Letters — Issue 4

To the Editors of The Roundabout

Sir,

I write as a long-standing observer of European affairs and a subscriber since your first issue, to note with some puzzlement that your publication, which describes itself as covering EU affairs from Brussels, devoted the greater part of its third issue’s investigative column to events on a private island in the Bahamas, attended by Americans, funded by a Russian, and featuring no EU officials whatsoever.

I do not dispute the interest of the material. I simply observe that the Bahamas are not in Europe, that Jared Kushner does not hold an EU institutional role, and that Commissioner Myrmidon’s own founding proclamation promised to report on what “actually happened” — a commitment I had assumed referred to what actually happened in Brussels, rather than in the Caribbean.

I would be grateful for clarification of the publication’s geographical remit, at your earliest convenience.

Yours faithfully,
Prof. Dr. Adelheid Grundsatz
Frankfurt
(formerly of the relevant faculty, 1991-2024)

We are grateful to Prof. Dr. Grundsatz for her letter, which raises a fair point with admirable precision. The Bahamas are indeed not in Europe. However, the people negotiating Ukraine’s future on behalf of the United States government attended a celebration funded by a Putin associate on an island in the Bahamas, and Ukraine is in Europe, and the war being negotiated is in Europe, and the EU’s response to both the war and the people negotiating it is, as this publication has noted, being monitored. Commissioner Myrmidon adds that the Bahamas are, geographically speaking, closer to the EU’s external border with the Atlantic Ocean than Transnistria is to its eastern border, and that he has never been asked to justify covering Transnistria. Madame Graticula notes that Prof. Dr. Grundsatz’s subscription is gratefully received and will be renewed at the standard rate.