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.