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Sophie Arts is a Washington, DC-based fellow with GMF’s Transatlantic Security team. She leads the team’s research on Nordic and Arctic security and geopolitics, covering North American homeland defense against conventional and hybrid threats, and cooperation with allies and partners. She also focuses on Russian and Chinese activities in the Arctic region. 

Arts serves as co-chair on the task force for global peace and security for the Think7 (T7), the official G7 group that brings together the world’s leading think tanks and research centers. Her writing and commentary are featured regularly in international media. 

In 2017, Arts joined GMF's security and defense policy team, focusing on transatlantic security within and outside NATO. Her prior research covered the alliance’s partnerships and flexible formats, the impact of emerging technologies on NATO defense and deterrence, the dynamics of escalation within the cyber domain, and strategic stability in a multipolar world.

Arts previously worked at the Atlantic Council, GMF’s Brussels office, Spiegel Online International, and Kantar Media. Originally from Germany, she holds a master’s degree from Humboldt University in Berlin and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Freiburg. She completed coursework at Connecticut College and the University of Virginia, where she also worked as a research assistant in the media studies department and in the university’s Center for Politics, supporting Larry J. Sabato's work on "The Kennedy Half-Century". 

Martin Klingst is a former visiting senior fellow.

Klingst was the news editor and a political journalist at the North German Broadcasting Corporation (NDR),  and he also served as the domestic and foreign affairs reporter, senior political editor, head of the political department, and US correspondent at the German weekly DIE ZEIT. At the Office of the Federal President of Germany,  he headed the strategic communications and speeches department.

During his career, Klingst reported from the war in the former Yugoslavia, and from India, China, the Middle East, and the United States. His work has taken him to domestic and foreign conflict hotspots and places wherever democracies and human rights were in danger. He chronicled some of these experiences in the books “Menschenrechte” (Human Rights) and “Trumps Amerika. Reise in ein wei�es Land” (Trump’s America. Journey to a White Country). In 2020, Klingst wrote a biography of Guido Goldman, the founder of major transatlantic institutions such as GMF. Its English edition was published in September 2021 by Berghahn Books under the title “Guido Goldman. Transatlantic Bridge Builder”.

Relations between Europe and the United States have long been at the core of Klingst’s interests. In 1971, aged sixteen, he flew across the Atlantic for the first time and spent a year as an exchange student in Colorado. He has since researched how, in times of growing authoritarianism and rapidly changing demographics, the intrinsic values of the transatlantic relationship—democracy, the rule of law, free trade, and civil and human rights—can be preserved.

Naja Bentzen is a policy analyst in the European Parliament Liaison Office in Washington DC.