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At the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Atlantisch Perspectief asked me to take stock of U.S. foreign policy towards the conflict. After the midterm elections and half way through Joe Biden’s presidential term, is America still all-in as a supporter of Ukraine or has fatigue and the success of Trumpian isolationists tempered U.S. enthusiasm for acting as the arsenal of democracy? Add to this uncertainty, equally important questions about Biden’s willingness to continue to lead and to unify NATO members against Putin. The recent debate on whether and when to supply tanks to a Ukrainian army that was obviously in need of more heavy military hardware and more ammunition, suggests that cracks were appearing in leadership, unity, and the ability to arm the defender.

It is certainly interesting and somewhat bemusing to witness the shift in Dutch public opinion towards the Joe Biden administration over the course of November to early January. Views swung from overt signs of relief that Republicans did not realize a significant red wave in the midterms to frustration that Biden had pulled the rug out of his promised “we’re back” multilateral foreign policy when it comes to free trade. I have two truths for my Dutch audience, one you will find a little comforting and the other a little frustrating.

In the months leading up to the 2022 U.S. midterm elections many Europeans let it be known that these elections felt exceedingly consequential, certainly more than the average midterm election round. A first indication was that my son asked me in September to remind him how to apply for an absentee ballot. A second indication came during a dinner in mid-September hosted by the U.S. Mission to the Netherlands where it was noted that the Dutch were paying close attention to the campaign. The big reason, of course, were concerns raised by Donald J. Trump and his possible impact on both U.S. domestic and foreign policy as well as possible knock-on effects to American democracy. The question that I was asked the most: will Trump be the kingmaker for Republicans running this November? And if so, what does that portend for November 2024, when Trump himself runs again, and what impact might that have for the future of American foreign policy?

While my American friends were mostly silent on the search and seizure of classified files retrieved from former U.S. President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, my European friends were scandalized. In late August, many in Europe voiced to me the certainty that this would be Trump’s undoing. My answer was that I thought that the Justice Department and the FBI acted in a way that would surely backfire against them—that they were striking the ball into their own net.

This spring and early summer several people in the Netherlands and the United States relayed to me dire apocalyptic warnings or offered complex schemes about world events. Whether it is believing that the FBI is actually behind many of the recent mass murders in the U.S. or that the CIA assisted freedom struggles in Georgia, Ukraine and Belarus, many of the explanations I heard centered on a powerful but corrupt U.S. government. The disconnect between these conspiracies and my own experience of watching a patriotic, smalltown 4th of July parade, with a good deal of candy thrown my way, is stark. Why are so many people currently spouting so many conspiracy theories on both sides of the Atlantic?

New religious movements in modern western culture often emphasize experience at the expense of reason; for that reason, some scholars have described their teachings as “flights from reason.” This description has been rightly criticized. Nevertheless, it is not entirely wrong. Many founders of new religious movements do claim immediate insight into a (divine) reality that transcends the intellect. And yet, they and their followers often spendmuch of their lives building an intellectual frame around this anti-intellectual claim. Why did such paradoxical “reasoned flights beyond reason” emerge? Based on the life and teachings of Franklin Merrell-Wolff (1887–1985) and his Assembly of Man, the intellectualization of anti-intellectual claims by founders and followers of new religious movements in twentieth-century North America can be partly explained by three sociohistorical developments: (1) increasing access to an academic education, (2) increasing demand for a reflexive spirituality, and (3) increasing competition between eastern and western esoteric movements that answered this call for a reflexive spirituality.

Sociological scholarship on social movements has shed important light on the role of knowledge production for processes of collective action and mobilization. However, much of this research overlooks the question of how movement-based knowledge emerges from within institutionalized settings of formal education. Drawing on a qualitative case study, this article examines the repertoire of knowledge-building practices mobilized from within a state-based system of adult education in francophone Belgium. Building on social movement theory, it is shown how formalized sites of adult education can empower the presence of social movements in society when they adopt counter-hegemonic principles of popular education that allow them to act as free spaces which facilitate the construction of strategic capacities and collective identities.

