door.
Oh, and by the way, the says we shouldn't call it "swine flu" any more. It's "influenza A (H1N1)". What's wrong with the "new flu virus"?
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