#postwar-1945

#postwar-1945

"Starting in December 2025, Sergey N., acting on behalf of a Russian intelligence service, surveilled a person in Germany who was shipping drones and related components from here to Ukraine."

Three of the four things that gave Trump a foothold, in my opinion, were failures in this century (the fourth is the legacy of slavery and the organized political violence that replaced it). The other three, though, are the War on Terror, the financial crisis, and social media. (COVID was the final catalyst, I think; having moved during the height of COVID, I can't express how much worse the US dealt with it than much of the EU.)

After the tensions of the George W. Bush era, the new US president's approval ratings among Germans skyrocketed. According to a Pew Research Center survey, 93% of Germans believed Obama would "do the right thing regarding world affairs." That remains a record to this day. Even in 2016, at the end of his second term, an extraordinary 86% of Germans still trusted Obama.

U.S. President Donald Trump, with his lust for Greenland and hectoring of Europe, thinks the world is at his mercy,and thatthe U.S. is invincible. He's right on the first point. But he discovered this week that he's wrong about the second one. In Davos at the World Economic Forum, Trump climbed down on his Greenland threats after his actions caused chaos in the markets.

France has offered to 'extend' its nuclear umbrella to other European countries without actually 'sharing' it. How can that work, asks John Lichfield. This will be the subject of a speech by President Emmanuel Macron in the next two weeks which could be one of the most important speeches in European history. Or a damp squib. Macron has promised to update France's nuclear doctrine. In other words, he will revisit the rules which have governed use of France's force de frappe or nuclear deterrent

Germany on Monday thanked US President Donald Trump for extending Berlin an invitation to take up a seat on his so-called "Board of Peace." German government spokesman Steffen Cornelius said: "We are thankful for this invitation. We share the aim of pursuing peace in the world. It is in Germany's core interest to end the conflict in Gaza for good."

Prost, whose name now shares the same list as some of the world's most dangerous people, from terrorists to North Korean hackers and Iranian spies, described the effect of sanctions on her life as "paralyzing" in an interview by The Irish Times. This high-profile case provides a glimpse into the disruption that being cut off from the U.S. can have on a person's everyday life; lawmakers and government leaders across Europe are growing more aware of the looming threat facing them at home, and their over-reliance on U.S. technology.

On Tuesday, French President Emmanuel Macron appeared before the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland the annual Alpine gathering of the global elite to declare that now is not a time for new imperialism or new colonialism. This, of course, was a reference to the current ambitions of Macron's counterpart in the United States, Donald Trump, who, in addition to recently kidnapping the president of Venezuela and repeatedly threatening to seize the Panama Canal,

Meeting in Munich over the weekend, officials on both sides said they wanted to continue to work together. In the world of geopolitics all eyes were on Southern Germany over the weekend where the Munich Security Conference (MSC) served as the latest make or break moment for Germany-US relations. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz delivered the event's opening speech in which he acknowledged that a rift has opened up with the US, and urged trans-Atlantic partners to repair and revive trust.

On the table are photos from another time: young men in uniform, barely older than 20, with serious expressions on their faces. Haxhimusa runs his fingers over one of the pictures. "That was us," he says quietly. The 58-year-old ethnic Albanian was once a member of the Kosovo Liberation Army, an ethnic Albanian separatist militia that fought against the Serbian police and the Yugoslav Army in the Kosovo War at the end of the 1990s.