A number of media outlets interviewed people trapped inside last week's Mumbai siege to get their perspective on breaking events. ABC Radio National's flagship current affairs program, AM, was among them, with anchor Tony Eastley interviewing Australian businessman Garrick Harvison, who was hiding in the Oberoi Hotel.

My colleague Rory Medcalf was quite right to point to the possibility that the terrorists, or their sympathisers in Pakistan, were monitoring the international media to gather intelligence about the siege. In that context, we must surely ask whether it was responsible for Eastley to pursue this line of questioning with Harvison:

TONY EASTLEY: When I look at a picture of the Oberoi Hotel and we see them on our television sets here, from the outside the building looks quite calm at the moment. Are you high up in the Oberoi? What level are you on?

An American civics lesson, courtesy of Stephen Colbert:

Here we go. The blood is still flowing in Mumbai and the media is already jumping on the blame-DFAT bandwagon. Apparently — amidst the ongoing mayhem and carnage — Australian consular officials haven't been able to sort out the mess. What on earth the Australian Government is meant to do on top of existing efforts is a little unclear.

From the first report I read, a DFAT crisis line was already operational and the High Commissioner, who was in the area by chance, has now visited all the local hospitals, searching for Australians. But apparently anything short of rolling the ADF out across Mumbai seems like it will fall short of expectations. Surely there is enough gore to go around for the pack to lay off this hackneyed topic until there is an actual story to report.

•  The scale of India's terrorism problem is far beyond what the West faces, yet Indians show tremendous resilience.
• A photo of President Bush congratulating strident Bush critic Paul Krugman on his Nobel prize has inspired a caption contest. The winner will be judged by...Paul Krugman.
• Andrew Davies from ASPI shot me an email to say that, although Springsteen did write good recession songs, Woody Guthrie had the best one.
• Typealyzer analyses blog personalities. The Interpreter, it seems, is 'great at finding subtle connections between things and imagin(ing) far-reaching implications', but 'might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive'.  
• According to this blog, 'the only single American event in history that even comes close to matching the cost of the credit crisis is World War II'. On the upside, the US government should get a big chunk of its money back.

I was in Indonesia recently and, in between reading Interpreter posts on corruption, I got to experience it first hand, as my taxi driver got pulled over by police road blocks for a compulsory Rp20,000 contribution to their pay cheques (progressively levied, as I discovered when I did the trip alone on a motorbike).

But other interesting things happened during the stay. While I was in Yogyakarta, the revered Sultan announced his candidacy for the Presidential election — which plenty of people seemed to think was fantastic news. The Bali bombers were also executed and it was quite remarkable to see the economic devastation that a blanket Australian travel warning can wreak.

But perhaps most interesting to me was the response to the election of Barack Obama. More...

Over at his Meganomics blog, political reporter George Megalogenis argues that economic downturns produce the best music, and he calls for nominations for the best recession songs.

I'll give an honourable mention to the Peter Gabriel/Kate Bush anti-Thatcher weepie, Don't Give Up, but my vote goes to Springsteen's The River:

I got a job working construction for the Johnstown Company
But lately there ain't been much work on account of the economy
Now all them things that seemed so important
Well mister they vanished right into the air
Now I just act like I don't remember
Mary acts like she don't care

Full lyrics here.

• Visit New Mandala and Bangkok Pundit for blog coverage of the violence in Bangkok.
• Eighteen thousand party officials have fled China with misappropriated money since the mid 1990s.
• I said yesterday that it would be interesting to see an Australian equivalent to the NIC Global Trends paper, but Global Dashboard argues we're suffering from analysis overload.
• Gideon Rachman confidently predicts the ruination of the G8. Why? Because next year, Berlusconi's going to be in charge, that's why.
• Foreign Policy has five physics lessons for Barack Obama. My favourite: 'Explain to the public that putting humans in space is not only very dangerous; it usually slows the advance of science.'
• Further to Allan Gyngell's post bemoaning the crapiness of many Australian government websites, Dan Flitton, diplomatic editor at The Age, reminds me of his piece from March about how US spy agencies are using their websites to recruit the very young.

Amid a strong consensus that the Iraq war was a mistake, it is refreshing to see the case in favour of the war made in such dispassionate terms as these.

