Europe

The last time NATO inducted a new member was in 2019. The alliance agreed to accept North Macedonia’s request for membership. The small Balkan country was an odd choice to become the alliance’s thirtieth member state. At roughly 7,500 troops, North Macedonia’s military was smaller than the Los Angeles Police Department. Its entire population was smaller than Brooklyn's and its economy was one fifth the size of North Dakota’s. Three years later, NATO is set to become even bigger. Finland and Sweden, two Nordic nations with a decades-long policy of military neutrality between the West and Russia, will very likely submit their own membership bids as early as next month. Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, neither power was especially interested in becoming full-fledged members.

In France’s presidential runoff vote on Sunday, incumbent Emmanuel Macron defeated nationalist contender Marine Le Pen. This makes the center-left Macron the first president since 2002 to get a second term, though he is also one of the least popular politicians in French history. Compared to 2017, Macron dropped by more than seven percentage points from 66 percent to just 58 percent. In turn, contender Marine Le Pen upped her score from 34 percent to 41.5 percent. Meanwhile, the abstention rate is the highest it’s been in more than 50 years, at 28 percent, higher than in the runoff vote compared to the first round. This explains why Macron lost a lot of the lead he had five years ago, and why Le Pen’s National Rally party registered its strongest support to date.

Last Sunday marked the beginning of the French presidential vote; the runoff election will take place on April 24, and incumbent president Emmanuel Macron winning again is no sure thing. If she plays her cards right, challenger Marine Le Pen has a legitimate shot at becoming the next president of France. Macron emerged victorious in the first round with 27 percent of the vote, followed by Le Pen with 23 percent. For the nationalist Le Pen, it is the second time she has qualified for the runoff, and thus the second time she is running against Macron. In 2017, she lost to Macron 66 percent to 33 percent, crushing once again the ambitions of her National Rally party. This year, however, will be a much closer call.

The first round of voting in the French presidential election will happen Sunday — and despite expectations of the last few years, the run-up appears increasingly anti-climactic. But not all is said and done in the campaign. Over the last few weeks, Emmanuel Macron has extended his lead in the opinion polls, bolstered by the uncertainty of the war in Ukraine. The most recent poll has Macron ahead at 28 percent, in front of far-right candidate Marine Le Pen at 23 percent, and far-left contender Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Far-right independent hopeful Éric Zemmour (9 percent) and Republican nominee Valérie Pécresse (8 percent) had experienced boosts in the campaign’s early stages, which have both since died down.

As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the UN Security Council today with all the anguish you would expect from a wartime commander-in-chief, he could nonetheless be relatively pleased about several things. Sure, Zelensky and his advisers are constantly making the point that Ukraine needs bigger and better weapons to resist Russia’s invasion, but the West has been quite responsive to Kyiv’s requests. The Biden administration’s latest weapons shipment, announced last week, adds to the $1.6 billion in military aid the US has sent to the Ukrainian military since the war broke out on February 24.

Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees have already streamed into Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic. Head north to Poland, and the numbers go from the unprecedented to the jaw-dropping: two and a half million refugees have entered the country with a total population of 38 million since the war in Ukraine began. In the Czech Republic, where I live, official estimates put the current number of refugees at over 300,000, a figure expected to rise to between 500,000 and 600,000 in the coming months. In a country of less than eleven million, that’s five percent of the population. In Poland, a proportion closer to ten percent is possible. At the moment, most of the Czech Republic’s refugees are concentrated in Prague.

The extraordinary skill, courage and effectiveness of Ukraine’s fighting forces have given the US and NATO an extraordinary opportunity to reestablish military deterrence in Europe and show the Kremlin that unprovoked military aggression will be repelled and ultimately defeated. But President Biden and NATO leaders are dithering. They are simply not acting with the urgency needed to fully support Ukraine’s military. It’s the same failure they displayed for the year prior to the invasion, when Putin was building up tens of thousands of troops along Ukraine’s border. Even now, the US and NATO are hesitating to provide the full complement of essential weapons to Ukraine, including air-defense systems, MIG fighters and a lot more drones, anti-tank and anti-ship weapons.

