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Do Free Trade Agreements Have a Future?

After President Trump’s withdrawal from the Transpacific Partnership (TPP) and with the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations “in the freezer,” the future of free trade agreements is put …

Germany’s Priority Is Keeping the European Union Together: This Is Fundamentally in the U.S.’ Interest

In a widely-read interview with the German daily tabloid Bild just days before his inauguration, Donald Trump called the British decision to leave the EU “smart,” and predicted that other …

Europe at 60: A German View

In the last sixty years, the institutionalized cooperation between sovereign nation states in Europe has been a major success. Underpinned by a U.S. commitment to the defense of Europe, European integration …

Brexit Day

March 29, 2017 marks an historic day for Europe: The British government has handed over the official letter for exiting the European Union to EU president Donald Tusk. This move, …

A New Narrative for German-American Relations

It is said that Mark Twain once commented, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Maybe a more accurate version is that history doesn’t repeat itself, but people often do—for better or for worse.

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Leadership Profile:  David McAllister, Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, European Parliament

New European Parliament Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman David McAllister is expected to play a prominent role in shaping the European Union’s relations with the new U.S. Administration and with a …

A German Blueprint for Europe

German leadership has been crucial to the efforts to hold the EU together—while also trying to articulate Berlin’s vision without alienating its neighbors. The domestic debate over German foreign policy …

Donald Trump – Aggravator or Catalyzer of the European Crises?

This text was originally presented at a public lecture at the  University of Pretoria, South Africa, on February 15, 2017. Introduction One might reasonably ask what is actually special about …

Principle, Policy, and Purpose: The Balance of Values and Interests

The American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once stated that the essence of statecraft is locating the point of concurrence between the parochial and the general interest, between the national and international common good.[1] Niebuhr emphasizes that realism implies an obligation to see the world as it actually is, not as we might like it to be. He warned that hubris can blind realism, finding expression in outsized confidence in both the power as well as the values of a country as being universal. Any country is susceptible to such temptations.

Demolition Enterprise Trump: A Manual for Saving the Transatlantic Relationship

Transatlantic relations play an important role in how the West reacts to the challenges of the twenty-first century, and certain measures must be taken to maintain the relationship under the …

Germany Cannot Replace the U.S., But Europe Can Live with Trump

There is ample evidence that there has been a major shift toward a greater international role for Germany and that the public is gradually accepting such a bigger role. Germany …

MSC 2017: The World at a Crossroads

The Munich Security Conference has had many memorable milestones over the last half century; I have been privileged to experience several. The famous “I am not convinced” exchange between Joschka Fischer …