Reimagining Transatlantic Relations

History will not view the 2010s as a high point for transatlantic relations. In the first half of the decade, former U.S. President Barack Obama’s pivot to Asia struck some Europeans as a kind of geopolitical infidelity, and then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s observation that NATO had a “dim if not dismal” future unless Europeans brought more to the table only added to the sting. In the second half, President Donald Trump’s at times open hostility to Europe and European leaders—and his consistent disdain for multilateralism—deepened concerns that the United States’ commitment to the transatlantic relationship was not the permanent fixture that many had assumed it to be.

Renewing the Promise of Transatlanticism

Europeans have not been passively accepting this new reality. Some are pushing to rejuvenate transatlanticism, while others are trying to make European self-reliance and EU strategic autonomy more frequent topics of conversation. In Washington, a growing chorus of transatlanticists—veterans of both Republican and Democratic administrations—decry the damage wrought by Trump’s behavior and his administration’s policies.

In this new decade, the transatlantic relationship will remain foundational to the security, prosperity, and freedom of people and societies on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet, even with a possible change in administration in the United States, the notion that U.S. and European leaders can will the transatlantic relationship into its exact shape before Trump, the coronavirus pandemic, and the pivot to Asia is a mirage. We cannot return to 1949 or 1992—or even 2016. The world has changed, and the transatlantic relationship must change with it. The United States is focusing more attention and resources elsewhere in the world, particularly on China and the Indo-Pacific—and Europe is doing so too. The resurgence of populism in both Europe and the United States poses another political and economic obstacle for each to manage. And overarching global challenges—“problems without passports” like climate change, pandemics, and the revolution in emerging technologies—do not fit neatly within the agendas and capacities of existing institutions. As the international landscape evolves, so too must the transatlantic relationship.

We must design and execute a new transatlanticism that both retains the foundation of mutual defense rooted in shared values and also charts a more affirmative, expansive, and flexible approach that supports domestic renewal on both sides of the ocean. We have a common interest in inclusive economic growth; technology policies and investments that can effectively compete with China’s much different vision; environmental policies that steer the world toward a cleaner, greener future; and defense policies that are more balanced. We should commit to working within our own societies and in partnership with others to address the political nervous breakdowns that have taken place on both sides of the Atlantic, the corruption that undermines democracy’s legitimacy, and the threats to our institutions and elections. These steps are grounded in our shared values, and they are more sustainable and productive than a narrower, reactive focus on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s perfidy (real as it is), Beijing’s assertiveness, or the persistently volatile tangle of instability and conflict in the Middle East.

Thinking Creatively About Transatlantic Ties

Rather than asking how we can restore the relationship we had, we must ask how we can reinvent transatlantic relations for a new era. The authors in this compendium have been asked to consider what features the U.S.-Europe relationship could and should have by 2030 and, in considering that question, answer two others:

1. What should we stop doing? What are the practices, policies, or organizations that we have held on to out of inertia or that are no longer useful or justified, given the ways in which the world around us has changed? How can we take advantage of a moment of transition, of crisis, and of purposeful rethinking to cast off or set aside things that don’t make sense as part of the transatlantic relationship of the future?
2. What should we start doing? What are the opportunities for innovation and diplomatic entrepreneurialism in this moment? What is missing from the architecture of the U.S.-Europe relationship? What issues or relationships have we underinvested in in the past that will be more important to the transatlanticism of the future?

The essays that make up this compendium are purposefully provocative—intended less as specific policy prescriptions for 2021, and more to spur thinking about where we might aim for 2025 and beyond. Michael Chertoff, who served as U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush, examines the intersection of technology and transatlanticism. Catherine Ashton, former EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, weighs in on trade. U.S. Congressman Tom Malinowski of New Jersey and human rights expert Sarah Margon argue for a more expansive view of burden sharing and a more aggressive joint approach on tackling corruption. German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer lays out a vision for how security partnerships can evolve. Gergely Karácsony, the Mayor of Budapest, offers a hopeful vision for how subnational partnerships can be a driving force for a kind of progressive cosmopolitanism (even in the shadow of regressive populism). Former Assistant Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development Linda Etim challenges Americans and Europeans to rethink the scale, structure, and execution of their approaches to international development and to tackle racism as they do so. And rising star Franziska Brantner, former EU parliamentarian and current Green Party member of the German Bundestag, calls for climate policy to be the center of a joint action agenda in the coming decade.

These thoughtful commentaries reflect a strong and enduring commitment to the transatlantic partnership and a forward-looking approach to managing the shared challenges before us. There truly has never been a more important moment in which to remind ourselves, on both sides of the Atlantic, of the continuing centrality of our relationship and the need to reimagine it, together.

Over the last decade, perhaps no feature of the transatlantic relationship has been more fraught than our approaches to cyberspace. Issues such as technological competition, data protection, free speech, and cybersecurity have become sources of controversy. As U.S. technology companies and social media platforms have taken a commanding position on the internet, European regulators have increasingly (and understandably) focused on antitrust enforcement. Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has subjected American companies to new requirements for ensuring data privacy and allowing users control over how their data is used. European approaches to hate speech and disinformation also differ from traditional laissez-faire U.S. practice. And, finally, while both sides of the Atlantic are concerned with securing the cyber domain, the United States has recently become more concerned about Chinese products on Western communications systems.

The apparent divide has been exacerbated by the approach of U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration, which has denigrated our European allies and NATO and has seemingly subordinated the value of our relationship to transactional attitudes on the trade deficit and defense spending.

Converging Transatlantic Cyber Interests

The good news is that U.S. and European approaches have been quietly converging, due in significant part to our common interest and values, and to strong relationships being fostered by members of the U.S. Congress and European legislators, as well as by civil society and the private sector.

