Future Proofing the US-European Relationship

The Moynihan International Affairs Seminar Series presents Rachel Rizzo. When Biden announced his commitment to permanently base US troops in Poland at the NATO Summit in June 2022, Europe let out a collective sigh of relief. After years of Trump’s abuse, and in the wake of Putin’s assault on Ukraine, America was indeed ‘back’—just like President Biden promised. Europeans oughtn’t be so confident. The Biden Administration made these decisions amidst an intense four-month crisis, with insufficient attention paid to trade-offs and political realities. While Ukraine has, indeed, pulled US attention back to Europe, the strategic long-term focus is still on China and the Indo-Pacific region writ large. This means Europe has an opportunity at this very moment to get its act together, become a geopolitically strategic player, and assert its position as both a geoeconomic and security power. It won’t be easy, but it is necessary, especially given the unknown landscape of future US administrations. This talk will focus on ways Europe (and individual states within the EU) can “future-proof” its relationship with the United States to create a more equal US-European partnership in the areas of security, trade, technology, and more.

Rachel Rizzo is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center. Her research focuses on European security, NATO, and the transatlantic relationship. From 2019-2020, she spent a year as a Robert Bosch fellow in Berlin, Germany, where she worked at the Berlin office of Human Rights Watch leading a research project on the EU’s dual-use surveillance-technology export policy and serving as an advisor to a member of the German Bundestag.