October 28, 2018

Europe in the coming weeks will be facing a host of political and economic challenges that are spooking international investors, endangering American interests and worrying even the most pro-European voices that their historic union has reached its limits in pooling sovereignty and burying historic resentments.

The world is understandably focused on the U.S. political drama circling around President Donald Trump ahead of midterm elections on Nov. 6, and after this week's mercifully failed letter bombs against Trump opponents. The full impact is also not yet known from the Jamal Khashoggi murder story, the focus of my last two columns, after Saudi officials this week conceded the journalist's killing had been premeditated – without saying who ordered it.

Yet for all the significance of those two unfolding stories, the cumulative threats now facing the European Union could be of longer term and greater geopolitical significance. That's because that the same brand of nationalism and populism that unifies Trump's voters, and inflames his detractors at home and abroad, is a far more fundamental challenge to one of history's great experiments, the European integration project that evolved after World War II.

Read more:

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/26/populism-nationalism-threaten-the-european-project.html