In unrelenting rain, more than sixty world leaders—Presidents and Prime Ministers, kings and princes, from a third of all the nations on Earth—shared big black umbrellas as they marched together down the Champs-Élysées, in Paris, on Sunday. They gathered to mark the hundredth anniversary of the Armistice that ended the fighting of the First World War, […]
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. Read Here – The New Yorker
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. Read Here – National Interest
Populist leaders and the legions of influencers riding their wave know they can create filter bubbles inside of platforms like Facebook or YouTube that promise a safer time, one that never existed in the first place, before the protests, the violence, the cascading crises, and endless news cycles. Read Here – BuzzFeed
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. Read Here – […]
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 […]
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. Read Here – Project Syndicate
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. Read Here – Slate
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. Read Here – Der Spiegel
From Washington, Moscow and Beijing to Tokyo, governments around the world will continue to squander money on espionage and counter-espionage. It is a great shame for taxpayers – most of these operations are so secretive that they are not accountable to the public nor subject to supervision. They are inherently wasteful and do not always […]
looking beyond borders 