09 Dec Euro-Atlantic Café: The State of the Alliance (Event Summary)

The Euro-Atlantic Café returned with its third edition this past Friday with the event ‘The State of the Alliance’ in the Continental Hotel Budapest. Two days after the NATO Summit, it was very timely to put the Transatlantic relations in the limelight with our guests Amb. Dan Fried, Weiser Family Fellow of the Atlantic Council, Damon M. Wilson, executive vice-president of the Atlantic Council, Benjamin Haddad, director of the Future Europe Initiative at the Atlantic Council, and Márton Ugrósdy, director of the Institute for Foreign Affairs and Trade, moderated by Edit Inotai, senior fellow of CEID.

Transatlantic relations suffered a serious blow in the past years. Europe tends to blame the current US administration, however symptoms of an estrangement have been there for more then a decade. The decision of the Trump administration to withdraw from multilateral agreements, the failure of the TTIP negotiations and clashes along the defence budget of the European allies intensified already existing tensions. Is there a way out? How can we relaunch and strengthen our partnership?

In the discussion, we reviewed the state of the Euro-Atlantic cooperation from a Hungarian and an American perspective, with a special focus on security and defence. The panelists emphasized the achievements of the NATO Summit and underlined that there might be personal tensions between the leaders on the surface, there have been tangible and concrete advancements with regard to the challenges the 21st century has in store for the alliance – the mentioning of China in the strategic documents, cyber dimensions and the reiterated commitments towards the allies all prove significant in today’s international security order.

The pre-study of the event, authored by Dániel Bartha, can be read here.

CEID broadcast the whole event oin a live video, it can be (re)watched on our Facebook page.

The event was organized in the framework of the Euro-Atlantic Café series and it was supported by the US Embassy in Budapest.