Navigating the Vortex

著者： Lucy P. Marcus & Stefan Wolff
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  • We live in a complex and ever-changing world. To navigate the vortex we must adapt to change quickly, think critically, and make sound decisions. Lucy Marcus & Stefan Wolff talk about business, politics, society, culture, and what it all means.

    www.navigatingthevortex.com
    Lucy P. Marcus & Stefan Wolff
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We live in a complex and ever-changing world. To navigate the vortex we must adapt to change quickly, think critically, and make sound decisions. Lucy Marcus & Stefan Wolff talk about business, politics, society, culture, and what it all means.

www.navigatingthevortex.com
Lucy P. Marcus & Stefan Wolff
政治・政府 政治学 経済学
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  • Trump is not trying to appease Putin – he is building a dangerous new world order

    Trump is not trying to appease Putin – he is building a dangerous new world order
    2025/02/24
    There has been much and justified focus on the implications of a likely deal between US president Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin and the overwhelmingly negative consequences this will have for Ukraine and Europe. But if Trump and Putin make a deal, there is much more at stake than Ukraine’s future borders and Europe’s relationship with the US.As we are nearing the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine’s future is more in doubt than it has ever been since February 2022. For once, analogies to Munich 1938 are sadly appropriate. This is not because of a mistaken belief that Putin can be appeased, but rather because great powers, once again, make decisions on the fate of weaker states and without them in the room.Similar to the pressure that Czechoslovakia experienced from both Germany and its supposed allies France and Britain in 1938, Ukraine is now under pressure from Russia on the battlefield and the US both diplomatically and economically. Trump and his team are pushing hard for Ukraine to make territorial concessions to Russia and accept that some 20% of Ukrainian lands under Russia’s illegal occupation are lost. In addition, Trump demands that Ukraine compensate the United States for past military support by handing over half of its mineral and rare earth resources.The American refusal to provide tangible security guarantees not only for Ukraine but also for allied Nato troops if they were deployed to Ukraine as part of a ceasefire or peace agreement smacks of the Munich analogy. Not only did France and Britain at the time push Czechoslovakia to cede the ethnic German-majority Sudetenland to Nazi Germany. They also did nothing when Poland and Hungary also seized parts of the country. And they failed to respond when Hitler – a mere six months after the Munich agreement – broke up what was left of Czechoslovakia by creating a Slovak puppet state and occupying the remaining Czech lands.There is every indication that Putin is unlikely to stop in or with Ukraine. And it is worth remembering that the second world war started 11 months after Neville Chamberlain thought he had secured “peace in our time”.The Munich analogy may not carry that far, however. Trump is not trying to appease Putin because he thinks, as Chamberlain and Daladier did in 1938, that he has weaker cards than Putin. What seems to drive Trump is a more simplistic view of the world in which great powers carve out spheres of influence in which they do not interfere.The problem for Ukraine and Europe in such a world order is that Ukraine is certainly not considered by anyone in Trump’s team as part of an American zone of influence, and Europe is at best a peripheral part of it.For Trump, this isn’t really about Ukraine or Europe but about re-ordering the international system in a way that fits his 19th-century view of the world in which the US lives in splendid isolation and virtually unchallenged in the western hemisphere. In this world view, Ukraine is the symbol of what was wrong with the old order. Echoing the isolationism of Henry Cabot, Trump’s view is that the US has involved itself into too many different foreign adventures where none of its vital interests were at stake.Echoing Putin’s talking points, the war against Ukraine no longer is an unjustified aggression but was, as Trump has now declared, Kyiv’s fault. Ukraine has become the ultimate test that the liberal international order failed to pass.The war against Ukraine clearly is a symbol of the failure of the liberal international order, but hardly its sole cause. In the hands of Trump and Putin it has become the tool to deal it a final blow. But while the US and Russia, in their current political configurations, may have found it easy to bury the existing order, they will find it much harder to create a new one.The push-back from Ukraine and key European countries may seem inconsequential for now, but even without the US, the EU and Nato have strong institutional roots and deep pockets. For all the justified criticism of the mostly aspirational responses from Europe so far, the continent is built on politically and economically far stronger foundations than Russia and the overwhelming majority of its people have no desire to emulate the living conditions in Putin’s want-to-be empire.Nor will Trump and Putin be able to rule the world without China. A deal between them may be Trump’s idea of driving a wedge between Moscow and Beijing, but this is unlikely to work given Russia’s dependence on China and China’s rivalry with the US.If Trump makes a deal with Xi as well, for example over Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea, let alone over Taiwan, all he would achieve is further retrenchment of the US to the western hemisphere. This would leave Putin and Xi to pursue their own, existing deal of a no-limits partnership unimpeded by an American-led counter-weight.From the perspective of ...
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    6 分
  • Europe may be willing to invest in its security, but is it able to do so?

