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1 week ago | 
csmonitor.com | Ned Temko
So much is changing, so jarringly, in America’s relations with China that it’s easy to overlook another equally dramatic diplomatic shift that could well decide how and when their tariff war ends. It involves relations not with America’s main rival power, but with its friends.
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2 weeks ago | 
csmonitor.com | Ned Temko
Only one tumultuous week elapsed between President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcement on the White House lawn and a sudden change of course. But the question now preoccupying U.S. trading partners worldwide, despite huge relief over the 90-day “pause” announced Wednesday, is whether he has changed his mind. Not about tariffs, clearly his geopolitical instrument of choice. Nor about America’s main trade nemesis under successive administrations: China.
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3 weeks ago | 
csmonitor.com | Ned Temko
Donald Trump’s declaration of “Liberation Day” on Wednesday, announcing sweeping new trade tariffs, carried a message not just for rivals, he said, but also for “friends.” The United States now sets the international trade rules, and you have to play by them if you want to avoid the new surcharges.
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4 weeks ago | 
csmonitor.com | Ned Temko
Germany, Europe’s economic giant, has just embarked on a revamp of its defense policy that until a few weeks ago would have been nothing short of unthinkable. The same could be said of the latest transatlantic contretemps: hostile sneers directed at America’s European allies by two top U.S. officials, in what they believed was a private chat, planning Washington’s recent airstrikes in Yemen. And the two are related.
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1 month ago | 
csmonitor.com | Ned Temko
This week, all eyes have been on talks that President Donald Trump portrays as a high-stakes diplomatic card game, with peace in Ukraine as the prize. Yet no matter how that drama ends, there is already one clear winner. The owner of the card table. Saudi Arabia, a country that is largely made up of desert, has fewer than 40 million people, and boasts a middling military with no nuclear arms, may be emerging as the 21st century’s most improbable superpower.
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1 month ago | 
csmonitor.com | Ned Temko
“The free world needs a new leader.”This extraordinary lament from the European Union’s top diplomat was prompted by last week’s Oval Office dressing-down of Ukraine’s embattled leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. But for Kaja Kallas and other European leaders, the internationally-televised scolding by U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance was merely an outward and gut-twisting sign of a wholesale shift in American attitudes to the European continent.
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1 month ago | 
csmonitor.com | Ned Temko
President Donald Trump’s U-turn on the Ukraine war – and his diplomatic embrace of Russia, the country that started it – has left American allies in Europe apprehensive about the future. Yet they are also haunted by echoes from the past, especially from the world war that devastated their continent only 80 years ago, when leading European powers underestimated Adolf Hitler’s readiness to swallow up neighboring states by force of arms.
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2 months ago | 
csmonitor.com | Ned Temko
Welcome back, Vladimir! All is forgiven. That’s the message President Donald Trump delivered, first in a phone call last week, and now very publicly, to Russian President Vladimir Putin. It will not matter how this ultimately affects negotiations over Ukraine, the country Mr. Putin invaded three years ago. Mr. Trump’s embrace of the man who started Europe’s most devastating conflict since World War II is likely to have a lasting impact on U.S. alliances worldwide.
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2 months ago | 
csmonitor.com | Ned Temko
It may well be the most profound change that President Donald Trump has yet wreaked on America’s place in the world. And if global attention has already moved elsewhere, barely a week later, it is only because of the sheer pace of his campaign to reshape the United States government. The significance of the move, however, will likely be anything but transitory.
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2 months ago | 
csmonitor.com | Ned Temko
It has been a week of whirlwind and whiplash in President Donald Trump’s Washington, highlighted by two ostensibly opposite actions. First, he imposed tariffs on America’s top trading partners in a muscular demonstration of U.S. power in the world; then came an order for U.S. Agency for International Development employees – the people who run U.S. emergency relief, health, education, and conflict-resolution programs worldwide – to return home within 30 days.