In Europe, liberal arts and sciences undergraduate university programmes are typically characterised by a high degree of freedom of choice in the curriculum. Educators often present this as allowing students to design an integrated, interdisciplinary curriculum around their particular interests. This paper explores how students in such programmes understand and experience that freedom. It postulates a theoretical typology of reasons why one might value curricular freedom and, based on 59 interviews with students from 13 such programmes, considers what aspects of this typology resonate with students. The paper concludes that students overwhelmingly see freedom of choice in the curriculum as an opportunity to try out different disciplines to discover which ones they enjoy most. While this eventually does lead them to making tailored choices about their studies, their path to this goal is more meandering than is commonly understood. This insight allows programmes with a significant amount of freedom of choice to better support students in their educational development.

The disenchantment of reality has bankrupted conventional sources of meaning for many people in modern Western cultures. This has led a growing number of figures and groups to search for alternative sources of meaning. Typical of their quests for meaning is the entanglement of secular and religious discourses. Since the twentieth century, scholars have studied the social configurations of these figures and groups as “cults” or “new religious movements” and their ideologies as “New Age” or “spirituality,” which are seen as parts of a longer tradition of “Western esotericism” (Europe) or “metaphysical religion” (North America). Several leading scholars have also interpreted them as forms of “secular religion,” but this has yet to gain academic traction. This article argues that the former concepts are lacking or losing a logical connection with the socio-historical phenomena to which they pertain and reintroduces the latter concept as a more appropriate one.

Discourses on Responsible Innovation and Responsible Research and Innovation, in short R(R)I, have revolved around but not elaborated on the notion of critique. In this article, generative critique is introduced to R(R)I as a practice that sits in-between adversarial armchair critique and co-opted, uncritical service. How to position oneself and be positioned on this spectrum has puzzled humanities scholars and social scientists who engage in interdisciplinary collaborations with scientists, engineers, and other professionals. Recently, generative critique has been presented as a solution to the puzzle in interdisciplinary collaborations on neuroscientific experiments. Generative critique seeks to create connections across disciplines that help remake seemingly stable objects in moments when taken-for-granted ways of seeing and approaching objects are unsettled. In order to translate generative critique from the neurosciences to R(R)I, socio-technical integration research (STIR) is proposed as a practice of generative critique in interdisciplinary R(R)I collaborations. These collaborations aim to account for societal aspects in research and technology development. For this purpose, a variety of approaches have been developed, including STIR and video-reflexive ethnography (VRE). STIR and VRE resemble each other but diverge on affective, collaborative, and temporal dimensions. Their juxtaposition serves to develop suggestions for how STIR could be modified on these dimensions to better enact generative critique in interdisciplinary R(R)I collaborations. In this way, the article contributes to ongoing discussions in R(R)I and in the engaged programme in science and technology studies more broadly on the dynamics of positioning in collaborative work.

Joe Biden entered the White House in January this year with the promise of bringing multilateralism “back” to a pre-transactional United States foreign policy. At the same time, Biden emphasized that he would double down on the Donald Trump administration’s hard stance on China. Biden has not rescinded Trump’s trade war with China and, in fact, embarked on a “blunting” strategy aimed to limit Chinese economic and political power alongside a new military pact designed to counter China’s growing military power. However, can the Biden administration successfully rebuild multilateral ties with traditional allies while at the same time impede China’s influence in multilateral institutions? Might the Biden administration’s intensification of the Sino-American rivalry ultimately undermine its attempts to restore multilateralism across the globe? If so, what might Europeans do to reignite an expansive multilateralism in U.S. foreign policy—one that not only reacts to China’s rise but that sets a clear vision for the future?

In different streams of literature employability has been defined in different, often related ways. We take an interdisciplinary approach, combining insights from research on higher education and workplace learning, taking a Western perspective. In doing so we take a multi-dimensional, competence-based approach. Our approach to conceptualizing employability responds to research from both disciplines arguing for a need of integrating approaches to employability, for a unified overview of conceptual frameworks and agreement on definitions of the concept. We conclude that models of employability from these different disciplines can reinforce each other. Certain dimensions of employability are less taken into account in one discipline, while receiving a lot of attention in the other. Hence, our work opens new avenues for conceptual and empirical research on employability in both domains. Moreover, it might influence how researchers and practitioners research and support (lifelong) learning for employability, both in higher education and in the workplace.

