The US has been the dominant military power in Europe for decades, but its willingness to uphold defense commitments has waned. This article argues that the US security umbrella in Europe has been deteriorating since the Cold War, with leaders now scrambling to appease President-elect Trump for continued security guarantees.
The writer is senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of ‘Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of US Global Supremacy’. In Europe, the race is on. Leaders are once again scrambling to get into the good-enough graces of president-elect Donald Trump to keep the US committed to their security for four more years. But they are grasping for a security umbrella that flew away long ago.
For a generation, the US has been the dominant military power in Europe in every respect except the most crucial: being willing to uphold defence commitments by fighting at significant cost. Trump reflects this problem, but he didn’t cause it. During the cold war, fine minds on both sides of the Atlantic persistently wondered whether Washington would really risk trading Boston for Berlin. Its security commitment nonetheless remained credible enough. Americans took on obligations whose price they understood, having recently fought two major wars in Europe. They also faced a communist adversary whose conventional forces were capable of overrunning the entire continent. After the cold war, however, the rationale for US military dominance in Europe flipped. Threats were now so minuscule that America’s military burden seemed hardly burdensome at all. In return for low costs, the US obtained the modest benefits of supporting market democracies in east-central Europe and stabilising the Balkans. Washington even backed the open-ended enlargement of Nato, bringing the alliance from 16 members in 1990 to 32 today. It did so not out of any resolve to defend the countries to which it nominally offered protection, but in the belief that once it offered protection, no attack would ever occur to force its hand. Consider the US Senate’s unanimous ratification in 2003 of Nato’s “big bang”, which brought in seven countries, including the three small Baltic ones along Russia’s border
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