Germany's Charm Offensive

As it were, I've returned to Brussels after six weeks in the United States and its Caribbean possessions. I'm still a sort-of super intern, with some more responsibility, a slight raise, and a different living situation. I will be here until the end of June. It's good to be back in Europe, living here for the fifth time now if you count it as separate from last year. I'll get to see some new places like Switzerland and maybe Russia, and hope to make it to Ypres's cat-throwing festival and a reenactment of the Battle of Waterloo.

I return to a Europe still on the brink of calamity due to the euro crisis, though it feels calm and the EU decisions of last December make muddling through more likely than apocalypse. Belgium actually has a government, which is novel. Today the country has been shut down by a general strike, with a dusting of snow thrown in for good measure. And Germany is still making people mad.

Extra supervision of member state budgets is probably one of the inevitable measures for getting over the euro crisis. But Germany has been particularly tone-deaf in suggesting an EU budget commissioner take over Greek fiscal policy. I can't say I'm optimistic about Greece improving its finances - default seems inevitable, perhaps even in March when a 14.4 million euro bond comes due, and a new government in April could well lead Greece out of the eurozone and even the European Union. But with technocratic governments in place in both Greece and Italy due a combination of market and northern European political forces, and with Germany's history, a little more respect for Greek sovereignty and democracy is due. This crisis has seen Germany's emergence as the political leader as well as the economic leader of the European Union, and so far it is doing an even worse job diplomatically than it is in solving the crisis.

I write this as someone who loves Germany, speaks the language, and knows the history, hardly a Germanophobe. But Angela Merkel is not doing a very good job these days, nor any of the parties in her coalition. I'll object to the Bavarian conservatives simply on principle, they're far too conservative. The Free Democrats have been inept in government under the leadership of Guido Westerwelle, also an inept foreign minister, and haven't improved noticeably under Philipp Roesler. And Merkel's Christian Democratic Union has lost virtually all of its leaders capable of challenging Merkel to various scandals as she has dragged through a disappointing second term. Its parliamentary leader, Volker Kauder, proudly claimed that "now all of Europe is speaking German" a few months ago. Perhaps the Social Democrats would do better.

One prominent European who is now speaking German is none other than the President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy. In a TV interview last night he profusely praised Germany as a fiscal model for France. Merkel and Sarkozy have always had an awkward partnership, despite general ideological compatibility, so it was a bit surprising when Merkel announced that she'd not only tacitly endorse Sarkozy's reelection - which she would be expected to do as a fellow leader of the European People's Party - but actually campaign for him. She is obviously afraid that Socialist Francoise Hollande would demand the renegotiation of some of the deals stitching together the euro crisis response. But such blatant intervention in French internal affairs does not strike me as a good thing. The only time I can remember the leader of one country campaigning for his or her preferred candidate in the election of a close partner country, with joint appearances on the campaign trail, was when Vladimir Putin tried to assist Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine in 2004. That resulted in the Orange Revolution. Which brings me to a second point - Merkel campaigning for Sarkozy is probably counterproductive. France and Germany have a strong partnership, but they also have a long history - and the French are as proud a nation as I can think of. If Germany says vote for Sarkozy, I can see more voters persuaded to vote for Hollande - or Marine Le Pen.

The Year of Magical Drinking

I have now returned to the United States following 11 months in Belgium, the lovely and peculiar country in between France and the Netherlands (and Germany and the United Kingdom). Brussels and Belgium do not sweep you off your feet, but they contain multitudes of treasures cultural and historical, located as they are in a major crossroads of Europe. It became home, and Belgium is in my thoughts today after the terrible grenade attack in Liege.

One of the more conspicuous treasures of Belgium is that this little country, the size of Maryland, has the best beer in the world. It's part of a common culture that unites Flanders and Wallonia. From frites to waffles to chocolates to beer, Belgium takes its food seriously and takes the time to deliver a well-crafted product.

For me, Belgian beers were already the best before I ever visited the country. Germany perhaps does "normal" beer best, with quality standards enforced by its early 16th century Reinheitsgebot, or purity law. But Belgian brews tend to be more interesting, more flavorful, and more to my taste. Third place among the nations is more up for grabs. (The Czechs deliver pretty consistent quality... Britain and Ireland have some classics... Mexican beers, at least the ones I've had, are consistently refreshing if a bit watery... the United States would probably be my winner though, as a growing and entrepreneurial microbrew scene makes up for the banality of the many of the major brands).

