Global China

A long overdue update for this site. A little more than a year ago, I switched jobs within the Brookings Institution’s Foreign Policy program, becoming the program’s publications editor. I’ve edited dozens of papers and policy briefs over the past 12 months, and many of them were part of “Global China: Assessing China’s Growing Role in the World” — a mammoth collection of analysis that ultimately amounted to more than 70 papers and primers delving into China’s power and influence across regions and functional areas, which concluded last month.

This recent Brookings Cafeteria podcast episode with project leads Rush Doshi and Ryan Hass as well as Lindsey W. Ford, who hosted a series of Global China conversations on the podcast over the year, offers a good overview of the project and its findings. The full body of analysis should provide a useful resource for the incoming Biden administration on what is probably the United States’ greatest external foreign policy challenge (the illiberal authoritarian evolution of the Republican Party and its policies being probably the overall most serious problem for a successful U.S. foreign policy).

Among the highlights in my opinion are Tanvi Madan’s February 2020 examination of India-China relations, Zach Vertin’s June 2020 deep dive on China’s experiment with a military base in Djibouti, former United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs Jeffrey Feltman’s September 2020 essay on China’s expanding influence at the UN, a short August 2020 primer by Kurt W. Tong on what can be done to help Hong Kong amidst Beijing’s destruction of its autonomy, and James Millward and Dahlia Peterson’s September 2020 paper on China’s system of oppression in Xinjiang. Another I learned something interesting from was Saif M. Khan and Carrick Flynn’s April 2020 paper on maintaining China’s dependence on the U.S. and a few of its democratic partners for advanced computer chips.

Since I haven’t managed to write as much about film on here as I’ve meant to, a few related recommendations.

The developments in Hong Kong beginning last year very much brought to my mind the 2015 omnibus film “Ten Years.” Five shorts, a few of them really excellent, paint a picture of the territory in 2025 as Beijing exerts increasing influence. I saw it during my Penn Kemble fellowship at the National Endowment of Democracy a few years ago, and it’s on Netflix now. Very much worth a watch.

And Ai Weiwei’s “Coronation” is a fascinating document of Wuhan when the coronavirus arrived and shut down the city, and what it says about China. Pair it with Alex Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyan, and Suzanne Hillinger’s “Totally Under Control,” on the United States’ botched COVID-19 response (on Hulu).

A no-deal Brexit approaches

March 29, 2019 has come and gone and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland remains a member state of the European Union. But probably not for long.

I interviewed my Brookings Center on the United States and Europe colleague Amanda Sloat on Facebook Live that morning just before Parliament voted Theresa May’s exit deal with the EU down for a third time, as we expected. Amanda’s been watching and explaining the twists and turns of Brexit, including nine blogs for Brookings on the “Brexit Endgame.” I’d also recommend her recent Foreign Affairs piece, her paper “Divided kingdom: How Brexit is remaking the UK’s constitutional order” from last fall, and her Time piece on Northern Ireland from last summer.

My own intuition for the past month or more is that the U.K. and the EU are headed to a break without a deal. May is a Conservative prime minister who set out to deliver a Conservative Brexit, and she negotiated one representing the weaker side against a unified European Union which prioritized Ireland’s bottom line of no hard border on the island of Ireland. But with May reliant on Northern Ireland’s hardline Protestant Democratic Unionist Party for her parliamentary majority since the 2017 snap elections, no special economic arrangement could be worked out for Northern Ireland. The hard Brexiteers in her party, heedless of the interests of the people of Northern Ireland, eventually made clear that they preferred the substantial risks of a no-deal Brexit to the potential that the U.K. stays in a customs union with the EU - if only in the contingency that they can’t come to a negotiated arrangement otherwise in 2020 under a backstop set up to guard the gains of the peace process. And May didn’t have enough votes between the two parties and from a few Labour MPs willing to buck their party to get her Conservative Brexit deal over the finish line.

Unless a fourth try by May works, we’re down to a no-deal crash out (which some hardliners welcome) on April 12 (or as late as May 22 if the EU is feeling generous enough to give the Brits more time to prepare), or the Parliament wresting away control to deliver a softer Brexit with the help of the EU for another extension which might well require general and European Parliament elections in the U.K. The crash out still seems likeliest to me, because the alternative is complicated and precarious - it requires an affirmative majority for something, which has been lacking thus far, it requires the acquiescence of 27 other EU countries with reasons to be torn about keeping the U.K. in for longer, and it faces hostility from both the lame duck prime minister and the hard Brexiteers. That alternative is still possible - fear of no-Brexit is what led the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson, and Dominic Raab to vote for May’s deal on Friday when they are on the record preferring no-deal - but time is running out. It’s going to be an interesting week in the British Parliament.