Even in the United States—home of the world’s biggest tech companies—concerns are growing about whether internet behemoths are too dominant in the marketplace. More specifically, public scandals like Cambridge Analytica’s use of citizens’ data have significantly increased public demands for data privacy protections. California, for example, has enacted a GDPR-like data protection law, and a number of tech firms now offer privacy controls as a positive feature for users. By the same token, European authorities are increasingly mindful of the free speech issues in hate speech and disinformation laws, with France’s highest court recently invalidating much of a new French speech code. And both the United States and Europe agree on the fundamental threats we increasingly face with respect to cyber attacks by malign actors, including nation state adversaries. In this respect, NATO has intensified its work in securing cyberspace and countering foreign disinformation campaigns.

The project for the next five years should be to build on these positive steps to create a truly common transatlantic strategy for cyberspace and the digital world. This will be more urgent than ever for three reasons. First, even in a post-pandemic world, more and more economic activity will be conducted online, and more of our critical infrastructure operating technologies will be managed digitally. Second, the increasing adoption of artificial intelligence–powered analytics means that the appetite and capacity to use (and misuse) personal data will increase, posing threats to our democracies and freedoms. Third, and relevant to the first two points, nations like Russia and China are becoming more aggressive in using cyber tools to subvert, dominate, and even attack nations around the globe.

Refining a Viable Transatlantic Cyber Agenda

What is to be done?

First, because U.S. and European human rights values are fundamentally alike, bearing in mind some differences in application, we should continue to build an increasing set of reciprocal agreements—like the U.S.-EU Privacy Shield—that allow for compatible transatlantic data protection standards. This does not require that the rules be identical, but that they be functionally similar in material respects.

Second, at the same time, the United States and European nations should enter into mutual legal assistance agreements that coordinate and streamline the process for enforcing appropriate law enforcement requests concerning data held by a country other than the requesting nation. These updated treaties should contain protections for human rights but not be overly bureaucratic. One model is the recently executed bilateral data access agreement between the United States and the UK.

Third, rules about hate speech and disinformation should be enacted with care so as not to create undue conflicts in U.S. and European legal regimes. Both sides of the Atlantic can agree that we can ban algorithms used for the manipulation of social media, foreign impersonation of domestic citizens, and incitement to violence and child abuse. But where European nations want to regulate content on the grounds that it is inaccurate or simply—as in the right to be forgotten—unfair, there should not be a European attempt to extend those rules to the operations of platforms in the United States, where the First Amendment applies.

Finally, even beyond what NATO is already doing, the United States and Europe should deepen cooperation on cybersecurity. In particular, in the wake of the pandemic, we can expect a strong drive to implement new 5G internet technology. Currently, few infrastructure providers are scalable and cost-competitive enough to displace Huawei. But allowing the Chinese company to dominate 5G as a sole source of supply is dangerous to security from a number of standpoints. If the United States and Europe combine to foster a market for transatlantic 5G providers, we can develop supply chain alternatives. Doing so would not only foster security and resilience but also would help all our economies.

Michael Chertoff is the Co-founder and Executive Chairman of the Chertoff Group and a former Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Any period of crisis, however short or unexpected, exposes long-term problems and gives rise to new ones. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the lack of preparedness of governments in Europe and the United States, the fragility of just-in-time business planning, and the vulnerability of far too many industries. As many businesses currently struggle with closures, their long-term viability is also increasingly at risk as the pandemic compounds the effects of several other disruptive trends. If we are to get through the current crisis and anticipate and better prepare for the next one, we need to tackle these challenges together now on both sides of the Atlantic by increasing our collective economic resilience.

Securing Essential Public Health Supply Chains

The most relevant lesson from the COVID-19 pandemic is the need to prepare for future public health emergencies. For example, our populations require greater investments in health care technologies and pharmaceutical industry research for new drugs and vaccines. The excuse that this pandemic was too hard to anticipate will not work again, even if a future crisis is different in its genesis and outcomes. As both sides take steps to reduce their dependence on China for essential medical supplies and equipment, they should simultaneously seek to liberalize current transatlantic restrictions on medical supplies and pharmaceuticals and reinforce integrated supply chains across the Atlantic.

Spurring Sustainable Economic Growth

We also have to start by imagining how the world will look in the wake of COVID-19. The focus for governments on both sides of the Atlantic has to be the drive to stimulate economies and provide jobs in a more sustainable way. At the heart of the EU’s approach is the Green Deal, designed to get to a climate-neutral Europe by 2050. From its Farm to Fork strategy and sustainable food systems to an energy strategy that has renewables and energy efficiency at its core, the Green Deal will drive economic growth and investment in the coming decades and shape the EU’s approach to international cooperation on trade and investment. Already some businesses are making the decision to leapfrog over their next investment plans and move directly to innovation in green technologies. Boosting transatlantic trade in environmental goods and encouraging more joint innovation on sustainable solutions should be a top priority for both the EU and the United States in the coming decade.

Ensuring Trade Works for Ordinary People

More broadly, advancing deeper trade and investment ties between the United States and the EU, and separately with the UK, could eventually form the core of a strong post-pandemic economic recovery. But negotiating a new comprehensive trade agreement takes time. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), for instance, failed to reach the finish line even after nearly four years of negotiations. While the EU has worked on new mandates with U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration, some of the underlying problems on market access and regulatory cooperation and rules remain. The departure of the UK—a strong advocate of a transatlantic trade agreement—from the EU does not help. France shows little sign of budging on its concerns that its “agriculture and culture” were under threat from any new deal.

This suggests we may see more skinny transatlantic trade agreements, linked to specific sectors. Set against a backdrop of wanting a deeper and more comprehensive deal, it is not impossible to see targeted support for some parts of the economy, as negotiators grind through the harder underlying issues while trying to find common ground. This approach has merits. In particular, the EU and the United States should seek to sign a bilateral trade in services agreement, build a transatlantic digital economy, reduce nontariff trade barriers, and promote regulatory cooperation especially on emerging technologies that can provide the basis for new global standards. On top of this, the EU and the United States should also boost their dialogue and cooperation on investment screening and export controls, transatlantic digital flows, and connectivity and infrastructure development to provide credible alternatives to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

TTIP will not return—either in name or negotiating mandate—but a strong desire to find an enduring set of trade and investment arrangements remains. The UK, meanwhile, is already negotiating a trade agreement of its own with the United States. The United States, for many in the UK, is the answer to the problem created by leaving the EU. While there is no comparison in terms of economic opportunity, a good deal would be a much-needed boost to an economy already struggling from Brexit. However, an early harvest is unlikely, as the two sides have a lot to cover on, for example, regulatory issues, where animal welfare has been just one highlighted concern.

