Weekly Notes, May 16-22, 2026
What I’ve Been Thinking About and Reading This Week While in Estonia and Czechia
I started the week on the Estonian-Russian border in Narva, surprised by the narrowness of the river that separates the two countries. I ended it inadvertantly sparking a rather feisty exchange at GLOBSEC in Prague between the Speaker of the Serbian Parliament and the former Prime Minister of Bulgaria over North Macedonia’s EU fortunes. This whirlwind European trip, which also took me to Belgrade, has left me without a voice, excited about all the follow-up exchanges I’ve teed up, energized by all the conversations and discussions I had, but also longing to get back home and sleep in my own bed again.
The one observation that stood out the most to me this week at GLOBSEC and last week at the Lennart Meri Conference in Tallinn is how much European security conversations have shifted from crisis management toward long-term structural adaptation.
Increasingly, European policymakers seem less focused on “ending” instability and more focused on managing what they now view as a permanently more volatile geopolitical environment, in large part caused by the Trump administration but also buffeted by their own challenging domestic politics. The relative absence of official Americans underscored to me the importance of ensuring the U.S. think tank, business, and academic community remains engaged and does its best to fill in the gap. Showing up is critical right now. I felt our European allies received a measure of assurance with our presence, though it certainly doesn’t compensate for the overall deterioration in relations with the United States.
For years, much of Europe’s political architecture was built around the assumption that large-scale interstate conflict on the continent had become historically unlikely. What seems increasingly clear now is that many European institutions are beginning to operate from the opposite assumption: that the relative stability of the post–Cold War period may have been the anomaly rather than the norm.
Articles of Interest
A story about how Ukraine’s drone innovation cycle is compressing the traditional timeline between battlefield experimentation and institutional military doctrine.
How Ukraine Gained the Upper Hand in the Drone War
Jimmy Rushton, Kyiv Independent, May 19, 2026
Ukraine increasingly appears less as a dependent recipient of Western military assistance and more as a driver of military innovation that NATO itself is studying in real time. What is fascinating about this is not just the Ukrainian ingenuity and technological innovation involved, but the speed at which the country has adapted tactically and institutionally. Ukraine’s drone ecosystem now operates across multiple layers simultaneously: tactical battlefield FPVs, mid-range strikes against logistics and command infrastructure, and increasingly sophisticated deep strikes inside Russia itself. What stood out most was the broader strategic implication: Ukraine’s ability to innovate rapidly in unmanned systems is beginning to erode two of Russia’s core advantages — manpower and geographic depth — while simultaneously forcing NATO and Western militaries to rethink how quickly battlefield experimentation can reshape modern military doctrine.
Two stories about this year’s partnership between GLOBSEC and Politico for GLOBSEC’s annual conference.
POLITICO and GLOBSEC partner to launch the POLITICO Speakeasy at the 2026 GLOBSEC Forum
Press Release, Globsec.org, May 5, 2026
Serbia’s Brnabić condemns EU double standards on enlargement
Sonja Rijnen and Anne McElvoy, Politico.eu, May 21, 2026
I spent a great deal of time during GLOBSEC at one of the most innovative of the gathering’s many innovative settings—the POLITICO Speakeasy at GLOBSEC 2026. The format was terrific—an almost constant round-robin of short, topical interviews with some of the most important people shaping transatlantic relations, in an intimate setting and tapping some of Politico’s best talents, including Anne McElvoy and Brussels Playbook Podcast hosts Zoya Sheftalovitch and Nick Vinocur. (Shout out also to Politico’s Gavin Sundwall and Cristina Gonzalez for flagging the programming to me and being such terrific organizers/hosts.) Among the memorable exchanges for me was one (naturally) about the Balkans and enlargement politics. McElvoy’s fantastic interview with Ana Brnabić touched directly on Serbia’s increasingly uneasy positioning between Brussels, Moscow, and the changing politics of EU enlargement. McElvoy didn’t hold back, and neither did Brnabić—leading to a truly substantive discussion.
A story about how the Strait of Hormuz crisis exposed a surprisingly underappreciated dependence the United States has on its transatlantic allies.
