Scowcroft Strategy Initiative

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.

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.”

Outer space is rapidly transforming as new actors test new limits. This Atlantic Council Strategy Paper calls for the United States and its allies and partners to secure space over the next three decades or risk wasting the promise of this emerging domain.

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.

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.

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.

The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) has found that the COVID-19 pandemic has led to the worst economic decline in Latin America and the Caribbean in two hundred years. In addition to its economic toll, the pandemic has had a devastating impact on the region’s society and health systems. Although the region represents just 8 percent […]

Enabling current and future generations to mitigate climate change requires the urgent creation and scaling up of technologies that minimize and reverse the impact of human activities on the environment.

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.

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.

As the world enters a new era of strategic competition, the United States, Canada, and Europe must work together to advance shared values and interests and foster a rules-based international order.

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.

The United States and its allies must take further actions to push back on Beijing’s crackdown in Hong Kong.

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.

With 900 million people and $1 trillion in defense spending, the United States and Europe represent by far the largest, oldest, and most capable economic and security community in the world.

The increasing assertiveness of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) poses a significant challenge to the interests and values of likeminded allies and partners and a rules-based internationa system.

Over the past decade, the Kremlin has executed a concerted strategy to undermine the cohesion of, and confidence in, democratically-elected governments in Europe and around the world. In response, leading democracies have acted to counter Russia by enacting sanctions and pursuing other measures aimed at defending frontline states against Russian aggression.

Americans have been the unconscious beneficiaries of a world order that would not exist without them. Just as we take for granted electricity and plumbing, so to we take for granted the peace and prosperity of our system.