sidelined

For Europe, the week brought back an unwelcome memory: the kind of creeping economic dread last seen when Covid-19 tore through the continent and pushed its economies to the brink in 2020 and 2021. "If this war escalates into a major regional conflict," Chancellor Friedrich Merz said at a Berlin news conference on Monday, "it could burden Germany and Europe even more than we experienced most recently during the Covid-19 pandemic or at the beginning of the war in Ukraine." Those two crises still loom large in EU capitals,…