Set adrift. The first move was economic: On February 13, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to prepare for reciprocal tariffs in April on countries that put import duties on American products. Speaking afterward, Trump singled out European Union trade practices as “brutal”; the order designates the value-added tax, a staple across the European Continent, as a trade barrier for reciprocal measures. Brussels issued a statement that it would respond “firmly and immediately” if the U.S. goes through with the tariffs—but so far has otherwise done nothing.

Then came the challenges to European, especially Ukrainian, security: The U.S. and Russia arranged talks with one another in Saudi Arabia last week, excluding Ukraine and Europe, while European leaders met separately in Paris—where they ignored the tariffs and struggled to align their positions on Ukraine’s future security arrangements.

Why can’t Europe get its act together? In this week’s member’s dispatch, we return to our conversation with Matthias Matthijs about the simultaneous, epochal problems the Continent is facing—and why its political systems are struggling to produce the kind of strong government necessary for the moment.

—Michael Bluhm

From the weekly Signal member’s despatch.

‘Una Cumbia en Kinshasa.’ From the new album Mapambazuko, this is a collaboration between the Peruvian musician Alejandra Cárdenas—aka Ale Hop—and the Congolese guitarist Titi Bakorta. Yes, it’s in the style of Peruvian cumbia music, but with Congolese flavored soukous guitar dappled over the top. Both of them play fierce guitars, so it’s a fun blend of up-tempo kinds of party music, resulting in a harmonious, fresh sound.

—Brendan Hasenstab

‘Ô Signe des Temps (Iueke Dub Remix).’ In 1986, the Québécois artist Bernardino Femminielli put together a cover of Prince’s then-current “Sign of the Times.” Contemporary culture being what it is, 1986 isn’t the past in any strict sense—people now listen to old and new music, almost without discretion—and three years ago, the French electronic producer Iueke put together a dub remix, and it’s a Francophone brainwave par excellence.

—Brendan Hasenstab

111 MHz: ‘When We Swam Together.’ The Lebanese composer and producer Fadi Tabbal is back with I Recognize You From My Sketches, an ambient wash of sound that is an ode to community, and a “breakup album between who we want to be and who we turned out to be,” an idea you can feel in this warm memory.

—Brendan Hasenstab

Coming soon. Next Friday, The Signal will debut the member’s despatch, a weekly digest on current affairs. The despatch is a digital magazine for those who want to keep up with what’s happening in the world—but also need their time cared for … and to feel confident that wherever they spend it reading anything, the material will matter, stick with them, and be a joy to take in and think about.

It’s an idea we’ve been cultivating for some time: not just a supplement to our regular features and notes, but a hub for them and everything we do—which now includes in-depth news briefings, key-debate roundups, books coverage, letters, and new-music curation from around the world.

Expect the member’s despatch to evolve, week over week. But fundamentally, expect it always to be worth your while—as reliable as it will be surprising; a resource that helps you free yourself from the incessant hype and noise of addiction-based media; and a companion that helps you stay centered, develop resiliency, and think effectively for yourself.

If the name sounds at all idiosyncratic, it takes inspiration from the traditional red “despatch boxes” sent to ministers and monarchs in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the Commonwealth to securely transport important, sometimes secret, correspondence and documents.

We’re delighted to be able to send it to you—as we will be to hear from you.

Until then,

—John Jamesen Gould

Members play a vital role in supporting The Signal’s independent current affairs coverage. Beyond the new member’s despatch and our free, twice-weekly newsletters, membership affords you access to an expanding array of exclusive benefits, including:

• Full access to every new article we publish
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‘Even the Horizon Knows Its Bounds.’ The Australian artist and curator Lawrence English may be best known for running the Room40 label for ambient and experimental music, but he also composes. Here, a taste of his latest album, featuring collaborators from an array of genres—including Jim O'Rourke, Claire Rousay, and The Necks' Chris Abrahams. Meditative, yet warm and sincere.

—Brendan Hasenstab

Whoever controls Damascus. They’d cooperated for years in the Syrian civil war against the now-fallen dictator, Bashar al-Assad—but only met for the first time on February 4: Ahmed al-Sharaa, the country’s interim leader, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey.

