Foreign agent / foreign influence laws are long overdue...

Some Europeans have still not caught up to a world profoundly shaped by Chinas industrial policy. A lot of hard pushback on targeted buy-European because it would reduce European competitiveness and product quality. Reality, created by China, would disagree. 1/

Peter Thiel has been open about this for a long time. Trump is a way to break the republic, which can then be replaced by “free economic zones” with oligarchs as dictators and tech as a taskmaster for helpless humans without any rights. (1/2)

Gute Sache. Es braucht trotzdem mehr Geld.

In der morgigen @diezeit.bsky.social findet sich auf der Seite 1 ein Leitartikel meiner Kollegin @oliviakortas.bsky.social , die in Kyjiw lebt, der so wahr ist und beklemmend und bestürzend, dass ich ihn jeder und jedem ans Herz legen möchte. Hier der erste Absatz:

India under Modi becomes more and more autocratic. Let´s not repeat the same mistakes that we made with China.

@josephtorigian.bsky.social asks a key question. We know Xi thinks in terms of hardening systems against risk, but is also a student of Maoist politics. Putting the fear of God into the PLA could be both. In a world where 2027 is a key year, Xi may see it as a final forging of the sword.

Ukraine is “close to a humanitarian catastrophe," Timchenko said. "People get power for 3-4 hours, then a 10- to 15-hour break. We have apartment blocks without heat for weeks already.” www.reuters.com/business/ene...

Russian representatives do not mirror the Estonian or Polish opposition in exile of the 20th century. Russia is not an occupied state seeking liberation; it is the aggressor, currently waging war on a neighbouring country. Beka Iromashvili in @NewEastEurope neweasterneurope.eu/2026/01/20/t...

Time to wall off #Europe from the US.

Seriously, wtf is wrong with him?!?🤦‍♂️ Impeach this embarrassment. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Prominent Republicans backing Trump on Greenland

Let's not forget that the real push for this probably does not come from Trump himself but from the racist and fascist tech oligarchs who hate any kind of regulation and want to build their own fiefdom. We need more troops in Greenland urgently. www.theguardian.com/world/live/2...

The good: the Commission is prepared to press member states on the exclusion of high-risk suppliers The bad: this will take 1-2 years to become law and be watered down substantially by recalcitrant capitals The bottom line: too little, too late www.ft.com/content/eb67...

Clowns. I hope the Americans realise that trust won't be rebuilt simply by Trump leaving office. There are just too many of these idiots and this school of "thought" is too widespread. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

Which economy is more productive - Germany or the US? It seems the answer would be clear, but it's not. The mood in Germany is so deeply negative, even aggressively pessimistic, that I thought we had fallen behind by a lot. But here are the facts - they surprised me as well:

I can never comprehend how one man thinks an entire country and it's people belong to and serve him. I wish Iranians good fortune in their struggle for freedom. www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

I don't feel good about this. The US is pushing to take all of #Europe's rare earths production, further illustrated by previous deals in France and Greenland. At this pace we are changing dependency on China for the US - and they are no longer reliable! kyivindependent.com/us-and-ukrai...

Regarding #Greenland, have we considered hacking the US government to get the #Epstein files and just dump them on the internet? Fastest way to get rid of the autocrats...🤷‍♂️

1/14 Unfortunately I don't subscribe to Krugman's substack, so I cannot comment on the whole article, but I can say that the first few paragraphs lay out the issue very accurately and with commendable simplicity. He certainly understands the main issues. open.substack.com/pub/paulkrug...

And Graham and Lutnick laugh along... All those MAGA Republicans are hostile towards #Europe and they always will be! It's not just Trump. It won't end with him.

What a sack of shit

During Fiona Hill's testimony to Congress on Oct 14, 2019, she described how Trump and Putin discussed exchanging Ukraine for Venezuela. The quid pro quo was if Trump refuses to help Ukraine fight off a Russian invasion, Putin would not help Venezuela (a Russian ally) resist a US takeover.

That's the world we live in. Only strength matters. To ensure our continued peace and prosperity we need to 1) establish the First Republic of #Europe 2) get nukes www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

These freaks want territorial expansion and they know Trump will do everything he can to deliver. This isn’t just a tweet from some random asshole either. This is Stephen Miller’s wife. Miller was in the room with Trump during the kidnapping of Maduro.

We are wide open for sabotage... These things are happening way too often.

Quite something that the US president openly states that they are stealing another country's resources. Then again, he is already trying the same thing with Ukraine.

