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“The only game now is out-Faraging Farage,”

Johnson’s entire gambit has been to provoke his opponents in Parliament into forcing him to delay a no-deal Brexit—allowing him to claim that his attempt to implement the 2016 Brexit referendum has been thwarted by an undemocratic, pro-EU Parliament. More, he wants to blame his opponents for forcing him to call the general election that he actually wants. And in that sense, Johnson has succeeded on both counts.

Even the usually pro-Conservative Times newspaper expressed dismay at Johnson’s ruthless bluffing. “Nothing is as it seems. Boris Johnson wanted and intended to lose his historic vote,” wrote Jenni Russell. “Johnson and his chief strategist, Dominic Cummings, deliberately planned and engineered last night’s defeat, goading the Commons into opposing him; he was lying to his party, parliament and the country when he claimed that he was being pushed into calling an election.”

The Brexit endgame, then, has become a tug of war over what election date will be maximally damaging for the Conservatives and least damaging for Labour

Labour would love to delay the public vote until after Johnson is humiliatingly forced to ask for a Brexit deal—which would be a boost for the Brexit Party and scupper Conservative chances of power.

with a mandatory delay of Brexit fast making its way into law, the only way for Britain to leave the EU now will be for Johnson to persuade a majority of voters to back his radical, no-deal version of Brexit in a general election. And the polls have been showing that public opinion is going in the opposite direction.

The UK’s trade negotiating efforts will instead be targeted, first, at reaching a satisfactory arrangement with the EU and renegotiating British membership of the World Trade Organisation.  A secondary priority will be to negotiate trade deals with other key markets and partners (for example the US, Canada, India, Brazil and China).

The UK will have no say in the EU’s plans to extend the Economic Partnership Agreements, in the EU’s ongoing efforts to promote regional integration in Africa, or in the future of European agricultural subsidies that continue to cause damage to African producers

Gorbachev was determined to stay in Russia and fight for reform, not to take up a life of well-compensated exile abroad. To do that, he would need money to fund his center, his staff, and his activities—urgently. As Gorbachev later told France 24 when asked about the ad, “I needed to finish the building. The workers started to leave—I needed to pay them.” To keep his vision going—and to stay relevant in a world moving beyond him—he would need a lot of money. More, even, than he could make by giving lectures. More than anyone in Russia could, or wanted to, give him.

(The exact amount that Gorbachev would receive for the commercial is secret, but it may have been one of the largest talent fees in history—an amount that would be easily in the seven figures today, adjusted for inflation.)

The concept obviously exploited the shock value of having a former world leader appear. But the ad played on the fact that Gorbachev was far more popular outside Russia than inside it. As late as October 1991, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll showed that 54 percent of Americans wanted to see Gorbachev as the head of the Soviet Union, compared with only 18 percent for Yeltsin. And warm feelings toward Gorbachev persisted in the West long after the Soviet Union dissolved.

The negotiations took months. Partly, this represented a negotiating tactic: The longer the negotiations drew out, the higher Gorbachev’s talent fee would be. But it also represented real hesitation on Gorbachev’s part.

a Moscow Pizza Hut near Red Square, which had opened in 1990 as part of a Soviet-era deal with the chain’s then-parent company, PepsiCo. That arrangement, which had been hailed as the “deal of the century,” flopped when the Soviet Union collapsed, killing both the Russian economy and the restaurant’s supply chain. (Overnight, Lithuanian mozzarella became an expensive import from a foreign country.)

Filming the interior scenes took the better part of a day in a different location, inside a real Moscow Pizza Hut. (Even though the bulk of the commercial is just a conversation around a table, multiple sources stressed that filming such a scene—with its complicated sightlines—is enormously challenging.) Coincidentally, it also happened to be Thanksgiving Day in the United States. Since the commercial was being shot at a working Pizza Hut, the cast and crew—including Gorbachev—ate pizza, which was “one of the most interesting Thanksgiving dinners I’ve ever had,” said Shaine, who was seated with Gorbachev.

Gorbachev’s granddaughter Anastasia Virganskaya ended up eating the slice.