The mutating left of Western Europe and the illiberal states of Central and Eastern Europe

Last week, Brookings published a suite of 20+ “Democracy & Disorder” papers covering democracy issues around the globe and implications for geopolitics and international order. Given the troubled state of Europe and the West these days, a number of them focused on the Old Continent. I co-authored two of them.

Célia Belin and I have followed up our March 2018 American Interest piece on the “Macronification” of Europe with a paper on how "the challenges of globalization, identity, democracy, and the governance of the European Union have weakened social democratic political parties over the past 20 years.” In the second half of the paper, we categorize political parties on or stemming from the left in Western Europe into four categories “based on radical versus mainstream ideology and experimental versus traditional methods” - the Established Left of the classic center-left social democrats (but also including Germany’s rising Greens, on the more experimental side), the Radical Left which yielded Syriza’s revolt in Greece four years ago, the Experimental Left which includes Italy’s Five Star Movement, now governing in coalition with the far-right League, and the Extreme Center embodied in Emmanuel Macron. We recommend U.S. policymakers do more to engage to the European left on Russia and understand its approach to sovereignty and that the American left engage its transatlantic counterpart.

We published another long-in-the-works report the same day, on “The anatomy of illiberal states,” analyzing the tools that illiberal leaders of NATO and EU member states have used to erode checks and balances on their power, which I co-authored with Alina Polyakova and Torrey Taussig plus Kemal Kirişci, Amanda Sloat, James Kirchick, Melissa Hooper, Norman Eisen, and Andrew Kenealy, who wrote case studies on Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. Our many recommendations boil down to a tougher but not carrot-free approach for the U.S. Congress and executive branch, key actors in the European Union, and NATO to member governments which have damaged their countries’ democracies.

I encourage you to check out the reports, hope you find them interesting/useful, and welcome your thoughts.

Measuring Transatlantic Relations

Brookings’s Center on the United States and Europe is out with the second edition of its quarterly Trans-Atlantic Scorecard. I’ve been involved in managing this project from concept to publication and promotion, and I’m looking forward to the picture that an increasing number of these snapshots of the troubled relationship between the United States and Europe will paint over time. That said, I’m not terribly optimistic for the near-term future of transatlantic relations. As my colleague Tom Wright argues, two years into the Trump administration, “observers can identify a unified, if still incomplete, Trump foreign policy in which the administration accommodates the president’s impulses and seeks to act on them.” That doesn’t bode well for NATO in the year the alliance turns 70 years old given Trump’s skepticism of alliances and demands for the Europeans to pay the United States more for their defense. The 70th anniversary summit will be held in Washington in April at the foreign ministers’ level in order to keep President Trump away and I fear he may show up at Secretary Pompeo’s show like the masque of the orange death. Wess Mitchell, the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs and a committed Atlanticist who particularly treasures ties with Central and Eastern European countries like the Czech Republic, Poland, and the Baltics, has resigned effective mid-February. If there was a policy reason for that (I’m not sure there is), I would assume it has to do with problems coming down the line for NATO.

Anyway, the second survey of Brookings experts, conducted at the beginning of January, shows a decline in the health of the transatlantic relationship compared to the low starting point of our September poll. That’s a rating of 3.5 on a scale from 1 (poor) to 10 (excellent), down from 3.6. Security relations are down from 4.7 to 4.4. U.S. relations with France are down from 5.1 (the best score yet recorded in the survey in any category) to 4.3 as the Trump-Macron relationship has cooled off considerably. On the other hand, relations with Turkey have improved. In September, they scored at 2.5, the same as U.S. relations with Russia then and now. But they are now rated at 3.3. Trump also spoke on the phone with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan more than with all the other European leaders combined in the last four months (we track that). They had a few things to talk about (the Trump administration’s ultimately successful efforts to get Ankara to release pastor Andrew Brunson from custody; the Saudi government’s murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in its Istanbul consulate; Syria).

