My guest is Mushaba Raman.

Mastava Raman is Manjin Director, Europe and co-head of My guest is Mushdabhar Rahman.

Mushtabharaman is Manjin Director, Europe and co-head of the London Office of the Eurasia Group.

Welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me back, Paul.

Thanks for being here, Midge.

Well, you may remember, you're quite irregular on the podcast.

We spoke about a year ago when I invited you to look ahead to 2024.

I promise you this is not an exercise in trying to work out how many of your predictions proved to be correct one year on.

But I will ask you to identify, from your point of view, some of the biggest challenges facing the European Union in this new year and how well,

if at all, the European Union is equipped to deal with these challenges. So in no particular

order, what would be one of your top challenges for the EU now? So I think, Paul, they all flow

from Donald Trump's second presidency. Trump, I think, creates trade and economic risks because of his stated desire

to put 10% tariffs on all European exports. I think there's questions around security, given

Trump wants to negotiate or force, rather, Ukraine Ukraine into a peace agreement with Russia.

There are real questions around EU security and defence if Trump not fully withdraws from NATO,

but begins to signal more ambivalence towards NATO.

And so I think there's a, you know, there's a set of questions around economic

competitiveness, around security and defence that were already difficult for Europe, but that

will be aggravated as a result of a second Trump presidency. In your experience, I'm quite surprised that so much has been announced by the president-elect.

He's still not in the White House, but you'd think he was already in office.

And that he's making all these announcements.

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