Why Trump can’t reopen Hormuz without Nato minehunters
Iona Cleave and Joel Seidman, The Telegraph, May 20, 2026
A good friend of mine, Joel Seidman, wrote this fascinating piece for the Telegraph about the under-discussed U.S. reliance on its allies to help de-mine the Strait of Hormuz. A highly successful former NBC producer, Joel has been focusing on Ukraine and transatlantic relations the past few years. He and Kevin Tibbles, working with the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, produced a documentary called Putin’s Endgame (watch it via the link here) in 2025 which aimed to raise awareness, particularly in the United States, of what is at stake if Putin prevails in Ukraine. His piece in the Telegraph this week argues that the United States—despite possessing the world’s most powerful navy—may not actually be capable of reopening the Strait of Hormuz on its own if Iran successfully mines the waterway. Instead, Washington increasingly appears dependent on specialized mine-hunting capabilities developed and maintained primarily by European NATO allies over decades of investment in Baltic and North Sea maritime security. What makes the story especially striking is the broader strategic irony: while American political rhetoric has often framed European allies as overly dependent on U.S. military power, this particular crisis revealed a highly specialized area where the dependency may now partially run in the opposite direction. More broadly, it feels like another example of how the post-Cold War division of labor inside NATO is being stress-tested by a far more unstable geopolitical environment.
A story about how Poland is attempting to navigate growing political friction with the United States without escalating into a broader strategic rupture.
Poland’s fugitive former justice minister can’t rest easy in the US
Jan Cienski, Zoya Sheftalovich and Chris Lunday, Politico, May 23, 2026
Another story that received considerable attention during the POLITICO Speakeasy at GLOBSEC 2026 involved former Polish justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro, who—despite remaining a sitting member of the Polish parliament—reportedly received a journalist visa approved directly by the U.S. Deputy Secretary of State before leaving Poland ahead of looming corruption charges tied to his tenure as justice minister under the previous, closely Trump-aligned Polish government. The country’s current foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, raised the issue in an interview with Politico, gently pointing out the irony that the U.S. was cracking down on illegal immigration while granting Ziobro (who has no journalistic background) a visa intended specifically for members of the press. It increasingly feels like many European governments are trying to manage two realities simultaneously: preserving the core transatlantic security relationship while also quietly coping with a more politically unpredictable American environment.
A story about how Europe is increasingly beginning to think about hybrid warfare as a permanent condition rather than a temporary disruption.
From Shield to Sword: Europe’s Offensive Strategy For the Hybrid Age
Will Brown, Jana Kobzová, Nicu Popescu and José Ignacio Torreblanca, European Council on Foreign Relations, March 6, 2026
One of the more interesting policy briefs I read this week (from March, but that I only saw this week courtesy of my friend Donna Woolf) argued that Europe’s response to hybrid threats—cyberattacks, infrastructure sabotage, disinformation, drone incursions, covert financing, and political destabilization campaigns—remains fundamentally too defensive for the geopolitical environment it now faces. The most interesting part of the piece to me (as a former public diplomacy practitioner) was its implicit argument for rebuilding something closer to a modernized Cold War-era public diplomacy apparatus. The authors repeatedly point to the role institutions like Radio Free Europe, the BBC World Service, and broader Western strategic communications efforts played during the Cold War — not simply rebutting Soviet narratives, but proactively shaping democratic ones. It feels especially notable given how much of that infrastructure was either deprioritized after the Cold War or actively dismantled in recent years, particularly under Trump. The broader argument seems to be that Europe increasingly recognizes it cannot rely exclusively on defensive resilience measures and may need to rebuild a more offensive democratic information strategy of its own.
Closing Thoughts
It was terrific to attend the Lennart Meri Conference and GLOBSEC 2026 for the first time, but I’m looking forward to some time back home for the next few weeks before more travel related to the Balkans and Ukraine. Both conferences were incredibly interesting, in very different ways—Lennart Meri for its intimacy and its Nordic-Baltic take on many of the issues affecting transatlantic relations today, GLOBSEC for its sheer scope and the variety of sessions and speakers.
Many of the discussions we were having in both Tallinn and Prague—around resilience, deterrence, enlargement, industrial capacity, and institutional adaptation—are no longer happening in isolated policy silos but are beginning to merge into a broader attempt to adjust to a far more unstable geopolitical era. I suspect a lot of the next few months will revolve around how sustainable that adjustment actually proves to be.
