US Strategy Will Not Solve Our Problems But It Can Help Europe Grow Up

But hey, ‘healthy nations of Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe’ will enjoy the benefits of economic, military and political exchanges with the US. Maybe, beyond Orban’s MAGA flirt, these countries might actually be doing something right about their security?

Europe awakes to a stark reality it has been so eager to ignore. The US National Security Strategy published before the weekend, outlines American priorities pivoting to ‘Western Hemisphere’ (both Americas) and emphasising the systemic challenge of rising China, which exploits the open-world system of free trade and democratic governance for its strategic interests of political dominance over its economic partners. This is why German external dependencies, including the BASF multibillion-dollar chemical plant in China started after Russia attacked Ukraine, are explicitly mentioned with irritation of Europe’s most important ally.

But while the US chooses its global priorities, it stops short of calling Russia part of the problem in stark contrast to the two previous versions of the document, at least as long as Russian assets do not meddle in Cuba or Venezuela. Russia is now to be considered a problem of European perception and lack of will to mobilise our full resources – as if the White House was reading Donald Tusk’s inaugural speech from the EU Parliament in January 2025: ‘Don’t ask America what it can do for our security. Ask yourselves what we can do for our own security.’