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Klaus Welle has been in residence at the Moynihan Center since its first year. Past visits have followed a similar shape: a week on campus spent teaching, presenting his own work in progress, and meeting with fellows, faculty, and figures across New York’s policy and diplomatic communities.

The arrangement reflects a conviction at the heart of the Center’s work. Students preparing for public service benefit from sustained contact with people who have governed, and those practitioners have something to gain in return from a seminar table where their arguments are tested by people a generation or more removed from them.

Welle will present a paper, “European Rearmament in a New Geopolitical Context,” to the Moynihan Seminar, the Center’s weekly gathering of Public Scholars, Distinguished Practitioners, Postdoctoral Fellows, and faculty. The paper takes up a question about which he has distinctive insight given his advisory role at the European Commission: what Europe’s security architecture looks like when the American guarantee that underwrote it for eight decades can no longer be assumed, and what rearmament on the scale now contemplated would require of European institutions.

He will also spend time with Moynihan Public Service Fellows and with faculty and students across the Colin Powell School.

Klaus Welle has chaired the Academic Council of the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies since April 2023. In May 2025, he was appointed Special Advisor to the European Commissioner for Defence and Space. He is also a guest professor in practice at the London School of Economics, a visiting professor at KU Leuven, and a Leader in Residence at the Moynihan Center.

After earning a degree in economics from the University of Witten/Herdecke in Germany, he worked at the CDU Central Office in Bonn before moving to Brussels. He served as Secretary-General of the European People’s Party from 1994 to 1999, Secretary-General of the EPP-ED Group in the European Parliament from 1999 to 2003, Director-General for Internal Policies at the European Parliament from 2004 to 2007, head of the cabinet of the President of the European Parliament from 2007 to 2009, and Secretary-General of the European Parliament from 2009 to 2022.