Without any doubt, this time Europe really has arrived at the proverbial crossroad. Moments of “epochal change” and great “turning points” are often declared in public discourse when some big event happens. In retrospect, when the histories are written, few live up to these expectations of paradigm-shift. But this time it’s different. This time, the US National Security Strategy 2025 really is a pivotal event – one of those markers that split the timeline into Before and After. This is it.
And like all such moments, it hasn’t come out of the blue. The signs of a structural reorientation of US strategy and of a redefinition of America’s relationship with Europe have been accumulating for some time. This column has tracked them over the past year – see, for instance, Europe’s choice: win with Trump or die alone, from November 2024, Would Trump defend Taiwan?, or the turn towards a “hemispheric” strategy for the US, foreseen in these pages months ago. So there should be no surprise today.
Like the causes of the First World War, the roots of this landmark Strategy stretch back even further, to the original 2012 Pivot to Asia under the Obama Administration (with Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State) which provided the first real shock to the transatlantic strategic framework. Of course, that in itself was caused by structural developments in the world power balance driven by the rise of China.
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