Trump’s new doctrine confirms it. Ready or not, Europe is on its own | Georg Riekeles and Varg Folkman

Europe is on a trajectory towards nothing less than “civilisational erasure”, the Trump administration claims in its extraordinary new National Security Strategy, a document that blames European integration and “activities of the European Union that undermine political liberty and sovereignty” for some of the continent’s deepest problems.

Everybody should have seen it coming after Washington’s humiliating 28-point plan for Ukraine. JD Vance’s shocking Munich speech in February, in which he suggested that Europe’s democracies were not worth defending was an early red flag. But the new words still land as a shock. The security document is the clearest signal yet of how brutally and transactionally Washington wants to engage with the continent. It marks another phase in Trump’s attempt to reshape Europe in his ideological image while at the same time abandoning it militarily. US policy, the paper says, should enable Europe to “take primary responsibility for its own defence”.

Withdrawing US troops from Europe has been a particularly adamant demand of the Maga right. Figures such as Steve Bannon openly argue for “hemispheric defence” – defending the Americas, not Europe. On his War Room podcast, Bannon said plainly that: “We’re a Pacific nation … the pivot, the strategic heartland of America, is actually the Pacific.”

One of the clearest articulations of US strategic retrenchment has come from a key figure in Trump-era defence thinking: Elbridge Colby, the principal adviser on defence and foreign policy at the Pentagon. In a 2023 policy paper, Getting Strategic Deprioritization Right, Colby and his co-authors laid out the logic behind reducing US commitments in Europe and concentrating resources elsewhere.

The starting premise is clear. As one contributor puts it, “the United States does not have, and does not plan to develop, the ability to fight and win major wars in Europe and Asia simultaneously”. China, they argue, is the decisive theatre, not Europe, and US attention and assets must shift accordingly.

Washington has signalled some version of this pivot for more than a decade. Yet European governments have found the idea that the US might actually deprioritise the continent’s security remarkably abstruse. The war in Ukraine has intensified this tension: Europe’s thinking is that a US withdrawal or an imposed, unequal peace would produce chaos in Ukraine and instability across Europe.

For Colby this is not in itself a sufficient argument against the US leaving Europe. As he writes: “Instability or even chaos alone is not enough … to judge a deprioritisation effort a failure.” What matters, in his view, is whether the US finds ways to shield itself from the ensuing chaos.

The new US security strategy confirms that Washington is increasingly focused on its “Western Hemisphere”. The administration plans to deprioritise issues and missions abroad – including, to some extent, China – to concentrate on domestic security and its immediate neighbourhood. The US naval buildup in the Caribbean, the largest in more than 30 years, underscores this shift.

There are reasons to believe that the US will not abandon Europe completely. Protecting roughly $4tn in US investments on the continent remains a key interest. Yet the direction is unmistakable – Washington is stepping back. The urgent question for Europe is, are we ready for the consequences?

Because it is clear that as Washington draws back militarily, it will pull even harder on its other levers: financial power, diplomatic pressure, export controls, trade measures and secondary sanctions. These instruments will increasingly be used to steer Europe in the political direction the US wants. Lenient enforcement, or the scrapping of digital and green rules altogether will be demanded of the EU – as US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick did last month. All this is happening as the security umbrella above Europe becomes ever thinner. The result is a dangerous asymmetry: less protection and more pressure.

Europe risks becoming collateral damage in a prolonged US-China confrontation while no longer enjoying the iron-clad guarantees that once cushioned those shocks. That is a brutal, lose-lose position.

If Europe wants to move from a defensive crouch to a posture of strategic agency, it must sustain its surge in defence investment and make it crystal clear that attempts at coercion from Washington or Beijing will be met with forceful countermeasures. Only then can Europe avoid being squeezed between a retreating patron and a mistrustful rival.

Bowing down to US pressure does not work, as shown by Ursula von der Leyen’s calamitous, lopsided trade deal in the summer. This EU humiliation was supposed to secure US security buy-in and continued support for Ukraine, and yet the opposite is happening. The US’s impulse to disengage from Europe is more powerful than anything an uneven trade concession can offer them.

Europe must not repeat that mistake. The next time Washington turns the screws, the EU should be ready to push back, starting with disowning the trade deal and triggering its powerful “anti-coercion instrument” at the first sign of pressure. Only a firm response will register in Washington.

If the US is to deprioritise Europe’s security, it has to come at a cost: its influence in the region should follow. Shorn of its historic security guarantees, US interference and coercion create an untenable situation for the continent.