Nato in focus #3: Taking Stock of NATO Enlargement

An expert in the history of international relations, Mary Elise Sarotte is the inaugural holder of the Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis Distinguished Professorship of Historical Studies. She is also a research associate at Harvard University’s Center for European Studies.

Sarotte earned her AB in History and Science at Harvard and her PhD in History at Yale University. She is the author or editor of six books, including The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall and 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe, both of which were selected as Financial Times Books of the Year, among other distinctions and awards.

Following graduate school, Sarotte served as a White House Fellow, then joined the faculty of the University of Cambridge, where she received tenure before accepting an offer to return to the United States to teach at USC. Sarotte is a former Humboldt Scholar, a former member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Her most recent book is Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate, on what the fight over NATO expansion did to Western relations with Russia.

Juhana Aunesluoma is a professor of political history at the University of Helsinki. He has held various positions at the University of Helsinki since 2000. In his research he has studied the position of the Nordic countries in the cold war, the history of the Finnish foreign policy and international trade policy as well the integration politics of Finland. He has also published research of economics and corporate history.

Ville Sinkkonen is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, Center on US Politics and Power. His research focuses on US foreign policy, great-power politics, normative power, and the politics of trust in international relations.

Sinkkonen is the author of A Comparative Appraisal of Normative Power: The European Union, the United States and the January 25th, 2011 Revolution in Egypt (Brill, 2015), and his work has been published in the Journal of Transatlantic Studies, European Review of International Studies and European Foreign Affairs Review, among others. He holds an LL.D. (International Law) from the University of Turku, where he defended his doctoral dissertation Failing hegemony? Four essays on the global engagement of the United States of America in the 21st Century in December 2020.

Sinkkonen is the chairperson of the Finnish International Studies Association (FISA) and co-editor of the Nordic Review of International Studies (NRIS).