The Scorecard also includes topical questions (a plurality expected that Britain and the EU would manage to avoid a “no deal” Brexit, a majority saw Jim Mattis’s exit as secretary of defense as weakening the Trump administration’s commitment to NATO), a timeline of relevant developments including notable speeches, figures charting information relevant to transatlantic relations (ie. America and Europe’s respective trade with Iran and U.S. LNG exports to Europe), and Tom Wright’s take on what to watch going forward. I hope you find it an interesting read and a useful resource.

Populist Pressure and Migration Policy in Europe

While Europe is facing critical issues such as the management of Brexit, a rogue ally across the Atlantic coming shortly for a visit that could go quite horribly, and the governance of the euro, the topic of the hour is migration - not because numbers are up (in fact they're down) but because the populist right is seizing the moment to press advantage. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is recently reelected and setting the pace for Central European populists and harder line conservatives across the continent, the leader of Italian's far-right Lega, Matteo Salvini, is an empowered interior minister, Bavaria's conservatives are trying to fend off the Alternative for Germany in upcoming state elections by threatening to bring down Angela Merkel, Austria's right-wing coalition is about to take over the European Council's rotating presidency. And all of these characters have a kindred spirit in the White House and notably good relations with the Kremlin.

My Brookings colleague Jessica Brandt and I wrote about the political developments and what's on the table for migration policy at the European Council summit this week: 

Despite Salvini’s appalling rhetoric (“We need a mass cleansing, street by street, piazza by piazza, neighborhood by neighborhood,” he said in an interview last year that received renewed attention after he announced a “census” of the country’s Roma community), Italy needs a common European solution more than any other government present at the summit—with the possible exception of Germany.

Salvini may have a kindred spirit in Hungary’s vitriolic, anti-migrant Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, whose parliament just passed a series of laws that allow the government to imprison individuals and nongovernmental organizations for assisting undocumented migrants, but geography matters. And Hungary and its Visegrád Group partners—the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia—are largely responsible for the failure to reach agreement on a collective response within the bloc, rejecting EU proposals to implement resettlement quotas that would ease the burden on frontline countries including Italy... Ultimately, if Italy wants a refugee burden-sharing scheme, and the perpetuation of Europe’s system of open borders, Merkel, not Orbán, is its ally.

The fault lines on the issue are deep, and running between as well as within nations, they threaten the EU and the chancellor who has been its dominant leader for the past 13 years. 

All the while, people are at risk. More than 34,000 migrants and refugees have died attempting to find a new home in Europe since the early 1990s. According to survivor accounts, more than 200 people drowned off the coast of Libya in several unrelated incidents just last week. As the stalemate between European countries deepens, almost 350 refugees and migrants remain stranded on two boats in the Mediterranean. The geopolitics of this week’s meeting are salient, but its human consequences are every bit as significant.

European Politics is Turning French

I have a piece out in The American Interest, co-authored with my Brookings Institution Center on the United States and Europe colleague Célia Belin, titled "European politics Is Turning French." (If you're blocked by the paywall, the full text can also be read at Brookings' Order from Chaos). We describe ongoing political realignment in Europe, with the pro-EU center consolidating against centrifugal nationalist-populists, a process that damages the center-left in particular given the center-right bent of economic governance in the bloc. 

The 2017 French electoral cycle may be the textbook example of this overhaul of European politics... With Macron’s rise to power, French politics have gone through a process of “Macronification,” a unification of centrist constituencies around a pro-European agenda, leaving little air for anything but radical far-Left and far-Right parties adopting an anti-EU line... While both of France’s mainstream parties were badly wounded by “Macronification,” the Socialist Party (PS) was obliterated...

Indeed, in France and elsewhere, commitment to Europe feels increasingly like the kiss of death for social democrats. Although the European project is, fundamentally, a politically liberal idea—designed to transcend the dark forces of nationalism—to which the European Left is deeply attached, the European Union of today hardly resembles the leftist ideal of a “United States of Europe"... The European Left finds itself in the paradoxical situation of defending the symbolic value of the European Union while deploring its current policies. Paying a high price for their European commitment, leftwing parties either accede to power as responsible stakeholders stripped of their ideology and identity, or watch from outside government as the Right chips away at what remains of the legacy of 20th-century social democracy.

Where the left / center-left in Europe and America are going in this age of right-wing populists on the rise is one of my primary research interests and one I have in common with Célia, so expect more from us on this topic. 

