GeoStrategy Initiative

It’s time to return to realism in US national security policy, putting hard power considerations and geopolitics front and center.

China exercises substantial control over the commercial drone market, which poses a security challenge for the United States and its allies and partners. What strategy will help the United States and its allies and partners counter China’s drone-market dominance?

The United States and its allies must leverage generative artificial intelligence to outcompete strategic rivals.

The strategic interest of the United States and the countries of Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) lies in strengthening their western hemisphere partnership. However, the perception of waning US interest and the rise of external influences necessitate the rejuvenation of and renewed focus on this partnership.

As strategic competition with China and Russia continues to intensify, the United States and its allies need a strategy for countering the malign influence of authoritarian rivals in the Western Hemisphere. This Atlantic Council Strategy Paper proposes a path forward for the United States and its allies to do that.

The United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) are engaged in a strategic competition surrounding the development of key technologies. Both countries seek to out-compete the other to achieve first-mover advantage in breakthrough technologies, and to be the best country in terms of the commercial scaling of emerging and existing technologies.

This report seeks to catalyze support for nonviolent pro-democracy movements fighting against authoritarian rule by proposing new approaches and tools to support civil resistance movements, advancing a new international norm — the “Right to Assist” pro-democracy movements — and developing strategic and tactical options to constrain authoritarian regimes.

Our strategy experts praised the document for being clear-eyed about the challenges posed by Russia and China, but downgraded it for a lack of focus as well as concerns about how to implement its ambitious aims.

Several of the Scowcroft Center’s strategy experts analyzed the Alliance’s new Strategic Concept, assessing the strategy based on five criteria. The reviewers generally agreed that the document was clear-sighted about threats facing the Alliance. However, implementing the ambitious strategy will require sustained commitment and high investment from Alliance members. Here are the full assessments.

The practice of diplomacy has changed over the past several decades, and significant work remains to be done to fully adapt US diplomacy to the challenges of our time.

A Democratic Technology Alliance would facilitate the development of common rules and norms in the technology space, consistent with democratic values, and ensure that the free world prevails in the race for advanced technologies.

A Democratic Trade and Economic Partnership could provide an integrated framework for leading democracies and other partners to selectively decouple from revisionist autocracies and foster free, fair, and secure trade.

With the rules-based democratic order under threat, the United States and its allies need new entities that facilitate cooperation not just across the transatlantic, but among larger groups of democracies worldwide.

With the rules-based democratic order under threat, leading democracies need to develop common strategic approaches that pool their collective influence to confront today’s challenges.

China presents the most important challenge to the United States in the twenty-first century. To address this challenge, the United States urgently needs “an integrated, operational, and bipartisan national strategy.”

The COVID-19 pandemic is an acute public health and economic crisis that is further destabilizing an already weakened rules-based international system. With cooperation, determination, and resolve, however, the United States and its allies can recover from the crisis and revitalize an adapted rules-based system to bring about decades of future freedom, peace, and prosperity.

On May 13, 2020, the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security hosted a strategy consortium with a small group of experts and officials to discuss the evolution of the Russia-China relationship and how the United States and its allies should navigate it. This paper summarizes many of the points made during this meeting. Background: The […]

We need a new strategy—one that is both ambitious and innovative, geared towards meeting the challenges and opportunities that the new decade brings.

This memo provides strategists and policymakers in the United States and elsewhere with a coherent framework for understanding the competition between the United States and China for technological dominance with respect to the Global South.

In this year’s Global Foresight edition, our experts identify the top risks and opportunities for 2024. Our foresight team spots “snow leopards” that could have major unexpected impacts in 2024 and beyond. And we share findings from our survey of global strategists and foresight practitioners on how human affairs could unfold over the next decade.

The scenarios on this page explore four alternative, plausible narratives envisioning the world in the mid-2030s, guided by dynamic interactions of drivers and trends highlighted in the larger The Future of Multilateral Peacebuilding and Conflict Prevention report.

In this year’s Global Foresight edition, our experts identify the top risks and opportunities for 2023. Our foresight team spots “snow leopards” that could have major unexpected impacts in 2023 and beyond. And we share findings from our survey of global strategists and foresight practitioners on how human affairs could unfold over the next decade.

This June, the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and the Global China Hub convened experts and officials in a private workshop to discuss technological competition between the United States, its allies and partners, and their biggest global competitor, China. The workshop explored the stakes in this competition across economic, military, and other domains, as well as the challenges facing Washington and its allies and partners with respect to China’s rising technological capabilities. This memo draws from insights gleaned during the workshop to give policymakers a better understanding of this competition, it stakes, and the strategic choices facing the United States and its allies and partners.

The inaugural edition of a new annual report from the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, home for the last decade to one of the world’s premier strategic foresight shops.

The Western Sahel is in a demographic impasse. To work their way out of this dilemma, Sahelian governments must shift a significant part of their development focus and funding to policies and programs aimed at preventing adolescent marriages and childbearing, promoting girls’ education, securing women’s participation in public- and private-sector workplaces, and achieving small, healthy, well-educated families.

The Formal Bilateral Influence Capacity Index tracks and quantifies the intensifying competition between China and the United States, measuring influence between pairs of states over the last six decades through the volume of their interactions and the dependence that countries have on one another.

A preliminary look at the geopolitical implications of the pandemic and possible directions for the global system after the still-unfolding crisis.

The COVID-19 pandemic has stressed pressure points in the global order and threatens to unravel the rules-based international system. This paper examines the geopolitical implications of the pandemic by identifying key strategic shocks and tensions exacerbated by the virus. It also identifies uncertainties for the global order and provides policy recommendations for how the United States and its allies should address the pandemic.