Readers of the Observant know that the future and quality of leadership is again a popular topic. Prof. Martin Paul will say farewell to us via his own musings on leadership. In my case, I was recently invited as a speaker and mentor for a Summer School for Female Leadership that took place in Lisbon. One of my roles was to be part of a panel entitled “Global Order: Leading with purpose for a sustainable, inclusive world.” Amongst the questions sent by the moderator of the panel, the journalist and opinion shaper Shada Islam, was the intriguing question: “‘Feminist leadership’ what is it, does it exist and if it does, is it good, bad or unimportant?”

The changing nature of the international system is subject to considerable contestation among scholars, with many claiming that the fundamentals of the post-war international system are being rewritten. We are in a world where the rules-based system that has been in place since the end of the Second World War is being challenged. Freedom and democracy are contracting while at the same time the United States is moving away from multilateralism and retreating from its global leadership role. New powers, such as China, are emerging to claim their place on the international scene. This volume brings together prominent scholars in the field of European security to address a range of pertinent issues related to Europe’s role in the context of these evolving global challenges. The first section focuses on whether the EU is an actor with a strategic nature and the wherewithal to act on a global security strategy. The second section considers the institutional dynamics and the approaches at the EU’s disposal to fulfil its possible intended global roles. The third section addresses Europe’s most important strategic relationship—the partnership it has with the United States. This section considers the recalibration of the transatlantic relationship in light of the changing international system and the reorientation of U.S. foreign policy under President Donald Trump.

The changing nature of the international system is subject to considerable contestation among scholars, with many claiming that the fundamentals of the post-war international system are being rewritten. We are in a world where the rules-based system that has been in place since the end of the Second World War is being challenged. Freedom and democracy are contracting while at the same time the United States is moving away from multilateralism and retreating from its global leadership role. New powers, such as China, are emerging to claim their place on the international scene. This volume brings together prominent scholars in the field of European security to address a range of pertinent issues related to Europe’s role in the context of these evolving global challenges. The first section focuses on whether the EU is an actor with a strategic nature and the wherewithal to act on a global security strategy. The second section considers the institutional dynamics and the approaches at the EU’s disposal to fulfil its possible intended global roles. The third section addresses Europe’s most important strategic relationship—the partnership it has with the United States. This section considers the recalibration of the transatlantic relationship in light of the changing international system and the reorientation of U.S. foreign policy under President Donald Trump.

Editorial on the Research Topic\ud Academic Advising and Tutoring for Student Success in Higher Education: International Approaches

It is widely agreed that contemporary higher education should teach critical thinking. In order to explore how university programmes can do so more effectively, this paper examines how students in European Liberal Arts and Sciences (LAS) programmes, which are renowned for developing critical thinking skills, experience how they acquire this ability. Based on a number of interviews with students in a range of LAS programmes, it is concluded that these students believe that they learn critical thinking by engaging with a multiplicity of perspectives on problems and issues. This makes them sceptical towards decontested claims to knowledge, appreciate different academic and social perspectives, and realise what they themselves should believe or do. LAS programmes achieve this through a multidisciplinary curriculum, a student-centred pedagogy, and a diverse academic community. This insight generates a number of suggestions for how other programmes might teach critical thinking better.

Just in time for Labor Day relaxed reading in the U.S., the well-known political journalist Jeffrey Goldberg dropped a bomb on Donald J. Trump’s re-election campaign with the head-line, “Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers.’” While, Goldberg is known for his inside-scoop-intrepid reporting, the timing and the content of his article suggests that other forces are at play—it indicates that the generals are making a tactical move against their commander in chief. It suggests that the generals have had enough of Trump in the White House and want him out.

