It’s been a hectic start to the year in international affairs: Greenland, Davos, Minnesota and more. Canada’s Mark Carney has delivered the last rites to the international rules-based order. NATO has settled back into a nervous simmer after Donald Trump escalated his demands to own Greenland only to back off.

Again the question arises: can Europe strengthen itself to a point of security self-reliance and perhaps even form the foundation for a new liberal world order? For our first episode for 2026, David Wroe caught up with Constanze Stelzenmueller, expert on trans-Atlantic security, Fritz Stern Chair and a senior fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, to discuss these questions and more.

Constanze gives her thoughts on Carney’s Davos speech as well as NATO head Mark Rutte’s dismissal that Europe can defend itself without the US. She talks about the difficulties with an independent nuclear deterrent, political dynamics in Europe — including with the far right — and ways for Europe to work around Brussels bureaucracy. Constanze finishes with some reflections from a brilliant short piece she wrote about Germany’s lessons on three-way dependencies on Russia, China and the US, as part of a series about Vladimir Putin’s notorious 2007 speech to the Munich Security Conference.

Links:

The Munich Security Conference’s volume on Putin’s 2007 speech: https://securityconference.org/en/news/full/out-now-selected-key-speeches-volume-iii/

The Steady State’s paper, “Accelerating Authoritarian Dynamics: Assessment of Democratic Decline,” https://substack.com/home/post/p-176315953