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In this, the Atlantic Council’s sixtieth anniversary year, we’re taking stock of our collective efforts over the past twelve months of global disruption to promote US cooperation with partners and allies on the world’s defining challenges, deliver relevant insight at speed to policymakers and the public, and shape a peaceful and prosperous global future.
The twenty-one “greatest hits” below, listed in chronological order, highlight the Council’s powerhouse convenings, from the Europe Center’s EU-US Future Forum to the Distinguished Leadership Awards; our incredible publications, from January’s Longer Telegram to December’s Global Foresight 2022; our agenda-setting coverage of major global news stories, from the attempted insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6 to the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan in August; and our commitment to building a stronger, more diverse foreign-policy community around the world, with the launch of the Young Global Professionals Program.
We hope you find this list as impressive, informative, and inspiring as we do.
When the COVID-19 pandemic abruptly evicted us all from our regular work spaces, we quickly shifted just about everything we do to the digital realm—including our world-class events, which all of a sudden were able to reach far more people across the globe. As a board member told me, we had discovered gold with our digital transformation; now we had to mine it. Such was the thinking behind this year’s Project Klondike, named for the gold rush of the late nineteenth century. Our newly formed Engagement Team spent months transforming our existing event rooms into studios and created “smart spaces” for virtual meetings across the Atlantic Council. Now our high-level and flexible production capabilities can meet our hybrid future, as we’ve shown in recent months through everything from internal staff meetings to major events such as our look at the future of counterterrorism.
US national security experts discuss counterterrorism twenty years after 9/11, reimagining the future of the terrorist threat.
The year had barely begun when our worlds were shaken by the storming of the US Capitol on January 6. The Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, which has the finest extremism trackers in the business, quickly exposed the roots of the insurrection—helping both the public and law enforcement connect the dots, from online troublemakers to Capitol Hill invaders. DFRLab helped rebut misinformation in real time, as detailed in its March report as part of the Election Integrity Partnership. Its February “Stop the Steal timeline” provided the most comprehensive tracking of how lies about a stolen election spread on social media and fueled the shocking violence at the Capitol. As we approach the one-year anniversary of an event that changed how the world views the United States, DFRLab is continuing its reporting to help leaders protect our democracy.
The executive summary of the Election Integrity Partnership’s collaborative report, “The Long Fuse: Misinformation and the 2020 Election.”
Throughout our history, the Atlantic Council has been committed to fostering the next generation of foreign-policy leaders around the globe. This year the Council’s Millennium Leadership Program, in collaboration with our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council and Human Resources team, launched a world-class, paid internship program to equip a global network of next-generation international-affairs professionals with the skills to tackle the defining challenges of the twenty-first century. Young Global Professionals—or YGPers—work with one of the fifteen programs and centers across the Council to develop professional and substantive expertise. They participate in a centralized curriculum designed to hone their collaborative problem-solving skills, teach them how to build a career in the foreign-policy space, and grant them access to senior experts on the critical issues of our time. Only 1 percent of applicants were accepted to the first year of the program, with nearly seven thousand applications for seventy-five positions across three cohorts—spring, summer, and fall.
The Young Global Professionals Program is a springboard for a more diverse generation of international affairs professionals. This prestigious paid internship program offers hands-on experience working at the forefront of global engagement and is designed to harness the potential of rising young leaders.
China is the defining challenge of our time—for the United States, for the world, and for the Atlantic Council. In January we published The Longer Telegram, a masterful work of strategic thinking from an unnamed former senior government official who offers a detailed blueprint for how the US government should reshape China’s own strategic paradigm to bring the rising superpower within the liberal international order. The author makes the case for how this can be accomplished by exploiting underappreciated fissures within the Chinese Communist Party leadership. The paper turned heads and sparked debate from Washington to Beijing to Islamabad to London, quickly becoming the most-viewed piece ever on the Council’s website. The second in a trilogy of China strategy documents from the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, this work led to a year of action that included the establishment of our new Global China Hub amid increasing tensions over China’s military buildup, human-rights record, and crackdown on major Chinese companies. All of this only lent more urgency to the author’s compelling argument.
