The world is “at war,” said António Guterres in 2015; but 2017 should be “a year of peace.” The nations of the world seem to be losing their way amid raging egoism, but Guterres, at he was sworn in as secretary general of the United Nations on Jan. 1 of this year, recalled the original mandate of the UN: “to prevent war by binding all members in a rules-based international …

The United Kingdom is leaving the European Union. Is the EU fragmenting, or will EU governments consolidate while finally getting their act together on defense? Donald Trump is the president of the United States. Is NATO increasingly obsolete, or will Europeans contribute more and convince Washington not to scale back its military commitment to European security?

No one knows for sure. Russia is unpredictable, and the wars across the Middle …

When Germany’s President Joachim Gauck, Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier argued at the Munich Security Conference in early 2014 that Germany would need to assume greater responsibility in foreign and security policy, the world was still comparatively stable and European security relatively intact.

Since then, however, with the annexation of Crimea and the war in Ukraine, Europe’s security order has plummeted into a grave …

At the end of January, fighting in Eastern Ukraine escalated again. On that weekend, newly elected US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke by phone for the first time. Many in Ukraine saw a connection between this call and the fighting for the town of Avdiivka. But this renewed escalation in the war’s third year follows a very different, far more general pattern – winter is fighting …

During the first two decades of the post- Cold War era, nuclear weapons as a factor of European security disappeared from the public eye. They only gained intermittent prominence as part of a broader discussion of non-proliferation, the Iranian nuclear program, or of abolition after President Barack Obama’s speech in Prague in 2009. Nukes had become unreal in the European context. The fact that the Western nuclear powers maintained robust …

America’s political pendulum has swung back once again – and this time in a “huge” and unparalleled way. GOP Congressman and Donald Trump supporter Tom Cole put it succinctly when he commented on the 45th president’s inauguration: “It really is a leap into the dark. And I think that’s true for the country and that’s true for Trump.” It is also true for Europe and the rest of the world.…

It is unclear whether US President Donald Trump is aware of the history behind the expression “America First,” the term he uses to describe his foreign policy vision. The catchphrase was first used just before World War II by isolationists who opposed any American engagement in the mounting European crisis. The echo of that dark period has relevance for today. At that time, the structures that had been put in …

The paradigm of a world in crisis is dominating the international debate. “Post-truth?”, “Post- West?”, “Post-order?” are questions certain to be raised at the Munich Security Conference. In the echo chambers of the “every nation for itself” ideologists, it sounds as if we are already on the slippery slope towards a Hobbesian system in which the European Union, NATO, the merits of rules-based order and even long-standing friendships and partnerships …