More generally, any new trade and investment agreement will need to tackle a variety of perceived as well as real challenges. The intertwined nature of economic life, combined with a sense that the blame for ailing economies lies at the door of bad trade deals or unfair trade practices, will not help push new proposals up the agenda. Ensuring, therefore, that any new transatlantic trade deals protect our middle class must be a top priority.

Reinvigorating Multilateralism Together

Finally, the EU and the United States should also join hands in reforming the multilateral trading order. The World Trade Organization (WTO) under new leadership will need to show it has a grip on working out a universal response to the issues thrown up by COVID-19. At its heart, the WTO has an important mandate—to ensure trade flows as smoothly, freely, and predictably as possible. U.S. collaboration with the EU and the UK as well as other key partners such as Japan would constitute a strong and effective lobby for reform. Working out a joint plan of action that encompasses internal reforms, addresses the role of China’s excessive state subsidies and forced technology transfers, bolsters support for the appellate court, offers new ideas for the role of the WTO in the digital sector, and highlights requirements of membership would help take the organization into the next phase. Abolishing it and finding something new that everyone agrees on would be a thankless task and should be avoided.

Any trade agreement needs architecture around it to make it work well, both within its framework and outside. There are questions about how multilateral organizations function when they rely too much on any one funder or the disproportionate effect a single dissenter can have against the grain of other members’ opinions. But for countries to feel comfortable in pooling choices, interests, and sovereignty to others, including on judicial oversight, new rules will need to be agreed on and new ways of tackling disputes will need to be found. What is clear is that the WTO has a big job to do if we are to have the level of trade and investment that will support both fragile and robust economies in the future.

COVID-19 has brought sorrow and uncertainty, destruction and loss of opportunity. As the United States and Europe begin taking tentative steps to restoring the lives we have known, it is time to imagine what legacy we want to create in the name of all those who have given so much. A new, more modern kind of trade agreement—or even more likely, trade agreements—between the EU and the United States should be part of that legacy.

Catherine Ashton is a former EU High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and a former European Commissioner for Trade.

We’ve been thinking a lot about rebuilding the U.S.-EU alliance, and while there are some conventional areas that need attention and focus, others are now ripe for change or expansion. The United States can’t just focus on reconstituting what existed previously. The world is in a different place than it was even four years ago. We have an opportunity to think differently and more boldly than we might have done if not for the cavalier disregard for norms, laws, and alliances that has dominated the headlines in recent years. To that end, we suggest two ideas that could help make the U.S.-Europe partnership not only stronger and more effective but also truly fit for purpose in today’s world.

Redefining Burden Sharing

First, we propose that the United States and our allies in Europe develop a new definition of burden sharing that encompasses more than military spending as a percentage of GDP. The goal of 2 percent of GDP that NATO set some years ago was never a good measure of an ally’s military contributions to the alliance, as it can be met even without building useful capabilities or actually doing anything to help the alliance achieve its security goals. And of course, military spending alone cannot fairly measure an ally’s true contributions to global security and to our common objective of winning the contest between democracy and authoritarianism.

A new definition of burden sharing should outline more precisely what military capabilities are needed by our democratic alliance to meet our common goals. This new definition should encompass not just spending on those capabilities but also what contributions individual countries are actually making to joint military, peacekeeping, and training missions—whether through NATO, the EU, or the UN. It should also take into account what allies contribute to the promotion of democracy and human rights, humanitarian relief, refugee resettlement, and collective defense against everything from cyber attacks to pandemics. Under U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration, we’ve seen burden sharing demands weaponized to divide the United States from Europe; instead, we need to recognize that every ally can do more, and we must encourage greater and more useful contributions from all.

Taking a Global Stand Against Corruption

Second, we’d like to see the United States and EU member states commit to much stronger, more coordinated, and more comprehensive anticorruption efforts. Most authoritarian regimes today, including those of Russia and China, are more politically vulnerable to charges of corruption than accusations that they are undemocratic. Anger at leaders who steal from their people and hide their ill-gotten gains outside their countries is almost universal—so a transatlantic policy of exposing and punishing kleptocracy would align us with ordinary people living in authoritarian countries and put their leaders on the defensive more than anything else we could do.

Of course, a credible global anticorruption policy will only be possible if we set a good example at home. But if we are able to achieve change in Washington, the manner in which we will have done so—through civic activism, a free press, and free elections—will itself serve as a powerful example. We will also need to enact the bipartisan beneficial-ownership legislation currently pending in Congress to make it harder for kleptocrats to hide their money in anonymously owned shell companies registered in the United States. The EU has already passed a similar law, with each member state obligated to establish a public registry of company ownership. Meanwhile, the EU is moving toward the enactment of legislation like the U.S. Magnitsky Act that would allow it to sanction foreign officials responsible for serious corruption. If these laws are robustly enforced with adequate resources, there will be tangible opportunities for transatlantic collaboration.

Doing so would require making anticorruption a genuine foreign policy priority, in ways that it was not under previous presidents, even those, like Barack Obama, who took some useful steps forward. The United States and the EU will have increasingly strong legal tools to go after kleptocrats, but they will also need to dedicate resources and muster political will. In the United States, this would mean greatly expanding the offices at the Department of Justice and the Department of the Treasury dedicated to exposing and prosecuting international corruption and assigning a far higher priority in the intelligence community to tracking illicit financial flows. Meanwhile, the United States and the EU should share more intelligence about the flow of dirty money and coordinate sanctions and enforcement.

