Europe’s Increasingly Complicated Relationship with Russia

Cathryn Clüver-Ashbrook explains why cracks have emerged within Europe on how to deal with Russia.

The bipolar world that framed international relations for nearly half a century may have fallen alongside the Berlin Wall, but the aftermath was far from the “End of History” as Francis Fukuyama posited at the time. While the breakup of the Soviet Bloc and subsequent economic and political reforms significantly altered the geo-political landscape, many of the institutions created during the Cold War still persist today, none so obvious as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Next year will mark 70 years since the founding of NATO, and if the end of the Cold War marked a major shift in the organization’s mission, escalating tensions with Russia in recent years seem to be moving it back towards its initial purpose.

The list of Russian provocations over the last decade runs long: Invading Georgia in 2008, annexing Crimea in 2014, instigating civil war in Eastern Ukraine, poisoning political dissidents in England, and interfering with democratic elections across Europe and the United States.

But while the Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation hung over European nations equally, Russia’s recent provocations have affected NATO member states in different ways, revealing fissures in desired strategies and outcomes. For instance, bordering nations like Latvia and Estonia have interpreted Russian aggression as an existential threat that requires a strong response, while other countries prefer a softer approach to allow for cooperation with Russia on issues such as migrant flows out of Syria.

In this episode, we dig into the historical and contemporary forces influencing Europe’s perspective on Russia with Cathryn Clüver-Ashbrook, executive director of the Belfer Center’s new Project on Trans-Atlantic and European Relations, which kicks off with an event featuring faculty chair Nicholas Burns and a coterie of special guests on April 24th.

Transcript

Note: This transcript was automatically generated and only lightly edited.

Matt: I wanted to start off with a little bit of a historical look. We came from this bipolar world where it was the Soviet Union versus the West, then we entered this 20-year period where things were a bit up in the air. Now things seem to be changing again. Can you give us some perspective?

Clüver-Ashbrook: Yeah, so, of course, the history of this relationship is absolutely a historic one, and you’re right to point out that I think in our understanding, our western understanding of Russia, one does need to look back historically and, in some respects, look back much further than the outcome of World War II.

If you spend some time reading or listening to, as I have to in my roles which you described, Sergei Lavrov speak for instance at the Munich Security Conference, if you parse some of those speeches …

Matt: He is the foreign minister for Russia.

Clüver-Ashbrook: Correct, of Russia. If you parse specifically, for instance, Vladimir Putin’s 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference, you’ll see some of the basic tenets that underlie Russian understanding of the world, and if you think of the Soviet Union as it was before its fall in ’91, this enormous landmass, this demographically rich, differentiated in terms of religions and peoples, landmass, and then this sort of idea that that territory was always going to be to some extent ungovernable and uncontrollable, so to Russians, Napoleon or Hitler or some version of invasion or subversion in the country could always happen again.

Russians feel largely that their territory is generally unsafe, and I think in some respects that, jumping way ahead, gives you an idea of why we’re now seeing these sorts of tactical measures deployed from Russia vis-a-vis the European Union to kind of split the European Union from the inside, but then also to basically split the Atlantic, to split the West, capital W.

To take a step back, of course, NATO, the separation between NATO and the Warsaw Pact in and of itself, of course, was an adversarial relationship, but, it’s important to think about … and, also, when we think about what other sort of avenues might there be to repair or to think about how we could we have a more engaged and positive global viewpoint together with the Russians on a couple of the issues that are really transnational in context, it’s important to think that their war tools that were invented, for instance, in the ’70s to try to create a modus operandi between the Soviet Union specifically in the Warsaw Pact and the West, and I think, specifically, there of the Helsinki Final Act that was signed in August 1975 because, there, we have sort of a couple of … it was categorized in baskets, but a couple of areas of working together, critical, of course, the sort of weapons control mechanisms, the arms control components that really were the bracket of what the Cold War was, the arms components, the arms deal components, but also, in the fourth basket, to try to think about interpersonal contact, something that, after the Cold War, we lost. We lost this idea that there would be an importance in investing in the image of the West in Russia.

Last week, we had Victoria Nuland here, who was the former US assistant secretary for Europe and Eurasia, and Victoria had I think very nuanced short descriptions of the phase that came after the fall of the wall, which you alluded to, but then also the disintegration ultimately of the Soviet Union, and she described it in three parts. Her first description is the field of dreams period under Yeltsin, where I think we were in our, the West, in our view of the end of this cataclysmic division that had so impacted Europe and the West just …

Matt: The end of history, right?

