Western Europe Archive

President Joe Biden took office last year during one of the most turbulent times the United States had experienced in decades. Though his administration has tackled important foreign policy issues, it has also faced multiple domestic crises, so the primary focus of this first year has been on the urgent matters at home. In 2022, though, the world is likely to demand more of Biden’s attention, even as the domestic challenges remain far from resolved. Some of the foreign policy issues are expected and already evident. To start, Biden will have to work to help the entire planet, including poor […]

Editor’s note: Guest columnist Richard Gowan is filling in for Stewart Patrick. The holiday season should be a good time to forget about work and take comfort in classic Christmas stories. Foreign policy analysts, with half an eye on events in Ukraine and Afghanistan, may struggle to relax this year. It’s hard to avoid noting echoes of world events. A few years ago, I rewrote the tale of the Three Wise Men and the baby Jesus as a parable about international negotiations for World Politics Review; a lot of the story revolves around the wise men haggling with Herod about […]

Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo announced yesterday that theaters and cinemas in the country will close, while stopping short of imposing a  full lockdown, as is now the case in neighboring Netherlands.  Last week’s announcement of the full lockdown by Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, just days after he clinched a deal to form a new government, came as a surprise to observers, given that the country generally adopted a more relaxed response in the early phases of the pandemic than its neighbors. Now it is the only country in Europe so far to have locked down in response to concerns over […]

Though many of us hoped that 2021 would bring some relief after the trials and tribulations of 2020, this year has been a bumpy ride. On Jan. 6, just one week into 2021, supporters of former U.S. President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol in Washington—an international beacon of liberal democracy. This seemed to set the tone for the rest of the year. Everywhere, anti-democratic, misogynistic and racist forces made gains; in particular, the Taliban’s takeover in Afghanistan this summer left many despondent about the country’s future. And all the while, the coronavirus pandemic continued to wreak havoc, especially on the lives of those who are victims of global vaccine inequity. In the middle of all this chaos, though, […]

TBILISI—On a chilly mid-November evening in Tbilisi, the scene outside of Georgia’s Parliament looked like a bit like rock concert: Huge speakers stood tall on either side of a broad stage; camera crews were lined up and ready to shoot; and spotlights glared out over the thousands of people massing on Rustaveli Avenue. The chants, though, were not for a rock star, but for “Misha”—that is, former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who despite living in exile for eight years, was evidently still able to draw a crowd. Saakashvili had returned to Georgia on Oct. 1 and was immediately detained by […]

On Dec. 8, former Chancellor Angela Merkel officially passed the baton to her successor, Olaf Scholz, after 16 years as Germany’s leader. Scholz now heads the three-party coalition between his center-left Social Democrats, or SDP, the pro-environment Greens, and the pro-market Free Democrats, or FDP. Known as the Ampelkoalition—or “traffic light coalition,” in reference to each party’s official colors, which correspond to the color sequence of a traffic light—this heterodox configuration’s “Dare More Progress” coalition agreement offers a roadmap to confront the challenges facing the German people. Domestic issues such as digitalization, the phasing out of coal and increasing the minimum wage […]

As 2021 comes to a close, the international community faces several emerging humanitarian and security catastrophes—even beyond the global pandemic that has gripped the world for two years. Ethiopia is undergoing a complex and multifaceted civil war that has spurred a humanitarian disaster of monumental proportions, with nearly 1 million people now living in conditions approaching famine. Meanwhile, Russia has been building up its military presence on its border with Ukraine, increasing tensions with the West and prompting fears that there will be yet another attack on Ukrainian sovereignty. And in the Taliban’s Afghanistan, more children are expected to die this winter from starvation than […]

While U.S. President Joe Biden seems determined to reduce the U.S. footprint in the Middle East, finally embracing Washington’s long-discussed  pivot to Asia, French President Emmanuel Macron is headed in the opposite direction. In recent years, Macron has made repeated trips to Lebanon, Iraq and the Gulf states, and launched a series of diplomatic initiatives in a bid to address regional crises. It is hard to think of any Western leader who has been even half as engaged as Macron across the range of high-priority issues confronting the Middle East.  Macron’s recent visit to the Gulf, during which he concluded […]

The European Union’s 27 national leaders are meeting in Brussels for a European Council summit to discuss a coordinated response to Russia’s provocations along its border with Ukraine as well as the new omicron variant of the coronavirus rapidly spreading across Europe. But it appears that internal divisions could hamper both efforts. Ahead of the summit yesterday, the EU leaders met with their five counterparts from the Eastern Partnership countries—Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan—in a show of solidarity with Kyiv. Speaking after the meeting last night, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said there was a “shared concern […]

In September, several senators belonging to Mexico’s National Action Party, or PAN, met with a visiting delegation from Vox, a rising political party from Spain. As the latest far-right party to gain traction in Europe, Vox seemed like a strange bedfellow for the PAN, a center-right party that has produced two of Mexico’s last four presidents. The meeting was a political gift for leftist President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who seized on it to brand his opponents in the PAN as “almost fascist.” The PAN’s own leadership hastened to assert that the senators had met with Vox in a purely […]

Russia’s ongoing military buildup along its border with Ukraine has cast into sharp relief the debate about how the United States, and its allies, can most effectively ensure security in the no man’s land lying beyond NATO’s eastern perimeter. Meanwhile, China’s mounting campaign of military pressure and intimidation against Taiwan is leading some observers to question the strength of U.S. commitments to the island. Though coordination between Russia and China on these efforts is likely limited at best, their attempts to bully Ukraine and Taiwan raise a common dilemma for Washington, one liable to become more pronounced and widespread in […]

Olaf Scholz of the center-left Social Democratic Party, or SPD, was sworn in yesterday as Germany’s ninth chancellor, ending the 16-year tenure of Angela Merkel and her center-right Christian Democratic Union, or CDU. But while in other countries a swing from the right to the left might herald significant change politically, this is unlikely to be the case in Germany, which is known for its preference for pragmatic, consensus-oriented political leadership. A key point to note is that Scholz was a member of the previous government, serving as vice chancellor and finance minister in Merkel’s fourth and final Cabinet, as […]

Observers in Washington and European capitals who were worried about NATO’s nuclear deterrent breathed a sigh of relief in late November, when the new German governing coalition signaled it would continue Germany’s role in the alliance’s nuclear-sharing agreement. But their reaction was tempered by the uncertainty that still surrounds U.S. President Joe Biden’s upcoming Nuclear Posture Review, which will also have major implications for NATO. Both the United States and Germany have been under strong pressure from other allies, concerned about how Washington’s and Berlin’s choices will affect their security and domestic politics. For now, however, it’s still one down, […]

On Nov. 24, two devastating and separate, but ultimately interrelated, incidents took place in far-flung corners of the world. First, at least 27 people perished while attempting to cross the turbulent waters of the English Channel, which separates France from the United Kingdom. The dead were migrants from Africa and the Middle East whose fragile, flimsy raft sank before it reached the U.K.’s shores. This was the deadliest migrant crossing across the channel ever recorded, but it is not an isolated incident. Attempted channel crossings have spiked since 2018, resulting in hundreds of deaths.  On the same day, more than […]

While previous waves of migrant crossings, and the deaths that often accompany them, have mostly been concentrated in Europe’s south, the latter part of 2021 has seen the extension of that problem to the European Union’s eastern and western borders as well. The European Commission now says that, because of these extraordinary circumstances, the bloc’s normal rules on refugees and asylum shouldn’t apply. Yesterday, the commission proposed that EU member states bordering Belarus should be given more time than the bloc normally requires to register and consider asylum claims from refugees entering their territory—up to four weeks, instead of the […]