Alexandru Georgescu

Economist, Research Fellow with the EURISC Foundation, studying geopolitics, international security issues and critical infrastructure protection, currently in a Ph.D. research program on the latter subject

A Quarter of a Millennium of Freedom

Alexandru Georgescu

No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 The United States of America is celebrating 250 years since the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. The moment marks the final break with the British Empire, after an escalation of the economic, fiscal, political and principled conflict between the metropolis and the North American colonies. The anniversary is an important one in American secular religion as a moment of affirmation of national identity. Its importance has gradually grown, as significant waves of migration (especially the most recent) have distanced America from the hard Anglo-Saxon and British core of its founding, and then the European one of its perfection as a global power. The quarter-millennium is important not only symbolically, but also politically, as an opportunity for the Trump Administration, surrounded on several sides and facing a difficult congressional campaign, to march on the rituals of the American republic to encourage national unity at a time of maximum division. Americans have celebrated their other major anniversaries with pomp, but, measuring every 50 years, the US has never faced another anniversary in such a difficult situation, although the uncertainties of the Cold War or the post-Civil War period were probably on Americans’ minds at the time. The relative decline of American power instruments as a whole, relative to the coalition of revisionist countries that oppose it and that are accelerating the transition to a multipolar world, constitutes a challenge not only to their Great Power calculus, but also to America’s self-conception as an exceptional country. The Administration’s bombastic style is in line with what Americans want from the celebration, but Donald Trump’s self-promotional tendency and “imperious and imperial” leadership style risk alienating that part of the opposition that could be mollified. After the confetti has settled and the hot dogs have been digested, Americans will return to a world that has become largely ambivalent about the idea of American leadership. The NATO summit in Ankara on July 7-8 will pit the United States against allies fearful of the current Administration’s unpredictability and caprices, but also of long-term structural changes to the United States and its presence in the world, regardless of the political color of the White House and Congress. More

The Concert of Terra: History Does Not Repeat Itself, but It Rhymes

Alexandru Georgescu

No. 59, May-Jun. 2026 In May 2026, Beijing held two summits with Washington and Moscow six days apart, in this order and not by chance: Donald Trump on May 14 and Vladimir Putin on May 20. The immediate comments focused, predictably, on trade deals, gas pipelines and the rhetoric of summit diplomacy. This is the level at which the 24-hour media cycle operates. But there is a deeper level to these visits, which does not appear in the joint communiqués and which deserves patient analysis: Beijing did not react to world events, but orchestrated a deliberate sequence through which it positioned itself as the indispensable pivot of a multipolar system in search of stabilization. More

The High Stakes of Hormuz: Why the US-Iran War Will Not End Soon

Alexandru Georgescu

No. 59, May-Jun. 2026 The ceasefire between the US and Iran was greeted with an optimism that I consider premature. We are not witnessing a moment of rupture, but a new phase of the same negotiation process that has been underway since it became clear that the regime in Tehran would not collapse under US military pressure and that, perhaps paradoxically, it has emerged from the confrontation more internally strengthened than before. Categorical statements about the refusal of any negotiation or the imminence of devastating strikes against civilian infrastructure have been part of the communication game of both sides. The reality on the ground is different and much more complicated. More

The Bulgarian Doom Loop and Political Instability in Eastern Europe

Alexandru Georgescu

No. 58, Mar.-Apr. 2026 Bulgaria held its eighth parliamentary election in five years on April 19, 2026. The Guinness Book of Records might soon find itself in competition with the Central Election Commission in Sofia for the most reliable chronicle of Bulgarian political milestones, but the result was, for once, reasonably decisive. Former President Rumen Radev, who resigned his largely ceremonial office in January in order to enter the murkier but more consequential arena of parliamentary politics, led his freshly minted Progressive Bulgaria coalition to a result not seen since 1997: an outright majority, 131 seats out of 240, enough to govern alone and, in principle, enough to silence, at least temporarily, the revolving door that has been the defining institutional feature of Bulgarian public life since 2021. More

