European Union
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The South Korean president, frustrated by an obstreperous, opposition-led legislature, declares martial law in an almost keystone-cops like attempt at dictatorial rule. The attempt falls apart immediately, resulting in nationwide demonstrations and the impeachment of the would-be tyrant. Meanwhile, in Romania, a key member of both the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European…
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While some of you probably will not find this of interest, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a Philadelphia-based foreign policy think tank, has published another article of mine on the Czech Republic. The quick summary is that as parliamentary elections await in the second half of 2025 the country runs the risk of joining Hungary…
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Thirty-five years ago the iron curtain collapsed. So ended a brief but tragic period in the European story first defined by Winston Churchill in a 1946 speech; “From Stettin in the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” As communist regimes fell from Budapest to Berlin to Prague…
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This is the sixth, and penultimate, in a series of articles on key foreign policy challenges for the next U.S. president. The articles will continue between now and the general election on 5 November 2024. The focus of this series of articles has been on specific foreign policy challenges – China, Russia, the Middle East,…
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This is the third article in a series on key foreign policy challenges for the next U.S. president. The series will continue between now and the elections on 5 November. In his influential 1992 work – The End of History and the Last Man, on the logical progression of social and governmental structures to the…
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Over the past eighteen months I have written four, long analytic pieces for the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), a Philadelphia-based think tank. The articles all focus on the roller-coaster politics of Central Europe, an area of the world near and dear to me. The latest of the four articles, focusing on the recent assassination…
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According to a recently-released report by the U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC), the fertility rate in America in 2023 fell to 1.62 births per woman, the lowest rate since 1979. The dearth of fecundity in this country is well below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman, the level required to maintain a…
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Imagine a scenario in which the major powers of Europe and North America had come together in a political-military alliance in the early 1930s, pooling their diplomatic, economic, and defense resources to counter the rising menace of Nazi Germany. Under this storyline, it is highly unlikely that Hitler’s utopian plans for world domination would have…
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Two years ago Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the largest military conflict in Europe since the end of World War II. Unleashing the Red Army from three directions – the north (Belarus), south (Crimea), and east (Russia proper), Russia sought to quickly occupy Ukraine and incorporate it into a Soviet Union 2.0. The initial reactions…
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