After much foot-dragging, the European Commission proposed a cap on the price it will pay for natural gas yesterday. Fifteen of the union’s members had proposed such a cap to limit Russian energy revenues due to spiking gas prices since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, but a group of members led by Germany are opposed to it.
Financial incentives for the purchase of electric vehicles included in the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act are leading to renewed trade frictions with the EU. While those tensions are significant in and of themselves, they mask deeper problems with how the IRA and climate legislation more generally fit into the global trade regime.
As the remaining results of this week’s midterm congressional elections in the U.S. continue to trickle in, the EU’s leadership is assessing the outcome’s implications for the trans-Atlantic relationship, now that the opposition Republican Party appears on track to win back control of at least one, if not both, chambers of Congress.
For decades, British commentators have expressed concern over other societies that have faced death spirals of governance. Now it is beginning to dawn on many senior political figures in the U.K. that their own system may be drifting dangerously close to the kind of existential crisis they used to think could only happen elsewhere.
Geopolitical tensions will dominate next week’s G-20 summit, as major world leaders convene amid Russia’s war in Ukraine, a heightened U.S.-China strategic rivalry and growing estrangement between the Global North and South. To save the forum from irrelevance, the West must deliver on priorities that matter to the Global South.
Since the onset of the war in Ukraine, hundreds of thousands of Russian men have fled the country to avoid being pressed into military service. In response, several European nations have barred Russian asylum-seekers from entering the country. But arguments for barring Russian draft-dodgers don’t stand up to scrutiny.
Since June, a series of strikes by railway workers represent the U.K.’s largest industrial action in decades. Long dormant, British trade unions are hitting their stride again, and the leadership and grassroots members are mobilized. Yet their resurgence poses a peculiar set of challenges for both of the U.K.’s dominant parties.
Italy’s new far-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, is in Brussels today for her first meetings with EU leaders. Such pro forma courtesy visits to Brussels are commonplace, but hers raises the question of how the bloc’s other leaders will manage the optics of working closely with Italy’s first far-right leader since World War II.
Sweden’s September elections ushered in a new government that promptly mothballed the country’s “feminist foreign policy” adopted in 2014. This unfortunate development, however, is an opportunity for everyone interested in promoting gender equality globally to rethink what a feminist foreign policy can and must do.