BBDO Chairman Philip Dusenberry insisted that the agency’s advertisements be cinematic in their quality. The Gorbachev production lived up to that standard. Informed estimates put the commercial’s budget in the low millions of dollars. Darbyshire, who wrote the script in English, went through three translators to get the right level of idiomatic Russian. To capture the beautiful establishing shots of Red Square and its domed churches, the crew hefted the film cameras high atop the Kremlin itself. And somehow the production managed to get the whole square shut down for the entire shoot.

Gorbachev finally assented—with conditions. First, he would have final approval over the script. That was acceptable. Second, he would not eat pizza on film. That disappointed Pizza Hut. “We always wanted the hero of the ad to eat the pizza,”

Gorbachev justified his decision to do the commercial on two grounds. First, the former leader argued, “pizza is for everyone.” It was nicely communal: “It’s not only consumption. It’s also socializing.”

Besides the expense and effort of the shoot and the postproduction (an original score recorded live!), the dialogue is entirely in Russian with English subtitles—even though Americans hate subtitles.

The commercial closes with the cheers resounding throughout Red Square and then all of Moscow in progressively wider shots with celebratory music underneath. “It has this impression, you might say the illusion, that the entire nation feels this is a wonderful thing that happened.” Of course, it is an illusion—in this case, taking the actor’s dialogue, adding reverb, and layering the chants over each other. But it’s also one that suited both the marketing needs of Pizza Hut and the myth-making needs of Gorbachev. Pizza Hut gets to be not only the avatar of global capitalism but also the restaurant that brings people together. In the commercial’s fiction, at least, Gorbachev gets the hero’s reception that Raisa always thought he deserved.

The future turned out to be much dimmer than the ad anticipated. A little less than a year after the ad was filmed, in August 1998, the Russian financial system collapsed. The economic recovery that had begun to take hold was wiped out. As the Moscow Times wrote, “The whole Russian economy fell to pieces at a stroke.”

Whatever optimism made the pro-Gorbachev slant of the ad even dimly plausible as a representative sampling of Muscovite opinion vanished. News reports suggest that the Pizza Hut location in which the commercial was filmed itself closed during the crash.

this fictional family, like most Russians, probably spent the early 2000s supporting the increasingly hard-line Vladimir Putin, seeing him as “the only person who can take them back to stability and potential for growth,” Weber said. Out with pizza, in with the vertical of power.

despite Gorbachev’s ambitions that his post-presidency could push his country toward greater openness, Russia has slipped ever further along a much less free path than he once envisioned

A tightening of laws on foreign support for nonprofits inside Russia squeezed the Gorbachev Foundation; many of his family members have reportedly moved to Germany. In a book released last month, Gorbachev even weakly offered praise for his successor on the grounds that Putin “inherited chaos” and that his moves could be justified if “the aim of authority is to create conditions for developing a strong modern democracy.”

In a 2018 poll by the respected Levada Center (another byproduct of Gorbachev’s reforms), 66 percent of Russians responded that they regretted the collapse of the Soviet Union. So, of course, does Gorbachev. His ambition was to perfect the country, not to end it.

As a leader, Russians rank Gorbachev well below Joseph Stalin.

Phares also told the BBC that while Trump was committed to moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, as other presidential candidates have vowed, he would not do so unilaterally. “Many presidents of the United States have committed to do that, and he said as well that he will do that, but he will do it under consensus,”

State Department spokesman Mark Toner warned that nothing was stopping Trump from tearing up the agreement, rebuffing comments from Iranian President Hassan Rouhani that the pact was enshrined by the United Nations Security Council and could therefore not be canceled by one party

Toner said if Trump pulls out of the agreement, it could fall apart and lead to Iran restarting work toward a bomb

“He will take the agreement, review it, send it to Congress, demand from the Iranians to restore a few issues or change a few issues, and there will be a discussion,” Phares added. “It could be a tense discussion but the agreement as is right now — $750 billion to the Iranian regime without receiving much in return and increasing intervention in four countries — that is not going to be accepted by the Trump administration.”

Phares did not elaborate on what consensus would be sought for such a move, which would break with decades of precedent and put Washington at odds with nearly all United Nations member states.

