2026-04-03 01:16:40
A Spanish startup wins a customer in Luxembourg. Good news. But growth soon turns into admin. When the Spanish startup hires a salesperson in Luxembourg, it needs legal advice, encounters payroll complications, and, in practice, pressure to open a local Luxembourgish subsidiary. Before long, a young company starts looking like an old company, with a small cluster of entities spread across the 27 nations.
That is the mess that the European Commission’s new 28th regime proposal, branded “EU Inc.,” is supposed to fix. Sold as part of Europe’s competitiveness push, it offers an optional company form meant to help startups set up faster, raise money more easily, and operate across the bloc with less legal drag.
Founders were never asking Brussels for pretty registration forms. They were asking for the ability to hire, sell, and operate across Europe without having to rebuild the business every time they entered a new market. That problem remains. Cross-border hiring remains messy. Labor law remains national. Tax rules remain national. Administrative friction remains national. EU Inc. cleans up the start and leaves much of the growth phase untouched.
It’s a step forward, but no panacea. In the US, Delaware combines flexible company law with a court system that gives founders and investors quick, predictable answers. Under the Commission’s proposal, companies will still go before national courts. That means different speeds, different habits, and different levels of expertise.
EU Inc. allows a minimum capital of zero or one euro. It permits flexible share structures and makes room for modern financing instruments such as SAFEs — simple deals for future equity. It also creates an optional EU employee stock option scheme with taxation deferred until disposal. It promises digital procedures across much of the company lifecycle. All of these measures are useful and long overdue.
Read the small print, however, and the promise shrinks. Brussels is selling a startup dream: register in 48 hours, for €100, through one central interface. That only works if founders use the Commission’s standard templates. For the simplest companies, that may be fine.
But many startups are not that simple for long. Once founders want tailored voting rights, different share classes, or other arrangements that investors often expect, the off-the-shelf model starts to look restrictive. Step outside of it, and the timeline stretches out.
Even on the fast track, the company is not simply waved through. A public authority still must check the filing before registration. Depending on the country, that may mean an administrative body, a judge, or a notary looking at the documents and confirming that the legal requirements have been met. In plain English, the process is still supervised. It is not the kind of automatic, low-friction registration that founders might imagine from the headline.
The EU interface may collect the documents, but the decision to register the company is made by the competent authority in the member state where the firm is being set up, under that country’s law. So, Brussels provides the front door; the actual approval still happens in the national back office.
Once a company needs some tweaks, the fast-track promise weakens further. The timetable slips from 48 hours to five working days. That may not sound dramatic, but it tells you what kind of regime this really is: quick for standard cases, slow and national the moment a startup looks like a real startup.
“If we want to boost entrepreneurship, we need to start thinking outside the box,” says René Repasi, the Social Democrat co-author of a European Parliament report. “Specialized court chambers and an alternative dispute resolution mechanism for ‘EU Inc.’ companies could help solve disputes quickly and create real trust.”
“I am happy the EU Inc. is a regulation – meaning that it will be uniformly applied and speedily available across the continent,” says Reinier van Lanschot, the Dutch MEP who has pushed this file hard. But van Lanschot worries about what the Commission left out. “Hiring cross-border will still be hugely problematic,” he warns. “Registration will not be made through a fully European registry.”
Another weakness concerns bankruptcy, currently an expensive, difficult procedure. The EU Inc. proposal contains simplified liquidation tools. But it remains national, conducted by 27 different legal cultures, resulting in uncertainity for investors and founders.
There is a political reason for this caution. The Commission wants the branding advantage of a European regime without confronting national sensitivities.
“The Commission has taken an important step, but Europe’s biggest problem is still speed,” says João Silva of Startup Portugal. “In a global race for talent, capital and innovation, even good policy loses value if it arrives too late. Europe needs less fragmentation, less delay, and a much shorter gap between political ambition and practical impact.”
Anda Bologa is a Senior Researcher with the Tech Policy Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2026-04-02 21:32:48
A reassuring idea has been taking hold in Paris. Many observers, especially in economic and industrial circles, harbor a quiet hope: that a victorious Rassemblement National (RN) might emulate the trajectory of Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
The assumption is increasingly explicit: if Marine Le Pen, the party’s longtime standard-bearer, or Jordan Bardella, its young president, wins, they will mirror the Italian prime minister’s pragmatic governance by tempering their rhetoric, reassuring markets, and largely falling into step with Brussels.
“Faced with the prospect of a Rassemblement National government, French business circles are looking across the Alps for reassurance,” according to a piece in the business magazine, Challenge.
This reading is not just optimistic. It is profoundly misguided.
