Brussels///Institute///for///Geopolitics

Twelve weeks into Trump’s second term, it is time to acknowledge that the US president has broken with the post-1945 international order with the aim of creating a new one.

The Baltic seabed is home to a web of subsea cables carrying vital telecommunications traffic between EU and NATO states, and linking Russia to its exclave, Kaliningrad. Vital data flows for the financial world, the internet and the military traverse the sea floor, which is also criss-crossed by power cables and gas pipelines. Consequently, the former ‘sea of peace’ has become a focal point of geostrategic rivalry in the wake of a sequence of attacks and disruptions to its critical infrastructure.

If US policies continue to be turbulent and unpredictable, and if Europe fails to strengthen the international role of the euro, China could seize the moment.

Albena Dimitrova is a Bulgarian-born author who relocated to France in 1989. She worked in economics, studying the privatization processes in former Eastern Bloc countries and the associated corruption. Her novel Nous dînerons en français (‘We will dine in French’) portrays the decline of a totalitarian regime through the eyes of a young woman.

André Wilkens is a German social entrepreneur and author. Born in East Berlin in 1963, he is a founding member of the European Council on Foreign Relations and co-founder of the Initiative Offene Gesellschaft.

Join us on Europe Day (9 May) at the Brussels Institute for Geopolitics for a conversation with Herman Van Rompuy, together with BIG’s founding Director Luuk van Middelaar on the topic of ‘Who speaks for Europe.’

It seems like the right moment to re-read Halford Mackinder, a British geographer, politician and influential thinker, whom many regard as the father of geopolitics. Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919), Mackinder’s most famous book, is surprisingly contemporary in content.

In this episode, hosts Christine Mhundwa and Elisa Díaz Gras are joined by Dipo Faloyin, author of Africa Is Not A Country. Dipo’s insightful writing has been featured in The Guardian, The New York Times, Esquire and more. As a journalist and commentator, he explores the complexities of identity, geopolitics and Africa’s evolving relationship with the rest of the world.

The Brussels Institute for Geopolitics (BIG) held a high-level ‘safe space’ strategy session on Wednesday 2 April, bringing together senior officials from across the European Commission for an in-depth exchange on the future of Europe’s energy and climate diplomacy. 

Faced with tectonic shifts, Europe has been jolted into a monumental and unprecedented defence effort. For this to be a success, two elements are of vital importance: an effective chain of command and weapons systems with European 'design authority'.

The Brussels Institute for Geopolitics (BIG) is delighted to welcome Herman Van Rompuy as a member of its Advisory Council, a distinguished group of leaders from the fields of politics, the arts, academia, and business.

The Brussels Institute for Geopolitics held an expert panel ‘Tech Sovereignty – What does it Mean?’ on Wednesday 12 March to discuss Artificial Intelligence and geopolitics.  It started with the launch of World Builders: Technology and The New Geopolitics by political philosopher, author and Portugal’s former Secretary of State for European Affairs, Bruno Maçães, followed by an expert panel on the topic with independent researcher, Ophélie Coelho and Professor of Political Arithmetic at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), Daniel Mügge.

Join us for the launch of World Builders: Technology and the New Geopolitics by Bruno Maçães, followed by an in-depth discussion on tech sovereignty featuring leading thinkers in geopolitics and technology.

‘A week is a long time in politics,’ British Prime Minister Harold Wilson is famously supposed to have said. The seven days between 12 and 19 February delivered some of the most dramatic politics for Europe’s leaders since the Russian invasion of Ukraine three years ago. Despite everything having been announced in advance, the pace of unfolding events still caught everyone off guard.

There is nothing quite like viewing one’s home in Europe – the foundational region of what we now call ‘the global West’ – at a remove. How we view world affairs is heavily contingent on our perspectives and from where we are looking at it.

Joanna Mytkowska is the director of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (since 2007), art critic and historian. She is the co-founder of the famous Foksal Gallery Foundation and curated the Espace 315 space at the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale (2005).

Andrei Grachev is a Russian historian, political scientist, and journalist renowned for his expertise in international relations and his role as the last spokesperson for Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.

