More than 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union and more than a decade after the so-called “Arab Spring,” hopes of peace, prosperity, and democracy across Europe and in the Middle East have been dashed. Instead, we are seeing open conflict in Europe and in Gaza, as well as ongoing tensions with China. Against this backdrop, world leaders – including U.S. President Joe Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz – have made trips to Israel to show their steadfast support for the country. At the same time, Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Beijing to showcase the partnership with Chinese Premier Xi Jinping. These diplomatic whirlwinds highlight how much the global political landscape has changed since Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine – and how this is playing out in Gaza right now.
1014 and the American Council on Germany hosted a virtual discussion with Steven Erlanger, Chief Diplomatic Correspondent in Europe for The New York Times, and Anna Sauerbrey, Foreign Editor at the weekly DIE ZEIT, about the evolving geopolitical landscape, emerging alliances, and the growing polarization between Western democracies and authoritarian regimes.
Biographies
Steven Erlanger is the Chief Diplomatic Correspondent in Europe for The New York Times, a position he assumed in 2017. As of earlier this year, he is based in Berlin.
In over 40 years of career as a journalist, he has covered news in over 120 countries, from the war in Kosovo to Brexit. In 2002, Mr. Erlanger shared the Pulitzer Prize for reporting on his work on Al Qaeda and again received the prize in 2017 for a series on Russia.
Between 1975 and 1983, he was a Teaching Fellow at Harvard University. Beginning in 1976, he also worked as an Editor and Correspondent at the Boston Globe. From 1983 through 1987, he was the Globe’s European Correspondent in London. Beginning in 1988, he served as Bureau Chief for the New York Times in London, Paris, Jerusalem, Berlin, Prague, Moscow, and Bangkok.
In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Mr. Erlanger has received numerous awards and recognitions, including the Robert Livingston Award for international reporting for a series of articles about Eastern Europe in 1981, the German Marshall Fund’s Peter Weitz Prize for excellence and originality in reporting and analyzing European and transatlantic affairs in 2000, and the Karl Klasen Journalists Prize for coverage of Germany and Europe and promoting trans-Atlantic understanding in 2017.
Mr. Erlanger’s writing has been featured in many publications such as The Economist, The Spectator, The New Statesman, The New Republic, The Financial Times, Foreign Policy, The National Interest, and the Columbia Journalism Review.
Dr. Anna Sauerbrey is the Foreign Editor at the weekly DIE ZEIT. Previously, she headed the opinion pages of Der Tagesspiegel and Tagesspiegel Causa, the online magazine.
She studied History, Political Science, and Journalism in Mainz and Bordeaux. From 2005 to 2009, she was a research assistant in the History Department at the University of Mainz. She worked as an intern at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and ZDF, among others, and as a freelancer for the Mainzer Rhein-Zeitung for several years. In 2009, Dr. Sauerbrey completed a traineeship at Der Tagesspiegel and became a staff member of its opinion/editorial department. In 2013, she was an Arthur F. Burns Fellow at the Philadelphia Inquirer. In 2018, she was awarded an Anna-Marie and Stephen M. Kellen Fellowship for Berlin-based journalists by the ACG to research religion’s role in American politics.