A Better Trans-Atlantic Relationship Is Entirely Possible
How Europe and the United States could end up in a healthier alliance.
Foreign Policy
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14 min read
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Metaphors for the troubled trans-Atlantic relationship abound. It’s a marriage, a divorce, or perhaps a parent and child navigating a soon-to-be empty nest. All are trying to get at the same thing: The trans-Atlantic dynamic is morphing into something new. Yet even as it has become increasingly clear that we are not returning to the post-Cold War status quo, too much of the debate around Europe continues to focus on how to limit the transition and fretting about worst-case scenarios. It’s true that the second Trump administration has shown a willingness to play geopolitical hardball on tariffs, Greenland, and more. But policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic seem reluctant to explore what a healthy and reconfigured relationship would look like. Why not ask the question: In a post-Trump world, what will Washington want—or need—from Europe?
In the aftermath of the Cold War, there were doubts about whether NATO would persist at all. Could a genuine European defense pillar emerge within the newly christened European Union? Policymakers in Washington, however, decided to sustain both NATO and the U.S. presence on the continent, to the extent of insisting that European states should not develop their own defense alternatives. As Madeleine Albright, U.S. secretary of state under President Bill Clinton, memorably put it, states in Europe would not be permitted to “decouple” their militaries from NATO, “discriminate” against non-European defense partners, or “duplicate” U.S. military capabilities.
It was nonetheless a great deal for European states, so long as they were happy to remain dependent on U.S. power. While disagreements over issues such as the Iraq War occasionally roiled the relationship, the United States continued to provide defense to the continent—and as a result, European governments could funnel spending to more popular priorities. Over time, the average European state saw its military spending drop from 3.2 percent of GDP in the late 1980s to about 1.4 percent of GDP by 2015. The Libya debacle in 2014, in which European nations proved incapable of sustaining a bombing campaign for several days, only highlighted how poor their military capabilities had become.
Though the first Trump administration and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine prompted discussions about European “strategic autonomy,” rearmament, and burden sharing, little changed. U.S. President Joe Biden was content to surge the U.S. military presence in Europe in exchange for remaining the largely undisputed leader of a Western, pro-democracy bloc. Foreign-policy conversations in Washington focused on what European states might contribute to U.S. aims in the Indo-Pacific. Today, some in Washington remain insistent that any shift to European defense would be damaging to U.S. interests. A 2026 report by the Council on Foreign Relations, for example, notes: “If allies were independent militarily … that would likely undermine American influence over those partners.”
Donald Trump’s second term, however, has pushed governments in Europe beyond mere rhetoric about burden sharing and independence. Most influential has been the president’s willingness to actively use U.S. power to coerce Europe, directly linking tariffs and trade to security and threatening to conquer Greenland. This is not the passing of a torch that critics of a dysfunctional trans-Atlantic alliance might have pictured; it looks more, as scholar and FP columnist Stephen M. Walt put it, as if the United States has shifted from benevolent hegemon to “apex predator.” But the result is that there is no going back to the status quo.
When one is scared of something, it looms all the larger in the imagination. So it’s no surprise that European and U.S. policymakers and experts—now having to face an actual transition to a European-led defense—are struggling to see past the worst-case outcomes. What was once an instrumentalized argument about the dangers that might come if burden shifting were to happen is now used to predict a highly dysfunctional relationship.
Three specific doomsday scenarios dominate much of today’s discourse—in addition, of course, to the traditional but largely debunked fear that Russia would easily conquer the continent. The first is an exaggerated trade-off between military capability and foreign-policy autonomy. If Europe becomes more capable, skeptics argue, it’ll break from the United States and begin to chart its own course in the world.
This fear has long been a tool of those who want to keep the United States engaged in Europe. On a 2023 visit to Washington, then-Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki told an audience at the Atlantic Council that “European autonomy sounds fancy, doesn’t it? But it means shifting the center of European gravity toward China and severing the ties with [the] U.S.”
This fear is simultaneously accurate and entirely overblown. There is no doubt that a more capable Europe would be better able to resist U.S. demands; Europe is already more independent on economic questions than on military questions. At the same time, the divergence between European and U.S. economic interests is typically small. Germans share similar concerns about Chinese manufacturing and oversupply; European democracies have similar reasons to fear authoritarian surveillance technologies. At least for a couple of decades, there is only really so far that European and U.S. interests are likely to diverge.