The Democrats' Foreign Policy in the Shadow of Trump

My policy paper on the foreign policy of the U.S. Democratic Party after Barack Obama's presidency and Hillary Clinton's failed presidential candidacy was published this week by the German Marshall Fund of the United States. I've been working on this for a few months, with the idea to explain where the party might be going on foreign policy to U.S. allies in Europe and beyond as well Americans inside and outside the Beltway. I focused on the rhetoric and legislative initiatives of a few key players in the party, include Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, and others. The paper is more descriptive than prescriptive, but I call for a more broader and serious debate on policy towards Russia, and on foreign policy generally ahead of the 2020 election.

Per my executive summary:

Despite the broad success of Barack Obama’s presidency, America’s Democratic Party finds itself debating the political path back to power amid the chaos of the Donald Trump administration, which has jumbled expectations for what a Republican foreign policy looks like. This paper examines where the Democrats might be headed on foreign policy — in opposition, for the coming 2020 presidential campaign, and for their eventual return to the White House in 2021 or later — focusing on the arguments of Congressional Democrats who might have a future in national politics. 

Foreign policy did not play a major role in the 2016 primary campaign between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, and the de facto Democratic foreign policy may be a continuation of Obama’s championing of the liberal international order mixed with pragmatic strategic restraint. Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy has articulated this “progressive foreign policy” direction most vocally. This Obamanian path competes with a somewhat more interventionist liberal hawk camp, including Clinton and her running mate Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, and a more critical left, which claimed victory over the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement during the primary and which includes Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, a sharp critic of regime-change military interventions. 

With Democrats more committed to multilateralism and diplomacy, particularly compared with Trump, America’s liberal democratic allies and partners will welcome the return of the party to the White House, but the post-Trump clean-up job will be Herculean and will require the rebuilding of Washington’s diplomatic apparatus itself. Congress is also playing an important role on foreign policy in the Trump era and Democrats must work with their colleagues across the aisle to mitigate Trump’s damage. Democrats should sharpen their foreign policy skills and debates in search of solutions to prevent catastrophic wars and ameliorate international problems. This includes finding a proactive and sensible policy toward Russia, despite the politicization of all things Russian in the aftermath of the 2016 election.

A paper on the Republicans is forthcoming from GMF colleagues. I also wrote a related blog piece on Bernie Sanders' foreign policy speech in September for GMF's Out of Order blog on Medium. 

Penn Kemble Forum and Democrats' Foreign Policy

Hello all, here's an overdue update. 

I was recently accepted as a 2017-2018 Penn Kemble fellow with the National Endowment for Democracy, and as such will participate in monthly dinners and online conversations about democracy, human rights, and policy with foreign policy experts, government officials, and democracy practitioners. The full group of fellows has just been named and I'm very much looking forward to these conversations and some related writing.

On a related note, most of my work as a resident fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States this summer has been focused on a paper on where the Democrats are headed on foreign policy, which should be out in a month or so. (I also did a few interviews on the occasion of Trump's second European trip - here on Al Jazeera - parts one and two). Zach Beauchamp at Vox has a good piece out this morning on the Democrats' lack of foreign policy ideas and structural reasons for it. I argue Barack Obama managed U.S. foreign policy pretty well, but the Democrats need a more vibrant debate going forward, accounting for both smarter policy and the realities of public opinion, to do what they can as a congressional minority and prepare for retaking the White House and repairing a damaged U.S. leadership role in the world, and I analyze what's already there in the Democratic debate. More soon.

The Little Mermaid, with Teeth and Polish New Wave Music

You might not associate Poland with mermaids. But its capital of Warsaw has thanked a Vistula River mermaid for her protection of the city by featuring her on its coat of arms for more than 600 years. And more recently, the country has produced the film The Lure (2015), a horror musical twist on the story of the Little Mermaid and the debut of director Agniewszka Smoczyńska, digitally available in the United States through the Criterion Collection (and assumedly on DVD at some point). 

We meet Silver and Golden, our heroines, luring a father and son from the beach, promising in their sweet song not to eat them. The mother, Krysia, lets loose a scream at her menfolks' peril when she notices. The next thing we know, we're in the surreal nightclub of an alternative 1980s Poland where Krysia sings for her family band in glittery pantsuits. The family has adopted the mermaid girls, and gets the club owner to hire them as a new act.