Wishing to make the most out of my opportunity of living in Belgium, I endeavored to sample as many different Belgian beers as possible. There are roughly 1,000, so it was simply a matter of time and effort, trying the readily available in Brussels and finding rarer ones in shops and bars. Before I left the county at the beginning of December, I managed to try 135 different ones.

A few introductory notes about the types of beer are worthwhile. Belgians actually drink crappy beer all the time - I would rate the ever-popular Jupiler as worse than Budweiser. The good stuff isn't much more expensive, but it tends to be heavier and have a higher alcohol content. Belgian beers can be divided into categories of quality and type. Trappist beers are made by monks, six abbeys within Belgium and one just outside are producing beer. The best known and easiest to find of these is Chimay. Westvleteren, made by the monks of Saint Sixtus Abbey, is not even distributed beyond the abbey's cafe, and its rarity has helped delicious Westvleteren Bruin 12 be hyped as the best beer in the world. Abbey beers (Bieres d'Abbay or Abdijbier) are based on the recipes of monks. Leffe, for example, is mass produced by Anheuser-Busch InBev from one of these old recipes. Many of the best Belgian beers fall into one of these two categories, which contain different styles. Dubbels (doubles) are dark beers of about 6% alcohol, tripels golden beers stronger than dubbels, quadrupels dark beers even stronger than the tripels.

Another specialty is lambic beer. Lambics are produced by spontaneous fermentation. They are known for fruity flavors - kriek, or cherry; framboise, or raspberry; pecheresse, or peach - but gueuze, a sour lambic, is quite popular within Belgium, and faro is made with brown sugar, sweet but not fruity. The Belgian white beer or witbier, exemplified by Hoegaarden, has entered the American microbrew lexicon as a style producing beers like Blue Moon. Flemish red ales are another popular local style. And Belgium also produces pilsners and other less extra-ordinary beers.

I kept a list for the year, but not notes. However, most of my favorites were beers I tried on multiple occasions, not rarities, so I am able to produce an annotated list of some of my top favorites without too much difficulty:

1. Westvleteren Bruin 12

2. St. Bernardus Abt 12

Honorable Mention - St. Bernardus Christmas

Westvleteren 12 is the holy grail of Belgian beer. I discovered it in a Brussels beer shop by April or so, but I still waited. The monks of Saint Sixtus Abbey do not distribute their highly sought-after beer, except on site on the western edge of Flanders, near Ypres. You can try to call and give a license plate number to reserve a time to pick up a case at the abbey, or you can get the beer at the abbey's cafe, In de Vrede. I had made up my mind to make the pilgrimage along with a trip to Ypres and its war memorials, and this finally happened at the end of November. A few weeks earlier, the monks actually did sell Westvleteren 12 in stores across Belgium - one supermarket chain that is, for one day until it sold out, and you needed a coupon to get the six-pack with two glasses for 25 euros. 93,000 of the packs were distributed. It was a one-off fundraiser for repairs for the abbey. My boss gave me a coupon, but I arrived at the store too late. Still, I made it to In de Vrede with my friends on a late Sunday afternoon, and enjoyed the deliciousness of Westvleteren 12, a highly complex, sweet, dark brew. Their other beers, a darker but less strong Bruin 8 and a blonde, are good but not essential.

I've only tried Westvleteren 12 this one time, but I feel like I can rate it the highest because I've been drinking its cousin all year. St. Bernardus Abt 12 is an abbey beer made in nearby Watou, based on the Westvleteren 12 recipe, and it is the only easy to find beer in Belgium that I would rate above the classic Chimay Blue. Westvleteren 12 was great, but not surprising - basically a slightly more interesting tasting St. Bernardus Abt 12.

As a side note, on my third night back in the US, I had dinner at Pizza Paradiso in Washington, and discovered St. Bernardus's Christmas brew on the drinks menu. It was lovely, just as good as either version of the 12, and I found a bottle of it in an Annapolis liquor store a few days later. So that's one of my Christmas gifts to myself.

