WASHINGTON — Next Tuesday’s U.S. midterm election is shaping into a debate about the role of government.  Age-old differences on the role of the market and the size of government are being used to score political points.  Candidates, most of them Republican, are making frequent references to “Europe” as  verbal shorthand for the heavy hand [...]

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Article originally published on euobserver.com Remember last year when the whole world was looking at a small and cold country in Europe – Denmark – mesmerized by an international conference on climate change known as COP15? This year, many people won’t even know where the follow-up conference, COP16, is taking place. While the next round [...]

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CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Deauville, the beach resort in Normandy where Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel, and Dmitri Medvedev met earlier this week, has seen better days. So—perhaps not coincidentally—have France, Germany, and Russia. Indeed, Deauville’s glory as the acme of summer holiday elegance for Europe’s elites lasted for much of the 19th century, when Prussia, France, [...]

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WASHINGTON — Angela Merkel, German chancellor, is said to be the most powerful woman on earth. But even by these standards, the global media tsunami that followed her remarks about the failure of multiculturalism in Germany must have caught her by surprise. Her every word was dissected in every corner of the world, and here [...]

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WASHINGTON — What ever happened to China’s “peaceful rise”?  It is certainly true that the emergence of other great powers in history was not peaceful.  But China promised to be different.  According to its leaders and many foreign experts, China’s internal development would hinge on its support for a stable world order underpinned by the [...]

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WASHINGTON – A contested issue lurked behind the curtain at the recent Annual Meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) — the redistribution of power between the industrialized and the emerging economies. While some European countries are willing to cede influence, others, including certainly the United States, are not. China, India, [...]

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WASHINGTON — My GMF colleague Dhruva Jaishankar gave us this week a convincing explanation of the conditions and events in Pakistan behind recent reports of new terror threats in Europe. The events and attitudes he describes bear directly on the safety and lives of Europeans and Americans, perhaps to a greater degree than any other external [...]

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WASHINGTON — In recent days, the world’s attention has turned once again to the terrorist threat emanating from Pakistan. Last week, the American and British governments issued heightened travel alerts for continental Europe following revelations of an extremist plot hatched in Waziristan. The operationalization of this plot, which reportedly involved coordinated raids on European cities [...]

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WASHINGTON – Europe’s relationship with China is at a crucial moment, and the United States should be paying attention. With the creation of a unified European foreign policy under the Lisbon Treaty, Brussels now has the authority and the tools to build a stronger relationship with Beijing. And officials on both sides appear anxious to [...]

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WASHINGTON — Last week, while attention was focused on New York and the U.N. conference to review the global development goals, a less prominent UN gathering took place in Rome. It was an emergency meeting, an emergency about food. Concerns are growing that a surge in wheat prices could trigger a global food crisis. Therefore, [...]

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