Frameworks for Strategic Research and Policy
Transatlantic cooperation is routinely assessed through security commitments, trade rules and summit diplomacy, yet an equally consequential layer of the relationship is organized through universities or research centers. This network constitutes strategic infrastructure in the literal sense: it generates epistemic foundations for evidence-based governance and cultivates the human capital essential for sustained innovation (European Commission, 2023). Since the European Union and the United States account for nearly half of global research and innovation funding, their partnership is defined by a shared commitment to openness, ethics and academic freedom. Consequently, transatlantic academic cooperation is not a peripheral exchange but a core public investment that yields measurable returns exceeding the capacity of either bloc to innovate in isolation.
This investment is anchored in a mature legal architecture. The EU-U.S. Scientific and Technological Cooperation Agreement has provided a formal framework since 1998, with its 2023 extension ensuring stability through 2028 (U.S. Department of State, 2023). These agreements do more than facilitate dialogue; they standardize reciprocity, protect intellectual property and institutionalize consultative channels, effectively lowering the “border tax” on cross-border scientific inquiry.
Building on this foundation, the EU and the U.S. have recently pivoted toward connecting research directly to global public goods. In January 2025, a joint statement reaffirmed this alignment, explicitly linking innovation to climate resilience and health security (European Commission, 2025). This shift moves cooperation from a discretionary cultural “add-on” to a normative instrument designed to solve systemic, cross-border challenges. By defining these goals publicly, both sides establish a baseline for policy accountability, ensuring that academic freedom remains the prerequisite for evidence-based policymaking.
Operational Scale and Scientific Impact
The scale of collaboration already underway further supports the argument that the “Atlantic campus” is operational rather than aspirational. The United States remains the preeminent non-EU partner in Horizon Europe, with 1,037 participations across 760 projects (European Commission, 2025). For European consortia, U.S. involvement provides “frontier expertise” and access to unique datasets; for U.S. researchers, the program offers an entry point into mission-oriented networks—addressing climate and advanced technology at a scale rarely replicable through national funding alone.
The value of this collaboration is reflected not just in the volume of projects, but in their scientific output. OECD analyses report that internationally collaborative research tends to achieve higher citation impact. While citations are an imperfect proxy for societal value, they remain one of the scalable indicators of scientific visibility and uptake. Thus, transatlantic collaboration acts as a productivity multiplier, increasing the probability that joint knowledge will diffuse through the global system to bolster both European and American scientific competitiveness.
Economic Benefits of Student Mobility
Beyond the laboratory, student mobility provides a second, quantitatively legible measure of mutual benefit. The Open Doors 2025 report notes that 298,180 U.S. students studied abroad for credit in 2023/24, with 45% (approximately 134,000) concentrated in Italy, Spain, the UK and France. These flows serve American interests by creating a workforce with geopolitical literacy and operational familiarity in allied societies. Conversely, for Europe, hosting these cohorts builds durable institutional linkages and drives demand for high-value joint programming.
Europe’s own investment in mobility further illustrates this reciprocity. The €26.2 billion Erasmus+ budget (2021–2027) positions mobility as a primary tool for human capital optimization (European Commission, 2021). The Erasmus Impact Study confirms that mobile students were half as likely to experience long-term unemployment after graduation as non-mobile students; even five years after graduation, their unemployment rate remained 23% lower. Mobility programs, therefore, are not merely educational; they are macroeconomic interventions that generate long-term societal resilience.
This human capital also translates into significant macroeconomic impact. NAFSA’s International Student Economic Value Tool estimates that international students contributed $42.9 billion to the U.S. economy and supported 355,736 jobs during the 2024–2025 academic year. Open Doors reporting indicates that total international student enrollment in the United States reached 1,177,766 in 2024/25, reinforcing the point that academic openness can be economically consequential at a national scale. Although these estimates are global rather than Europe-specific, they clarify an often-missing piece in transatlantic debates: educational exchange is not only a soft-power practice but also a measurable contributor to local labor markets, university finances and the broader innovation ecosystem.
Durable Networks and Institutional Legacy: The Karski Lens
While modern data confirms the economic utility of these links, aggregate metrics often overlook the rotational role of individual case studies. These alumni do not merely participate in the transatlantic discourse; they actively reconstruct the institutional mechanisms that enable them to engage in it. This is shown by generations of European alumni of American universities and their American counterparts in Europe, whose professional successes provide a long-standing historical validation of the exchange model.
The career of Jan Karski provides a historical anchor for this logic. A Polish World War II resistance courier and former junior diplomat, Karski risked his life to carry eyewitness reports from occupied Poland to Allied decision-makers. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum identifies him as one of the first individuals to deliver eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust to Allied leaders, including senior British authorities and President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1943. After the war, Karski transitioned from wartime emissary to academic witness, spending decades as a professor at Georgetown University (PhD ‘52). Read through the lens of transatlantic institutional exchange, Karski’s Georgetown tenure transformed individual moral credibility into durable pedagogical and diplomatic influence. In this sense, Karski’s Georgetown career anticipated the logic of the Atlantic Campus by showing how personal authority, university networks and policy education could converge in Washington, D.C. to shape successive generations of transatlantic policy professionals.
This legacy is sustained today through formal capacity building that links Poland and the United States through specialized academic programming. The Jan Karski Educational Foundation’s sponsorship of young Polish scholars in the Georgetown Leadership Seminar illustrates a critical analytical point: transatlantic cooperation is most durable when it is embedded in professional networks that outlast electoral cycles. Poland thus serves as a concrete laboratory for how these bridges operate on the ground. The Polish–U.S. Fulbright Commission reports that dozens of Americans come to Poland annually to conduct research at the intersection of EU integration and regional security.
Conclusion
In conclusion, while the transatlantic relationship will continue to be judged by deterrence credibility and economic bargaining power, those metrics omit a critical enabling layer: the capacity to generate reliable knowledge, train adaptable talent and develop interoperable standards for emerging technologies. Official EU-U.S. research frameworks, the scale of current mobility and evidence on the performance benefits of international collaboration together support a pragmatic conclusion: investing in the Atlantic Campus is a defensible win-win strategy when it is built around coordinated priorities, scalable mobility pathways and compatible research security governance.