Earlier Thursday, Trump Israel adviser Jason Dov Greenblatt told Israel’s Army Radio that the president-elect would make good on his promise. “I think if he said it, he’s going to do it,” Greenblatt said. “He is different for Israel than any recent president there has been, and I think he’s a man who keeps his word.

Phares also indicated efforts for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal would be a top agenda item for Trump, casting doubt on a claim by Greenblatt that Trump would not necessarily prioritize trying to push the Israelis and Palestinians into peace negotiations.

“He will make it a priority if the Israelis and Palestinians want to make it a priority,” Greenblatt said. “He’s not going to force peace upon them, it will have to come from them.”

The gap in signals coming out of Trump’s camp is consistent with frustration some have pointed to in trying to demystify what Trump’s foreign policy will be.

Tzachi Hanegbi, a minister-without-portfolio who is a close confidant of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said Thursday that the Iran nuclear deal and construction over the Green Line — the two most contentious topics between the Obama administration and Netanyahu — will no longer be a source of tension between Israel and the United States under a Trump presidency.

Nor will other countries meekly accept a return to imposing tough sanctions at America’s beck and call if Washington undermines the deal that European allies worked so hard to reach.

to demand a return to the opening-gambit US provi-sions and to impose other conditions is to engage in fantasy. There has long ceased to be any possibility that Iran would give up its enrichment pro-gramme altogether

a major breakthrough for the nuclear non-proliferation regime, which to date has never explicitly granted the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) the right to verify nuclear weaponisation work that does not involve nuclear materials

Perfect accuracy of intelligence cannot be guaranteed, of course, but Iran would have to assume that any significant cheating on its part would very likely be quickly observed. If so detected, the US and its allies will not give up any of the options they now possess to compel compliance. In fact, such options will be more robust in the latter years of the Iran deal because the technology for military options such as bunker-busting bombs will likely improve, as will the intelligence picture on Iran’s activities.

it buys 15 or more years of certified non-nuclear status – and the reassurance of not having to resort to war to stop the programme

the suggestion that it might abet regional adventurism. That is an open question; Iran’s behaviour might get worse, especially in the near term, but the deal also offers prospects for it getting better.

we may have to live with more uncertainty than we would like; opponents of the agreement in both the US and Iran will exploit the inevitable difficult moments.

We do not trust the Iranians and they do not trust us. Arms-control or nuclear-limitation agreements are not concluded between friends and allies, but between adversaries

If the US blocks the agreement, we will be isolated. Our allies and part-ners are unlikely to acquiesce in the careless rejection of an agreement so painstakingly arrived at; nor would they – especially the Russians and the Chinese – be inclined to maintain the stringent sanctions that were crucial to bringing the Iranians to negotiate seriously

airstrikes would do no more than retard the programme for a year or two at best and guarantee that Tehran regarded a nuclear weapon as a vital necessity

For at least 15 years, the nuclear issue has been the central obstacle in our relations with Iran, effec-tively standing in the way of any broader dialogue between the US and one of the most important countries in the Middle East.

A lifting of sanctions will begin to bring Iran back into the world economy with unforeseen consequences. It is estimated that sanctions relief will greatly boost Iran’s oil exports and sub-stantially increase GDP. Khamenei notwithstanding, some leading figures in Iran, including President Hassan Rouhani, have made no secret of their hope that the nuclear agreement will lead to a broader dialogue. Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif specifically said to Kerry, ‘If we get this finished, I am now empowered to work with and talk to you about regional issues’.2The US side certainly has similar hopes. There is an urgent list of regional issues – beginning with the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) and Syria – on which the two countries might engage

The regional ambitions of Iran and other Arab states, notably Saudi Arabia, will certainly continue to conflict. It will take a great deal more to lessen Israel’s very understandable fears of Iran. But the nuclear dimension will be in abeyance

As with the Soviet Union, we face in Tehran a fundamentally antagonistic regime whose hostility is durably rooted in ideology. History suggests that while this will preclude close relationships, it need not be an obstacle to finding common ground on a limited range of issues of mutual interest

The day we establish an embassy in Tehran is regrettably probably far off. (It seems fashionable, if bizarre, to see the establishment of diplomatic relations as a ‘reward’ to the country in question.) There is no doubt, however, that the absence of diplomatic representation on the spot has deprived us of a valuable diplomatic tool

Traditional attempts at peacemaking have created complex bureaucracies, circuses of diplomats, frequent flyers around the global terrain with insufficient evidence of success in the resolution of conflict. Indeed, current structures have proved to be cumbersome and ill-attuned to the skills of mediation. A new form of mediation is now required that recognises the competing narratives of the parties involved in the conflict.

