The Aspen Institute Germany is delighted to announce the launch of RESET – Reimagining the Transatlantic Future: Strategic Exchange for Political Youth from the Heartlands to the Hinterlands.
The transatlantic partnership is under significant and growing strain. Geopolitical power shifts, rising societal polarization, and increasingly diverging priorities are putting pressure on a relationship that has been built over decades. At the same time, a new generation of politically engaged young people is emerging on both sides of the Atlantic, bringing fresh ideas, new questions, and a strong willingness to take responsibility. Now more than ever, dialogue is essential for mutual understanding and overcoming the significant tensions facing the partnership.
The project creates a structured, multi-partisan, and values-based platform for dialogue among young political leaders from Germany and the United States. Between 2026 and 2028, three cohorts will bring together a total of 60 participants aged 20 to 30, representing youth political party organizations from across both countries. Cohorts will be intentionally multi-partisan, regionally diverse, and drawn especially from outside traditional political centers.
At the core of each cohort is a strategic foresight process that goes beyond day-to-day politics to explore the long-term future of the transatlantic relationship. In facilitated foresight workshops, participants analyze emerging challenges and opportunities and develop future scenarios to inform political debates at the regional, national, and transatlantic levels. Each year focuses on a key future-oriented theme: Security (2026), the Information Landscape and Democracy (2027), and Demographic Change, Migration, and Social Cohesion (2028).
Through in-person exchanges in both Germany and the United States as well as virtual workshop formats, RESET combines both personal encounters with intellectual depth. The project fills a critical gap by reaching politically active young people who have so far remained largely outside existing transatlantic networks. The program builds new transatlantic connections, strengthens strategic and future-oriented thinking, and fosters trustful, multi-partisan dialogue. By building bridges between regions, political parties, and generations, RESET strengthens young leaders’ ability to engage constructively with shared transatlantic challenges and to shape the future of the partnership.
A call for applications is currently open for representatives of youth political party organizations to participate in the first cohort, including two study trips to Norfolk, Virginia, USA and Wiesbaden, Germany. Please find the Call for Applications to take part in the 2026 cohort of the RESET project here.
The project is supported by the Transatlantic Program of the Federal Republic of Germany, funded by the European Recovery Program (ERP) of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWE).
