The EU's national rivalries comprise a standing invitation for any major world power to divide and rule. In an article for The Guardian, Timothy Garton Ash argues that even if things go well, what Europeans may achieve in concentrating power resources will only just compensate for the relative loss of power to the re-emerging old-new giants in the east.

At first glance the recent Franco-British treaty on defence looks like a model of pragmatism, tinged by a British desire to keep greater pan-EU defence cooperation at bay. But like so many European agreements over the last decades, this aspiration to preserve sovereignty may not prevent the treaty contributing to exactly that higher level of cooperation.

Following President Obama?s mauling in this week?s midterm elections, European diplomats will doubtless be working on memos to their ministers with titles like ?The Transatlantic Alliance and the Tea Party?. Richard Gowan suggests what they should say.

The mid-term elections in the United States are not just a set-back for President Obama at home: they will also limit his capacity to lead in the international arena at a time of rising powers and greater competition.

A historian of the future writing about the decline of the West should include a few lines on the events of October 2010. The EU gave up some privileges at the IMF, but it's not clear that the rising powers will now play by the West's rules.