Even as an academic exercise, the details have raised alarm among EU diplomats by exposing an “absolutely huge” gap in expectations with London when there are only a few days left for talks. Theresa May, UK prime minister, has pledged to put a revised Brexit package to a House of Commons vote by March 12.

Both the EU and UK want to allay Brexiters’ fears that the backstop could become a permanent arrangement, keeping Britain in a customs union with the EU and tying Northern Ireland even more closely to the bloc’s regulatory regime. But there are fundamental differences over how such reassurances can be offered without compromising the withdrawal treaty or EU law.

proposed an arbitration process using a test of “reasonableness” to determine whether the UK acted in good faith.

After the EU’s response to his plans, Mr Cox warned Mrs May he was not yet able to change his legal advice, which concluded that the backstop could leave Britain trapped in a customs union “indefinitely”. That judgment contributed to MPs’ historic 230-vote rejection of the prime minister’s deal in January.

At best, one ambassador said he hoped the bruising talks this week had a “pedagogical effect”, bringing Mr Cox around to a more realistic departure point for negotiations.

“They are a new team who are looking for fresh ideas,” said one official handling Brexit for an EU member state. “We all know the ideas aren’t fresh and won’t fly. But we maybe have to go through the motions.”

by taking up military history, Gladwell’s half-witted didacticism threatens to convince millions of people that the only solution to American butchery is to continue shelling out for sharper and larger knives

Although the phrase “Bomber Mafia” traditionally refers to the pre-World War II staff and graduates of the Air Corps Tactical School, Gladwell’s book expands the term to include both kooky tinkerers and buttoned-down military men. Wild, far-seeing mavericks, they understood that the possibilities of air power had only just been breached. They were also, as Gladwell insists at various points, typical Gladwellian protagonists: secluded oddballs whose technical zealotry and shared mission gave them a sense of community that propelled them beyond any station they could have achieved on their own.

Gladwell’s narrative is transmitted as seamlessly as the Wall Street or Silicon Valley koans that appear atop LinkedIn profiles, Clubhouse accounts, and Substack missives.

Gladwell has built a career out of making banality seem fresh

In 1968, he would join forces with segregationist George Wallace as the vice-presidential candidate on his “American Independent Party” ticket, a fact literally relegated to a footnote in Gladwell’s book. This kind of omission is par for the course in The Bomber Mafia. While Gladwell constantly reminds the reader that the air force leadership was trying to wage more effective wars so as to end all wars, he cannot help but shove under the rug that which is inconvenient

as is typical with Gladwell’s books and with many historical podcasts, interrogation of the actual historical record and the genuine moral dilemmas it poses—not the low-stakes bait that he trots out as an MBA case study in War—is subordinated to fluffy bullshit and biographical color

“What actually happened?” Gladwell asks of the Blitz. “Not that much! The panic never came,” he answers, before favorably referring to an unnamed “British government film from 1940,” which is in actuality the Academy Award-nominated propaganda short London Can Take It!, now understood to be emblematic of how the myth of the stoic Brit was manufactured.

Gladwell goes to great pains to portray Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay as merely George Patton-like: a prima donna tactician with some masculinity issues. In reality, LeMay bears a closer resemblance to another iconic George C. Scott performance, one that LeMay directly inspired: Dr. Strangelove’s General Buck Turgidson, who at every turn attempts to force World War III and, at the movie’s close, when global annihilation awaits, soberly warns of a “mineshaft gap” between the United States and the Commies. That, as Gladwell might phrase it, was the “real” Curtis LeMay: a violent reactionary who was never killed or tried because he had the luck to wear the brass of the correct country on his uniform. “I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal,” LeMay once told an Air Force cadet. “Fortunately, we were on the winning side.”

