NATO is the most successful military alliance in the history of the world. The US bases, supply chains, and forward deployments across Europe aren’t a favor to the Europeans, they’re how America projects power from the Middle East to the Arctic at a fraction of what it’d cost to do it from home. The transatlantic relationship has been central to both American strategy and the stability of the post-war order. And if you’ll remember, the only time NATO’s Article 5 has ever been invoked was by the United States, after September 11, 2001. Every European ally came to America’s defense despite different approaches to free speech, regulation, and countless other policy disagreements. They showed up, fought, and died alongside Americans in Afghanistan. Many joined Iraq, too.
But President Donald Trump believes that a strong and well-coordinated Europe is bad for America's interests. He doesn’t like the European Union, in large part because the EU is big and self-confident enough (at least on some issues like European security and digital regulation) to tell the president and his allies things they don’t want to hear. Together, the Europeans match American heft in trade and regulatory power. Its consumer market is larger than America’s. That’s a lot of leverage, and Trump doesn’t like being on the receiving end of it.
What’s most striking to me about this document isn’t any specific policies, but what it reveals about values. Increasingly, the United States and Europe don’t share them. This reflects a change in America far more than a change in Europe. Trump sees a G-Zero world ruled by the law of the jungle, where might makes right and everything can be bought. For all its flaws, institutional quirks, and bureaucratic sclerosis, the European Union stands for something else: rule of law, liberal democracy, human rights, multilateralism. You can roll your eyes at that list all you want, but it’s the foundation of the entire European project. Heck, it’s why America built the transatlantic alliance in the first place. (The alternative, two world wars, didn’t work out too well for anyone.) And it’s now in direct tension with what Washington is selling.
One of the document’s primary arguments is that Europe, mainly through its immigration policies, is facing “civilizational erasure.” That sounds offensive on its face, but it’s worth noting that many European leaders – in France, Germany, Italy – have been raising similar concerns for years. In fact, EU migration policy has tightened considerably since the days of Angela Merkel’s open-door approach. The key difference is that Europeans want to address these and other challenges by making Europe stronger, not by tearing it apart. Even increasingly popular Euroskeptic populist parties across the continent have stopped pretending they’d be better off outside the union – Brexit cured them of that. Marine Le Pen’s party used to flirt with “Frexit” – turns out it’s a political loser. Instead, they argue that bolstered sovereignty for each member state is the best way to strengthen Europe as a whole. A strong European Union is one of the few policies most European voters actually agree on.
The Trump administration sees it differently. The NSS talks openly about “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” That’s not a diplomatic boilerplate, it’s the United States committing to undermine its erstwhile closest allies from within. It also institutionalizes what Trump, Vance, Elon Musk, and others have already been doing: boosting far-right, anti-EU forces from Germany to the United Kingdom.
European leaders should see this for what it is. If Washington is no longer aligned with Europe on values Europeans consider essential, then American electoral interference starts to look a lot like Russian meddling. Most European leaders now believe the United States can no longer be counted on as an ally. That’s an existential crisis for the transatlantic alliance. Or, as we put it in our top risk back in January, the G-Zero wins. What the Europeans are prepared to do about it is another matter entirely.
They’ve been willing and able to act together in support of Ukraine because almost all of them see Russia as an existential threat. There’s virtually no new American taxpayer money going to Kyiv now, so they’re paying the entire tab to keep Ukraine in the fight. That gives them a degree of influence in the relationship they haven’t had before – and an effective veto over whatever Trump tells Russia’s Vladimir Putin or Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky.
Just as Putin’s war on Ukraine has forced soul-searching and big new plans across Europe, so this NSS forces European leaders to ask themselves: is the United States a wayward partner that can be brought back into the fold? Or is it an emerging rival – maybe even a threat – that has to be countered?
Europeans can find reasons for complacency; that’s been their (supra)national sport ever since they stopped killing each other. They can tell themselves the NSS is more about factional signaling by the Vance-Stephen Miller wing than operational policy, while the Europe-friendly Secretary of State Marco Rubio remains the most influential US policymaker on the global stage. They can say Trump isn’t known for reading, let alone adhering to, formal strategy documents. And they can take comfort in Congress’s efforts to put guardrails on the worst outcomes as seen in the latest draft of the National Defense Authorization Act, which limits troop withdrawals from Europe and extends Ukraine funding through 2027.
But none of that should reassure Europe. The NSS may not be an actionable policy blueprint, but it is a marker of where power is shifting inside the administration. Rubio’s political capital is finite; Vance and Miller are ascendant. Trump himself has no history of warm relations with most of Europe's current leaders and no personal commitment to the transatlantic alliance. Congress can protect the capability to engage with Europe, but it can’t force the president to use it.
If a NATO ally triggered Article 5 tomorrow, would this administration answer the call? Paraphrasing Henry Kissinger, who would they even dial to get an answer? Trump? Rubio? Vance? Miller? I honestly don’t know. I don’t think anyone in Europe does either. That uncertainty is itself a gift to Moscow.
As we look to 2026, European leaders have their work cut out for them. Whether or not it becomes policy, the NSS reflects the current values of the world’s only military superpower – values that break sharply from everything Europe has known since World War II. Europeans can’t afford to bet on American dysfunction. They have to assume the worst and prepare for a world where Europe can stand on its own.
