China & Russia
India joins the west
01 November 2005
Prospect
Last month saw a small geopolitical revolution: India backed the west against Iran.
One of the most significant geopolitical events of the decade has gone almost unnoticed in the west: at September's meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency, India joined the US and the EU in backing a resolution condemning...
One of the most significant geopolitical events of the decade has gone almost unnoticed in the west: at September's meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency, India joined the US and the EU in backing a resolution condemning...
United against Iranian nukes
14 September 2005
International Herald Tribune
Last February, a group of European and American foreign policy experts issued the "Compact Between the United States and Europe," a detailed proposal for trans-Atlantic cooperation on the key foreign policy issues of the day (IHT Feb. 17, 2005).
A beacon of liberty flickers: Observations on Georgia
18 July 2005
New Statesman
President Bush proclaimed Georgia a "beacon for liberty" when he visited Tbilisi in May. Georgia has certainly made great progress since people power overthrew the corrupt and incompetent regime of Eduard Shevardnadze in 2003. Nevertheless, clouds are dimming the light of that beacon.
There is something amiss, for example, when none...
There is something amiss, for example, when none...
The road obscured
11 July 2005
Financial Times
It is pre-modern, the kind of scene that westerners visit and photograph or encapsulate for later conversation: on Hainan Island, off the Leizhan Peninsula and a 50-minute flight south from Hong Kong, Chinese peasants toil in paddy fields. They wear straw hats and use water buffalo to plough the fields.
Then,...
Then,...
Europe - Don't write the obituaries yet. A new France could put Britain on the sidelines
06 June 2005
New Statesman
The gleeful obituaries are piling up, not just for the EU constitution, but for the country that torpedoed it. France is in a mess, we read; its politics are paralysed, its economy is over-regulated and it just can't accommodate itself to globalisation with an Anglo-Saxon face.
But before we gorge on...
But before we gorge on...
The UK should see enlargement as an opportunity to revive the Lisbon process
01 June 2005
Progress online
At the Lisbon summit in 2000, EU leaders signed up to an ambitious economic reform programme: the Lisbon agenda, designed to close the economic gap with the US.
The lure of Beijing
25 May 2005
The Guardian
China's foreign policy establishment likes the idea of the EU. In Beijing, senior ministers turn up to speak at conferences with titles such as "The Future of EU-China Strategic relations".
What If the British Vote No?
02 May 2005
Foreign Affairs
In June 2004, the member states of the European Union concluded the negotiation of a treaty that, if ratified, would establish a European constitution that would make substantive changes to the way the union works. For the first time, an individual would be appointed president of the European Council, overseeing...
Europe: the new superpower
18 February 2005
The Irish Times
The world that emerges in this century will not be centred on the US or the UN, but will comprise a community of regional clubs led by the Europeans, writes Mark Leonard in London.
In the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC, a middle-aged woman with a weather-beaten face and...
In the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC, a middle-aged woman with a weather-beaten face and...
A concrete strategy for mending fences
17 February 2005
International Herald Tribune
For the past several years, the conventional wisdom has been that the United States and Europe have grown apart, that the end of the cold war and 9/11 have produced a strategic divergence that is impossible to overcome.