To the inhabitants of the British Isles, the nations of central Europe have always existed in a semi–mythical space, near enough to be recognised as somehow European, but too distant to be taken seriously. Neville Chamberlain dismissed them as ‘faraway countries of which we know little’; Shakespeare gave landlocked Bohemia a coastline. In British school […]
After many weeks of claiming, dishonestly, that European allies “owe us a tremendous amount of money for many years back” — in fact, Europeans spend far more money on European defense than does the United States — and after referring to NATO members as “delinquent” and worse, President Trump appears to have handed America’s European
Europe needs to start planning for a future with no U.S. Read More »
In the United States, a country where Cabinet members now resign with great regularity, the departures of David Davis, the British cabinet minister responsible for Britain leaving the European Union, and Boris Johnson, the shaggy-haired foreign secretary, may not seem like much of a story. Theresa May, the prime minister, for the first time in
Brexit turned out to be harder than they thought — so the Brexiteers are quitting Read More »
“We really believed in our hearts that this was the dawn of the new day we had all been praying for,” Harry Hopkins told his biographer. “We were absolutely certain that we had won the first great victory of peace.” Hopkins, one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s most important advisers, was not the only one
Trump is hinting at concessions to Putin. So what do we get back? Read More »
There was a moment, at the height of the Greek debt crisis in July 2015, when many Athenians went to sleep expecting to wake up in a different country. One Greek academic told me he feared Greece would crash out of the euro currency overnight, that there would be no money in the banks in
The reputation of Washington as a heartless, power-crazed city, a place for the hard-eyed and the coldblooded, is not entirely undeserved. There is a lot at stake in the capital of a superpower: the fate of whole countries, the shaping of culture and education, millions and billions of dollars. Many who arrive in Washington from
It is remarkable, in retrospect, how many and varied were the dictatorships of the past century. Murderous regimes — states that killed large numbers of their own citizens for political reasons — arose in every possible type of society. Communist, fascist and tribal ideologies evolved in places whose cultural histories, economic status and religious traditions
The dark history behind Trump’s inflammatory language Read More »
“Virtue-signaling” is a snide little phrase that people vaguely of the “right” invented to tease people vaguely of the “left.” Like “limousine liberal” or “champagne socialist,” it implies insincerity and self-righteousness. Those who brag about doing something good — say, riding their bicycle to work every day — are said to be “virtue-signaling” their desire
In the old days, these things were done differently. There were KGB couriers, bags of cash, “Moscow gold,” secret subsidies for far-left printing presses: The Soviet Communist Party was seeking to undermine Western democracy, covertly. But it was all pretty small-scale. The U.S.S.R. was not rolling in wealth, and it was never in a position
Scruffy, yellowish-brown buildings are bunched around a long courtyard; portable toilets and generators have been set up on the dusty ground beside. Inside, military-grade laptops, the kind that don’t break if you drop them, are arrayed along a series of tables, their cables spooling off onto the floor. Men from different countries, some dressed in
