Angela merkel

Has there been a more cataclysmic year for US-Europe relations than 2025? It began with J.D. Vance’s “sermon” to EU leaders at the Munich Security Conference last month, in which he berated Western Europe for its policies on immigration and free speech. This year has also seen the growing threat of NATO falling apart after 76 years of peace in Western Europe, with the White House seemingly tilting toward Russia and Trump demanding that alliance members such as Germany, France, and the U.K. dramatically increase their defense spending. This week, as the Trump administration imposes tariffs on Europe and Europe retaliates, there are even signs of a full-scale trade war.

Over the headline “Peace Mission,” a recent cover from the conservative Hungarian periodical Mandiner shows an awkwardly photoshopped Viktor Orbán mediating between a bemused-looking Vladimir Putin and a grim Volodymyr Zelensky. Behind Orbán, a map of the world connects Kyiv, Moscow, Beijing, Washington and Budapest. One of these capitals, as they say, is not like the others. Even before Ukraine’s Kursk offensive, the chances of Orbán’s July trips to Kyiv and Moscow producing a peace settlement were slim. The Mandiner cover, however, is a revealing window into the mindset of Orbán’s conservative fans. The idea of a Hungarian prime minister mediating between squabbling great powers is both attractive and plausible to many of Orbán’s fervent supporters.

The 2024 presidential race between Joe Biden and Donald Trump is a dead heat. At most, a few percentage points separate them in the polls. Thousands of miles away, however, European leaders are operating as if Trump has already won, not wanting to be caught flat-footed yet again. When Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016, European officials scrambled to establish contacts with the incoming administration. This time, the same wonks are proactively reaching out to Trump-friendly lawmakers and think-tankers, not only to understand what Trump’s foreign policy would look like in a second term but to press their own priorities. The Europeans, of course, are right to be worried.

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.

Remember how Washington’s foreign policy establishment and their media echo chamber bashed the “isolationist” President Donald Trump for abusing, humiliating and making life miserable for our close European allies, in the process obliterating the “liberal international order”? Remember how some of the Europeans responded? Germany’s Angela Merkel declared “a new chapter” in US-European relations, saying that Europe “really must take our fate into our own hands.” France’s Emanuel Macron stated that Europeans need to stop “being naïve,” and assert their strategic independence from the US. What happened? Nothing. Here we are, three decades after the end of the Cold War, and it is déjà vu all over again between Washington and Moscow.

Belarus, the former Soviet satellite state, isn’t exactly a global heavyweight. Alexander Lukashenko, the country’s authoritarian president, is an international pariah who is better at concocting conspiracy theories than he is at running a country. At $60 billion, the Belarusian economy is about the size of Rhode Island’s. Other than petroleum, cheese and dump trucks, Belarus doesn’t offer much in the way of exports. A once promising information technology sector is now gutted, as Lukashenko’s crackdown on dissent forces highly educated talent to flee the country for the Baltics. Lukashenko, however, is smarter than he looks.

The familiar should be a consolation amid the terrible novelties of COVID-19, but the pandemic’s effects on the European Union threaten to turn familiar fiasco into dangerous novelty. As a weakened Angela Merkel faces Germany’s crisis of economic responsibility, and France floats the idea of issuing its own ‘corona bond’, the EU and its currency face what Emmanuel Macron would probably not want to call its Waterloo.Henry Kissinger’s remark — ‘Who do I call if I want to speak to Europe?’ — has never seemed more true. Britain is leaving.

Angela Merkel’s decision to allow more than one million migrants into Germany has caused a crisis in Germany’s prison system. About half the prisoners in Berlin and Hamburg are now foreign-born, according to the latest figures in the German press, and in prisons across the country, German is becoming a foreign language. This surge in outsiders on the inside coincides neatly with the 2015 decision to allow in migrants from the Middle East, Africa and Asia. All regions of Germany report a ‘very strong increase’ in the number of foreign and stateless prisoners, according to data from the past three to five years. Prisons throughout Germany are overcrowded and struggling to handle the influx in population.