Fighting Words: The Risks of Loose Talk About a “European Army”

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This article was originally published by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) on 20 November 2018.

‘European army’ is an empty phrase; what is actually needed is less talk and more action – more concrete projects to integrate defence efforts while avoiding careless talk.

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CSS Blog

Increases in Defense Budgets Between 2016 and 2017

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This graphic shows the changes in defense budgets of various European countries from 2016 to 2017. For more on the challenges facing European defense and armament planners, see Michael Haas and Annabelle Vuille’s recent addition to the CSS Analyses in Security Policy series here. For more CSS charts, maps and graphics on defense policy, click here.

European Security Post-Merkel

Image courtesy of European Council/Flickr. (CC BY 2.0, the image has been cropped)

This article was originally published by the Danish Institue for International Studies (DIIS) on 14 November 2018.

EU defence cooperation suffers from a lack of strategic purpose. This challenge offers an opportunity for smaller members such as Denmark to stress that PESCO supported by Germany and the French EI2 initiative are not and should not be competitive models.

The Internal Nature of the Alliance’s Cohesion

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This article was originally published by the NATO Defense College (NDC) in September 2018.

NATO Summits take stock of recent political and security developments, assess how they affect the Alliance’s posture and adaptation agenda, and decide on possible new directions. From the outside, a key feature of any Summit is also what it reveals about NATO’s political cohesion and relevance.

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Regional Stability

A Europeanized NATO? The Alliance Contemplates the Turmp Era and Beyond

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This article was originally published by War on the Rocks on 25 September 2018.

When asked about President Donald Trump’s July 2018 visit to Europe, Henry Kissinger presciently noted, “I think Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretenses.” In other words, for all the uproar surrounding the president’s personality, something bigger is going on, and Trump has come to personify it. Perhaps the biggest challenge is, therefore, to put words to this shifting ground and imagine its potential consequences.