The latest US strategic posture toward Europe, the National Security Strategy, has been received in some quarters as a shock or rupture. It is neither. What it does is to formalize a reality that has been developing over the years, shaped less by declarations than by the slow reallocation of power, risk, and attention. Far from revolutionary, it is an act of delayed acknowledgment.
The broader picture inevitably raises a deeper question: what still binds the United States and Europe together? The answer has long been there. It merely became obscured by habit and ritual.
The transatlantic bond has never rested solely on institutions. It emerged from a shared moral grammar that evolved from a common civilizational heritage into a political commitment to freedom, individual dignity, and liberty. Over time, this produced a powerful assumption: that the security of one side of the Atlantic is a prerequisite for the security of the other. Not as sentiment, but as strategic interdependence rooted in shared exposure to coercion and disorder.
Yet stripped of rhetoric, the current US course reflects a colder truth. Under Trump, the US is acting squarely in its own interest. For over two decades and most of the 21st century, Washington and its allies were consumed by the War on Terror, an open-ended campaign that ended not in victory but a hecatomb and an implicit admission that Western might is wearing thin. The disorderly retreat from Afghanistan in 2021 underlined the lesson. Even the most capable coalition cannot sustain perpetual conflict, even when geographically limited and technologically asymmetric.
And times have changed, too. Power today is increasingly projected and consumed not in the tangible realm of territory, but in the intangible domains of data, standards, platforms, and systems. In this environment, the United States no longer sees securing a large, permanent military presence in Europe as self-evidently beneficial. What once anchored influence and deterrence is now viewed as tying resources to a theater where marginal returns are declining, while escalation risks are rising high. The emerging logic favors selective engagement and leverage from afar. Entanglement is being replaced by optionality.
This, however, does not mean disengagement. Europe remains critically dependent on the US in precisely those intangible domains that now shape power. American firms dominate in European cloud infrastructure, digital platforms, artificial intelligence development, cybersecurity ecosystems, and the databases that underpin everything from finance to defense logistics. European efforts to diversify remain half-hearted, while regulatory attempts to discipline US firms for entrenched market power are increasingly interpreted in the US as geopolitical confrontation rather than competition policy. The growing hostility of parts of Silicon Valley toward Brussels reflects where leverage truly resides.
Energy policy tells a similar story. The US is rapidly entrenching itself as the dominant LNG supplier to Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe, including Ukraine, through terminals in Poland, Lithuania, Croatia, and Greece. The revival of the Three Seas (3SI) framework and its P-TEC format serves this purpose well. Russian pipeline gas is being replaced, but should the region’s geopolitical volatility become unacceptable, US firms can redirect cargoes globally, and Washington can support allies from afar without committing ground troops.
Whether the broader political instincts of the current US administration ultimately serve American long-term interests is a separate question. Particularly revealing is the signaling by the Trump administration that it seeks privileged relations with a select group of EU states, while simultaneously anointing Germany as the country expected to reclaim leadership and defend Europe. The irony is hard to miss. But it is “divide and rule” at its finest.
I recall a conversation in June this year with senior officials at Germany’s foreign ministry, in which I suggested that NATO, in its current form, may be structurally unsustainable and might reorganize in regional subblocks. Even raising the prospect triggered visible discomfort. Yet the reason is straightforward. The stakes of confronting Russia are not the same for NATO’s northern and southern members.
For the Baltic states, Germany, Poland, and much of Central and Northern Europe, Russia is an existential threat. They are rearming accordingly. For others, it remains a problem to be managed and requires no significant change to the security policy. Inevitably, security will tighten first where the threat is most immediate. And regional bonds are growing stronger. It is no coincidence that Poland selected Swedish submarines for its naval rearmament program, or that Norway chose British frigates and German submarines.
Europe is not toothless. It has all the cards it needs to act on its own behalf. It commands capital on a scale few can match. Its population, though aging, remains sizable. Its industrial base, under pressure from global competition, still retains depth and adaptability. Its network of research institutions, technical universities, and skilled professionals remains among the strongest in the world. Its problem is not capacity but discipline and unity.
European strategic autonomy, a hackneyed slogan, will not fail for lack of resources. It will fail if choices are postponed, diluted, or reversed. The challenge is not to invent new tools, but to agree on priorities and persevere, even when the political cost is high and the payoff distant.
Europe has had time to adapt. Putin has been ruling for over a quarter of a century. More than four years have passed since the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, and nearly as many since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In that sense, history has been unusually lenient, and yet EU leaders, absorbed by domestic politics and opinion polls, largely squandered it.
Adaptation is no longer optional. Russia now openly threatens Finland following its accession to NATO, Poland’s rearmament, and the post-1997 European security order. Regardless of the outcome in Ukraine, all available evidence points to one conclusion. The Russian state has reorganized the regime’s rationale to defeat and subdue democratic Europe.
But this moment should not be seen merely as a crisis. It is also an opportunity for European self-invention. To adapt to the world as it is, not as it would like it to be. Doing so will require the management of Russian irredentism, US retrenchment, migration flows, and rising tensions with China, while confronting internal fractures over the European Union’s future structure and slowness of decision-making. There is no refuge from these issues for Europe’s political class.
The US has made its choice and Europe must now adapt. Quickly, because time is running out.
Maciej Filip Bukowski is the Head of the Energy and Resilience Program at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation in Warsaw, and is a non-resident fellow with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), where he writes about issues including Central European security.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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