Why would Malcolm Gladwell, who seems to admire LeMay so much, talk at such great length about the lethality of LeMay’s Japanese firebombing? The answer lies in what this story leaves out. Mentioned only glancingly in Gladwell’s story are the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. The omission allows for a stupid and classically Gladwell argument: that indiscriminate firebombing brought a swift end to the war, and its attendant philosophical innovations continue to envelop us in a blanket of security that has not been adequately appreciated

While LeMay’s 1945 firebombing campaign was certainly excessive—and represented the same base indifference to human life that got Nazis strung up at Nuremberg—it did not end the war. The Japanese were not solely holding out because their military men were fanatical in ways that the Americans weren’t, as Gladwell seems to suggest, citing Conrad Crane, an Army staff historian and hagiographer of LeMay’s[1]; they were holding out because they wanted better terms of surrender—terms they had the prospect of negotiating with the Soviet Union. The United States, having already developed an atomic weapon—and having made the Soviet Union aware of it—decided to drop it as it became clear the Soviet Union was readying to invade Japan. On August 6, the United States dropped a bomb on Hiroshima. Three days later, and mere hours after the Soviet Union formally declared war on the morning of August 9, the Americans dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki. An estimated 210,000 people were killed, the majority of them on the days of the bombings. It was the detonation of these bombs that forced the end of the war. The Japanese unconditional surrender to the Americans was announced on August 15 and formalized on the deck of the USS Missouri on September 2. As historians like Martin Sherwin and Tsuyoshi Hasegawa have pointed out, by dropping the bombs, the Truman administration had kept the Communist threat out of Japan. Imperial Japan was staunchly anticommunist, and under American post-war dominion, the country would remain that way. But Gladwell is unequipped to supply the necessary geopolitical context that could meaningfully explain why the American government would force an unconditional surrender when the possibility of negotiation remained totally live.

Drawing a false distinction between the Bomber Mafia and the British and American military leaders who preceded them allows Gladwell to make the case that a few committed brainiacs developed a humane, “tactical” kind of air power that has built the security of the world we live in today.

This is truly a lesson for the McKinsey set and passive-income crowd for whom The Bomber Mafia is intended: doing bad things is fine, so long as you privately feel bad about it.

The British advocacy group Action on Armed Violence just this month estimated that between 2016 and 2020 in Afghanistan, there were more than 2,100 civilians killed and 1,800 injured by air strikes; 37 percent of those killed were children.

Saudi Arabia accused Iran of sowing strife in its minority-Shiite communities, which have long complained of discrimination and neglect from authorities in Riyadh. A month after Nimr’s execution, the kingdom put 32 people on trial on charges of spying for Iran, including 30 Saudi Shiites. Fifteen were ultimately given death sentences.

Tensions reached new heights in 2019 after a wave of Houthi drone attacks on Saudi oil facilities, knocking out half of the kingdom’s oil output. At the time, U.S. officials said they believed the assault was launched from Iranian territory. Tehran denied involvement.

Yemen has enjoyed a rare reprieve from fighting since last April, when a United Nations-sponsored truce went into effect. Though the truce expired in October, the peace has largely held, and back-channel talks between the Houthis and the Saudis have resumed.Story continues below advertisementThese negotiations “are also a reflection of Saudi-Iranian rapprochement,” said Maysaa Shuja al-Deen, a senior researcher at the Sanaa Center for Strategic Studies.

The Yemeni Embassy in Washington responded defiantly to Friday’s announcement, tweeting that “The rogue Iranian regime is still sending lethal weapons to the terrorist Houthi militia in Yemen, and the Yemeni embassy in Tehran is still occupied.”

The Houthis, meanwhile, appeared to approve of the agreement. “The region needs the restoration of normal relations between its countries, so that the Islamic nation can recover its security lost as a result of foreign interventions,” spokesman Mohamed Abdel Salam tweeted.

Iran and Saudi Arabia had been exploring a rapprochement since 2021, participating in talks hosted by Iraq and Oman.

