The ‘Right’ View by Francis P. Sempa
The 2026 NDS: Putting Europe and NATO in Their Place
The Department of War’s 2026 National Defense Strategy puts Europe and NATO in their place—and that place is a diminished one in global geopolitics. In an exercise of refreshing candor, the authors of the NDS say the quiet part out loud: Europe isn’t as important as it used to be in global affairs. It now takes a back seat in that regard to the Indo-Pacific.
Russia, the NDS states, “is in no position to make a bid for European hegemony.” The European nations of NATO “dwarf Russia in economic scale, population, and thus, latent military power.” Moreover, Europe, the NDS recognizes, “has a smaller and decreasing share of global economic power” relative to the nations of the Indo-Pacific. Non-U.S. NATO GDP is $26 trillion compared to Russia’s $2 trillion. European NATO, therefore, must take “primary responsibility for its own conventional defense.”
This is a dramatic change from past U.S. administrations where Atlanticists held sway in most national security bureaucracies. It had been that way since at least 1917, when the Wilson administration committed the United States to the defense of Western Europe. But that war began what Yale professor Hajo Holborn accurately characterized as “the political collapse of Europe.” That political collapse was completed after the Second World War, when the United States and the Soviet Union emerged as the lone great powers and Europe became a prize in the ensuing Cold War.
The Truman administration and its successors committed the United States to the defense of Western Europe pursuant to the policy of containment, which led to the Marshall Plan in 1947, the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) two years later and the deployment of hundreds of thousands of American troops to Europe, and to America extending its growing nuclear umbrella over Western Europe.
But just how long would the United States remain as the protecting power of Europe? In 1951, when he became NATO’s first Supreme Allied Commander, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower said that if U.S. troops were still stationed in Europe after 10 years, NATO would be a failure. Seventy-four years later, U.S. troops are still stationed there. Meanwhile, we fought two large wars in Asia—in Korea and Vietnam—but the U.S. foreign policy establishment continued to prioritize Europe.
When the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed, NATO’s mission ended, but bureaucracies, as they always do, found ways to survive, even grow. NATO, with U.S. support, found “out of area” missions to support—in the Balkans, the Middle East and elsewhere. Worse, despite a lessened threat in Europe, NATO, again with U.S. support, decided to embark on “enlargement” in the face of opposition from Russia (not just Putin, but Gorbachev and Yeltsin, too).
NATO enlargement was a decision that the American diplomat and historian George F. Kennan, who famously explained why containment was necessary in 1947, strongly opposed, claiming that it would be the most fateful error of U.S. foreign policy in the post-Cold War world because it would result in harming relations with Russia and resurrecting Russian imperialism. More than 50 American national security and Russia experts pleaded with U.S. leaders to refrain from enlarging NATO, but under Presidents Clinton, Bush 43, Obama, and Biden, NATO grew from 16 members to 30 members before Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022.
President Trump’s 2026 NDS will no doubt trouble the Europeans, who have become accustomed to and enjoyed being American protectorates. And it will trouble America’s foreign policy establishment, many of whom refuse to recognize the changed geopolitical landscape. Europe just isn’t as important as it used to be. In the words of the NDS: “although we are and will remain engaged in Europe, we must—and will—prioritize defending the U.S. Homeland and deterring China.” It appears that Gen. Douglas MacArthur was right when he predicted in 1962 that America’s future would be “irrevocably entwined with” Asia, the western Pacific and the Indian Ocean.
Francis P. Sempa is the author of the books “Geopolitics: From the Cold War to the 21st Century” and “America’s Global Role.” He is a contributing editor to “The American Spectator” and writes a regular column for “Real Clear Defense.”