Smoczyńska's mermaids are fiercely teethed, fishy with monstrous, long, colorless tails, and frequently topless. Along with their songs sung on stage or to lure prey, there are a few more surreal choreographed numbers, including one set in a department store that would not be out of place in La La Land. Overall, however, this film is closer in spirit and style to Hedwig and the Angry Inch. With carnivorous mermaids. 

Silver, the blonde, has a sweeter disposition and falls for the bass-playing son of the family - a risky business given the rules mermaids operate under when it comes to romance with humans (forget Disney's The Little Mermaid and watch the gorgeous 1968 Soviet animated short Rusalochka for a review). Golden, the brunette, is cooler towards humanity, and hungrier.   

The Lure is different, ambitious, and has fun, and I'm interested to see what Smoczyńska does next. The music is pretty catchy. If you think you might be into a Polish-language new wave musical about nightclub mermaids with sharp teeth, I wholeheartedly recommend you see this film.

Janus Films is pleased to present Agnieszka Smoczynska's hallucinatory Polish genre-bender THE LURE, opening theatrically on February 1st at New York's IFC Center, as well as March 3rd at Los Angeles' Laemmle NoHo and at other dates and venues nationwide.

And here's an interview with Smoczyńska. The real gem: 

"In Poland, there’s no tradition of musicals... There’s no tradition with horror. There’s no tradition with genres. You can imagine what people think when they watch this movie... They promoted it as 'the Polish Chicago'... They didn’t show in the trailer that they are mermaids. They didn’t show the horror element. And people with children came to this film."

Warsaw's mermaid in Rynek Starego Miasta, from my 2014 visit.

NATO Braces for Trump

The fourth step of Donald Trump's first foreign trip as president is a NATO summit. Given Trump's track record of questioning the U.S. commitment to NATO (though that's been walked back), the organization and its members are bracing for the meeting and coming up with some symbolic deliverables for Trump. Foreign Policy and Politico had good stories on this in the past couple days - with Politico quoting NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg saying "The president of the United States has a 12-second attention span.” I'm quoted in John Hudson's BuzzFeed News scoop published on Thursday May 18 that Trump's disturbing nationalist advisor Stephen Miller, a former Jeff Sessions aide, is writing Trump's speech for the occasion:

I'd obviously feel much better if [Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Europe and Russia] Fiona Hill was working on the speech, but the foreign policy adults in the Trump administration don't exactly seem ascendent this month... NATO members do need to spend more and more importantly improve their capabilities... But if this is a tough speech saying ‘pay more or else’ from a US president hated by much of the European public and seemingly untrustworthy when it comes to Russia, it won't be productive.

The dynamics at the meeting between Trump and each of western Europe's big 3 countries bear watching. Germany is entering election season and the anti-Trump card is perhaps the Social Democrats' best hope at improving their share of the vote, though Angela Merkel seems near certain to win re-election at this point. Merkel's government has committed to increase German defense spending to 2 percent of GDP, but slowly; the Social Democrats are hedging on that. This will be Emmanuel Macron's first meeting with Trump, and he will need to try to build a working relationship. And with Britain on its way out of the European Union, NATO looms larger as a key institution connecting London with Europe and the United States.

Suspicious Minds: U.S.-German Relations in the Trump Era

Earlier this week, the Transatlantic Academy published its latest annual collaborative report, Suspicious Minds: U.S.-German Relations in the Trump Era. I edited the report as the Academy's program officer, and am one of 11 co-authors, along with executive director Stephen F. Szabo and our fellows Frédéric Bozo (Sorbonne Nouvelle), Stefan Fröhlich (University of Erlangen-Nürnberg), Wade Jacoby (Brigham Young University), Harold James (Princeton University), Michael Kimmage (Catholic University of America), Hans Kundnani (German Marshall Fund of the United States), Yascha Mounk (Harvard University), Mary Elise Sarotte (University of Southern California), and Heidi Tworek (University of British Columbia). 