Atlantic Council Strategy Paper Series by Anonymous
Atlantic Council Strategy Paper Series by Anonymous
China presents the most important challenge to the United States in the twenty-first century. To address this challenge, the United States urgently needs “an integrated, operational, and bipartisan national strategy.”
Our fifth annual Atlantic Council Global Energy Forum in January featured myriad innovations by Global Energy Center Senior Director Randy Bell and his team. The flagship event, which was organized and executed to reach all the world’s time zones, landed better speakers, expanded its global audience, and convened smaller, more customized events for our most significant partners. The agenda was robust, the digital platform was innovative, and the Communications team offered the right content at the right time for the right audience—as evidenced by the eighty million impressions the conference helped drive through the #ACEnergyForum hashtag on social media.
The 2021 Forum had a special focus on the post-pandemic energy system, emerging net-zero carbon goals, the role of the Middle East in the energy transition, and the US’s energy and foreign policy priorities in the Biden administration.
With so much attention focused on the current standoff over Ukraine, as Vladimir Putin’s Russia threatens to dramatically escalate its eight-year war there, take a moment to consider what might happen after the Russian strongman exits the stage. In this in-depth report published by the Eurasia Center in February, former Council expert Anders Åslund and Russian opposition politician Leonid Gozman chart out the necessary steps to reform Russia so that the country becomes a constructive player on the world stage and Russians themselves play a greater role in a fairer political and economic system. The key, Åslund and Gozman argue, is dismantling Russia’s bloated security and legal bureaucracy and restoring personal and political freedoms. While the world is occupied with today’s grave security concerns, this report provides a roadmap for what could be a brighter future in Russia.
Report by Anders Åslund and Leonid Gozman
Report by Anders Åslund and Leonid Gozman
We do not know when and how President Putin’s regime will end, but there are signs that it is struggling and the end could come in the foreseeable future. We need to start discussing now how a new state should be built on the ruins of the old system.
Last year, the sprawling Sunburst cyberattack—which included the breach of the software contractor SolarWinds—was discovered after it had infected dozens of government agencies across the globe and many of the world’s biggest companies. Our Cyber Statecraft Initiative’s incisive report, Broken Trust: Lessons from Sunburst, provides a blueprint for preventing the next such breach, which will require a public-private partnership to emphasize “speed, balance, and concentrated action.” Trey Herr, the initiative’s director, drew from this work when testifying before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.
Report by Trey Herr, Will Loomis, Emma Schroeder, Stewart Scott, Simon Handler, and Tianjiu Zuo
Report by Trey Herr, Will Loomis, Emma Schroeder, Stewart Scott, Simon Handler, and Tianjiu Zuo
The story of trust is an old one, but the Sunburst cyber-espionage campaign was a startling reminder of the United States’ collective cyber insecurity and the inadequacy of current US strategy to compete in a dynamic intelligence contest in cyberspace.
In May, as part of a yearlong campaign on the European Union, our Europe Center launched the first EU-US Future Forum with a who’s who of the most influential transatlantic voices, including Slovak President Zuzana Čaputová; Estonian President Kersti Kaljulaid in conversation with US Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH); Germany’s Greens co-leader Annalena Baerbock (who is now minister of foreign affairs); US Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT), and Senator James Risch (R-ID); and EU commissioners Thierry Breton, Vera Jourová, Kadri Simson, Olivér Várhelyi, Margaritis Schinas, and Dubravka Suica. But aside from the A-list of speakers, this was a display of the Council’s transformation in the COVID-19 era, as our teams built a world-class television studio in our Washington headquarters befitting any major news network. Indeed, this event—which generated 113,000 views across platforms, with the hashtag #EUFF2021 generating more than 72.5 million impressions—became a playbook for others at the Council to engage their global audiences in new and inventive ways, particularly as Zoom fatigue becomes more pervasive.
The EU-US Future Forum, a three day conference from Wednesday, May 5th – Friday, May 7th, is a unique convening of leaders and stakeholders in dialogue to build a new transatlantic agenda and momentum for EU-US cooperation.
