EU

More ministers resign as May faces the axe.

Hosted by Charlie Sykes.

Greetings from the Midwestern Bureau of TWS. We’re dark this week, as regular readers know, but we’re not taking the week off! The website must go on. A number of Standard writers and editors are back in their non-swamp ancestral homes for the Fourth. I’m in Saint Louis, where I went to college…

Plus, why can't the Trump administration hire normal people?

The nation-state reconsidered.

A political establishment of long standing always suffers from a kind of mental illness. No matter how unambiguously it is repudiated or how joyously it is driven from office, its members will continue to remember the episode as accidental, temporary, and unjust. This week in Italy such arrogance…

In March, Italian voters decided they had more to fear from corruption than from incompetence. Despite the warnings of experts, they voted overwhelmingly for two parties that want Italy to reclaim its sovereignty from the overweening European Union. One of those parties, the League, is on the…

President Trump threatened to impose tariffs on the European Union, in what would be an economic counter-strike to Europe’s expected response to impending steel tariffs.

Over the past five years, the State Grid Corporation of China has come close to performing a feat that the European Union, despite its 13 trillion euro economy, has failed at for two decades: create an electricity grid stretching across much of Europe, introducing efficiencies and economies of…

When the nationalistic Alternative for Germany (AfD) party swept into the national legislature with 13 percent of the vote in the fall, the American op-ed industry boomed but Germans mostly took it in stride. The country has had populist parties since World War II, even extremist ones. They have…

If Americans think our nation is painfully divided, two statistics from across the Atlantic might put their minds at ease. The first is the percentage of British voters who chose, in a binding referendum last year, to abandon the European Union: just slightly under 52 percent. The other is the…

All politics aspires to the condition of entertainment. At least it does so these days, whether in London or in Washington. The British derive enjoyment from their national dramas, even when things go wrong—Dunkirk was the film of the summer. But that multi-series extravaganza known as Brexit makes…

Berlin

Berlin

European officials are signaling openness to cracking down on Iran’s support for terrorism and improving on the 2015 nuclear deal, which one diplomatic official attributed on Monday to the Trump administration’s tough talk.

A week is a long time in politics, and the days grow short as you reach September. Teresa May began last week with a victory, the passage of the EU withdrawal bill, previously known as the “Great Repeal Bill,” through the House of Commons. But her week ended with a harbinger of defeat. On Friday,…

Michael Warren is on vacation this week, and Andrew Egger is filling in for him on White House Watch. Michael will be back in the saddle on July 3.

Don't look now, but Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine isn't going how he expected.

Speaker Paul Ryan will take advantage of the House recess to lead a bipartisan delegation to the United Kingdom and three other European countries next week to discuss economic and security matters facing NATO member countries, his office announced Wednesday.

"I  don't know where democracy will end," said the Habsburg statesman Klemens von Metternich, "but it can't end in a quiet old age." Metternich was an architect of a postwar European order—the Concert of Europe, assembled after the defeat of Napoleon. In his old age, he witnessed its disintegration…

"I  don’t know where democracy will end," said the Habsburg statesman Klemens von Metternich, "but it can't end in a quiet old age." Metternich was an architect of a postwar European order—the Concert of Europe, assembled after the defeat of Napoleon. In his old age, he witnessed its disintegration…

Paris

Paris

Every January, Davos Man, that semi-mythical hominid whose natural habitat is the club lounges of major airports, migrates to his eponymous Swiss Alps resort for the World Economic Forum. There, he huddles in a warm cave of mutual congratulation. Last week, the usual avalanche of glib optimism came…

Every January, Davos Man, that semi-mythical hominid whose natural habitat is the club lounges of major airports, migrates to his eponymous Swiss Alps resort for the World Economic Forum. There, he huddles in a warm cave of mutual congratulation. Last week, the usual avalanche of glib optimism came…

"Brexit means Brexit," Theresa May said in July 2016 when she replaced David Cameron as Britain's prime minister. Since then, May has continued to insist that Brexit will mean Brexit, but without offering even a taste of what Brexit means. Would it be a "hard Brexit," cutting Britain off entirely…