University of Chicago professor Eric Posner does not mount an ideological or moral argument for the war, but a utilitarian one, using the Brookings Institution's Iraq Index to show that by many metrics, life has improved considerably for Iraqis since Saddam was overthrown. Posner does not ignore the human costs of the war, but argues that if Saddam had been allowed to stay in power, many more Iraqis would have died.

The post is worth reading in full. I would make a few objections:

• Posner adopts a consequentialist ethic, which is to say that he judges the rightness or wrongness of an action by its consequences rather than by whether it is intrinsically good or bad. Needless to say, this leads us down some uncomfortable moral alleys: is it right to murder one person to save ten more?
• Posner does not consider the opportunity cost of the war. What else might have been done with the resources used in fighting it? (Likely US$1-2 trillion.)
• Posner compares the costs of the war with the likely costs of a continued sanctions regime. He does not allow for the possibility that there were other options available to the US than those two. For me, Michael Walzer presented the best case for a third way.

(I note the first comment made in response to Posner's post, suggesting Posner is not being entirely serious with his argument. Useful exercise, though.)

• Lowy Institute visiting fellow Hugh White made an appearance on episode 2 of the ABC documentary The Howard Years last night, discussing the 1999 Timor operation. Here's a paper Hugh wrote earlier this year with more detail on the strategic decision-making process.
• Europeana is a huge new digital library of Europe's cultural and intellectual heritage. The website opened recently and crashed soon after, due to overwhelming demand.
• Obama as kitsch: '...kitsch is the willed absence of doubt, it acts as a neatly closed emotional system, impervious to skepticism and hostile to introspection...'
• Further indications that the Afghan surge will be bigger than previously thought.
• Some cool footage, taken from a police car, of a meteor strike in Canada.

The US National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World is available now on the web. It’s well worth your attention: a thought-provoking, judicious and geographically and thematically sweeping account of how the world may change between now and 2025. It doesn’t try to predict the future but to identify the trends and drivers that will shape it. 

It’s not just the content that is impressive but the methodology: in contrast to the conventional public view of the intelligence agencies’ obsession with secrecy, the NIC consulted very widely in the report’s preparation and the final product was shaped, as it acknowledges, by a wide range of discussions and debate with outsiders (including some of us at the Lowy Institute).  It shows the American intelligence community at its best.

Australian agencies like ONA and DIO have been good at staying in touch with outside views, but are much less comfortable about contributing to the public debate. There are some sound reasons for this – including the resource costs of re-writing classified material — but Global Trends 2025 shows how usefully the analytical agencies can strengthen the foundations for a sounder, more balanced, discussion about the national future. 

The time has come for more of it. There is no need to go as far as the FOI – the aptly-named Swedish defence research institute, which makes all its reports available to the public — but we have a long way to go before that’s anywhere near in prospect.

My colleague, Rory Medcalf,  has been urging an Australian version of the 2025 report. The nearest Australia has come to this was an excellent speech to ASPI in September by ONA’s Director General, Peter Varghese, looking at the Australian strategic environment to 2030, available on ONA's website. 

By the way, Sam, does ONA have the most boring Australian government website? It’s a tightly-fought competition, I know, but surely one The Interpreter would find worth running. (Ed. note: Interesting challenge, Allan. The DFAT site is pretty grim too, and what about the Department of Education? That one gets extra points for irony, as standing out from its grim utilitarianism is a brightly coloured button for the 'Digital education revolution'! But over to you, readers. Give us your nominations via the Email the Editor button below.)

There is a view that the creation of the G20 leaders meeting will diminish the role of APEC. There will be some resistance to this idea among Canberra’s long-standing APEC aficionados, but it might not work out too badly for Australia. Let’s leave to another day the debate about whether APEC has become a bloated, directionless and messy hodge-podge of disparate countries in search of something useful to do, and look at how this latest development might be turned to our advantage.

First, the main plus for APEC was the Leaders Meeting, and G20 could replace this, for Australia, without loss.