In 2021, the Atlantic Council’s premier live ideas platform—#ACFrontPage—celebrated its first full year of gathering leading voices around the world to make news and engage with global audiences. Reaching nearly 200,000 livestream viewers and generating over 156 million Twitter impressions, Atlantic Council Front Page featured twenty-nine speakers this past year, including YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, Secretary of the Smithsonian Lonnie Bunch, Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Representative Gregory Meeks, Nobel Laureate Malala Yousafzai, and Director of the National Economic Council Brian Deese. The #ACFrontPage platform also elevated many other major bodies of work at the Atlantic Council, including special editions featuring French President Emmanuel Macron, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Prince Charles. This is the place where the world’s newsmakers come to discuss the most important issues in front of a knowledgeable audience.
#ACFrontPage harnesses the convening power and expertise of the Council’s fourteen programs and centers to spotlight the world’s most prominent leaders and the most compelling ideas across sectors. The virtual platform engages new audiences eager for nonpartisan and constructive solutions to current global challenges. This widely promoted 45-minute program features the Council’s most important guests and content serving as the highlight of our programming each week.
Before her first trip to Latin America, US Vice President Kamala Harris called on leading experts to brief her on how to address the root causes of the surge of migration to the United States from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Among those top minds was Jason Marczak, senior director of our Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center, who advised Harris on how the US government can help stamp out extortion and corruption, boost small business and human capital, facilitate trade, and expand digital-infrastructure investments. Those recommendations built on the Center’s landmark work tracking COVID-19 vaccinations across the region and charting the course to economic opportunity in the Northern Triangle, and they helped inform the White House’s migration strategy for Central America, released in July.
Our interactive maps track the percentage of the population of each Latin American and Caribbean country covered by current vaccine agreements; the total number of doses secured by each country and breakdown by supplier/vaccine; where each vaccine is being used across the region; and how many vaccines flow from each major producing country to regional destinations.
We are at the dawn of the “GeoTech Decade,” a moment when technology will have an expanded impact on geopolitics, the economy, and global governance. To set the agenda for this new era, our GeoTech Center gathered a high-level bipartisan commission featuring leaders from Congress, academia, the private and nonprofit sectors, and more. They produced a comprehensive report on how the United States can retain its preeminence in crucial areas while helping ensure the trustworthiness and reliability of the digital economy. The work received strong endorsements from leaders on Capitol Hill and made its way to US President Joe Biden himself as it continues to inform administration policy.
In-Depth Research & Reports by The GeoTech Center
In-Depth Research & Reports by The GeoTech Center
An in depth report produced by the Commission on the Geopolitical Impacts of New Technologies, making recommendations to maintain economic and national security and new approaches to develop and deploy critical technologies.
While the Atlantic Council doesn’t pretend to be able to fully predict or control fast-moving events, our Afghanistan-related work recognized early on, following Biden’s announcement of a US troop withdrawal from the country, that we needed to find a new approach to ensure Afghanistan’s security, prosperity, and freedoms. There’s far too much field-shaping work to list here, but April’s transatlantic charter for peace and security in Afghanistan, penned by a high-level group convened by our South Asia Center, warned of dangers ahead following the agreement for a US military exit. As Kabul fell in August, the Scowcroft Center’s Ben Jensen brilliantly explored the Taliban’s “operational art” while the Digital Forensic Research Lab’s Emerson Brooking described how the Taliban “took the internet” and GeoEconomics Center Senior Director Josh Lipsky and Rafik Hariri Center and Middle East Programs Senior Director Will Wechsler teamed up in the pages of the Wall Street Journal with a head-turning argument on how the International Monetary Fund should deal with Afghanistan’s pending COVID-19 relief funds. Behind the scenes in those harrowing days and weeks, so many of our colleagues worked long hours to evacuate endangered Afghans. It was a moment of deep sorrow for so many of us, but also one of pride that we came together to help inform debate at a critical moment for the United States.
