ATLANTISCH PERSPECTIEF
A United States that is either Unwilling or Unable
The future of European security beyond the 2024 U.S. Elections
Paul van Hooft
Whoever wins the 2024 elections, whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, Europeans need to invest vastly more in their own security. In the coming decade, the United States will either be unwilling – Trump and Vance – or probably incapable – Biden, Harris, and Walz – to spend adequate resources on the European theatre. If the United States needs to choose between simultaneous threats in Europe or Asia, it will surely choose Asia.
Focusing on the eccentricities of Trump as a character for the past nine years has proven a red herring; the United States is and has been shifting gradually but inexorably towards the Indo-Pacific.[1] This is the key message from years of research I have done, including trips to DC this year and talks with experts there. Of the two parties, the Democratic Party is the one that advocates continuity in American grand strategy, which means maintaining alliance commitments in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
More experts are, however, unsure if the United States can indeed fulfill commitments. The Republican Party, in contrast, is fragmented after nine years of Trump; the advocates of continuity are now a minority, and the real competition is between the national-populist grouping and a prioritizer grouping. For respectively cultural-political and strategic reasons, neither is willing to continue to indefinitely provide security to NATO Europe. In November 2024, like every four years, Europeans will wait with baited breath for the results of the U.S. elections. In the long run, that is no way to manage European security.
Trump: The resentment against foreign policy elites / America First
The Republic Party’s foreign policy establishment is in disarray. Gone are the days of George W Bush and John McCain who supported a militarily assertive version of liberal internationalist grand strategy for the United States. That approach, of course, led to and was delegitimized by the dragging so-called ‘forever wars’ in Afghanistan and Iraq, which disenchanted an entire generation. Donald Trump tapped into that disenchantment during the 2015 and 2016 Republican primaries by being the first major candidate to publicly call the war a big mistake. His remarks might have been motivated by a sense of the United States having not sufficiently benefitted from the war, it struck a chord among voters and not just conservatives.
Of course, one of the explanations for Obama’s remarkable success in the 2008 elections was precisely that he also signaled an end to the triumphalist attitudes that had carried over from the end of the Cold War and the 1990s into the hubris of Iraq. However, Obama had then disappointed many of his voters who had expected more radical change while he maintained the military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and only slowly prepared to wind these down.[2] Nor had Obama done much, in their eyes, to address the deregulated greed that had led to the 2008 financial crisis. For these disenchanted groups, Trump seemed a radical departure from the prospect of either another (Hilary) Clinton or a (Jeb) Bush as future president.
However, it would be utterly wrong to understand Trump solely as a corrective to the excessive of ambitious U.S. policies of the 1990s and 2000s. His views on foreign policy and alliances had been established decades earlier and essentially saw international relations as zero-sum games. In the 1980s, Trump had railed against providing military protection to Japan and Germany while they became richer. To him, the failure of Iraq was not the regional instability and conflicts that followed or even the loss of American lives – talking about veterans, Trump famously remarked that he could not understand what was “in it for them” – but the inability of the United States to even get oil out of the deal.[3] When it came to international trade, imports simply subtracted from U.S. wealth, in his view, while exports added to it. And migrants detracted from U.S. wealth as well. With America First, Trump advocated for a renationalization of U.S. foreign and domestic policy.[4] But his actual preferences are more fluid.
A second Trump presidency remains unpredictable because of the fluidity of his personal preferences that also seem to depend on when he makes the decision. Often mentioned by DC experts was Trump’s contradictory attitude in not responding to the September 2019 attacks on the Abqaiq-Khurais oil fields when Saudi allies expected him to, but then throwing caution in the wind when assassinating Iranian general Suleimani in January 2020. Threatening fire and fury towards North Korea, then gushing about receiving a “beautiful love letter” from Kim Jong Un.
No more ‘adults in the room’
It is tempting to continue to view these shifts as mere rhetoric. When European officials push back against alarmist views of a possible second Trump presidency, they point to the increased funding of the Enhanced Forward Presence in the Baltics during his first years in office. The policy is supposedly proof that Trump primarily relies on rhetoric to prod European allies to spend more on their defense and has no real intentions to move U.S. forces from Europe.
