The second Trump presidency poses profound challenges for European security and NATO. Europe may well be thrown into a trade war that it is poorly equipped to fight while an all-out conventional war continues to be fought on the continent. Trump has radicalised rather than softened the MAGA agenda, threatening the cohesion and stability of Euro-Atlantic security.
This briefing will assess these dynamics in the following areas:
1. How is Europe gaming out a Trump presidency - especially in relation to the critical area of trade policy and its own geoeconomic strategy - and what risks/opportunities does it face?
2. How do we assess the likely shape of a European strategic response to Trump in light of the developments in European integration and the ‘return’ of a serious discussion of membership expansion?
3. What should Europe be doing differently to strengthen democratic security, international law and the stability of global institutions in the face of cascading crises?
Meet the speakers and chair
Dr Rosa Balfour is Director of Carnegie Europe. Her fields of expertise include European politics, institutions, and foreign and security policy. Her current research focuses on the relationship between domestic politics and Europe’s global role. Balfour is also an advisor to Women in International Security Brussels (WIIS-Brussels), an associate fellow at LSE IDEAS and an alumna of the Europe’s Futures program at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. In 2024 she was appointed to the Scientific Advisory Council of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. Since 2021, she is an honorary patron of the University Association for Contemporary European Studies (UACES). Prior to joining Carnegie Europe, Balfour was a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. She was also director of the Europe in the World program at the European Policy Centre in Brussels and has worked as a researcher in Rome and London. Dr Balfour holds an MA in history from Cambridge University, an MSc in European Studies and PhD in International Relations both from LSE.
Dr Mary Kaldor is Professor Emeritus of Global Governance and Director of the Conflict Research Programme at LSE. She has pioneered the concepts of new wars and global civil society. Her elaboration of the real-world implementation of human security has directly influenced European and national governments. She is the author of many books and articles including New and Old Wars: Organised Violence in a Global Era (3rd edition, 2012), International Law and New Wars (with Christine Chinkin, 2017) and Global Security Cultures (2018).
Dr Simone Tholens is Associate Professor of International Relations at John Cabot University, and part-time assistant professor at the European University Institute/Robert Schuman Centre. Her main research interest are interventions, security assistance, bordering processes, and materiality of global war practices, as well as theories of contestation and practice. She has worked on these issues in the Middle East, Western Balkans and South East Asia. In her research, she combines critical approaches to security & conflict, with practice-based methodologies. Her ongoing projects include a monograph on Assembling Security Assistance: Knowledge, Materiality and Networks of a Global Practice (for submission with Oxford University Press), as well as a series of initiatives on Ignorance and Interventions, in which she focuses on the role of non-knowledge, secrecy and ignorance in contemporary intervention practices.
Dr Heljä Ossa is a research fellow at LSE Ideas, working on the non-nuclear deterrence project funded by the Carnegie Endowment Corporation of New York, led by the Conflict and Civicness Research Group. Her areas of expertise include European security and defence policy, NATO, transatlantic relations, and Finnish foreign policy. She holds a Ph.D. in Military Sciences from the Finnish National Defence University, with her dissertation focusing on European strategic autonomy from the U.S. perspective. Prior to joining LSE, she worked as a Researcher at the Finnish National Defence University, where she did research on transatlantic relations and co-authored the book NATO’s Burden-Sharing Disputes: Past, Present and Future Prospects (Palgrave, 2022). In 2024 she co-authored a book on how Western allies perceive Finland as a security actor.
This event is part of a series of webinars on Trump 2.0 and the age of polycrisis organised by the LSE Conflict and Civicness Research Groups based at LSE IDEAS, the in-house foreign policy think tank of LSE. These sessions from our research community provide a series of 60 minute briefings on the impacts of Trump’s second term for some of the issues and contexts that we research.
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