The upcoming EU-Western Balkans Summit in Montenegro will test whether the European Union can turn geopolitical urgency into credible enlargement policy, writes Serbian politician and diplomat Goran Svilanović. He contends that integrating the Western Balkans is now a strategic necessity amid great power competition and growing uncertainty in transatlantic relations.
Germany is entering a new era in its relationship with the United States. The old Atlanticist reflex has not disappeared, however it no longer reflects the instincts of the next generation of senior officials. For them, the moral clarity of the Cold War is not the starting point. It is an era of disruption, doubt, and strategic volatility. Berlin should take this into account, writes Vincent Tadday. The future of the transatlantic relationship will not be secured by waiting for the past to return.
At NATO headquarters and in European chancelleries, a new consensus has emerged: the security of the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific is indivisible. Yet Europe’s major powers are responding to this reality in strikingly different ways. As Harvard Kennedy School Fellow Joel Christoph writes, this divergence is not a weakness to be papered over. It is an asset that should be organised.
Around the political NATO Summit in the Hague last week, with its limited ambition to make Donald Trump happy again, a less visible and much more productive summit occurred, writes ELN Senior Network Member Nicholas Dungan. Concentrating on what Europe needs to do to increase European deterrence, efficiency, and resilience, it produced sound thinking and actionable proposals.
As the situation on the battlefield has changed in recent months to the detriment of Ukraine, a “prolonged war” where there is no decisive military victory on either side is the most likely scenario, writes ELN Policy Fellow Katia Glod. Based on a scenario-building workshop with experts from Ukraine, Russia, and wider Europe, she outlines what implications this could have for Europe and how the EU and UK can prepare for it.
In an excerpt from her new book “The New Cold War”, ELN Senior Policy Fellow Julia Berghofer writes that despite the challenges, the West needs to maintain certain channels of communication beyond the political and military level. Contact with a younger generation of Russian security experts, civil society activists, and political scientists is essential for a safer Europe.