What Erdoğan Has Wrought?
Seeking concessions to support Finland and Sweden joining NATO has done damage to Turkey’s standing in Europe and its long-term security interests.
Jacques Chirac
A Victim of the Hate That Won’t Be Named
Co-written by Ben Cohen. Back in 2002, the serving president of France, Jacques Chirac, huffily told an interviewer from the New York Times, “To imagine that France, the v...
Op-eds
The Chilcot Report
The Chilcot report on the Iraq war ought to elicit two emotions: sympathy and pity for former British prime minister Tony Blair. As was evident by late 2002, when Europeans saw the fri...
Op-eds
Europe Needs Straight Talk About Radical Islam
BERLIN – Europe’s timid approach to Islamic terrorism imploded last week with the horrific jihadi-animated murder of 17 men and women in Paris, including most of the cartoonists...
Op-eds
The French
What are we to make of the latest broken stereotype, the one that portrays the French as Europe's leading surrender monkeys? After French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius rejected the latest...
Op-eds
About That Special Relationship
Some are fretting about whether the special relationship that has bound the United States and the United Kingdom since World War II has been damaged by the House of Common’s vote against Br...
Op-eds
How Will European-Israeli Relations Look in 2013?
There will be no shortage of rifts and sharp disagreements between Europe and Israel in 2013. During 2012 the EU and Israel clashed over construction of settlements, outlawing Hezbollah within th...
Op-eds
Yes We Still Can
In 1999, as America prepared to enter the new century, French leaders decried its rising status as a "hyperpower". A hyperpower, explained then French foreign minister Hubert V&ea...
Op-eds
Beyond Farce
The following is not the outline of a rejected screenplay by an aspiring Hollywood writer trying to outdo 24. Nor is it product of a freshman political science student's imagination, concoct...
Op-eds
Expected and Undisturbed Hezbollah Coup
The Lebanese government last week tried to put a stop to Hezbollah's blatant takeover of the country. Authorities outlawed Hezbollah's illegal parallel telecom network and fired the air...
Op-eds
Sarkozy: Europe’s Proponent of Bush’s ‘Freedom Agenda’
To get a sense of how President Obama’s Libya (and Mideast) strategy is stuck in a foreign-policy rut, one only needs to look at how French president Nicolas Sarkozy seems to be the only fo...
Op-eds
Berlusconi: Undone by La Dolce Vita?
Silvio Berlusconi holds an amazing record of political longevity. Three G-8 summits have been held in Italy in the last 17 years (1994, 1999 and 2009). The U. S. was represented by Presidents Cli...
Op-eds
Le Pen’s National Front and the Anti-Zionist Party
Marine Le Pen took over the party leadership of the xenophobic, far-right National Front Party this week. The Wall Street Journal noted that “Ms. Le Pen on Sunday became the party’s s...
Op-eds
Sarkozy’s Costly Pipe Dream
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s latest trip to France served as yet another reminder of the obvious futility of the Elysee’s attitude towards Syria under Nicolas Sarkozy. Driving t...
Op-eds
The Spy Swap that Really Happened: The Case of Agent ‘Lily’
I’ve of course been following the story of the French release of Ali Vakili-Rod, the Iranian assassin of former Prime Minister Shahpour Bakhtiar. If you like assassinati...
Op-eds
A New French Resistance
The electoral victory by Nicolas Sarkozy is the product of the French public's rejection of a decay eroding the foundations of the Fifth Republic since its inception in 1958. The country...
Op-eds
French Resistance to Jihadism
When I was leaving Paris at the end of October 2005 after a visit to France, I had two things in mind: First, I had seen the beginning of the urban intifada, which would soon engulf about two hun...
Op-eds
Good News from Cote d’Ivoire
It often seems that the news media, both traditional and new, operate under a journalistic version of Gresham's Law whereby bad news trumps good news. This certainly appears to be t...
Op-eds
Europe’s Munich Moment
In March 2003, on the eve of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the current French Prime minister, Dominique de Villepin -- then his country's foreign minister -- condemned the Coalition of the Willin...
Op-eds
Connecticut? This is London Calling
We are reading only about 24 arrests today. If we were already in the heralded antiwar world of Ned Lamont and the war-against-the-war crowd, it could be much different. We could just as easily b...