ABSTRACT
The unfolding security crisis in Ukraine has provided scholars with a rich occasion with which to test and refine theories to explain international politics and security. The resulting fluidity in the Western ecosystem of security reveals new forms of 'complicating security' that portend possible evolutions in the relative state of the transatlantic equilibrium or an identifiable and functioning security community. All participants in German, European and American debates about recalibrating post-Cold War narratives of security understood, however, that the theme of 'national injury' had to be taken seriously. The German government has provided some of the clearest language and normative priorities for framing national and Western measures for containing but also resolving the Ukraine crisis. The Ukraine crisis has illustrated that there are at least four discernible narratives of security binding and complicating the transatlantic security space.
