Why treating Washington’s new doctrine as a baseline—not an insult—can make Europe more geopolitically mature.
– Wim Van Laere –Senior Researcher EDARA
Executive summary
The new United States National Security Strategy (NSS) has triggered strong reactions across Europe. It portrays Europe as demographically fragile, overregulated, weakened by migration and “civilisational” drift, and calls on Europeans to assume more responsibility for their own security while the US reprioritises its own hemisphere. This is abrasive, and in places inaccurate. But for serious European policymakers, the NSS should be read first of all as a clarified US baseline: a condensed selfportrait of how Washington currently understands its interests, priorities and limits.
Treating the NSS purely as an insult is emotionally understandable but strategically selfdefeating. Europe cannot change Washington’s selfdefinition by reacting to the language. What it can do is to (1) understand that definition clearly, (2) use the shock to clarify Europe’s own strategic baseline, and (3) engage the US from a position of greater coherence and responsibility. In a world of polycrisis and accelerating technological change, that is what geopolitics between adults—rather than clients—looks like.
This article argues for three moves. First, Europe should read the NSS as the US putting its cards on the table, not as a verdict on Europe’s worth. Second, Europe should draw on its own existing strategies to restate, in concise form, what it already stands for: security and resilience; shared prosperity and social cohesion; human dignity and democracy; and planetary responsibility. Third, Europe should recognise the catalytic challenges of the NSS: it forces Europeans to decide what they stand for, where they want to be dependent or autonomous, which behaviours from partners they will accept, and what kind of influence they want to have in the world.
If the European Union and its member states use this moment well, the NSS shock can mark the end of a long phase of strategic dependence and ambiguity. It can become the starting point for a more balanced transatlantic partnership and for a wider “great rebalancing” of the global system—one in which each major bloc acts from a clearer sense of selfinterest while accepting that their ultimate interests converge on a world that is liveable and humane for all. The window for action is limited: swift, coherent response signals strategic seriousness; hesitation confirms dependency.