The End of Atlanticism
Government bureaucracies change very slowly. There is a tendency among governments — call it bureaucratic inertia — to keep doing what you have been doing for decades, even in the face of changed conditions. The United States emerged from the Second World War with a globalist outlook because, alone among the world’s great powers, it escaped the worst consequences of that war and faced a global ideological and geopolitical challenge from the Soviet Union. Those circumstances created in the United States an Atlanticist outlook that prioritized Europe over Asia with the Marshall Plan and the formation of NATO.
Much has changed since the early days of the Cold War and since the collapse of the Soviet empire, but only now, with the Trump administration’s recent National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy, is the United States poised to confront the changed geopolitical landscape. (RELATED: America’s Robust National Security Strategy)
Throughout most of the Cold War, U.S. national security strategy prioritized Europe, even when we fought lengthy wars in Korea and Vietnam. Asia was never considered as strategically important as Europe. The great concern among U.S. policymakers was that communist parties would gain power in Europe and Soviet conventional military forces would thrust through the Fulda Gap in Germany and sweep across Western Europe to the English Channel and beyond. We interfered in Europe’s elections to defeat communist parties while we pledged to use nuclear weapons to deter and, if necessary, defeat a Soviet conventional attack in Europe. (RELATED: The European Political Collapse That Never Ended)
The NDS is equally explicit in diminishing the importance of Europe to U.S. security.
Although we fought to a stalemate in Korea in the early 1950s and lost a war in Vietnam in the early 1970s, our defeats in Asia were offset by the Sino-Soviet split and the Nixon administration’s triangular diplomacy, which, as Henry Kissinger noted, set the stage for the Reagan administration’s policies that won the Cold War in Europe. The Soviet empire’s collapse in 1989-91 manifested itself in the liberation of the satellite nations of central and eastern Europe.
Communism, however, survived in Asia — in China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. In Asia, the Cold War was suspended as the U.S. and the West pursued policies designed to bring China into the “liberal international order.” While China was quietly rising economically and militarily, U.S. national security policy continued to focus on Europe (and sometimes the Middle East, especially after the 9/11 attacks). The end of the Soviet threat to Europe changed nothing. NATO not only survived but it grew bigger — much bigger. During the next three decades, NATO doubled in size and pushed geographically closer to Russia, despite prescient warnings from Russia experts like George Kennan, Richard Pipes, Jack Matlock, Jr., Arthur Hartman, Edward Luttwak, and Paul Nitze, among others, that NATO enlargement would lead to trouble with Russia.
Now, however, the Atlanticist outlook of our government is changing. It is Trump’s team of realists who recognize that in the 21st century, it is Asia and the Indo-Pacific, not Europe, that must be prioritized in our national security policies. Trump’s realists include Michael Anton, who, from his perch at the State Department’s Policy Planning staff (Anton has since left the administration), oversaw the drafting of the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) and Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby, who oversaw the drafting of the 2026 National Defense Strategy (NDS). Those two important documents make it unmistakably clear that Western Hemisphere security and the geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific, not Europe, should be the focus of our national security policies. (RELATED: Michael Anton and the Fate of the Republic)
The NSS, when it refers to Europe and NATO, does so in the context of “burden-sharing and burden-shifting.” “The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over,” according to the NSS. Our NATO allies must “assume primary responsibility” for their defense and security. NATO should not be a “perpetually expanding alliance.” The Indo-Pacific, not Europe, the NSS continues, is the 21st century’s “key economic and geopolitical battleground.” (RELATED: Europe Is Thus Illuminated, Exactly As It Is)
The NDS is equally explicit in diminishing the importance of Europe to U.S. security. Our NATO allies, the NDS states, must “take primary responsibility for Europe’s conventional defense, with critical but limited U.S. support.” “Europe remains important,” the NDS continues, but “we must — and will — prioritize defending the U.S. Homeland and deterring China.”
In his 1969 memoir Present at the Creation, Dean Acheson, an unrequited Atlanticist, recounted the creation of the post-Second World War order that effectively made Western Europe a protectorate of the United States. Today, we are “present at the creation” by President Trump’s team of realists of a new geopolitical order designed to free Europe from its protectorate status and focus U.S. defense and security resources on our own hemisphere and the Indo-Pacific. It has been a long time coming.
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