Category: EuroActiv

Call it diplomacy with Chinese characteristics. As Beijing increasingly views itself as locked in an ideological and political contest with the West, the foreign ministry no longer plays nice, as often as it used to. Wolf warrior diplomacy — named after two nationalistic action movies depicting a Chinese army hero fighting villains in Asia and […]

Rajan Menon is the director of the Grand Strategy Program at Defense Priorities, Spitzer Professor Emeritus at the Powell School of City College of New York, and a senior research fellow at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute for War and Peace Studies. Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a foreign affairs columnist […]

ROME — Giorgia Meloni, the favorite to become Italy’s next prime minister, has rejected claims that a government led by her far-right party could herald a fascist revival, instead likening her tribe to Britain’s ruling Conservatives. The “Tories” as the U.K.’s governing party is also known, have themselves been criticized for pursuing radical right-wing policies, […]

LONDON — China’s ambassador to the U.K. has been hauled into the Foreign Office for crisis talks over Beijing’s “aggressive and wide-ranging escalation” in Taiwan. Liz Truss, the U.K. foreign secretary and Conservative Party leadership hopeful, summoned Ambassador Zheng Zeguang to explain his country’s actions over recent days. Tensions between China and Taiwan escalated dramatically […]

William Nattrass is a freelance journalist and commentator based in Prague. It was never going to last.  Though Russia’s invasion of Ukraine brought about a brief détente in Poland’s rule-of-law dispute with the European Commission, relations are now, unsurprisingly, hitting a new low.   Fury is building in Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party […]

LONDON — The U.K. is offering all children aged 1 to 9 a booster dose of the polio vaccine after further poliovirus has been found in sewage in the capital. The committee advising the British government on vaccination has recommended that a booster dose be offered to children of those ages in all London boroughs. […]

Europeans have been saved from a summer shutdown of social media sites Facebook and Instagram by … European Union bureaucracy. An Irish draft decision to block the social media sites’ parent company Meta’s data transfers from Europe to the U.S. is stuck in the process, as regulators from across the EU butt heads over the […]

KYIV — Blasts that rocked a Russian military airfield in forcibly annexed Crimea signal the start of Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the south and a critical new phase of the war that could shape its ultimate outcome, two Ukrainian officials told POLITICO. The series of explosions Tuesday sent huge fireballs and mushroom clouds of black smoke […]

Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said Wednesday morning he was planning to run for the Senate in Italy’s upcoming general election. “I think I’ll run for the Senate, so we’ll make everyone happy, after receiving pressure from so many, even outside Forza Italia,” the 85-year-old Berlusconi, who leads the center-right party Forza Italia, said on Rai […]

Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas has tested positive for coronavirus, she announced in a Facebook post on Wednesday. “The morning started positively, unfortunately, corona-positively,” she quipped. Kallas said she has minor symptoms: She lost her voice on Monday, attributing that to a minor cold, because her rapid COVID tests were negative at first. She tested […]