But what about the benefits of keeping the US engaged in Asia? If the East Asia Summit could become the principal regional debating ground. Its 17 members include six G20 members, so this could be the venue where Asian positions are sorted out (no easy task, but well worth taking as far as it will go), with the distilled position then being carried to G20. G20, in turn, is much better linked into the still-evolving global rule-setting framework than APEC: whatever new rules come out of the current financial crisis, they will be developed in bodies such as the Basle Committee on Banking Supervision and the Financial Stability Forum, which link more logically to G20 than to APEC.

This strong presence in G20 – almost one third of the members – gives the EAS a head-start over the slightly smaller Asian groups (ASEAN and ASEAN+3 include only four G20 members) which at present are seen by most of the region as the principal vehicles for regional cooperation. It would take some slick diplomatic work on Australia’s part to shift the action to EAS, but the logic of the EAS plus G20 is compelling.

• The NSW State Government cannot find the money for a proper Sydney metro. Baghdad authorities seem to be more visionary...
• 007, anti-imperialist: '(Daniel) Craig's Bond is an intimation of the sort of Britain that could have been, if Tony Blair had stood up to Bush...'
• Via Public Opinion, a thoughtful review of Tom Friedman's latest book on the coming 'green revolution'.
• And speaking of green revolutions, this looks like another bold move from Governor Schwarzenegger. Obama is also talking tough.

Will Clegg writes on how to regulate a financial system that Ken Henry described as 'so complex it defies understanding':

It would appear that 'emergent behaviours' (inherently unpredictable behaviour emerging from within very complex systems) are often the source of systemic volatility in financial markets. The mechanisms which translated an increased default rate in the sub-prime mortgage market into a systemic global liquidity and credit crisis, able to undermine international aggregate demand and the solvency of sovereign entities, were not predicted by people capable of (1) constructing a compelling analysis and (2) gaining adequate official attention for their views.

Similarly, the implications of any particular set of rules that might have prevented the sub-prime crisis cannot easily be estimated. The very complexity of our financial system, and the disaggregation of power within it, is one of the key reasons global leaders are emerging from the G20 meeting with such modest reform agendas. Will new rules produce public failures? What will their effects be on allocative efficiency? Will they generate new, disruptive incentives for regulatory arbitrage? Far easier, it would seem, for governments to defend the status quo and underpin an inherently volatile system with state guarantees. More...

I was interested to read today that four Australian judges have been shortlisted to sit on two of the UN's new administrative tribunals, set up to replace the utterly shambolic former system.

I once interned in the UN Panel of Counsel which represented UN staff in administrative disputes under the old regime. On my first day, I was asked to help with the annual office spring clean, which consisted of checking the names of the hundreds of open case files lining the room from floor to ceiling against the New York Times obituaries from the previous year. That day we made short work of at least part of the giant backlog as we stacked up the cases of deceased former UN staff. 

Strangely, UN personnel gave the impression of being slightly demoralised when we told them they would need to wait around 25 years to have their case resolved and that if they were really lucky they could expect a few thousand dollars in compensation for being shot, harassed, underpaid or the like. That's why the noble sounding resolutions establishing this new system of internal justice are good news for abused UN staff. 

But one of the biggest obstacles to justice in the past was the significant financial implications of compensating so many staff who had been so poorly managed/abused for so long. States, it seemed, were reluctant to cough up for UN managerial incompetence. I am curious to see how the new justice regime deals with the issue of compensation, and how states respond.

• The Interpreter is lucky to have one of the world's leading Burma experts guest blog for us occasionally. Today, Andrew Selth has an op-ed in The Age arguing that it is not realistic to try to remove the regime — we should put our energies toward helping the Burmese people.
• New Mandala is right to insist that the Government do more to help Harry Nicolaides, detained in Thailand over  book that sold ten copies.
• Five myths about the US election. Key points: the GOP is not dead, the Democrats do not have cart blanche, and the Palin pick was not the catastrophe you think it was.
• Before Mark Corcoran became a foreign correspondent with the ABC, he served in the Royal Australian Navy. Here he tells of his encounters with Vietnamese boat people as a sailor and a journalist.

I've never worked in finance, yet I found this oddly familiar (H/t Sullivan):

To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue.

I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. More...

