Out of Order

Among the hardest hit in Europe, Spain is cautiously charting a way out of its strict countrywide lockdown. Manuel Muñiz, Secretary of State for Global Spain (a senior minister role in the country’s Foreign Ministry), is a key voice on how exactly Spain sets out on that path. This week on GMF’s Post-Pandemic Order podcast Muñiz joins Rachel Tausendfreund to give an inside look at how Spain handled...

In this week’s episode of “Post-Pandemic Order,” we’re back in Washington where Derek Chollet is joined by Michigan congresswoman Elissa Slotkin (D-MI 8) whose extensive background in national security is informing the way she is fighting the coronavirus pandemic within her district and from a foreign policy and defense perspective. With Congress passing trillions of dollars in relief bills, Rep....

The recent World Press Freedom Day was a reminder of the growing threats faced by journalists around the world. The coronavirus pandemic only exacerbates things, especially for media navigating places where corruption and democratic backsliding are on the rise as some leaders seek to take advantage of the moment for political or financial gain. On the second episode of Out of Order, produced with...

We are excited to collaborate with our partners in The Democracy Group podcast network to bring you a bonus episode on how COVID-19 is impacting democracy in the United States and around the world. COVID-19 brings together several issues that have long been talked about separately — political polarization, misinformation, international cooperation, democratic norms and institutions, and many other...

Though this pandemic is first and foremost a health battle, the experience has also surfaced ideological clashes: autocracy vs. democracy; globalization vs. nationalism; left vs. right; interconnectedness vs. isolation. With Germany at the center of many of these big debates, prominent German parliamentarian Cem Özdemir—member of the Green political party-- joins GMF’s Derek Chollet to talk about...

Fighting the Coronavirus, Preserving Democracy:  A Conversation with USAID’s Brock Bierman  While the headlines focus on the world’s larger nations, the pandemic is also hitting Europe’s far corners where resources and international attention are in shorter supply. On this episode of Out of Order, produced with GMF’s Frontlines of Democracy Initiative, GMF’s senior fellow Jonathan Katz sits down w...

Former EU trade commissioner and member of the Swedish Liberals party Cecilia Malmström joins GMF’s Rachel Tausendfreund this week to discuss Europe’s response to the pandemic and its economic future as the coronavirus crisis weighs heavily on all aspects of society. From an initial rush by countries to seal borders and ban exports, back to “better behavior” and cross-border cooperation, the EU re...

On the first episode of GMF’s new mini-series “Post-Pandemic Order,” U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) joins Julie Smith to talk America’s global response to the pandemic, how the pandemic could (and should) alter U.S. foreign policy thinking, and the role democracies play in dealing with crises. Senator Murphy, who recently introduced new legislation with Senator Mitt Romney reaffirming U.S. commi...

The Chinese government appears to be taking a page from Russia’s playbook-- by deploying disinformation to both distract and divide, it’s working to cover up its own shortcomings in responding to the initial outbreak of the coronavirus and attempting to damage U.S. credibility. Beijing’s more confrontational posture on COVID-19 and use of disinformation represents a clear departure from its past b...

As the coronavirus upends life in ways that seemed unimaginable just a few weeks ago, governments are responding differently to the crisis. From border closures, export bans, and stay at home orders, decisions by leaders around the globe will surely set off a wave of political and geopolitical implications that are far from being fully realized. In this week’s episode of Out of Order, GMF experts...

Out of Order is excited to present part two of our first collaborative episode series, Reporting Across the Pond, produced in coordination with the Europe Desk , a podcast from the BMW Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University. Out of Order host Peter Sparding connects with Juliane Schäuble, the U.S. Correspondent for “Der Tagesspiegel”, to discuss her experience covering the...

Out of Order is excited to present our first collaborative episode series, Reporting Across the Pond, produced in coordination with the Europe Desk , a podcast from the BMW Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University. In this two-part series, we will be talking both to a European journalist reporting on the U.S. and a U.S. reporter dispatching from Europe. This first episode, p...

