Special Reports

On 31 May 1989 in Mainz, George Bush promised the Federal Republic a role as a “partner in leadership” of the West. Thirty-seven years later, as Washington withdraws its troops from Germany at the very […]

In Metz, the city of Robert Schuman, Leo XIV closed his trip to France with a speech on Europe. This second piece does not summarize the press — it rereads the texts: what the pope says about Europe, about peace, about barbarism, and what he implies without naming anyone.

Claude Martin was France’s ambassador to Germany from 1999 to 2007. But long before holding that post, he had already been a quiet witness to it — a young diplomat in Bonn in the 1960s, a member of the Quai d’Orsay’s “Centre d’analyse et de prévision” in the 1970s, a deputy secretary-general in the 1990s. In his memoirs, Quand je pense à l’Allemagne, la nuit (L’Aube, 2023), he recounts, scene after scene, six decades of the same German reflex toward Washington — a reflex that runs through every government, every political color, and that no chancellor, not even the most Gaullist-compatible, has ever truly broken. What Bush was opening at Mainz in 1989 without naming it, Claude had seen coming, patiently, for thirty years already.

Since April, three European Security bylines have each, in their own way, dissected the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz: Admiral Christian Girard across a three-part naval analysis, Jérôme Denariez in a two-part geoeconomic decryption, […]