3. Chimay Blue

Chimay produces more beer than the other Belgian Trappist brands (Westermalle, Rochefort, Orval, Achel, and Westvleteren). Its blue label is my favorite of its three, darker and sweeter, my favorite Belgium beer before I went to Belgium. You can find this one pretty much anywhere in Belgium and its not hard to find in the States either. And though I sampled plenty, I did not find much that was better.

4. Gouden Carolus Cuvee van de Keizer - Blauw

Mechelen brewery Het Anker's Gouden Carolus Classic is a very good beer which I wish I ran across more often, but this special version of it is even better. It is produced one day a year, February 24, in honor of the birthday of Charles V, the Ghent-born and Mechelen-raised Holy Roman Emperor who ruled most of Europe and South American in the 16th century and spoke Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to his horse. It only comes in large bottles and you can keep it in the cellar for years. Fruity, complex, dark, and very good (you get the picture of what kind of beer I prefer). I actually was given a bottle by a friend before my departure for Brussels, but drank it before I left and liked it so much that I had it a few more times in Belgium.

5. Tripel Karmeliet

One of Belgium's best rated, for very good reasons. This is the best tripel I've tried.

6. Papegaei

The name means parrot, and it has a cool bottle and glass. The beer is light, yeasty, and a little fruity, though strong at 8%. It was the hundredth beer I tried on the year, and one of the keepers.

7. Leffe Brune

8. Leffe Blonde

If gentlemen prefer blondes, then perhaps I'm not a gentlemen. Nevertheless, my relative estimation of Leffe Blonde grew in the year that both were readily available to me. I still give the edge to the Brune however. Both are excellent, reliable beers, although in one of Belgium's quirks, more reliable when served from the bottle than the tap.

9. Lindemans Pecheresse

The peach beer with the sexy bottle (the name pecheresse plays on the French words for peach and "sinner") is my winner in the lambic category.

10. Kasteel Rouge

My first taste of Kasteel Rouge in Belgium (I may have had it a few years ago in New York) was a shock. I had thought it to be a red ale, but it was a cherry beer twice as strong as most krieks. I also prefer the taste to most krieks - sweet but not light, darker and thicker, almost like a liquor. And delicious.

11. Barbar

Another sweet one. Barbar is a honey beer far tastier than any mead I've tried at renaissance fairs in the US. The James Joyce near Schuman always has it, otherwise I usually had to buy it in a beer store.

12. Kwak

The best thing about Kwak is its ridiculous serving glass, bulbous at the bottom and fitting into a wooden holder. It was the carriage drivers' beer, designed so they could drink it while driving. The reddish beer is pretty tasty, too.

13. Rochefort 6

The 6 is probably the least celebrated of the three Trappist Rochefort beers, and the weakest, at 7.5%. But I was disappointed by the others, and when I tried this one I thought it was delicious. We called the Rochefort glass "the chalice" in our household.

14. Lindemans Faro

Faro is the brown sugar lambic. This is the only one I ever tried, but it's quite good - and cheap, and available in my local Carrefour.

15. Pannepot

Pannepot is one of the more unique Belgian beers. It's thick and chocolaty with no carbonation at all. It's made by De Struise (the Ostrich) Brewery near De Panne, on the south end of Belgium's coast. In this case, my trivial beer knowledge enabled me to read the word "Struisevogel" on a menu and enjoy some ostrich medallions at one of my last meals in Brussels. The beer isn't too easy to find in bars, but I split one three ways with my sister and her boyfriend at the legendary Delirium, and picked up another at the Beer Temple soon after.

16. De Koninck

I feel like this amber beer is more easily found in New York or Washington than in Brussels. It's essentially the official beer of Antwerp, Belgium's second city (and coolest city). Thus the hand on the glass - the legend of Antwerp is that a hero cut off the hand of a mean giant who collected tolls at the river, then threw the hand in the river. Antwerp basically translates as "hand throw." And it's a great place to have a few drinks with friends and catch the last train back to Brussels, round midnight.