Chris Skinner adds some valuable context to my brief remarks about Treasury Secretary Ken Henry's observations on financial complexity:

Ken Henry identified three dimensions of the global financial system:

1. Complexity and its cost;
2. Risk and uncertainty; and
3. Regulation and governance.

All of these are applicable, in the same way, to any interconnected large scale system. His comments could apply just as well to the internet, the international criminal intelligence system or the command and control system of military forces. There are significant commonalities in these three dimensions, and that should be the source of insight to better manage the system. More...

If it wasn't creepy enough that Clancy predicted the use of passenger planes to destroy iconic American buildings in Debt of Honour (1994), how about this bit of news:

In an official lunch with foreign diplomats, Icelandic President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson shocked neighboring Nordic countries with inviting Russia to take use of the strategically important airbase. Foreign diplomats hardly believed what they heard when the Icelandic president said that his country needs “new friends” and that Russia should be invited to take use of the old U.S. airbase of Keflavik.

Clancy fans will recall that in the techno-thriller Red Storm Rising, Soviet forces invade Iceland and use Keflavik to stage air attacks against naval convoys crossing the Atlantic to supply NATO, which is battling it out against the Warsaw Pact in Europe.

In a nice modern twist on that Cold War tale, Russia did not have to use anything as crude as brute force to get this generous offer from Iceland. It just had to offer Iceland a loan.

Photo by Flickr user smperris, used under a Creative Commons license. H/t to NOSINT for the Iceland story.

• China wouldn't be increasing its troop presence on its North Korea border if it thought all was well in Pyongyang.
• Last week I argued that even if US automakers are developing greener cars, that's no reason to bail them out. Josh Marshall thinks they should be bailed out, for that very reason. But Matt Yglesias shoots Josh down.
• An Australian shipbuilder has won a major US Navy contract.
• George Packer interviews Austalian counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen about the war in Afghanistan, which Kilcullen describes as winnable, just.
• Last week I asked why Steve Clemons had removed a post carrying the now-widespread rumour that Obama had approached Hillary Clinton to be his Secretary of State. Here's Clemons' explanation, and an interesting afterthought: '...this is EXACTLY what George W. Bush did to his most serious rival...He gave Powell Secretary of State and then began to box him up.'
• New Atlanticist looks like a pretty useful blog.

This is usually the time of the week I post a Friday Funny. But this clip isn't really 'funny'. It is fun and quirky, though, and it will make you think, so what else was I going to call it?

It also fits nicely with the green stimulus theme we've been debating this week. Have a good weekend.

(H/t Wilkinson.)

This weekend’s meeting of the G-20 leaders has been hailed as marking a new era for international governance. At long last, it seems, the time of the anachronistic G7 has passed, and the global architecture is being brought closer into line with the underlying realities of the world economy. 

Back in 2006, the year Australia hosted G-20 finance ministers in Melbourne, my colleague Malcolm Cook and I wrote a paper called Geeing up the G-20, which argued that the G-20 should replace the G7 as the steering committee for the world economy. So I view the elevation of the grouping as welcome news. Indeed, it has gone further than Malcolm and I hoped back then, when we thought the prospects for an L-20 (a G-20 leaders meeting) were poor. Which just goes to show the difference the worst international financial crisis since the 1930s can make...

What should we expect from this weekend’s gathering? After all the initial excitement about the possibility of forging a new Bretton Woods agreement, expectations seem to have receded somewhat in recent days. More...

• Five reasons why we shouldn't expect too much from the G20 summit. I guess a sixth would be George Bush's lame-ducktitude.
• The NY Times reports rather gleefully on a Sarah Palin-related hoax that revealed 'the shoddiness in the traditional news media and especially the blogosphere.' Fine, but the blogosphere is far more efficient at correcting mistakes than the traditional media.
• Superb photo essay of American troops in action in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley. (H/t Peace like a River.)
• Awful, awful, awful: Somali girl raped and stoned to death.
• Here are seven pages of questions you need to answer if you want to work in the Obama Administration.
• Putin tells Sarkozy he wants to 'hang Saakashvili by the balls'. And the conversation only gets better from there... (H/t Passport.)

Shiro Armstong at East Asia Forum has misunderstood the point I tried to make yesterday about President Bush and the G20. I can see how he might, so let me try to state it more clearly.

