“We re-engaged our Alliance. We helped to re-energize our Alliance,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said at NATO’s recent 75th summit. “We helped to re-imagine our Alliance so that even as we celebrate 75 years of the most successful defensive alliance in history, we were resolutely focused on the future and doing everything that we could in our time to make sure that that success for 75 years would continue.”

The anniversary celebration is over. Proactive, forward-looking U.S. leadership is needed now more than ever to rescue NATO from its crises of identity and purpose.

The West faces a world in chaos. Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine is the most destructive and dangerous war on the European continent since 1945; the U.S.-led West is pitted into a confrontational footing with an increasingly assertive China in the Asia-Pacific; and the Gaza War is whittling away at the West’s global influence even as it breeds divisions within NATO.

Against the backdrop of these unprecedented challenges, American domestic politics are mired in a bout of prolonged turmoil with potentially significant implications for the way that the U.S. engages with the rest of the world. Regardless of who wins the upcoming presidential election, some form of American retrenchment — whether gradual and haphazard, or sudden and premeditated — from Europe toward Asia is not just possible but likely.