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Navigating the Vortex

Navigating the Vortex

By: Lucy P. Marcus & Stefan Wolff
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 We live in a complex and ever-changing world. To navigate the vortex we must adapt to change quickly, think critically, and make sound decisions. Lucy Marcus & Stefan Wolff talk about business, politics, society, culture, and what it all means.

www.navigatingthevortex.comLucy P. Marcus & Stefan Wolff Economics Political Science Politics & Government
Episodes
  • Nato's summit in The Hague is a critical test for the transatlantic alliance

    Nato's summit in The Hague is a critical test for the transatlantic alliance
    Jun 24 2025
    When Nato leaders meet for their annual summit in The Hague on Wednesday, June 25, all eyes will be on Donald Trump. Not only is the 47th president of the United States less committed to the alliance than any of his predecessors in Nato’s 76-year history. But he has also joined Israel’s war with Iran, threatened regime change, and then brokered a ceasefire between Tehran and Tel Aviv. Closer to Nato’s borders, he seems long have given up his efforts to end the war in Ukraine.Leaders of Nato’s 32 member states should therefore have a packed agenda. Although there are several meetings and a dinner planned for June 24, the actual summit – which has tended usually to stretch out over several days – has been reduced to a single session and a single agenda item. All of this has been done to accommodate the US president. A single session reduces the risk of Trump walking away from the summit early, as he did at the G7 leaders meeting in Kananaskis, Canada, on June 16.The single item remaining on the agenda is Nato members’ new commitment to increase defence spending to 5% of GDP by 2035. This is meant to placate Trump who demanded such an increase even before his inauguration in January 2025. The US president, like many of his predecessors, has also frequently complained, and not without justification, that European members of the alliance invest too little in their defence and are over-reliant on the US. A draft summit declaration confirming the new spending target has now been approved.Even accounting for Trump’s notorious unpredictability, this should ensure that Nato will survive the Hague summit intact. What is less clear is whether Nato’s members can rise to the unprecedented challenges that the alliance is facing. These challenges look different from each of the 32 capitals, but for 31 of them, the continued survival of the alliance as an effective security provider is an existential question. Put simply, they need the US, while the US doesn’t necessarily need to be part of the alliance.Symptomatic for this dependence is the capability deficit that Canada and European member states have compared to the US, which was thrown into stark relief by Washington’s airstrikes against Iran over the weekend. This is not simply a question of increasing manpower and equipping troops to fight. European states also lack most of the so-called critical enablers required to prevail in a potential war with Russia, including intelligence capabilities, command and control structures, and heavy-lift aircraft to quickly move troops and equipment. All of these have traditionally been provided by US forces, and they will take significant time and resources to build up should the US pull back from Europe.For now, Russia is tied down in Ukraine, which will buy time. And the 5%-commitment, even if not all member states will get there quickly or at all, is likely to go some way to mobilise the necessary resources for beefing up Europe’s defences. But time and resources are not limitless. And it is not yet clear what the American commitment to Europe will be in the future and when and how it will be reduced.Nor is it completely obvious what kind of war Europe should prepare for. Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is both a very traditional war of attrition and a very modern technological showdown. A future confrontation with the Kremlin is initially likely to take the form of a grey-zone conflict, a state of affairs between war and peace in which acts of aggression happen but are difficult to attribute unambiguously and to respond to proportionately.This has arguably already started with Russian attacks on critical infrastructure across Europe. But as the example of Ukraine illustrates, grey-zone conflicts have the potential to escalate to conventional war. In February 2022, Russia saw an opportunity to pull Ukraine back into its sphere of influence by brute force after and launched a full-scale invasion, hoping to capture Kyiv in a matter of a few days. This turned out to be a gross misjudgement on the Kremlin’s part. And three years on from that, and partly as a consequence of it, the possibility of a nuclear confrontation can no longer be ruled out either — if frequent Russian threats to this effect are to be believed.Key members of the alliance are unequivocal in their assessment of Russia as an existential threat to Europe. This is evident from the UK’s strategic defence review and a new strategy paper for the German armed forces. Yet, it is not a view unanimously shared. Trump’s pro-Putin leanings date back to their now infamous meeting in Helsinki when he sided with the Russian president against his own intelligence services. In Europe, long-term Putin supporters Victor Orban and Robert Fico, the prime ministers of EU and Nato members Hungary and Slovakia, have just announced that they will not support additional EU sanctions against Russia.Hungary and Slovakia are hardly defence ...
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    7 mins
  • Amid an escalating air and ground war, talks between Russia and Ukraine yield no progress

