Ukrainian elections: Poroshenko and proliferating populists
Ukraine is already in election mode. The president and parliament that came to power in the tumult of 2014 will run for a new term in 2019 – the president in March; parliament in October. However, President Petro Poroshenko is currently trailing in fourth or fifth place in the polls. He also has the…
Europe is on the verge of a big new crisis, just six years after the last one
Could it be that Europe is facing yet another existential crisis, six years after financial meltdown threatened the eurozone’s collapse? This week the third- and fourth-largest economies in the eurozone — Italy and Spain — experienced political earthquakes. Italy will now have a government of insu…
Warsaw to Trump: Let’s make a military deal (without NATO)
It’s the kind of HUGE deal that Donald Trump promised would be a hallmark of his presidency: Poland wants a U.S. Army armored division permanently stationed on its territory as a deterrent against Russia, and it’s willing to pay up to $2 billion to make it happen. Warsaw’s pitch,…
Abe expresses hope for peace treaty progress as he departs for summit with Putin
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe left for Russia on Thursday to hold a summit with President Vladimir Putin and to attend an economic forum, with bilateral economic cooperation likely to be high on the agenda. Prior to the flight to St. Petersburg, Abe told a group of reporters that he hopes to make progre…
5 takeaways from EU’s big Balkan get-together
SOFIA – It wasn’t a renewal of the wedding vows because the big ceremony never happened. It was two partners declaring they still want to be engaged — even though one is now playing hard to get. Fifteen years ago, EU leaders told their western Balkan counterparts at a summit in Thessaloniki tha…
A Reckoning for Obama’s Foreign-Policy Legacy
Embedded in any policy is some theory of victory—some explanation, no matter how inchoate or ill-considered, that explains why this might work. So too with President Trump’s decision to walk away from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the agreement with Iran so ungainly that even the acronym J…
Trump’s only possible Iran strategy is a fantasy
Jeb Bush said Donald Trump would be a “chaos president.” And this week, President Trump lived up to the billing, choosing to defy virtually the entire world, including America’s closest European allies, and raising tensions in the most unstable part of the globe, the Middle East. It is hard to under…
UN puts brave face as climate talks get stuck
UN talks have been officially suspended as countries failed to resolve differences about implementing the Paris climate agreement. The negotiations will resume in Bangkok in September where an extra week’s meeting has now been scheduled . Delegates struggled with the complexity of agreeing a ruleboo…
Can America’s Credibility Survive the Death of the Iran Nuclear Deal?
It was never obvious that Donald Trump knew much about the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the nuclear deal with Iran, but he knew the important parts: It was Obama’s deal. It was a deal with Iran. Those two crucial facts likely doomed it from the start. Trump called it the “worst deal e…
AI will spell the end of capitalism
The most momentous challenge facing socio-economic systems today is the arrival of artificial intelligence. If AI remains under the control of market forces, it will inexorably result in a super-rich oligopoly of data billionaires who reap the wealth created by robots that displace human labor, leav…