Afghanistan has long struggled with instability, terrorism, and conflict. The withdrawal of US and NATO forces after twenty years of war leaves it at an even more perilous juncture. As the Taliban takes control of the country, the pressure is mounting on regional powers and the global community to help stabilize Afghanistan for the sake of their own interests as well as those of the Afghan people.
Our Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center was launched to deal with the vitally important but little-understood work of climate adaptation and resilience, and this year they sunk their teeth into climate’s deadliest impact: extreme heat. In August, the team pulled together the Council’s first-ever “Big Story,” a rich, rousing, and insightful narrative by the center’s senior director, Kathy Baughman McLeod, on the findings and policy solutions stemming from the Resilience Center’s excellent report on the economic and social impacts of extreme heat in the United States. Aside from earning coverage from CBS News, Time magazine, Fast Company, and Reuters, the analysis was soon cited in a US Department of Labor press release announcing the launch of a new rule to protect workers from extreme heat nationwide. Now that’s impact.
The Big Story by Kathy Baughman McLeod
The Big Story by Kathy Baughman McLeod
Most people know the knock-on effects of global warming by now: rising sea levels, mass extinction of plants and wildlife, worsening floods, fires, and hurricanes. But heat itself is too often overlooked as a destructive force in its own right.
The most important strategic question of our generation is China’s role in the world in the twenty-first century. And the establishment of the Global China Hub in September demonstrates the Council’s unique advantage in making a meaningful impact in this area. Our other fourteen programs and centers and their incredible expertise give the Council remarkable analytical insight into the many global facets of the China challenge. Unlike any other center at the Council, the Global China Hub has been designed from the beginning to collaborate with all programs and centers with a China remit to create a cross-cutting capability for better understanding China’s activities in the world.
The Global China Hub researches and devises allied solutions to the global challenges posed by China’s rise, leveraging and amplifying the Atlantic Council’s work on China across its 14 other programs and centers.
It’s hard to get a window into China’s often-opaque economy. So this year we built one. Developed by our GeoEconomics Center and Rhodium Group, the China Pathfinder Project is an entirely new system for scoring China’s convergence or divergence from open market-economy norms through six economic indicators: financial-system development, a modern innovation system, market competition, trade openness, direct-investment openness, and portfolio-investment openness. When taken together, these indicators offer a clear and data-driven assessment of China’s claim that it is reforming. Our research shows that, in fact, it’s a mixed story. Although China has undertaken significant trade reforms over the past decade, those reforms fall far short when compared with open-market economies, and China’s financial markets may be beginning to backslide. This tool will be updated quarterly to inform policy discussions about how market economies should respond. For now, such economies should be making moves to protect themselves with dwindling Chinese growth on the horizon.
The Big Story by Josh Lipsky
The Big Story by Josh Lipsky
With China, the story is never so simple. The truth is that China still hasn’t decided which direction its economy is ultimately headed. And we need a credible way to track its trajectory.
It was a delicate undertaking to say the least: hosting the first-ever in-person gathering of senior government officials from Israel and all six Arab nations that have announced diplomatic normalizations with Israel. But the get-together to cement the Abraham Accords, featuring Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates, was a grand success. With the Atlantic Council and Jeffrey M. Talpins Foundation convening the right players, the countries worked to deepen regional cooperation and integration, in contrast to the mostly bilateral contacts that had occurred since the Accords.
The two-day conference that ended on Wednesday, named N7 — N for normalization and 7 for the number of participating countries — was hosted by the Jeffrey M. Talpins Foundation and the Atlantic Council, the culmination of six months of planning.
Suffice it to say, documentaries are not the usual wheelhouse for a think tank. But our Atlantic Council IN TURKEY team is an unusually creative bunch, and they produced the Council’s first-ever documentary, Do Seagulls Migrate? The film chronicles the lives of four Syrian women who fled their homes in a time of war to seek survival, prosperity, and a new life in Turkey. Do Seagulls Migrate? reveals the refugee experience firsthand as Reem, Khloud, Inam, and Reem M. share their emotional journeys, care for their families, forge new experiences, and build new careers. Screening this moving documentary at a venue as storied as the Kennedy Center made for a powerful evening, and we’re looking forward to the festival buzz for the film in 2022.