Tony Judt as Nostradamus

One of the wisest commentators on post-war Europe, Tony Judt, passed last summer, and his piercing analysis is missed as Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, Herman van Rompuy, Jose Manuel Barroso, Mario Draghi and others struggle to prevent the Eurozone from falling apart while credit ratings agencies and Tory backbenchers sharpen their knives and Barack Obama breaks a sweat. But a short book by Mr. Judt has reappeared on the bookshelves of Brussels. A Grand Illusion? is a Euro-pessimist essay based on lectures given in spring 1995 at my alma mater, Johns Hopkins University's Bologna Center. Judt appreciates the EU's accomplishment but doesn't see "Europe" expanding on equal terms or defeating nationalism. While the integration of Poland and other eastern states has been far more successful than Judt predicts, he's got plenty of salient points, and the book is well worth a read. To be honest, very little seems out of date. For example:

"The recently touted German idea of a small inner core of European states moving at full speed toward integration and setting demanding macro-economic criteria for membership in their club is merely the latest evidence that the future of Europe will be on German terms or not at all. It is unlikely that Italy, Spain, or even Britain will ever qualify for such an exclusive club, and even more absurd to envisage Poland or Slovakia doing so. Actually, no one except Luxembourg really qualifies according to the criteria set out in various position papers from the Christian Democrats, but to make the idea even semi-plausibly 'European,' Germany, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands have to be in, rules or no rules."

And that's your probable core of a new two-speed or three-speed or four-speed EU, with the possible additions of Austria, Finland, and top pupil Estonia... and just maybe, in a few years, Padania.

Armistice

In several days, I will depart a Europe that is on the brink of falling to pieces. It is nearly impossible to predict the specifics of the break-up of the Eurozone and the effect that will have on the European Union and the social cohesion of Europe's countries. But we are headed towards a disaster. Germany and the European Central Bank may still have the power to come to the rescue (Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski gave a great, impassioned speech addressed to Germany on Monday), but it appears it may be a matter of days before something snaps. It's a scary and depressing situation. The failure of the euro was not assured from the start, despite the EU not being an optimum currency area, etc. This could have been avoided, even as late as the last few weeks. I pray it still can.

Some talk of war. I worry about resurgent nationalism, I have worried about that for years. Does a major economic crisis make the election of a radical like Newt Gingrich or Marine Le Pen more likely? Yes. Is actual violence in Europe likely? Europe's suicide in 1914 and the carnage of the two world wars have probably extinguished the likelihood that western Europe will erupt into violence between states anytime soon. Also, most countries are embedded in NATO and have sold most of their tanks and planes. More likely is riots along the lines of what we saw in London this year.

But things can change quickly in times of upheaval. And even without violence, politics in a crisis could rip Europe apart. And that would be an unspeakable tragedy. 93 years ago, the armistice ending the Great War came into effect between the Allies and Germany. November 11 is a holiday across the European continent. It fell on a Friday this year, and I happened to be in Paris for a long weekend.

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, by the Arc de Triomphe, surrounded by troops, tanks and dignitaries, President Nicolas Sarkozy stepped out of his vehicle to the pomp of "La Marseillaise," comically short next to a tall general in uniform. But the ceremony was completely somber. The head of state acknowledged a series of different groups of veterans, represented by guards with flags. He stood with the mothers, widows, and children of fallen soldiers from the past year, as an announcer read the names one by one, each punctuated by "Mort pour la France." The head of state laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc and gave a solemn speech. Only when the ceremony was over and he had walked past my vantage point on Av. Hoche did he reach out and shake the hands of his people, the politician rather than the national patriarch.

Two weeks later I visited Ypres, the Flemish cloth town resembling Bruges and Ghent which was absolutely demolished during the war, as it lay just on the Allied side of the front line for years. I lived this year with a former captain in the British Army's Royal Irish Regiment, Patrick Bury, and we had been planning a visit for months (he and my other roommates made it to another blood-soaked piece of Belgian soil, Bastogne, in Belgium's southeast corner where the German counter-offensive in early 1945 struck hard, for Armistice when I was in France). The supposedly can't-miss In Flanders Field Museum is unfortunately closed until June 2012, but the town was gorgeously restored, the huge and beautiful Cloth Hall looks much older than it really is.

We visited the Island of Ireland Peace Park in Messines, unveiled in 1998, months after the Good Friday Agreement, in tribute to all the Irish who died in the Great War. The German Soldier's Cemetery in Langemark, a few miles north, was the most haunting site. Small square stones are laid in the ground in a plot surrounded by a short wall and trees, each has a few names on it, many also say "10 [or 15 or 20] unknown German soldiers." We arriving in the dying light of the sun. I stood in front of a mass grave where another 24,917 German soldiers are buried. This is the site where I found my own surname among the names of the dead.

