“It fuels an already confused debate when it comes to the future of transatlantic relations,” says Ian Lesser, senior director for foreign and security policy at the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Brussels. “Europe is already worried that the US is pivoting to Asia, and what this would mean for European strategic interests…. [The shutdown] will also reinforce existing European anxieties about a more inward-looking, less activist US.”…

But it is the expression of a deeper problem of failed checks and balances that will impact American ties with Europe, says Josef Braml, a transatlantic expert at the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin. “If the superpower has no room to maneuver, it will have to shift burdens to foes and friends,” he says, which will then create a wedge.

“We already see it in security policy,” Dr. Braml says, especially the waning US commitment to NATO and its focus on Asia. “Europe and especially Germans have to think of how they take care of their own security.”