Author: CROBBINS

German Chancellor Angela Merkel isn’t the warm and cuddly type. She famously winced when President George W. Bush decided to massage her shoulders during a G-7/8 meeting. And she got along ok with him. She made almost no effort to disguise her contempt for/revulsion toward President Trump during their joint press conference a couple of weeks back. While Ms. Merkel clearly likes her space, she isn’t going to let the Brits walk away from the EU easily–or cheaply– as this piece in Business Insider (summing up a piece in the FT, which has a paywall) explains neatly.

See you Monday at the Grad Center to hear Anne Applebaum. You can read her latest columns here. Well worth it.

Monday morning (this morning) the House Intelligence Committee holds its first public hearing in its investigation into Russian interference–meddling sounds far too friendly–in the 2016 presidential election. While the questions of who, how and why the Russians hacked the campaign–and how we stop it from happening again–are critical to national security, the big news today will be what FBI director James Comey says when asked about President Trump’s ‘Obama-wiretapped-me’ claim. That delusion isn’t only undermining the President’s credibility at home, it is doing serious damage to his, and this country’s, credibility abroad. And Trump can’t seem to stop. His spokesman, Sean Spicer, claimed for a while that the Brits were in on it–infuriating Mr. Trump’s only pal out there, British PM May. And then POTUS made a joke about how he and German Chancellor Angela Merkel had something in common: they were both wiretapped by Obama. Beyond the obvious–this man has nuclear weapons and sounds unhinged–problem, wiretapping is a hyper-sensitive issue for Merkel, who grew up in East Germany.

For background on the hearings, and whether we can realistically expect to learn anything from them given the partisan leanings of this Congress, you can read this piece I wrote this past weekend in The American Interest. And if you are wondering about the term ‘gaslighting’ in the lede, it refers to a great Ingrid Bergman movie in which she is being driven slowly crazy by her husband who, among other things, keep turning the (gas) lights up and down. We all feel that way these days, no?

Vitaly Komar, a Moscow-born artist, put his own chilling spin on the famous photo of FDR, Churchill and Stalin meeting in Yalta. In this Sunday’s New York Times Komar explains:

“I had this vision when Donald Trump was elected. In the old Yalta, there was a big difference between Stalin and the other two: He cared only about his power. Now I see these leaders — Mr. Trump, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping — and they all seem to care only about their power. This has united them, finally.”

PS Who is that guy in the back? Maybe he can save us all.

 

 

 

The European Union usually needs Washington to stiffen its backbone–but not these days. Meeting in Brussels on Monday, EU foreign ministers vowed to keep economic sanctions on Russia until Vladimir Putin gets serious about a ceasefire in Ukraine and pulls back his heavy weapons from the border.

“I cannot say where the U.S. administration stands on this, but I can say where the Europeans stand on this,” the EU’s foreign policy chief, Frederica Mogherini, told reporters after the meeting. Even Britain’s EU-hating/Putin-admiring Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, claimed to be on board: “The U.K. will be insisting that there is no case for the relaxation of the sanctions, every case for keeping up the pressure on Russia.”

Putin may be counting on his new BFF Donald Trump to bail him out. But the economic realities are hard to ignore. Before it decided to invade Ukraine and annex Crimea Russia did a lot more business with Europe than it did with the US. Vlad can’t live on love alone–at least not forever.

The question of this course: “Are you in or are you out?” is not theoretical. It is one of the key issues confronting this country and many of our key allies.

Underneath that big question are a host of others:  Are global institutions slowing us down? Are our allies taking unfair advantage of us?  Is free trade fair trade? Can walls protect us from transnational threats like disease, climate change and terrorism? For that matter can the alliances built up after World War II do any better?  What do we lose–in ideas, in creativity, and humanity–if we close ourselves off from the rest of the world?  I look forward to reading your posts and to our discussions in class and on this blog.