An interview with Stephen Szabo, a senior fellow at the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies in Washington, DC. Interviewer: Kate Langdon

KATE LANGDON: Transatlantic relations have been a cornerstone of German foreign policy for decades. As US President Donald Trump questions the political legitimacy of the European Union (EU) through acts such as downgrading the EU’s economic and diplomatic priorities, will Germany seek to strengthen transatlantic ties? Has President Trump inflicted any irreparable damage already?

STEPHEN SZABO: Yes, Germany certainly will seek to strengthen transatlantic ties. Germany has too many interests at stake to allow these ties to be dissolved simply due to the actions of one administration, or more precisely the actions of the White House. The US market is the largest single-export market for Germany and the American security relationship remains indispensable to German security. Chancellor Angela Merkel learnt from the split over the Iraq war that Germany could not afford another break of the type that occurred with former Chancellor of Germany Gerhard Schroeder’s split with the Bush Administration.

Interview with Marci Shore, associate professor of history at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Interviewers: Kate Langdon and Jordan Luber

KATE LANGDON AND JORDAN LUBER: What does it mean to be a public intellectual in 2018?

MARCI SHORE: I can answer this only for myself. For me, it has been important to learn to speak at different registers, to reach out to different people beyond the university and beyond my own academic field. This is a kind of translation: can I express in essence the same ideas, the ones I feel it is most important to convey at a given moment, in different kinds of language? This demands a kind of empathy with the audience, a figuring out of what is and what is not self-evident at a given moment to a given group of people. And it involves taking a risk to leap out of one’s disciplinary comfort zone.

Interview with Marci Shore, associate professor of history at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Interviewers: Kate Langdon and Jordan Luber