Patterns and strategy in current U.S. foreign policy are hard to discern given President Donald Trump’s personalistic, mercurial, and transactional style. But almost a year since the elections, the contours of the new U.S. grand strategy are crystallizing. And while European leaders knew that America’s focus would increasingly lie elsewhere, the shift is proving to be more profound than many expected. In my judgment, Europe now ranks fourth among U.S. strategic priorities, behind the Western Hemisphere, the Indo-Pacific, and the Middle East.
It is not surprising, per se, that Europe is playing a lesser role in U.S. strategic thinking. Historically, U.S. grand strategy has typically been Eurocentric, occupied with shifts in the balance of power on the continent. But since the turn of the millennium, the confluence of the abating risk of a hegemon dominating Europe and the ascent of other geopolitical centers of power led the United States to increasingly prioritize other regions. While President George W. Bush focused on the Middle East, every president that came after him announced (if not always fully pursued) policies of pivoting to Asia.
Reinforcing these structural trends, demographic shifts underway in the United States mean that the Cold War generation of reflexive, sometimes nostalgic, transatlanticists is retiring. In its place, a younger, more diverse generation is more skeptical of the U.S. role in the world and often lacks the instinctive affinity toward Europe. Given his deep hostility toward NATO and the European Union, nobody expected Trump, in his second term, to reverse the relegation of Europe.
What is surprising, however, is how much Europe has been downgraded. For all other post-Cold War presidents, Europe still continued to play a central, albeit secondary, role in U.S. strategy. Europe was seen as a key market for U.S. (defense) goods and services, European allies could be important multipliers of U.S. power in other regions, and Russia was perceived to pose a threat to both European security and the wider U.S.-led order, including in the Pacific, where it has its own equities and is aligned with China.
For Trump, however, Europe seems increasingly irrelevant or, on a bad day, even an adversary. At the core of his views lies the rejection that European security constitutes a core U.S. national interest, thus breaking with decades of U.S. grand strategy. Since his first presidential campaign, Trump has sowed doubt about whether he would honor NATO’s Article 5 commitments, including by conditioning U.S. protection on political demands, such as higher defense spending. For example, in March 2025, he said “If they don’t pay, I’m not going to defend them. No, I’m not going to defend them.” Three months later, when asked about this issue, he said “Depends on your definition [of Article 5]. There’s numerous definitions of Article 5. You know that, right? But I’m committed to being their friends.”
It’s true that Trump has at times made more favorable noises about America’s commitments to NATO. At the otherwise disastrous meeting with the Ukrainian president back in February, he committed to defending Poland and the Baltics. And during the NATO Summit in The Hague, following an agreement by allies to increase defense spending targets to 5 percent of GDP (up from 2 percent), Trump said, “We’re with them all the way.”
However, his administration has also phased out security assistance for states bordering Russia and declined to criticize Moscow when 19 Russian drones invaded Polish airspace in September. And at several points, he has treated NATO as a third party, as if the United States is no longer a member. For instance, the first draft of the 28-point-Ukraine-Russia peace plan (see below) states that the United States would mediate a dialogue between Russia and NATO.
Fundamentally, Trump has made it all but clear that the war in Ukraine is largely immaterial to U.S. interests because, in his words, “we have a big ocean in between” and “it doesn’t affect the United States…unless you end up in a world war.” But Ukrainian and European security are indivisible, not only because Russia’s war aims at dismantling the European security order writ large but also because no large-scale conventional Russian attack on NATO territory is likely while the war in Ukraine continues.
These sentiments will likely be reflected in strategic shifts. Per recent press reports, the forthcoming National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy will prioritize threats in the western hemisphere and from China, while downplaying the U.S. role in Europe (though we will have to wait for the next defense budget to be certain). Accordingly, the Pentagon is poised to announce the withdrawal of troops and capabilities from Europe in the forthcoming global posture review (having already decided to withdraw a rotational brigade in Romania with hardly any notice). And even if that process is properly coordinated with European allies – a big if – the credibility of the U.S. extended deterrence is increasingly in doubt. In light of continued close U.S. engagement in the Middle East – from driving the ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Gaza, to joining Israel’s attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, to the recent security pact with Qatar and talks with Saudi Arabia to the same ends – it is thus reasonable to deduce that Europe ranks fourth among U.S. strategic priorities.