At 8 p.m., we came to Menin Gate, an imposing white marble arch at the eastern entry into town honoring the dead who have no known grave, who vanished into the muddy hell of the Ypres Salient. Churchill wanted to buy the entire town of Ypres; the Belgians declined, but they gave Britain the town gate. By the end of the 1920s the gate was constructed with about 55,000 names inscribed. The remaining 35,000 Commonwealth missing are honored at another nearby memorial, as they had run out of room on the gate. Every night at 8, buglers from the local fire brigade sound the Last Post to a gathered crowd. We looked at the names for a while, finding the Irish on the outside of the arch, then drove back to Brussels.

Decades of European integration have brought peace to the continent, along with prosperity and made most of its countries firmly democratic (there are always exceptions: Russia, Belarus, Liechtenstein, and the Vatican are not democracies and some of the democracies are pretty flawed). Western Europe in the past several decades has had about the highest standard of living of any place ever.

At the center of the European project stands the bilateral relationship between Germany and France. As I said, if the Eurozone and European Union fall to pieces in the next months over this crisis, instead of moving forward into deeper integration, it is very difficult to predict how it will happen and into what they will transform. But one scenario that seems likely it a more tightly integrated core Europe. Germany does not want to stand alone, and I would be shocked were it to give up on France. France will lose its AAA credit rating soon, but I expect it to retain a joint currency with Germany, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and others. And though its debts are among the worst, Belgium will not leave the core either. Brussels is the capital of Europe, Belgium is economically healthy enough to grow. In a silver lining, the worsening euro crisis has led to a Belgian government after a world record 535 days - everything was agreed yesterday, and the new government will be sworn in on Monday.

The places where the fall of Europe will be most catastrophic, if it occurs, are on the periphery. Italy, one of the original six member states of the European Community, risks plunging out and into economic and political chaos. Greece's misery will continue. Portugal and Spain could be taken out by contagion. Further east, the EU's newer member states will have their economies damaged; Austria and Germany have already restricted lending to the east. Germany's other key bilateral relationship is indeed with Poland, and it would be devastated if the EU shrinks and excludes members who have done nothing wrong. The treatment of the Central and Eastern European member states is one of the real unpredictables of the crisis. And with a shrunken, inward-looking EU, the European dream could die in places like Belgrade, Sarajevo, Skopje, Pristina, Chisinau and Kyiv.

The crisis is scary and confusing. We can only hope that political leaders, particularly Angela Merkel, show braver and more enlightened leadership in the next days then they have in the last 20 months.

Notes from the 9/11 Decade

I saw the World Trade Center towers for the last time in late August 2001. My family was driving me up to Maine for college and we took a scenic route through New York, I think through Brooklyn (my NYC geography wasn't great at the time). Several weeks later I came out of an 8:30 a.m. American history class at Bowdoin, learning about the early Cold War, Paul Nitze's NSC-68. I heard a stray remark about a plane hitting the World Trade Center. I didn't think much of it, imagining a small plane accident like Yankee pitcher Cory Lidle's a few years later. But when I tried to check the news online, none of my regular sites were working, so I turned on my roommate's TV. Then I alerted most people on the floor of my dorm. I watched the towers collapse. I couldn't eat much for a few days.

A few weeks later, I was on a camping trip in Acadia when the United States attacked Afghanistan. I was less worried than most of the others in the car. It was a just retaliation against the country harboring al Qaeda. I didn't imagine that US troops would still be there a decade later in the longest war in American history.

In 2003 I was studying abroad in London during the march up to war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. I never believed the Bush administration's case for war. I did not trust or respect the president, partially for his politics and style, partially because I was 19, it would be a few more years before I forgave him for coming into the office in an illegitimate fashion with the Florida debacle, even though it wasn't really his fault. But the main points were that I knew there was no link between al Qaeda and Saddam and that I did not believe that preemptive war could be just or legal, at least not without the blessings of the United Nations. I admired Tony Blair at the time, he was the most eloquent public figure I had seen before Barack Obama, and he could make the case for the war in a way that almost convinced me. But then President Bush would open his mouth and drawl about Saddam "showing his cards" and I walked off to protest with more than a million others in Hyde Park. When the bombs started falling I was in Amsterdam for the weekend and ashamed to be an American. As a march of anti-war protesters went by I shed my North Face jacket and tried to look European in a purple-brown sweater.