A group of men and one woman standing in front of the columns of the White House.
European leaders meet with U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House on Aug. 18, where Trump hosted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for a bilateral meeting and then an expanded meeting to discuss a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. Win McNamee/Getty Images
A second, related fear is that Europe itself might become hostile to the United States. We see early indications of this in the way that Trump administration officials and Silicon Valley magnates talk about Europe’s regulatory frameworks and the restrictions they place on U.S. tech giants. If Europe were forced to build its own defense, some argue, this might force further European integration in ways that would ultimately create a rival to the United States’ own power. Echoes of this fear can be found in the latest National Security Strategy. Despite the obvious synergies that the EU could produce for defense funding and procurement, the Trump administration would prefer to deal with a multinational Europe—not a supra-state headquartered in Brussels.
Again, this fear is legitimate but overblown. The EU is not poised to become a European hegemon; divisions continue to persist among its member states on all kinds of issues. Several of the continent’s most capable military powers (e.g., Turkey and the United Kingdom) are not EU members. The two areas where the EU will most likely be able to constrain the United States or challenge its companies in coming years are regulatory (where its markets are already powerful enough to act as a constraint) and in the growth of a native defense industrial market (which could actually be a boon to an already overstretched U.S. defense industrial capability).
The final of these worst-case scenarios is the exact opposite, the notion that Europe without the United States will collapse back into fratricidal warfare among states. John J. Mearsheimer’s infamous essay “Back to the Future” predicted that this would be the inevitable result of the end of the Cold War. His argument was widely ridiculed and considered debunked. Today, however, such a fear is reemerging among liberal internationalists, who argue in particular that a fear of German rearmament could create a nationalist free-for-all on the continent.
This is by far the least realistic of the fears now gripping Washington. Even in a scenario where European states fail to come together for a unified common defense, they still remain connected in economic, social, and even political ways that mitigate against the kinds of arms racing and misperception seen in past decades. National prerogatives matter, whether in defense procurement or in labor policy, but European leaders are clear that the continent’s future is a joint endeavor. French, British, and even Polish leaders are actively taking steps to reassure their own populations that German rearmament is a good thing—an unimaginable stance even a few decades ago.
That we are likely to avoid the worst-case scenarios does not mean that the future is clear. We do not know exactly how the process of European rearmament and U.S. pullback from the continent may unfold. Even experts disagree on the big questions at play. European states are starting to spend more on defense but at an uneven rate. NATO remains the best organizational option for joint command and control of the continent’s armed forces, while the EU is well suited to navigate complex questions of debt and joint procurement. A variety of minilateral arrangements are also springing up among similarly minded states, focused on air defense, Arctic training, and more.
Yet for all the anxiety and uncertainty about this crowded field of options, it is simply not the case that a failure of Europe to come together as one unified security force would undermine the whole process. There are, in practice, multiple practical paths to a sufficient European defense. For U.S. policymakers, the biggest question is not the nitty-gritty of exactly how Europe replaces U.S. defense capabilities but rather what the United States wants from the relationship in coming decades.
A crowd of people waving flags. One sign reads: Yankee Go Home!
Demonstrators protest in support of Greenland, a Danish territory, and against U.S. threats to annex it in Copenhagen on Jan. 17.Martin Sylvest Andersen/Getty Images
Though the fears and metaphors are overblown, the fact is that the trans-Atlantic relationship is at a low point—more so than one might have expected even from a significant U.S. push on burden shifting. The competition among different factions within the Trump administration is largely to blame.
Elbridge Colby, the U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy, told a NATO audience this year, for instance, that the United States wants “partnerships, not dependencies.”
Others within the administration, though, are stoking tensions over Greenland, expressing open support for far-right parties such as the Alternative for Germany, and lecturing Europeans about free speech and values. These criticisms, even if partially true, leave many European populations feeling as if the United States only wants a partner that reflects conservative values. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz rejected the idea in his opening remarks in Munich, telling the audience that “MAGA’s culture wars are not ours.”
Democrats, meanwhile, are far more comfortable with Europe’s existing cultural and social policies but still appear highly ambivalent about the notion of Europe as an independent actor. Many cling to the idea that Trump remains an aberration that Europeans can outlast and outwait. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a potential presidential candidate, told an audience as much at the Munich Security Conference this year. But that message is also increasingly unpopular in European capitals, where it looks as if Europeans are being told to spend more and tolerate Trump before returning to a position subservient to U.S. policies.
