NATO and the future of U.S. alliances

Joshua Alley is a postdoctoral research associate with the Democratic Statecraft Lab at the University of Virginia. His research interests center on the political economy of security, especially the relationship between alliance participation and military spending, as well as the domestic politics of alliances. Other working papers examine the political economy of intra-state conflict. His work appears in International Interactions, two edited volumes and The National Interest. 

General Philip Breedlove is distinguished professor and CETS senior fellow at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology, which he joined after retiring as NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe and the U.S. European Command Commander. In these capacities he oversaw all U.S. and Allied troops in Afghanistan, Kosovo as well as all NATO operations across Europe and the Mediterranean. His 40-year military career included nine overseas tours and eight major commands. Today, he works with faculty, staff and students on security issues and policy.

Alexandra de Hoop Scheffer is the director of research for Transatlantic Security and the director of the Paris office of the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF). She also directs the Transatlantic Trends annual survey. Her areas of expertise include geopolitics, transatlantic relations, U.S. and French foreign policies and European affairs. She has served as a senior advisor for U.S. foreign policy and transatlantic relations on the Policy Planning Staff of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs; an advisor to NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR); and a consultant to the French Ministry of Defense on U.S. defense policy and the future of conflicts. In 2006, she worked for the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations, where she contributed to working groups on public administration reform in post-conflict societies. De Hoop Scheffer is also an associate professor at Sciences Po Paris, member of the advisory board of the Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique (FRS) and member of the editorial board of the Washington Quartely. 

James Goldgeier is a professor of International Relations at American University, where he served as Dean of the School of International Service from 2011–17. He is also a Robert Bosch Senior Visiting Fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution. He was a visiting senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations from 2017–19 and in 2018–19, he held the inaugural Library of Congress Chair in U.S.-Russia Relations at the John W. Kluge Center. He has authored or co-authored four books including America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11 (co-authored with Derek Chollet); Power and Purpose: U.S. Policy toward Russia after the Cold War (co-authored with Michael McFaul); and Not Whether But When: The U.S. Decision to Enlarge NATO.

Todd S. Sechser is the Pamela Feinour Edmonds and Franklin S. Edmonds Jr. Discovery Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia. He is also a professor of public policy at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy and a faculty senior fellow at the Miller Center. He is coauthor of the book Nuclear Weapons and Coercive Diplomacy (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and is the director of the Democratic Statecraft Lab, a project that aims to map the foundations of U.S. grand strategy for an era of great-power competition.