Strategic Trends 2016

As is tradition with the Strategic Trends series, this issue presents five chapters introducing and analyzing key developments in international affairs. At the beginning, Daniel Keohane diagnoses a fundamental paradigm shift in European security politics, namely a renationalization of defense cooperation. This contrasts markedly with security challenges that are, at their core, trans-national: As Lisa Watanabe writes in her analysis of the political economy of migration, the effects of the huge number of migrants arriving in Europe pose tremendous challenges both to the internal policy mechanisms of the European Union as well as its concept of foreign policy. It has become impossible to write about European security challenges without using the term ‘hybrid warfare’ to describe the complexity of threats. However, writes Prem Mahadevan, this concept is by no means applicable only to Europe. To the contrary, the current state of power politics in Asia surrounding the continuing rise of China has shown remarkable similarities to the Russian conduct in Crimea – and are beset with the same dangers of unpredictability and escalation. Oliver Thränert warns that an increased salience of nuclear weapons coincides with a lack of political interest in arms control. As a result, concerns over nuclear stability are not as much a thing of the past as often assumed. Finally, Severin Fischer casts a light on key implications of a world energy order in flux – an order where conventional wisdom too often falls short, and where internal instability in states vital to regional security structures might well lead to new conflicts that, as the last year showed, will have repercussions felt worldwide.