Patrick Lawrence: Germany in Crisis Part 2: A Short History of Exploding Gas Pipelines
This is the second of four reports on Germany’s various crises, the history that produced them and how Germans, other than the neoliberal elites who now hold power, think about their way forward. Part 1 of this series is here. POTSDAM—A single,…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Trump 2.0 Crosses the Atlantic
Whatever the future may hold — and seldom does it present such promise and peril as now — Trump and his national-security team set a lot of wheels in motion last week. Eight years ago, at precisely this moment in…
Patrick Lawrence: The Centrists Cannot Hold
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…” Alot of us are familiar with these lines from Yeats’s thoroughly anthologized and…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Europe’s Identity Crisis
As European leaders continue to import a version of U.S. militarism, rearmament will cost the Continent its postwar social contract. It is many years now since the French, bless them, revolted as Disneyland Paris arose near the previously uninvaded village…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Macron’s Europe
France’s president has proven himself to be a well-oiled weathervane. What he says on Monday may not match what he says or does on Wednesday. But his remarks while visiting China are interesting in several ways. Emmanuel Macron got poor…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Who Should Control Foreign Policy?
Proposing that foreign policy be subjected to democratic processes is a call, essentially, to revolution. I had a letter in the mail the other week from someone named Barry Klein, who resides in Houston. I filed it knowing I would write…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The New Iron Curtain
The Ukraine crisis proves to be Europe’s crucible and Europe proves a profound disappointment. We have read a great deal about a new Cold War since the U.S. cultivated the coup of February 2014 in Ukraine and the nation was…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Putin Speaks
As the Russian president’s year-end presser helped underscore, Europe will increasingly understand itself as the western end of Eurasia rather than the eastern shore of the Atlantic. Vladimir Putin was “defiant” during his end-of-year press conference last Thursday. The Russian…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Aimless Empire
Under Biden, the world’s most powerful, most heavily armed, most determinedly righteous nation shows little sign of having any foreign policy at all. Bitter and frightening realities face us four months into Joe Biden’s presidency. On the domestic side it…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Chihuahuas, Not Dobermans
Trump’s determination to end the Ukraine war has forced the Europeans, at last, to go their own way. And they charge in precisely the wrong direction. I have never been much for schadenfreude: It is always best to occupy one’s mind with worthier…