A dog whistle is also a logical fallacy that intends to cast its object in a certain subjective light. While it has been decades since I took a course in logic (and even back then I could not get my Ps and Qs right), I can still recognize that Trump is a master at strategically employing the informal persuasive fallacy. Recognizing this, prompted me to have a closer look at a few of Trump’s effective fallacies.

My home state in the U.S. is South Dakota, where President Donald Trump happened to give a provocative Fourth of July speech at Mount Rushmore. While Trump’s visit to my beloved state surely called for reflection on my part, I struggled to find the right balance of ideas. I know people who attended what amounted to a campaign rally that blatantly exploited iconic American imagery and incited cultural and race divisions for personal electoral gain. This fact made me wonder, what would it take for my fellow South Dakotans, who attended the event, to reject Trump and his chauvinist-racist ploys to win a second term?

We are all cleaning out our closets in this lockdown period. One of my neighbors found a Special Edition of The New York Times from Sunday the 16th of September 2001, which had been lovingly saved over the years. Still unable to throw it away, he passed it on to me. Reading it these nineteen years later, painted stark pictures of two different global crisis responses. In the days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States a real sense of “we are in this together” unity infused the Western world. This accord sits in direct contrast with the disunity affecting Transatlantic relations today. This disparity led me to ask, how the current state of affairs emerged, which includes an international blame game, interstate fights over personal protective equipment (PPE) and vaccine battles? And, in general, why hasn’t this global crisis brought the world together like crises in the past?

A a whole host of articles have speculated on whether U.S. President Trump’s lack of interest in global leadership during the covid-19 pandemic is hastening China’s emergence as an influential global power. Many of these articles follow on the alarm raised by nervous foreign-policy watchers in the U.S., who argued that the pandemic and the resulting global recession were marking a geopolitical reordering that would leave China as the winner. Undoubtedly, China wants to take on a great power mantle, which includes leading a response to a global health crisis, but is the West ready for its guidance and what would we be giving up if the U.S. shed its role as the global system’s leader in times of crisis?

This policy brief elaborates on the circumstances of the United States’ dwindling leadership role within the multilateral alliance. The ramifications of this leadership decline are evident in the lack of coordination regarding policy in Syria and Iran and in the doubts cast by the U.S.’ role as the guarantor of last resort for the European continent.

Why do advisors do what they do in their advising practice? What challenges do they face in getting from thought to action, from theory to practice? How do they navigate those challenges? What is their process? What is their method? (B. Lamons, personal communication, November 6, 2018) After briefly surveying the landscape of recent literature on the scholarship of advising, this article explores the concept of praxis in general, underscoring the critical importance of a scholarly approach and activity in academic advising praxis. The article mines the topics of the nature of scholarship in general and the ways in which it relates to praxis, offering concrete examples from within the academic advising profession.

Some restaurants allow guests to decide how much they would like to pay for their meals, depending on how much they enjoyed the experience. It is not counterintuitive to think that such a mechanism would set a deserved wage. After all, one might think thathow much one deserves depends on how much value one creates for others and that individuals can adequately judge how much value they derive from some good or service. Hence, letting consumers decide what they think certain goods or experiences are worth would result, in the aggregate, in a deserved and just wage. In this paper, I will explore and defend this argument.

ObjectiveTo describe the clinical phenotype and recovery of diaphragm dysfunction caused by neuralgic amyotrophy in a large cohort of patients, to improve accurate awareness of this entity, and to encourage adoption of a standardized approach for diagnosis and treatment.MethodsThis observational cohort study recruited adult patients with neuralgic amyotrophy and symptoms of idiopathic phrenic neuropathy from the database of the Dutch expert center for neuralgic amyotrophy and the Dutch centers for home mechanical ventilation. Demographic and clinical information on diagnosis, symptoms, and recovery was obtained from chart review. We attempted to contact all patients for a follow-up interview.ResultsPhrenic neuropathy occurs in 7.6% of patients with neuralgic amyotrophy. Unilateral diaphragmatic dysfunction and bilateral diaphragmatic dysfunction are frequently symptomatic, causing exertional dyspnea, orthopnea, disturbed sleep, and excessive fatigue. Diagnostic practices varied widely and were often not optimally targeted. The majority of patients experienced at least moderate recovery within 2 years.ConclusionWe recommend screening every patient with neuralgic amyotrophy for diaphragm dysfunction by asking about orthopnea and by performing upright and supine vital capacity screening and diaphragm ultrasound in cases of suspected phrenic neuropathy to optimize diagnosis and care.

