The Smokescreen Has Lifted
The largely performative turmoil that has defined the trans-Atlantic alliance in the past week has more to do with geopolitical inevitabilities than with America’s short-term foreign policy goals
After just three weeks, 2026 has already become no stranger to a number of… notable geopolitical developments. Iran’s regime came close to collapse, and it’s very likely that it will on the next occasion that things in Tehran go south. In the Western Hemisphere, the Americans launched an operation to capture Venezuelan dictator Nicholas Maduro, effectively ending Caracas’s role as a Sino-Russian proxy and reaffirming America’s historical dominance over the Americas. And even then, there’s more to come. Washington has declared that it is actively seeking regime change in Cuba by the end of the year. Crazy times, indeed.
If you’re a European, however, they’re even crazier. While Europe is not necessarily embroiled in an existential crisis of its own, it’s had a real rough time dealing with the fact that its perception of “how the world works” hardly reflects the reality of contemporary global affairs—one which recent events at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and tensions surrounding American control over Greenland have clearly revealed. Indeed, Europe’s notorious level of bureaucratic inefficiency extends to its deeply outdated geopolitical outlook, one which has long operated under the idiotic presumptions that American protection is unconditional and that Russia’s opinion doesn’t matter.
And certainly, agreeing with the Russians is no easy thing to do on any geopolitical matter, but Brussels’ belief that such disagreement necessitated simply ignoring the strategic interests of the Eastern Hemisphere’s most heavily militarized superstate from 2008 all the way to 2022 was a catastrophic miscalculation. It has, if anything, led us to a war in Ukraine on account of unregulated NATO expansion.
Before World War II, Europe was a hot mess of interstate rivalries and heated nationalisms. Once the continent had destroyed itself two times over—and dragged much of the world down with it— the Americans had enough with trusting its overseas neighbors to keep the peace and decided to do the dirty work on its own.
And thus was born the modern framework of European stability—in turn for American economic and military cover, the Europeans would agree not to fight each other and (more importantly) to take Washington’s side in the campaign to strangle the Soviet Union. Such an arrangement gave way to unprecedented prosperity throughout Western Europe, but it also induced a sense of geopolitical oblivion. Military spending was halted in turn for massive social welfare programs. But to the Americans, that was ok—so long as it had friends in its fight against Communism.
Long Term Realities:
In 2026, that security arrangement has long outlived its purpose. The Soviets took the way of the dodo well over 30 years ago. While Russia remains a formidable nation on the global stage, America’s focus has shifted invariably towards the rapidly-emerging People’s Republic of China, a far greater threat than is the Russian Federation. For America’s Pacific partners like Japan, Taiwan, South Korea (and even some newer ones like Vietnam and India), the post-1991 arrangement still stands. The United States needs these countries to stick it out with them if Beijing ever makes a move against Washington.
Unfortunately, the reality is different for the Europeans. True, the trans-Atlantic alliance is the most formidable the world has ever seen—and for the sake of shared democratic values, global prosperity, and the continued coherence of the free world, America would be foolish to discard a security bloc that now extends deep into the former Soviet sphere. Yet, an American pivot to China makes NATO far more difficult to be seen as a primary priority by Washington. And in fact, it’s been a hindrance to the Americans in more ways than one.
With the Soviet Union off the map, the United States no longer needs the Europeans to take part in a campaign of strangulation against a Russian regime which cannot even compare in strength to its predecessor. Russia might be bad, but its not big and bad like was the Soviet Empire—arguably the most formidable land empire ever assembled in human history.
In essence, the very arrangement of “European alliances for American subsidization” that has categorized the past eight decades has outlived its initial purpose. The European Union has continued to benefit from the American security umbrella without offering any substantive strategic gains to Washington on the global stage. Through a rather unwise policy of NATO’s unregulated eastern expansion into Ukraine and beyond, the trans-Atlantic framework has in fact only caused problems for Washington—who is now expected to fix a mess that would have never happened if NATO had not advocated for Ukrainian membership into the alliance.
Short-Term Sentiments:
If you’ve been following the news recently, you’ve probably heard more than once that “NATO and the Western Alliance is doomed” on account of one man: Donald Trump. The American President’s aggressive push for control over the North American island of Greenland from the Danes has most certainly been driven by a mix of legacy-building and “Manifest Destiny” that on paper makes little strategic or economic sense given America’s near-unlimited access to the island through the NATO alliance.
