For many visitors, Budapest casts a spellbinding beauty, sparkling with ageless jewels like Saint Stephen’s Basilica and the fin de siecle House of Parliament. Beneath this surface of gothic grandeur however, a determined fight is being waged for control of Hungary’s historical narrative, and thus for direction of its future progress. This fight is most...
Charismatic leaders, from George Washington to Nelson Mandela, have dominated political revolutions in many nations. More important than their charisma itself though, at least once the Bastille is stormed, is how these leaders channel charisma into a constitutional order. France’s twentieth-century experience with presidentialism provides a particularly rich example of this process, and exposes the...
“Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom,” Edmund Burke observed. At the turn of the twentieth century, both France and Germany were wooing Great Britain as an ally against the other. Why was it France, Britain’s nemesis for centuries, which succeeded in gaining British friendship? The answer is complex, but a large part...
On the heels of a European tour intended to galvanize traditional American rivals for an era of great power competition, President Joe Biden yesterday arrived in Geneva – “the city of peace” – for a much-anticipated summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin. News conferences for both leaders followed the formal meeting — the contents of...
The Arctic debate appears to present a conflict between long-term necessities and short-run priorities. In the long run, mitigating the climate crisis will necessitate multilateral cooperation, with Russia and China as integral parts. However, deterrence is the only policy that can credibly commit the U.S. to defend its Arctic interests. Abandoning the Arctic could invite...
This week, G7 finance ministers will meet in London to discuss, among other things, the Biden Administration’s proposed global minimum 15% corporate tax rate. The idea is simple (to crack down on multinationals’ tax arbitrage schemes) and comes gift-wrapped with a timely justification (to pay for pandemic-induced recovery packages). The proposal, with U.S. Treasury Secretary...
President John F. Kennedy arrived in Vienna sixty years ago with lofty expectations for a Cold War breakthrough. But rather than alleviating U.S.-Soviet tensions as Kennedy had hoped, his conference with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev instead precipitated a summer of crisis in Berlin, the perennial flashpoint of the Cold War. Probing Kennedy’s resolve, Khrushchev reissued...
Last weekend, Belarus dispatched a warplane to divert and ground a commercial Ryanair flight in Minsk. After landing, authorities swiftly moved to arrest journalist Roman Protasevich, a longtime critic of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko who, in a predictable turn, defended the move as an internal matter. In response, the EU banned Belarusian flights over the...
Ahead of a diplomatic swing highlighted by an encounter with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has broadcast the Biden Administration’s concerns about the militarization of the Arctic. Against the backdrop of increased Sino-Russian cooperation in the region, united by shared economic interests in its control, Blinken has stated that the...
For now, the standoff is (apparently) over. As of this morning, Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu released a statement explaining that the recent Russian troop buildup along the Ukrainian border was a snap ‘military exercise’, and that troops would return to their bases. This is a live story, and experts are scrambling to react; here’s...