Clüver-Ashbrook: … exactly, the end of history, just assumed that our theory of the case held solid, which was that Russia wanted to live in the western world order, it wanted to become a responsible power, and we were going to help it.

I got into this business by sitting behind Warren Christopher when I was in high school, frankly, doing a presidential classroom where Warren Christopher was being deposed on Russian food aid, a food aid to Russia, economic aid. We pumped $20 billion into supporting the Russian economy back in the day because that was how we saw that.

That even held true when Putin first came to power. We thought this could be the extension of the reforms of Perestroika that we had seen under Gorbachev, a modernization, a true modernization of Russia, and we quickly saw … I mean, in as much as there’s always advances, there’s always setbacks, and we know from what we teach here at the Kennedy School that change creates loss and things are difficult, but we saw him then already pretty much in the early stages of his time begin to dismantle the things that we in the West hold dear, local elections.

He went after the oligarchs and began to bind them to the Russian State. Either you’re with us or you’re without us, or you’re against us, if you will, and so then we had that sort of phase where then Secretary of State here in the United States Condoleezza Rice said, “Look, let’s try to get them off of this. Let’s try to get Putin off of this ideological push. Let’s try to get him more into a transactional relationship,” and that’s what Victoria Nuland then describes, again, I think I find this very fitting, the porcupine partnership.

Some things work and some things are very prickly and uncomfortable, and that’s when Putin begins to really see … or that’s when we begin to understand how Putin begins to see the color revolutions that began to start sort of in the early 2000s, and he sees those and the invasion of Iraq ultimately as moves that are designed to encroach on him or designed to put Russia in its place, and so that begins to really support this idea of the worldview, the Russian Soviet worldview, again, that we see also echoed in literature in a way that essentially pushes him to give this speech in Munich in ’07 where he sort of lays down the law, which is to say, “This is going to be ultimately an adversarial relationship and you cannot continue to encroach on Russia,” and so, despite the fact, your point about NATO, that in the Clinton years we set up the Partnership for Peace and the NATO-Russia Council and all sorts of institutional mechanisms that we in the West felt were designed to bring Russia closer into a conversation, but to find partnership agreements that would sort of extend the basic ideas of the Helsinki Final Act.

With this speech in Munich, Putin essentially says, “Look, you’re the aggressor. You’re on the offensive. You’re moving into our territory, and this will stop,” and so that sort of enters or that sort of heralds this, what Victoria Nuland calls the back to the future phase, which is where we get to this idea that now we’re hearing bandied about, not that I necessarily agree with this, but we’re hearing bandied about that we are back in the extension of the Cold War or worse. The president picked up that language in a series of tweets just last week that we’re in a situation that’s worse than the Cold War was, so … and it’s true if you think about just this last year.

I grew up in Germany. The wall fell when I was 13 years old. I would never think that in my lifetime, to your point about the end of history, within a year’s span, we would come on three occasions almost visually close enough to having an encounter between American and Russian troops, or the US and Russian military, because in the president’s decision to launch airstrikes against Syria, one of the primary concerns was could this set us up for another confrontation with Russia?

We had a confrontation not a few months ago between Russian mercenaries and US Special Forces in Syria, so if you’d ask me then to predict when we were in this early wonderful phase that we would end up here again, I would have declared [inaudible 00:10:40], and yet here we are.

Matt: Russia has come historically from a Great Power mindset, while the European Union is based around shared values. It’s a group of nations that are trying to find ways to collaborate. Does that mean Russia has a fundamentally different worldview on how it’s approaching its policy?

Clüver-Ashbrook: Yes and no. I think, historically, what Gorbachev wanted around the time of the German unification was something he called the Common European Home, and so this gets back to the Helsinki point, which James A. Baker and then President Bush actually used to convince Gorbachev that the countries in Europe would have free choice of allegiance and if they chose NATO, so be it, and wouldn’t he have to agree on the premise of the Helsinki Agreement, and Gorbachev said yes a number of times, very smart negotiation tactic.