The Academy works on a different topic related to transatlantic relations every year. The future of relations between the United States and Germany was a good fit for the final year of an institution which had been a German-American partnership. Despite the close cooperation between the Obama administration and German government under Angela Merkel, especially close after the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis in 2014, we saw some long-standing and developing tensions in the relationship - revelations of National Security Agency surveillance badly damaged German trust in the United States including on the elite level, German distrust of U.S. corporate power has made the chances of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership highly questionable and is heightened in relation to digital giants like Google and Facebook in our digital age, Washington has complained about Germany's low defense spending, its unsustainable  policies towards to eurozone, and its huge trade surplus, Berlin joined the BRICS in abstaining on the Libya intervention resolution at the Security Council, and the sharp divide over Iraq - where Germany was far wiser - was not so long ago. 

Into this already more-fragile-than-it-seems situation comes the global catastrophe of Donald Trump as U.S. president. As we write, Trump "challenges four key assumptions on which German foreign policy has been based since the creation of the Federal Republic in 1949: the assumption that the United States’ posture toward Western Europe is predictable; the assumption that the United States sees Western Europe’s security as vital to its own strategic interests and would therefore come to Germany’s defense if needed; the assumption that the United States will defend and extend the liberal international trade and financial order; and the assumption that the German–American alliance is underwritten by such key political values as democracy, the rule of law, and human rights." Trump leaves U.S. allies (and especially security-exposed trade-dependent status-quo ones like Germany) with a nasty dilemma - "If they assume the best and embrace the status quo, they risk being caught unprepared. But if they assume the worst, act suspiciously, and formulate a radically new foreign policy strategy, they could hasten the demise of an alliance that has protected them for many decades. So far, Germany is taking a pragmatic wait-and-educate approach, trying to inform and advise a president unschooled in transatlantic issues and history and hoping that the lessons take."

Our recommendations for the Trump administration essentially boil down to continue to cooperate with the Europeans, don't change U.S. foreign policy too much, and don't try to destroy the European Union. The federal bureaucracy, state and local governments, and the private sector should try to maintain the benefits of transatlantic cooperation amidst the chaos at the top. Meanwhile, Germany does need to do more to provide for its own security, in its own interest, and we have some good suggestions on creative ways to do so including DARPA-style defense research that could yield long-term economic gains and hiring top-notch cybersecurity people away from the private sector with good salaries (for more detail on these ideas, see Heidi Tworek in War On the Rocks). It also needs to strengthen Europe by rebalancing the European economy, and play the long game and not give up on the United States. This Trump shall pass.

Give the report a read if you get a chance - I'm proud of it. The Transatlantic Academy is closing shop at the end of May, but we'll have a few more policy papers come out later this month, potentially in to June, and a few more events. 

Death in Sarajevo / FilmStruck

Film is one of my favorite ways to travel, around the world, through time, and into the shoes of others. Run Lola Run inspired me to continue studying German and ultimately write an undergrad honors project thesis about the works of Tom Tykwer and Andreas Dresen, British film was at the center of my studies in London in 2003, the first time I had lived abroad or in a city, and by now I've seen upwards of 500 foreign-language feature films. So I enjoy DC's film festivals, the December European Union one at the AFI Silver (technically in Maryland) above all, and try to get to showings when I can. A few days ago, at Filmfest DC (which unfortunately just ended), I saw Danis Tanović's Death in Sarajevo with a few friends, and I'll recommend it for anyone who has a chance to see it. 

Tanović's No Man's Land (2001) won the foreign film Oscar, and while I saw it too long ago to directly compare the two, I remember it as being excellent. Based on and incorporating a Bernard-Henri Lévy play called Hotel Europa, Death in Sarajevo takes EU-sponsored commemorations of the 100th anniversary of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip as the set-up for a dive into Bosnia and Herzegovina's continuing problems two decades after Dayton. It's an Altman-esque nearly real-time tour through a hotel - based on and filmed at the iconic Holiday Inn where foreign correspondents stayed during the war - during preparations for the festivities. The manager hopes to use the sales boost to pay his workers for the first time in month, but they're planning on striking - led, ultimately, by the mother of the chief receptionist who the manager relies on - despite the efforts of the gangster running a strip club in the basement. A famed French actor rehearses the Levy play in his room, filmed by an overzealous but coked-up and distracted security guard. On the roof, a TV journalist interviews historians for a segment and meets another Gavrilo Princip, a Serb nationalist from the provinces concealing a gun and vague plans but not his anger. Sparks fly as they argue about history, politics, identity, and whether any assassination today could make a difference. Tanović draws laughter as well as blood, but this is a sharp film about the country's continuing paralysis, the Balkans' recurrent problems - nationalism, poverty, crime - and perhaps how little the EU ultimately matters there. 

