With his State of the Union address, President Obama combined the two most powerful tactics of modern politics – big speeches and big data – to spur political action. Are we witnessing a reinvention of representative democracy?
In foreign policy the UK is already far more involved in Europe than its disengaged image would suggest. ECFR's European Foreign Policy Scorecard suggests that the UK is up there with Germany and France as a leader in European foreign policy.
A comprehensive evaluation of European foreign policy
Like Greece, Spain and Germany, Britain now faces a cathartic moment when it needs to decide what price it is worth paying to stay in the European Union: coolheaded rationality must prevail over emotion
Cameron's EU speech is a bad miscalculation that underestimates how much the world has changed, and how much Britain needs Europe if it is to retain an influential voice in global affairs.
How the euro crisis has affected politics in 14 EU member states
The Mali conflict has caught the EU asleep at the wheel. But with support from across the Union and credible, limited aims, a European intervention in Mali can be successful.
Sanctions are the EU's sole coercive instrument of power short of military action (Brussels, mercifully, does not engage in warfare). The EU needs to understand their impact so that it can use them more effectively.