From Simona Kordosova, the New Atlanticist:  Ten years ago, in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in its history.

As NATO Ministers of Defense convene in Brussels on June 8 and 9th, they face a full plate. They will review the operations in Afghanistan and Libya. They will give thanks to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates for his leadership, and they will address how the Alliance will sustain and exercise its capabilities in a time of declining defense budgets.

Damon Wilson, Atlantic Council Executive Vice President, and Ian Brzezinski, Atlantic Council Senior Fellow, contributed essays to a Center for European Policy Analysis publication on U.S.-Central European relations. According to CEPA, the volume presents a forward-looking geopolitical assessment and provides policy roadmaps for U.S.-Central European relations in the next decade.

In the latest Atlantic Council Issue Brief, “Roma Inclusion: A Call for Central European Leadership,” Susan Ball, a State Department Senior Fellow in the International Security Program, highlights the growing urgency of the challenge to integrate Europe’s Roma populations and makes the case for Central European states to play a leadership role in Europe’s efforts to combat Roma exclusion.

In the latest Energy and Environment Program issue brief titled "Central Europe and the Geopolitics of Energy," co-authors Franklin D. Kramer, John R. Lyman, and Mihaela C. Carstei explain the need for a coordinated energy security policy for Central Europe.

Central Europeans are known for their persistent pessimism. An old Hungarian joke sums it up well: "We know that next year is going to be an average year - because it's going to be worse than this year, but better than the year after that." That glass-half-empty mentality was on public display in July 2009, when several senior Central Europeans wrote an open letter to President Obama decrying the lack of engagement from the new U.S. administration.

On June 25, the Atlantic Council--together with The Transatlantic Leaders Forum at The Center for Transatlantic Relations, Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, and the Center for European Policy Analysis--presented a Washington Central Europe Initiative Event.

In his remarks in Bucharest, the U.S. Vice President Biden celebrated the democratic and economic development of Central and Eastern Europe since the fall of communism twenty years ago.