“Facing a dead end in nuclear negotiations with the United States, and shunned by the European Union because of its arms exports to Russia … Iran has scored a major diplomatic victory,” said Ali Alfoneh, a senior fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.

China’s well-publicized role in the deal was probably intended to send a message to major powers, including the United States, “that the hub for the Middle East is shifting,”

Beijing has largely avoided intervening politically in the Middle East, focusing instead on deepening economic ties. China is the largest importer of energy from the region, and “there is a lot of interest” among major players including Saudi Arabia and Iran in securing long-term access to Chinese markets

“China has truly arrived as a strategic actor in the Gulf,”

China may present the single most compelling factor. There is an increasing awareness that to deal with the challenge of China’s rapidly growing economy, Europe and the United States will have to learn to cooperate better

European leaders, including Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, have been pushing for a trade deal as a low-cost way of stimulating their struggling economies. The United States Chamber of Commerce and large companies like General Electric have also lobbied for an agreement

Potentially more important than abolishing tariffs, but also much more complicated, would be a deal that harmonized regulations on products like food, cars, toys and pharmaceuticals. Automobile manufacturers would like to see agreement on safety and emissions standards for cars, reducing or eliminating the need to build different versions for the American and European markets. Matthias Wissmann, head of the German Association of the Automotive Industry, said that harmonizing safety features would save several hundred dollars per automobile. Mr. De Gucht, who is expected to lead the talks on the European side, said that a deal could provide vital leverage over emerging powerhouses like China

Bashar al-Assad does not intend to step down from power, and he will use any means at his disposal to prevent that from happening

Five years ago, Syria was a local problem; today it is an international one. U.S. indecision, risk aversion, a total divergence between rhetoric and policy, and a failure to uphold clearly stated “red lines” have all combined into what can best be described as a cold-hearted, hypocritical approach. At worst, Washington has indirectly abetted the wholesale destruction of a nation-state, in direct contradiction to its fundamental national security interests and its most tightly held values.

U.S. commitment remained negligible when compared with our often uncoordinated regional allies, such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. It seems U.S. officials wanted Assad out but wanted others — whom administration officials would say in private they did not trust — to do it for them

The result? Nearly half a million people dead, more than 1 million people living under siege, and 11 million people displaced. Catastrophic refugee flows have led to an anti-immigrant backlash in Europe and the rise of far-right politics while Syria is now home to perhaps the greatest concentration of jihadi militants in any single country ever

Jabhat Fateh al-Sham — formerly the Nusra Front — the most capable, politically savvy, and militarily powerful al Qaeda movement in history. Al Qaeda’s central leadership has also revitalized itself inside Syria, with the international terrorist organization’s newly named deputy leader almost certainly residing in the country. The correlation is simple: U.S. shortcomings equal al Qaeda’s success in Syria.

most Syrians living in opposition areas now view al Qaeda as a more trustworthy and capable protector of their lives than the United States. If there were ever a sign of policy failure, this would be it.

there will be no purely military solution to Syria’s conflict — a negotiated settlement is the only feasible path toward stability. However, Assad will never treat a political process with any level of seriousness until placed under meaningful pressure, which the United States has thus far done everything in its power not to do.

Opposition to partition is arguably the single issue that unites communities supportive of and opposed to Assad

combating al Qaeda in Syria cannot be done solely with bullets and bombs. Defeating it is instead an issue of providing a more attractive and sustainable alternative to the jihadi group’s narrative. Given its successful efforts to embed within the opposition and build popular acceptance as a military (not a political) ally, al Qaeda does not represent a conventional counterterrorist problem

If Assad remains in place indefinitely and the conflict continues or worsens, the Islamic State will undoubtedly live to fight another day

Civilian protection should remain the core focus of any broad-based strategy, but it must be backed up by real and discernible consequences for violators

Skeptics of a more assertive approach to the Syrian crisis can deride their critics as much as they want — but one would hope that after five years of failures, they would at least admit that they have got something wrong

