When Angela Merkel took office as Federal Chancellor in 2005, she was more prepared for the challenges on the EU’s eastern border than any other West European head of government. However, Berlin had, already before Merkel’s take over of the chancellorship, sent wrong signals to the new neo-imperial leadership in Moscow by inviting Putin to the Bundestag in 2001 and starting the Nord Stream projects in 2005. Consequential missteps before and after Merkel came to power put German Ostpolitik on the wrong path in the new century. In 2014, there was only a partial correction of the Russia course set by Germany’s 1998-2005 Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Today, politicians, diplomats and experts in Moscow likely wonder what has gotten into the Germans since the annexation of Crimea: Weren’t Russian special rights in the post-Soviet space an unwritten law of post-Cold War Eastern European geopolitics accepted by Berlin?
Trump’s State of the Union. Turkey intensifies operations in Syria. Merkel mends her coalition. All this in The Week Ahead. UNITED STATES: Trump’s State of the Union: President Trump will present his State of the Union Address to Congress this Tuesday, following a rough week that included a government shutdown, controversy in Davos, and revelations […]
An overview of what to expect in the coming week. Headlined by Brexit talks, the German election, and Trump’s first official conference at the U.N.
Ankara has manifested a habit of eagerly seeking concessions and funding from the EU, but being notably less keen on keeping its own side of the bargains.
If the 20th century was about an ideological fight between market-economy versus Communism, the 21st could very much be about liberal democracy versus imperialism. This could be the very lesson of Russia’s invasion of Crimea. Power politics is – even though it has never disappeared – now a reality that the EU and the U.S. […]
The European Union should provide Ukraine with the trade benefits it would have realized had Russian pressure not prompted the government of President Viktor Yanukovych to announce on November 21 that it would not sign a long-anticipated Association Agreement with the EU. That announcement set off not only pro-EU protests in the streets of […]
The snowball effect of the Snowden revelations is finally picking up. Between the revelations of the National Security Agency eavesdropping on Merkel’s cellphone and massive collection of European citizens’ emails and phone calls (as demonstrated by the illustration below), Europeans are furious and have been asking questions to a reluctant Obama administration. US Secretary of […]
The struggle for positioning in the solar energy marketplace took another turn. On June 4 Karel de Gucht, the European Commissioner for Trade, announced a new 11.8 percent tariff to be applied to imported Chinese made solar panels, and photovoltaic cells and polysilicon wafers, two system components. To avoid an additional increase escalating to […]
On March 22, 2013, WVUM, the student radio of the University of Miami, invited me into its station in order to discuss the mess taking place in Cyprus. Despite talking for almost 15 minutes on the roots of the crisis in Cyprus and the ECB’s ultimatum, I could not resist continuing the discussion on Iran, […]
17 years later the socialists are back in power. François Hollande was elected president of France on Sunday evening. He is the second socialist, after François Mitterrand, to assume the highest function of the state. Mr. Hollande defeated Mr. Sarkozy with 51.62% of votes. Interestingly, these numbers do not represent the reality of the votes of […]
Considering the unpredictability of fear-driven markets the eurozone is not yet out of the woods. Neverthless, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to say that Europe has ridden out the worst of the storm. The piecemeal rescue process has not been pretty, but the sum of measures taken – the incremental build up of a firewall, the six pack, […]
Vladimir Putin was elected President of Russia. What a surprise! One thing is quite certain, being elected was not the problem, the real dilemma for Putin may be to stay in power as long as he envisions it. Russian citizens are seriously concerned about the problems of representation, transparency, accountability, and most importantly ramping corruption. […]
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