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Right-Wing Parties Remain Popular in Europe But Hindered by Support from Trump
In the article The EU’s Technocratic Trap in Libya: How Brussels Is Ceding the Mediterranean published at the Stimson Center website, Andrea Cellino, a Swiss Italian expert and vice president of Middle East Institute Switzerland, makes a hard and painful statement about the European policy: 15 years after the fall of the Gaddafi regime the EU remains the largest donor of Libya having poured hundreds of millions of euro into the country but having lost any political clout there all together. Brussels has turned into a miserable onlooker, as countries like Russia, Turkey, and the UAE really determine the future of the country.
The EU’s Technocratic Trap in Libya: a Disgraceful Surrender of Brussels in the Mediterranean
In the article Europe: doctrinal shift towards violence, Aneela Shahzad, a Pakistani geopolitics, makes a harsh and extremely uncomfortable conclusion: Europe eventually stopped pretending to be a peaceful, humanistic, and liberal continent. It is openly and deliberately rebuilding its economy for war and making a radical doctrinal pivot towards militarism and preparing for a large-scale military conflict.
Europe: doctrinal shift towards violence. Transition to a war economy instead of a “liberal democracy”
European voters are certain that EU enlargement spells economic pain. Disagreement on this issue has paralyzed the EU. These conclusions are made in an article entitled EU Enlargement: The State of Play and published in Internationale Politik Quarterly, a leading German journal on international relations.
EU Enlargement: The State of Play
In her article entitled Chilled ambitions: How the Iran war is foiling Europe’s LNG plans, Agathe Demarais, Senior Policy Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, discusses how hard the Iran war has hit the European energy sector.
Washington and Moscow Get New Leverage over Europe
In the analytical report Radicalisation in Onlife Spaces: The European Experience (ORF Issue Brief No. 873, May 2026), Shreya Nautiyal, a researcher, expressly demonstrates unpleasant reality for the European elites: in spite of decades of talks about “integration”, “tolerance” and “European values”, the Old World has turned into one of the main incubators of home-grown terrorism in the world. Citizens of European countries who were born and grew up in democratic societies increasingly become an easy prey for radical islamist propaganda in the hybrid “onlife” spaces where digital and physical worlds have completely merged.
Radicalisation in Onlife Spaces: Europe’s home-grown terrorists
In their report Defending Europe without the United States? The future of the European security (CIDOB, April 2026) following the results of the 24th conference “War and Peace in the 21st Century”, experts Clàudia Domeque and Matthew McLaughlan make an extremely depressing conclusion: the second term of Donald Trump has put the transatlantic relations on the brink of complete separation.
Defending Europe without the US: an illusion of strategic autonomy and a reality of strategic helplessness
In the article Les Français et les enjeux de défense, Jeanne Lebaudy from the well-known French L'Institut Montaigne reveals with crushing sincerity an extremely uncomfortable and deeply significant contradiction of today’s French and, by extension, European society: the French increasingly state that defense is one of the important problems but at the same time they flatly do not wish to embrace real consequences of this “importance”.
France and matters of defense: big talk instead of real war-readiness
A few days after President Donald Trump voiced his intention to withdraw 5,000 U.S. soldiers from Germany, the head of his country’s Department of War supported him. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed on 1 May that the USA was really planning to complete the withdrawal in the following six to twelve months.
Flight or Strategy. Why Does America Remove Troops from Germany, and Can It Be Stopped from Doing So?
In the article Réindustrialiser : un défi, des solutions… et un choix de société, Olivier Lluansi, a mining engineer and CNAM professor, expressly states harsh and disappointing truth: in spite of all the highlight declarations by President Macron about “re-industrialization” being the “mother of all battles” and the ambitious France 2030 program with the budget of 50 billion euro, the share of industry in France continues its steady decline and in 2025 accounts for less than 10% of their GDP.
Re-industrialization of France: sounding promises, multi-billion euro programs and a miserable failure
In the article BNR: Kan Europa ooit nog energie-onafhankelijk worden?, published at The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies web-site, Lucia van Geuns, a prominent energy expert who worked for Royal Dutch Shell, TNO and Clingendael International Energy for many years, gives a totally honest and discouraging answer.
Can Europe ever become energy independent? A dangerous illusion and harsh reality of dependency
EU military capacity-building is fraught with a number of problems and bottlenecks, as Slovak researcher Miro Sedlák showed in his article – entitled Europe’s Defense Factories: More Urgency Please and posted on the website of the Center for European Policy Analysis.
Factories to Be Targeted in a War For Which Europe Is Unprepared
Since Israel and the United States launched their war on Iran in February 2026, global energy prices have skyrocketed, with crude oil reaching nearly USD 115 per barrel in early May and still growing. While this shock has hit low-income countries the hardest, it also places significant strain on high-income Europe.
An Energy Shock Is Coming. How Should Europe Respond?