Ankara and Washington are locked in a game of chicken. With Turkey refusing to budge over its purchase of the NATO-incompatible S-400 missile defense system from Russia, the U.S. is upping the stakes with the threat of sanctions and ejection from the lucrative F-35 fighter jet program. The implications of this could be far reaching not just for Turkey and the U.S., but could shift the geopolitical balance in far-reaching ways.

More than five years after the Euromaidan, Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko is battling for his political life against Volodymyr Zelensky – a comedian and political newcomer who has emerged as the favorite to win Sunday’s runoff. Zelensky’s plans for leading Ukraine remain uncertain against an ongoing conflict with Russia, economic stagnation, and internal corruption.

Nearly seventy years ago to the day, President Harry Truman signed the North Atlantic Treaty and established NATO. Ahead of an unprecedented address to a Joint session of Congress by NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and ministerial meetings in Washington, Out of Order explores the state of NATO and the key issues animating defense debates from DC to Paris to Warsaw.

This week on Out of Order, Karen Kornbluh, director of GMF’s new Digital Innovation and Democracy Initiative, and Michel Servoz, the senior advisor to European Commission president Jean Claude Juncker, discuss the frontier technologies changing society, differences in the U.S. and European tech policy debates, and why bridging the Silicon Valley-Washington-Brussels gap is essential.

The controversy over Chinese telecoms giant Huawei and the potential for it to unlock an unprecedented level of access to Europe’s critical infrastructure through 5G has been at the center of headlines around the world. But how does Huawei’s 5G plan actually work, and why does it have policymakers and technologists on both sides of the Atlantic so concerned?

In the concluding episode of the two-part “What to Watch” feature, the Out of Order roundtable discusses another raft of issues that they’ll be tracking this year, now that we have made it through a shutdown and almost two eventful months. We focus this time on Europe, the United States, and global democracy challenges.

A month into 2019, the fight over immigration policy is without resolution as the White House battles with Democrats over border wall funding. New York Times White House correspondent Michael Shear joins Out of Order’s Peter Sparding for a timely conversation about immigration politics and how it all got to this point—from the origins of Trump’s wall fixation to the many characters driving the debate, and where the actual policy stands…  beyond the bluster.

In the podcast adaption of the new blog post, “What to Watch in 2019,” the Out of Order hosts—with cameos by various German Marshall Fund experts from around the world—weigh in on what to expect in 2019 when it comes to transatlantic trade battles, China, and U.S. and European domestic politics in Part One of this two-part special.

Note: Out of Order will be taking a break for the holidays! We will return the week of January 14th with Part Two of our "What to Watch in 2019"

The Angela Merkel era is ending. Currently, there are three candidates are vying for her position. The cast of characters is interesting: The ambitious Jens Spahn, currently serving as health minister; the woman generally viewed as Merkel’s anointed heir and perhaps a kind of Merkel 2.0, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, and Friedrich Merz, an old arch rival of Merkel’s who abandoned politics for finance after he was elbowed out by her in 2002.

Host Rachel Tausendfreunde sits down with Director of the European Program and Senior Fellow, Jan Techau and Maryna Rakhlei from GMF's Fund for Belarus Democracy. In the spirit of Thanksgiving, host and guests discuss recent occurrences in the transatlantic space that they are personally thankful for. Topics include developments in the Russian news media industry and U.S. domestic politics.