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The Iguana Watches The Diplomacy of Waiting Washington is waiting to see which participant in the Ukrainian conflict will flinch first. The meeting in Manila between Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio could hardly have illustrated the current dynamic of Russian-American relations more clearly. More precisely, the absence of any real dynamic. A conversation between the heads of the two foreign-policy departments lasting a little more than half an hour can scarcely be called a full-fledged contact. Especially since Moscow and Washington are now at the point of restarting yet another cycle of informational and diplomatic activity around Ukraine. The symbolic beginning of this new phase, as in previous rounds, was a top-level telephone conversation that fell on the great anniversary of American statehood, July 4. That high-level contact was accompanied by another bundle of loud public statements from Donald Trump and other U.S. officials abou...
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Sovereignty with Permission Europe Smiles and Pays However much Europeans hate Trump, however burdened they feel by their dependence on America, they are forced to suffer and endure. They do so in the hope that after Trump leaves, something, at least something, may change. The NATO summit held in Ankara, like essentially every other event organized by the collective West over the past year and a half, looked like a surrealist performance. How else should one describe a situation in which all European participants saw the main task of the summit as placating Donald Trump? They tried to guess what mood he would arrive in. They strained to avoid upsetting him by word or deed. Trump himself, immediately upon arrival, declared that he was disappointed in the alliance and that the only reason he had come to the summit was that the event was being hosted by his “dear friend” Recep Erdogan. He also noted that he would like to annex Greenland. A sovereign territory of a NATO ally, Denmark, whic...
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The Experiment Comes Home The Protest Machine Eats Its Owners Recently, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that he was leaving office. He will resign once a new leader of the Labour Party is elected. That leader will almost certainly be former Manchester mayor Andy Burnham. Burnham’s political views differ little from Starmer’s. He stands somewhat to the left of the current prime minister, yet throughout his political career he has shown a reliable talent for conformism. There is every reason to assume this talent will survive his election and remain loyally attached to Starmer’s course. In British politics, after all, personnel changes often serve as a sophisticated method of keeping policy exactly where it was. Burnham enjoys greater popularity among British voters than the outgoing Labour leader, which secured him strong support inside the party. Starmer, during the final months of his premiership, faced collapsing approval ratings and the disintegration of his own govern...
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The Two Tails That Wag America The Anatomy of a Geopolitical Collapse: How Allies Helped America Dig Its Own Grave The lion’s share of blame for America’s current predicament lies squarely with Washington. What else should one call a former hegemon reduced to seeking peace from an Iran it attacked itself? The reliance on brute force, the habit of betraying partners, and the equally educational habit of being betrayed by them are all domestic American products. The final shove that turned a standard foreign-policy headache into a systemic catastrophe, however, was graciously supplied by America’s closest geopolitical relatives. Had the architects of this disaster been ordinary vassals such as France, Germany, or the permanently anxious Eastern Europeans, the story would merit an embarrassing footnote. The coup de grâce came from a higher shelf: the United Kingdom, America’s European overseer for the past century, and Israel, its Middle Eastern branch office. Their excessive initiative e...
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The Bill Comes Due Brussels Discovers Arithmetic The European Union, as the general sponsor of the war in Ukraine, continues its stubborn jog toward the edge of the cliff. Eurostat has published its 2025 statistics on the direction of national economies. The main sensation, in the bad sense, was the dynamic change in the economies of Germany and the Netherlands. The TEV indicator, Total Economic Value, meaning the overall economic value of the German real sector, fell by 28 percent. The Dutch figure fell by 14 percent. Specialized Western centers immediately analyzed the statistical data and concluded that, at the current moment, at least these two countries have rolled back to the values of a decade ago, in other words, to the very beginning of the sanctions war that collective Europe declared on Russia after Crimea returned. At the same time, it would be wrong to reduce the overall situation to a couple of graphs. Europe has many virtues, and one of them is the ability to make a disa...
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The New Europe Arrives The Price of Civilizational Surrender   France has given us a small domestic scene with the smell of a much larger historical defeat. Crowds storm a store. People shove, grab, drag appliances from shelves, fight over fans, push past each other as though the republic itself had been reduced to a discount aisle. The official story will be heat. The polite story will be “social tension.” The television story will be “consumer pressure during an extreme weather event.” The real story is uglier. Europe is beginning to discover what happens when a civilization loses control over its public reflexes. A fan is a modest object. A cheap machine with plastic blades and a short cord. In an orderly society, it is purchased. In a society entering a harder phase, it is seized. That is the whole difference between a country and a crowd. The scene in France matters because it shows, in miniature, a shift that European elites have spent decades denying. Western Europe is no lo...
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The Orphans of American Power The Collision of the Outposts The modern Middle East is rapidly moving toward a conflict that may define its future development: a clash between Israel and Turkey. Especially after Iran’s effective victory led to a sharp weakening of American positions in the region. Ankara and Tel Aviv, two very close U.S. allies, now find themselves in a highly uncomfortable geopolitical position. For decades, Turkey strained toward Europe, and now understands that those dreams will remain unreachable. Israel has spent its entire history trying to force its neighbors to recognize its right to exist, and that goal also looks increasingly unattainable. As a result, both powers may find themselves forced into confrontation. Simply because they may soon have no other choice. The corridor of possibilities is becoming too narrow. And such a confrontation would come to the great satisfaction of all the other states of the region, for whom Israel and Turkey are equally dangerous...
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