The notion that France’s far right would follow a similar path overlooks three critical structural differences between the two countries.
First, there is the nature of the governing coalition. Meloni governs as part of a broader right-wing alliance comprising her Brothers of Italy, Matteo Salvini’s Lega, and Forza Italia (FI), the party founded by Silvio Berlusconi. The presence of FI, particularly under the leadership of Antonio Tajani — a former president of the European Parliament and European Commissioner — provides a distinctly pro-European, center-right anchor. It serves as the coalition’s moderating partner, tempering more radical impulses and helping keep the government within the bounds of mainstream European politics. The Rassemblement National, by contrast, seeks to govern on its own terms and with far fewer built-in constraints.
Second, Italy has a far more deeply embedded tradition of technocratic correction. Figures such as Mario Monti and Mario Draghi — respectively a former European Commissioner and a former president of the European Central Bank, both called in to serve as prime minister at moments of acute national strain — embody the country’s recurring willingness to hand power to non-partisan technocratic figures in times of crisis.
That wider culture, embedded across the state apparatus, acts as a meaningful check on political excess. France, too, has a formidable technocratic tradition, but its grands corps de l’État have historically been more tightly woven into the machinery of executive power and are therefore less an independent brake on a determined government than one of the instruments through which it governs.
Finally, there is the relationship between business and politics. In Italy, a more decentralized structure, in which power often rests on dense arrangements between firms, territories, and political-economic networks, gives business multiple points of leverage over politics, from the local level upward.
Matteo Salvini’s retreat from euro-exit rhetoric is a case in point: when his position veered too far into economic brinkmanship, pressure from Italy’s business establishment helped force a return to realism. France, by contrast, is far more centralized, the relationship between major corporations and the state is more distant, and French industry is ultimately less well placed to cajole a radical administration back towards moderation.
The so-called “Meloni model” rests on specifically Italian conditions: coalition constraints, technocratic counterweights, and a decentralized economic fabric that can help contain political excess.
France offers no such guarantees. To assume that the Rassemblement National would be moderated by power in the same way is not prudent – It is wishful thinking.
Arthur de Liedekerke is a Fellow with the Transatlantic Defense and Security Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He is a Senior Director at Rasmussen Global, the political advisory firm founded by former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, where he oversees the firm’s leading European Affairs team. He previously served as a Strategy Officer in the French Ministry for the Armed Forces.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2026-04-02 04:23:34
In the latest part of CEPA’s work on Russian shadow warfare, we published War Without End: Deterring Russia’s Shadow War on March 31. Here are the main recommendations.
Shadow warfare is persistently misclassified.
Institutional mandates mean many shadow attacks are processed through criminal law and civilian enforcement frameworks. Cable disruptions are framed as maritime accidents and cyber intrusions managed as technical incidents, for example. Each response may be reasonable on its own, but when combined, they fragment responsibility so coordinated campaigns of hostile state action are handled as a series of unrelated problems.
The tempo of response lags the tempo of attack.
Russian operations are fast, deniable, and iterative. Western responses are slow, deliberate, and constrained by the need for consensus. By the time attribution has been established and response options weighed, the political urgency has often passed. Deterrence weakens when consequences arrive late or fail to arrive at all.
Fear of escalation produces ambiguity, which favors the aggressor.
By avoiding clear thresholds and predictable consequences, governments have hoped to avoid war. In practice, this restraint has raised Moscow’s tolerance for risk, and each unpunished act increases the space for the next one.
Deterrence is tethered to courtroom standards of proof.
Shadow warfare is designed to frustrate legal certainty. By insisting on incontrovertible evidence before responding, the West puts the initiative in Moscow’s hands. This is particularly true when attribution is based on intelligence sources that cannot be made public. Deterrence cannot rest on legal attribution alone; it must be informed by patterns, intent, and cumulative effect. This does not mean evidentiary standards should be lowered, but that governments must be able to act on secret intelligence assessments.
Attribution should be based on pattern recognition, not isolated proof.
Russian shadow warfare relies on deniability. Blame should rest on repeated operational signatures (methods, targets, timing, and intent), rather than treating each incident as a standalone criminal act.
Collective consultation should be routine, not exceptional.
European allies should normalize collective consultations in response to shadow aggression. Patterns of activity should trigger collective assessment and coordination.
Hybrid threats must be included in a single deterrence framework.
Cyber-attacks, disruption of critical undersea infrastructure, drone incursions, and proxy violence are mutually reinforcing elements of a unified Russian strategy. Allies should treat hybrid warfare as a continuous campaign, aligning maritime, cyber, legal, intelligence, and military tools under a shared logic of escalation.
Allies need a standing menu of consequences.