He can't even run his own country...

Required reading for those European capitals that are still in denial. As a recent Rhodium note cited by the FT stresses, a weak renminbi, persistent deflation and excess capacity in China will erode the bite of conventional trade defence tools. New thinking is needed www.ft.com/content/079f...

We need boots on the ground and throw the US out. www.bbc.com/news/article...

This should not go unnoticed. Any subsidiary of a European company in China can be seized/lost control of - including all know-how and tech, and we cannot hope to compete on price. We need proper outward FDI control yesterday.

Meanwhile in Russia: inspired by the Trump administration’s anti-European stance, state TV host Vladimir Solovyov predicted that Russian and American combat troops will jointly storm European cities. youtu.be/3PWkEmc0we0?...

So we still can't hold big tech accountable... We should at least try a little bit harder - for the sake of democracy 🤷‍♂️ youtu.be/RW944FGIdwg?...

Die EU ließ sich nicht erpressen. Kann man auch so sehen. Nachgeben bei hostage diplomacy sendet jedenfalls ein fatales Signal und bedeutet es passiert auch künftig. Was bedeutet das für unsere Souveränität?

THREAD The freeing of Russian and Belarusian political prisoners is certainly very welcome. Yet, their rescue in exchange for the release of Russia's foreign agents and a lifting of sanctions against Belarus's regime generates perverse incentive structures for Putin and Lukashenka. 1/3

The shining city on a hill is now a very dark place.

Du sagst nach einer Chinareise, Du hast mit einer ominösen Diamanten-Firma mit Chinaverbindungen gar nichts zu tun. Aber auf einer Visitenkarte bist Du als Vertriebsleiter angegeben: Jan-Wenzel Schmidt von der AfD. Text von @jmuellertoewe.bsky.social & Annika Leister

Ouch. Brutal reality hitting slow EU rare earth policy rollout: Commissioner Sejourne tells NRC: “I was due to travel to Brazil to hold talks about a mine extracting rare earths. 3 days before, we were told that the Americans had come by and bought up all production through to 2030.”

I hope the German Chancellor catches up - a 1990s deregulation agenda isn’t going to cut it against a wildly undervalued Chinese exchange rate. I think Europe should consider broader China tariffs - either to slow down the shock directly or as a tool to pressure China to revalue. 1/

It’s not just disorganised criminals and local idiots that form the extended arms of Russia’s intelligence services abroad. Insider threat, including by highly placed individuals with power and privileged access, is still very much alive. In unrelated news: euobserver.com/eu-and-the-w...

One explanation for economic populism in the US is the recurring cycle of bubbles and bailouts that happens without any democratic input

At this point X is like 1950s Vienna, a whole place made up entirely of spies, running ops against other spies, with no non-spy people. Or maybe like a 1971 Black Panthers convention where 3/4 of the attendees are conintelrpo.

1/5 #Ukraine #Norge This excellent piece from @thebarentsobserver.com shows in detail how #Russia is actively trying to destabilize its neighbors. #Norway is a #NATO country with a very important border with Russia in the north. Just across the border is Russia's Northern Fleet, ⤵️

Europe’s solar boom has handed China remote access to hundreds of gigawatts of its power capacity. Without a 5G-type toolbox banning untrustworthy suppliers of inverters and other grid technologies, Europe risks another energy security crisis, writes @tobiasgehrke.bsky.social ecfr.eu/article/how-...

Why russia cannot help but invade? Been pondering this question for a decade now... 🇷🇺 didn’t “return” to dictatorship under POO-tihn. It never left. Rusich is crowdsourcing war crimes, Navalnaya is asking 🇪🇺 to fix 🇷🇺 for russians, and I try to make sense of it all kyivindependent.com/why-russia-c...

Another attempt by the US and Russia to carve up and weaken #Europe. Also, let's not forget that both the US and Russia were signatories to the Budapest Memorandum. Any peace deal with involvement of the two is worth nothing. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...

The old Russian demand for Ukraine’s capitulation – essentially its destruction – is once again being re-branded as a “new peace plan” allegedly backed by American “security guarantees”. Only a fool with no grasp of even recent history could believe any part of this “plan”.

This Rhodium timeline of the Nexperia saga shows how CEO Zhang Xuezheng set about creating a China-based mirror image of the company almost as soon as he took the reins

What a colossal failure of (political) elites this was - and still is!

We should start hitting back if we want to stop this. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...