John Jefferson
Western European leaders responded to President Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 presidential campaign with admiration. Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz praised Biden for his role in strengthening transatlantic relations. It’s a legacy Biden entrusts Kamala Harris, his vice president and pick for the Democratic nomination, to defend against former President Donald Trump in November.
A Harris victory would undoubtedly elicit a sigh of relief in Brussels. A staunch supporter of NATO, Harris promises to be a steady hand on European security. By contrast, Trump offers a very different vision for Europe’s future. His frequent denigrations of the alliance and his campaign’s talk of dramatically reducing American involvement sent European officials scrambling to “Trump-proof” the pact. Nevertheless, Trump’s political defeat wouldn’t resolve the disquiet that pervades the alliance.
America’s security guarantee is suffering a crisis of confidence. And it will persist, regardless of who occupies the Oval Office, for as long as Europe competes for Washington’s attention. A survey conducted by the Institute for Global Affairs of the United States and three European NATO members found that only six percent of European respondents believe Washington will be a “very reliable” guarantor of European security over the next decade.
European capitals—historically dubious of Washington’s ability to tain public support for a peacetime alliance an ocean away—are sensitive to the tenor of U.S. politics. They are perturbed by the weakening domestic consensus underpinning U.S. leadership in NATO. True, most Americans still believe NATO is essential for U.S. security, but many are also reluctant to foot the bill for capable allies when there are problems at home and more pressing priorities abroad. According to the same IGA survey, most think Europe should be primarily responsible for its own security.
What’s more, Americans’ views of the alliance have succumbed to the country’s partisan divide. Republicans are less likely than Democrats to think Washington should honor its security guarantee, and, while factions across the political spectrum question NATO’s value, GOP support is declining. The party’s critics find a voice in Trump and his running mate, Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, who says Europe and the war in Ukraine are secondary to the “real issue, which is China.” This charge—that Europe diverts U.S. weapons, troops, and matériel needed to counter China and prepare for a contingency over Taiwan—won’t go away.
Vance articulates what Europe already suspects: Asia will preoccupy the United States long term. Washington is in near agreement that America’s core geopolitical interests lay across the Pacific, not on the Atlantic. The Trump and Biden administrations both singled out China as the preeminent challenger to global order. Even amid Russia’s war in Ukraine, the Pentagon has continued to call the PRC its “pacing challenge” and allocated more resources to Asia. Meanwhile, Biden has spent his four years in office bolstering relations with Asian allies ostensibly to share the lift of Pacific defense.
In practice, though, the United States will likely end up doing more, not less, in Asia. taining an expansive South Pacific defense perimeter while also carrying the burden of responsibility in Europe will stretch the U.S. thin. Insisting otherwise won’t comfort Europeans; instead, it will only serve to delay tough but necessary discussions about NATO.
Today’s crisis isn’t the first time U.S. policy toward Asia has created problems for NATO. Early in the Cold War, a contingent of American lawmakers, who prioritized containing communism in Asia, contested the Military Assistance Program aimed to buttress the newly minted alliance. While the Korean War fortified America’s garrison in Europe—six divisions were committed to the Continent and the alliance’s military structure began to take shape—the Vietnam War shook Europe’s confidence in the United States.
By the time President Lyndon B. Johnson escalated American involvement in Vietnam, few European allies shared Washington’s perspective that communism in Asia posed the same threat as that on the other side of the Iron Curtain. West Germans were particularly perplexed by the logic that American credibility was at stake in a Southeast Asian imbroglio at a moment when Washington failed to assure NATO members that troop diversions to Vietnam wouldn’t compromise their security. For France’s President Charles De Gaulle, the war confirmed that Cold War geopolitics had shifted. America’s preoccupation with Asia, coupled with the stabilization of tensions with the Soviet Union, left a vacuum of leadership in the Atlantic alliance.
Then, like today, geopolitics prompted a political reckoning with the alliance. NATO members eyed the U.S. Congress warily as pressure mounted to reduce America’s European burden. Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon struggled to placate a loose coalition of fiscal-minded doves and Asia hawks, who demanded West Germany pay more for its defense. America’s withdrawal from Vietnam, and the shared threat of the Soviet Union, helped to paper over rifts in the alliance, though Europeans couldn’t shake lingering doubts about America’s security guarantee.
The current crisis of confidence is more acute. Russia undermines European stability, despite its diminished economic and military might. American and European interests are converging in Asia, but Europe is underequipped to support US forces there and wary of a Cold War with China. This should cause the alliance to seriously reconsider its division of labor.
Western Europe’s prosperity and democracy—a byproduct of the U.S. security umbrella—fuel American frustration with burden sharing and erodes political will required to support the alliance. The war in Ukraine has prompted Europe to take major strides in meeting its defense obligation. Many Europeans want to their countries to spend more on the military and would like to see the reduced role for the US in Europe.
More still needs to be done on both sides of the Atlantic to adjust expectations and revamp an alliance for an era of an American focus on China and a European focus on Europe. Otherwise, NATO’s problems will continue no matter what happens in November.
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