European Politics.

For decades Europe delegated its defense to Washington and, quietly, its judgment too. Ukraine is the cost of the first failure. Our confusion about China is the cost of the second.

The case for deeper European integration has nothing to do with ideology. It is a structural response to a world that has stopped waiting for Europeans to make up their minds.

Friedrich Merz speaks about power differently than his predecessors. Rhetoric is the precondition, not the achievement. Six months in, the preconditions exist. The test comes next.

Liberation Day was not a trade policy. It was a demonstration - of what happens to countries that have no answer to economic coercion. Europe watched, got a 90-day reprieve it did not earn, and learned nothing.