The European Union’s current crisis is symptomatic of a broader crisis or malaise of regional and international multilateralism

he EU has proved an extraordinarily robust and crisis-resistant organization. It survived: the collapse of the European Defence Community project in 1954; France’s rejection of two British bids for accession in the 1960s; the empty-chair crisis precipitated by De Gaulle in 1965; the crisis concerning the UK’s contribution to the EU budget in the first half of the 1980s; the semi-destruction of the European Monetary System in 1992–1993; and the defeat of several proposed new treaties in referenda in Denmark, Ireland, France and the Netherlands since the end of the Cold War

From an IR institutionalist perspective, the critical questions relating to the EU’s future are thus whether, especially in the enlarged EU, there are sufficiently pervasive common interests linking member states and whether, much as for intergovernmental-ists, the ‘most powerful states’ (Keohane and Nye, 1993: 18) — by which the US is as much meant as the ‘big three’ EU members — continue to support the integration pro-cess

far more regional organizations have failed, in the sense that they collapsed, than succeeded

to ask to what extent there has been any change in the variables that have fuelled the integration process in the pas

growing distrust among Europe’s big powers over ‘hard’ security issues is not at the root of Europe’s current crisis

From a realist perspective à la Mearsheimer, European disintegration would hence most probably result from an American military withdrawal from Europe and a collapse of NATO

uncertainty as to the durability or reliability of the American com-mitment to European military security has led to more rather than less security and defence cooperation between EU member states

Classical intergovernmentalism focuses our attention on the evolution and degree of convergence of the stances of the French, German and British governments as determi-nants of the future of European integration. Trends in this trilateral relationship in the last two decades do not augur well for the EU’s future. Growing British Euro-scepticism has made Franco-German threats to exclude the UK from the integration process increas-ingly hollow — not because such threats cannot be implemented, but rather because the British government has been increasingly impervious to them

The Franco-German ‘tandem’ can still exercise a decisive influence in the EU even after the post-Cold War enlargements from 12 to 27 member states, especially where the two governments form ‘opposing poles’ in the EU around which other member states can coalesce

Intergovernmentalism implies that if a fundamental breakdown should occur in Franco-German relations, this would surely lead to European disintegration

IR institutionalists argue that such organizations can achieve a high level of durabil-ity or permanence by helping states to overcome collective action problems, carrying out functions that these cannot (notably ‘facilitating the making and keeping of agreements through the provision of information and reductions in transaction costs’), monitoring compliance, reducing uncertainty and stabilizing expectations

s serious as the EU’s crisis seemed to be in 2012, there was no unequivocal empirical evidence that the integration process had begun to unwind and the EU to disintegrate. Still no member state had ever left the EU, while several states were queuing to join it. Still no issue-area into which the EU’s competence had previ-ously been extended had been repatriated to the member states. There had still not been any observable formal or actual diminution of the EU’s decision-making and implemen-tation capacities

From an IR institutionalist as well as an intergovernmentalist perspective, the EU’s future seems likely to ride on the evolution of the Franco-German relationship,

While the governments of “sovereign” member-states remain free to tear up treaties and walk away at any time, the constantly increasing costs of exit in the densely integrated European polity have rendered this option virtually unthinkable’

Whilst historical-institutionalist scholars generally focus on constraints and the ‘“stickiness” of historically evolved insti-tutional arrangements’ and provide ‘explanations of continuity rather than change’, they nonetheless recognize that critical junctures or crises can bring about ‘relatively abrupt institutional change’

‘punctuated equilibrium’

‘As transnational exchange rises, so does the societal demand for supranational rules and organizational capacity to regulate’

growing economic interdependence seems increasingly to fore-close other, unilateral policy options and to compel member governments to forge or acquiesce in closer integration

, Germany has increasingly visibly assumed the role of the Eurozone’s and the EU’s ‘indispensable’ member

it is still not evident that European-level political party groups can ‘discipline’ or ‘moderate’ the positions taken by their national member parties on EU issues

R institutionalism and, more so, clas-sical intergovernmentalism are more circumspect about the EU’s future. Viewed from these perspectives, European integration is a more contingent phenomenon, resting on the scope of member states’ common interests, which has arguably narrowed following successive waves of enlargement, and/or on the extent of hegemonic leadership or con-vergence of interests among the EU’s three big powers. The latter has diminished in as far as the UK has proved hostile to closer integration on most issues, leaving the EU’s fate in these perspectives increasingly in the hands of the Franco-German duo