    Europe may be willing to invest in its security, but is it able to do so?
    2025/02/22
    The last week has left European leaders in little doubt that they will be mostly on their own when it comes to providing security guarantees to Ukraine when Russia and the US have made a deal on the future of the country. This will most likely be a deal negotiated largely in the absence of both Europe and Ukraine. And it will be a deal that looks, at least in the short term, more like a Russian victory.These are worrying prospects to begin with. They are further exacerbated by the fact that Europe is ill-prepared for a future without a significant US security presence on the continent that has, since the end of the second world war, kept America’s NATO allies in Europe safe—first from Soviet and then from Russian aggression.For these past 80 years, since the ‘big three’ allies of the second world war divided Europe into a Soviet and an American sphere of influence in Yalta, the bill for European security has mostly been footed by Washington—much to the annoyance of US presidents past, and especially present.Even three years into the largest land war on the continent since 1945, European defence spending is dwarfed by America’s. There have been significant and real-term increases in military budgets in Europe since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But even then, defence expenditure in Germany—now the largest spender on defence among European NATO members—stands at below 10% of that of the US. Where Washington committed over $900bn in 2024, Berlin spent less than $90bn.The story is similar when it comes to combat-ready forces. Poland has the largest standing army among EU member states with around 200,000 soldiers, half of whom are land forces that would be critical for both providing peacekeepers to Ukraine and deterring a future Russian aggression against another European country. Yet, Poland has already ruled out sending troops to Ukraine. Other EU countries, including Germany, Spain and Denmark, have been more circumspect about whether they would be willing to put boots on the ground in Ukraine.The clearest commitment so far to contribute ground forces to secure a ceasefire in Ukraine has come from the UK. However, the British prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, has not given any details on actual numbers yet. With the size of the British army now below 80,000 soldiers and reportedly fewer than 20,000 ready to deploy in combat, he will be hard pressed to commit British troops in significant numbers.Compare that to Russia’s armed forces with an overall personnel strength of 1.32 million soldiers, including land forces of 550,000—and the scale of the problem for Europe becomes clear. The necessity to step up and assume greater responsibility for its own security has been recognised by European leaders for some time now. Their increasing determination to do something about it was also evident at a meeting hastily arranged by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, on Monday, February 17, 2025, in Paris.Necessity and willingness to one side, Europe’s ability to act, however, remains in doubt. The meeting in Paris, much like a joint statement last week by the so-called Weimar+ group (Germany, France, Poland + Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, the EU’s diplomatic service and the European Commission) is indicative of how divided Europe is becoming over what course to chart between Russia and the US.There is an emerging “coalition of the willing” who are determined to invest in the continent’s defences in an effort to deter Russia from future aggression and provide Ukraine with badly needed security guarantees once a deal has been agreed between Trump and Putin. This coalition shapes up to be a mix of the Weimar+ group, those countries and institutions invited to the emergency meeting in Paris on Monday (Germany, Britain, Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands and Denmark, as well as the NATO secretary-general and the presidents of the European Council and the European Commission,) and NATO’s other Baltic member states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, as well as recent joiners Sweden and Finland).Potentially, this is a formidable alliance. But as the debate over the commitment to ground forces already indicates, this coalition is far from a unitary force. And even if they were, their ability to act fast and decisively is hampered by the financial constraints they face. Several of them are highly indebted countries, including France, Italy and Spain who are among the EU members with a government-debt-to-GDP ratio above 100%.Germany, on the other hand, has a debt brake in place that prevents the federal government from exceeding an annual borrowing limit of 0.35% of GDP. While temporary emergency exemptions are possible (and were enacted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic), changing this permanently to enable sustained higher defence spending would require a constitutional amendment.With many European countries domestically constrained to increase their ...
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    7 分
  • The US is pushing Europe to the brink