Join GMF hosts Rachel Tausendfreund and Sydney Simon for a discussion on the crisis in Idlib. From Washington, Sydney speaks with GMF senior fellow Jonathan Katz on the confluence of Syrian, Russian and Turkish interests in the area, the stance of the United States and the humanitarian stakes at hand. We then head to our Berlin office where Rachel dives into the big picture implications of the cri...

President Macron’s observations about NATO’s “brain death” jolted Europe, eliciting a spectrum of reactions across the continent-- from ambivalence to annoyance to hysteria. Four months after, now that the dust has settled, what did Macron’s NATO comments reveal about Europe’s own cohesion on defense and where do things stand between France and its neighbors? Picking up on one of Out of Order’s on...

When the Berlin Wall fell and the USSR crumbled, an era of excessive optimism set in. It was a period where it seemed like liberal democracies would lead a straight march to global peace. Three decades later, Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff says that, somewhere down the line, we took a hard turn toward excessive pessimism – or Immerschlimmerismus—the German word describing a feeling that things keep getti...

More people today have been forcibly displaced from their homes than at any time since World War ll. According to the UN, a record 70 million people around the world are living as refugees or are displaced in their own countries worldwide. The Mediterranean region has been at the center of intense debates over migration since 2015, when an unprecedented number of refugees and migrants – many fleei...

Germany’s center-left Social Democrats (SPD) recently elected two new leaders, Norbert Walter-Borjans and Saskia Esken. Both are strongly critical of the already-shaky “grand coalition” with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative CDU and this surprising election result has thrown the future of German politics into question—again. At the same time, the Greens and the far-right AfD are growing in p...

In the information wars, controlling the narrative is key. From Hong Kong to 5G to US politics, the Russian government has made no illusions about its willingness to bend reality to get what it wants. What is that narrative and is it really making an impact?  And why does a professional disinformation tracker think that the overt information – news spread to the world from state-run outlets like S...

Extraordinary things happened in 1989. The Berlin Wall fell. Europe finally came close to being “whole and free.” But that was not where history ended. The subsequent rise of an “anti-liberal counterrevolution” showed that the liberal internationalists’ agenda was far from bullet-proof.  The tipping point, according to historian Timothy Garton Ash, was Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution—when Putin w...

Since President Trump announced the withdrawal of US troops from Syria, realities on the ground have moved at breakneck speed. To make sense of it all,  Out of Order caught up with GMF experts in Ankara and Washington. First, senior fellow Jonathan Katz joins discusses the situation as it has unfolded—and its vast consequences-- and how it’s playing out politically and geopolitically. Later in the...

As frustration with inaction on climate change at the national and global level boils over, cities of all sizes and geographies just might hold the solutions we need to take action on global warming. In this episode of Out of Order, two mayors from opposite sides of the Atlantic—Cambridge, MA and Heidelberg, Germany-- are at the table to discuss the role of cities in confronting climate change and...

We're interrupting the Out of Order stream this week to share a new episode of the "Democracy Works" podcast -- a project of Penn State's McCourtney Institute for Democracy and WPSU. In this episode, renowned democracy expert Larry Diamond talks with Democracy Works' Jenna Spinelle about China’s model of authoritarian capitalism and the effect it's having around the globe on democracies and other...

John Bolton, President Trump’s 3rd National Security Adviser, has made his exit. With change afoot (or maybe not) two of the most well-positioned voices on all things NSC—John Gans and Derek Chollet-- are at the Out of Order table to discuss what went wrong for Bolton, how the national security process has been broken under the Trump administration, and what could come next for a yet-to-be-named s...

U.S. society is as divided as it has been in modern history. Americans cannot agree on the past, and politicians refuse to face the future. Political animus has replaced compromise and bipartisanship is the norm in Washington, as a divisive President seeks a second term. With election season ramping up and political divisions on display, two veterans of U.S. politics-- Margaret Carlson, Columnist...

After a diplomatic breakthrough in the turbulent Balkans, the Republic of North Macedonia has a new name and its sights set on integration with the European Union and NATO. What is the path ahead for the potential future NATO member state, how do the complicated politics of the region affect its prospects, and what is America’s role in all of this? At the German Marshall Fund's Brussels Forum held...