The United States and Iran have been on a predictable collision course since the Trump administration withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in May 2018. The drivers of this heightened tension are two fundamentally clashing and self-reinforcing approaches: Washington is convinced that a policy of “maximum pressure” will prompt Iran to succumb to its demands – and should such pressure fail, the US response should apply even …

Almost a year has passed since the Battle of Baghuz Fawqani in eastern Syria, where in March of 2019 fighters of the Islamic State (IS) terrorist organization took their last stance against the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces and the US-led Global Coalition against Daesh. It was there and then that the IS “caliphate” came to an end.

Nothing remains of the pseudo-state the jihadists had set up in 2014. But …

When you walk past the United Nations headquarters on Manhattan’s 1st Avenue, it’s hard to overlook the massive sculpture on the front lawn: a larger-than-life Saint George slaying a giant dragon. You could easily mistake it for a medieval monument, if the dragon weren’t made of fragments from Soviet SS-20 and US Pershing nuclear missiles – weapons destroyed under the INF Treaty of 1987.

For more than 30 years, the …

The relationship between the European Union and the United States has always been complicated and riddled with disagreements. It is, after all, an unconventional pairing between one of the most powerful countries on earth and a set of institutions that do their best to represent the often disparate views of 28 individual member states. Whether on trade, counter-terrorism cooperation or Iran, fostering EU-US cooperation is a never-ending exercise in patience, …

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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