One thing, however, I know with certainty: violence, or the direct threat of violence, of the kind we have seen in the past few days, is totally unjustified as a response to any published word or image.

Nuclear proliferation - the proliferation of WMDs altogether - is one of the greatest dangers of our time.

A central claim of the Bush administration's foreign policy is that the spread of democracy in the Middle East is the cure for terrorism.

If you had said to anyone in 1945, at the end of the Second World War with the continent it ruins, that you could have a European Union of 28 member states stretching from Portugal in the West to Estonia in the East, all of them more-or-less liberal democracies - they wouldn't have believed you.

But transitions from the politics of violence to democratic compromise are always messy.

The Eurozone has clearly gone spectacularly wrong, pulling down all the continental economies.

After saying yes to Turkey, the EU is having difficulty finding clear and consistent grounds for saying no to other, still more remote candidates - but being in the general vicinity of Europe does seem to be a continuing requirement.