Christoph Heusgen: “We have to reach out beyond the West”
The most striking event at the Munich Security Conference (MSC) in February did not involve the roster of Western presidents, prime ministers and foreign ministers who speak each year from the stage in...
View ArticleFrom Benjamin Myers to Timothy Garton Ash: new books reviewed in short
Eve: The Disobedient Future of Birth by Claire HornProfile, 224pp, £14.99 In 2017 US researchers succeeded in gestating a premature lamb foetus in an artificial uterus, managing what scientists had for...
View ArticleEurope lost Turkey once. It cannot afford to make the same mistake again
BERLIN – So drastically has Turkey changed during its two decades under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan that it is easy to forget the optimism surrounding his early years in power. In his first term as prime...
View ArticleGraham Allison: “American politics is driving towards a provocation that...
What would Thucydides make of the tensions between the US and China today? It is more than an academic question. In his History of the Peloponnesian War, the Athenian general and historian wrote that...
View ArticleJavier Marías and the mists of history
“A mist often descends over Ruán, or perhaps rises up from the river, I don’t know,” observes the eponymous narrator of Tomás Nevinson, “but it does hover on the surface of the waters, mingling with...
View ArticleJoe Biden said “America is back”. So why are its foreign allies going their...
Donald Trump’s arraignment may have been the most eye-catching item of US news lately, but another development just as decisive for America’s future happened on the other side of the world. On 2 April...
View ArticleSpain’s left coalition defied expectations. Can its leader, Pedro Sánchez,...
Spain’s current government did not exactly come to power in benign circumstances. It was January 2020. Pedro Sánchez, the leader of the centre-left Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), had become...
View ArticleXi and Putin: are there limits to the “no limits” friendship?
Since the start of the war in Ukraine last year, there has been a strong focus on the China-Russia relationship – and on whether Xi Jinping might be preparing to distance himself from Russia, or, as...
View ArticleEurope’s focus is on Ukraine and the east – but relations with Africa are as...
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, Europe has been looking east. Attention has turned not only to the support of Kyiv but to other previously neglected neighbours in the region....
View ArticleAs strongman leaders around the world begin to fall, has authoritarianism...
We live in the age shaped by authoritarian strongman leaders. Consider Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Viktor Orbán, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. All played pioneering roles in the rise...
View ArticleThe twilight of Erdoğanism
ANKARA AND ISTANBUL – At 4.17am on 6 February, an earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale struck southern Turkey and northern Syria. It was followed by another measuring 7.7 nine hours later, and...
View ArticleFrom Katja Hoyer to Charles Foster: new books reviewed in short
Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990 by Katja HoyerAllen Lane, 496pp, £25 In 1989, as a four-year-old Katja Hoyer visited the observation platform of the television tower in Berlin with her...
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Pedro Sánchez’s election battle will pre-empt Europe’s future
Riposa in pace, Silvio. Italy’s four-time prime minister is no more. Yet for all the obituaries proclaiming Silvio Berlusconi’s death on 12 June as the end of an era, the opposite is true. The most...
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In defence of “what if?”
It is autumn 1989. The Monday demonstrations have swept across East Germany, protesters chanting, “We are the people!” Pressure on the regime is building. At some time in early October, the Sliding...
View ArticleThe Spanish election reveals the future of Europe
Since 2018, prime minister Pedro Sánchez has led a surprisingly durable and impactful Spanish government, implementing progressive policies such as improved rights for abortion, transgender people and...
View ArticleIn defence of counterfactual history
What if the rush to war in 1914 had been averted? What if the Berlin Crisis of 1961 had led to nuclear war? What if the liberal revolution of 1848 had been successful? A new exhibition in Berlin...
View ArticleEurope’s east-west divide is widening
It was a chilly day in Warsaw in December 1970. The West German chancellor, Willy Brandt, was in the Polish capital to sign a treaty accepting the country’s new borders on the Oder-Neisse line....
View ArticleEurope has made itself vulnerable by outsourcing its security
In October 2022 Josep Borrell committed a revealing gaffe. When addressing an event in Bruges, the high representative of the European Union for foreign affairs and security policy referred to the...
View ArticleSahra Wagenknecht’s new left conservatism
“Who’s afraid of Sahra W?” asks the cover of the latest issue of the German news magazine Focus over a black-and-white photo of Sahra Wagenknecht, a slight smile on her lips. The implied answer:...
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Joseph Roth’s lessons for Putin’s Russia
Early in Joseph Roth’s novel The Radetzky March a scene plays out in a country orchard in Bohemia. The year is something close to 1870. Joseph von Trotta, a captain in the Austro-Hungarian army, is...
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