Prospects and Challenges for Transatlantic Relations After Trump and Corona

The paper starts by examining the challenges faced by transatlantic relations. Several key challenges can be directly attributed to the Trump administration's often radical changes in foreign and domestic public policies and his willfully destructive approach to U.S.-built international institutions and alliances. But some key challenges also reflect broader shifts and long lingering problems, rendered more severe or at least more visible by the COVID-19 pandemic and unlikely to disappear with a change in administrations. The paper then focuses on identifying what American and what Europeans can – and should – do to restore and strengthen transatlantic security cooperation, as well as transatlantic economic relations, in light of the existing challenges. Re-establishing de facto collaboration and trust among political leaders, as well as trans-governmentally will be crucial for setting the tone. But as the paper highlights, commercial ties, scientific cooperation, joint initiatives by non-governmental policy think tanks (working transatlantically to establish, for instance, common standards for the ethical and transparent governance of new technologies), and private friendships also can contribute greatly to restoring the transatlantic partnership "from the bottom up." The paper ends with a proposal for a joint transnational (multilingual) media channel focused on truthful information provision, co-sponsored by the world's liberal democracies but made available to the world