The revival of the US Monroe Doctrine through Donald Trump’s offer to ‘buy’ Greenland from Denmark or to take it by force has made the Arctic a focus for renewed geopolitical tension. In pushing back against Europe's presence in the region, Trump has argued that the United States’ sphere of influence should extend across the entire American continent, and used his address to Congress on 4 March 2025 to reassert that control of Greenland is in the interests of US security and the ‘freedom of the world’.

Zelenskyy’s pride had made Trump fly off the handle before. It got the better of him at the White House once more, with fatal consequences. Not since the early days of the war has Ukraine’s future looked less certain.

The Brussels Institute for Geopolitics (BIG) is delighted to welcome Poland as its eighth EU state member, increasing the Institute’s geographic representation in central and eastern Europe, alongside current member, Czechia.

The Paris Summit on Defence brought together eight national leaders, two EU presidents and the NATO secretary-general. Such improvised configurations should not be dismissed as mere set pieces of theatre: they are essential vehicles of political communication and serve to mobilize Europe’s agency in the face of existential threats.

In this first episode of Handing Over the Mic, we hand over the mic to Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, the acclaimed Senegalese writer and 2021 Prix Goncourt winner. In a wide-ranging conversation, he reflects on Europe's literature, politics and historical legacy through the lens of Senegal and Africa, offering new insights on identity, colonial memory and the power of storytelling.

The Brussels Institute for Geopolitics held a High-Level Breakfast Conversation on 18 February for the Brussels launch of the report ‘A New Transatlantic Bargain: The Case for Building a Strong European Pillar’ on behalf of the Belfer Center at the Harvard Kennedy School. It is one of a series of events across European capitals assessing Europe’s capacity to defend itself.

In the two short weeks since Trump’s second inauguration, the White House has despatched a flurry of executive orders, blasted allies and enemies with threatening rhetoric over tariffs and territorial takeovers, and zigzagged from domestic to international proclamations at such speed that Europe’s leaders can barely keep up with the spray-tanned septuagenarian’s diplomatic golf cart.

Over the last four years, energy and climate partnerships have become a central feature of the European Union’s diplomacy. From securing critical raw materials (CRM) to diversifying energy supplies, the EU is forging ties with countries worldwide to safeguard its economy, bolster its geopolitical position and accelerate the green transition.

From 2005 to 2021, Angela Merkel was the dominant political figure in one of the world’s greatest economic powers, the most important anchor of the European Union and a touchstone of liberal democracy. Her tenure as chancellor witnessed some of the most consequential events of the post-war period, from the financial crisis of 2008 to the Eurozone crisis in the early 2010s, to the migration crisis of the middle of that decade, to the COVID-19 pandemic that shattered lives and destabilized politics across the world.

Tune in to Handing Over the Mic, a new podcast series where influential voices from the Global South share their perspectives on Europe—its past, present and future.

In advance of today’s defence summit—at which the EU’s 27 heads of state and government will assemble, alongside UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte—Luuk van Middelaar sat down with Claude-France Arnould, former executive director of the European Defence Agency. They discussed the future of European defence, its industry, its governance, and the most urgent decisions leaders can take at this week’s summit to ramp up Europe’s production and investment and its command-and-control capability.

As America’s 47th president moves into the Oval Office, Europe needs a long-term approach to shoring up its defences against Russian aggression. In the short term, the options remain worryingly limited. Europe’s security will depend on a US president who views foreign territories as real estate that can be bought, traded and sold on. 

The security guarantees that the West provides to Ukraine will be a critical element in the settlement of the war with Russia, which Trump has suggested will take place soon after his inauguration. Although a discussion of how to guarantee Kyiv’s future security might seem premature, Europeans would do well to prepare for the possible cessation of hostilities by producing their own proposals for peace and security on the continent.

Spain joins the Brussels Institute for Geopolitics as a full member starting January 2025.

At the start of the new year, leaders have an opportunity to capture and shape the geopolitical mood of the moment from their country’s point of view.

Rearmament, in the military sense, is the order of the day. However, confronted with History’s return, there is also a need to re-equip ourselves mentally and intellectually, to refill our linguistic toolbox so that we can make sense of unfolding events and situate ourselves in time.

