This is John Batchel, a conversation with my colleague Judy Dempsey of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

She's in Berlin about the European Union.

Judy very carefully presents why it is that there's an absence of leadership,

what is necessary going forward with all the problems being raised by parties on the right and the left and the

challenge of Ukraine. All of that is at the long, at the end of a long string of troubles that

the European Union has not adequately dealt with. Is Judy Dempsey in Berlin on the EU,

27 states banded together.

The chief economy is Germany.

The second is France.

Britain is out of the EU.

What is to be done?

More of this tonight.

I should say yes.

It's very complicated now what's unfolding in the European Union.

And it's a crisis of leadership.

I think it's something deeper.

And regardless whether it's France or the Netherlands or Germany or Italy, I think the European Union as a project based on prosperity and on peace and on well-being and progress, it got a big knock during the collapse of Lehman Brothers and then the

Euro crisis. It got a big knock then with the banking crisis. It got a big knock with COVID.

It's got a big knock with the Russian attack on Ukraine. It's got a big knock with immigration

and migration and whole refugee issues.

And all of a sudden, the kind of project and architecture that the European Union was built on

is simply being battered and in its place is a vacuum being filled by far right-wing parties, far-elect-wing parties,

...