Responses should be designed for speed and predictability, and include cyber and intelligence operations, action against vessels and networks supporting covert activity, economic measures to constrain Russia’s warfighting capacity, and direct support for Ukrainian defense.
The EU and NATO should harmonize capabilities and thresholds for action.
Fragmented decision-making and national caveats are the soft underbelly of European deterrence. To avoid duplication and close exploitable gaps, allies should formally divide responsibility, with NATO leading on detection, defense, and military response, and the EU leading on financial pressure, borders, law enforcement, and export controls.
Responses must be anchored in national security institutions.
Militaries and intelligence services — not law enforcement agencies — should lead the response to concerted campaigns of shadow warfare. Criminal investigations remain necessary to impose consequences on individuals, but they cannot be the primary framework for deterring a committed state actor. Their findings should feed into political and security decision-making structures, enabling fast action in coordination with partners across Europe.
Public–private coordination should be a key pillar of hybrid deterrence.
The frontline of Russia’s shadow war runs through privately owned systems and civilian spaces, including undersea cables, energy grids, warehouses, telecom networks, cloud platforms, and shipping. Allied governments should move beyond ad hoc information sharing to formal, legally mandated public–private security partnerships and integrate industry into threat detection, attribution, incident response, and resilience planning.
Allies should reassert durability in the face of Russia’s escalatory rhetoric.
Strong allied deterrence, as outlined in this report, will invite escalatory rhetoric from Moscow. Such intimidation is designed to paralyze allied decision-making before policies are implemented. It will need political will to tolerate intimidation without allowing it to dictate thresholds or timelines for action. Clear red lines, predictable consequences, and collective resolve must hold firm when Moscow responds with saber-rattling or worse.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2026-04-02 04:09:43
An unidentified object crosses into Lithuanian airspace from Kaliningrad and is quickly picked up by NATO radar systems. It’s small, fast, and unregistered. Shortly thereafter, three more similar objects joined in formation.
NATO aircraft are scrambled. Commercial flights in and out of Vilnius are rerouted, and ground traffic is halted completely. For a few tense hours, everything stops while NATO is on high alert. But the incident passes — the drones were only in Lithuanian airspace for a few minutes. Yet another close call on a growing list.
Now reimagine the same sequence, only this time the worst-case scenario ensues: A passenger jet on approach to Vilnius is suddenly on a collision course with a handful of unidentified unmanned aerial objects that have drifted into the jet’s flight plan. Air traffic control is saturated. The objects are misclassified or detected too late. There is no time to adjust the jet’s trajectory.
This time, Europe wakes up to not just another near-miss incident, but instead to a disaster that has resulted in mass civilian casualties.
Troubling as it may sound, there is nothing hyperbolic or exaggerated about this scenario — the conditions for this sort of catastrophe are already in place. Indeed, it is chillingly close to events at Dublin airport in December as President Zelenskyy’s plane was landing. Such is the present reality of Russia’s shadow war against Europe.
There are dozens of variations of Russian shadow war tactics, many of which are designed for more deliberately catastrophic outcomes. A bomb planted by a proxy agent could derail a passenger train on its way through Poland. A severed cable in the Baltic could kill the power in an Estonian intensive care unit. The list goes on – and each of these possibilities mimics real events of the past few years.
Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion in 2022, Russia has systematically expanded its war against Ukraine into Europe’s interior. Unable to confront NATO and EU allies conventionally, Moscow is deploying diffuse and deliberately hard-to-attribute operations across European land, sea, and airspace. The objective? To challenge EU/NATO cohesion, readiness, and willingness to support Ukraine’s defense with attacks that fall just below the threshold that would trigger an allied military response.
Effectively deterring Russian shadow war has been a persistent challenge for NATO and the EU. Allies are inherently constrained by several factors, including uneven threat perceptions, domestic political divisions, and differing thresholds for escalation. Moscow is keenly aware of these disconnects and has mastered the ability to exploit them.
But there is a deeper issue among allies compounding these restraints. Most problematically, Russian shadow war is persistently mischaracterized by allies. Instead of understanding the various tactics that make up Russian shadow war as one comprehensive campaign, they are generally dealt with on a case-by-case basis. Sabotage is generally handled through law enforcement; cyber incidents are considered technical concerns; subsea disruptions are considered maritime incidents.
Attribution further compounds the problem. Russian shadow operations are deliberately designed to obscure responsibility, making it exceedingly difficult for allies to efficiently carry out the legal process and respond in a timely manner. Moscow increasingly relies on proxies, criminal networks, and deniable intermediaries to blur the line between state action and criminality. This ambiguity is not a byproduct — it is the strategy. By denying allies a clear “smoking gun,” Russia slows decision-making, fractures consensus, and reinforces a pattern of restraint.