Taking global corruption seriously would also require accepting the diplomatic costs when, inevitably, our efforts expose criminality by the leaders of countries with which we do business. But that would be a price well worth paying for revitalizing our alliance with countries that share our values around a principled cause to which our adversaries have no good answer.

Tom Malinowski is a Member of the House of Representatives for the Seventh Congressional District of New Jersey.

Sarah Margon is Director of U.S. Foreign Policy at the Open Society Foundations.

As for most Germans from my generation, the transatlantic relationship is a personal affair. It provided the security Germans needed during the Cold War. It ensured Westbindung— Germany’s firm embeddedness in the community of free and democratic countries. And it was the foundation on which our national unity was built in 1990. This is why I deeply care about the mighty challenges we face as transatlantic partners today. As the world struggles to find a new form of order amid a pandemic, power shifts, and political uncertainty, transatlantic relations are in a phase of reorientation. This does not come as a surprise. For decades, transatlanticism—a robust worldview based on human rights, democracy, and open markets—has been a core pillar of the rules-based international order that is under so much duress at the moment. If one is in trouble, the other one will feel the pain, and vice versa.

Identifying the Key Challenges

What can be done? Looking beyond the headlines, four challenges are of particular importance for the future of transatlantic relations.

The first challenge is to what extent U.S.-China relations are turning confrontational. Predictions range from inevitable war to joint stewardship of globalization. Europeans are already gravely affected by China’s rise and the U.S. response. Their role in that confrontation will be defined, either by themselves or by Washington and Beijing. There is no doubt in my mind that Europe will come to the defense of freedom and openness and that we have to strengthen democracy and human rights. This is very much in our interest. To do this, Europe needs to be strong, resilient, and capable of acting in service of both principles and interests. But something else is crucial here as well: will the United States still be interested in the fate of its European allies? Will Europe be seen by Washington as a key asset in that great power competition with Beijing? At the very least, European dependence on U.S. security guarantees make these questions crucial for the future of transatlantic relations.

Closely connected to this first challenge comes a second one. It is the seemingly eternal question of whether Europe can become a forceful player on the world stage. Europe needs to develop an ambition to have a say in global affairs. It needs to strengthen its ability to act, also militarily. It needs to fully grasp how to manage its disunity so that this disunity does not become its downfall. And it needs to be economically strong and technologically capable. Increasingly, power grows out of the ability to create, utilize, and protect data and the networks through which it flows. Will Europe become a driver and champion of the exploding fourth industrial revolution? All of this will be key for transatlantic relations: for how we trade between the United States and Europe, how we define shared interests, how we can be each other’s reliable allies, how our militaries interoperate, and whether our mindsets are compatible.

Third, how can Europe and the United States jointly manage the off-kilter nuclear balance in Europe after the end of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, Russia’s massive arms build-up, and the rise of China? The latter casts its long shadow over the European power balance. Europe is no longer the main theater in which the global balance of power is being determined. And yet it is already at the receiving end of the arms race that has heated up between China and the United States, not least because Russia exploits the global focus on the Indo-Pacific by expanding its threat potential in Europe. How can nuclear deterrence survive and a healthy balance of power be maintained in Europe? This question matters for Europeans and Americans alike. Neither of them has found a good answer yet.

Fourth, can Germany become a backbone of European resilience? My country, for a long time, was the object, not the subject, of global power politics. This situation changed thirty years ago when the Cold War ended. But this hiatus’s impact on Germany’s political and strategic culture can still be felt today. Slowly, the country assumes more responsibility, increases its defense budget, and realizes to what extent other countries must and want to rely on it. No doubt it needs to be quicker, and we are working on it every day.

For many decades, the German question was whether the country was a fully committed member of the family of Western nations. Today, the German question is whether Germany can become a protector of the wider West, that is to say, of any country subscribing to and acting upon Western principles and values. Transatlantic relations can only be in full bloom and at maximum impact if Germany can complete its path toward being a much bigger force multiplier for the West, for NATO, and for the EU. We have made great progress toward that goal over the last decade, but we need to press on. I see it as my task as the German defense minister to strengthen and speed up that process as much as I can.

Reaffirming the Importance of the Alliance

Finally, I want to make it very clear that in all four of these challenges NATO remains Germany’s ultimate frame of reference. The Atlantic alliance will remain key to European and U.S. security, just as it will continue to be a decisive pillar on which U.S. leadership and its status as a global power rests. NATO has proven time and again that it is adaptable and adjustable around its core principles. Germany has sizably increased its support for the alliance over the last few years—in cash, in capabilities, and in commitments. It will continue to do so.

The future of transatlantic relations lies beyond the headlines of the day. It is a strategic long game that we need to play with passion and conviction—even more so in a world in which the balance of power is more volatile than it has been for a lifetime. The challenges are mighty indeed. Posterity will measure us against the progress we make against them. Let’s join forces and act now.

Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer is the Minister of Defense of the Federal Republic of Germany.

The world is not in good shape, and neither is the transatlantic relationship. The United States and Europe diverge on a range of issues including climate policy, trade, foreign affairs, and pandemic protections, divides that are deepening the liberal international order’s erosion that was already under way long before U.S. President Donald Trump took office. Worse still, these divisions are playing out amid rampant global warming, environmental degradation, and unprecedented levels of inequality, exacerbated by the recent coronavirus pandemic.

Even if much of our old alliance can be restored once the United States elects a new president, environmental and social injustice will continue to impact our future. The global community has been increasingly challenged by issues such as the coronavirus pandemic, which, in the words of former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, are “problems without passports.” Consequently, a renewed transatlantic relationship must go beyond pre-Trump and pre-pandemic arrangements. If there is a time to envision bold change, it is now.

We must recenter our politics on universal values and human dignity and embrace subnational diplomacy—particularly the existing and potential collaborative work between cities—as an engine to drive progress in a new era.