Since the meeting, Sharaa has said he wants to pursue a deep strategic relationship with Turkey. Which makes sense: Turkey had long provided weapons and money to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the rebel group Sharaa led in the civil war. Sharaa and Erdoğan also share a similar ideology of political Islam, a broad ideology on which the principles of the Muslim faith provide the foundations for a country’s secular laws. And for Turkey, having Syria as close Arab ally in a critical location in the Middle East would be invaluable.

It’s an alliance that could reshape the region.

The complication is, since Sharaa and HTS toppled Assad in mid-January, almost every other powerful actor in the region has developed its own strategic designs for Syria. And the country will need massive investment to rebuild after more than a decade of civil war, sitting as it does on only modest reserves of oil and natural gas.

Last week, the emir of Qatar visited Syria last week to meet with Sharaa. And a day before his meeting with Erdoğan, Sharaa flew to Saudi Arabia to meet with its crown prince and de facto ruler, Mohammad bin Salman. Qatar and Saudi have far more capabilities to pay for Syria’s reconstruction, whereas Turkey’s economy has been struggling for years.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and Erdoğan have long been deeply divided over political Islam: The Saudi royal family profess devotion to Islam but see their hereditary authority as separate, and they’ve always viewed Islamist parties as threats to their regime and other Gulf monarchies.

So who has the upper hand here?

Shortly after the fall of Assad, Vali Nasr looked at the dramatic recent changes in and around Syria. Nasr says Assad’s ouster caused the overnight transformation of the political landscape in the Middle East. For one, it means an acute loss of power and standing for Iran—as Assad was a key ally in the so-called Axis of Resistance Iran formed to counter what it casts as the regional dominance of the U.S. and Israel. But it also means new opportunities for the other leading regional rivals: Turkey, the Gulf states—Qatar, Saudi, and the United Arab Emirates—and Israel.

Still, Nasr says, there’s a bigger question in the background. The longstanding, shifting rivalries among the players in this immediate power struggle will continue to influence the Middle East. But the region’s deeper challenges don’t come from these players directly; they come from the region’s broken states—including Syria itself, but also Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq—and from the chronically volatile situation in Israel-Palestine. The ways those challenges play out, Nasr says, will determine what happens in Syria more than anything Sharaa works out in the near term with Erdoğan or any of his rivals.

—Michael Bluhm

5 W Main: State of Silence. On taking office, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to declassify the remaining files pertaining to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. The executive order stated that continued secrecy “is not consistent with the public interest.”

It’s still possible, though, that the American intelligence community will refuse to cooperate. In 1992, when Congress passed a law to release all JFK documents within 25 years, officials in the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency prevailed on a succession of presidents—including Trump himself—to keep thousands of pages secret. And it worked, at least until now.

Why is it so hard to get the the American national-security state to release classified informations, decades after it was classified?

As Matthew Connelly said here at The Signal last summer, there are a number of factors in play. More than a million people in the United States have a Top Secret security clearance, but only some two thousand government employees work to release files to the public. And the incentives favor overclassification: No one has ever been fired from the U.S. government for classifying too promiscuously, but the bureaucrat who lets the wrong thing slip out might not only lose his or her job but face prosecution, as well.

In State of Silence: The Espionage Act and the Rise of America’s Secrecy Regime, Sam Lebovic explores how the American national-security state is underpinned by a vague law enacted more than a century ago: The Espionage Act of 1917 is the keystone in this “secrecy regime.” Originally intended to help the government root out foreign spies, this obscurely worded statute has been reinterpreted and patched up so many times that it now gives the government a near-absolute right to censor its own employees—in many cases even long after they’ve left their jobs.

As Lebovic shows, the government polices its own employees so diligently because that’s the most efficient way within its means of controlling American public opinion. During World War I, the government could censor the press fairly easily. But that censorship sparked a counter-reaction. A free-speech movement began gathering momentum. The government, realizing it could no longer prevent the press from publishing state secrets, mounted a concerted effort to make sure such secrets never reached the press in the first place. So paradoxically, one of the main reasons the American secrecy regime is so vast is the fact that the American media can say what it likes.

—Gustav Jönsson

111 MHz: ‘Issa.’ The Malian desert blues band Songhoy Blues is back with their fourth album, Heritage. From which, here’s a crackerjack, up-tempo single, written to promote keeping their rivers clean and navigable. “Issa” means “river” in the Aynehan languages. A love letter to the waterways of Mali.

—Brendan Hasenstab