Wolfgang Friedrich Ischinger is a German diplomat who served as chairman of the Munich Security Conference from 2008 to 2022.
The Partnership for Peace is a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) program aimed at creating trust and cooperation between the member states of NATO and other states mostly in Europe, including post-Soviet states; 18 states are members. The program contains 6 areas of cooperation, which aims to build relationships with partners through military-to-military cooperation on training, exercises, disaster planning and response, science and environmental issues, professionalization, policy planning, and relations with civilian government. During policy negotiations in the 1990s, a primary controversy regarding PfP was its ability to be interpreted as a program that is a stepping stone for joining NATO with full Article 5 guarantees.
The Atlantic Council is an American think tank in the field of international affairs, favoring Atlanticism, founded in 1961. It manages sixteen regional centers and functional programs related to international security and global economic prosperity. It is headquartered in Washington, D.C. It is a member of the Atlantic Treaty Association.
Atlanticism, also known as Transatlanticism, is the ideology which advocates a close alliance between nations in Northern America and in Europe on political, economic, and defense issues. The term derives from the North Atlantic Ocean, which is bordered by North America and Europe.
Transatlantic relations refer to the historic, cultural, political, economic and social relations between countries on both side of the Atlantic Ocean. Sometimes it specifically means relationships between the Anglophone North American countries, and particular European countries or organizations, although other meanings are possible.
The NATO Parliamentary Assembly serves as the consultative interparliamentary organisation for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). It consists of delegates from the parliaments of the 32 NATO member countries as well as from associate and partner countries. Its current President is Gerry Connolly from the United States, elected as Acting President in 2024 after former president Michał Szczerba was elected to European Parliament. Its current Secretary General is Ruxandra Popa, who has been in this position since January 2020.
Relations between the European Union and the United States began in 1953, when US diplomats visited the European Coal and Steel Community in addition to the national governments of its six founding countries. The two parties share a good relationship which is strengthened by NATO, cooperation on trade, and shared values.
John Christian Kornblum was an American diplomat and businessman. He entered the American Foreign Service in 1964. Over the next 35 years, he served at the State Department in Washington D.C. and in Europe, eventually becoming Ambassador to Germany. From 2001 onward, he established himself as an investment banker and international business consultant.
Karen Kornbluh served as U.S. Ambassador to the OECD under President Barack Obama and as a senior official at the U.S. Department of the Treasury and Federal Communications Commission under President Bill Clinton. She is an expert on communications policy, international trade and issues affecting working families. Her profile in The New York Times focused on her efforts “Fighting for Economic Equality.” She is now Director of the Digital Innovation and Democracy Initiative at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a think tank dedicated to promoting transatlantic cooperation, where she is also a Senior Fellow. She also currently serves as the Chairperson of the board of the Open Technology Fund. She was previously Executive Vice President of External Affairs at Nielsen, Senior Fellow for Digital Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a presidentially-appointed member of the Broadcasting Board of Governors. She was a senior adviser to Barack Obama from the beginning of his Senate tenure throughout his 2008 presidential campaign.
The European Institute is a nonpartisan public policy organization dedicated to Transatlantic relations. The Institute was founded in 1989 and is based in Washington, D.C. It regularly hosts forums, roundtable discussions, and programs with political and business leaders from the U.S. and Europe. Additionally, the Institute publishes the e-journal European Affairs.
The George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies is a bi-national United States Department of Defense and Federal Ministry of Defence (Germany) security and defense studies institute. When the Marshall Center was founded in 1993, its mission was to create a more stable security environment by advancing democratic institutions and relationships, especially in the field of defense; promoting active, peaceful, security cooperation; and enhancing enduring partnerships among the nations of North America, Europe, and Eurasia. As of Oct. 1, 2014, the Marshall Center's regional mission changed to a transnational one based on an Office of the Secretary of Defense directive to change from a European to a global participants' base.
Damon M. Wilson is an American foreign policy scholar who serves as president and CEO of the National Endowment for Democracy, a foundation supporting freedom and democracy around the world. From 2011 to 2021, he was the Executive Vice President at the Atlantic Council, a nonpartisan think tank focused on international cooperation. A former civil servant, Wilson served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for European Affairs at the National Security Council during the second term of President George W. Bush.
Kori N. Schake is an American international relations scholar currently serving as Director of Foreign and Defense Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. She has held several high-level positions in the U.S. Defense and State Departments and on the National Security Council. She was a foreign policy adviser to the McCain-Palin 2008 presidential campaign. Schake is a contributing writer at The Atlantic. She serves on the board of advisors of Foreign Policy Research Institute and the Alexander Hamilton Society. Schake is a member of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee.
Reta Jo Lewis is an American attorney, former diplomat, and politician, currently serving as president and chair of the Export–Import Bank of the United States.
The United States Mission to the European Union (USEU) is the diplomatic mission of the United States to the European Union; it is based in Brussels, Belgium. The US has maintained diplomatic relations with the EU and its predecessors since 1953. The first predecessor of the current mission was the US diplomatic mission to the European Coal and Steel Community in Luxembourg, which opened in 1956. In 1961, the US Mission to the European Communities was established in Brussels, which later became the United States Mission to the European Union, upon the latter's establishment in 1993.
Karen Erika Donfried is an American foreign policy expert who previously served as the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs. The State Department announced in March 2023 that Donfried would be stepping down from her post at the end of the month. She also served as president of the German Marshall Fund from April 2014 to September 2021.
Balkan Trust for Democracy is a foundation based in Belgrade, Serbia. It was founded in March 2003 by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.
The Federal Chancellor Helmut Schmidt Foundation is the most recent of the seven non-partisan foundations commemorating politicians in Germany. It was established on 1 January 2017 by the German Bundestag to "preserve the memory of Helmut Schmidt's political work for the freedom and unity of the German people, for European freedom and unification and for understanding and reconciliation among nations". Within the framework of its political education work, it is also tasked with conveying to young people in particular those topics that exercised Schmidt as a politician and journalist.
Guido Goldman was a Swiss-born American academic and philanthropist known for advancing post–World War II US-Germany academic and cultural relations. He was a co-founder of the German Marshall Fund and also set up the Center for European Studies at Harvard University.
Heather A. Conley is president of the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF) in Washington, D.C.