Reimagining a Progressive Transatlantic Relationship for the Twenty-First Century

Above all, I imagine a transatlantic alliance that has planetary and human well-being at the forefront of its agenda. Economic growth has also created a grotesquely unequal distribution of wealth. If Western democracies want to live up to their own noble ideals of human dignity and equality, they must aim at a much fairer balance than the one putting half of the world’s wealth into the hands of the top 1 percent.

Rather than starting a quixotic fight against the forces of globalization, we need to tame them. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership—along with any other bilateral or multilateral trade agreements—should be reevaluated with labor and environmental protections at its heart. The strategic rationale still stands, and our regions are in dire need of a constructive trade and investment partnership rather than a trade war.

Human welfare also needs to be redefined, especially in our transatlantic region, which accounts for the lion’s share of consumption-based, historical greenhouse gas emissions. Poverty reduction must remain our priority, but we cannot fight poverty simply by increasing global consumption. Western societies must lead the way in reimagining human welfare in qualitative, not quantitative, terms. They should mainstream progressive policy positions such as reduced work hours and universal basic income. These policies would ensure less human impact on nature, while allowing us to live more liberated, meaningful lives.

The rule of law, separation of powers, freedom of speech, and pluralism must remain the cornerstones of our communities. But here, too, old ways will not suffice. Our transatlantic community needs to be vigilant and enforce the principles of Western political thought for the sake of both our democracies and those looking to us as an example to follow. We cannot tolerate authoritarian and illiberal leaders, lest we risk the resilience of our communities.

Backing words with deeds is just as important when it comes to diversity. The next generation shaping transatlantic relations must reflect our ever more diverse societies. When brought to life, transatlanticism may have been championed predominantly by white male strategists and experts. This pattern cannot continue in the twenty-first century, or else it will cease to be a valid cultural reference for young Americans and Europeans alike.

New challenges necessitate that we engage in new fields of cooperation. With the coronavirus pandemic, public health has emerged as a key aspect of national security. What is more, it is one where we can make use of our joint military capabilities. As Karen Donfried and Wolfgang Ischinger pointed out recently, a transatlantic pandemic strategy, a shared system of global medical surveillance, and stockpiles of medical equipment are all within NATO’s reach and would go a long way toward protecting our citizens.

Leveraging Cities to Drive Progress

Local governance can do much to advance these objectives, and urban populations on both sides of the Atlantic can be a source of political capital and ideas to drive them forward.

Urban, metropolitan populations want more democracy, not less of it. In Budapest, like in many other European cities, citizens’ engagement, participatory budgeting projects, and bottom-up adjustments to the political process offer compelling propositions to disenfranchised voters. Good local governance—close to the people and focused on addressing their daily struggles—is an effective remedy to the crisis our democracies face.

The need for good governance also implies that value-based city alliances can function as stalwarts of socially liberal, pluralistic, and inclusive societies. Our Pact of Free Cities—formed last year with Bratislava, Prague, and Warsaw—has that very aim at its core. We intend to counter the illiberal wave, as do many U.S. cities with progressive leadership. Joining forces in transatlantic networks of cities would advance and renew U.S.-EU ties.

At the policy level, too, urban voters represent similar values on both sides of the Atlantic. For several years now, U.S. cities and states have been leading the charge in transitioning to a low-carbon economy. An increasing number of European cities are taking the same path now. By sharing know-how, technology, and best practices, our cities can boost business, innovation, and people-to-people ties to act together for a sustainable future.

One of the challenges that many of our democracies face is waning confidence from the citizens we serve. City authorities and local government officials often have a more direct impact on the daily lives of their inhabitants than national governments do—cities play a key role on issues of policing, education, sanitation, economic development, integration of immigrants and refugees, and so on. Collaboration between cities in Europe and North America on key challenges of municipal governance is an opportunity to strengthen our respective societies.

Looking ahead, convergence outweighs divergence in our relationship. We still have the same interests and challenges—protecting the climate, bolstering public health, and curbing social inequality being the most current and crucial ones. Large and politically active urban populations cherish our founding ideals of pluralism, internationalism, and openness. They are less favorable, however, to unregulated market capitalism and rampant inequality. If the Western alliance can renew itself around environmental and social justice while remaining the standard bearer of liberal democracy in an ever more illiberal international environment, progressive local governance can greatly contribute to transatlantic ties.

Gergely Karácsony is the Mayor of Budapest.

More people live on Earth now than at any other point in human history, and we are weathering one of the most profound changes to the global order in recent history. More than 70 million people have been displaced from their homes by conflict or persecution; we are managing the first global pandemic since 1918; climate change has moved from ravaging the Global South and Oceanic states to devastating communities across the United States and Europe with droughts, fires, and storms; and the rise of automation and machine learning is poised to change the ways we work, build economies, and fight wars.

Against this backdrop, the meaning and utility—not to mention the ethics—of a transatlantic partnership that privileges security, economic, and cultural relations between North America and Europe is increasingly being called into question. The transatlantic relationship of the future must be less about creating a fortress to protect North America and Europe from external threats and more about leveraging the resources and capacities of the richest countries in the world to address global challenges.

One Thing to Stop Doing

Both sides of the Atlantic should stop preparing for twentieth-century wars. The United States currently spends $730 billion on defense and, prior to the pandemic, Western European countries were projected to spend over $300 billion on defense by next year. The allocation of $1 trillion of total security spending reflects a false assumption that the majority of our security challenges will look like yesterday’s wars rather than tomorrow’s multifaceted security threats. The United States and our European allies continue to overwhelmingly define “threats” in terms of an overland or sea invasion and have failed to sufficiently focus on modernizing approaches to warfare and deepening our capacity to counter the systemic and transnational threats we are already facing.

This is not to say we should jettison things that are working: NATO, in the face of growing Russian aggression, has never been more relevant to these traditional threats. However, NATO—in part because of the distraction of U.S. entanglement in forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—has been too slow to define strategies for addressing twenty-first-century threats, such as climate change, mass migration, cybersecurity, weaponized misinformation and deep fakes, and global health challenges.

