In the five weeks since the Germans first requested peace negotiations, half a million casualties had been added to the war’s toll. As the delegates talked, Germany continued to collapse from within: inspired by the Russian Revolution, workers and soldiers were forming soviets, or councils.
When German chancellor Angela Merkel started attending her first international summits, she would mingle with Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac and George W. Bush. All are long gone—but until today Merkel appeared to be the permanent stabilizing fixture in international politics.
As China expands its influence around the world, Europe has become a prime destination for Chinese investment and infrastructure projects. Chinese companies have poured over $300 billion into the Continent over the past decade, lately under the Belt and Road Initiative, to acquire strategic assets in Western Europe, develop energy and port infrastructure in Southern Europe and increase transport connectivity to Eastern Europe.
It was a moment Germans might call a Katastrophe. No translation needed. At what was supposed to be a simple breakfast meeting, President Donald Trump kicked off this week’s annual NATO summit with a televised tirade belittling Germany as “captive to Russia” over its energy policy and sneering at the country’s military spending levels.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan is set to be sworn in as president of Turkey after his election victory last month which allowed him to keep his post with increased powers. The inauguration ceremony on Monday will be attended by dozens of foreign leaders and dignitaries, including Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani.
Turkey’s relations with the West have never been as tense and turbulent as under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In addition, few governments in the Middle East appear to be enamoured with Ankara’s interference in the region’s affairs. Following Erdogan’s recent electoral victory, however, it is ties with the West that will determine much, especially now that Erdogan is effectively Turkey’s sole ruler following implementation of constitutional amendments adopted in 2017.
Since the European Union’s migration crisis peaked in 2015, the number of illegal migrants arriving in the EU has fallen by 95%. Migration challenges remain, and reform of the EU’s methods for managing immigration is desperately needed, as the recent scandalous treatment of the Aquarius rescue vessel, which Italy and Malta turned away, made all too clear. But the timing of the immigration talks held by European leaders in Brussels last month was more a reflection of domestic political crises than a response to a spike in new arrivals.
In the past, Europeans often diminished the value of geography, which would have demanded a closer relationship with Russia, in favour of the geography of values, which justified a transatlantic orientation. When the US is led by an administration that is betraying those values, however, that argument no longer applies.
Seventy-three years ago, on Monday, Adolf Hitler killed himself in his Berlin bunker alongside his wife of one day, Eva Braun. With the Red Army closing in, their bodies were hastily burned and buried in a shell crater in the nearby garden. That’s the official story anyway.
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With a wayward president at the helm in the United States, the world has become a more dangerous place. In response, though, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is once again steering Germany to the foreign policy sidelines, clearing the way for French President Emmanuel Macron.