As the Syrian civil war marks a decade of destruction and displacement, millions of refugees are forced to endure harrowing journeys and create new lives from scratch. Do Seagulls Migrate?, a new documentary from the Atlantic Council, chronicles the lives of four Syrian women who fled their war-torn homes to seek survival, prosperity, and a new life in Turkey. Do Seagulls Migrate? reveals the refugee experience first-hand as Reem, Khloud, Inam, and Reem M. share their emotional journeys, forge new experiences, care for their families, and build new careers.
Soft power is the new hard power. That was the lesson from the first annual African Creative Industries Summit, hosted by our Africa Center and the Smithsonian Museum of African Art, and featuring heads of state, top diplomats, groundbreaking artists, and even a soccer legend. All the participants pointed to Africa’s rising soft power, which is evident in music and fashion trends sweeping the globe, not to mention sports and film talent. The United States has a crucial role to play in fostering the growth of these industries, which will help power the economic revival of the world’s youngest continent by age.
New Atlanticist by Katherine Walla
New Atlanticist by Katherine Walla
The Atlantic Council brought together Africa’s brightest cultural minds—and the policymakers who’ve helped make their achievements possible—to understand Africa’s cultural revolution and rising soft power.
At our core, we at the Atlantic Council are community builders. Without our communities of influence and impact, none of our work to shape the global future gets traction. COVID-19 has pushed our communities almost entirely to the virtual realm, which makes an in-person gathering all the more remarkable. Especially one of the magnitude of the Distinguished Leadership Awards, our first in-person awards dinner in more than two years. It was a stunning success, and not just for our fundraising efforts or stellar honorees—President of the European Commission Ursula von de Leyen; Chairman and CEO of Pfizer Albert Bourla; the co-founders of BioNTech, Özlem Türeci and Ugur Sahin; and musician Dua Lipa. Most of all, it was the magic of our friends all being in the same room that made this night unforgettable.
New Atlanticist by Dan Peleschuk
New Atlanticist by Dan Peleschuk
Singer Dua Lipa, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Pfizer’s Albert Bourla, and BioNTech’s Özlem Türeci and Ugur Sahin earn the Atlantic Council’s highest honors for shaping the global future together.
The Atlantic Council’s presence at this year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26)—through our Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center and our Global Energy Center—set itself apart with the solutions-oriented nature of its work. Our teams focused on meaningful discussions among significant players on issues that included green hydrogen, small modular nuclear projects, electric vehicles, agricultural advances, and city-focused, financial, insurance, policy, and on-the ground solutions for tackling climate change’s biggest killer: heat. The Arsht-Rock team provided some of the most creative and impressive work in Glasgow on climate-change adaptation, while the Global Energy Center team offered up some of the smartest ideas and most powerful convenings on climate mitigation. If you’re a US legislator navigating climate-related issues, you turn to the Atlantic Council as your partner.
The 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) is bringing political leaders, climate policy makers, and activists to Glasgow, Scotland to tackle an existential crisis for the planet. And the Atlantic Council will be there, with experts across a range of disciplines—from energy to security to resilience—delivering unique insight and analysis on this critical conference.
From the Omicron variant and Russia’s threatening of Ukraine to China’s saber-rattling over Taiwan and Iran’s simmering nuclear program, 2022 is poised to be a volatile year—with a highly uncertain decade to follow. That’s why we have the finest foresight minds around as part of the Scowcroft Center to peer into the future and assess the top risks and opportunities for the coming year, provide a “choose your own adventure” selection of scenarios for what the world could look like in 2030, and explore emerging “snow leopards”—known but underappreciated phenomena that will shake our world.
Atlantic Council Strategy Paper Series
Atlantic Council Strategy Paper Series
The inaugural edition of a new annual report from the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, home for the last decade to one of the world’s premier strategic foresight shops.
Frederick Kempe is president and CEO of the Atlantic Council.
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