Exploding Transatlanticism

There’s a pattern to it. The first day of the annual Munich Security Conference traditionally features self-obsessed “transatlanticists” talking about the unity and shared values of the U.S. and Europe; more acrimonious differences become prominent on the second and thirds days of the event. 

Until now. The European political establishment and its American media lackeys were not ready for what was about to come on the very first day, even though it has been trumpeted (for lack of better word) for more than a few years. Amid apoplexy and aneurysms at the truth-bombs from Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump, and J.D. Vance, they ignored perhaps what would have been the most provocative policy shift of the last few days: the issue of NATO defense burden-shifting.

“Safeguarding European security must be an imperative for European members of NATO. As part of this Europe must provide the overwhelming share of future lethal and nonlethal aid to Ukraine,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said in his Brussels speech to the Ukrainian Contact Group. 

It will require our European allies to step into the arena and take ownership of conventional security on the continent. The United States res committed to the NATO alliance and to the defense partnership with Europe. Full stop. But the United States will no longer tolerate an imbalanced relationship which encourages dependency.  Rather, our relationship will prioritize empowering Europe to own responsibility for its own security.

 Europe taking “ownership of conventional security” of the continent while being within the U.S.-protected alliance and with Washington providing a nuclear umbrella is something that a few policy analysts have proposed for the last years; that is now being translated to actual U.S. government policy, for which there is now a strategic doctrine and template. Burden-sharing is out, burden-shifting is officially in. 

A bizarre interpretative challenge was noted among a certain section of American media, but it is observable how much thought went into every single speech by both the VP’s office as well as the DoD. 

Consider Hegseth in Brussels. “My job today and in Brussels was to introduce realism to the conversation. The reality that returning to 2014 borders as part of a negotiated settlement is unlikely. The reality of U.S. troops in Ukraine is unlikely. The reality of Ukraine membership in NATO as a part of negotiated settlement, unlikely,” Hegseth said, adding to his previous statement. “Safeguarding European security must be an imperative for European members of NATO. As part of this Europe must provide the overwhelming share of future lethal and nonlethal aid to Ukraine.” 

Trump seemed to throw his support behind his secretary of defense. “I don’t see any way that a country in Russia’s position could allow them to join NATO. I don’t see that happening,” the president said. “I believe that’s the reason the war started because Biden went out and said that [Ukraine] could join NATO.” 

When in living memory have we seen a secretary of defense and a president in lockstep waxing about the virtues of a distinctly realist worldview of a narrow and negative great-power balance and equilibrium? 

And if that wasn’t enough, the vice president gave a historic speech in front of a stunned audience in which he pointed out how, despite all the talk of shared values, the European Union is looking like a “smiley-badge” version of the USSR. 

“To many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation,” Vance thundered. Pointing at “European commissars,” Vance said, “And consider the side in that fight that censored dissidents, that closed churches, that cancelled elections. Were they the good guys?” 

Vance added, “The threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within. The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values: values shared with the United States of America.”

Part-time critics of NATO and the EU have often pointed out how disjointed, hypocritical and nonsensical the “democracy versus autocracy” framing always was. The two hypotheses are these. First, the U.S. is a liberal empire, and all other states are victims with no agency. Second, there is a transnational liberal clerisy, and everyone else, including both normal Europeans and Americans, of any color and creed, are its victims to the whims in everything from foreign policy to censorship. I happen to fall on the second. To rephrase Pitt the Younger, the U.S. has liberated itself from the chains of this ideology through exertion and will now lead Europe by example. 

The entire argument of transatlanticism was predicated on the idea that, despite disparate geographical demands and relative powers, common values and common governance types determine a common foreign (and domestic) policy. That has always been foolish. Vance and Hegseth to their immense credit have now nullified that contention. It is a common trope to look back at history to see parallels of foreign policy. Neoconservatives and neoliberals constantly do that with their hackneyed resurrection of the ghosts of 1938. A more accurate historical lens would be to see the ideological schism between eastern and western Europe in the early 14th century. If the values are neither common, nor shared, then geography will dictate a more narrow and detached foreign policy. Vance and Hegseth’s common rhetorical theme was to lay that reality bare in front of the artificial and bloated construct of the European Union, which is a free-riding trade rival at the best of times, and doesn’t deserve unconditional American support or protection.