The Hungarian Elections: The Prodigal Son Gets the Fatted Calf

Alexandru Georgescu

No. 58, Mar.-Apr. 2026 On April 12, 2026, Péter Magyar and his Tisza party rewrote history. With nearly 80 percent turnout, Tisza secured 138 seats in the 199-seat Hungarian parliament on 53.6 percent of the vote, handing Viktor Orbán his first electoral defeat since 2006 and ending sixteen years of Fidesz rule. The celebrations along the Danube were genuine. They were also, in some important respects, premature. More

The Epiphany of a Multipolar World at Davos

Alexandru Georgescu

No. 57, Jan.-Feb. 2026 The World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos has, over the past decades, cultivated a reputation as the premier gathering of the global elite, as an event where one must be present and visible to count among them and to remain attuned to the great trends shaping the world. Alongside the annual meeting, the Forum has also become a prolific producer of influential reports and research, such as the Global Risks Report, which have become essential reading for decision-makers across the globe. More

The End of the Long 20th Century

Alexandru Georgescu

No. 57, Jan.-Feb. 2026 Historian Eric Hobsbawm borrowed from the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg the concept of the long 19th century, a 125-year period from the French Revolution in 1789 to the First World War in 1914. The period is marked by the Enlightenment, the rise of national movements, and the rise of European empires amid the Industrial Revolution. I would suggest that 2025 or perhaps 2022 was the end of a long 20th century, marked by ideological conflicts between states, bipolarity, and eventual American hegemony, and now the end of the postwar order. Perhaps future historians will place this end during the financial crisis of 2008, or at the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, a member of the UN Security Council, and the strong economic response of the West, which shook global financial and energy flows. Or perhaps Trump’s first or second term, with his iconoclasm towards the traditional priorities and instruments of institutional American power in the world, will be declared the beginning of a new era. What is certain is that we are witnessing the gradual return of an anarchic global system, increasingly focused on unilateral actions by powerful states and in which the completion of secular trends in the fiscal, technological and investment fields is rewriting the map of power on the world map. More

The Hegemon and the Growing Pressure on Limited Resources

Alexandru Georgescu

No. 56, Nov.-Dec. 2025 The recent announcement that the Trump Administration will reduce its forces in Romania by not replacing the forces here on rotation has caused consternation in the political environment and in society, in the context of the challenges of the war in Ukraine and Donald Trump’s mixed messages, over time, regarding military support for US allies. The partial withdrawal is not a surprise except in the context of the eternal present of the 24-hour media cycle – the first declarations of intent came to light in March 2025, and the respective forces were part of the additional forces sent by the Biden Administration in the initial phase of the war in Ukraine in 2022, when the allies feared a potential conventional war on their own territory. Whether right or wrong, the Trump Administration does not seem to believe that Russia has the capacity to attack a NATO member in any other way than hybrid and unconventionally in the immediate future, given the situation in the war in Ukraine and the losses suffered by Russia (issues such as drone intrusions being solvable by other means such as the acquisition of MEROPS systems and other anti-drone systems). President Trump’s mercurial changes in attitude towards Ukraine and President Zelensky also fuels anxieties among allies, through a wrong conflation between the American will to help Ukraine and the credibility of the guarantees to NATO Treaty allies. However, the emphasis on the analysis of the movement of American troops through the lens of a shortcoming of the governments of the affected countries or a possible anti-European hostility of the Trump Administration has become excessive and has marginalized in the public space a rational discussion about the constraints under which any Administration in Washington DC operates. Such an analysis would help us become more realistic about American resources in the multipolar world and stop reacting with shock to American moves. Romania, like other US partners, needs to understand the US in order to develop and implement strategies to get what they want from the Americans. Europe has proven since 2016 and until recently that it finds it very difficult to act in this way, generating awkwardness and counterproductive interactions in a complicated relationship that had become more uncomfortable anyway. More

