NATO
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Lord Ismay, the first Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), famously remarked in the early 1950s that the purpose of the nascent alliance was “to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” The conclusion of the recent NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, provides a propitious opportunity to…
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I was asked by the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) to contribute a short piece for inclusion in a compilation of expert opinion on the recent NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey. The longer article, in which my analysis of the Czech participation at the summit is included, can be found here.
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I have recently been working on a longer, analytic piece for the think tank world. The subject, highlighted in the title above, has been percolating in my Central European-centric brain for some time. The article went live yesterday at Delphi Global Research Center, a new think tank out of Wilmington, DE that was founded by…
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Sitting in a comfortable rental apartment in Liptovský Mikuláš, looking out on the majestic Vysoké Tatry (High Tatras) mountains in north central Slovakia, it is hard to imagine that less than two hundred miles to the east, a savage, and at this stage seemingly pointless, war continues to engulf Ukraine. Currently on a short “sabbatical”…
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I write this post from Terminal E of Boston’s Logan Airport, awaiting my flight to Copenhagen and then on to Prague. Before starting my European adventure, I wanted to share my latest analytic piece for the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), which was published online earlier today. The article addresses the recent elections in Bulgaria,…
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The rapturous celebrations on the banks of the Danube in central Budapest on the night of April 12, 2026 were testament to the political earthquake that the small Central Europe nation had just experienced. After 16 years of increasingly autocratic rule by Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party, the Hungarian populace voted overwhelmingly to move…
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Given the significance of the recent (April 12) Hungarian elections, I put together a quick analysis for the Foreign Policy Research Institute of their ramifications for Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. The piece went live today and can be accessed here. I will also be posting a second article—for the local papers—on this blog…
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The Foreign Policy Research Institute published this morning another of my analytic pieces on Central Europe, this time on the Czech Republic. If interested, the article can be found here. I had not planned to write another newspaper article for a few weeks but the Middle East war certainly deserves my attention. Consequently, I may…
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While the Beatles feature in the title of this commentary, the lyrics from another British rock and roll band offer a practical framework as the warring sides in the ongoing conflict in Eastern Europe probe for an acceptable offramp after four years of bloodshed. You can’t always get what you want But if you try…
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At a recent speech in Detroit, President Trump summed up his first year in office thusly: “I told you we were going to do a lot of things, Nobody thought it was going to turn out like this. This has been crazy.” When it comes to Trump 2.0’s foreign policy over the past 12 months,…
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