He also said, “Look, what I want is to see the construction of a Common European Home where Russia could be a part of this because we are in the process of changing our political system of democratizing, if you will,” and that gets back to the fundamental values that underpinned both the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The members have to be democracies, and that is true of the European Union as well.

Now, this is an aside, we’re seeing various different trends now emerge within the European Union, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Austria, where the definition of democracy is beginning to get a little blurrier, and we’ll talk about that and the Russian role in that shortly, but, originally, I think Russia’s design would have been to have part of that or some control of that and, for some of the things we’ve already discussed, that viewpoint shifted. Russia had to become … became a lot more self-interested.

Now, you’re already alluding to the fact that in as much as you have cohesion in the European Union of still 28, because it is a European union, what you don’t have is a cohesive policy vis-a-vis Russia, and part of that, again, is historic.

If you think about Germany, the country where I was born and raised and own a passport of, it was split down in the middle and, as a result, you have populations within, certainly now, even the German public, but also the German political elite for whom one of the legs of even western foreign policy, this long idea that we would always have to at least get along with the Soviet Union, maybe accommodate, but that if something happened in the middle of the Cold War, the main target was certainly going to be Germany, and so all the more the importance of the western and US protective umbrella.

Of course, that was the main outlook for western German foreign policy, but also this idea of Ostpolitik that came up in the ’60s and was spearheaded by Willy Brandt, and so you see now some of the remnants in the discussions even of our current cases, the Skripal poisoning case in Salisbury, England, where you had essentially a dissident or a flipped spy, if you will, and his daughter poisoned.

The way that the German public and the way that the German political leaders are discussing this begins to show that there are pretty significant cracks of understanding and different viewpoints on what our relationship between these two powers, and this gets back to where are we in thinking about world … the remnants of the Cold War rather, how we should interpret western interpretations of this case or if not in fact the Russians are right when Sergey Lavrov and others raised a number of questions, although now, again, the OPCW, which has investigated the Skripal case, has decided without a doubt, or with nary a doubt, that the British assessments of that poisoning case were cracked and that there was a Russian involvement, but that’s just to say that there are deep cracks within the European Union vis-a-vis their relationship to Russia and that Russia is exposing these because part of Vladimir Putin’s ethos towards its own public is to say the West is weak, the West is exploitable and the West can crack in a way that we can’t.

The way that I see it, he is using four tactical areas or four tactical principles really to make that exceptionally clear and to create more disaggregation within the European Union and within the West or in the West writ large.

Matt: One of the ways we’re seeing some of those cracks is in a bifurcation between countries right on the Russian border and the countries that are a little bit more geographically separated, the Baltic states like Estonia, Latvia, Poland. They see Russia in many ways as a existential threat to their existence especially through things like hybrid warfare where it may not be an overt attack. It may be something more similar to Crimea, which NATO may not be able to respond to as easily. Can you talk about that, that fissure and … Yeah?

Clüver-Ashbrook: Yeah, so you’re absolutely right. I think part of, again, this gets back to the historic relationships between the countries that are now within the European Union that were vassal states, that were part of the Soviet Union, and that in some respects, and some political scientists argue that that has still been the logic in Russia and that Crimea is just an example that has been played out over and over and over again because, one … and this gets to one of my four parts already, but this idea of territorial interference.

The Baltic countries fear that and have in some respects seen that, so the 2007 denial-of-service hack attack on Estonia is certainly one way. You see Russia moving into Swedish waterways and airspace to posture, but you see it in these sort of the [fringe 00:17:41] countries that were, just like you mentioned, in Ukraine’s case, for instance, pursuing this association agreement with the European Union.

That is true of a number of countries, Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine, and, there, Russia has decided to interfere in a way or stoke existing animosities such that within many of these countries, and then Crimea and Ukraine are the extreme example, frozen conflict.

It’s done that with its war in Georgia and it’s done with its interference in Moldova, because the logic behind that would be, if you create a frozen conflict, then that becomes less and less attractive for the European Union to pursue their often … They’re hard and arduous, not unlike pursuing EU membership, which the Western Balkan is pursuing and Russia is meddling there as well, but it just makes it harder for the European Union to say yes, and so that was part of the tactic originally in Ukraine before the annexation of Crimea and, right now, as we’re seeing the continuous violations of the Minsk II Agreement, that seems to be playing out as the tactic there as well.

Matt: It actually mirrors the Russian tactics in our elections here in the United States and other western nations in finding internal disagreements and trying to exploit them.