    The US is pushing Europe to the brink
    2025/02/17
    European leaders are scrambling to respond to what looks like the end of reliable US protection of the continent. It is unclear what the “main European countries” (including the UK) might be able to agree beyond a hastily convened meeting in Paris on Monday February 17. But individual countries, including the UK and Germany, have come forward to put concrete offers on the table for Ukraine’s security, which could involve putting their troops on the ground to secure a ceasefire.This unusual circling of the wagons was triggered by the 2025 Munich Security Conference, which ended on Sunday, February 16. It brought to a close a week of remarkable upheaval for Europe, leaving no doubt that two already obvious trends in the deteriorating transatlantic relationship have accelerated further.What the world saw was unabashed US unilateralism when it comes to the war in Ukraine and unashamed American interference into the domestic political processes of European countries—most notably the upcoming German parliamentary elections on February 23, 2025.None of that should have come as a surprise. But the full-on, full-force assault by President Trump’s envoys to Europe was still sobering—especially once all its implications are considered. What was, perhaps, more surprising was that European leaders pushed back and did so in an unusually public and unequivocal way.US unilateralism over Ukraine is leaving Europe out in the cold.Over the course of just a few days, two of the worst European fears were confirmed. First, the Trump administration is pushing ahead with its idea of a US-Russia deal to end the war in Ukraine, leaving Ukraine and the EU out of any negotiations and to their own devices when it comes to post-ceasefire security arrangements.On February 12, 2025, Trump announced that he had spoken at length with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, and subsequently informed Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky of the conversation. The same day, US defence secretary Pete Hegseth, confirmed at a press conference after a meeting of Nato defence ministers in Brussels that direct negotiations between Russia and the US would begin immediately and not include any European or Ukrainian officials.Hegseth also poured cold water on any hopes that there would be robust US security guarantees for Ukraine. He explicitly ruled out that US troops would serve as peacekeepers in Ukraine or that any future Russian attack on forces deployed by other Nato members would be considered an attack on the whole alliance and trigger a collective response as provided under article 5 of the Nato treaty.For once, the European reaction was swift and, at least on paper, decisive. Right after Hegseth’s comments in Brussels, the Weimar+ group (Germany, France, Poland + Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, the European External Action Service and the European Commission) issued a joint statement reiterating their commitment to enhanced support in defence of Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity.On February 14, the EU’s top officials—Antonio Costa and Ursula von der Leyen—met with Zelensky on the margins of the Munich Security Conference. They assured him of the Union’s “continued and stable support to Ukraine until a just, comprehensive and lasting peace is reached”.The following day, Costa’s speech in Munich reiterated this commitment. Similar to earlier comments by Nato’s secretary general Mark Rutte, Costa underlined Europe’s determination to “to act better, stronger and faster in building the Europe of defence”.But these declarations of the EU’s determination to continue supporting Ukraine do not reflect consensus inside the Union on what to do and, importantly, how to do it. Weimar+ only includes a select number of EU member states, institutions, and the UK, underlining the continuing difficulties in achieving unanimity on critical security and defence issues. European unity is fragile and under threat, including from the US.Unsurprisingly, Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán issued a scathing condemnation of the Weimar+ statement as a “sad testament of bad Brusselian leadership”.Orbán’s comments play right into many Europeans’ fears about another dark side of Trump’s agenda when it comes to transatlantic relations. As foreshadowed in the influential Project 2025 report by a coalition of conservative US thinktanks, the Trump administration is intent on weakening European unity. This will include preventing the UK from slipping “back into the orbit of the EU” and “developing new allies inside the EU—especially the Central European countries”.Trump’s vice president, JD Vance, used his speech in Munich to claim that the real threat to European security was not coming from Russia or China, but rather “from within”. He went on to chide “EU commissars” and insinuated that Europe’s current leaders had more in common with the “tyrannical forces on ...
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    8 分

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