The hotel, taken on my visit in 2012.

On a related note, I'd like to give a shout-out to my top source of cinema at the moment, FilmStruck. As a lover of international and arthouse cinema, I'm a lover of the Criterion Collection - but those DVDs are rather expensive, even when they're 50 percent off in flash sales. So Hulu's collection of Criterion made me a Hulu subscriber a few years ago. Last fall, Criterion migrated to its own start-up streaming service, in partnership with Turner Classic Movies. The best thing about FilmStruck is the library of hundreds of great films. The second best thing is how it's curated - with dozens of virtual film festivals around a particular theme, director, country, actor, cinematographer, etc. on at the same time. The downside is that my Apple TV is too old to carry the FilmStruck app directly, so I watch everything via my iPhone and AirPlay. That works, although it's suboptimal when you need to pause. The cheaper FilmStruck option gives you a sizable selection of rotating films only, the Criterion Channel costs extra but gives you access to the full library as well as additional specials. Overall, I highly recommend. 

Welcome / Reflections on the Election in France

Welcome to my new website. I'm Ted Reinert, I'm a 34-year-old American living in northern Virginia, and I spend much of my time thinking about politics in wider Europe, in my own country, and around the world. I'm planning to use this space to promote my published writings and offer some additional longer-than-140-character commentary, largely on matters of international affairs and politics, but occasionally on some of my other interests like cinema and travel (though I love Twitter as a news source and way of sharing good journalism and more). Since I was last active on my Blogspot site The Penguin Revolutions, I've been working as program officer at the Transatlantic Academy at the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Washington, a heavily editorial role working with brilliant fellows on topics like liberal order, religion, Russia, and Germany. I've written and presented some of my own commentary in recent years - most recently on German Chancellor Angela Merkel's visit to the Trump White House (on Al Jazeera, which can be seen here and here, and on the Academy website) - but am planning more of this going forward as the Academy closes its doors - journalism was my first career and I love writing.

Five years ago, living in Brussels and working as a researcher at the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, I visited the northern French metropolis of Lille on a day trip for the second round of the French presidential election, and blogged about it. Sharply critical of Germany's reticence to take steps that might actually solve the euro crisis, I welcomed François Hollande's victory (as did hundred of people on Lille's Place du General de Gaulle), while keeping my eye on the long campaign in my own country, which thankfully resulted in Barack Obama's reelection. In my view, Obama remains the smartest, wisest, and most inspiring political leader of our time, prudent with restraint in foreign policy and successful domestically despite scorched-earth opposition. Hollande, for his part, wasn't so bad. But vexing problems of providing good stable, jobs amidst technological change and global competition continue to haunt the United States and Europe alike, and so do the old xenophobic nationalist demons. Illiberalism has been on the march since May 2012 - Vladimir Putin tightening authoritarianism in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan doing the same in Turkey, Viktor Orban consolidating "illiberal democracy" in Hungary, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi's coup and crackdown in Egypt, continued carnage in Syria, the rise of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, Poland's fall to a vengeful Law and Justice Party, the victory of the mendacious Brexiteers, and the tragic twists that unbelievably brought us U.S. President Donald Trump. Against all this, Merkel's frustrating inflexibility in the management of the common European currency doesn't seem so bad. (Although it too is dangerous. I'm worried about Italy). 

France has averted a catastrophe far right vs. far left runoff with the first round first-place finish of Emmanuel Macron (an alumnus of the German Marshall Fund's Marshall Memorial Fellowship program, by the way, and we're very proud). Macron waved the flag of the European Union, and it helped him to victory. The dike has continued to hold against the far right in continental Western Europe, as Sylvie Kauffmann points out - perhaps the post-World War II wariness of nationalism is stronger there, perhaps the politicians of the center right have simply been more principled there than in the United States and United Kingdom. The defeat of Marine Le Pen is highly likely - and France doesn't have an electoral college to get in the way - but one can't be too complacent. Nor, in defeat, will she be spent as a political force. 

But a President Macron would have his work cut out for him, governing without an established party behind him, and challenging the German position on the euro to try to rebalance the European Union economy - in a German election year. On that note, former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis's account of his dealings with Minister Macron two years ago is interesting. 

Thanks for reading.