Debt limit episodes have been a recurrent federal fiscal feature in the past two decades. Since 2002, the debt limit has been modified 19 times. In August 2019, the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2019 (BBA 2019; P.L. 116-37) suspended the debt limit through July 31, 2021. The limit was reset …

In Europe and the US, there used to be a tradition of pragmatic and often harshly realist statecraft. It went back at least as far as the 5th century B.C. Greek historian Thucydides, whose influential history of the war between Athens and Sparta was essentially an account of the coercive …

The post-Merkel era is set to kick off in Germany, as the ‘traffic light coalition’ of Social Democratic Party (SDP), the Greens, and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) have agreed to form a new government headed by the SDP’s Olaf Scholz. Success was anything but assured given the wide variance …