"Brexit means Brexit,” Theresa May said in July 2016 when she replaced David Cameron as Britain's prime minister. Since then, May has continued to insist that Brexit will mean Brexit, but without offering even a taste of what Brexit means. Would it be a "hard Brexit," cutting Britain off entirely…

The European state system, Leon Trotsky wrote in 1932, resembles "the 'system' of cages in an impoverished provincial zoo." The European Union, the ideal of postwar reconstruction, was intended to replace the tariffs, borders, and belligerence of the old Europe. With the euro currency and the "four…

The European state system, Leon Trotsky wrote in 1932, resembles “the 'system' of cages in an impoverished provincial zoo." The European Union, the ideal of postwar reconstruction, was intended to replace the tariffs, borders, and belligerence of the old Europe. With the euro currency and the "four…

History matters, except to politicians.

Ventotene, Italy

Ventotene, Italy

Ideas travel, both the bad and the good. One is shared by two life-long members of the ruling class, Hillary Clinton, standard-bearer of the Democratic party, and European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker, two politicians who feel threatened by the new revolt of the masses.

After the breakup, who gets to keep the gold medals? That's the question some sports fans are asking themselves after a European Union website included British medals in a table that boasted of the EU besting both the United States and China in the Olympics medal count.

George Papaconstantinou has been through hell. His reputation as the finance minister who cowrote and signed Greece’s first bailout agreement with the eurozone in the spring of 2010 cost him his cabinet post the following year and his parliament seat the year after that. He spent the next three…

It was the mayhem that made Theresa May. Britain’s unexpected vote to leave the EU crushed financial markets and plunged some Remainers into angry, unhinged, and tellingly snobbish mourning: It was, one author explained, "the revenge of the Brownshirts, a dictatorship of the illiterate and the…

Why did Brexit win? Well, first bear in mind it's not unusual for the EU to lose referenda. Before the end of the Cold War, the only votes it lost were in Norway (1972) and Greenland (1973). But in 1992, the Maastricht Treaty almost lost in France (51.1 percent in favor) and did lose in Denmark…

Great Britain has voted to leave the EU and that may, or may not, be a good thing. Too soon to tell, as they say. Unless, that is, you are part of the elite media or the establishment left in which case, you know exactly. And these people, of course, are always right about these things.

Reporters around the world were left terrified, heartbroken and angry over the vote in the United Kingdom to withdraw from the European Union.

London

Complacency, laziness, or a simple failure to keep up can reduce foreign policy to a habit, unexamined and out of date. The United States traditionally smiled on the idea of tighter European integration. Binding the nations of Western Europe more closely together would bolster them against Soviet…

Voters in the United Kingdom will be choosing — in a referendum to be held by the end of next year, and perhaps as early as June — whether or not to stay in the European Union. Barack Obama wants the U.K. to stay put and is reportedly planning "a big, public reach-out" to persuade Brits to stick…

The walls are going up all over Europe; we shall not see them lowered in our lifetime. The dream of "ever-closer union," and the eventual merging of nations into a United States of Europe, is over. From the white cliffs of Dover in the west, where David Cameron refused to follow Brussels's orders…

Across the Middle East, there is concern about the nuclear deal with Iran. By releasing frozen assets and removing economic sanctions, the deal seems to facilitate renewed aggression. Won’t that encourage more violence from Iranian terror proxies, like Hezbollah and Hamas? The international…

Flushed with the success of its five-year effort to restore prosperity to Greece, Brussels’ eurocrats have turned their attention to Italy, and ruled that the country’s famous buffalo mozzarella need not be made with fresh milk: powdered milk will do just fine. So Italy will have to repeal a 1974…

The vote in Greece is running 60 percent “No” on the terms of its creditors.  The same experts who had been predicting a close vote will now explain why it was a runaway in favor of … well, who knows.  But count on the usual confident voices to sort it all out.  

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange will not find a home in France. The French government has announced today it will not grant asylum to the fugitive.

