European security ...is under threat once again. So, once again, Europe’s security must top our political agenda. Even before the Ukraine conflict began in 2014, there were growing signs of a brewing confrontation between rival blocs... Arms-control agreements, history has demonstrated, are not the result of existing trust – they are a means to build trust where it has been lost. In 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear confrontation...Soon after the crisis – when the US-Soviet relationship was at an all-time low – both superpowers decided that it was time to work across the divide, through small and concrete steps. This principle was also at the heart of Willy Brandt’s Neue Ostpolitik in the 1960s and 1970s....
