Section: Foreign Policy (USA)
Don’t Bring a Dove to a Polish Hawk Fight
WARSAW — On Feb. 14, Magdalena Ogórek, a left-wing candidate in Poland’s presidential race, said if she were elected, she “would pick up the phone to call the Russian president” to normalize relations between Moscow and Warsaw. As it happens, it’s an unlikely scenario: The 36-year-old historian and TV personality is polling just 3...
Putin’s Great Patriotic Purge
MOSCOW — When prosecutors and police officers from the anti-extremism division showed up at Dmitry Lazarenko’s antique shop in Sochi a few months ago, they took him by surprise. After rummaging through the wares in the small space he keeps with two other collectors, they accused him of spreading Nazi propaganda before seizing a World War...
Time for Triumphant Tories to Restore Britain’s Global Power
The British Conservative Party’s victory in yesterday’s British elections should give hope to U.S. Republicans who remember how Margaret Thatcher’s decisive victory in 1979 preceded Ronald Reagan’s sweep of the U.S. election in 1980. That Prime Minister David Cameron’s party managed to actually pick up seats in...
Russia’s Stumbling Pivot to Asia
On May 21, 2014, after a marathon negotiating session in Shanghai, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, finally put pen to paper on a $400 billion natural-gas deal widely heralded as the kickstart to Russia’s own pivot to Asia. One year later, though, it’s far from clear that strategic shift is...
Situation Report: Texas safe from military rule; Obama Mideast summit flailing; Syrians start training; and more
By Paul McLeary with Ariel Robinson Two takeaways from Thursday’s Pentagon press conference with Defense Secretary Ash Carter and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey: Paranoid? Carter stated emphatically that the U.S. military is not, repeat not, planning an armed takeover of the State of Texas. Some people in the southwest and...
Situation Report: The Hill shakes; Baiji close to falling; Kurds and Baghdad find common ground; and more
By Paul McLeary and Ariel Robinson Around and around. In what looks to be a big move in Washington’s revolving door process, Paul Juola is stepping down as Democratic staff director for the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense after more than 29 years in federal service, sources tell FP’s John Hudson. While there’s no...
The Short Life and Speedy Death of Russia’s Silicon Valley
In the world of tech, six years is a long, long time. In 2009, the iPad was but a twinkle in Steve Jobs’s eye; 20 percent of the mobile phones sold in the United States were made by BlackBerry; and some of 2015’s finest procrastination tools — Instagram, Snapchat, even Candy Crush Saga — were still years away from release. It was in...
Ruble to the Rescue?
April was the best month for the ruble since 1993. The Russian currency is up 18 percent against the dollar so far this year. Those gains pushed Russian stocks up and rewarded investors who stuck it out or were brave enough to jump back in. They’re not big enough, though, to save the country’s faltering economy. And new data suggest...
Rich Germany Has a Poverty Problem
BERLIN — The signs of Germany’s economic might are hard to miss. There are the swanky new high-rise hotels cropping up on Berlin’s main shopping mile and luxury condominium complexes spreading across the government quarter. In the southwest, Germany’s engineering heartland, auto parts factories are humming and newfound...
All’s Fair in Bromance and War
Shocker alert: North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un doesn’t keep his word. After accepting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invitation to visit Moscow for the Victory Day parade on May 9, Kim abruptly cancelled his trip, supposedly because of “internal Korean affairs.” It was embarrassing enough that Putin felt the need to invite...
