Euro-Atlantic Triangle: Joint project with CEPS

How best to harmonise the EU's Strategic Compass with NATO's Strategic Concept

Together with CEPS, we have set up a project to explore how best to harmonise the EU’s Strategic Compass with NATO’s Strategic Concept in a fashion that contributes to stabilising the pan-European security system and that enhances the strategic autonomy of the European Union. In this aim, we have brought together a coalition of researchers who aim to ‘square the triangle’ of deeper NATO-EU cooperation, greater EU strategic autonomy, and the stability of the wider Euro-Atlantic security space. While all three of these things were once thought to be desirable and simultaneously possible, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought the choices facing Americans and Europeans into starker contrast. It may be that, for the foreseeable future, pursuing one or two of these goals precludes achieving the third, at least to a significant extent.

How to shape the European security architecture after the war in Ukraine? 

We have published the findings and policy recommedations in four different publications, which highlight some of the tensions between the short- and long-term policy imperatives facing the transatlantic community. The publications raise the following questions and many more: What can the EU uniquely bring to a contested continent and to an international order in transition? From a grand strategic perspective, should the EU plan to be more of a regional actor or more of a global one? How to shape the European security architecture after the war in Ukraine? How should the future of the transatlantic security partnership look like?

This project is taking place against the backgrop of a similar project of the colleagues of CEPS and FES ROCPE on trends in the world’s mega region’s, mainly Asia-Pacific.

Publications

Read all project publications below:

Regional actor, global player: Can the EU get the best of both worlds? by Zachary Paikin, Shada Islam, Sven Biscop, August 2023

Solid foundation, rocky future? Assessing transatlantic defence and security ties after NATO’s Madrid summit by Michael J. Mazarr and Daniel Fiott, 18 July 2022

Can we ever build a common European home? The perils and promise of an old idea by Zachary Paikin and Michael Kimmage, 5 December 2022

Which kind of realism should drive Western support for Ukraine? by Henrik Larsen, 12 December 2022

Project coordinators

Zachary Paikin, Researcher (EU Foreign Policy unit), CEPS

Sidonie Wetzig, Policy Officer (Foreign Affairs, Security and Defence), FES Brussels

For more information, please contact Sidonie.Wetzig(at)fes.de.