The Denver Warburg Chapter and the Denver Council on Foreign Relations will host a discussion and dinner with Hans Kundnani, Senior Transatlantic Fellow for the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
Hans Kundnani is a Senior Transatlantic Fellow with the German Marshall Fund of the United States’ Europe program, based in Berlin. He previously worked as the Research Director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, where he worked for five years. He is also an Associate Fellow at the Institute for German Studies at Birmingham University. His research focuses on German power within Europe, German foreign policy, European integration and dis-integration, European foreign policy, and relations between Europe and Asia. He is the author of two books, Utopia or Auschwitz. Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust (2009) and The Paradox of German Power (2014). His articles and papers have been published in journals such as Foreign Affairs, The Washington Quarterly, and Internationale Politik and newspapers such as the Financial Times, Le Monde, and Die Zeit. Mr. Kundnani studied German and Philosophy at Oxford University and Journalism at Columbia University in New York, where he was a Fulbright Scholar.
Abstract: The election of Donald Trump threatens to radically change the parameters within which European countries have operated for 70 years. In particular, the U.S. security guarantee – the basis of European security and historically the precondi-tion for European integration – has been thrown into doubt by the election of Trump, who has refused to commit to the U.S. alliance system. This will be a particular challenge for Germany, which since the beginning of the euro crisis seven years ago has emerged as Europe’s de facto leader but is particularly limited in terms of military power. Since the election, many have de-clared Chancellor Angela Merkel to be the “leader of the free world.” But tempting as it may be to think that the woman the Germans call “Mommy” can simply replace the President of the United States as the “leader of the free world,” it is an illusion.