Chinese-Style Industrial Development with American Characteristics

Alexandru Georgescu

No. 55, Sep.-Oct. 2025 It’s not easy being a politician in America, especially a Republican one. The world’s largest economy is going through an ideological upheaval accompanied by a reorganization of the electoral coalitions that have dominated American politics for the past 50 years. The effects of demographic transformation, globalization, and social media are rewriting the rules of American politics in a very short time. More

The EU-US Trade Agreement, a Study in the Contrast between Politics and Reality

Alexandru Georgescu

No. 54, Jul.-Aug. 2025 While few would compare Donald Trump to Mahatma Gandhi, a saying by the Indian leader applies to the US President: “first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win.” The recently announced EU-US trade agreement represents a political triumph for Donald Trump and his political vision of recalibrating trade, economic, technological, and security relations with the rest of the world, including its most important allies. From the famous clip of German delegates laughing at Trump in 2017 when he warned them about their dependence on Russian gas to today’s “unequal treaty”, Trump has managed to prevail despite domestic and foreign opposition. The economic realities behind the agreement are uncertain, as is the implementation of its vague commitments. It may well be that US citizens will suffer the most from Trump’s campaign, but the way these negotiations were presented as conflict and aggression required the designation of a winner and a loser. The agreement is therefore a political disaster for Ursula von der Leyen and the “Geopolitical Commission” that was meant to transform the EU into a global power. Several European leaders, including Pres. Macron who wanted the most aggressive approach against the US, have denounced the agreement as a continuation of a “century of humiliations” for Europe similar to those suffered by colonized countries. The hyperbole takes on a life of its own and may lead to drastic political changes in the EU. The problem is not that the Europeans do not have skilled negotiators, but that their negotiating position was weak from the start after the EU’s economically lost generation (after the 2008 crisis) and after the effect of “perma-crises and poly-crises” (in the World Economic Forum’s formula). These include the sovereign debt crisis, the refugee crisis, the Covid pandemic, the invasion of Ukraine, the sanctions imposed on Russia and the failure of the EU’s political and economic system, in particular the drastic bet on combating climate change at the expense of energy security. From aspiring to equality with and surpassing the US, the EU has fallen far behind and its strategic and technological autonomy has regressed. More

The Limits of Complex Systems: The Power Outage in the Iberian Peninsula

Alexandru Georgescu

No. 54, Jul.-Aug. 2025 On 28 April 2025, a power outage affected the entire Iberian Peninsula and border areas of France, as well as Andorra. Reports of outages in other countries turned out to be false or unrelated to the events in Spain and Portugal. The power outage affected all of the mainland parts of the two countries. The islands were not affected, as they had independent power grids. By the next day, power had been restored in almost all of the affected areas. Damage was estimated at 4.5 billion euros, but even more important in the long term is the erosion of confidence in the reliability of European critical infrastructure. Politically, there could be major consequences, including increased risks of populism, since the European Union has in recent years been moving strongly (and often self-defeatingly) towards decarbonizing energy production, electrifying important areas of the economy such as transport, and increasing the share of renewable energy in the European mix, under the auspices of the dual digital and green transitions (and, ironically, the Spanish Presidency of the EU Council was talking about the triple transition, including the social one). While it is too early to have definitive answers about the root causes of the incident, the blackout was a shock to Europe and perhaps a wake-up call about the weaknesses of a strongly ideological and political approach to pragmatic and technical realities. More

Trade War: Between Populism and 5D Chess

Alexandru Georgescu

No. 53, May-Jun. 2025 As President of the United States and leader of the free world, Donald Trump has pursued a radical agenda of institutional reform, reevaluating and recalibrating America’s relationships with both the international community and its formal allies. Although he faces pressing global security concerns—such as the war in Ukraine, the conflict in Gaza, the looming prospect of a confrontation between Israel and Iran, and even rising tensions between India and Pakistan—Trump’s focus has remained firmly on his populist agenda: illegal (and legal) immigration, foreign trade, and the internal culture war. More