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The Sick Man Is Europe
Something other than leaves will fall in Europe this autumn. American attention, no doubt, will focus on Barack Obama’s date with an angry electorate this November. Yet across the pond, governments of the right, left and center in Europe appear ready to crumble, their positions eroded by a wave of austerity, high unemployment and government debt, plus a smattering of nasty corruption scandals.
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Beijing’s ‘Own Goal’
One of the many theories about North Korea which appears to float on thin air (and make no mistake, most of them do) goes something like this: China, the one country with real leverage on crazy Kim and his gulag, loves the status quo. Like that guy in your neighborhood who walks around with the pit bull straining against his leash, the Chinese parade their influence on the Pygmy of Pyongyang, as if to remind the neighborhood that without the strong hand of his masters in Beijing, Kim Jong-il’s steroid fed army of Stalinist zealots would run amok all over East Asia.
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Beyond the Euro: German Foreign Policy Unbound
Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from a larger RGE Analysis, “Uncertain Giant: Germany’s Changing Role in Europe” by Katharina Jungen and Michael Moran, May 24, 2010.
The events of the past several months in the eurozone have accelerated a dynamic that German policy makers—within Germany and among some of its allies—have tried for decades to smother. Since the end of the Cold War, which removed the existential threat of Soviet invasion from the political debate, Germany’s increasing share of EU GDP, coupled with increasing demands from the U.S. and others that Berlin shoulder more of a burden on the international stage, have encouraged a “coming out” process for German foreign policy.
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The Middle Makes Its Move
If anyone needed reminding that the American Century is over, Turkey and Brazil provided it by giving notice that they won’t stand aside as another nuclear nonproliferation crisis slides toward armed conflict. The standoff between the U.S. and its allies in Israel and Western Europe on one side, and Iran and its sympathizers around the world on the other, may or may not end in violence. But the surprise Turkish – Brazilian diplomatic coup this week makes it clear that nations once relegated to the second-tier of influence in the world refuse to watch from the sidelines in deference to American power this time around.
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Despite Appearances, Score One for Moscow in Kyrgyz Unrest
The conspiracy mongers should be having a field day. Just a few months before the expiration of a fragile agreement granting the U.S. military access to a strategically vital airbase in the Kyrgyz city of Manas – a base that represents the lynch pin of the Afghan war’s logistical chain – an opposition rising ousts the president and installs as caretaker the former Kyrgyz ambassador to the United States.
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Washington’s Dirty Secret: ‘Bipartisanship’ Returns, at Least on Foreign Policy
As Washington has torn itself asunder over health care, a surprising word has crept back into foreign policymaking circles: bipartisanship. To a surprising degree, especially on the big issues of Iraq, Afghanistan/Pakistan and North Korea, President Obama’s administration has found allies across the policy barricades to bolster his approach to the rest of the world.
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Choppy Waters Rock the Trans-Atlantic Relationship
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Each day in recent weeks has brought new evidence of troubles in the once stalwart “trans-Atlantic relationship,” the outdated misnomer for ties between Washington and its major Western European partners: Britain, France, Germany and more recently, the European Union. Disputes and slights – some real, some imagined – have led to speculation about a drift in a relationship that dominated (and indeed founded) most of the global institutions of the second half of the 20th century. While few see any evidence of an actual rivalry between the two sides, it’s possible that the combined damage to the relationship caused by the 2003 Iraq War and then the global financial crisis in 2008 has altered the way the major players view each other. In particular, hopes that maturing EU institutions could simplify this relationship so far remain unfulfilled. Ties between various individual European states and Washington vary greatly, with Poland and the Baltic states on the warm end and an increasingly disgruntled Turkey and bellicose Russia on the other.
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Beware of Greeks Buying Ships
How Secret Greek Military Spending, and Cold War Thinking, Helped Push the Eurozone to the Brink of Disaster
In the final moments of Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant Cold War farce Dr. Strangelove, the American president and his military advisors are evacuating the war room, having bumbled with the Soviet Union into a full exchange of nuclear weapons that will destroy most life on earth. As they head to their subterranean bunker, the hawkish Gen. Turgidson (played by George C. Scott) has a brainstorm about the world survivors will emerge into a century later when the fallout dissipates.
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Fake Left, Cut Right, Drive Down the Middle
It’s a move that should be second nature to a practitioner of Southside Chicago basketball. Driving forward, shoulder down with the basket always the ultimate goal, it’s sometimes necessary to pause, look your defender in the eye and throw a head fake. The fake has to be convincing or you’re just not going to score. But done properly, the head fake clears the lane, sending your opponent lunging in the wrong direction as you charge toward the hoop.
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Dodd Unbound
Beyond the political calculations sparked by Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd’s decision to retire, the decision of the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee to relieve himself of electoral considerations a full year before his term is up may carry deep implications for various flavors of financial reform legislation making their way through Congress. Indeed, given Connecticut’s “blue state” tendencies, and the fact that Dodd’s poll numbers had been lagging badly ever since the revelation that he accepted a “sweetheart” mortgage from Countrywide back in 2003, his retirement – politically – is something of a gift to Democrats hoping to hold onto the Senate in the next election. The once formidable vote-getter who won five terms in the Senate is by now, at best, damaged goods in the political sense.