As part of the virtual 2020 German-American Conference, the American Council on Germany and Atlantik-Brücke will host a video discussion on “Did we miss the warning signals? Global trends and new security threats,” with Ambassador Boris Ruge, Vice-Chairman of the Munich Security Conference and Gregory F. Treverton, Professor of the Practice of International Relations and Spatial Sciences at the University of Southern California and former Chairman of the National Intelligence Council. Moderated by: Dr. Constanze Stelzenmüller, Kissinger Chair on Foreign Policy and International Relations at the Library of Congress and a Senior Fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution.
With the spread of COVID-19, an unprecedented public health crisis has brought global travel to a halt and slowed international commerce. The current environment was almost unimaginable as recently as January of this year. Or, should we have seen this coming? Our guests will discuss whether or not we should have anticipated this pandemic and how the definition of security threats is evolving.
Ambassador Boris Ruge took up his assignment as Vice-Chairman of the Munich Security Conference in August 2019. He previously served as Director Middle East/North Africa at the Foreign Office in Berlin, as German Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, and as Deputy Chief of Mission at the German Embassy in Washington, DC.
Having joined the Foreign Service in 1989, much of Ambassador Ruge’s career has been focused on security policy and stabilization. He worked at NATO Headquarters in Brussels during the Kosovo air campaign and later served as Chief Political Adviser to two successive Commanders of the Kosovo Force and as Head of the Political Department at the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia-Herzegovina. At the Foreign Office he was also in charge of European security and defense issues.
Following undergraduate studies at the University of Cologne, Ambassador Ruge received a master’s degree in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He holds a diploma in international relations from the Bologna Center of the Johns Hopkins University and was a participant in the 2005 course of the Royal College of Defense Studies in London. He is married and has three daughters and one son.
Gregory F. Treverton is Professor of the Practice of International Relations and Spatial Sciences at the University of Southern California.
He served as chairman of the National Intelligence Council from September 2014 to January 2017. Earlier, he directed the RAND Corporation’s Center for Global Risk and Security, and before that, its Intelligence Policy Center and its International Security and Defense Policy Center. He also was associate dean of the Pardee RAND Graduate School.
He has served in government for the first Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, handling Europe for the National Security Council and as vice chair of the National Intelligence Council, overseeing the writing of America’s National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs).  In addition to RAND, he has taught at Harvard and Columbia universities, has been a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and also Deputy Director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
Dr. Constanze Stelzenmüller is an expert on German, European, and transatlantic foreign and security policy and strategy. She currently holds the Kissinger Chair on Foreign Policy and International Relations at the Library of Congress and is a Senior Fellow at The Brooking’s Institution’s Center on the United States and Europe. She served as the inaugural Robert Bosch Senior Fellow at Brookings from 2014 to 2019.
Prior to working at Brookings, Dr. Stelzenmüller was a Senior Transatlantic Fellow with the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF), where she directed the influential Transatlantic Trends survey program. She is the former director of GMF’s Berlin office. From 1994 to 2005, she was an editor for the political section of the German weekly DIE ZEIT, where she had also served as defense and international security editor and covered human rights issues and humanitarian crises.
She has worked in Germany and the United States, and speaks English, French, German, and Spanish. Dr. Stelzenmüller holds a doctorate in law from the University of Bonn (1992), a master’s degree in public administration from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University (1988), and a law degree from the University of Bonn (1985).