Bush's reelection in November 2004 was another moment of despair. I knew almost no one who liked or would even defend the president and his record, and yet he won the popular vote decisively (The Democrats' lackluster candidate John Kerry nearly won the election due to a close vote in Ohio, though). The next two years were terrible for the president, however. Bush's second inaugural address is worth a read, especially in the context of the changes today in the Middle East. America's power was already past its peak - which was in the 1950s, around the time my parents were born, although the 1990s represented a new peak - and we would never return to a pre-9/11 sense of security. But the laissez-faire candidate who had campaigned against nation-building had become a war president who fully embraced Wilsonianism with his "freedom agenda." This was a crusading president whose country still looked strong. Months later, Hurricane Katrina destroyed that president, with FEMA's failures and television cameras exposing scenes that many people worldwide did not believe could happen in America. Iraq got bloodier and opposition rose.

I taught German students, a few of whom were the children of Turkish or Iranian immigrants, at a high school in Hamburg in 2005 and 2006, on a Fulbright grant. The students told me they hated George W. Bush, some said they didn't like America. I explained that myself and many other Americans didn't like Bush either or agree with him on Iraq, that the country was divided but that we had freedom of speech and a rich history of dissent, I told them about Henry David Thoreau going to jail for a night rather than support the Mexican-American War with his taxes, I played them Bob Dylan's "Masters of War." They warmed up to me.

I love my country though I had very strong feelings against the ruling party. I was in Hamburg for the World Cup, and I bought myself a Team USA jersey, watched many games in an outdoor viewing area, in bars and cafes and pubs, at home, cheered raucously, shook hands with Italians after the US drew with them in a nasty, gritty match. I returned home in the summer. The Democrats swept into power in Congress. Donald Rumsfeld was replaced by Robert Gates (one of the best decisions of Bush's presidency - by and large, the weakened president did a much better job in his last two years).

I never watched Barack Obama's speech at the Democratic Convention in 2004. By summer 2007, Mark Warner had decided not to run, Bill Richardson didn't look like he was going anywhere, and while I still hoped Al Gore would jump into the race, I couldn't count on it. I read Obama's Dreams From My Father to confirm a hunch and embraced his candidacy over Hillary Clinton's and John Edwards'. He was very smart, had an inspiring story, eloquent speaker, I agreed with him on most policies (and still do), and I understand his temperament (and still do). He had the potential to become one of the great presidents in American history, to recover what we had lost of ourselves at home and abroad over the past decade and longer. I obsessively followed the primary and its results, I could tell you who every member of Congress had endorsed. I campaigned for him in Maryland, Ohio and Pennsylvania. On election night, I was watching at a party hosted by the American Embassy in Rome, having moved to Bologna, Italy, to study international relations. Most of us students at the Johns Hopkins University's Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, at least in the Bologna campus, supported Obama. Some cried when he won Ohio and sealed his election. I was elated as I wandered the Eternal City at dawn. A bright future for America and the world had opened up, and working in international relations, I was going to be a part of that somehow.

Three years later, however, the economic crisis that Obama inherited has not been solved, and a double-dip recession looms when the Eurozone crisis reaches a breaking point, if not sooner. I had made Washington, DC my home by the time the Tea Party rose up to shake my faith in the possibility a brighter future for my country. I still strongly support President Obama. But the character of the United States remains conservative enough - in both parties - and the money flowing into politics corrupting enough and the media useless enough and the Republican Party has skilled and cynical enough tacticians and the president cautious enough that Obama's will not be a great transformative presidency. The left in America is instead facing a rearguard action to preserve decades-old social programs, environmental protection, and worker's rights. Wall Street will not be controlled by regulation. The fundamentals of the American economy are not strong, when the economy grows it produces growth for too few, and I have little hope that people with power will not block the situation from being substantially improved. The debt ceiling crisis was a turning point. The country is headed in the wrong direction, and it is heading in that direction because the power of the right, even controlling just one house of Congress and the Supreme Court. Austerity will make our problems worse, not solve them. Sometimes you can only laugh to keep from crying about the situation, this is why comedian Jon Stewart has become the leading voice of progressives' outrage.

