...it to survive in reasonable comfort, if it demonstrates respect for Russian anxieties of having a potentially hostile alliance, smack dab against Russian borders, and if room is made in its world-ordering efforts for unconditional Chinese participation. An amazing phenomenon in Europe is the stream of suggestions penned by European commentators about what Obama ought to do once he is president. They are no doubt much influenced by the ubiquitous American commentary they must have read. But the amazing part is the absence of a European dimension to all that advice. President Obama is not at all served by scared and sycophantic vassals. What he will need instead is fearless input from former allies who wish to regain the best aspects of a post-World-War-II world order committed to international law; an order of which the United States itself was the main architect. That means first and foremost the forceful rejection of preventive war as a policy tool. Such rejection is the minimum that European officials also owe the citizens of the Union’s member countries, if an integrated Europe is to remain true to its original purpose of abolishing war. In the current recipes for a desirable world order the assumption...

...get homegrown assessments of what is going on outside their countries. But what is considered news to begin with, if it comes from far away, is first of all almost always predetermined by American editors and correspondents. Al Jazeera TV broadcasts are a wonderful new development, especially because of the much more detailed attention they pay to what is happening in the poorer parts of the world, but selections of these broadcasters, too, tend to follow a beaten path. What Japanese or Koreans learn about European events goes through that same mainly American filter. There are Japanese correspondents based in Brussels, but a lot of what their newspapers consider European news has become news because of American preoccupations. And the same is true again for a majority of European correspondents working on other continents who are not given the time to acclimatize in non-Western political systems. I know this from my experience as a correspondent covering many stories unfoldign in East Asia. In Europe the American-British filter even overlays unfolding reality more than one border away. There exist no European-edited quality broadcast programs and no European newspapers or magazines to give the Danes and the Spaniards and the Rumanians and...

As the Bush years are now one day away from finally drawing to a close, what occurs to me is how much is lost in writing from hindsight. Sure, the gains that come with it are not open to dispute: often a better perspective as earlier unknown elements of the story fall into place, or revelations emerge that give it a dramatic twist. But there is something about the immediate experience of an event that, when conveyed with an effort, may contain knowledge about it that will be very difficult to recapture at a later stage. Which is why historians like diaries. Some knowledge just simply disappears. George Orwell understood this when writing about the Spanish Civil War and being sure that what he himself had learned about it from direct experience would never enter generally accepted historical records. Two striking examples from my own experience come immediately to mind: the last days of Saigon before North Vietnamese regulars took over the city in April 1975, and never-explained aspects of what happened during the horrific Kobe Earthquake and its aftermath in January 1995. I experienced the Bush years in a special, haunting manner. I had just embarked and a writing...

...to a point where, so many assume, Europe will inevitably emerge as a politically significant entity, the Union is administered by a generation of politicians not up to the task of helping such further integration along. The political acumen of the politicians at the top of European administrations does not stretch much farther than local electoral politics. As George W. Bush introduced his own new rules of permissible foreign policy, leading European politicians did not react with acute political judgment. When the rescuer in World War II and the protector of 45 years of Cold War suddenly showed signs that normally would cause widespread doubts about the sanity of its view on the world, you might have expected that a thorough rethinking of all this would be in order. But the European political elite has been running away from it. Choosing the seeming comforts of denial, its politicians and commentators reacted, instead, with reference solely to what they knew, to the routine past of the Cold War; a past in which they had never been called upon to contemplate the independent protection of European states and Europe’s strategic position in the world. A powerful emotion blocks intellectual readiness and political...

Martin Wolf writing in the Financial Times asked a couple of days ago whether Barack Obama’s presidency has already failed. He concedes that in normal times, such a question would be ludicrous. But by now most politically thoughtful people have concluded that these are times, as Wolf puts it, “of great danger”. “Today, the new US administration can disown responsibility for its inheritance; tomorrow, it will own it. Today, it can offer solutions; tomorrow it will have become the problem. Today, it is in control of events; tomorrow, events will take control of it.” Wolf, along with many other economists not mired in ideological or Republican Party received opinion, is afraid that Obama will do too little to stave off a worsening of the economic crisis. Norm Schreiber in The New Republic warns against hasty conclusions on this score, and goes into the manner in which the political maneuverer Obama appears to manage potential opponents very well, also in this case. He does not bring it up, but Obama’s history in Chicago is witness to that as well. There are few American places in which the political wheeler-dealing is more vicious and corrupt than in that city. But in that...

...was no question of any form of protectionism inside the European Union, and thus no harm done to any market. The European Commission had already given green light for Sarkozy’s plans concerning the French car industry, and he had already asserted that “the others are now imitating us’. He may actually be proven right before long. A collapsing General Motors could very well drag its German daughter company, Opel, down with it. The leaders of the German Länder (federal states) with Opel division within their borders are not likely to accept a refusal of Berlin to come to their aid. The summit participants could go home with the message for their domestic constituencies that solidarity within Europe had remained intact. There is no dividing line across Europe. There is no question of any protectionism. Protecting one’s own industry in times of emergency is possible without violating the rules of the treaty. A typical Brussels invention. A lot of what most troubles several of the member states remained outside the summit’s agenda. Much of that revolves around the Euro. Sixteen of the twenty seven member states have adopted the European currency, and having done so form so-called Euroland. Among the new...