Europe’s Problem is not America, its Europe

The publication of the US National Security Strategy (NSS) last week sent shockwaves throughout Europe. The alarm is not unwarranted per se. From the perspective of the continent’s transatlanticists, the document is a statement of Washington’s explicit opposition to the core tenets of the post-1945 European order, which generations of past American administrations helped construct. The subsequent lament of Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk succinctly captured the bewilderment of many European officials: “Dear American friends, Europe is your closest ally, not your problem…Unless something has changed.”

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But that’s just the thing. Nothing has changed. At least not since Donald Trump declared his intention to pursue the American presidency in June 2015.

For a decade now, Trump and his supporters have championed a program which has been deeply critical of, and even hostile to the EU, NATO, and the broader liberal international system. In fact, Trump has articulated a similar policy agenda since the 1980s. This includes the President’s rejection of the so-called “Washington Consensus,” the (neo)liberal economic agenda which has steered economic policy on both sides of the Atlantic since at least 1979. And the central pillars of the NSS were already shared with European officials by Vice President Vance in February at the Munich Security Conference.

Europe may not like what it has heard but it cannot claim that the President and his administration(s) have not been clear.

Yet only days after the publication of the NSS, the draft of the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) was released. The approximately $900 billion defense bill is expected to pass with significant bipartisan support in the coming weeks, as is the norm for NDAAs. But this NDAA also contains several amendments which read like a clear Congressional rebuke of the administration’s NSS.

This includes the proposed Western Balkans Democracy and Prosperity Act, which states that the “reforms and integration with the European Union pursued by countries in the Western Balkans have led to significant democratic and economic progress in the region” and that it is a “sense of Congress” that “United State should [inter alia]… support the accession of those Western Balkans countries that are not already members to the European Union and to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization”.

Combined with dissention within the ranks of Congressional Republicans regarding the White House’s recent peace efforts in Ukraine, the contents of this legislation suggest there may still be a significant bipartisan constituency in Washington interested in rebooting the transatlantic relationship on mutually acceptable compromises and shared concerns. The Western Balkans might be the area where such joint political redeployment is possible.

But can Europe, however, recognize and seize the opportunity to do so?

Since 1776 America has consistently opted for action over accommodation in international affairs, transforming in the process from a colonial backwater into the world’s premier military and economic superpower. That preference for action has resulted in triumph (e.g. the American Revolution itself, the construction of the post-war transatlantic order, or the successful brokering of the Dayton Agreement by the U.S. after years of European failure) and in disaster (e.g. Vietnam, Iraq, or President Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan). But America’s disposition, asserted more slowly or quickly depending on the relative primacy of the central issue(s) to core U.S. national security interests, is towards action.

Europe, in contrast, appears incapable even of articulating its own self-interests.

As Steven Everts, the Director of the EU Institute for Security Studies, opined in a recent Politico essay: “Anyone looking at Europe’s choices in recent months can see a psychology of weakness. It paints the picture of a continent lacking courage, unable to take decisive action even when it comes to its core interests and when policy alternatives are within reach. Europe is losing confidence, sinking into fatalism and justifying its passivity with the soothing thought that it has no real choice, as its cards are weak.”

From the perspective of Sarajevo or Pristina one might only object to Everts’ claim that this situation is a recent phenomenon. It is not. It has been characteristic of European waffling in the Western Balkans for decades. And even in Ukraine – that purportedly existential struggle for the continent’s future –the capitals continuously drag their feet on providing decisive military support to Kyiv. Worse, the EU continues to purchase Russian energy supplies at rates virtually on par with its aid to Ukraine, a stupendously incoherent policy regime.

Europe’s problem then is not Trump, or America, or even Russia. It is its own (geo)political incompetence. Because the essence of President’s Trump’s critique of the transatlantic relationship is little different from that of President Obama. Like Trump, Obama believed America’s chief peer rival was in the Pacific, not in Europe; that Europe should look to itself for its security needs; and that Russia, even in the wake of the first invasion of Ukraine, was not a threat to Washington’s wider strategic interests.

American demands for Europe to assume greater responsibility for its own security and “neighborhood” stability are thus not recent. What has varied is tone, not substance. Contra Churchill’s maxim that Americans will always do the right thing, after they have exhausted all other options, it is Europe which appears to be still in the process of exhausting its options: doing everything but asserting its own (geo)political relevance. Perhaps the erosion of the liberal international order is therefore less the consequence of American abandonment than of Europe’s unwillingness to defend, adapt, and finance it.

So, until Europeans assume the political and strategic resolve commensurate with their lofty rhetoric, no relationship nor reset with Washington will be truly durable.