I live in Europe these days, and was woken up around 3:30 a.m. on May 2 by the beep of a news flash on my iPad. I followed the rumors on Twitter and then President Obama announced that Osama bin Laden had finally been killed by our SEALs. I was proud and wished I had been back in DC to run over to the White House where Americans were celebrating. The death of al Qaeda's leader punctuates the end of the 9/11 decade. We can reflect now, on September 11, 2011. The men who killed thousands and changed our world have been brought to justice. With the Middle East transforming at a rapid rate in 2011, we're in a new chapter of history.

So what shall we conclude from the results of the 9/11 decade? I'm unfortunately fairly pessimistic.

Al Qaeda has been largely defeated - at least the core group. But there are offshoots, like the one we fought in post-invasion Iraq. Yemen and other failed states pose a threat because of jihadist terrorists operating there. And al Qaeda got much of what they wanted. They drew the United States into bloody wars in the Middle East and Central Asia. The world economy has been damaged and its center of gravity shifted away from the West.

The war in Iraq was a strategic mistake. America won the war, but at too dear a price. The new Iraq could become a proxy of Iran. John Maynard Keynes once wrote "it is not sufficient that the state of affairs which we seek to promote should be better than the state of affairs which preceded it; it must be sufficiently better to make up for the evils of the transition." This is a key question for the transitioning Middle East, for many Iraqis, their new life will not be sufficiently better to make up for the things they have lost in recent years.

Afghanistan, the just war, looks to have been lost between 2002 and 2009 if it was ever winnable, largely because resources were shifted to Iraq. The real war against al Qaeda in Central Asia is being fought by the CIA in Pakistan. The decade-long effort of the US and its allies in Afghanistan has definitely improved things for Afghans, in the balance, but it has also likely weakened the state in Pakistan, a larger, nuclear-armed country full of anti-American extremists.

With the Middle East in turmoil, there have been triumphs for democracy and the human spirit as dictators have fallen. The fall of the terrible Muammar Qaddafi in Libya is the most positive development, though that country still risks becoming Somalia-On-the-Mediterranean. Horrific violence continues in Syria and regime change is far from certain there. It is hard to predict what the future will look like in Egypt and the other countries. As a recent essay in the New York Review of Books, points out, revolutions eat their children. Israel, under the leadership of Binjamin Netanyahu, at the end of the 9/11 decade, at the end of a decade of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his AK Party transforming Turkey into a more democratic but more Islamist state, and nine months into the Arab Spring, is as isolated as it has been in decades.

The United States of America has spent trillions of dollars on national security in the last decade - wars, concrete barriers in our cities, unreasonable security measures around our embassies and in our airports. Many of these measures make us safer, some, like the war in Iraq, have the opposite effect. Al Qaeda's attack has done too much to change American life. The occasions where we have thrown away our principles in the name of security have damaged us in the eyes of the world, just as the crisis of our much lauded and copied economic system spread to damage the economies of countless other countries, weakening their faith in America. Humiliating visitors to our country and building ultra-secure castles to house our diplomats abroad damages our soft power.

The optimistic side? New York, especially Lower Manhattan, is doing fine. So is Washington. We can absorb attacks, as Londoners did during the Blitz. Fight our enemies abroad in the shadows, with intelligence and drones and Stuxnet and the like, but not with torture. We shouldn't live our daily lives in fear of low-probability attacks. We have to face up to the real greater challenges, rebuild our strength at home, and manage our inevitable loss in relative power overseas as other countries grow faster than we can. The country's challenges are real and they are dire. But terrorism is not that close to the top of the list. Becoming the country we want to be, living up to our ideals and our great potential - that needs to be our priority.

The Princess Imprisoned

It is fitting that the crime of which Yulia Tymoshenko stands accused relates to gas. Gas made her rich in the 1990s, she was one of the oligarchs, known as the Gas Princess. It made her deputy prime minister for fuel and energy Viktor Yushchenko's cabinet back in the Kuchma years, from December 1999 to January 2001. When her reforms angered enough powerful enemies, she was pushed out of government and arrested. That was a decade ago. After the Orange Revolution, the peasant braids, two stints as prime minister, serial gas crises with Russia, a massive economic crisis, a close-run presidential election, vociferous denunciation of new President Viktor Yanukovych's swift and unconstitutional consolidation of power, and a political trial in which she has shown Ukraine's criminal justice system as much contempt as it has shown her, Tymoshenko sits in prison once more, accused of making an improper deal with Russia to restore the flow of gas in 2009.

