The designer of a foreign policy success story looks back on what made it work.

The fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago changed the face of Germany, Europe and international politics. If the Cold War, with its dangerous nuclear competition, was some kind of protracted crisis, then it was by definition an abnormal period, and therefore its conclusion would open the way to a return to normalcy for […]

 Ninety years after 1919, seventy years after 1939, twenty years after 1989: Could it be it time for Germany to declare normalcy, for Germans to stop obsessing about their history and start living in the present? After all, we Germans have accomplished what is today broadly reckoned to be an honorable and complete accounting of […]

Simple questions do not always dispose themselves to simple answers, so in pondering what it means to say that Germany is (or is not) a normal country twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I turn first to analogies furnished by memory. Two memories, in particular, come to mind. In the early 1970s, I […]

A bold new design for a master metric of national power.