Monocle’s editorial director Tyler Brûlé joins the former head of the Danish intelligence service and head of Macro Advisory Partners, Thomas Ahrenkiel. From cyber security to Russia, terrorism and beyond we analyse the risks that face Europe as we head into 2022.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
In this series of the Chiefs, we're casting a watchful eye on the year ahead.
And in today's episode, we sit down with a man who has a keener eye than most.
Former head of the Danish Intelligence Service and head of Europe at London based Macro Advisory Partners, Thomas Erenkiel joins me today from Copenhagen.
He offers a report card on Europe's approach to the current threat landscape.
As we ask whether we're truly prepared for what lies ahead.
From cybersecurity to Russia terrorism, to the oversight of threats from Africa and the Middle east, we undertake a thoughtful probe of the risks that face the European continent as we head into 2022.
From Zurich, I'm Tyler Brulee and this is the Chiefs on Monocle 24.
Thomas, why don't we start just very briefly or can take as long as you want as well, but maybe if we survey the landscape across Europe, and that, of course, is from an EU and NATO context, of course, we can look a little bit further beyond as well.
But if you had to deliver a end of 2021 going into 2022 report card, an assessment of how you see things from a security point of view also.
Yes.
With this underlay of 21 months of COVID from an intelligence perspective, knowing your background, how do you see things?
Well, I think 2021.
2020, actually, and moving into 22, they have all been challenging years.
Of course, the pandemic has been defining a lot of what has been going on.
And dealing with the pandemic has been, I would say, the biggest challenge for governments across the world, and, of course, also governments in Europe.
I would say the scorecard is actually, it's mixed, but it's overall, I think we done quite a good job.
Even though we now see an increase in cases and we have seen risks of new lockdowns.
I would say dealing with the pandemic has really been key to cooperation in Europe over the last one and a half years, and that has actually gone better than we could have feared.
Of course, we have seen nations also going for themselves in terms of distributing vaccines, in terms of producing vaccines.
There's increased focus on supply chain and the robustness of those supply chains in the health sector, but also in other sectors, and that continues to be a challenge.