I did not mean to argue that Bush was responsible for getting China into the G20. What I meant to say was that, by convening the G20 to address the financial crisis, Bush had potentially made an important move toward setting in place a concert of powers for the 21st century.

Shiro ends his post by saying that 'George W is not the one calling the shots anymore'. I think that's an exaggeration, but it still gets at the point I was clumsily trying to make. By choosing the G20 rather than the G7 or some other institution, Bush has acknowledged that China and other developing economies are going to be critical to resolving the current financial mess. And if the G20 performs well in this instance, we may just see it develop as an important institution for peacefully managing the new global order. 

If all that comes to pass (and that's a lot of 'ifs'), we might owe President Bush a debt of gratitude. That's all I meant.

According to WorldPublicOpinion.org, 74% of Americans believe it is the government's responsibity to ensure that people's basic food needs are met. That's in the home of free enterprise; in the twenty other countries surveyed, the figure is even higher.

I doubt this means Americans want the Department of Agriculture to create collective farms. In fact, most of the world has learnt that such basic needs are far better met by efficient open markets. And it's pretty clear that consumers around the world like the greater variety and higher nutrition offered by market-based food production.

So what's going on here? I reckon there's a clue in the survey question: 'Do you think the [country’s] government should be responsible for ensuring that its citizens can meet their basic need for food, OR do you think that is NOT the government’s responsibility?'

Perhaps that word 'basic' stuck in respondents' minds, and they took the question to mean, 'do you think governments should allow their people to starve?'

Lines of grey, muttering faces, masked with fear,

They leave their trenches, going over the top,

While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists,

And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists,

Flounders in mud. O Jesus, make it stop!

— Siegried Sassoon, as quoted in E. Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes.

•  Thanks to Rory for this link: 'Asia Matters for America provides a hub for American and Asian audiences to explore the importance and impact of Asia in the United States...'
• George Packer is right — the cover of the latest New Yorker is gorgeous.
• Nice piece of detective work from the BBC suggesting the latest North Korean photo of Kim Jong Il is fake. (H/t Passport.)
• Apparently, the very well connected Steve Clemons posted a rumour on his blog that Hillary Clinton would be Obama's Secretary of State. But the post has been removed. What's up, Steve?
• This blog on Iranian military issues looks pretty good. (H/t Peace like a River.)
• New Mandala urges discussion of Thailand's anachronistic lese majeste law. I know of country experts who agree, but they're worried such discussion will just see them banned from Thailand or, worse, suffer the same fate as Australian Harry Nicolaides.

• The latest issue of Inside Indonesia focuses on Indonesian Papua, and includes this handy collection of online Papua-related resources.
• I loved this quote: 'There is ample support in economic theory for your view – it is just a shame there is little support for it in practice.'
• Here's a bold claim that merits discussion: 'The ability to get along with as many people as possible will soon become a more accurate measure of influence than the ability to form coalitions that isolate one or another actors.' Discuss.
• World Nuclear News wants to make nuclear power plants more beautiful.
• Surely this is parody: 'Our failure to stand by the one person who continued to stand by us has not gone unnoticed by our enemies. It has shown to the world how disloyal we can be when our president needed loyalty...'

Oxford University researchers have compiled their top ten list of most irritating phrases. I suggest using this as a bingo card the next time you have to sit through a Kevin Rudd interview.

Have a good weekend, but check in with us tomorrow, as I'll be posting another interview with our man in Washington, Michael Fullilove. We'll talk about how we can bring new meaning to our lives now that the presidential election is over.

I loved this story, found on Global Dashboard:

This morning, at the airport in Brussels, I was chatting with a retired Scottish aid worker. He told about his friend who got on a flight in Lagos to find it completely full…plus one. One person was standing in the aisle with no seat. The flight attendants went through and checked that everyone had a boarding pass, which they did. (Apparently someone had a forged pass; welcome to Lagos.) The staff then made an announcement that everyone was going to de-plane and that they were going to check everyone’s boarding pass carefully. 

As soon as the first person stepped off the plane, the staff slammed and locked the airplane door, despite the person’s cries and banging on the door. Problem solved.

