Dalibor Rohac is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC. He tweets @DaliborRohac
It’s been less than three years since the EU made the unprecedented decision to issue €750 billion of its own debt to help finance the EU’s post-pandemic recovery. Despite this supposedly being a one-time policy, the idea of issuing new debt is now rearing its head again – this time to fund the EU’s industrial policies.
For Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, there is only one lesson to be learned from the compromise reached with the EU this week: blackmail works. With the deal, Hungary has managed to partly unblock EU pay-outs in exchange for lifting its veto on an EU aid package to Ukraine and a minimum global corporate tax
Emmanuel Macron’s state visit to Washington this week and the upcoming meeting of the US-EU Trade and Technology Council on Monday are important tests of whether the western world can avoid a return of destructive beggar-thy-neighbour policies which already once destroyed the global trading system in the 1930s. The most recent point of contention centres
Liz Truss’s mind was probably elsewhere when she arrived in Prague for the inaugural summit of the European Political Community (EPC) today. After precipitating a financial panic, backtracking on tax reform plans, and seeing her approval rating plummet to -37 within a week, the Prime Minister has a lot on her plate. It would be a mistake,
Today, Europe needs nothing more than a strong Polish leadership. Poland already counts among the largest providers of military and financial assistance to Ukraine, and Poles have admirably shouldered the burden of Ukrainian refugees flowing into the country. Diplomatically, however, Warsaw punches well below its weight in the EU. That is a problem in an
Viktor Orbán’s speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas, Texas, delivered everything the audience could have asked for. From an emphasis on ‘winning’, through an equivalence between the modern-day left and Cold War communism, to extolling the virtues of Hungary’s border ‘wall’, he covered it all. Its concluding segment, dedicated to Russia’s
Oddly enough, a visitor to Kyiv these days is unwittingly reminded of Israel, of all places. With sunbathers on the beach by the Dnipro, busy (though not completely full) restaurants and cafés, and hipsters and skateboarders, it is sometimes hard to wrap one’s head around the fact that this is a country at war. Yet
Poland is back. Not so long ago, the country was seen as an effigy of democratic backsliding, rather than a post-communist success story. In 2017, the European Commission made its first use of the Article 7 procedure against Poland over concerns about eroding separation of powers between the executive and the judiciary. On the campaign
‘If you don’t like how the table is set, turn over the table,’ said Frank Underwood, the Machiavellian character played by Kevin Spacey in the US version of House of Cards. One needs to look no further than Vladimir Putin’s body language in his recent meeting with defence minister Sergei Shoigu to conclude that Russia’s
Following his fateful decision to invade Ukraine, Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin has been customarily described as a high-stakes gambler. Yet the embarrassing underperformance of the Russian military in Ukraine and the bite of Western sanctions suggest that Putin is no genius mastermind strategist but a risk taker who has bitten off more than he can
Remember when the EU was going to provide an antidote to the spectre of vaccine nationalism? While Italian authorities are raiding pharmaceutical plants for vaccines, the European Commission is pushing for measures to block vaccine exports to countries that do not ‘reciprocate’. Unfortunately, European authorities have it exactly backward. Instead of seeking to expand the
Joe Biden received a lot of flak for suggesting that Nato might be divided about what to do next if Vladimir Putin limits Russia’s aggression against Ukraine to a ‘minor incursion’. While clumsy and ill-advised, the comments were what Americans call a ‘Kingsley Gaffe’ – a situation when a politician accidentally tells the truth. After all,
Forget the ‘commitment‘ of the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Ukraine’s sovereignty, the EU’s ‘firm and decisive’ support, and Liz Truss’s vow to ‘stand firm‘ with Ukraine. The hard truth is that the West has already lost, or rather abandoned, Ukraine. Even if it is not overrun by Russian tanks this winter, the Kremlin has a
Among America’s self-described foreign policy ‘realists,’ there is a common trope according to which the best way for the United States to get its allies to do more is to show them some tough love – particularly by doing less. That theory has just been put to a test in Afghanistan. It has failed spectacularly.
For a political actor that ‘believes in the universal value of democracy and the rights of the individual,’ as the European Commission’s President Ursula von der Leyen put it in her state of the union speech last September, the EU is becoming strikingly inured to threats to democracy in its immediate neighbourhood. Tunisia has been
Much like Mark Twain’s apocryphal quote about arguing with idiots who ‘drag you down to their level and beat you with experience,’ Europeans should think twice about whether they want to try to compete with China when it comes to the use of economic power in pursuit of geopolitical ends. ‘It’s useless moaning about it,’
Judging by the European press’ reaction to his address to Congress this week, US president Joe Biden’s domestic agenda is popular outside of the United States as well. ‘In the choice between going big and going bipartisan, big is winning, remaking America with government at the centre,’ the Guardian writes approvingly. Biden embarks on ‘a historic
President Biden’s emphatic assertion that ‘America is back’ at the Munich Security Conference last month was met with a lukewarm reaction from European leaders. ‘Europe has moved’, William Galston explained in a Wall Street Journal column pointing to a recent survey by the European Council on Foreign Relations that revealed a persistent distrust of the
The advocates of Brexit like to paint an optimistic picture of a post-EU Britain as an active, globally engaged power. ‘Who has the parochial mindset here,’ asks Dan Hannan, ‘those who want a global role of the United Kingdom, or those who think that our role must be mediated by Federica Mogherini, the EU’s Foreign
When Václav Havel first visited the United Kingdom as Czechoslovak President in March 1990, Margaret Thatcher hosted a dinner in his honour at 10 Downing Street. By then, Havel’s team, populated partly by chain-smoking dissidents, had been in active politics for only a couple of months. The Prime Minister did not hesitate to use the