However, unlike his first presidency when U.S. foreign policy continued largely as before due to the presence of the so-called ‘adults in the room’ such as Generals Jim Mattis, H.R. McMaster, Mark Milley and Rex Tillerson, DC insiders believe that this time Trump will only appoint loyalists. Moreover, if the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 offers any indication, the State Department, alongside with other government agencies, looks to be stripped of many long-term policymakers and advisors; at the very least, this would have a chilling effect on any policy dissent.
The team that Trump has assembled around himself now is more openly dismissive of European interests, with vice presidential candidate JD Vance calling to withdraw from NATO or considering Ukraine as not very important to the United States. This is more than just rhetoric; in the debate on the Ukraine aid package, the Republican members of Congress delayed it as long as possible. Opinion polls show a sharp partisan divide on the values of NATO, with Republicans showing a distinct lack of enthusiasm.[5] Again, a strong policy departure from the party that used to belong to Ronald Reagan, George W Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. Moreover, there are few if any younger leaders within the party that are poised to be the successor to their internationalist approach.
His fluidity creates the conditions for Trump to act as a kingmaker in his potential second term, choosing between the advocates for different foreign policy perspectives and interests who are vying for his support. Policies could turn out to seem surprisingly consistent on certain issues, for certain periods of time, and be highly unpredictable on other issues, depending on the regional or sectoral interests being advocated and how they fit Trump’s own interests. However, the sense one gets from reading the intra-Republican Party debates and in conversations in DC, is that the continuity grouping has largely diminished and certainly lost the ear of Trump and the group around him. Yet, surrendering U.S. influence by a complete retrenchment from global affairs is unlikely to be popular even with the national-populists; the prioritizers arguably are in a better position to drive U.S. policy.
Not just Trump: The rise of the prioritizer
The changing constellation of foreign policy preferences within the Republic Party is also a consequence of structural changes in the international distribution of economic and military power: Asia and Europe have reversed in order of priorities in American thinking. East Asia is now the region where key economies are located – the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of Korea, and Japan – with South Asia – India and Pakistan – rising, and many of the key economies of the coming decades between both, in Southeast Asia – Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. The Indo-Pacific is a term of recent invention, but it describes a region that is the most economically and demographically dynamic. During the Cold War, Europe was its battleground but also its chief prize; it was where most of the world’s industrial and technological potential was located outside of the United States and the Soviet Union. Yet Asia was where the hot wars were fought, in Korea and in Vietnam. That situation may now have reversed, at least until the Sino-American competition would result in a conflict over Taiwan.
Within the Republican Party, prioritizers are both a rejection of the neoconservative era with its forceful push for democratization and free markets, as well as the continuation of the Primacy advocates that looked to uphold American hegemony after the Cold War. From the perspective of the prioritizers like Elbridge Colby, China is vastly more powerful than any of the Asian states that could balance it, is poised to dominate its region, and could then mount a sustained challenge if not attack on the global position of the United States.
Not just Republicans
Yet, while Democrats may strongly prefer the liberal internationalist continuity, they too are wary of the structural changes in the international system. The Biden Administration’s 2022 National Defense Strategy that sets policy for the U.S. Department of Defense underlined that while Russia was a threat, China was the only state capable of providing a challenge – political, diplomatic, economic, technological, and military – to U.S. hegemony and that therefore it was the pacing challenge for which the Department would plan.[6] It was published five weeks after the start of the largest land war in Europe since the end of the Second World War.
Whether one agreed with his policies or not, President Biden has arguably been the most transatlantic president since George HW Bush and the end of the Cold War. It is very telling that his administration published the NDS. It was also telling that the Biden Administration initiated the technology export controls towards China in the same year Russia invaded Ukraine, adding additional strains on European and Asian allies, and removing whatever incentives may have still existed to dissuade China from providing technological and military aid to Russia. Whether willing or not, whether Europe remains the “ally of first resort” or not, national security thinkers within the Democratic Party are increasingly prioritizing the Indo-Pacific over Europe as well.