European leaders should also not mistake the occasionally constructive noise or decision on Ukraine as anything other than a momentary relief. At the time of writing, Trump has not yet abandoned Ukraine, but this seems driven by his desire to conclude a peace deal at any cost in his idiosyncratic quest to be recognized by the Nobel committee rather than a durable, genuine concern for the security of Ukraine or Europe. His erraticism testifies to that, with Washington’s Ukraine policy oscillating between blaming Ukraine and Russia for the outbreak of the war, halting and restarting military support for Kyiv, threatening Russia with sanctions and exempting it from tariffs, toying with providing tomahawks without going through with it, and habitually echoing Russian talking points. While recent sanctions against Russian oil companies impose significant costs on the Russian economy, the Trump administration seems to have backtracked again. According to some sources and allegedly the U.S. secretary of state himself, the U.S. administration, with Russian officials, drafted a 28-point peace plan which massively undermines Ukraine’s sovereignty by giving in to many Russian maximalist demands. These include limiting the size of the Ukrainian armed forces, Kyiv ceding parts of the Donbas that are currently under Ukrainian control, and placing constraints on western military support for Kyiv.
Three Factors Driving the Demotion of Europe in U.S. Grand Strategy
Three recent and mutually reinforcing developments are driving the demotion of Europe among U.S. strategic priorities beyond the aforementioned structural forces. First is the hemispheric turn in U.S. foreign policy. The unexpected and growing military focus on the Western Hemisphere – deploying troops to the southern border and U.S. cities, reinforcing the U.S. posture in the Caribbean, and threatening forcible regime change in Venezuela, to name but a few indicators – marks a fundamental shift in U.S. foreign policy. Even before the shift, perceptions of scarce resources had served as a central justification for retrenching from Europe. The hemispheric turn exacerbates this problem, given that the competition for resources and attention between regions is widely perceived to be in zero-sum terms among U.S. policymakers.
The hemispheric turn, together with the quest to normalize relations with Russia and doubts about U.S. resolve to defend Taiwan, also signals an openness to the idea of spheres of influences. This corroborates my interpretation that this administration does not seem to view European security as a core U.S. interest. According to the logic of spheres of influences, parts of Europe would supposedly be treated as Russia’s natural hinterland. Moreover, if the United States followed through on the claims on Greenland, the hemispheric turn would also pose a direct challenge to the sovereignty of a European state (Greenland is an autonomous territory of Denmark).
Second, and unlike previous administrations, the Trump administration does not view Europe as an asset it can leverage in other regions or for other priorities, hence being able to afford to pay less attention to the continent. On China, the United States is showing no interest in forging a united front with Europe to build allied scale, preferring to deal with Beijing in bilateral, G2 settings. Despite significant interdependencies between the European and Indo-Pacific theater, the Trump administration treats them as bifurcated regions that can be approached in isolation of each other. U.S.-European cooperation on China is rendered even more difficult by the fact that the Trump administration has sowed doubt about long-held views that Beijing represents the pacing threat. Trump’s China policy is less tough and more fluid than most anticipated, oscillating between threatening a full-out trade war against Beijing and pursuing a grand bargain while sending mixed signals about his resolve to defend Taiwan. The timing is tragic because European views on China are increasingly hawkish as a result of Beijing’s hostile trade policy and growing support for Russia’s war against Ukraine.
On the Middle East, European disunity has translated into a lack of influence during the Israel-Gaza war and the subsequent ceasefire negotiations. Meanwhile, Trump’s hostility toward global governance of, for instance, climate change and international organizations, such as the United Nations or the World Trade Organization, deprived the Europeans of potential value to the United States, given their traditionally significant voice in multilateral settings.