    Amid an escalating air and ground war, talks between Russia and Ukraine yield no progress
    Jun 4 2025
    News of the spectacular “spiderweb” mass drone attack on Russian air bases on June 1 will have been uppermost in the minds of delegates who assembled the following day for another round of direct talks between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul.The attack appears to have been a triumph of Ukrainian intelligence and planning that destroyed or damaged billions of pounds’ worth of Russian aircraft stationed at bases across the country, including at locations as far away as Siberia.Ukraine’s drone strikes, much like Russia’s intensifying air campaign, hardly signal either side’s sincere commitment to negotiations. As it turned out, little of any consequence was agreed at the brief meeting between negotiators, beyond a prisoner swap, confirming yet again that neither a ceasefire nor a peace agreement are likely anytime soon.As with the similarly inconclusive meeting between the two sides on May 16, the lack of progress is unsurprising. However, the broader context of developments on the battlefield and beyond offers important clues about the trajectory of the war in the coming months.At their earlier meeting in Istanbul in May, Moscow and Kyiv had agreed to draft and exchange detailed proposals for a settlement. The Ukrainian proposal reiterated the long-standing position of Kyiv and its western allies that concessions on the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the country are unacceptable.In other words, a Russian-imposed neutrality ruling out NATO membership and limiting the size of Ukraine’s armed forces as well as any international recognition of Moscow’s illegal land-grabs since the annexation of Crimea in 2014 are non-starters for Ukraine. While the Ukrainian proposal accepts a ceasefire along the frontline, it considers this only as “the starting point for negotiations” and demands that “territory issues are discussed only after a full and unconditional ceasefire.”In substance, this is very similar to Zelensky’s peace plan of late 2022 which failed to get broader traction outside the capitals of Ukraine’s western allies.The Russian proposals are also mostly old news. Moscow’s terms were only handed to Ukrainian negotiators at their meeting in Istanbul on Monday. Given what the Kremlin is reported to be asking for, this is unlikely to have made any difference to the possibility of meaningful discussions between the sides: the full recognition of Russian territorial claims since 2014, Ukrainian neutrality, and the stringent conditions set out for even a temporary ceasefire are hardly in any way more serious negotiation positions from Ukraine’s perspective than Kyiv’s proposals are likely to be to Moscow. In fact, what the Kremlin put on the table in Istanbul is more akin to surrender terms.Ukraine is in no mood or need to surrender. The wave of drone attacks targeted several airbases deep inside Russia on June 1, including some hosting parts of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet. But this, like previous drone strikes against Moscow in June 2023, is more of a symbolic morale booster than signalling a sustainable Ukrainian capability that could prove critical in evening out some of the advantages that Russia has over Ukraine in terms of material mass and manpower.Closer to the frontlines inside Ukraine, Kyiv’s forces also struck the power grid inside the Russian-occupied parts of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions. This may have an impact on any Russian plans for an offensive to capture more of these two southern Ukrainian regions that Russia has claimed since sham referendums in September 2022 but still does not fully control. But much like the drone strikes deep into Russia, it is, at best, an operation that entrenches, rather than breaks the current stalemate.There is no doubt that Ukraine remains under severe military pressure from Russia along most of the more than 1,000km-long frontline. The country is also still very vulnerable to Russian air attacks. However, while Russia might continue to make incremental gains on the battlefield, a game-changing Russian offensive or a collapse of Ukrainian defences does not appear to be on the cards.Kyiv’s position will potentially also be strengthened by a new bill in the US senate that threatens the imposition of 500% tariffs on any countries that buy Russian resources. This would primarily affect India and China, the largest consumers of Russian oil and gas and could cut Russia off from critical revenues and imports — if New Delhi and Beijing decide that trade with the US is more important to them than cheap imports from Russia.Yet, US president Donald Trump, to date has been indecisive when it comes to putting any real, rather than just rhetorical pressure on his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. It is, therefore, not clear whether the proposed senate bill will have the desired effect any time soon or at all.By contrast, European support for Ukraine has, if anything, increased over the past months. It still falls ...
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    7 mins
  • Berlin steps up to replace Washington as guarantor of European security