Clüver-Ashbrook: Freezing them in time or paralyzing them in some way, shape or form, and so, again, I think this is one example of where Russia is generally playing what otherwise look like a very weak hand. They don’t really want to shoulder the responsibility of taking on difficult situations in that same way. They’re actually interested in the Donbass region staying unstable. They don’t really fully want to deal with what it would mean to resurrect that, create government structures that would actually work now. It’s merely about this disruptive element, so you’re absolutely right then to point to the countries within the European Union where similar things are being attempted.

We’ve talked a little bit about those sort territorial interference pieces and then the systemic interference piece. That’s sort of piece number two, so Estonia we talked about, the sort of incursions and provocations and then, exactly what you alluded to, we now have … I find sufficient proof of the meddling here in the 2016 election. That goes on right around the border states just as well.

In the Baltics and in other places, it’s useful to make a little bit of a distinction between, because we’re here at the Kennedy School, between soft power, as Joe Nye has talked about it, so the sort of more overt things, the fact that you have Russia today or Russian language radio and television stations still streaming into large parts of specifically the Baltic countries, but even in places where the Russian linguistic minorities exist.

That is a perfectly overt version of soft power, and then what other people have now called sharp power, which is exactly the more subversive, what goes on in Facebook, the fake news pieces, the kind of things that are generated with the intent to disturb, destroy, disaggregate, those kind of things. That’s been attempted right across the … what used to be those … essentially, the countries of the Soviet Union.

If you look at a couple of these countries, Poland, for instance, once liberated from the specter of Soviet rule, was the most Atlanticist and has always been considered the most Atlanticist of the eastern EU members today, and they’re bizarrely were sort of recognizing or seeing a strange phenomenon, and as much as Poland continues to be anti-Russian, again, in the Baltics and in those border states, those were the countries that first welcomed and were very excited about the NATO decision to send in troop contingents as part of an enhanced forward presence, which I surmise will become not rotating troop contingents, the US is heading up one of them, but fixed ones.

Poland has been very adamant to continue to bring in the Aegis missile protection system that Russia, again, thinks it’s geared toward it, and then in the official vernacular, that, of course, is supposed to protect against missile attacks possibly from Iran just as well, so Poland and Romania have been really pushing to have deep components of a NATO defense infrastructure within them and, yet, in Poland, we’re seeing the major shifts that really erode what would be considered democratic fabric.

That, again, is partially Russian tactic, potentially, but partially evolutions that, again, come from not fully borne-out transition processes and internal dynamics within these countries, in Poland and Hungary and elsewhere, that make certain populations there more vulnerable to a populous rhetoric as we’re seeing it play out right across the West.

Matt: You mentioned a couple of countries, Hungary, Austria. These are countries that have seen far right populous type movements take power in recent years and, in a lot of ways, they are responding to … not to what’s going on in Russia so much as what is happening in the Levant, migrant flows and refugees coming in, and those concerns are not too dissimilar from what’s been talked about in Germany and France and these other countries which are farther from the Russian border. Some of the thinking has been, “Well, we need to accommodate Russia to some degree because we need their help in Syria,” for instance. How is that impacting this dynamic?

Clüver-Ashbrook: It’s a very interesting power play that you’re alluding to because what Russia has done, and this is a strategic piece, not necessarily a tactical piece at all, for Russia, and this is my maybe primary concern, that unlike Russia and China, the West writ large, but, specifically, Europe and the United States, even as separate entities, are not seemingly putting together a strategic worldview despite the fact that we have a national security strategy now in the United States.

To look just at the president’s tweets last week on his relationship to Russia within an hour and a half saying that missiles would be incoming, nice and new and smart, then tweeting within the hour that we needed a good relationship with Russia to deal with all sorts of different issues, as you’ve alluded to, and then, third, to tweet again within another hour that the depth of the crisis with Russia was due to the Democrats at their insistence on this collusion investigation, if you were on the military side in either branch of the United States Armed Forces and you had to build a strategy on this, in my mind, it would give you whiplash.

I worry because what’s happening on the other side and what’s happening in Russia is to say to look at the Middle East, and to have been able over the last few years in part because of their own strategic interest, because what is propping up the Russian economy is its strength in the energy sector and the ability to still refine oil and deal in liquified natural gas.