Over the last year, CEPA has undertaken an intensive study of Russian shadow war. We have analyzed and tracked how the shadow war system propagates the Kremlin’s philosophy of perpetual war with the West; the actors, methodology, and governance structure involved in carrying out Russia’s shadow war; and most importantly, where NATO and the EU’s key vulnerabilities lie.
Our findings show that deterrence has failed not for lack of awareness, but for lack of coherence. In order to effectively deter Russian shadow war, several key reorientations must take place. Perhaps the most essential will be building responses under a single deterrence framework: Cyberattacks, cable cuts, drone incursions, proxy violence — these are not isolated threats. They are parts of a single, coordinated campaign. Until allies respond with the same unity — by aligning military, intelligence, legal, and economic tools into a single deterrence framework — effective deterrence will remain out of reach.
Hereto, attribution and deterrence must rest on cumulative pattern recognition, not courtroom standards of proof. To paraphrase Riley: if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, allies shouldn’t wait for a court ruling to attribute an attack to Russia and respond accordingly.
Finally, restoring deterrence will require the political will to withstand inevitable escalatory rhetoric from Moscow. Stronger, more coherent responses to shadow war will provoke threats and saber-rattling; this intimidation is designed precisely to paralyze allied decision-making before action is taken. Allies must not allow Russian bluster to dictate thresholds or timelines. Instead, they should establish a standing, predictable menu of consequences, ranging from cyber and intelligence operations to economic pressure and expanded support for Ukraine, that can be deployed quickly, decisively, and consistently. The objective is not to seek confrontation, but to ensure that every act of shadow aggression carries a clear and unavoidable cost.
Time is of the essence. Every day that passes without a more cohesive allied strategy for deterring Russian shadow war leaves the door open for the sort of catastrophe outlined earlier. Must we wait for our Lusitania to be sunk before taking decisive action?
David Kagan is the Senior Program Officer for the Democratic Resilience program at CEPA. He is the author of “The Veiled Invasion: Deterring Russian Infiltration in Europe” in CEPA’s study of Russian shadow war, “War Without End: Deterring Russia’s Shadow War”
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2026-04-01 21:02:59
Of the more than 12,000 Iranian sites targeted by the US and Israel, the strikes against an obscure Caspian Sea naval base seemed at first sight one of the oddest.
Israel said it hit dozens of targets, including warships, a command post, a shipyard, and port infrastructure at Bandar Anzali on March 18.
The operation marked the first-ever missile attack in the Caspian Sea. While the port is not the primary base of the Caspian Flotilla, also known as the Northern Fleet, it was likely a dispersal base for military units.
The aim? To strike at the Iranian-Russian military trade across the Caspian Sea, the Wall Street Journal reported. The route’s importance has been growing since Russia launched its all-out war on Ukraine four years ago, and now involves the shipment of key military items, including drones based on the Shahed design.
The unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) first flowed northward to Russia, but the Kremlin built its own plant, improved the product, called it the Geran-2, and — according to some evidence — shipped them back to Iran for use in the war. Western intelligence services have also said that Russia is tutoring the Tehran regime on drone tactics.
It is a worrying moment for countries in the region, signaling that the war may yet spread. And if it does, that would prove a further headache for Europe, which now relies much more on energy from the South Caucasus.
In recent years, the deepening Moscow-Tehran axis has heightened concerns among other littoral states, namely Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, that a gradual shift is underway in the balance of power in the Caspian Sea in favor of the Moscow-Tehran axis.
These developments are especially relevant for Azerbaijan, which holds strategically important energy assets in the Caspian Sea, ensuring the flow of oil and gas to Europe through the $35bn Southern Gas Corridor. For three decades, offshore oil fields operated by the BP consortium have anchored this supply.
Azerbaijan has also emerged as a key logistics hub via the Middle Corridor, a multimodal trade route spanning Eurasia, supported by multi‑billion‑dollar investments in maritime and railway infrastructure. Against this backdrop, the country has cautiously observed the escalating confrontation among the United States, Israel, and Iran over the past three years. It has refrained from taking sides, though it is no secret that it is Israel’s biggest oil supplier, and that the two countries have a strategic military relationship.
It was Iran that fired the first shot with a March 5 drone strike on the passenger terminal of the Nakhchivan exclave’s airport. President Ilham Aliyev issued harsh statements toward Iran in the aftermath and referenced the estimated 15–20 million ethnic Azeris in Iran’s northern regions.