Contrasting post-2000 EU politics with that of the preceding half-century, I sug-gest that European integration is threatened by sharply rising hostility towards the EU in the domestic politics of the member states. Contrasting Europe with other regions, I argue that a ‘semi-hegemonic’, pro-integrationist Germany accounts for the uniquely high level of political integration in Europe, but that there is a significant and growing risk that Germany’s commitment to the European ‘project’ will wane in future

Hegemonic stability theory derives the indispensability of hegemonic leadership for economic openness and stability from public-goods theory, holding that only large states have a material incentive to supply non-excludable ‘collective’ goods rather than to ‘free-ride’. Germany has strong economic and political incentives in the maintenance of a politically and economically stable Europe that its governments have historically seen as being best secured through integration

In some member states, notably but not only in the UK, there was of course always significant domestic political opposition to European integra-tion. Nonetheless, in the post-Cold War and post-Maastricht Treaty period and especially during the last decade, hostility towards the EU and closer European integration has arguably transformed the domestic political context of EU decision-making to the point where one could more accurately speak of an ‘unpermissive dissensus’ that severely constrains the room for manoeuvre of member governments on EU issues

At the same time as the balance of political power in many member states has tilted sharply towards ‘anti-European’ political forces, the capacity of governments to control the EU agenda in the member states — a prerequisite for the smooth functioning of the processes of negotiation and ratification of EU policies — has been eroded

tension between the requirements or logic of domestic politics, on the one hand, and those of the EU (and international financial markets), on the other

Most federations fail (Lemco, quoted in Kelemen, 2007: 53). Multinational federa-tions, of which the EU is certainly an example, may be more prone to failure than others (Kelemen, 2007: 61)

growing levels of economic exchange and economic interdependence do indeed create pressures on governments to institutionalize their economic ties. However, levels of political integration in East Asia, the Asia-Pacific and North America are not even remotely comparable to those in Europe

It is rather the presence, in the form of Germany, of a pro-integrationist regional hegemon that best explains Europe’s comparatively very high level of political integra-tion

What has made the EU exceptional in respect of regional political integration is neither an exceptionally high level of economic integration nor the presence of a ‘leading state’ as such, but rather the fact that, compared with other ‘lead-ing’ regional powers, the member state that occupies this role in the EU — Germany — has pursued a much more radical agenda involving the creation of a quasi-federal European state

Germany needs good and close relations with other European states to avert the risk of diplomatic isolation and a resurgence of traditional ‘balance-of-power’ politics in the region

EU policy choices do not disproportionately reflect German preferences. Compromise and consensus, not a German diktat, are the rules in EU decision-making

As a regional paymaster, but hitherto not typically a disproportionately influential rule-maker, Germany was long more a ‘semi-hegemonic’ than ‘normal’ hegemonic power in the EU

A Grand Coalition of pro-European Social and Christian Democrats, on the other hand, may, as the experience of other EU member states suggests, spawn the emergence and growth of new national-populist parties and/or, for electoral-political motives, the transformation into Euro-sceptical movements of those established parties that would then be in the opposition

the EU’s future is more contingent

the EU is very vulnerable to domestic political backlashes manifested in the rise of national populism in the member states, particularly so long as few citizens in the member states share a strong European identity and there are no strong pan-European political parties that can effectively integrate and mediate their conflicting interests

German domestic politics therefore matters more for the EU’s future than that of any other member state

n more than 60 years, the European integration process has confronted and survived many crises. But it has never so far had to confront a crisis ‘made in Germany’.

The plethora of regional and pluri- or minilateral trade agreements signed across the world over the last decade or so cannot disguise the fact that most regions in the world remain at best only very weakly politically integrated and regionalorganizations therefore cannot be relied upon to institutionalize and secure peaceful cooperation among their members.

Is it possible that, as hegemonic stability theory would suggest, the roots of the gathering crisis of interna-tional multilateralism are to be found in the ‘end of the United States’ unipolar moment’ (Layne, 2006) and the arrival at long last of the long-anticipated decline in the capacity as well as willingness of the US to play the role of a stabilizing international hegemon?