The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has advanced the big hand of its Doomsday Clock, which forecasts the destruction of the world through nuclear war; the time is now two minutes before midnight. The Bulletin’s justification was the war threats levied between the US and North Korea – which have aggravated tensions between America and its rivals in China, Iran and Russia – as well as the expansion of existing …

What do the following places have in common: Kosovo, Crimea, Catalonia, Chechnya, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria, Hungary, Scotland and the Kurdish regions of Iraq, Syria and Turkey? After the Cold War, each was the scene of secession attempts or demands to alter national borders.

In Yugoslavia, Georgia and the Ukraine, the secessionists used violence to forcibly shift national borders with the help of external actors (NATO, Russia). Otherwise, the specific …

It´s not all about Donald Trump. That’s a statement more easily written than believed, given the US president’s comportment on the world stage — his tweets and taunts, his disregard of international accords, his odd choice of foes, his even odder choice of friends. But a more inward-looking US, the increasing militarization of foreign policy and shrinking space for diplomacy and multilateralism are features of the international order that predate …

Relations between Europe and the United States have never been just a pleasant walk in the park. The transatlantic partners have had many passionate agreements; intermittent laments about an increasingly broad “rift,” “chasm,” “gulf” are nothing new. But never before has the danger of actual divorce been more real than after the inauguration of Donald Trump.

Over the past seven decades the allies quarreled about Mannesmann pipes to Russia and …

What a difference a year makes. In early 2016, a lot of Europeans saw Russia as the most serious threat to their security. Nowadays, quite a few of them are torn between identifying Russian President Vladimir Putin or US President Donald Trump as the bigger challenge. After 70 years of entrusting their foreign and security policy to Washington, Europe is realizing that unless it finds an international identity of its …

President Donald Trump feels Europeans must do more for their own defense. He is not alone among Americans. Many think the US has gotten a raw deal. How far will Trump go to put America first?

America’s European allies say they aim to increase their defense spending to 2 percent of national GDP by 2024. But how many of them mean it?

The sharing of defense burdens is a toxic …

Since its founding in 1949, the Federal Republic of Germany has had ten foreign ministers. The first three – Konrad Adenauer, Heinrich von Brentano and Gerhard Schröder – anchored Germany in the European Community and in NATO. The next three – Willy Brandt, Walter Scheel and Hans-Dietrich Genscher – initiated West Germany’s Ostpolitik, the détente that would ultimately lead to German reunification. Then Klaus Kinkel and Joschka Fischer set the …

Not so long ago, armed conflict between the states on the shores of the Baltic Sea was considered almost unimaginable. The thought of military conflict in the Baltic Sea region was like a distant echo from the past, an idea with no further relevance. The region was often presented as a model case for cooperative security, where prosperity and stability fostered cooperation between respective states and flourishing civil societies and …

During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the famed US film director Stanley Kubrick decided to move to Australia. He reckoned that in a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, the fallout would be less Down Under. However, when he learned that he would have to share the bathroom of the ship’s cabin with the passengers of the adjacent cabin, he cancelled the trip. His fear of …

Analysts and politicians talk about a new Cold War. In my view, the term does not fit the current situation; Cold Peace is more apt.

Cold Peace is worse, more dangerous and less predictable than Cold War. It is “cold” because no one wants to fight a war. Yet a few old methods have made a comeback: great powers’ policy; spheres of influence; the reshaping of national borders; and the …