Third, the ideological divide between the MAGA movement and mainstream European politics is sharpening. The Trump administration is increasingly pursuing an authoritarian agenda at home and exporting it abroad, while the MAGA movement grows more radical. From expressions of sympathy for far-right parties such as the German Alternative für Deutschland, to fueling culture wars in Europe over immigration, to allegations that countries like Germany or the United Kingdom are limiting free speech, the administration is increasingly involving itself more openly in the domestic politics of European states.
Vice President JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference this February was emblematic, with the vice president claiming that “the threat that I worry the most about vis à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China … what I worry about is the threat from within: the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values.” References to supposed civilization affinities between the United States and Europe are a thinly veiled attempt to redefine the transatlantic community in white ethnic, Judeo-Christian rather than pluralistic, enlightenment terms. Unlike in the past, values are no longer a glue for the transatlantic relationship but rather driving Europe and the United States apart.
Europe should thus not be under any illusions about its place in U.S. grand strategy. Rather than clinging onto vain hopes of keeping the United States meaningfully engaged in European security, Europeans need to embrace the fact that they will have to meet their security challenges – from supporting Ukraine to deterring Russia – mostly alone.
On Ukraine, the Europeans finally need to shift gears and move from reactive to proactive mode. It is critical for Ukraine’s negotiation position that the European Union agrees on using the frozen Russian assets to fill Ukraine’s funding gap at the next European Council in December. In addition, the European coalition of the willing should urgently make own proposals of what security guarantees should look like, both with and without a U.S. backstop. Finally, Europeans need to increase their military support for Ukraine, including by donating relevant U.S. weapon systems, even if that temporarily weakens national defenses.
On European defense writ large, the Europeans will have to replace the bulk of the U.S. conventional troops and capabilities. The prerequisite to do so is much higher defense spending, which NATO allies have committed to (with the exception of Spain) at the latest summit. But many large European states will struggle to meet those commitments, given their high debt and deficit levels. Hence, E.U. member states should use the next E.U. budget to properly fund promising new E.U.-level initiatives that incentivize joint development and procurement, which however currently lack adequate financial backing. More ambitiously, E.U. member states led by Germany should design a joint debt instrument to help finance European public defense goods, including capital-intensive flagship projects such as a pan-European air defense structure.
Without a wholesale reform of Europe’s dysfunctional defense industrial system, however, additional spending will hardly translate into additional capabilities. The defense industrial landscape in Europe has long been fragmented along national borders, with the big European states mostly procuring from domestic or, to a lesser extent, American companies rather than suppliers in other European countries. This has led to costly duplications of capabilities, limited production capacities given small order sizes, interoperability issues among European armies, and dangerous dependencies on off-the-shelf orders from third parties.
Deepening defense industrial relations requires that the biggest spenders in Europe – Germany, France, and the United Kingdom – show political leadership and collaborate much more on joint development and procurement. The current petty quarrel between German and French firms over work shares of Europe’s most important joint defense project, the Future Combat Air System, is emblematic of the parochialism still dominating industrial relations. Greater E.U. fiscal incentives for cooperation on realizing NATO’s capability targets will help too. Another crucial step to overcome defense protectionism is to create an E.U. single market for defense, as it has for other industries, by imposing mandatory standards of military goods, devising rules against defense protectionism, and agreeing on common export rules.
Finally, Europeans need to take ownership of the institutional dimension of NATO, which has historically been led by the United States. Europeans will have to craft their own “European way of war” by adjusting NATO’s regional plans for Europeans (and Canadians) to provide the vast majority of force requirements and crafting new concepts of deterrence and defense. They also need to devise new forms of defense governance and Europeanize NATO’s command structure to provide the necessary political and military leadership until recently exercised by Washington.
Europeans need to dispel the myth that their rearmament efforts create a self-fulfilling prophecy of hastening U.S. withdrawal from the continent. This U.S. administration will not be swayed by displays of weakness. It is overdue that Europeans seize the mantle of leadership for European defense.
Leonard A. Schuette, Ph.D., is an international security program fellow at the Belfer Center at the Harvard Kennedy School and a visiting fellow at the German Marshall Fund. He has published widely on European security, U.S. grand strategy, and German defense policy.
Image: The White House via Wikimedia Commons
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