Nonetheless, the rift between Europe and America which Trump has supposedly created is not of his own making at all. In fact, he has simply pulled up the tablecloth to reveal a rift that has been ignored for three decades: the inherent imbalance and strategic indirection of the American-European relationship.
The American President’s outward-facing and absolutist personality certainly haven’t done anything to calm the situation, but the White House isn’t really acting much differently from how it has since its European alliance became relatively vestigial in 1991. When George Bush’s administration invaded Iraq in 2003, it did so in spite of the fervent opposition of European countries like France and Germany. Since the adoption of the Euro, the EU has become a silent yet pronounced competitor with America’s domestic manufacturing base. Flare-ups over NATO defense spendings, disparate views on how to handle China and Iran, and the refusal of Europe to back America diplomatically in places like the Middle East and East Asia in general all hint to the same inevitable and inescapable reality which is the aimlessness of the NATO alliance—whose only true claim to existence stems from deterring a Russian state which has taken four years to conquer a fifth of Ukraine. They aren’t reaching Paris anytime soon, and while NATO is unquestionably a defensive alliance, its continued existence and rapid expansion eastward would lead anyone in Moscow to believe that the bloc serves a more subversive purpose than is claimed. Perceptions might not reflect the truth, but they do matter when they lead countries to do things like, say, invade Ukraine.
Every American President since the end of the Cold War has expressed their discontent—whether indirectly or blatantly— with a European partnership which feels to be more of a burden than a bilateral alliance. Donald Trump has represented the culmination of this growing discomfort. In the National Security Strategy, the White House went perhaps a bit too far in waiving the “do whatever you want” card the Europeans have long held in matters of domestic and foreign policy for years. While Russia and America have a lot of ground to make up between themselves, it is also clear that Washington’s efforts to make peace in Ukraine while bypassing the Europeans signals a desire to eliminate the central liability which has stemmed from NATO: the War in Ukraine.
As the United States continues to shift its focus away from Europe and towards the now-emerging Chinese, getting the conflict resolved in Ukraine is of paramount importance. Not only would the conflict’s conclusion free up American resources to be directed elsewhere, but it would also mitigate the risk of America’s worst-case adversarial development: a direct Sino-Russian confrontation against the United States.
If Russia and China were to make their friendship official, even a fully mobilized Europe would prove incapable to make up for an alliance that would give China all the things it doesn’t have right now to fight the United States. While Russia and China are certainly cozying up with one another, ending the conflict in Ukraine would likely prompt Russia to reassess and rebalance its global outlook so as to remain a center of independent geopolitical mass, thus giving America a chance to keep Moscow and Beijing apart.
In essence, Russia matters because it cannot matter when it comes to China. If the nation were to stay neutral in a Pacific boxing match, it would truly box-in the Chinese in a way that would make total victory nearly impossible for them. If Russia were to directly side with Beijing, the opposite would be true. The world’s biggest resource deposits and biggest industrialized society by population would be in league against the West. That’s not a one-sided fight, but it’s certainly not one I’d want to take on.
As America continues to posture against the Europeans, recall that what is happening on both sides of the Atlantic is an escalation of grievances 30 years in the making rather than an unprecedented and sudden rift.
America’s frustrations with Europe may have their merits, but we must also remember the benefits which NATO does still provide the United States with. The alliance anchors America’s economic supremacy on the global stage and serves as an unprecedented vessel for global stability and American power projection, along with making the American ideal of democratic governance a global standard.
The trans-Atlantic alliance in its current form is imbalanced, and America will have to take measures to rebalance its relationship with Europe if it is to remain competitive on the global stage. This could involve efforts to strengthen US-Russian ties so as to keep Moscow and Beijing apart, or it could constitute a continued American desire for Europeans to double down on their own independent defense capacity (which many are already doing with considerable success).
And yet, American involvement in NATO is not mutually exclusive with a large-scale pivot to East Asia. If moderating voices prevail in Washington, we could easily see NATO assume a more passive but nonetheless persistent role in the US-European alliance, a reality which would be made more feasible if the rift between Russia and the West were to be at least in part resolved.
In conclusion, NATO sits at a pressure point that has been building for decades. If the alliance is to survive, it will have to adapt to the new realities of the 21st century. This will not only require the United States to gracefully scale back from the continent, but also force the Europeans to recognize that present-day geopolitics are nothing like those of the post-WW2 period.
And, as dramatic as recent events surrounding Greenland have been, perhaps they have woken the Europeans up not just to their own vulnerabilities, but also to the need to confront the new state of the world with the same assertiveness and resolve that the Americans have shown as of recent.