Dalibor Rohac is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC. He tweets @DaliborRohac
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
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,
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
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
The off-colour comment by Lu Shaye, China’s ambassador to France, that post-Soviet countries such as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania did not enjoy ‘an effective status within international law’ was not a gaffe or a case of a Chinese official gone rogue. Instead, Shaye’s remark, which he made on Friday night on France’s LCI channel, must
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,
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
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.
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
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
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,
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
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
Oddly enough, a visitor to Kyiv these days is unwittingly reminded of Israel, of all places. With sunbathers on the beach by the Dnipro, busy (though not completely full) restaurants and cafés, and hipsters and skateboarders, it is sometimes hard to wrap one’s head around the fact that this is a country at war. Yet
Poland is back. Not so long ago, the country was seen as an effigy of democratic backsliding, rather than a post-communist success story. In 2017, the European Commission made its first use of the Article 7 procedure against Poland over concerns about eroding separation of powers between the executive and the judiciary. On the campaign
‘If you don’t like how the table is set, turn over the table,’ said Frank Underwood, the Machiavellian character played by Kevin Spacey in the US version of House of Cards. One needs to look no further than Vladimir Putin’s body language in his recent meeting with defence minister Sergei Shoigu to conclude that Russia’s
Following his fateful decision to invade Ukraine, Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin has been customarily described as a high-stakes gambler. Yet the embarrassing underperformance of the Russian military in Ukraine and the bite of Western sanctions suggest that Putin is no genius mastermind strategist but a risk taker who has bitten off more than he can
Joe Biden received a lot of flak for suggesting that Nato might be divided about what to do next if Vladimir Putin limits Russia’s aggression against Ukraine to a ‘minor incursion’. While clumsy and ill-advised, the comments were what Americans call a ‘Kingsley Gaffe’ – a situation when a politician accidentally tells the truth. After all,
Forget the ‘commitment‘ of the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Ukraine’s sovereignty, the EU’s ‘firm and decisive’ support, and Liz Truss’s vow to ‘stand firm‘ with Ukraine. The hard truth is that the West has already lost, or rather abandoned, Ukraine. Even if it is not overrun by Russian tanks this winter, the Kremlin has a
Among America’s self-described foreign policy ‘realists,’ there is a common trope according to which the best way for the United States to get its allies to do more is to show them some tough love – particularly by doing less. That theory has just been put to a test in Afghanistan. It has failed spectacularly.
