Stephen Holmes

Commentaries by Stephen Holmes

Stephen Holmes

Professor at New York University School of Law, Berlin Prize Fellow at American Academy in Berlin

Stephen Holmes, a professor at New York University School of Law and Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, is the co-author (with Ivan Krastev) of The Light that Failed: A Reckoning (Penguin Books, 2019).

Appeasing Trump Only Invites Betrayal – as Europe’s Far Right Just Learned
Feb 05, 2026
By threatening to seize Greenland by force, US President Donald Trump has exposed the childlike illusions of his European admirers. Having spent years cultivating their bromances with him, the continent’s right-wing populists – the United Kingdom’s Nigel Farage, Jordan Bardella in France, Alice Weidel in Germany, Italy’s Matteo Salvini, Robert Fico in Slovakia, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and Mateusz Morawiecki in Poland – imagined themselves fellow travelers in a revolt against liberal internationalism. Now their idol and patron has been threatening to swallow whole or in part (if the supposed “deal” he has announced comes about) the sovereign territory of a European ally.
U.S.-EU Relations Donald Trump American Politics U.S. Foreign Policy Major Power Relations
Trump Is Betting Against the Future
Dec 10, 2025
The new US National Security Strategy is not, in any meaningful sense, a strategy. A strategy connects means to achievable ends. What President Donald Trump’s White House published last week is something else: a 33-page confession that this administration does not believe in the future – and therefore sees no point in investing in it.
National Security U.S. Foreign Policy