For much of the past decade, American strategic debate has been dominated by a single proposition. The United States is told it must choose between theaters of conflict. China is described as the pacing threat, and Washington should therefore commit its finite resources toward the Indo-Pacific. Europe, while important, can no longer be the center of gravity.
The logic is understandable. China possesses the world’s second-largest economy and the most formidable long-term challenge to the international order.
Yet the debate rests on a false premise. While the Asia theater adherents say America must choose, its adversaries do not. They increasingly treat the two theaters as inseparable.
Russia’s war against Ukraine has made this unmistakably clear. Moscow’s defense industrial base now depends heavily on Iranian drones, North Korean ammunition, and Chinese dual-use technologies. Beijing may not have crossed the threshold into direct military support, but Chinese firms have provided critical components that sustain Russia’s ability to wage war. Its military secretly engages in joint planning with Russia to degrade and destroy the Starlink satellite system. North Korea has used the conflict to deepen military cooperation with Moscow while testing new systems and gaining leverage. Iran, meanwhile, has demonstrated how rapidly technologies developed in one conflict can migrate to another.
The strategic question is not whether Russia and China have formed a formal alliance. They have different interests and priorities. What matters is that their activities are complementary: Moscow diverts Western attention and military resources, Beijing supplies economic and technological capacity, while Iran and North Korea provide military support.
The implications extend well beyond Ukraine. China is studying the war closely — not because Taiwan is Ukraine, but because the conflict offers lessons about alliance cohesion, sanctions, industrial mobilization, and democratic resilience. Russia, for its part, has become increasingly dependent on relationships that strengthen China’s broader geopolitical position. The result is a loose system of mutual reinforcement.
For decades, the US organized its national security apparatus around geography. Combatant commands, diplomatic bureaus, and alliances evolved to manage distinct regions. That model made sense when threats could largely be contained within theaters. Today’s authoritarian competitors ignore those boundaries.
The challenge is not simply military. China and Russia cooperate on energy, critical minerals, space, cyber capabilities, and influence operations while exploiting democratic vulnerabilities and shaping the international environment in ways that favor authoritarian governance. Their strength lies not in centralized coordination but in flexibility.
This does not mean the US should abandon prioritization. Strategic choices remain unavoidable. Elbridge Colby at the Department of Defense and others are right that China represents the most significant long-term challenge to the international order. But recognizing China as the pacing threat does not mean Europe becomes a secondary theater whose importance is steadily diminishing.
NATO offers a useful reminder: the alliance embodied a broader truth — that security in Europe, North America, and beyond is interconnected. That insight remains valid.
Europe’s role in this new strategic environment must change. European allies must assume greater responsibility for deterrence, accelerate defense-industrial production, and reduce critical dependencies. Increased defense spending is necessary but insufficient. Europe must develop the capacity not only to defend itself, but also to compete effectively.
At the same time, Washington must resist the temptation to frame every strategic debate as a contest between theaters. The choice between Europe and Asia is, in many respects, a symptom of a deeper problem: the erosion of institutions capable of thinking across regions and time horizons.
The US once excelled at integrating military power, economic statecraft, technological innovation, and alliance management into coherent strategies. Today, too much policymaking is reactive, fragmented, and consumed by immediate crises. Governments struggle to address “meta threats” that cut across regions, domains, and bureaucratic boundaries. The result is a tendency to reduce strategy to false binaries: Europe or Asia, deterrence or competition, military power or economic security.
The answer is not to abandon strategic prioritization, but to organize democratic power around the reality that these challenges increasingly reinforce one another.
First, the United States and NATO should reject the premise that strategic success requires choosing between Europe and Asia. They possess the economic resources, alliance networks, and military capabilities to address multiple challenges simultaneously — provided they organize themselves accordingly.
Policymakers should integrate European and Indo-Pacific strategy rather than treating them as competing portfolios. NATO’s engagement with Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand reflects the reality that developments in one theater increasingly shape outcomes in another.
Second, the transatlantic community must accelerate defense-industrial integration. The wars and crises of the coming decades will not be decided solely by the size of military inventories, but by the ability of democracies to innovate, produce, and sustain collective action over time.
Third, democratic governments must devote greater attention to the political dimension of strategic competition. Authoritarian powers understand that their greatest opportunities often lie not in defeating Western militaries, but in exploiting divisions within alliances and eroding public confidence in democratic institutions.
The central challenge of our time is not choosing between Europe and Asia. It is recognizing that America’s competitors have already linked regions, technologies, and political systems that democratic governments still approach separately.
The decisive advantage will belong not to those who concentrate on a single theater, but to those who can think and act across all of them.
David M. Cattler is a Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He is a senior transatlantic security leader with more than 35 years of experience across the US government, NATO, and the Intelligence Community. Most recently, he served as Director of the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA) and was previously NATO’s Assistant Secretary General for Intelligence and Security, the alliance’s senior intelligence official. Cattler is a graduate of the US Naval Academy and Georgetown University and was an MIT Seminar XXI Fellow.
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.
