Yet another confab of world leaders came and went this week, long on headlines and short on substance, as NATO leaders gathered in London to celebrate NATO’s 70th anniversary. There were laughs. There were shrugs. There were storm-offs. The only thing there wasn’t much of was genuine cooperation.

Why It Matters:

NATO is facing some serious existential issues. To be fair, they’ve been facing them since the collapse of the Soviet Union, as the military alliance’s raison d’etre was to counter threats from Moscow. NATO’s purpose was no longer clear, but there was no immediate need to disband. And in the euphoria of those “end of history” days—supercharging the momentum behind multilateralism and international cooperation—it became a vehicle to bring more countries into the Western fold (NATO’s membership grew from 16 in 1989 to 29 members today). For more than two decades it was enough for NATO to plod along.

But then NATO began losing its luster, first slowly then suddenly. The arrival..

(OSWIECIM, Poland) — German Chancellor Angela Merkel voiced a feeling of “deep shame” during her first-ever visit on Friday to the hallowed grounds of the former Nazi German death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where Adolf Hitler’s regime murdered more than a million people.

Merkel noted that her visit comes amid rising anti-Semitism and historical revisionism and vowed that Germany would not tolerate anti-Semitism. She said Germany remains committed to remembering the crimes that it committed against Jews, Poles, Roma and Sinti, homosexuals and others. Speaking to a gathering that included former Auschwitz inmates, she said she felt “deep shame in the face of the barbaric crimes committed by Germans here.”

“Nothing can bring back the people who were murdered here. Nothing can reverse the unprecedented crimes committed here. These crimes are and will remain part of German history and this history must be told over and over again,” she said.

She called such responsibility a key element ..