The admonition from Washington came in loud and clear, and it made immediate waves across Europe. In late February, US President Donald Trump publicly called on European governments to finally take back citizens who had fought for the Islamic State (IS) and have since been captured. Europe’s answer came only a few days later: “What we’re dealing with here is the judicial processing of international terrorism, which means that it …

Ten years ago, when Germany’s Basic Law turned 60, the birthday party in Berlin attracted hundreds of thousands of citizens. They strolled along Strasse des 17. Juni where official institutions had set up their exhibition stands. They crowded in front of the Brandenburg Gate to listen to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with the final melody that has become the hymn of the European Union, and to pop music afterwards. And from …

The Munich Security Conference has grown accustomed to ranking the security threats to the West: Islamist terrorists, Russian revisionism or the global ambitions of China’s big data dictatorship. But today, the most critical challenges come not from outside the West but from the political dynamics within.

In 2019, they actually derive from one of the most unlikely sources: the elections to the European Parliament. Traditionally, these elections bear almost no …

As of the beginning of February, nine Democratic candidates had announced a bid for the US presidency; The New York Times estimates that a tenth candidate is “all but certain to run” and identifies three more as “likely to run” and an additional nine who “might run.” That adds up to a potential 21 candidates on the Democratic side, plus Starbucks CEO Howard Schulz’s possible candidacy as an Independent.

Of …

A character in the Hemingway novel The Sun Also Rises, asked how he went bankrupt, responds, “gradually and then suddenly.” That is a fair description of how the world order collapsed before the two world wars. Unfortunately, Americans and Europeans have since forgotten how quickly it can happen, how quickly graver threats than we anticipate can emerge to catch us physically and psychologically unprepared. One would think it hard to …

A look at Western Europe’s postwar history helps illuminate what served as its foreign policy’s point of departure in the past, and the foundation that undergirds its foreign policy moving forward. We can view the outcome of World War II as a global overthrow of Europe. In a matter of a few years, European imperialists and colonial masters found that their role on the global stage had changed completely. The …

A growing security threat at Europe’s southern borders has remained unacknowledged for almost a century. It has never been conceived in military terms and, I believe, rightfully so. But it has been depoliticized as merely a matter of economic expediency – the intake, first, of a cheap and much needed low-skilled labor force and, then, of a vital demographic to rejuvenate the Old Continent’s faltering social security systems, “retirement fodder” …

All through December 2018, a hacker by the online handle “Orbit” teased and tantalized his followers, releasing a new heap of hacked emails, chatlogs and home addresses each day. At first, German comedians, YouTube stars, rappers and TV stars were the only ones affected, with the media and public commenting and sharing the information that went viral. But then the real target, over 1,000 politicians from the Free Democrats and …

This year’s Munich Security Conference (MSC) – the security and foreign policy twin of the Davos World Economic Forum – convened under dark clouds of doom and gloom. The over 800 participants – among them 19 presidents, 13 heads of government, 83 ministers of defense and foreign affairs, a 50-person US congressional delegation, high-ranking diplomats and military officers from all over the globe – came together at a time when …

In late 2018, one of Germany’s most venerated and long-standing companies stopped being German. Linde AG was founded in 1879 by Carl Linde, the inventor of the refrigerator, and rose to become the world’s largest supplier of industrial gases, including oxygen and nitrogen. Late last year, it merged with its US competitor Praxair. Today, the new company, Linde plc, has its head offices in Dublin instead of Munich – for …