Special Reports

Eighteen months of disorder: a president who humiliates his allies, depletes his own munitions stockpiles, normalizes Russian assistance to an adversary killing American soldiers — and who, without meaning to, may have done more for Europe’s strategic autonomy than ten years of speeches. The question is how much longer the world will wait, arms folded, for someone to tell him so to his face.

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, […]