Column Archive

Spain’s King Juan Carlos, who until only recently was beloved by a vast majority of his subjects, announced Monday that he had decided to hand the crown to his eldest son. Within hours, before the sun even had time to set over the Iberian Peninsula, tens of thousands of Spaniards took to the streets to demand a referendum on abolishing the monarchy altogether. It was a head-snapping collapse in popular approval for a man who was once hailed as Europe’s most popular monarch and was considered without hyperbole as a savior of Spanish democracy. And it comes as a cautionary […]

For years, security experts have warned of the threat from “homegrown terrorists” inspired by al-Qaida’s violent ideology. While American jihadists have not yet pulled off an attack on the scale of 9/11, they were responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings of 2013. Other Western nations have been similarly unfortunate: Homegrown terrorists engineered the Madrid train bombings of 2004 and the London Underground bombings of 2005. And it could get worse as dozens or even hundreds of trained, experienced, radicalized fighters return home from conflicts in the Islamic world. The Syrian insurgency is the biggest concern. An estimated 11,000 foreign fighters […]

On May 28, the European Commission released its comprehensive energy security strategy. Although the immediate goal is to avert another winter energy crisis such as those Europe experienced in 2006 and 2009, the long-term objective is to reduce European Union reliance on vulnerable foreign energy supplies, especially from Russia. The European Council, comprised of the member states’ heads of state or government, will discuss the proposed plan at its June 26-27 session. Europe’s core challenge is that its energy demand will rise by an estimated 27 percent by 2030, while EU domestic energy production is falling. EU countries already rely […]

By the time you read this column, the American public and punditocracy alike will have moved on from President Barack Obama’s West Point speech—after all, five days is an eternity in today’s media landscape. But a question I was asked by Sirius XM’s Ari Rabin-Havt in commenting on Obama’s address has stuck in my mind. What would it take, Rabin-Havt asked, for Obama’s West Point speech to be remembered like the Marshall Plan speech? He was referring to George Marshall’s 1947 commencement address at Harvard, which laid out the need for major economic assistance to postwar Europe. The outlines of […]