“I fear German power less than her inactivity,” remarked Poland’s Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski at the height of the eurozone crisis. More than Germany leading Europe, Europe must fear a Germany that eschews its leadership responsibilities. Last week Chancellor Angela Merkel disproved these concerns. Her joint proposal with President Emmanuel Macron puts Germany back in the game and raises hopes…
We are experiencing what experts agree is the biggest pandemic since the 1918 Spanish flu and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. It’s an almost impossible combination, especially if you’ve just emerged from the biggest recession since World War II. Confinement intensifies the experience, even though its scenes play out only on the screens that connect us to…
Europe speaks many languages, but the language of global power is not one of them. Worse than political misfortune, this is historical carelessness, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde. The new European Commission, under President Ursula von der Leyen, has raised the bar of global ambition, identifying itself as “geopolitical.” The previous Commission under Jean-Claude Juncker branded itself “political,” implying a cleverer…
A key irony of our times is this: The United States and Britain have been accused in previous decades of constructing an international order to suit their interests. The postwar Western and global system was governed by the international institutions and organizations they created (from Bretton Woods to NATO). The losers of World War II, Germany and Japan, were rebuilt…
Often the haze of current events and our political bias obscure the big picture. What would a foreign observer see, I wonder, looking at Greece from a distance? Here on the inside, we continue to see politicians who refuse to change, and refuse to retire. Some of them had a crucial role in leading the country to its financial crash.…