The international condemnations flow into Kyiv, as her supporters chant, "Shame, Shame!" The world heavyweight boxing champion - Vitali Klitschko, also a member of the Kyiv City Council and leader of the Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform Party - declares his readiness to stand bail for the damsel in distress.

Tymoshenko's hands are not totally clean, no one's are in Ukrainian politics. She made her money in the wild 90s; in her early political career she was allied to Pavlo Lazarenko, a corrupt prime minister who currently sits in a California prison. She governed a country with weak institutions in transition in the middle of an economic crisis, could not work with the president, and dominated the Cabinet. As a leader, she gets things done, but she has a domineering personality and a bit of a cult of personality, before the election some in Europe feared her autocratic tendencies as much as Yanukovych's.

But it was Yanukovych who won the election and since, he and his allies have played fast and loose with the constitution, cracked down on the free press by pressuring journalists, and overseen a decline in the fairness of elections since the presidential one in January and February 2010, which was basically free and fair. Their prosecution of Tymoshenko is selective and part of a pattern, clearly a bid to disqualify the most powerful opposition leader from future political office. Tymoshenko would be a real threat if the next presidential election was as fair as the 2010 election. While she has plenty of detractors with valid complaints, she would have likely won the presidency if an economic crisis started in the United States had not badly wounded fragile Ukraine under her watch. Her political response to the crisis in 2008 and 2009, which I studied extensively in graduate school, including by visiting Ukraine and conducting interviews with policymakers and experts, was not bad. And Yanukovych's heavy-handed approach to governance has disenchanted many of the people who were not part of his political base but voted for him in the run-off.

The Tymoshenko trial puts Ukraine in a very bad light abroad. The foreign reaction has been strong, and not only from her allies in the West and Western governments. Russia too is upset with Yanukovych over the trial. Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt gets it right in a recent op-ed penned upon her recent detention in August. Yanukovych is serious about pressing forward to European integration, but he seems to think he can get away with murder (figuratively) at home and still move integration forward. The EU should continue its negotiations on an Association Agreement with a deep free trade area, but its leaders will and must push Yanukovych on his domestic abuses of power. And Yanukovych should worry about Tymoshenko. He risks turning her from an opposition leader with a strong following to a more sympathetic political prisoner who one assumes will eventually be freed and able to return to politics. And I doubt a freed-from-prison President Yulia Tymoshenko would have the forgiveness of a Nelson Mandela.

Slate Highlights the Microstates

As I'm tied to a desk for the summer with dwindling funds, I've enjoyed reading Slate's recent slate of travelogues featuring Europe's microstates. In July, Happy Menocal and John Swansburg wrote and illustrated what is practically a small book (indeed you can download it for your Kindle) about Malta, the smallest EU member state. This week, Josh Levin has a series where he visits Andorra, Monaco, San Marino and Liechtenstein. I find the tiny states and the reasons for their survival (basically, they are either located in between two big countries or didn't join in when Germany and Italy unified) fascinating. Visiting them can be interesting - I've been to San Marino twice on daytrips after nights in Rimini, and I like the old town; flashy Monaco is less charming but I was hung over after partying in Nice and on a budget and it's worth seeing once; I came within a few kilometers of Andorra on a train-bus-train trip from Barcelona to Toulouse, from what I know I don't think a few hours in a town there would be so hot but a hike in the mountains could be nice. One thing I learned from the series: there is an Olympics-affiliated biennial Games of the Small States of Europe, in which all of Europe's ten countries with a population under one million compete, except for that sovereign office building Citta del Vaticano. Levin attends these games in Liechtenstein.

At the other end of the spectrum, Slate has also recently highlighted one of Europe's largest countries - Kazakhstan. Yes, Kazakhstan is in Central Asia, but it too has territory near the Caspian Sea which belongs to that vague geographic expression known as Europe - that's why it competes in UEFA not Asia in football.