Hello and welcome to the CR podcast on Packing Europe.

I'm Guigi Skeetieri, Senior Research Fellow at the CR, and the host of this episode.

I'm very pleased to be joined by two guests today, Ian Bond, who's the deputy director of the

CR, and Sophia Bess, who's an alumna of the CR, and now in Washington, as Senior Fellow

at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Welcome, Ian and Sophia. In this episode,

we're going to be discussing the US election and its implications for transatlantic relations.

As we all know, Donald Trump is going to be the next president, and he has actually won a very

large victory, the presidency, the popular vote, the Senate, and quite probably the House

as well. And in Trump's own words, he claimed he had put together the biggest, the broadest,

and the most unified coalition. And over the past 24 hours, European leaders have all lined up

to congratulate him. But there is a lot of anxiety in Europe about what his election

will mean for transatlantic relations in terms of his stance towards NATO, his promise of a quick

end to Russia's war on Ukraine, but also his trade policy and his policy towards China. So that's

a lot to worry about. And I'm very happy to have Ian and

Sophia with me to try to make sense of some of that, at least. I'll start by asking you to

discuss what you see as the key risks in these different policy fields, and then we can turn

to how Europeans have been responding and indeed how they should be responding. So let me start with you first,

Sophia. One of the big worries about Trump is his stance towards European security. He's never made

a secret of his dislike for NATO. But some say that in his first term, the damage was relatively

contained and maybe this is something to be hopeful in his second term as well.

But is that just wishful thinking?

...