The European Crisis: Origin and Future

The release of the 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy has brought into focus a fundamental tension that has been simmering since before President Donald Trump took office: the understanding between the United States and Europe that the geopolitical system that emerged from World War II was to be permanent. The National Security Strategy essentially says that this geopolitical relationship is obsolete, resulting in a sense that the U.S. has betrayed Europe. Thus is Europe’s crisis. In assuming that U.S. security guarantees were an enduring feature of global geopolitics, the Continent, as a whole, has made little effort to guarantee its own security.

U.S. guarantees were a direct byproduct of World War II. After 1945, the Soviet Union occupied and installed communist regimes in Eastern Europe. U.S. and British allies occupied Western Europe and formed a variety of democratic systems. The division left Western Europe extremely vulnerable to Soviet military action.

The U.S. did not want the Soviets to take control of Western Europe – something Moscow could easily have done after 1945 – in part for ideological reasons. Western capitalism was directly at odds with Soviet communism. But it also opposed the Soviet Union for strategic reasons. The foundation of U.S. national security (argued persuasively by strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan) was the command of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The U.S had no military threats in the Western Hemisphere; the only threat lay half a world away. Recall that the U.S. did not enter World War I until German U-boats sank the Lusitania. The death of the Americans on board triggered an emotional response, of course, but as important, it brought to the fore the threat Germany posed in the Atlantic. The British navy had already secured the Atlantic, but it had done so without threatening the U.S. or interfering with its trade. Germany’s maritime strategy, if successful, would have thus created an economic problem because Washington could not assume Berlin would allow it to trade unimpeded. Hence, the U.S. joined the war effort.