I was driving along a curvy English road outside a village in Gloucestershire a few weeks ago when a sign loomed on our left. It said: CATS EYES REMOVED My first thought was: What a horrible way to make a living in this day and age, even out here in the countryside. So much for All Things Bright and Beautiful... Maybe those people who said that Brexit would turn the English into depraved monsters were right. I was jumping to conclusions. It hadn’t been put up by an entrepreneur or veterinarian but by the highway authority. Cat’s eyes are what the English call those super-reflective bumps embedded in the stripes on minor highways to keep drivers from drifting across lanes. The sign was a warning that this curvy road had recently become much more dangerous.

The simplest description of the war in Ukraine is this: stalemate, accompanied by constant, deadly bombardment. For the Ukrainians, that bombardment is aimed at the Russian military. For the Russians, it is aimed mostly at civilian targets, a deliberate strategy that is also a war crime. Russian artillery shells, cluster bombs and cruise missiles are killing tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians and destroying their homes, schools and businesses. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s counterattack is imposing huge, irreplaceable losses on Russia’s army, killing soldiers, destroying their equipment and liquidating incompetent military leaders who come to the front to untangle the mess. Russia’s initial war plan failed, abysmally.

One thing anyone who studies foreign policy for a living knows is that fairytale endings never happen in war. I suspect Ukraine will follow this sad trend. Why should we expect anything different? War never conforms to humanity’s desire for the good guys to defeat the bad guys. Indeed, great power politics grounded in realpolitik but shaped by mankind’s sense of morality is a mixture that yields tragic results. The demand for closure, clean endings to conflicts where the antagonists get punished, is rarely fulfilled. Wars only have happy endings in the movies. In fact, some wars never seem to end, as the combatants are left unfulfilled — or just haven't been weakened enough.

Angela Merkel is one of the most recognizable names in modern politics and probably the only German chancellor since post-war leader Konrad Adenauer that Americans will remember. Merkel was the leader of the center-right CDU party and head of the German government for a full 16 years, making her one of the longest-serving chancellors in German history as well as the first woman to hold the post. Now the full scale of her disastrous reign is becoming clear. Following the nuclear power plant incident at Fukushima in 2011, Merkel began Germany's "Energiewende" (energy shift), intending to phase out of all of Germany's nuclear plants in favor of renewables.

It is now a matter of consensus that Vladimir Putin never intended to fight the type of war that now faces him in Ukraine. What was plainly meant to be a blitzkrieg-style assault has devolved into a war of attrition, with death, destruction and violence on a scale unseen in Europe since the disasters of the last century. It is quite plain that the Kremlin, despite its bluster, is aware of this. The Kyiv government's claims of Putin dismissing his generals and raving in fury at his security services are consistent with events on the battlefield; indeed, after two weeks of fighting, Russia has only managed to decisively claim one Ukrainian city.

The End of History has ended. It officially ended with Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine. Francis Fukuyama wrote The End of History in the early Nineties. It's a book that captures the optimistic zeitgeist of that decade — born of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of communism. The basic idea was that once communism faded away — the reality, not the ideal, which will forever exist in the minds of many intellectuals — the world would become a more liberal, democratic and commercial place. It was an argument with real legs. East Germany was digested by the West without a burp. The Baltic states prospered. Asia took off. A rising commercial tide lifted all boats.

In the wake of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky has renewed his country’s wish to join the European Union. This week, the European Parliament approved Ukraine’s application to join the EU with an overwhelming majority. But Ukraine will not join the European Union this year, and possibly not even in the next five years to come. The reasons for that lie within the structure of the EU. The closening ties between Brussels and Kyiv had been the reason for Ukraine’s revolution back in 2014. Then Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych had rejected the EU-Ukraine association agreement, which tied both partners closer together, politically and economically.

Of the war in Ukraine, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman writes, “Our world is not going to be the same again because this war has no historical parallel.” In the very next sentence, he describes the Russian invasion of Ukraine as “a raw, eighteenth-century-style land grab by a superpower,” thereby acknowledging that the episode actually has innumerable historical parallels — just not ones that Friedman cares to acknowledge as legitimate. Friedman figures prominently among those claiming to have divined the essential character of the present age. His key finding: tech-driven globalization has rendered old-fashioned power politics obsolete. The rules of the game have changed irrevocably. Practically speaking, nations have no choice but to submit.

The Europeans have been jolted awake from their deep Pax Americana slumber, when the continent was largely content to eat the spoils of economic prosperity and allow the United States to do the heavy lifting on all things security. And we have Vladimir Putin to thank for it. Russia’s nearly week-long invasion of Ukraine has shocked the conscience of many who believed Europe would never return to the dark days of large-scale land warfare.