NATO’s real crisis is not Trump

America’s strategic future no longer lies in Europe

Not so long ago, there was a time when meetings of NATO foreign ministers in Brussels focused overwhelmingly on external dangers confronting the alliance. Yet throughout his second presidency, Donald Trump’s long-running frustration with Europe has raised questions not merely about policy, but about NATO’s future itself.

Trump’s abrupt reversal yesterday of a Pentagon proposal to withdraw 4,000 U.S. troops from Poland may have calmed nerves in Warsaw. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/22/world/europe/poland-troops-trump.html But it should not obscure the larger strategic reality: American priorities are changing.

As Secretary of State Marco Rubio bluntly acknowledged after Trump’s intervention, Washington is reassessing its military posture in Europe in light of mounting global demands. The United States, he noted, faces growing obligations in the Indo-Pacific, the Middle East and the Western Hemisphere.

The timing is hardly accidental. Washington’s confrontation with Iran and the growing instability around the Strait of Hormuz have reinforced the extent to which U.S. military resources are being stretched across multiple theatres simultaneously. For European governments, the crisis is also a reminder that American strategic priorities increasingly extend well beyond the Atlantic alliance.

America is unlikely to abandon Europe altogether. But the era in which European security dominated Washington’s strategic imagination is plainly drawing to a close.

To be sure, there are counterarguments. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has revived the alliance after years of drift. European defence spending is rising. Finland and Sweden have joined NATO. And figures such as the secretary-general Mark Rutte continue to insist that the alliance’s core principle -- collective defence under Article 5 -- remains unshakable.

Yet the deeper structural reality remains unchanged: Europe is no longer the central theatre of American strategy.

Many commentators greet this prospect with alarm. Yet it really should not come as a surprise.

The United States and its transatlantic partners have never been natural or permanent allies in the sentimental sense often implied by the language of “the West”. Shared civilisation has never automatically translated into enduring strategic solidarity.

Even after the Allied victory in World War II, President Harry S Truman abruptly terminated Lend-Lease with scant regard for Britain’s shattered economic condition. U.S. support for Europe has always depended less on sentiment than on calculations of national interest.

Nor is today’s Russia remotely comparable to the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin. Russia is a declining power: demographically weakened, economically dependent on commodities, and struggling to subdue even parts of eastern Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin is an autocrat whose regime deserves little admiration. But Russia lacks the capacity to dominate Europe in the manner once feared during the Cold War, which ended 35 years ago.

From Washington’s perspective, China –- not Russia -- is now the principal strategic challenger. Beijing seeks to overturn the balance of power in East Asia, the region that increasingly defines the future of global commerce, technology and geo-political competition.

That strategic reality helps explain Trump’s instinct to seek some form of accommodation with Moscow. Critics from left to right often portray such thinking as appeasement. But it also reflects an older balance-of-power logic: the desire to prevent a durable Sino-Russian bloc directed against the United States.

History also offers reasons for caution about security guarantees themselves. Take the Locarno Treaties of the 1920s. Britain and Italy guaranteed the post-war European settlement and a pact of non-aggression involving France, Germany and Belgium.

Yet, as the English historian A. J. P. Taylor drily observed: “The Treaty of Locarno rested on the assumption that the promises given in it would never have to be made good -- otherwise the British government would not have given them.” The same lesson emerged more tragically at Munich in 1938 when France and Britain abandoned Czechoslovakia.

History repeatedly suggests that states honour alliances most reliably when their own vital interests are directly engaged. That is the uncomfortable question now hanging over the Atlantic alliance.

Many Europeans still regard Trump as an aberration and assume that normal service will resume after he leaves office. Perhaps. But the broader strategic shift predates Trump and will almost certainly outlast him.

America entered the First and Second World Wars only after direct attacks on its own interests. The Cold War alliance endured because Soviet expansionism posed a genuine strategic threat to the United States itself. To say again: Putin’s Russia, for all its brutality, does not occupy the same place in U.S. strategic thinking.

Meanwhile, the global balance of power has shifted decisively toward Asia. Washington now faces the difficult task of reconciling strategic ambitions with finite resources in an increasingly multipolar world.

For allies in the Indo-Pacific, including Australia, this strategic reordering is not necessarily unwelcome. But it does underscore a larger truth, now visible from the Persian Gulf to Eastern Europe: even U.S. power has limits.

All this suggests that Charles de Gaulle may have been prescient when he told his friend André Malraux in 1969 that America’s “desire -- and one day it will satisfy it -- is to desert Europe.” It has taken nearly six decades, but de Gaulle’s prophecy no longer seems quite so implausible.