Two veteran European political leaders agreed this week that Europe’s relationship with the United States needs to adapt to be able to address fast-changing economic and security problems. They also agreed that Germany must play a more assertive role if Europe is to resolve these challenges.

Javier Solana, the former secretary general of NATO and the former de-facto European foreign minister, joined former British Foreign Secretary David Miliband at a John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at Harvard Kennedy School to debate the transatlantic alliance and its handling of issues including Afghanistan and Iran.

Solana and Miliband also took part in a series of events and master classes during Europe Week, organized by the Future of Diplomacy Project in the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. They visited the Kennedy School as Fisher Family Fellows.

As soon as Paul Doty launched what is now Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs in 1974, he began planning a scholarly journal on international security. He shrugged off colleagues’ concerns that there would be little market for such a journal.Thirty-six years after the first issue appeared in the summer of 1976, the Belfer Center’s quarterly International Security consistently ranks No. 1 or No. 2 out of over 70 international affairs journals surveyed by Thomson Reuters each year.

On the eve of the Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul, South Korea, a new study finds that an international initiative to secure all vulnerable nuclear stockpiles within four years has reduced the dangers posed by many of the world’s highest-risk nuclear stockpiles.  But the new analysis, by researchers with the Project on Managing the Atom at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center, also concludes that much will remain to be done to ensure that all nuclear weapons and material are secure when the current four-year effort comes to an end.

How will Vladimir Putin’s return to the Kremlin impact American national interests? Should the U.S. allow Georgia to block Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organization? How can the U.S. engage  Russia to reach further cuts in nuclear arsenals and reduce the global threat of nuclear terrorism? These thorny policy questions and others are tackled in a new report by the Task Force on Russia and U.S. National Interests, a group of business leaders and former military officers, senior government officials, and diplomats.

In September, experts from Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and other Boston-area universities participated in a three day conference convened by the Belfer Center to examine policy choices facing the fast-changing field of information and communications technology.

The U.S. government could save the economy hundreds of billions of dollars per year by 2050 by spending a few billion dollars more a year to spur innovations in energy technology, according to a new report by researchers at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. The three-year project by the Belfer Center's Energy Technology Innovation Policy research group calls for doubling investment and adopting policy changes in energy technology.

Industry and academic experts from Harvard, MIT, and other Boston-area universities met for a three-day conference in September 2011 to examine policy choices facing the fast-changing field of information and communications technology at the intersection of public policy. The conference was convened by the Belfer Center for Science and International Affair’s Information and Communications Technology and Public Policy Project (ICTPP) at the Harvard Kennedy School.

The United States and China need to move beyond a Cold War mindset and reframe their relationship as “a community of interests” in which they work together as partners, the Chinese ambassador to the United States said in a policy address at Harvard Kennedy School. Ambassador Zhang Yesui spoke to an overflow audience in the Wiener Auditorium on Wednesday, Oct. 12, in an event hosted by the Future of Diplomacy Project in the School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Zhang also took questions from the audience after his speech in an off-the-record discussion moderated by R. Nicholas Burns, professor of the practice of diplomacy and international politics and director of the Future of Diplomacy Project.

CAMBRIDGE, MA. - Eric Rosenbach, a veteran Army intelligence officer who served as executive director for research in the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs from 2007 to 2010, has been appointed deputy assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced the appointment on Tuesday, Oct. 4, in Washington. Rosenbach left the Kennedy School in 2010 to become managing director of the Markle Foundation, handling national security issues, and moved earlier this year to a senior role at Good Harbor Consulting, a leading consulting firm on cyber-security and related issues. He remained a faculty affiliate at the Belfer Center and an adjunct lecturer at the school, teaching a course on counterterrorism policy and national security law.

Many of this year’s Arab uprisings are evolving from angry popular revolts into drawn-out political struggles to build democratic systems that will protect basic civic rights and social justice, analysts told a John F. Kennedy Jr. forum audience at Harvard Kennedy School on Monday, Sept. 19.