€800bn arms without armies? All dead steel and no soldiers
Once the European Commission opened the €800 billion defence spending honeypot and Germany moved to exclude defence spending from deficit calculations, the big beasts of…
Despite euro-fantasies, Trump, Xi and Putin do not regard the EU as a sovereign state
Much has been made of the lopsided deal Ursula von der Leyen struck with Donald Trump, which among other things traded zero tariffs on US goods for a 15 per cent tax on EU…
Defence now: Europe learns intentions require capabilities
The spectacular raid on Fordow nuclear complex showed Europe the limits of multilateral diplomacy when confronted with irreconcilable demands.
Downstairs are heading Upstairs: It will be a shock to the drawing room
How do you keep the help down in the scullery and well away from the drawing room where they might upset their betters?
Euro-champions to be built on subsidies, but where can the EU find markets?
Moving with its usual lightning speed, the European Commission has pencilled in the end of 2027 for new guidelines designed to relax competition rules and permit mergers between…
Merz will learn from Bismarck, firewall against the AfD may actually be political fuel
Europe pays regular obeisance to remembering “the lessons of the past.
A friendly letter from the American heartland to our European allies
Hello Europe, I’d like to introduce you to America. No, not the America you know.
Haunted by the euro-ghost of Hallstein: the power to collect direct EU taxes
The European Commission finds itself in a bit of a pickle.
For the EU elite, a lesson in how an American succeeds, no credentials needed
Anyone who still doubts that Donald Trump has a wicked sense of humour need only consider his chosen ambassador to the EU, Andrew Puzder, recent CEO of the Hardee’s and…
The new EU defence commissioner, not much money, not much influence
No one knows the hazards of the defence portfolio better than Ursula von der Leyen, whose tenure leading the German defence ministry was marked by a failure to improve procurement…
Censorship fog descends on Europe, world cut off
A performative fury erupted across Europe when the dread Elon Musk not only endorsed Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD), but agreed to host an extended interview on…
EU leads to the Molenbeek Fallacy: luscious benefits but no national pride
The good secular rationalists who founded the European project after the horrors of the Second World War believed that political stability could be restored by meeting the…
What will the EU do when cars become commodities?
Volkswagen has defused the labour crisis sparked by its announcement of impending plant closures with a deal that agrees to keep these factories open and reduce overall worker…
EU must rebuild Syria or Syrian immigrants will stay in Europe
Thirty-three years ago, Jacques Poos, President of the Council of the EU, announced that the impending civil war in Yugoslavia was “Europe’s hour” to take its place…
High-born French and low-born Italians against Chinese Commies: car wars
European car companies are locked in an increasingly bitter struggle to maintain profits and market share amid a secular downturn in sales of internal combustion vehicles…
In France the helicopter air-drops of fresh cash are over
In one of his Letters from Paris published many years ago in the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik observed that the French suffer from what he called a “White Helicopter” syndrome.
Outdated software running Germany Inc goes for easy protection not innovation
Christian Democratic Union (CDU) leader and likely future chancellor Friedrich Merz is sidling cautiously up to the debt brake issue that just demolished the traffic light…
The world’s economic blocs ready to choke the flood of German exports
The high drama of Germany’s Traffic Light Coalition is over.
Europeans must find way to fire EU elites when they screw up
Much of the European commentariat’s theatrical horror at the re-election of Donald Trump smacks of a comfortable smugness that such a dread outcome cannot befall their beloved…
Economic liberal Lindner provokes coalition partners with free market talk
After four unhappy years shackled to a coalition of misery, the Free Democratic Party (FDP) leader and Finance Minister Christian Lindner has filed for divorce.
Germany and France lack a strategic brain on Ukraine, and here comes Trump
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz seized on Joe Biden’s final visit to Europe last week to organise a conclave of key leaders on Ukraine.
How the Greens die: suffering economy and young dump the ‘party of youth’
After another catastrophic result in yet another eastern Bundesstaat, the German Green Party has lost its leaders.
Brussels forcing production of EV cars nobody wants, sales crash 70 per cent in Germany
Some bad news for the European Union's Green New Deal: sales of electric vehicles have declined 18 per cent across the Union, led by a 33 per cent retreat in France and a…
Draghi’s plan says ‘Europe First’ and load it with debt: who thinks it will work?
Having famously saved the rickety euro from the international bond markets over a decade ago, Super Mario Draghi has now moved on to an even grander project: rescuing the…
Auto worker ‘peasants’ may force Volkswagen to stay in Germany, downplay China
Courtier: “Sire, the peasants, they’re revolting!” King Louis XVI: “I know that, they stink on ice.” – Mel Brooks, History of the World Part 1
The DSA is the EU’s enforcement arm against online free speech
It is an iron law of administrative bureaucracies that gathering power, staff and budgets is more important than providing service to the public.
Macron: can’t lead France, so can’t lead Europe, and Scholz will not help
Happy electorates prefer a stable polity and vote for parties offering to preserve it.
Workers abandoned by centre Left embrace economic nationalism
Amid the protracted battle by leading members of the EU Parliament to wrest more powers from the Council and Commission, few anticipated they would also acquire the power…
EU’s vain desire to be AI regulatory boss: 7.5bn customers say No
Brussels is again full of self-congratulation after the EU Parliament and Council passed the Artificial Intelligence Act, presented as the world’s first regulatory framework…
Germany’s Merz moves right, but enough or too much?
When Germany extended the franchise for June’s EU Parliamentary elections to 16-year-olds, it did not anticipate that some of these new voters would express their political…