That’s one of the ways, and to complete my circle of four here shortly, one of the other ways, of course, that Russia is very successful at splitting Europe, but, conversely, then it’s looking for ways to secure that sort of muscular posture in the world specifically since, of course, these sanctions are doing their work, so to have control over the energy markets in the world has been a strategic interest of Russia, and so for it to get involved in the Middle East would be almost a clear pinpoint.

When I was at the Munich Security Conference just this past January, people there were talking about Russia in an odd refraction of what Madeleine Albright used to think about the United States, meaning, to say, in that particular region, Russia has become the indispensable nation. They have become the number phone call, and until we saw some of these changes in certain relations, the US relationship with Israel, for instance, recently, Russia was the number phone call for everybody in the region regardless of how almost they stood to one another.

I think, in terms of the West, that makes it very dangerous for a lot of the points you’ve already alluded to that are more self-interested, meaning to say the migration flow piece, but back to our values, the kind of questions we are again asking ourselves in relationship to Assad’s, frankly, regime of terror in Syria. Where are the basic understandings again of the responsibility to protect, what we do with someone who has killed the largest group of his own civilians over the course of these seven years? What do we do about the proxy wars that are playing out in Yemen? What do we do about Iran and other forces in the north of Syria beginning to carve up Syrian territory for itself, and what does that mean for prolonged conflicts in the region?

I’m not seeing a lot of joint, applied strategic thinking by the United States and the Europeans together, and you see that in the expressions that came out of … or that followed the attacks on Friday. You saw some great support by the Europeans and, again, some deep questions because … and then some of the deep questions were not unfounded, which was to say what’s our strategy there, because Russia has a single-minded, interest-based, often energy-based strategy for that region, and in that basic construct we’re not measuring up, we’re not rising to the set up the multiplicity of challenges that face us there.

Matt: Is that because do you think of disagreement between the United States and the various EU and NATO countries on what they would like to see the end result be, or is it simply because their interests? Their hands are tied when they might want to pursue an end goal.

Clüver-Ashbrook: I think that there are a couple of things that come together there, but I think the first … and I think you’re right there, the fundamental pieces, that it is unclear because, ultimately, and hindsight is always 20/20, the way that we dealt with Iraq and the way that we dealt with Afghanistan, again, America’s longest war, we have not figured out as the West writ large because, again, there were coalitions engaged in both of those missions and continued to be engaged in those missions, as the West, we have not figured out how to restore countries in which we have intervened to the kind of economic and self-fulfilling, self-reliant kind of economies and societies as we may have imagined when the first bombs were dropped or boots hit the ground.

That in part explains the wavering and some might say dithering that we saw under the Obama administration with respect to the Red Line, but in part that also explains our unwillingness to really define a serious strategy and in some way to cop out to say, “Look, you know, focus strikes on specific issues and specific areas that have to do with chemical warfare,” but then the question becomes, “Is it still all right for a leader of the country to be killing his own people with bullets? Are we just going against the weapon of war or are we going against the war itself, and if we did intervene, in which way would we intervene, and what is the long term plan?

That’s exactly the questions we heard raised by members of Congress. They’re still being really loudly raised today as we speak on Capitol Hill, which is to say, “Is there any way that we can either shape or curtail or frame the president’s ability to act in this way in this volatile area?”

I think those are really fundamentally the big questions of our time, and back to your original point, I think what we’re seeing in Europe, this forced introspection that comes from a series of shocks that you have discussed here on your program from the eurozone crisis, the migration crisis and, now, what we’re seeing, as you I think rightly described it, a crisis of democracy right at the heart of Europe is not only demanding European’s attention in a distracting way, but these are really fundamental issues that the Europeans are grappling with and that, in some respects, lead to very basic questions. Who are we? What do we want, and what is our outlook in the world?

In some way, shape or form, many of the European countries are doing that. We saw, in Germany, it took six months to form a government. In France, we have a young upstart populous, fundamentally, government who’s making big demands and big changes and then, in some respects, that country, that sort of ring of countries that you mentioned, we have Viktor Orbán now, a week and a half ago, exclaiming victory for illiberal democracy.