That reminds me of a documentary I once saw about aviation in early 90s Russia, when the once-proud Soviet flag carrier Aeroflot was on its knees. A fault was found with a plane after passengers had already boarded, and the local ground crew insisted that the airline pay cash on the spot for the required spare part. So to raise the money, the cabin crew passed a hat around among the passengers!

• With prices dropping sharply, where have all the Peak Oil believers gone? (H/t Oil Drum.)
• John McCain's appearance on sketch comedy program Saturday Night Live was quite funny, but James Fallows argues it was also an admission of defeat.
• The Mark Thirlwell presentation I raved about last week is now available for viewing on Slow TV.
• If ship-based missile defence is going to be a real capability, it needs to demonstrate the ability to destroy multiple incoming missiles. On this evidence, they're not there yet.
• Gulp: a fire broke out in a US nuclear missile silo and burned undetected for five days.

The Interpreter turns one tomorrow. Thanks to our readers for their support, and to everyone who has contributed to The Interpreter's early success.

Given military issues and arms control have been prominent themes in our first year, I thought this video might be a good way to mark the occasion:

Lowy Institute Executive Director Allan Gyngell has an op-ed in the Financial Review today. My attention was drawn to one particular paragraph, questioning how the world can govern itself more effectively:

Despite the end of the Cold War, despite the rise of Asia, the world's central institutions remain stubbornly resistant to change. States that possess power are notoriously reluctant to give it up. So year by year, outmoded structures like the United Nations Security Council or the G7 group of industrial powers or the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (in which the Benelux countries have a larger share of the votes than China) are being drained of their usefulness and their legitimacy.

My initial reaction was that, although it is certainly true that those who hold the upper hand in these institutions are reluctant to surrender it to China, what is China itself doing to grasp this influence? Is there much evidence that China even wants a leadership role? I see an answer of sorts in today's Australian:

EUROPE turned to Asia and the Middle East for help yesterday as the financial crisis threatened to overwhelm Hungary and other ailing European economies.After talks with other Western leaders, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown urged China and the oil-rich Gulf states to come up with hundreds of billions of dollars to aid countries struggling to survive.

Any help from Asia and the Middle East is likely to come at a high price. China, Japan and the Gulf states are demanding more say in the way the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are run. Both organisations are dominated by the US and western Europe.

• The PM's office denies that Bush ever asked Rudd, 'What's the G20?'
• Also from The Australian, it looks like our Defence Minister is in the Robert Gates camp when it comes to focusing on the wars we're in rather than the wars we might get in. That will please my colleague Mark O'Neill.
• There is little evidence for the claim that poverty leads to civil war, according to VoxEU.
• The Asia Foundation has published its annual public opinion survey of Afghanistan.
• Iran has opened a naval base at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. (H/t Nosint.)

• Leading indicator?: Oil prices may have fallen by half, but that hasn't stopped an 'alarmingly fast paced and and widespread' drop in global airline traffic.
• Foreign investment in Thailand plummets as the political crisis continues.
• Stocking stuffers: it seems Usama bin Laden and Joe the Plumber are both working on books.
• Business Week's Eye on Asia blog says Asia's financial crisis has only just started.
• The usually sensible Thomas Barnett says 'only America can really play Leviathan. The rest of the world simply loses it during times of tumult.' Spare me.
•  It's the oldest and soundest financial truism around: in the long term, stocks always go up. Ummm...

• According to the People's Daily, there are now over 100,000 Chinese students in Australia.
• Hans Blix is hip: Not only did he get a starring role in Team America, now there's a band named after him. (H/t Total Wonker.)
• The Australian Government has started thinking about its next generation of submarines.
• Harvard University's Middle East blog debates Bush's regional legacy.
• The Washington Post reports on how blogs are keeping the world informed about the US election.

What motivates any bribe is the hope or even expectation that 'everyone has a price'. If the inducement is sufficiently large, it is argued, you can talk anyone into anything. Now I doubt this is true all the time, and it may be that, as Judah Grunstein argues at World Politics Review, Iran is simply too attached to its uranium enrichment program to ever give it up, no matter what is offered to them.

But although I agree with Judah that the West ought to be thinking about the type of inducements it is offering Iran, I do wonder if we've yet come close to meeting Iran's price. More...