Scowcroft Center Commentary & Analysis

Barroso Discusses Europe’s Unity in Light of Ukraine Crisis, TTIP, and EU Elections

By Anni Piiparinen

Testing Europe’s Unity The Atlantic Council kicked off the second day of the conference “Toward a Europe Whole and Free” with a keynote conversation featuring José Manuel Durão Barroso, president of the European Commission. With the crisis in Ukraine unfolding, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations on the agenda, and the European Parliament […]

Defining a Strategy for Europe’s East

This special panel on Defining a Strategy for Europe’s East included national leaders from Lithuania, which hosted the last EU summit on the Eastern Partnership, and from Latvia, which will host the next Eastern Partnership summit in 2015.

Applying American Power in the 21st Century

As recent events have shown, the United States must find a more effective way to operate in the 21st century. War roils in the Middle East; trade talks are faltering or reaching intractable sticking points; and fiscal uncertainty erodes America’s economic and military power. The issues of today, as well as developments that are meeting […]

Working Group on a New US Defense Strategy and Posture in the Gulf

For more than four decades, the United States has had a robust web of partnerships with the states comprising the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). This system has helped to achieve common strategic goals, including securing the free and constant flow of oil from the region to the world at large; preventing the rise of a […]

Leidos CEO Gen. John Jumper Discusses Defense Industry Evolution

In September last year, the Virginia-based government contracting company SAIC split into two. The government-services wing maintained the SAIC name and the newly-created Leidos was created to focus on national security, commercial health, and the engineering sectors. Gen. John P. Jumper, the first chairman and CEO of Leidos, joined the Atlantic Council to discuss this […]

The Promise of Human Space Exploration

Space exploration captured Americans’ imaginations in the 1960s and became a significant cultural touchstone in American history due to the Apollo programs and that iconic moment when man first walked on the moon in 1969. Lately, this sense of wonder seems to be fading as NASA gets less funding, private industry steps in to fill […]

The End of the Peace Dividend and the Future of Transatlantic Relations

The era of peace in Europe that has lasted 25 years is drawing to an end, according to Poland’s Minister of National Defense Tomasz Siemoniak. In a public speech at the Atlantic Council, Minister Siemoniak discussed the importance of NATO’s ability to react to the ongoing crisis on its eastern flank as the threat from […]

European Defense Post-QDR

With the recent release of the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) from the US Department of Defense there is a need to analyze and create a strategy to deal with the world ahead. On April 16, 2014, a panel of experts on the defense budget and international security discussed the strategy and means by which […]

Looking Ahead: Economic and Social Reforms in China

Mr. Liu Mingkang, former chairman of the Chinese Banking Regulatory Commission and honorary professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s School of Business, highlighted several important areas for Chinese economic and social reform over the next decade. Speaking at the Atlantic Council on April 16, Liu focused on developments from the Chinese Communist Party’s […]