When people in Germany talk about trans-Atlantic relations, the conversation soon turns to Donald Trump. He’s regarded as the source of all conflict between the United States and Europe, especially with Germany.

Yet Trump is not to blame for everything. And he’s not always wrong, for instance when he criticizes China. We won’t solve any problems with the US – whether trade issues, dealing with Iran or Nord Stream 2 …

During the critical final phase of the negotiations over the nuclear deal with Iran in March 2015, John Bolton published an opinion piece in The New York Times titled “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.”

When President Donald Trump named Bolton his new national security advisor in March 2018, the next day’s The New York Times editorial column included the following passage: “

The good thing about John Bolton … …

In May, the Federal Republic turned 70, making it by far the longest-lasting political formation in the history of modern Germany. It will soon have outlived the German Empire (1871–1918), the interwar Weimar Republic (1918–1933) and the Third Reich (1933–1945) combined.

The Federal Republic is a remarkable democratic success story and the only such story in German history. Built on the ashes of the Nazi dictatorship, it has become a …

The hegemonic transition from the UK to the US was peaceful and promised normative continuity. The hegemonic transition to China will be conflictual and accompanied by a shift in the normative paradigm.

On Feb. 17, 1941, Henry Luce published his essay, “The American Century,” in Life Magazine. He meant, of course, the 20th century, during which the US established the basis for its international leadership in all areas, and called …

They do, in fact, exist – women in leadership positions in Germany. Janina Kugel and Lisa Davis, for example. And, since the beginning of this year, Birgit Bohles. The first two women are board members at Siemens and the third recently made it onto the board of directors at Deutsche Telekom. There are others, as well: Renata Jungo Brüngger and Britta Seeger, for example, are two management executives at Daimler …

Economically, at least, things are just fine between the United States and Germany. Bilateral trade is flourishing. America is the biggest consumer of German goods worldwide, ahead of France and China. Exports across the Atlantic rose last year by 1.5 percent to €113.5 billion. In 2018, imports from the US into Germany grew even more rapidly, rising by 4 percent to €64.6 billion. The bilateral trade surplus with the US …

In 2010, The Washington Post ran a Tom Toles cartoon that regrettably seems to become more and more relevant from year to year. The cartoon depicts researchers in 2060 still searching for a breakthrough technology to solve climate change; what they’ve come up with is a time machine to take the scientists 50 years back to the point in time when humanity should have put a price on CO2. From …

It was a bit of good news, at least for the Rheinische Post: “Facebook is promoting journalists in Germany,” ran a May 2018 headline of the Düsseldorf daily. “Facebook is honoring a pledge to invest in the struggle against online fake news via technological solutions as well as through advanced training.” It sounded like Germany’s journalists and public at large had been longing for such a commitment.

Since November, …

The city of Khorgos in Central Asia is a barren steppe. It’s unbearably hot in the summer, and temperatures in the winter can get down to a teeth-chattering minus 40 degrees Celsius. Until a few years ago, this patch of land was a small post on the border between China and Kazakhstan. In fact, it’s not far from Eurasia’s “pole of inaccessibility,” that is, a geographical location marking the farthest …

Nothing is impossible in the land of opportunity. “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” said US President John F. Kennedy in 1962. And he wasn’t the only one who believed in the unlimited possibilities ahead. On July 21, 1969, US astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the moon, …