How do people exert their agency in the face of large-scale societal crises? Merging strands of sociolinguistic scholarship with social movement theory, this article offers a way of looking at how grassroots actors work to overcome dramatic episodes of macro-structural instability and uncertainty through participation in collective action. Particular attention is given to a heuristic development of the concepts of ‘stance’ and ‘stance-taking’. Stance is defined as the strategic and solidaristic position taken up by a group of actors toward a critical event, such as an economic meltdown or collapsing political regime. Stance-taking is defined as the ensemble of discursive, organizational and dramaturgical practices through which group-based stances are developed and deployed. Ultimately, the social construction of stance is theorized as integral to the emergence of collective action and the broader expansion of social movement activities in times of crisis. By way of illustration attention is given to the stance-taking practices that fueled the rise of mass protests and mobilization in Argentina during a period of severe crisis in 2001-02.

This paper addresses the question of how the current growth paradigm perpetuates existing gender and environmental injustices and investigates whether these can be mitigated through a degrowth work-sharing proposal. It uses an adapted framework of the “ICE model” to illustrate how ecological processes and caring activities are structurally devalued by the monetized economy in a growth paradigm. On the one hand, this paradigm perpetuates gender injustices by reinforcing dualisms and devaluing care. On the other hand, environmental injustices are perpetuated since “green growth” does not succeed in dematerializing production processes. In its critique of the growth imperative, degrowth not only promotes the alleviation of environmental injustices but also calls for a recentering of society around care. This paper concludes that, if designed in a gender-sensitive way, a degrowth work-sharing proposal as part of a broader value transformation has the potential to address both gender and environmental injustices.

Surely after America’s rushed withdrawal from Syria last October, European leaders must be worried that their insubstantial contribution to U.S. global strategic interests makes them vulnerable for a similar desertion. Certainly, traditional Republican foreign policy experts fear that America’s security umbrella looks like it is full of holes to its European strategic partners.

I was saddened to hear about a recent report published in the Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) that life expectancy in the U.S. is declining and has been on a downward trend for three years. Perhaps more disturbing is the fact that the group experiencing the largest decline is from the ages of 25–34 years. These figures are shocking for several reasons, not least because the United States has the highest per capita health care spending in the world. Moreover, this downward trend is going in the opposite direction of America’s peer nations, which continue to experience rising life expectancy. These worrying facts have me asking, what’s wrong with America and why are midlife adults dying in what should be the prime of their lives?

In particular, the accusations made by Trump allies against the top Ukraine expert on the NSC, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, that he was disloyal to the United States, had me pull my copy of David McCullough’s prizewinning book Truman off the shelf. Because, it is not the first time in American history that knowledge on a topic was exploited as a justification for greater scrutiny, character assassination and ultimately the firing of U.S. officials. In the 1950s, the House on Un-American Activities Committee accused officials at the State Department of being disloyal because they were specialists—in other words, they knew the history, culture or language of the country they monitored. Unfortunately, the long-term costs to America’s foreign policy were significant, with the purges of the 1950s being directly related to foreign policy mistakes made in the 1960s. What can we learn from this ill-fated time and how can we ensure that we do not see the revival of the tactic of defaming competence?

In October 2019, President Trump reignited bipartisan criticisms on his foreign policy by lifting just-imposed sanctions on Turkey. Not only is Trump's foreign policy abandoning U.S. allies but it is allowing Russia to consolidate control of northern Syria and freeing terrorists who are intent on attacking Americans. Turkey's assault included roadside executions and many dead civilians, including children.