While it is not realistic in practice, the United States would benefit from a zero-based budgeting exercise on defense, diplomacy, and development. Forcing ourselves to confront the mismatch between our current budget and the challenges we will face in the coming decades could help us begin to remedy the imbalance and could be the basis for a more strategic approach with European partners.

Three Things to Start Doing

First, we should rework the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) into an international assistance reform effort, charging the DAC with renovating the Global North’s approach to economic development. As with our national security budgets, development assistance budgets must be assessed in light of shared goals and needs. (We are almost certainly heading in the wrong direction today: we have seen a regrettable trend in Europe and in the United States of cutting overseas development assistance precisely at a time when it is most needed.) The links between climate change, migration, conflict prevention, and economic development mean that a U.S.-Europe strategy for economic development must be more sophisticated than national aid agencies dividing up a focus on different countries and putting together a bouquet of projects.

Domestic bureaucratic reshuffling alone is unlikely to drive real change in the strategic approach and effectiveness of development assistance. The coronavirus pandemic’s limits on global travel have brought into sharp relief the need to transfer ownership and responsibility for the conceptualization and delivery of assistance programs to the communities closest to the action. New research is showing that antiquated, donor-driven, high-overhead approaches have poor outcomes when compared to streamlined approaches that focus on empowering people through methods like direct cash transfers. Europe and the United States should consider a Marshall Plan–like effort that is conceptualized and implemented by the countries themselves, in line with the New Deal for Fragile States that was never properly realized.

Second, Europe and the United States need to seize the moment. We should create a new initiative around training the next generation of global health workers. This is a sustainable development goal that looks daunting on its face, but it is imminently achievable if conceptualized and coordinated at scale and in partnership with the governments of the Global South. This will have the added benefit of helping to address the long-term healthcare worker shortfalls in Europe and the United States at the same time.

Finally, we must prioritize the fight against global white supremacy and nationalist populism that verges on fascism, both in our own countries and internationally. The rise of xenophobic and ultranationalist populism is not only a domestic threat to our democracies, but it also leads to a dangerously perverted understanding of the world. The legacies of colonialism and persistent racism continue to impose a burden on the inhabitants of too many countries. There will be some in the Global North who push for an inward turn—who push to ignore what U.S. President Donald Trump infamously called “shithole countries” in a racist quip.

But while politics may change, geography does not. Starving the Global South of attention and resources will not only lead to humanitarian disasters but will also provoke massive security challenges that dramatically impact the Global North too. The Black Lives Matter movement arose out of the specific context of the persistent race-based caste system of the United States. But the movement’s fundamental claim—of the equal dignity and rights of all persons by virtue of their humanity—is one that needs to be driven through our perspectives and approaches to international development as well.

What the World Has at Stake

A final thought before closing: what is at stake is not only the individual lives and futures of billions of people but also the idea of a sustainable and stable world. As colonialism waned and the Cold War ended, the Global South became something that the wealthiest countries thought about only episodically, when convenient. But the Global North cannot routinely pretend away the rest of the planet—and perhaps no phenomenon demonstrates this point as clearly as migration. Human migration is not a new phenomenon; it has ebbed and flowed over the centuries. It cannot be stopped by seas or walls or deals with autocrats: when forced to do so, people will seek security and freedom elsewhere when they become convinced there is no hope to find it at home. Exchanges of people, ideas, and goods across oceans and borders can enrich us all, but a failure to consider the political and economic welfare of those distant from us can contribute to shocks—conflicts, economic collapse, and massive movements of people—that strain the systems that facilitate our common existence on the planet we share.

We already know that climate change—and the disasters and conflicts that accompany it—will make the twenty-first century a period of mass migration. Managing migration is a governance challenge for every region and will test the capacities of many states. Increasing the size and effectiveness of U.S.-European investment in economic development, climate adaptation, conflict prevention, and food security is the single most important step we can take to promote a world in which migration is manageable. Such a world, in which sustainable global economic growth provides a future for all people, is the foundation for political stability.

Linda Etim is the former Senior Adviser on Africa Policy for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and a former Assistant Administrator at the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The coronavirus crisis has shown how vulnerable we all are: the virus does not respect borders, and we have learned that our economies are linked in ways that make too many of our critical supply chains one-sided, leaving us dependent on others for simple but essential goods like protective masks. These acute challenges associated with the pandemic should push us to think anew about how we will confront another urgent threat whose consequences will be amplified by interdependence: climate change. It has been clear for decades that our ways of doing business are not sustainable. We exploit natural resources and the environment without regard for the natural disasters, mass migration, community devastation, and public health crises that climate change potentially creates and accelerates. This must stop.

Tackling Climate Change Effectively

The U.S.-European relationship of the future must be based on a level-headed partnership with new priorities at its heart, including climate change. On both sides of the Atlantic, there is increasing popular support for a dramatic change in policies and investment that can drive real progress on the climate. In the United States, members of Congress have pressed for a Green New Deal. Europe, too, needs a so-called Green Deal. For Europeans, the Green Deal must strengthen our energy independence and boost domestic demand in the post-pandemic economic recovery. It should also be an instrument for a renewable energy partnership with African countries.

But this Green Deal can form a new transatlantic bridge should the United States, at some point in the not-too-distant future, choose to adopt a robust Green New Deal of its own. Here are some ways to amplify that opportunity.

• Forge new alliances: The EU could provide incentives for European regions leading the way in climate policy together with U.S. partner regions to forge new alliances.
• Provide adequate funding: The EU should show this commitment in the new Multiannual Financial Framework through, for instance, a separate EU structural policy funding line enabling a grant-making partnership between the EU and the United States for the Green Deal. This would contribute to funding structures that increase public awareness of climate change, and it would foster cooperation between public entities such as cities and industrial actors to align climate goals and share best practices.
• Negotiate a fair trade agreement: They should start new negotiations on a fair transatlantic trade agreement, in a transparent way based on international law for the protection of humanity, the climate, and the environment, safeguarding public services of general interest and abandoning the very notion that a private court should litigate conflicts between states and private entities like corporations.
• Incorporate other major players: China and India will both be central to EU-U.S. collaboration on climate change because there is no way to make global progress without Chinese and Indian participation. Europe and the United States need to have a shared and coordinated approach, especially on China, that addresses both the geostrategic challenges posed by the country’s authoritarian systemic rivalry and its economic and technological ambitions and the opportunities to include China in global efforts to tackle problems like climate change.
  
