As Donald Trump shreds the bargain underpinning the western alliance, a rising China asserts itself, Russia seeks to redraw the map of Europe and middle powers such as Brazil and Saudi Arabia grow in influence, everyone agrees the global order is changing.
What nobody knows is what will happen next, how fast and far-reaching a reordering of power there will be or where it will leave the European Union and, more specifically, Ireland.
As the only Irish news organisation with a global network of full-time foreign correspondents, The Irish Times reports every day from the frontline of wars, from inside the centres of power and on the lives of people all over the world.
Global Briefing, which goes out every day from Monday to Thursday, will try to make sense of what is happening and to find patterns or connections between events in different parts of the world.
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When I started reporting for The Irish Times from Berlin in the 1990s, it was in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of communism in Europe. The end of apartheid in South Africa and China’s embrace of the market economy contributed to an optimism among western liberals that the world was moving their way.
The US seemed invulnerable during its unipolar moment but the attacks on September 11th, 2001, and its catastrophic response to them ushered in a new chapter of darkness and cruelty in American foreign policy.
I spent the first few years of the new century in Brussels reporting on the European Union before moving to Washington in 2005 to watch the US turning against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and electing Barack Obama on a wave of hope.
The 2008 financial crash happened in the weeks before Obama took office but its political impact was felt for years, not only in the US but in Europe and beyond.
By 2010, I was in Dublin as foreign editor and later deputy editor, where the bank bailout cast the EU as both Ireland’s rescuer and the architect and enforcer of economic austerity.
Moving to London in 2015, I reported on Brexit and its aftermath before coming to Beijing as China Correspondent in October 2022. It’s from Beijing that I will write this newsletter most of the time and I hope it will benefit from having a perspective situated outside the West.
I hope too that you will share your thoughts and expertise to help me navigate this changing world order a little better and gently to put me right if you think I’m going wrong.
And if you like Global Briefing, please share it with anyone you know who might enjoy reading it.
