A letter to President Joe Biden from the publisher Detlef W. Prinz

Dear Mr. President,

Congratulations! When today, at 12 noon Washington time, you swear your oath to the US Constitution and are officially inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States, the world will breathe a collective and deep sigh of relief. The aberration is no more. America is back.

But let’s not kid ourselves – yours will …

It almost seemed as if international jihadism was on the retreat: the so-called caliphate also known as the Islamic State (IS) or by its Arabic acronym Daesh destroyed, the so-called caliph killed, his followers scattered to the winds. But five years after the devastating attack on the Bataclan in Paris, the fanatics in Europe are back. A wave of attacks carried out by Islamist militants in Paris, Nice, Dresden, Vienna …

No one looking back on the past decade can do so with satisfaction, let alone complacency. The world has become unstable. The international order created after World War II is breaking down; the global institutions established as part of that order are frail and ineffective. The COVID-19 pandemic has turned previously existing fault lines into frontlines. Troubles are piling up everywhere. In many places, cooperation is morphing into confrontation. US-China …

Putin has not yet chosen a course vis-à-vis Belarus, but all signs point to his continued support for Lukashenko

After the disputed presidential election in Belarus on Aug. 9, Vladimir Putin was one of the first to congratulate Alexander Lukashenko on his landslide win. Yet the Russian president was cautious at first, pursuing more of a wait-and-see approach as to which position the Kremlin should take.

“Putin congratulated Lukashenko on …

Her era will have to come to an end eventually. Angela Merkel has been German chancellor since 2005; you would have to look long and hard to find another politician holding a country’s top political position for so long, autocracies and banana republics excluded. But Merkel has unequivocally stated she will not run for office again in fall 2021, one year from now, in the Bundestag elections.

Her announcement in …

There are Russians who see German hospitals as a salvation, and there are Russians who see them as a curse. The family of Alexei Navalny, Russia’s foremost opposition leader, arranged for him to be treated at Berlin’s Charité hospital after being subject to an apparent poison attack in August. The Russian government and its media empire have cast doubt upon the findings and diagnoses of his German doctors. The Navalny …

In most corners of the world, hopes are running high that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will win the upcoming US election and thus bring to a close this current dark chapter. These hopes, however, rest on less-than-sound footing, and for several reasons. The unrest in American cities, the possibility of a vaccine being introduced in advance of the election, a rebound in the US economy and, last but not …

The idea of selling the European Green Deal as Europe’s “man on the moon moment” was no doubt very much to the liking of Ursula von der Leyen. She is an expert at setting the perfect stage for introducing policies with an emotive tone and professional glow. Last December, less than 14 days after being elected president of the European Commission, von der Leyen stepped up to the microphone to …

Anyone in 2020 with a pair of eyes or ears cannot help but recognize the enormity of the tasks and challenges confronting Germany’s current presidency of the EU Council. At stake is nothing less than the internal reconciliation of Europe and the fortification of our continent in the eyes of the world, so that it can again play an important role in international affairs and speak with a united voice …

We are facing “the greatest challenge in the history of Europe.” When Angela Merkel uttered these words in the Bundestag only a few days before Germany assumed the presidency of the EU Council, the chancellor was not referring to the climate crisis. Nor was she talking about the massive and ever-increasing destruction of the environment or the ongoing extinction of countless species of plants, fish and insects. Merkel was speaking, …