One of the most important skills that university students need to develop to function in tomorrow’s society is the ability to make reflective judgments. This ability to make decisions in the absence of determinate and authoritative criteria will form the enduring basis of careers and meaningful lives in a world in which artificial intelligence and global competition are becoming ever more present. Fostering this ability requires a student-centered approach to higher education, in which students take control of both what they study and how they study it, so that they can cultivate their own agency. Liberal arts programs, as they have appeared in Europe since the Bologna process started, can provide examples of how this approach can be realized in the context of the modern university.

The global spread of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is an existential threat to humanity, one that has generated a macrosecuritizing response by states and international organizations. Since the turn of the century, China has been a source of numerous infectious disease outbreaks. It is also the origin of the MCR-1 gene, which confers resistance to colistin, a “last-line” antibiotic deployed against multidrug-resistant infections. With the largest population in the world, coupled with its status as a major supplier of agricultural produce, evaluating Chinese responses to AMR is critical to understanding the efficacy of the global response. Drawing on knowledge of both Chinese politics and health security, this article analyzes how Chinese actors have responded to the threat in the public and animal health sectors as well as the domestic and international implications of these responses. Based on interviews with key Chinese and international officials, scientists, and public health specialists, as well as farmers and consumers, we argue that the securitization of AMR in China is currently more concerned with domestic policy and resource competition than with addressing the existential health threat. Without a greater alignment of AMR strategies within China, macrosecuritizing efforts to address the threat globally cannot succeed.

One of the most important decisions a president will make soon after an election is what kind of relationship he/she will have with cabinet secretaries and agency heads. Will the president control weaker secretaries and agency supervisors or will the president give them greater autonomy, making them in effect policy entrepreneurs? For example, George H. W. Bush created a contractor presidency, one that subcontracted management to important officials, giving them considerable freedom. Yet when it came time to support initiatives, Bush did not spend any political capital in backing his policy entrepreneurs, which ultimately led to policy failure. Bush’s approach to government is informative because of its similarities with Donald J. Trump’s strategy in policy-making. Trump also created a contractor presidency, which handed over major policy making to important officials in his cabinet. Yet, at the same time, Trump prevented those same executives from building their own teams and further gave equivocal or even contradictory responses to their policy initiatives. Just as Bush’s unsupportive relationship with his policy entrepreneurs led to policy defeat, Trump’s contradicting connection with his policy entrepreneurs also resulted in policy failure.

NATO’s 70th birthday was prolifically analyzed by pundits and academics, including me. While commentators were filling columns and airwaves with mostly, insistently positive interpretations of the alliance’s endurance, most politicians were aggressively mute on the topic. To the relief of NATO’s supporters, the subtle celebrations did not present any opportunities for fireworks, such as the dressing down that U.S. President Donald Trump gave his fellow leaders at NATO headquarters in May 2017. It helped that the heads of government of the member states were not invited to mark the occasion in Washington, D.C. All this careful management to ensure that the alliance does not break while Trump is at the helm (at least not in 2019), leads me to suppose that its future is in more danger than we realize.

Although U.S President Donald J. Trump’s recent summit with North Korean leader Kim Jon Un was less theatrically rewarding, as the Trump entourage flew back to Washington it was still clear that tensions with North Koreas were significantly lower. We can thank Trump’s sympathetic manner towards the dictator for the easing of hostilities on the Korean Peninsula. This “win” had me reflecting on the pros and cons of Trump’s foreign policy. Specifically, what is Trump getting right?

Trump’s short-term goals to keep his base happy might be effective to keep him in office but what are the long-term costs of his insurgency? What are the effects of the insurgent, who was elected to burn the house down, when he significantly undermines the procedures that protect workers, students, refugees, allies or the environment?

NATO’s existence has always been controversial. Indeed, each decade starting in the 1950s had an alliance crisis of some sort, with NATO often acting as the conduit for the expression of transatlantic disgruntlement. This should not undermine the fact that the alliance provided real benefits to the United States and its foreign policy interests over the last seven decades. This article engages in a stocktaking exercise, from an American perspective, considering what NATO delivered to the U.S. since its founding in April 1949. What value did NATO provide to the United States and are NATO’s benefits still evident today?