Yet for most advocates of burden shifting, it has never been about changing Europe’s internal politics or about ending the U.S. partnership with Europe. The United States does share values with Europe: a shared political, philosophical, and cultural heritage. The United States and Europe are undergoing many of the same difficult political debates—from the role of the state in regulating technology to the extent of acceptable migration and cultural change. And they continue to share interests: resisting the rise of Chinese global hegemony, sustaining stability on the European continent, ensuring that both the U.S. and European economies, which are highly interlinked, continue to grow and prosper.
“Partners, not dependencies” is actually a decent description of what a more functional and equal U.S.-European relationship would look like. Indeed, there has never been any inherent contradiction between America’s Article 5 commitment to Europe and the idea that the United States should not be the first line of defense. As late as 1951, Dwight D. Eisenhower, then NATO commander in Europe, noted that “there is no defense for Western Europe that depends exclusively or even materially upon the existence, in Europe, of strong American units. … We cannot be a modern Rome guarding the far frontiers with our legions if for no other reason than because these are not, politically, our frontiers.”
Burden shifting is about empowering Europe to guard its own frontiers. But for this to work, it will also require U.S. policymakers to accept Europe as a partner capable of independent judgment and choices. That will mean focusing on shared interests, not merely U.S. ones, and agreeing to disagree on a variety of issues, from energy to culture. Today, the existing division of labor within the alliance always privileges U.S. concerns because Washington holds all the cards. A better relationship would see European states’ concerns also taken more seriously.
Some may balk at this loss of control and influence. But in return, the United States will be able to free its own assets for other theaters, reducing the burden of military responsibility for the European continent. It can help mitigate the so-called “simultaneity problem,” where Pentagon planners fret about being unable to fight simultaneous conflicts in Europe and in Asia. And, over the long term, retrenchment from Europe could even enable the United States to restructure its military, cutting ground forces and bolstering the naval and air forces better suited to Indo-Pacific and global missions.
Two men in suits sitting in front of a blue NATO backdrop and U.S. flag on a stand.
Trump and NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte speak to media at the NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands, on June 25, 2025.Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Getting to this more positive trans-Atlantic relationship is entirely possible—even plausible. But it will require some changes from U.S. policymakers. First, they need to smooth out the seesaw of partisan approaches to Europe. Even progressive Democrats such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sought to reassure European states that the U.S. commitment to the continent would return just as soon as Trump was gone. But the constant flip-flopping between administrations is likely only to create bad feeling and an impression that the United States cannot be trusted as any kind of partner. Democrats need to spend less time thinking and talking about a return to the status quo and more on imagining what a robust, friendly trans-Atlantic relationship would look like without U.S. dominance.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, needs to decide what it actually wants from Europe: culture war or defense partner? The former is likely to lead only to acrimony that will undermine the latter. More broadly, this principle applies to all administrations. Instead of assuming that U.S. influence in Europe is limitless, going forward policymakers will have to get used to prioritizing the issue areas in which they choose to pressure or seriously engage with European states, as they already do for other countries. It may be wise for U.S. policymakers to prioritize trade concessions that bear directly on U.S. interests, for example, rather than cultural issues that do not.
Finally, U.S. policymakers need to think more holistically about the relationship. Though it has always been thought of as a defensive alliance, the truth is that many of the strongest bonds between the two sides of the Atlantic are in entirely nondefense areas, such as trade and technology. The EU-U.S. Trade and Technology Council, for example, set up under Biden for high-level talks on these issues, has largely lapsed under Trump. Other areas, such as space cooperation, pharmaceutical development, or the building of liquefied natural gas terminals, could be fruitful. Changes in the defense side of this partnership should be matched by increased cooperation elsewhere.
There will undoubtedly be challenges in trying to rebalance the U.S.-European relationship. But if we fall back on metaphors, we can understand why those challenges are worth it. All marriages require work. Just because things are tough doesn’t mean it’s time for divorce. A little rebalancing—with perhaps a bit of therapy—can often fix complaints on both sides. And in return, both the United States and Europe could perhaps hope for a happier partnership because it would comprise equals.
