When news of Yevgeny Prigozhin and Wagner Group’s march to Moscow broke, there was palpable shock among EU and U.S. officials. The extent to which Western governments were blindsided by a crisis that had been building for months was a reminder of how institutions in the U.K., EU and U.S. struggle to manage geopolitical risk.
The true danger for NATO is not the emergence of European defense capacity, but the lack of it. A rebalanced alliance will require a new paradigm based on closer NATO-EU cooperation with a stronger European pillar within NATO. That will only happen if Europe adopts, and the U.S. supports, a more ambitious European defense agenda.
The AfD party’s current success in Germany was built on social trends that had already become entrenched before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Rather than reflecting a sudden break from the moderate center right, the AfD offered a viable political home for far-right milieus that had always been lurking at the edge of party politics.
