April 30, 2025
A U.S. Strategy for Advancing EU Enlargement
In 2014, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker famously declared a pause in the European Union’s enlargement. This pause is now over, after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine spurred the bloc to fill geopolitical vacuums along its periphery. Abandoning former strategic ambiguity toward its Eastern neighborhood, the European Union has opened accession negotiations with Ukraine and Moldova and granted candidacy to Georgia. EU enlargement’s new momentum has spilled over into the Western Balkans, where Bosnia-Herzegovina has likewise received the green light for negotiations and North Macedonia and Albania have formally begun them.
As President Donald Trump’s second term kicks off, his administration has yet to lay out a clear position on the issue of EU enlargement.
There are currently ten officially recognized or potential candidates for EU membership (adding Kosovo, Montenegro, Serbia, and Türkiye to the above six). While their current progress toward joining the bloc ranges widely, all have nonetheless received an explicit promise of membership from the European Union. Yet daunting obstacles to enlargement remain. Both the European Union and accession countries must make difficult reforms. Unresolved conflicts in accession countries—most crucially the war in Ukraine—continue to block their EU paths, and these countries’ persistent economic and security vulnerabilities make progress along this path fragile.
Read the full article from The Washington Quarterly.
More from CNAS
-
Reflecting on Four Years of War in Ukraine
Podcast
This week marks the four-year anniversary of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Brussels Sprouts wanted to mark this somber milestone with a look at the conflict and the...
By Andrea Kendall-Taylor & Jim Townsend
-
Can China Capitalize on Changing Transatlantic Currents?
Podcast
This week’s episode of Brussels Sprouts picks up in the aftermath of the Munich Security Conference. The U.S. tone at Munich was notably more conciliatory than last year, as U...
By Andrea Kendall-Taylor & Jim Townsend
-
The Sound of Munich: Autonomy, Anxiety, and the Twilight of Transatlantic Order
Commentary
This article was originally published in War on the Rocks. Munich was warmer than Washington this weekend, both in weather and in sentiment. Neither development was widely fo...
By Richard Fontaine
-
Commentary
Transatlantic Security / Middle East Security
Migration Can Provide the Manpower for European DefenseThis article was originally published in Foreign Policy. Europe faces parallel challenges that policymakers have yet to connect: a pressing military recruitment shortage and a...
By Adham Sahloul
