The US remains the single most externally active and powerful country on earth. Accordingly, it has diverse interests all around the world. Often these interests conflict with each other and while the two domestic parties regularly identify the same objectives, they prioritize them in very different ways. This has led to an increasingly volatile US foreign policy, especially as political competition in the US has become more radical and closely contested over the last decade.

This reality is not pleasant for the EU. Possibilities of the EU to influence the US domestic discourse are very limited. Any long-term planning or stable policy development on the executive level becomes increasingly difficult due to the fast-changing domestic political situation. In order to adapt to this context, the EU needs to develop new capacities for pursuing an independent foreign policy, position itself decisively and united, and pay close attention to the way topics are debated domestically in the US. This paper aims to be a step towards this direction. The selection of researched areas relies on the expertise and interest of the contributing authors, offering a wide variety of areas, exceeding the more common focus of foreign policy analysis on great powers.

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