In early May, Kevin Kühnert, who heads the left-wing SPD youth organization – the Jusos – sparked national and even international discussion. In an interview with the weekly Die Zeit, asked whether he favored the collectivization of the automaker BMW, he answered: “In a democratic way, yes.”

Is it possible that today, roughly 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, serious …

Celebrations in Washington marking the 70th anniversary of the founding of NATO have ended with mixed feelings. On the one hand, the North Atlantic Alliance is growing and thriving, and its military might is still a decisive factor in global politics. On the other hand, the Alliance is being fractured by more and more internal contradictions that not even its celebratory rhetoric could conceal.

Surprisingly enough, one of the “problem …

Since 2003, China and the European Union have been committed to what is called, rather grandiloquently, a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. In this framework, their trade relationship has flourished above all others. For 17 years now, the EU has been China’s biggest trading partner, while China has become the EU’s second-biggest partner after the United States. In 2018, their trade volume reached an impressive $682 billion.

In recent years, however, the …

You have to give Donald Trump credit for at least one thing: He never hid his feelings about China. One year before he was elected 45th president of the United States, he wrote in his manifesto Great Again: How to Fix Our Crippled America: “There are people who wish I wouldn’t refer to China as our enemy. But that’s exactly what they are.”

An erstwhile trading partner becomes a stated …

Is Brexit a wash? The question is not as absurd as it once might have been, not since the European Union heads of state agreed on April 10 to once more extend the date for the UK leaving the EU.

The chaos in London, which has caused so much headshaking and frustration on the Continent in recent weeks, has an upside: the nonsense of Brexit and the full extent of …

A palpable spirit of optimism hung in the air at the last European elections five years ago. In 2014, many EU politicians and most voters were eager to finally leave behind the banking and euro crises that had shaken Europe for years. Conservatives and Social Democrats alike sought to put an end to highly unpopular austerity policies and focus instead on investment and growth. Some even called it the “European …

Donald Trump is relentless. He continues to
believe that Germans are hoodwinking the United States. It’s not enough that they’re swindling everyone else to maintain their high export surplus, he complains; they’re also still making Americans pay for their geopolitical security, something they’ve been doing for decades. The president insists that the burden be more fairly shouldered.

One of the issues annoying Europeans the most these days is the fact …

Several times a month, Anja Pfeiffer, the mayor of Weilerbach, drives to “her” construction site, she likes to say with a laugh. At the outer edge of her municipality, directly across from the US air base in Ramstein, the Americans are building a new hospital. The diminutive mayor is a welcome guest at these site consultation meetings. She knows her stuff. Since 2011, when she first learned of the project, …

Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the CDU’s brandnew chairwoman and a leading candidate to succeed Angela Merkel as German chancellor, has already started taking warm-up laps. At the recent “Denk ich an Deutschland” conference organized by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Alfred Herrhausen Gesellschaft in Berlin, the former minister president of Saarland mused aloud about the manufacturing of a European aircraft carrier, stating that such a project would give expression to the …

Donald Trump is causing Germans so much emotional grief these days that they can no longer soberly distinguish what’s good and bad for Germany, what poses a tangible danger to the country and what is, plainly put, just terribly annoying. At one point in time, Germans knew for certain that Russian missiles were pointed directly at them – and that it was US weapons that were protecting them from attack. …