The reversal of priorities between Europe and Asia does not mean that the United States wants to give up Europe; or at least not the supporters of continuity of a liberal internationalist order. However, they may not have a choice during a challenge by either Russia or China in one theatre, and the risk of subsequent opportunistic aggression by the other in the other theatre. When I asked in my interviews about which blind spots Europeans have, it was striking that one recurring answer is that Europeans should not believe that the United States still has the capabilities to simultaneously fulfill all its global military commitments in the same manner as it could have done 25 years before. It may want to, but not be able to come to the aid of Europe – because, as they assured me, if the United States needs to choose between simultaneous threats in Europe or Asia, it will choose Asia.
Plan B
Looking at the 2024 and the previous two elections, it is past time that Europeans draw conclusions about the need to backfill U.S. capabilities. This is not the same as a break from the United States; if the United States chooses or is forced to direct its focus away from Europe, it would be irresponsible for Europeans to not prepare a Plan B to safeguard European security and the transatlantic relationship.
The work needed from Europeans is significant. At its core, NATO is a nuclear alliance which primarily leans on the extended nuclear deterrence that the United States provides. If NATO would rely to a greater extent on the French or the UK strategic deterrents, it should start sooner rather than later to build the institutional habits that would show they are serious about their roles. They would still lack the ability for escalation management during a crisis with Russia that could turn nuclear; for those reasons, France, the UK, and other major European states would need to invest in serious advanced conventional capabilities, such as long-range precision strike and airpower.[7] This would allow Europeans to pursue deterrence-by-denial and raise the nuclear threshold. Of course, none of these policies would suffice without additional investment in strategic enablers for which NATO Europe now relies on the United States, such as command and control, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, and lift, and deterrence would not be credible if Europeans cannot make it believable that they can sustain a war effort through serious defense industrial capacity.
Should the 2024 U.S. election again offer Europeans breathing room, and a window of opportunity to further reform and Europeanize NATO, they should not let it go to waste. The Biden administration was arguably the last gasp of post-WWII transatlanticism. The future will demand Europeans to largely shoulder the costs for their own security, both for their own interest and with an eye on saving the transatlantic relationship.
Footnotes
[1] Paul Van Hooft, “The United States May Be Willing, but No Longer Always Able: The Need for Transatlantic Burden Sharing in the Pacific Century.”, The Future of European Strategy in a Changing Geopolitical Environment: Challenges and Prospects, 2021; Nina Silove, “The Pivot before the Pivot: US Strategy to Preserve the Power Balance in Asia,” International Security 40, no. 4 (2016): 45–88.
[2] Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine,” The Atlantic 316, no. 3 (2016): 70–90.
[3] Jeffrey Goldberg, “Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers,’” The Atlantic (blog), September 3, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/trump-americans-who-died-at-war-are-losers-and-suckers/615997/.
[4] Paul van Hooft, “The Renationalization of Foreign Policy and International Order,” Atlantisch Perspectief 40, no. 3 (2016): 30–33.
[5] Richard Wike Austin Moira Fagan, Sneha Gubbala and Sarah, “2. Americans’ Opinions of NATO,” Pew Research Center (blog), May 8, 2024, https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2024/05/08/americans-opinions-of-nato/. “J.D. Vance’s Opposition to U.S. Support for Ukraine: In His Own Words – The New York Times,” accessed September 19, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/15/world/europe/ukraine-jd-vance.html.
[6] “National Defense Strategy” (Washington D.C: Department of Defense, October 2022).
[7] Paul van Hooft, “Deter, Compete, and Engage: Europe’s Responsibility within the Arms Control Regime after Ukraine, with or without the United States,” The Future of Nuclear Arms Control, 2024, 75.
Photo: Shutterstock.com / Jonah Elkowitz
Dr. Paul van Hooft is the Research Leader for Defence and Security for the Netherlands office of RAND Europe. His academic and policy advisory related work for the past 15 years has focused on the origins of the post-WWII transatlantic order and the declining importance of Europe in American thinking since the beginning of the 21st century.