In and Beyond Ukraine
A tour d'horizon by Julian Lindley-French
Claire—I’m delighted to introduce a new writer to the Cosmopolitan Globalist. Julian Lindley-French is the chairman of The Alphen Group, which describes itself as “an informal network of leading strategic thinkers who have come together to consider the future of the transatlantic relationship and European security and defense and do something about it.”
From his bio:
[He is a] Senior Fellow at the Institute for Statecraft in London, Director of Europa Analytica, Fellow of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute and a member of the US-German Loisach Group of the George C. Marshall Center and the Munich Security Conference. He has published twelve books and many articles and reports. In January 2022 he published the TAG NATO Shadow Strategic Concept co-written (inter alia) by a former NATO Secretary General, a Deputy Secretary General, Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe, Chairman NATO Military Committee, UK CHOD, COMUSAREUR, Assistant Secretary-General Policy Planning, Deputy Assistant Secretary-General, Assistant Secretary of Defense, and two Permreps.
In 2021, Lindley-French published a major new book entitled Future War and the Defence of Europe with US General (Ret.) John R. Allen and US Lieutenant General (Ret.) Frederick (Ben) Hodges. … He holds three advanced degrees, has held three professorial chairs (Professor of Military Art and Science and Eisenhower Professor of Defense Strategy, Netherlands Defense Academy and Special Professor of Strategic Studies, Leiden University) and senior policy and project positions for the EU, NATO, and the UN. He was Vice-President of the Atlantic Treaty Association in Brussels and Distinguished Visiting Research Fellow of the National Defense University in Washington. In 2015, he was made an Honorary Member of the Association of Anciens of the NATO Defence College in Rome.
He served General Sir David Richards and General Sir Nicholas Houghton on the UK Chief of Defense Staff’s Strategic Advisory Group and was Head of the Commander’s Initiative Group for Lieutenant General Sir Richard Shirreff, COMARRC. In November 2017, he was lead writer for the The Future Tasks of the Adapted Alliance (The GLOBSEC NATO Adaptation Reports) as part of a team with inter alia Deputy Secretary General Alexander Vershbow, Chairman of the NATO Military Committee Admiral Giampaolo di Paola, and General John R. Allen.
He’s terrifically busy these days, as I’m sure you can imagine, so it was awfully good of him to agree to let us publish this essay and then tolerate my editorial questions.
It is an excellent essay, and I’m very pleased to begin the year with it.
Survey of the Overall Situation in and Beyond Ukraine
by Julian Lindley-French
“War is young men dying and old men talking”. —Franklin D. Roosevelt
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