Events won’t wait

"My last call to colleagues: Be more united, take decisions quicker. Events won't wait for you," was the advice of the EU's chief of foreign policy, Josep Borrell, at the last Foreign Affairs Council that he chaired. This distilled his experience over the past five years, which saw Europe struggling to cope with a world changing abruptly and unpredictably, with the pandemic and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, with war in the Middle East, an energy crisis, high prices and problems in production and supply chains, with the strengthening of groups within Europe and outside it undermining the project of Union. 

Now the EU will have to deal also with a very different America. Donald Trump's first presidency tested US-EU ties, but the president was held within the tracks of this strong alliance. He returns with his hands untied, free of the establishment figures around him who...