  A note of caution here is warranted: Europe’s inability to establish a cohesive continent-wide vision to deal with issues like 5G connectivity and the Belt and Road Initiative, compounded with China’s economic inroads in some key European countries through the 17+1 format, are major hurdles to overcome. Simultaneously, the United States and China have been locked in a bitter trade war with both sides imposing tit-for-tat tariffs on U.S. and Chinese goods. The United States and Europe ought to jointly address Chinese investment practices and 5G technology—especially with the United States leaving trenches and individual EU member states abandoning short-term economic advantages at the cost of European cohesiveness. The EU and the United States together have much to gain by effectively using and reforming the World Trade Organization’s legal framework to include better environmental and social standards for global trade.

Rejuvenating the Foundations of Liberalism

Progress on climate change will not happen without work to renew the foundations and conditions for liberal democracy and to reinvigorate the transatlantic relationship more broadly. Inclusive public goods should be at the center of this renewal: education, healthcare, social safety nets, and high-quality news. We could define an agenda on how inclusive public goods should look in the twenty-first century. We must also promote safe and humane digitalization and jointly protect our liberal democracies against fake news, conspiracy theories, and online hate speech—whether these threats emanate from inside or outside. This means passing tough regulations of social networks and platforms and breaking up data monopolies. The United States and the EU should return to effective antitrust policies and apply them to the digital sphere.

The transatlantic relationship will never be easy, but it can always be respectful, pursued in good faith, and with an eye toward the long term. We—both Americans and Europeans—should stop trying to bully each other to push our interests through. We should stop weaponizing our interconnectedness. It makes no sense for U.S. President Donald Trump to threaten us with punitive duties on European products, just as it is wrong that the EU should menacingly plan to impose import duties on U.S. goods. It is insane for the United States to walk out of the negotiations through the Organization on Economic Cooperation and Development on a digital taxation scheme and to once again threaten retaliatory penalties if Europeans go ahead with the negotiations.

We should stop talking about each other and start talking to each other; we need to learn to listen to each other again. Insults and cursing may be the culture of the U.S. real estate world, but it surely is not a productive way to gain the attention of leaders like German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The populist rhetoric and vituperations Trump seems to stir up for his domestic political base at his rallies are heard in Europe, too, and they contribute to a poisoning of the political discourse and climate.

There is room for progress on both sides of the Atlantic. The United States must bring a serious plan on climate change to the table, along with a serious recommitment to a respectful transatlantic partnership. We Europeans must be ready to compromise and bring ideas and resources to the table, too. We should throw the 2 percent national defense spending goal for NATO members out of the window. It makes no sense for Europeans to have national targets. We must create European capabilities and synergies. We should define joint NATO qualitative objectives, theaters, and situations where we have to and want to be able to act and define the capabilities we need accordingly—as Americans, as Europeans, and together. We cannot assume that this is just about the United States: we Europeans have to deliver when the day comes that the U.S. government has regained its senses. This is a precondition for another seventy-five years of a fruitful, predictable, value-based transatlantic partnership.

Franziska Brantner is a Member of the German Bundestag from the Green Party and a former Member of the European Parliament.

While much of the current focus is on the U.S. presidential election and its impact on transatlantic relations in 2021, it is worth taking a step back to contemplate where the relationship will be five or even ten years from now. Regardless of whether President Donald Trump is reelected or whether Joe Biden becomes the forty-sixth U.S. president, one thing is certain: transatlantic relations will not snap back to what they used to be.

The litmus test for both U.S. and European policymakers will be how to readjust and rebuild a partnership that has served both sides so well for decades so that it is equally prepared to manage tomorrow’s challenges. As the eighty-year anniversary of the Atlantic Charter approaches in 2021, it is an opportune moment to ponder what a new Atlantic Charter for the twenty-first century would look like.

Revitalizing Transatlantic Relations

The authors of this volume set out to provide a diverse series of fresh perspectives on the future of transatlantic relations across various issues to spur collective U.S. and European thinking about what the transatlantic partners might aim for in 2025 and beyond. Two basic central questions deeply informed this effort: 1) what should we stop doing and 2) what should we start doing?

The main takeaway is simple: not only can we not turn back the clock, but we shouldn’t want to—the transatlantic relationship should not strive to return to what it was in the past but should strive toward a deeper and broader partnership that is suitable for the world we’re in now. When the two of us asked the authors to share their views, we did not steer them in a certain direction—other than the two open-ended questions mentioned above.

As we read the contributions together, we are struck by several broad takeaways.

• Getting our own houses in order: A starting point for renewing and rebuilding the transatlantic relationship is to clean up our own domestic messes on both sides of the Atlantic. This task requires firmly pushing back against racism, democratic backsliding, the politicization of democratic institutions, corruption, and illiberalism within our own societies. For instance, Tom Malinowski and Sarah Margon argue for a far more ambitious joint transatlantic approach to fighting kleptocracy—including by clamping down on shell companies registered in the United States and having the EU pass and implement a new set of Magnitsky-style sanctions.
  