The crisis in Greece remains … a crisis.  After five years, during which time everyone who was paying attention said it was a crisis.  And, of course, the crisis went unresolved. The end game may come soon but, then, who knows?  But there seems to be a consensus of sorts building around the idea…

Julian Hattem at The Hill reports that:

We have been hearing, for so long now, that the end is nigh in the crisis of the Greek economy that it is hard to take another such warning seriously.  The problem of Greece, like so many others, seems to have no end, no resolution and, even, no point. Unless, that is, you are a citizen of Greece.…

There is an important difference between European and American appetites, in addition to those for fast foods: risk taking. “Investments in Start-Ups Pick Up Pace,” reports the New York Times after surveying the high-tech financing scene here in America. “Europe Struggles to Foster a Startup…

Springtime in the Mediterranean: The skies are clear, the waters are calm, and the migrants are drowning. In 2014, the U.S. Border Patrol estimated that 307 people died while being smuggled into the United States from Mexico. So far this year, more than 1,650 people have drowned as they attempted…

Bill de Blasio is trying to insert himself into the foreign policy arena. The New York City mayor, more specifically, has commented on the deaths of refugees crossing the Mediterranean Sea.

Eight days after a meeting on a potential free trade agreement between the United States and the European Union last month, two congressmen introduced a bill to influence the process and help prevent economic discrimination against Israel. Called the “U.S.-Israel Trade and Commercial Enhancement…

Today is the sixth anniversary of Hillary Clinton's reset with Russia. That's when Clinton physically gave her Russian counterpart a "reset" button (though, in fact, she got the translation wrong):

Former Texas governor Rick Perry is taking on Russian president Vladimir Putin. The possible presidential candidate says that the "peace and security of the world" depends on how America deals with Russia.

Vice President Biden spent about a day and a half in Belgium in early February to meet with various European leaders, but his entourage, security team and other delegation members required up to 209 rooms for up to three weeks surrounding the visit. While the estimated tab was $690,507, this cost…

In Athens in mid-January, two weeks before the election that would make 40-year-old engineer Alexis Tsipras Greece’s new prime minister, a bunch of cleaning ladies explained to me why they planned to vote for his party, the Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza, for its Greek acronym). We met where…

Vice President Joe Biden is in Europe today where how spoke out against Vladimir Putin's aggression toward Ukraine.

The European Parliament has called for the dismemberment of Google, the French want  “les Gafa,” as they call Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon, reined in, EU regulators are under pressure to get tough with the Americans. And the leaders of Silicon Valley’s non-tax-paying, privacy-invading,…

Only 12 years ago, the Republic of Turkey was correctly seen as the model of a pro-Western Muslim state, and a bridge between Europe and the Middle East. A strong military bond with the Pentagon undergirded broader economic and cultural ties with Americans. And then, starting with the 2002…

When Joe Biden addressed the John F. Kennedy Forum at Harvard's Kennedy School in Boston last Thursday night, he said that the "international order that we painstakingly built after World War II and defended over the past several decades is literally fraying at the seams right now." Thanks to some…

When it comes to military actions, President Obama likes to declare the end of wars, regardless of whether America’s opponents agree that is the case. When it comes to economic wars, he has no need to declare an end, no need for unilateral disarmament, because he never engages in the first place.…

In the late 17th century, times were tough in Scotland.  The Stuarts, the Scots’ royal family, had been tossed off the throne of England for a second time, and the country had been excluded from the burgeoning English system of international trade regulated by the Navigation Acts.  Even the climate…

This week’s referendum on Scottish independence may seem like an obscure, perhaps even Ruritanian quarrel to many Americans, but it has profound implications not just for the U.K. and Europe but also for the United States.

Vladimir Putin’s efforts to establish hegemony over Ukraine may now have reached a decisive point both for the balance of power in Central and Eastern Europe and for the NATO alliance. Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko warned on August 30 that Russia’s invasion of his country and extensive aid…

In my quest to write an article about my family vacation to Turkey and thereby write off part of the cost, I came up with an observation I deemed worthy of David Brooks or Malcolm Gladwell. It turned out to be dead wrong.

I taught for a year at the Kiev-Mohyla University in 1993-94 and returned to Ukraine this June after an absence of twenty years. Things here have changed.

A time bomb does not have to be elegant; it just has to be lethal, primed, and in the right place when the moment comes. Britain’s next general election is set for May 7, 2015. That is likely the day when David Cameron will pay the full price for failing to have defused the revolt on his right.

