The Minilateral Turn: Germany, the United States, and Post-Hegemonic Transatlantic Security Cooperation
Speaker: Nele Marianne Ewers-Peters, DAAD/AGI Research Fellow
Moderator: Jeff Rathke, President and Director of the Foreign & Security Policy Program, AGI
The Euro-Atlantic region has recently experienced a number of shocks and shifts that have affected the contemporary European security order and the cohesion of its multilateral organizations, most notably NATO and the EU. As these organizations face an essential crisis, states have increasingly sought to form alternative frameworks and initiatives to advance their security interests. The concept of minilateral security cooperation (MSC) has, in this context, received greater scholarly attention. While minilaterals can complement and support NATO and the EU, they might also lead to greater institutional fragmentation and divergences in the European security order. This raises questions about which states initiate minilateral security frameworks and with what motivations and rationales.
This presentation will first discuss the concept and emergence of minilateral security cooperation in the Euro-Atlantic region. It will then focus on how the United States initiates and leads minilateral security cooperation. Finally, it will make some tentative comparisons to Germany’s approach and rationales.
Dr. Nele Marianne Ewers-Peters is Assistant Professor for European Security at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASoS) at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. Her research is at the intersection of European security and global governance with a particular in transatlantic security cooperation and the EU-NATO relationship. Previously, she held positions at Helmut-Schmidt-University of the Federal Armed Forces, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and University College London, and received her PhD in International Relations from the University of Kent. She is the author of Understanding EU-NATO Cooperation: How Member States Matter (Routledge, 2022) and co-editor of NATO 2030: Towards a New Strategic Concept and Beyond (Brookings, 2021).
Event Summary
The webinar examines how and why states in the Euro-Atlantic increasingly rely on minilateral security cooperation alongside NATO and the EU, and what this means for European and transatlantic security. Recent crises—particularly Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and signs of U.S. disengagement from traditional multilateral formats—have exposed divisions and blockages inside large institutions and raised questions about who actually drives security policy in Europe.
Minilateral security formats involve cooperation between a small number of states (roughly three to fifteen). These formats can be institutionalized, but they are typically issue-specific, goal-oriented, exclusive, flexible, and often designed to find innovative, practical solutions to concrete problems. Examples include Nordic and Nordic-Baltic formats, the Bucharest 9, the “European Five” (Germany, France, United Kingdom, Italy, Poland), AUKUS, the Quad in the Indo-Pacific, and earlier arrangements like the Normandy format or the Contact Group in the Balkans.
A mapping of cooperation patterns across the Euro-Atlantic showed a “mushrooming” of such groupings, especially after 2014 and again after 2022. Contrary to what standard power-based expectations would suggest, the United States appears directly engaged in very few Euro-Atlantic minilaterals (mainly the Euro-Quad/Quint and earlier the Contact Group), whereas medium and smaller powers—particularly Germany and Poland—are highly active. Germany alone participates in roughly a dozen minilateral formats and links almost all subregions in Europe, rather than operating only in one regional cluster.
Which factors drive states to initiate and lead minilateral security cooperation, and why do the United States and Germany use minilaterals differently?
Interviews with former officials in Washington suggest a preference for action-oriented, pragmatic, and increasingly transactional U.S. security policy. Minilaterals are seen as a natural extension of diplomacy: small, exclusive groups of capable partners that can be brought together quickly, pool resources, and move faster than large organizations. They are particularly attractive in an environment of capability overstretch and multiple simultaneous crises. At the same time, there is a long-standing U.S. preference for bilateralism, where power asymmetries can be maximized, and a “love–hate relationship” with multilateral organizations that are valued when they serve U.S. interests and abandoned when they do not.
Minilateralism is compatible with Trump-era foreign policy: informal, low-commitment formats fit a deal-making style, allow ambiguity, bring together like-minded partners, and can be used both to control allies and constrain rivals. In the Indo-Pacific, the United States has actively constructed a hub-and-spoke network of minilaterals to deal with China and to bring together partners (like Japan and South Korea) that would otherwise not cooperate closely. In contrast, in Europe, NATO already exists as a formal security architecture, so the United States relies far less on minilateral networks of its own making, instead reaching out to existing European minilaterals to avoid the emergence of counter-coalitions and to maintain influence.
Preliminary findings based on network mapping show a pattern of broad German engagement across Europe rather than dominance in one regional cluster. Germany takes part in political and defense-industrial minilaterals, sometimes as initiator and sometimes as a joiner. Many of these initiatives cluster around moments of crisis or uncertainty, such as in 2014 with the Russian invasion of Crimea, in 2016 in response to Brexit and Trump’s first presidency, and in 2022 with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Observers in the United States often interpret German behaviour as “leading from the middle”: using minilaterals as a cover to avoid standing alone, while still exerting considerable influence by having “a hand in everything.”
The implications for European security and institutions are ambivalent. On the positive side, minilaterals help overcome consensus problems and vetoes in NATO and the EU. Small, like-minded groups can move faster, commit resources, and socialize their solutions back into larger multilateral bodies. Minilaterals can function as engines that make NATO and EU decision-making more effective, rather than alternatives to those institutions.
On the negative side, the proliferation of overlapping, sometimes poorly coordinated minilaterals carries a real risk of fragmentation. Parallel formats may pursue divergent goals, create duplication or competition in capability development, and gradually erode NATO and the EU as the primary organizers of European security. Whether minilaterals strengthen or undermine multilateral organizations depends heavily on how they are used: as support structures that pre-negotiate compromises and build coalitions or as vehicles to bypass and replace inclusive frameworks.
In the discussion, questions focused on typologies and lessons from U.S. practice. On typologies, minilaterals can be regional, capability-focused, purpose-specific, or long-standing political clubs, and many states simultaneously participate in several types, making rigid classifications difficult.
The exchange underscored that there is no “optimal” size for minilaterals; effectiveness depends on the problem at hand, but efficiency declines as groups grow and start to resemble regular multilateral bodies. Minilateral security cooperation in the Euro-Atlantic is here to stay: driven by interest-based, pragmatic, flexible problem-solving but highly contingent on how major players—particularly the United States and Germany—choose to employ it in relation to NATO and the EU.
This event is supported by the DAAD with funds from the Federal Foreign Office.
