The French presidential and legislative elections earlier this year have instilled new hope in the European integration project, by raising the prospect of deeper Franco-German cooperation. And yet some forms of cooperation, not least shared liability schemes, would be a mistake. As long as member states have sovereignty over fiscal and economic policymaking, France and Germany should focus their efforts on making the eurozone itself more resilient.French President Emmanuel Macron has started to

Most pundits agree that the least bad way to deal with North Korea’s nuclear saber rattling is a continued combination of tight containment and aggressive diplomacy. Fewer, however, have recognized that the least bad military option -- the one implied by US President Donald Trump’s insistence that China take responsibility for its dangerous neighbor -- is a Chinese invasion, or regime change forced through China’s threat to launch one.This outcome, which would sharply shift East Asia’s strategic

With the long Labor Day weekend upon us, tens of millions of Americans will hit the road in an annual rite. Along the way, drivers will fill up gas tanks, grab a bite to eat, stretch their legs and perhaps stay the night at a motel. Should autonomous, electric vehicles displace traditional automobiles, this roadside economy and ecosystem will be disrupted. How and when remains to be seen.Thanks to the construction of the interstate highway system decades ago, it’s relatively easy and affordable

Latin American countries deserve credit for their recent denunciations of what they bluntly refer to as Venezuela’s dictatorship, but I have a hard time understanding why they don’t do the same thing with Cuba’s dictatorship. When it comes to Cuba, they all seem to look the other way.I was thinking about this when I read about Cuba’s Oct. 22 election for municipal council members. It will be the first of several tightly controlled steps leading to the election of a National Assembly that is to d

Germany will elect a new parliament on Sept. 24, and polls indicate that Chancellor Angela Merkel, head of the Christian Democratic Union party, is likely to be re-elected to a fourth term. With the outcome seemingly a foregone conclusion, the campaign hasn’t been too exciting. Fierce discussions? Heated debates? Nowhere.Into this vacuum stepped Jens Spahn, a 37-year-old conservative, whose recent newspaper commentary has drawn considerable attention in Germany. His concern is the use of English

China is increasingly desperate for foreign investment. Yet foreign companies are less and less interested in what it has to offer. How this problem gets resolved may be one of the most important questions facing China’s economy.After China joined the World Trade Organization, in 2000, overseas investors couldn’t wait to jump in. Foreign direct investment grew at an annualized rate of 10.8 percent from 2000 to 2008. Enticed by China’s market size and development capacity, companies were willing

There are reasons to be optimistic this Labor Day. The unemployment rate is low, at 4.3 percent. Hundreds of thousands of new jobs are being created every month. Second-quarter gross domestic product was revised up to 3 percent.That said, economic anxiety still lingers. President Donald Trump, trying to ease that anxiety, talks tough about the North American Free Trade Agreement and the possibility of implementing tariffs. While it sounds good -- what American doesn’t want to boost US manufactur

Suppose the US all stood up at exactly the same minute, from Maine to Hawaii, and shouted at the top of our lungs: infrastructure!Would it make any difference? Not likely.You-know-who would probably be tweeting about how badly he is treated, and we’d all be ignored. Again.As danger, misery and heartache in the form of Hurricane Harvey plague those we love in Texas and Louisiana, we hear again and again that if aging reservoirs, pot-holed roads, outmoded drains and weathered water treatment plant

You can only blow so much air in a balloon before it bursts, a concept President Donald Trump needs to master.One night, he gives a thoughtful, well-ordered, substantive speech on Afghanistan, but then what happened in Phoenix? At a political rally, he reverted to his worst self, a ranting, raving juvenile.His harangue was largely about criticisms of how he responded to the racist, neo-Nazi, KKK, alt-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and he was right on some points. But it was essentiall

As monuments to the Confederacy are swept away from public spaces, white supremacists, neo-Nazis and the president of the United States have been fretting over the so-called attack on history, presumably their history. Their white history.Attack, assault, erasure, destruction — well, truth and justice in the face of denial and dissembling can certainly feel like that. But there is no such thing as whites-only history, there never was, not even with regard to the Confederacy.Like millions of Afri