Reverberating through the chattering classes of Europe and America is the recent triumph of Nigel Farage’s U.K. Independence party (UKIP) in the European parliament elections. UKIP bested both Labour and the Tories not only in England but also in Wales and Scotland. The victory might be explained…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with editor William Kristol on Obama's Afghanistan speech and the European elections.

In the curious pantomime that is the EU parliament, the French politician Joseph Daul is a star. He’s the president of the European People’s party (the principal center-right bloc in the parliament), an apparatchik with impeccable EU establishment credentials. He has euro-federalist beliefs, a…

Amsterdam 

General Secretary Xi Jinping of China is in Lyon, France today, the second stop on a European swing, his first trip there since taking over the leadership of China’s Communist party.  He has already visited Amsterdam, where he met with President Obama. After France, including a visit to Paris, Mr.…

President Obama is keeping up the rhetorical pressure on Russia. As Justin Sink of the Hill reports:

In a recently leaked private phone call, an EU foreign policy official, Helga Schmid, grumbled to the EU’s ambassador to Kiev that it was “very annoying” that the United States had criticized the EU for being “too soft” to impose sanctions on Ukraine. Criticism may be annoying, but EU softness is a…

Riga, Latvia

On November 26, the Financial Times published an extravagant encomium to Lady Catherine Ashton by its Brussels bureau chief Peter Spiegel, under the headline “EU foreign policy chief Lady Ashton comes of age in Iran talks.” Spiegel reported, “her team returned from negotiations in Geneva to a…

This week the EU took a stance that it heralded as pro-peace, pro-"peace process," and anti-settlement. Henceforth, new guidelines require all 28 member nations to refuse any grants, scholarships, prizes, or funding to entities in Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Or any part of Jerusalem that…

Here’s a TTIP for you. No, that’s not a typo missed by our ever-vigilant editors. It stands for Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, what British prime minister David Cameron calls a “once-in-a-generation prize” that can create two million jobs on both sides of the Atlantic, and Sir…

Take a visit to the cyber-belly of the beast, to a website run by the European Commission, the EU’s bureaucratic core, and you will be told that “the financial sector was a major cause of the [economic] crisis and received substantial government support.” Soon it will be payback time, in the form…

The Russian energy company Gazprom is offering to bailout Cyprus in exchange for gas exploration rights, according to media reports. 

Recall how improbable it seemed that the tiny nation of Greece might bring down the Euro and cripple the world's financial mechanisms?  And, then, the story – if not the danger – seemed to fade away.  Well, it now appears that the even more insignificant island of Cyprus may provide the spark. As…

Growth is the summum bonum of economic policy. Tough to arrange at home: stimulus packages don’t work very well, and monetary policy produces lots of fiat money but not very many jobs. The solution: export-led growth—the other guy will buy so much of your goods and services that your economy will…

Yesterday the Bulgarian government announced the results of its investigation into the July 18, 2012 bus bombing that killed 5 Israeli tourists and a Bulgarian bus driver in the city of Burgas. At least two members of what appears to have been a three-man team belong to Hezbollah. More…

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy is moving to London to avoid France's high taxes, according to a report in the British Daily Mail. The move would mean that Sarkozy, along with his wife, Carla Bruni, would avoid France's top tax rate of 75 percent.

Sarajevo

He won more votes than any other candidate in Finland’s 2011 parliamentary election, and the maverick party he leads is a profound embarrassment to the current eurozone regime, but there’s something refreshingly down-to-earth about Timo Soini, the leader of the euroskeptic Perussuomalaiset (PS),…

After a year and a half of conflict, and despite some 40,000 deaths, the world still stands impotent to end the bloodshed in Syria. With Russia and China reviving their recurring role as United Nations Security Council obstructionists, concerned countries have been forced to seek out meaningful…

The European Union passed a new round of Iran sanctions on Monday, targeting the Islamic Republic’s vulnerable financial, shipping, and bank sectors.

The 2012 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, the European Union (EU), was lauded by the Norwegian selection committee for having “contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe.” Among various attainments, some decades in the past and others arguable, the…

The Nobel Peace Prize committee has given this year's award to the European Union. The committee explains in a press release:

September 12 was a momentous day for Europe. It saw three separate events that in a powerful way may come to remake the European Union.  First, Germany’s Constitutional Court ruled that the nation’s parliament can ratify a new, permanent rescue fund for the eurozone, called the European Stability…

A new chart, set to be released later today by the minority office of the Senate Budget Committee, finds that, in the next five years, "U.S. Per Person Debt To Increase 7 Times Faster Than Italian Debt."