  Franziska Brantner reminds us that more transatlantic cooperation is needed to ensure “safe and humane digitalization” by countering hate speech and fake news online—an issue that is even more relevant today in light of rising anti-vaccine sentiments and vaccine-related disinformation on both sides of the Atlantic amid the ongoing pandemic. Digitalization also provides new threats—and opportunities—when it comes to securing the integrity and legitimacy of our democratic institutions. Michael Chertoff points out that, while there are opportunities for a transatlantic partnership on thorny tech issues, both Europe and the United States first have to take steps domestically to make good on these openings.
• Putting citizens first: The transatlantic alliance cannot just be an elite-driven relationship between politicians and business leaders—it must include ordinary citizens at its center and be inclusive. As Franziska Brantner notes, it is not enough for Europe and the United States to just talk about each other: they must also talk with each other more, on more issues, and in more ways—including by strengthening people-to-people connections and civil society dialogues while also ensuring that these discussions are diverse and inclusive. As Gergely Karácsony points out, locally driven dialogues between Europeans and North Americans can play an instrumental role. Even at a time of heightened populism on both sides of the Atlantic, city-to-city transatlantic dialogue can drive a cosmopolitan agenda even when national governments are not in the driver’s seat.
  
  Another area where citizens must be put at the core of the relationship is on trade. As the protests across Europe against the prospective Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership in the mid-2010s highlighted, when politicians choose to ignore citizens, they put themselves in a position of great peril. And as Catherine Ashton rightly notes, any future EU-U.S. trade talks must take into account the impact such an agreement would have on the middle class and job markets.
• Forming a more perfect partnership will require a more equal one: As opposed to the traditional Cold War–era transatlantic relationship, which was generally shaped by Washington, U.S.-European cooperation in the twenty-first century is based on an increasingly equal partnership. The United States is no longer the unipolar power it once was, and the EU is gradually emerging as a more coherent, stronger player through several crises in recent years—the eurozone crisis, the migration crisis, Brexit, and (most recently) the coronavirus pandemic.
  
  While Europe seeks to continue growing as a military, diplomatic, economic, and technological power, the prospect of a more autonomous EU is not a contradiction to a healthy and vibrant transatlantic partnership. On the contrary, a stronger European pillar in the transatlantic relationship would actually be a positive development. As Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer notes in her chapter, U.S. leadership remains crucial, but Europe must also be more ambitious about its own role in the world, and Germany has a particularly important role in this regard. In other words, Europe cannot passively wait for Washington to take the initiative—it must be willing and able to share more of the burden and assume greater responsibility.
• Redefining security: While NATO’s role as a collective defense alliance remains the core of transatlantic ties, the relationship must be reoriented to better meet tomorrow’s challenges. As several authors note, the security challenges of the next decade will be multifaceted in nature—ranging from conventional military threats to nonmilitary hybrid tactics like cyber or information warfare. In addition, transnational challenges such as climate change, migration, food security, and pandemics will require more attention and cooperation between not only the United States and Europe but also with other countries around the globe.
  
  An important part of successfully addressing these challenges, argues Linda Etim, is to address the mismatch between military spending and spending on diplomacy and development as well as other efforts to prevent conflicts in the first place. In the same vein, Malinowski and Margon argue for a new definition of burden sharing—one that is much broader than NATO countries’ 2 percent defense spending goal and that takes into account countries’ actual contributions to global peace and security in a broader sense. At the same time, traditional threats will not disappear though they may evolve in the future. As Kramp-Karrenbauer reminds us, the long-standing issue of nuclear arms control is becoming increasingly complex as Russia engages in a massive arms buildup while China also adds to its nuclear arsenal.
• Thinking beyond the West: The transatlantic partners must lead with values centered around a shared agenda for a free world to push back against growing authoritarian influence. The shared democratic values underpinning transatlantic ties are universal—they don’t apply or resonate only in North America and Europe, and North Americans and Europeans must actively engage with other like-minded democratic partners around the world. Karácsony proposes a vision for a progressive agenda that can hold global appeal. Brantner puts forward a joint approach to dealing with China’s authoritarian systemic rivalry by responding to the Belt and Road Initiative, the security risks of partnering with unreliable vendors of 5G technology, and WTO reform. At the same time, Etim reminds U.S. and European leaders that they must be fully cognizant of the unfortunate legacy of colonialism and the persistent racism from some of our own leaders.
• Recognizing that it’s the geoeconomics, stupid: While we should invest in the transatlantic partnership, we should be clear-eyed about its centrality in the strategic challenge of our time: Europe and the United States need to think strategically about how to leverage economic tools to serve their middle classes, make their democracies deliver, and maintain their global competitiveness in an age shaped by a rising China. This task will require paying far more attention to aligning domestic technology policies and investments to compete and present a different vision than China’s state-driven authoritarian model. Technology is rapidly emerging as a key front for greater transatlantic action.
  
  Ashton argues that the United States and Europe also need to reorient their traditional trade and investment cooperation with a stronger emphasis on the digital economy and standard setting for emerging technologies. And, as Chertoff writes, the convergence between U.S. and EU views on cyber and digital challenges should inform a joint agenda in the coming five years that encompasses data protection, online content moderation against hate speech and disinformation, and cyber security cooperation on issues such as 5G connectivity.

From Handwringing to Seizing the Moment

While reflection and self-criticism can be constructive, Americans and Europeans should not let our examination of the transatlantic relationship we currently have blind us to the possibilities of the transatlantic relationship we can have and will need in the future. The last decade has taught us that we cannot take institutions and relationships for granted; they must be constantly renewed. We have learned that even self-evident truths must be reaffirmed in each generation.

The good news is that, as we look into the 2020s and beyond, there are abundant opportunities for a strong and dynamic transatlantic relationship to be a linchpin in addressing global challenges. There is so much work to do—on combating climate change, reinvigorating our democracies, promoting global health, delivering broad-based economic growth, and thoughtfully seizing the opportunities of rapid technological innovation—and all of that work will be more successful if we do it together. The transatlantic relationship’s raison d’être has not disappeared: rather, it has evolved, and it is as dynamic and compelling as it ever has been.

As former president Dwight D. Eisenhower put it in a 1951 speech: “The road ahead may be long—it is certain to be marked by critical and difficult passages. But if we march together, endure together, share together, we shall succeed—we shall gloriously succeed together!”