By the spring of 2018, it was clear that Europe’s efforts to seduce, educate and impress the president had come to nothing. The harder its leaders pressed, the more abrasive he became. Trump looked at the world, as he put it, “from a real-estate perspective”, and because he was entirely unapologetic about who he was, he could neither be reasoned nor shamed into becoming someone else.

A map of Ukraine’s borders over the last one hundred years offers a lens through which to view the complex territorial history of Central and Eastern Europe.

Picture Don Vito Corleone at his daughter’s wedding in The Godfather, showered with  gifts and the fawning gestures of his guests, consulting with his consigliere and family members, offering protection or help in exchange for loyalty, debt and future service. So appears Trump in Mar-a-Lago.

The expansion of BRICS, an informal political bloc, is indicative of the shifting dynamics of global power. This map, capturing three distinct stages of its development, spotlights the group’s evolving composition and its performance against the G7 countries.

Josep Borrell joined Luuk van Middelaar for a conversation at the Brussels Institute for Geopolitics for his final political event as the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.

In what will be his last public appearance in the role before bowing out, Josep Borrell, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, joins Luuk van Middelaar, Director of the Brussels Institute for Geopolitics, to reflect on five years as the EU's leading diplomat.

On Thursday 7 November, the leaders of forty-plus states from across Europe will meet in Budapest to discuss the continent’s security challenges. It offers the perfect opportunity for a collective stock-take of the US election result but there will be much more to consider at this strategic forum.

As the US presidential race enters its final stretch, two authors provide an in-depth analysis of what the outcome would mean for Europe. Hans Kribbe draws lessons from Donald Trump’s first term on how to engage with him. Damir Marusic provides clues as to the direction an as-yet untested Kamala Harris might take.

Pipelines have long shaped energy geopolitics, but our maps must soon chart a new type of power line, namely electricity cables.

On 23 October 2024 the Brussels Institute for Geopolitics hosted an event to launch the essay ‘European economic statecraft in search of a future’ by BIG’s co-director Hans Kribbe. It is the first paper in a series on economic security.

Acknowledging new economic security risks, the EU is drafting a toolbox of policy instruments. This essay argues that we also need a strategic debate about the underlying goals and reasons. It identifies the three basic ways Europe can think about economic statecraft and proposes a way forward for the debate.

The resurgence of the term ‘geopolitics’ is often understood as a ‘return’, or even the ‘revenge’, of power politics. Something that was supposed to have disappeared, we now realize had just been neglected, forgotten or even repressed.

When European explorers first ventured across the oceans in search of new lands and riches, they nonchalantly named the places and peoples they encountered. As the West’s global dominance recedes, so too does its semantic grip on the world.

Recognition of a new state is a political act. It sends a signal, not just to the state being added to the international pantheon, but also to friends and foes of the recognizer. This simple map of Palestine’s recognition as a state thus throws light on several key moments and relationships in recent political history.

The Paris Olympics took place during a tense geopolitical period at the heart of Europe. Russian and Belarusian delegations have been banned from this year’s Summer Games. The International Olympic Committee thus leveraged the long-existing connection between sports and political power, which this essay further explores.

The Brussels Institute for Geopolitics (BIG) has hosted a ‘What Can Culture Do?’ roundtable, co-organized with the European Cultural Foundation (ECF). This joint session in Brussels forms part of a series of listening roundtables organized by ECF that are taking place across Europe.

The Brussels Institute for Geopolitics is pleased to announce that its Board held its first meeting today. The members of the Board have elected State Secretary Heiko Thoms as Chair and Ms Rita Faden as Vice-Chair. Composed of seven individuals who will serve a two-year term, the Board brings a wealth of experience and expertise to guide and oversee the institute's strategic development.

In an era marked by great power competition, states increasingly use energy as a strategic tool. This report sets out why and how Europe should revamp its energy diplomacy to navigate the green transition and to secure supplies.

This paper maps the tensions, dilemmas and daunting homework the EU faces, now that it has committed to a next round of enlargement.

The Institute’s first publication addresses the future of the European Political Community ahead of its second meeting in Moldova.