This business with Greece goes on and on, and one begins to think, automatically, of Sisyphus and his rock. Only in this case, you start pulling for the rock.

Martin Taylor, chairman of Syngenta and a former chief executive of Barclays, has written a thought provoking article about the perilous state of the European economy in the Financial Times. He observes that while most of the world is quick to blame bankers, the problem is also that European…

The Hill: "Dick Armey: Gingrich campaign turned into 'first-rate vendetta' against Romney"

Cancel the competition. Mark Steyn has already won the "best-article-not-in-THE-WEEKLY-STANDARD-to-appear-in-2012" award. Read his "The Sinking of the West."

Joel Gehrke: "Tina Brown: Professor Obama 'doesn't like his job'"

Berlin

Mario Monti’s appointment as prime minister of Italy has given some hope to observers of the current crisis in the eurozone. Monti, a former student of Nobel Prize winning economist James Tobin at Yale and president of the Bocconi University in Milan, has strong academic and policy credentials.…

Associated Press: "Obama donor discussed solar loan with White House"

Financial Times: "Europe is now leveraging for a catastrophe"

The German Marshall Fund has released data from its annual Transatlantic Trends survey. The most striking finding: “there remains a very strong transatlantic difference of opinion over whether war is sometimes necessary to obtain justice, with 75% of U.S. participants  agreeing with that concept…

The riots in the United Kingdom continue for a fourth straight day. On Tuesday, Londoners awoke to torched cars and street scuffles in Ealing, police horses lining up in Lewisham, and stores and residences in flames in Tottenham. Prosperous boroughs in the capital now resemble war zones, as mobs…

With the debt ceiling debate behind us, now might be a good time to get back to the biggest problem currently facing the world economy: the eurozone. While the European debt crisis may have slipped off Americans' radar screens in the past weeks, its significance has not diminished.

New York Times: "Boehner, Short of Support in House, Delays Debt Plan Vote"

In a little noticed letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, dated May 9, three House members and four senators wrote, “As strong supporters of the Baltic States in Congress, we were troubled to learn that Russia intends to build a nuclear power plant within 50 kilometers of the Lithuanian…

Helsinki If you believe the members of the fastest growing political party in Finland, their country is the sucker, the sap, the patsy among the Nordic nations. Norway never joined the European Union. Sweden and Denmark opted out of using its currency, the euro. Finland, however, is a full member…

"You know what? I’m gonna call it. Bill Maher is the de facto leader of the Democratic Party."

Last weekend, PayPal announced that it was freezing the PayPal account used by WikiLeaks. In a statement, PayPal explained that WikiLeaks was in violation of the company’s acceptable use policy, which “states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote,…

Ross Douthat provides a synopsis of Ireland's rise and fall today, and he ends with this chilling conclusion:

In the annals of mind-bendingly obfuscatory teaser lines, the following from the New York Times surely must be given pride of place: “Germany may have secured one of the new nonpermanent seats on the U.N. Security Council, but with the rise of China, Europe’s influence is waning.” The teaser leads…

An EU diplomat and diplomats from 10 European countries tried to deliver a letter of congratualtions from EU Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso to Liu Xia, the wife of Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo at her home in Beijing. They were prevented from entering by guards.  Liu Xia is under…

Some 53 percent of Americans now say they don’t much like free trade, compared with 32 percent a decade ago. In part that is due to unhappiness with the jobs situation. Today’s jobs report might have cheered specialists who dig beneath the headline numbers: 64,000 private sector jobs were created…

The European edition of Newsweek has discovered the face of European extremism. It peers out from the cover of the October 4 issue of the magazine. It consists neither of the hoary features of French National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, nor the fresher look of the blond-coiffed Dutch anti-Islam…

Berlin

Mark Dubowitz and Benjamin Weinthal write in the Wall Street Journal: 

Late last month, EU Home Affairs commissioner Cecilia Malmström announced the resumption of the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP), under which American counterterror investigators have consulted and analyzed selected data on international bank transactions originating in Europe. (Note that…

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