    Berlin steps up to replace Washington as guarantor of European security
    May 29 2025
    Two statements from world leaders this week bear closer examination. On May 27, US president Donald Trump took to his TruthSocial social media channel to proclaim that if it wasn’t for him, “lots of really bad things would have already happened to Russia”. The following day the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, announced that his country would assist Ukraine in developing long-range missiles to deploy against targets inside Russia. Both statements are quite extraordinary.Even by Trump’s own standards, the public declaration by a sitting US president that he is protecting the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, is unprecedented. Putin is an indicted war criminal who has been waging a war of aggression against Ukraine for more than three years after having illegally annexed Crimea over a decade ago. There can now be no doubt left that the US has become an unreliable ally for Ukraine and its European partners.This is the context in which Merz’s announcement of increasing defence cooperation with Ukraine becomes significant. While Trump continues to chase an impossible deal with Putin – even after threatening to abandon his mediation efforts less than ten days ago – Germany has doubled down on Ukraine’s defence.Not only that, but as the EU’s largest and Nato’s second-largest economy, Germany is now also aiming to turn its Bundeswehr into the “strongest conventional army in Europe”. Its most senior military officer, Carsten Breuer, has published plans for a rapid and wide-ranging expansion of defence capabilities.Germany is finally beginning to pull its weight in European defence and security policy. This is absolutely critical to the credibility of the EU in the face of the threat from Russia. Berlin has the financial muscle and the technological and industrial potential to make Europe more of a peer to the US when it comes to defence spending and burden sharing. This will be important to salvage what remains of Nato in light of a highly probable American down-scaling — if not complete abandonment — of its past security commitments to the alliance.After decades of failing to develop either a grand strategy to deal with Russia or the hard power capabilities that need to underpin it, achieving either will take some time. But it is important to acknowledge that some critical first steps have been taken by the new German government.For Germany, and much of the rest of Europe, the investment in more defence capabilities does not simply require producing more ammunition or procuring more advanced defence systems. These are important — but what is also needed is a significant investment in developing manpower. This means either finding more volunteers or reintroducing conscription, which is now no longer a taboo in Germany.Deploying a whole new brigade to Lithuania is an important signal to Nato allies about Germany’s commitment to the alliance. It is also a clear signal to Russia that Germany finally is putting its money where its mouth is when it comes to containing the threat from Russia, which has grown significantly since the beginning of the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.The three years of Russia’s war against its neighbour have also highlighted the threat that Russia poses beyond Ukraine’s borders. The war against Ukraine has exposed European vulnerabilities and its dependence on the United States. And it has taught military planners important lessons about what a likely future confrontation with Russia would look like. This is why Germany’s military planners have identified air defence systems, precision strike capabilities, drones, and electronic and cyber warfare assets as procurement priorities.Beyond Germany, the signs have been that Europe more broadly is beginning to learn to stand on its own feet when it comes to its security. For the continent, the challenge is threefold. It needs to beef up its defence spending in light of the ongoing war against Ukraine and Russian threats to expand it further. Europe also needs to come to terms with the dismantling of the transatlantic alliance by Trump. And, finally, there is a growing populist surge that threatens the very foundations of European democracy and has the potential to undermine European security and defence efforts. This has been given extra fuel by the alignment of Trump’s America-first Maga movement with Putin’s Russia.These are enduring challenges with no quick fixes. The first test of this apparent new-found European mettle will be the war in Ukraine. Giving Ukraine permission to use long-range missiles against targets in Russia is not a new development. Such a move was first taken by the then US president, Joe Biden, in November 2024 when he authorised Ukraine to launch limited strikes into Russia using US-made long-range missiles, followed by similar authorisations from London and Paris at the time, but not Berlin.Now, as then, how effective this will be depends not ...
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    7 mins
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