It’s hard to see how any Caspian nation would benefit from a widening of hostilities. Azerbaijan has significantly deepened cooperation with Central Asian nations in recent years, particularly in trade and logistics, while actively promoting the Caspian basin as a “safe haven for transit” to attract greater European investment.
This strategy underscores Baku’s ambition to position itself as a reliable partner for regional connectivity and commerce. Both Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan have voiced concerns with the recent escalation, even as Iran has demanded they respond with a “firm stance.” Neither wants to publicly criticize the US and Israel, however.
Yet Baku understands that further devastating attacks might provoke Tehran to launch strikes on key energy infrastructure in the region, likely those linked to Western companies. That puts Azerbaijani oil and gas fields at risk.
And that could threaten a wider war. In such circumstances, Baku would likely turn to its closest ally, Turkey, given that its direct military options against Iran are limited. The military partnership between the two states was formalized in the 2021 Shusha Declaration, which stipulates that if either country’s independence or territorial integrity is threatened by a third party, both countries will provide necessary military support.
A prolonged war with Iran, involving spillover risks, could also jeopardize the US-led Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP), a core part of the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process formalized in the Washington Declaration in August. As the route crosses Armenia’s Syunik province and the Nakhchivan exclave, both adjacent to Iran, significant security challenges are certain to arise.
Here is what we know: Moscow and Tehran will very probably continue to use the Caspian route for arms transfers, and that Israel may therefore resort to additional strikes.
There is plenty of room for escalation and no room for winners.
Fuad Shahbazov is a policy analyst covering regional security issues in the Eurasian region. He regularly provides his short geopolitical insights at @fuadshahbazov.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2026-04-01 20:59:07
US political scientist Kenneth N. Waltz wrote in 1990 that the power of nuclear weapons resides in what a nation can do, not what it does. Similar rules apply to cyber threats: uncertainty over possible capabilities is far more powerful than absolute certainty over their limitations and shortcomings.
For a decade, there has been a steady stream of concerns and reports about Iran’s cyber capabilities, fueled by bold statements from Tehran. They have reached new levels during the US-Israeli war on Iran, with assertions that Western infrastructure, businesses, and governments could be severely damaged by cyberattacks.
As the air campaign began on February 28, there was widespread understanding that cyber retaliation against the $30 trillion US economy was on its way.
Declaring that it was the “response to ongoing cyber assaults against the infrastructure of the Axis of Resistance,” Handala, an Iran-linked hacking group, said the world would see the wrath of the Islamic Republic and its cyber warfare units.
Then it happened, and the retaliation turned out to be the targeting of a medical device company headquartered in Michigan. The hackers wiped remote devices running on the Windows operating system by using a Microsoft utility that was not properly configured.
While the attack scraped the surface of the corporate system, it did not harm the core of the company’s IT-infrastructure. There was no systematic targeting of other companies or organizations and no major lateral jumping from entity to entity.
The group also managed to hack the personal emails of FBI director Kash Patel, a breach of security that was embarrassing but showed no evidence that they had broken into any US government systems.
Both attacks were unsophisticated and a long way short of what might be expected from a state actor, particularly one that had talked up its cyber capabilities as much as Iran.
By mid-March, the US government had not identified an increase in Iranian cyber activity, Nick Andersen, acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, told The Record.
The impact has been much smaller than claimed by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and cyber units. They had some success targeting US banks and Middle Eastern companies before the war, but their performance since the bombing began suggests their capabilities were wildly exaggerated.
While Iran’s cyber capacity should not be underestimated, as it comprises an extensive system of state and state-aligned actors with shared funding, tactics, and procedures, bragging about its capabilities and then delivering a microscopic impact has minimized cyber as a strategic tool for Tehran.
The existence of cyber capabilities should force an adversary to consider what could happen, especially in an increasingly tech-dense and digital society amid the secrecy and fog of war, and can have a direct impact on their decision-making.
But the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s cyber operation has failed to create deterrence or to affect its adversaries’ thinking because it has highlighted the limits of its abilities and outlined what it can’t do.
By contrast, the Ukrainian and Russian cyber communities, with the experience of four years of war, have successfully maintained uncertainty for their opponents about their true capacity. This has forced both sides to constantly consider the possibility of the enemy using capabilities that are unknown, with effects that cannot be predicted.
This uncertainty creates the leverage Kenneth N. Waltz noted: it is not what you do, but what you can do. Without uncertainty about what it could do, a cyber force’s impact on its enemy’s decision-making evaporates.
Jan Kallberg, Ph.D., LL.M., is a non-resident Senior Fellow with the Transatlantic Defense and Security program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) and a George Washington University faculty member. Follow him at cyberdefense.com and @Cyberdefensecom.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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