These bifurcations or this plethora of differentiation across the continent is real, and what it does it limits the actual political capacity, but also the political creativity, the ability to work on the drawing board on what action threshold one might want to take in the long term. I mean, it’s wonderful, if you will, that our UK and French allies joined the United States in this campaign and I think in a justified campaign, but I think, conversely, all the questions that are being raised now, too little, too late, what’s the plan, where are we going, I think are all justified questions.

Matt: All these are issues that you’re going to be exploring further with the Project on European and Trans-Atlantic Relations. Can you just tell us a little bit about how you’re going to be looking at this?

Clüver-Ashbrook: Yeah, I think you started our conversation exactly right by looking ahead to 2019, which is … marks the 70th anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. We celebrated not too long ago a similar anniversary for the Marshall Plan.

Again, the history of that relationship after World War II is an unlikely one, but is really the foundation of the institutional system and the global order in which we still operate today, and I think if you are a member of the West writ large, I think, especially of my generation, and I still think of our student generation as well, but we’re right on the cusp where things are changing, it is fundamental to continue to understand what these values mean, understand that there is possibly a difference in the ranking of these value.

I think that’s part of the reason why we’re seeing these sort of gaps in understanding across the Atlantic because, while we might fundamentally believe in the same values, I think we might rank them a little differently in this modern day and age, and so we are really wanting to explore with this program in part what does the West still mean. Should it still mean how can the United States and the European Union continue to deliver upon some of their basic promises, which is to, if you bring it down to the really basic ideas, which is physical security and then economics security, because wrapped in this is an understanding of liberalism, an understanding of modern and evolved capitalism, ideally a better understanding in what equality means in the 21st Century, because as you alluded, I think a lot of the problems or a lot of the democratic deficit maybe that you will see in a lot of the eastern European countries comes not necessarily from capitalism per se, but comes from the way that inequality has played out and the way that globalization has played out in the practice in many of our lives?

Those are the arguments that have been pulled in to explain why our president is Donald Trump or why the leadership in some of the European countries is named Viktor Orbán and [Kuczynski 00:36:34], so what we’re trying to do with this program is really, for the first time really, and this is almost appalling to say, in decades to bring continuous teaching on Europe and the European Union to the Kennedy School, in my mind, the premier institution for the teaching of public policy in this country.

To look at that and to have that anchor here, we’ve had a number of visiting professorships, which we will continue the Pierre Keller Visiting Professorship, bring teaching on Europe and the European Union and the Transatlantic relationship luckily to the Kennedy School every spring. We have a Pierre Keller professor here right now, and we’ll have another in the following spring.

What we’re really aiming to do is to anchor a deep understanding for American students, for international students, this is a school that has over 40%, almost 50% of international students, that people understand what are the institutions, and that gets back to sort of the nuts and bolts of how a bill becomes alive, if you will, but how that works across the Atlantic and how we make policy and steer policy on some of these critical questions.

Of course, the security dimension is a critical one, but security, as you’ve mentioned, the idea of security has expanded to include cyber, to include energy policy, to include the elements of hybrid warfare, but particularly the Transatlantic case also, things like nuclear security and where are we, if you will, with questions like New START and other ways in which we have designed systems to keep us safe?

We’re going to be examining those elements. We’re going to be examining diplomacy between … in the West, but also I think strategies in our fourth work stream that keep our democracy strong, and that in some respects gets to, “Wow do we tackle together those transnational challenges, migration, terrorism, pandemics?” but also some of the sub-questions, “What does the future of work look in the 21st Century? Can we actually still guarantee wealth and progress for people in the West based on how we’ve dealt with globalization up until this point?”

That’s why I think it’s really critical that we have this program, the public policy institution, because here, ideally, all these nodes are supposed to come together in an interdisciplinary place of work and study. We bring students together that range in age from 23 to early 50s, so all of these people have perspectives on this. They have ideas on this. They have smart views on how technology is going to influence the world, which the tactical and strategic foreign policy thinkers have operated and how that’s going to have to change.

That’s why I’m very excited that we’re going to launch this program next week, that we’re going to launch it here because I think, again, we want to do work that’s academically grounded, we want to do research, but we also want to, and that is the Harvard Kennedy School tradition, teach through the eyes of practitioners and convene our students who in many respects are two steps ahead of us in terms of thinking about the future with some of these large questions that plague the relationship between Europe and the United States to again to turn that narrative back towards something positive, optimistic, hope inspiring and something that then generates a next generation of leaders in this space.