When someone talks about the European Union these days, it’s a shock to hear them utter anything but negative criticism. After all, there’s quite a lot to criticize, and politicians and the media – especially during election campaigns – pick and choose the details to cite in delivering their expected anti- EU bromides: too much Brussels bureaucracy, too patronizing, too confining for its member states, not really democratic and too …

Jeremiads about the state of liberal democracy and its institutions have been the dissonant theme of 2019. The West as a whole is in decline; NATO is obsolete; once proud and powerful parliaments and congresses have been rendered superfluous. Autocratic rulers like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un seize the day while Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Jair Bolsonaro seem more inclined to emulate their …

When US President Donald Trump and German Chancellor Angela Merkel met in Biarritz, France, in August, it marked the first time the two had ever held a meeting at which the dominant theme was not their dispute over the level of German military spending.

Trump has visited Paris, London and Warsaw twice since coming to office, but has not yet made the trip to Berlin. This, in turn, highlights the …

In the past several years, Görlitz, a picturesque town on Germany’s eastern border with Poland, has functioned as the backdrop to several major Hollywood films, including Around the World in 80 Days starring Jackie Chan and Arnold Schwarzenegger, The Reader with Kate Winslet and David Kross and The Grand Budapest Hotel featuring Tilda Swinton and Bill Murray. However, the town’s elegant facades conceal a weak economy and scores of elderly …

If solidarity is a valuable commodity, then the West was heaven on earth. It doesn’t matter that NATO and the various European communities started out as emergency solutions. They were the answer of North American and Western European states to the specific challenges posed by the Cold War. The actions, especially in Eastern Europe, of Stalin and his successors were seen as so dangerous and unpredictable that Western nations were …

The warming of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans is wreaking havoc in the Arctic, where the summers used to be short and cold and winters prohibited any type of commerce – and any type of war, for the temperature was unthinkably cold and storms punished anyone bold enough or unlucky enough to be there. It used to be unimaginable that the Arctic would ever thaw, but today’s say that it …

World conflicts continue to grow in both number and ferocity. Politics, economics and society are changing at a rapid pace. In this uncertain environment, there are two democratic principles to which we must remain steadfast: freedom and responsibility.

The gradual shift of power, influence and wealth from the Atlantic to the Pacific is having a growing impact on Europe. Economic dependence on China, the ASEAN states and the entire Indo-Pacific …

May 20, 2019, saw the inauguration of Ukraine’s sixth president, Volodymyr Zelensky. Despite his convincing results at the polls, the young politician polarizes Ukrainians like no one else can. The split for and against Zelensky cut right through the heart of Ukrainian society. His supporters and critics have pinned various hopes and concerns on their new head of state: fighting corruption vs. continuing the system of oligarchs, improving living standards …

On that fateful night of November 9, 1989, there was no sign of revolution in the air. Sure, change was coming – but slowly, we thought. As the US Deputy Ambassador to East Germany at the time, I lived on the communist side of the Berlin Wall, but I was spending the afternoon in West Berlin at an Aspen Institute reception with leaders from both sides of the divided city. …

In the fall and winter of 1989– 90, the entire world watched in anticipation as events unfolded in Germany. It seemed that every day brought something that would have been considered impossible only a day earlier. The highpoint was the evening of Nov. 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall – that decades-long symbol of communist rule over half of Europe – came tumbling down.

Today, individual pieces of the Wall …