The year 2019 was ushered in under clouds of gloom and doom. The current global order is, in fact, a frightening global disorder. Not only is the world economy weakening, as tariff conflicts herald a pernicious trade war, but the certainties of international cooperation are also waning and vanishing in the political realm, as America’s retreat from global leadership and the rise of Xi Jinping’s China upend the prevailing power …

A character in the Hemingway novel The Sun Also Rises, asked how he went bankrupt, responds, “gradually and then suddenly.” That is a fair description of how the world order collapsed before the two world wars. Unfortunately, Americans and Europeans have since forgotten how quickly it can happen, how quickly graver threats than we anticipate can emerge to catch us physically and psychologically unprepared. One would think it hard to …

The contemporary security horizon is marked by a worrying number of negative developments. Gloomy prognoses abound. Although the details of analysis often differ quite significantly, the dismal mood is widely shared. This mood has barely shifted over the last four years. For confirmation, just consider the titles of successive editions of the Munich Security Report:

2015: Collapsing Order, Reluctant Guardians? 2016: Boundless Crises, Reckless Spoilers, Helpless Guardians 2017: Post-Truth, Post-West, …

As we move into 2019, a new round of US-Russian nuclear competition – Arms Race 2.0 – is clearly emerging. The risk of nuclear conflict through deliberate action or some tragic combination of mistakes and escalation is growing. While both sides are developing and deploying new offensive and defensive strategic systems, the two governments are taking actions that could lower the threshold to nuclear use.

Amid all of this, political …

The year 2019 marks the 55th convening of the Munich Security Conference at a decisive time in international affairs, a time in which we will see the impact of the escalating crises of recent years.

To Europeans, the crisis of the trans-Atlantic alliance is particularly troubling. To feel it crumbling beneath our fingers is deeply unsettling, both because Europe currently lacks the capabilities to assert itself more fully and because …

Concerns are growing in many European countries that they can no longer depend on the United States and the security guarantees enshrined in Article 5 of the NATO treaty. President Trump’s decision to withdraw US forces from Syria marked the end of US reliability. Doubts about America’s trustworthiness have produced a flurry of driveling speeches in 2018 on the idea of a European army. So – what about it?

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NATO is not dead. European defense budgets have been rising steadily since 2014; American forces are staying in Europe; and Donald Trump will eventually leave the White House. Yet Europe can no longer assume the permanence of the historically exceptional strategic order created some 70 years ago. China has become the United States’ peer competitor and the Indo-Pacific is the key theater in which that relationship will play out, with …

On its 70th anniversary, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is doing fairly well as the most successful security alliance in modern history. Through constant evolution and adaptation, NATO has managed to preserve its relevance for both sides of the Atlantic, each a fundamentally unique security environment. In the long term, however, NATO faces an almost existential problem, as it will be difficult to maintain its significance for the United States …

A look at Western Europe’s postwar history helps illuminate what served as its foreign policy’s point of departure in the past, and the foundation that undergirds its foreign policy moving forward. We can view the outcome of World War II as a global overthrow of Europe. In a matter of a few years, European imperialists and colonial masters found that their role on the global stage had changed completely. The …

As of the beginning of February, nine Democratic candidates had announced a bid for the US presidency; The New York Times estimates that a tenth candidate is “all but certain to run” and identifies three more as “likely to run” and an additional nine who “might run.” That adds up to a potential 21 candidates on the Democratic side, plus Starbucks CEO Howard Schulz’s possible candidacy as an Independent.

Of …