Dalibor Rohac

Dalibor Rohac is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC. He tweets @DaliborRohac

It’s time to give Poland nuclear weapons

As Donald Trump marches towards the Republican nomination, a question hangs over Europe: how should the continent prepare for a world in which Nato becomes dead letters? For some, the answer is ‘strategic autonomy’; for others, it lies in procuring as much US-made kit as possible to buy goodwill with the future administration. One obvious

The EU is incapable of defending itself

For years, European leaders have recognised that ‘in a world of carnivores, vegetarians have a very tough time of it,’ as Germany’s former Foreign Minister Siegmar Gabriel put it in 2018. Six years later, as a handful of well-armed Houthi pirates all but shut down maritime trade on the Red Sea, Europe is finding itself to be

The EU has become paralysed by its own bad decisions

In 2019, France’s president Emmanuel Macron famously called Nato ‘braindead’. Think what you will about the health of the defence alliance, but it is increasingly the European Union, not Nato, that seems paralysed, unable to think more than just a step ahead.  The EU has been trundling along in this state for some time now.

The unfortunate reality about US support for Ukraine

Pranked by a Kremlin-friendly comedy duo, Italy’s Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, spoke for many when she confessed her ‘fatigue’ with the war in Ukraine. But there is some bad news for all the Europeans ‘tired’ of the conflict. Europe’s real job will only begin when the current war of attrition eventually congeals along more or less

Law and Justice has lost. Where does Poland go now?

If it continues to hold, the likely electoral victory of Poland’s opposition last night is good news for all those concerned by the health of Polish democracy. In a recent piece in The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum painted a dire picture of creeping state capture, suggesting that in some ways, ‘Poland already [resembled] an autocracy,’ and eloquently arguing why

Poland and Hungary could come to regret their Ukraine grain ban

The row over Ukrainian grain imports shows that politicians in Eastern Europe can be their own worst enemies. Five Eastern European countries – Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia, led by Poland and Hungary – failed to convince other EU member states that the existing ban on imports of grain from Ukraine, imposed earlier this year, should be

Nato membership for Ukraine would guarantee peace in Europe

Although Western support to Ukraine’s defence effort continues unabated, the honeymoon between Kyiv and even its staunchest allies is decidedly over. In a recent interview, President Zelensky’s advisor Mykhailo Podolyak, said that Ukraine sees Poland as its close friend ‘until the end of the war.’ Then, he added, ‘competition between the countries will begin.’ The quote,

Nato would be wrong to reject Ukraine’s membership plea

US president Joe Biden has been busy curbing expectations about Nato’s looming decision over Ukraine’s future membership. Starting the accession process at the summit in Lithuania this week would be ‘premature’, Biden said. Ukraine still needs to meet other qualifications for membership, ‘including democratisation’, the president added. Biden’s hesitation is misplaced. The Vilnius summit offers an opportunity for Nato to redress the historic

Macron has no idea how to pay for ‘reindustrialisation’

Emmanuel Macron is playing the emperor again. Last week he proudly announced a grand new strategy, but without any indication of how to pay for it. The French President said that ‘“Made in Europe” should be our motto,’ and urged Europeans to ‘take back control of our supply chains, energy and innovation’. Macron’s call for

Will the EU finally see sense over its Common Agricultural Policy?

What should be done about Ukraine’s grain exports? Ongoing controversy in Poland over the country’s imports into the EU, which currently face zero tariffs, gives a flavour of the fights to come if Ukraine becomes a fully-fledged member of the bloc. It also presents an opportunity to start a much-overdue conversation about the EU’s worst,

Slovakia risks following in the footsteps of Orban’s Hungary

With an early election just six months away, the most pressing question facing Slovak politics is whether the country is about to turn down the path of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. The decision might come down to just one individual: former prime minister Peter Pellegrini. A lot is pointing in direction of Orbánism. With the collapse of

The EU is sleepwalking into a debt trap

It’s been less than three years since the EU made the unprecedented decision to issue €750 billion of its own debt to help finance the EU’s post-pandemic recovery. Despite this supposedly being a one-time policy, the idea of issuing new debt is now rearing its head again – this time to fund the EU’s industrial policies.

The EU is letting itself be blackmailed by Hungary

For Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, there is only one lesson to be learned from the compromise reached with the EU this week: blackmail works. With the deal, Hungary has managed to partly unblock EU pay-outs in exchange for lifting its veto on an EU aid package to Ukraine and a minimum global corporate tax

The EU and America are sliding into protectionism

Emmanuel Macron’s state visit to Washington this week and the upcoming meeting of the US-EU Trade and Technology Council on Monday are important tests of whether the western world can avoid a return of destructive beggar-thy-neighbour policies which already once destroyed the global trading system in the 1930s.  The most recent point of contention centres

Many Europeans continue to yearn for British leadership

Liz Truss’s mind was probably elsewhere when she arrived in Prague for the inaugural summit of the European Political Community (EPC) today. After precipitating a financial panic, backtracking on tax reform plans, and seeing her approval rating plummet to -37 within a week, the Prime Minister has a lot on her plate. It would be a mistake,

The EU needs to work with Poland, not push it away

Today, Europe needs nothing more than a strong Polish leadership. Poland already counts among the largest providers of military and financial assistance to Ukraine, and Poles have admirably shouldered the burden of Ukrainian refugees flowing into the country. Diplomatically, however, Warsaw punches well below its weight in the EU. That is a problem in an

Orbán is doubling down on Russian energy

Viktor Orbán’s speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas, Texas, delivered everything the audience could have asked for. From an emphasis on ‘winning’, through an equivalence between the modern-day left and Cold War communism, to extolling the virtues of Hungary’s border ‘wall’, he covered it all. Its concluding segment, dedicated to Russia’s