BERLIN — German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will meet French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday night in Paris for a dinner to discuss European Union and China policy. The clandestine meeting of two heavyweight EU leaders, which comes just days ahead of a visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping to Europe, is being described as a semi-private event: Scholz and his wife, Britta Ernst, are on a short vacation in the French capital, where they will meet Macron and his wife Brigitte in a French restaurant. No advisers will participate, according to three people with knowledge of the dinner, who were gr ..read more

NEW YORK — A leading ally of former U.S. President Donald Trump has launched a scathing criticism of U.K. Foreign Secretary David Cameron — and heaped praise on his would-be successor. Speaking to POLITICO’s podcast Power Play, Elbridge Colby, who is tipped to become national security adviser in a  potential second Trump administration, hit out at what he described as Cameron’s “moralizing” and “lecturing” of U.S. politicians. In contrast, he spoke warmly of David Lammy, the U.K. opposition Labour Party’s lead on foreign affairs, saying: “Based on what I can see, David Lammy is ..read more

BELGRADE — For many Serbs, it’s as if the Taliban wanted to build a luxury apartment compound on the site of New York’s Twin Towers. That’s how news of a redevelopment project proposed by Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of former U.S. President Donald Trump, and Richard Grenell, a key Trump ally, is being taken in some quarters of Belgrade. The plan includes the demolition of the bombed-out former Yugoslav army headquarters, which until now had been left largely undeveloped as an unofficial memorial to Serbian suffering during the 1999 NATO bombing of Belgrade. In its place would rise a Trump To ..read more

A seismic shift in Armenia’s foreign policy that has seen it forge closer relations with the European Union is not a threat to Moscow, the country’s ambassador in Brussels insisted amid increasingly tense relations with the Kremlin. “Armenia’s geography means it historically and practically has so many connections with Russia that only phantasmagoric people think Armenia would take the suicidal step of trying to undermine Russian interests in the region,” Tigran Balayan, the country’s envoy to the EU, told POLITICO in an interview. “The Armenia-EU relationship is based on Armenian national int ..read more

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Abdallah Nabhan and members of his family died overnight after an Israeli airstrike in the city of Rafah in southern Gaza, the Belgian development agency Enabel said in a statement Thursday. Belgian Foreign Minister Hadja Lahbib summoned Israel’s ambassador following Nabhan’s death. “Bombing civilian areas and populations is against international law. I summon the Israeli ambassador to condemn this unacceptable act and demand explanations,” she said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. Enabel said that Nabhan, whose father, brother, niece and son were also killed in the attack, was on th ..read more

How a second Trump presidency could tear Europe apart  The former president’s return would cement a shift in the U.S. as a fact that can no longer be ignored. By  BARBARA MOENS,  JACOPO BARIGAZZI,  KARL MATHIESEN,  ALEX WARD and CAMILLE GIJS Illustration by Matthew Brazier for POLITICO This is the moment most of Europe’s leaders hoped they would never see. The date is November 7, 2024, two days after Donald Trump edged out Joe Biden in the U.S. presidential election, and already the once-and-future president has announced he will force Ukraine to s ..read more

John Kampfner is a British author, broadcaster and commentator. His latest book is “In Search of Berlin,” published by Atlantic. “Should Donald Trump win, we’ll have to dress up warm,” stated Markus Söder, one of Germany’s most senior politicians. The leader of the Bavarian conservative party, the Christian Social Union, Söder was responding to the former U.S. president’s — and likely the next U.S. president’s — February warning that he was willing to let Russia do “whatever the hell” it wanted to NATO members that don’t pay their fair share. “We need a fully equipped military,” Söder said. Tw ..read more

KYIV — Donald Trump doesn’t easily forgive or forget. As Trump’s Republican allies in the United States Congress block military aid that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Kyiv desperately needs to avoid defeat in its war with invading Russian forces, it’s clear the former U.S. president’s ill will toward Ukraine has deep roots.  It was, after all, a phone call with Zelenskyy that led to Trump’s first impeachment in December 2019, after he was accused of seeking to influence the 2020 election by leaning on the Ukrainian leader to investigate current President Joe Biden and his s ..read more

LONDON — David Cameron was resurrected from the British political wilderness to act as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s surrogate on foreign policy. But five months into the job, Cameron has pushed the boundaries further than many expected. The British foreign secretary has been described inside government as the “prime minister of foreign affairs,” frequently threatening to overshadow his boss as Sunak battles endless political crises on the domestic front. One Foreign Office insider said officials see him as a “man in a hurry,” rushing to rehabilitate his personal legacy in what, given the Conse ..read more