This is Paul Adamson and welcome to In Conversation, the regular podcast of my online magazine InCompass.

I chat informally with personalities from a wide variety of backgrounds on a wide variety of subjects.

If you like this podcast, you can go to the magazine's website, Encompass-Europe.com,

or any of the main platforms for free access to all the podcasts to date. I hope you enjoy this

conversation. My guest is Dr. Rosa Balfour.

Rosa Balfa is the director of Carnegie Europe.

Welcome to the podcast, Rosa.

Nice to be with you, Paul.

Well, there's so much to cover, but we only have about 25 minutes.

So let's try and focus, Rosa, in these next 25 minutes,

on European foreign security policy

and how your assessment of how the EU's foreign policy institution, the External Action Services, is operating now into its 12th year.

And obviously because it is so topical, it was published on yesterday, the UK's new integrated review, Global Britain, in a competitive age.

So I think those two subjects are enough to keep us occupied for the next 25 minutes.

So let me start, if I may, by asking you, where do you think?

When I'm here, I think, year 12 of the European External Action, so with this great experiment

in trying to forge a new foreign security arm of the EU European project,

how is it going in your view?

Well, over the past few weeks, we've seen some sad spectacles,

a humiliating trip of the High Representative for Foreign Policy,

Josep Borrell, to Moscow, where he was humiliated really by Lavrov and

quite a bit of backlash from the member states. And this comes after a long period in which

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