Mark Leonard

The United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) now underway in Glasgow might conclude with a big international agreement.

The geopolitical story of the last few years has featured Western democracies’ gradual awakening to the realities of an increasingly ambitious and authoritarian China.

A lot of chickens came home to roost this year. The Covid-19 pandemic was not some random thunderbolt from out of the blue, but rather a man-made “natural” disaster, holding up a mirror to so many of our bad habits and dangerous—indeed, lethal—practices.

Before the G7 summit in Biarritz, France, this month, it was a toss-up whether the greater disruption would come from US President Donald Trump or British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

The escalating rivalry between China and the United States is ushering in a bipolar world. While the past few decades have been defined mostly by cooperation among the world’s leading powers, the next few will be marked by zero-sum competition. Already, globalisation and the deepening of ties between countries is giving way to what has euphemistically been called “decoupling.” Countries and regions are sorting themselves into smaller economic and geopolitical units under the guise of “taking back control.”

Two Americas were represented by two different vice presidents at the Munich Security Conference this year. Between them, former Vice President Joseph Biden certainly received the warmer reception, but Vice President Mike Pence may have unwittingly emerged as the saviour of transatlantic relations.

Will the European Parliament elections this May result in a political revolution? Populist and nationalist parties certainly hope so.

At The 73rd session of the United Nations General Assembly this month, there was a widespread sense of foreboding among world leaders. The anxiety went beyond standard concerns about what US President Donald Trump would say, do, or tweet.

This week, a senior German official pointed out to me that, “The Iran nuclear deal is the last firewall preventing military tensions in the world's most combustible region from spilling over into thermonuclear war.” That language is unusually apocalyptic, but it reflects a genuine fear that US President Donald Trump could soon dismantle a crucial line of defence that Germans and other Europeans are proud to have built.

UNTIL the terrorist attack at a market in southern France on March 23, French President Emmanuel Macron had been planning to launch a new European-level political campaign. Though the official rollout has now been postponed, Macron's latest project remains central to his presidency and to his conception of power.

Deep divisions within Europe are increasingly threatening the values upon which the European project of “ever closer union” is based. In 2015, during the refugee crisis, many commentators saw a divide between German Chancellor Angela Merkel's Willkommenskultur (welcoming culture) and Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán's vision of ethnic purity: a Western Europe of bridges versus an Eastern Europe of walls.

Emmanuel Macron's election to the French presidency provides the European Union with an opportunity to move past the internal

After the United Kingdom's unexpected vote to leave the European Union and Donald Trump's unexpected triumph in the US

Historians may come to see the American actor Alec Baldwin as US President Donald Trump's most useful ally. Baldwin's frequent and widely viewed impersonations of Trump on the comedy show “Saturday Night Live” turn Trumpism into a farce, blinding the president's political opponents to the seriousness of his ideology.

After the annus horribilis that was 2016, most political observers believe that the liberal world order is in serious trouble. But that is

This past year changed everything, except how governments think. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the pre-negotiations for Brexit.

The most frightening periods in history have often been interregnums – moments between the death of one king and the rise

We have entered the age of migration. If all the people who live outside the country of their birth united to form their own – a republic of the rootless – it would be the fifth-largest country in the world, with a population of more than 240 million people.