Thursday, September 17, 2026
In her State of the European Union address in Strasbourg on Wednesday, Ursula von der Leyen invited Canada to become the EU's first associate member. The treaties make full membership impossible, because Canada is not a European state. What she is offering is a new category, to be negotiated, with a summit in Montreal next month.
Britain has banned imports from Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and sanctioned individuals and companies involved in settlement expansion. The goods ban takes six to nine months and covers a small trade flow. The measures on construction, financing, real estate and advertising start sooner and reach further.
Eurometal says 300,000 European manufacturing jobs will go before the end of this year, and marked the claim by carrying ten coffins around the European Commission. The stunt makes the figure easy to discount. The cost gap underneath it does not depend on the stunt being fair.
When Suez closed, ships went around Africa. It cost more and took longer, and it worked. The Gulf offers no equivalent, which is why traffic through Hormuz has fallen by most of itself rather than moved somewhere else.
The long-term contracts that financed the world's liquefied natural gas terminals assumed buyers who would take the volume for decades. Those buyers are now asking to be let out, and the terminals still have debt to service.
Commercial interest in northern shipping routes is running well ahead of the capacity to escort, chart and rescue along them. The constraint is a shipyard problem that takes a decade to solve and was deferred for thirty years.
After years of supply chain speeches, the physical evidence has arrived: factory construction, border logistics investment and trade flows reorganizing around proximity.