Forty-four European leaders, all the current and candidate EU member-states, the whole of geographical Europe and its neighborhood to the east, as far as Armenia and Azerbaijan. The European Political Community (EPoC) Summit was an important event, at the level of symbolism if nothing else. And beyond that? President Emmanuel Macron’s initiative seeks to consolidate the EU’s position as the…
How much authoritarianism can a society take when they can have a measure of comparison with the free world? In Russia, citizens are reacting to Vladimir Putin’s military conscription by voicing their dissent or by queuing to exit the country. In Iran, the “guardians of morality” are shock testing their theocracy’s resilience against the resistance of brave women aspiring for…
Russian President Vladimir Putin has always been eager to share an instructive story from his childhood, about how, when he was growing up in poverty in Soviet Leningrad, he used to spend his days chasing rats. And how he once cornered a big rat. With no way out, the rat launched itself at him and bit his face. The threat…
Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine has sparked a new introspection in the West. A number of commentators, most of them writing from the US and the UK, have come up with their latest scapegoat: Germany’s to blame, they say, with its decades-long policy of appeasing Russia. Really? People love to dislike Germany. Often for good reasons. Successive Merkel administrations were…
It’s been one crisis after another for the last 20 years. Greece has been at the center of some, and battered by the tidal-wave aftershocks of others. The 21st century began with the attack on the Twin Towers. The West awoke to the asymmetric threat of radical Islam, a threat it would find itself confronting at home (UK, Spain, France)…