European Union

Europe’s “Hard Right” Uprising

Featured image Across Western Europe, the right is rising. This strikes fear into the hearts of Brussels bureaucrats, as the London Times reports, with this headline: “‘Hormonal’ voters could hand hard-right victory, EU chief fears.” Josep Borrell, the EU’s high representative for foreign policy, warns that migration fears could send political shockwaves across Europe. Borrell, 76, a Spanish Socialist and former foreign minister, was referring to the fact that illegal immigration has »

First Argentina, Now the Netherlands

Featured image The Netherlands went to the polls today in a national election and Geert Wilders and his Freedom Party (the PVV) won the most votes. “Polite opinion” (that is, the EU and the major media) have long considered Wilders beyond the pale, on the same plane as Nigel Farage in Britain or Marine Le Pen in France. After all, he is anti-immigration and a Euro-skeptic, and as such not clubbable. Like »

Notes from Central Europe

Featured image An unusual experience on the train from Salzburg to Munich yesterday. The train stopped at the German border, whereupon eight police officers, well armed and wearing full body armor, boarded the train and asked to see passports. I haven’t had a passport check on a European train in years, and I thought they were obsolete in the era of the Schengen Zone that allows visa-free travel throughout the European Union. »

Vaclav Klaus, After All

Featured image SALZBURG, Austria, October 19—Back in August of 1990 I attended my first-ever meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in Munich, West Germany, not far from my current temporary location. I was still a sluggish graduate student at the time, long past when I should have completed my dissertation, but somehow I had contrived to snag a fellowship to attend, and present a paper whose precise topic I don’t now recall, »

The Daily Chart: The High Cost of High-Cost Energy

Featured image Everyone knows that Germany was the “first mover” on the net-zero bandwagon, spending more than a trillion Euros over the last 15 years on its “energiewende” (“energy revolution”) only to see their greenhouse gas emissions begin rising again, and last year reviving coal-power to keep the lights on. One thing they did achieve was causing consumer energy prices to roughly double. I guess that “wind-and-solar-are-cheaper” isn’t working out according to »

To the Budapest Station

Featured image To the Finland Station is Edmund Wilson’s magnum opus about the long train of revolutionary thought and action stretching from Jules Michelet to Lenin, culminating in the October revolution in 1917 that gave birth to Soviet Russia. It has an especially vivid account of the journey of the sealed train that delivered Lenin—”like a plague bacillus,” as Churchill put it in The World Crisis—to Petrograd. Yesterday I arrived for a »

Macron: Europe’s ‘greatest risk’ is getting ‘caught up in crises that are not ours’ – like Taiwan

Featured image Following six hours of talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping, French President Emmanuel Macron spoke to a Politico reporter and two French journalists aboard COTAM Unité, France’s Air Force One this weekend. He discussed his concept of “strategic autonomy for Europe, presumably led by France, to become a third superpower.” Specifically, Macron said Europe’s “greatest risk” is getting “caught up in crises that are not ours,” such as a potential conflict »

Meloni Ascendant

Featured image When Giorgia Meloni became Italy’s Prime Minister last fall, we hailed her election. Of course, that was not a unanimous reaction: the usual suspects denounced her as a crypto-fascist and predicted her regime would be short-lived. Of course, in Italy that prediction is never a long shot. Nevertheless, so far, at least, Meloni has thrived, as the London Times grudgingly admits: “Called a danger, now Giorgia Meloni is EU’s most »

Elon Agonistes [Updated]

Featured image Elon Musk has suspended the Twitter accounts of six Democratic Party operatives from CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, etc. They violated Twitter’s terms of service by linking to a site that tracks the location of Musk’s private jet. The rationale is strong: the whereabouts of the jet is not public information, but someone apparently has software that is nevertheless able to track it, and these operatives apparently »

How Corrupt Is the European Union?

Featured image The European Union is a liberal’s dream: no pesky national sovereignty, an attenuated democracy, a government of, by, and for self-appointed elites. Just what America’s liberals aspire to. How could it go wrong? For starters, it could be corrupt. It turns out that Qatar handed out a lot of cash to members of the European Parliament in connection with the current World Cup tournament. The London Times reports: Police have »

Europe’s Downward Energy Spiral

Featured image The European Union has committed to going “green.” This means they are closing reliable fossil fuel and nuclear plants, and betting on wind and solar to meet their energy needs. Liberals assure us that wind and solar will represent a cost savings. (Which, obviously, is why they need to be subsidized.) Also as part of its “green” agenda, Europeans are moving to replace internal combustion vehicles with electric vehicles, with »

Who Blew Up the Pipeline?

Featured image Who blew up the Nord Stream pipelines? Your guess is as good as mine. It does seem peculiar to think Russia would have blown up their own pipeline, but it is not inconceivable that a faction of Russia’s military is trying to sabotage Putin as a prelude for ousting him, or that Putin sees it as a kind of “Cortez burning his ships” moment to indicate that he is all-in »

Freaking Out Over Italy

Featured image We’re getting another confirmation today of a key definition in Power Line’s Lexicon of Leftist Terms: ‘”Populism” is when the wrong person or cause wins a free election”.’ The corollary is that every Republican candidate for president is Hitler, and now we learn that every Italian conservative is Mussolini. On the other hand, I can see why the authoritarian elites of the European Union, who have made vague threats against »

Up Next: Green Starvation

Featured image As has often been noted, environmentalism is, for many, a religion. It now appears that it is a religion that demands human sacrifice. Agricultural productivity depends on fertilizers. The world cannot be fed without them. Yet, when it comes to a tradeoff between carbon dioxide and mass starvation, the “green” left is OK with starvation. Reuters reports: The European Union is divided on how to help poorer nations fight a »

“The Lamps Are Going Out All Over Europe”

Featured image Perhaps the most memorable comment at the outbreak of World War I—or at least the one quoted in every history book—came from the British foreign minister Sir Edward Grey: “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.” The first half of this statement suddenly applies again to Europe’s energy crisis that threatens a cold and dark winter ahead, and we’ll have »

Photo of the Day

Featured image At first I thought this photo of the G-7 meeting had to be a fake, or deeply photoshopped, but apparently it is genuine: First of all, Boris Johnson looks like he just stumbled in from an all-night bender. And just where is President Biden’s right hand? I’m working on a separate piece about why this was maybe the worst G-7 meeting since the 1979 G-7 meeting in Japan, which, coincidentally, »

War Is the Health of the State, 21st Century Edition

Featured image I don’t have a firm conclusion about just what we should do about the Ukraine crisis (beyond not sending Kamala Harris to Munich to embarrass the country). We ought to arm the Ukrainians with all the weapons they can use (short of nukes), impose serious sanctions on Russia, and perhaps some heavy cyber actions. But it is also worth considering that if Germany won’t stand up with the rest of the »