“Armies do not fight for abstractions,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared at the Munich Security Conference in February 2026, in a speech that invoked “civilization” a dozen times. Rubio isn’t the first to call for a revitalized alliance grounded in a shared Western inheritance. Yet the Trump administration has also made clear that the United States intends to retrench from Europe, transfer responsibility for the continent’s conventional defense to Europeans and concentrate American attention on the Western Hemisphere and Asia. A civilizational interest in Europe now coexists uneasily with a strategic instinct to pull back from it.
This tension reflects a deeper structural dynamic. The institutional foundations of the postwar transatlantic order increasingly diverge from the strategic conditions that originally justified their creation.
Even if a future US administration recommits to NATO, the United States and Europe will still be moving toward different priorities. The “US-led liberal international order” was never a single, comprehensive political and economic system. At its Western core, its principal institutional embodiment has always been the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The Marshall Plan offered another model, one focused on investment, industrial reconstruction, trade, and common standards. But it wound down within four years, and economic integration became a largely intra-European enterprise, culminating in the European Union. The transatlantic relationship endured as a predominantly military arrangement.
NATO, meanwhile, evolved from an emergency response to Soviet expansion into a permanent security framework. Many of its American architects did not expect the United States to shoulder the main burden of Europe‘s conventional defense forever. George Kennan saw the alliance largely as a psychological salve that would “stiffen the self-confidence” of Western Europeans while they rebuilt their economies and stabilized their politics. From the beginning, US officials called on Europe to do more for its own defense. Repeated failed attempts at burden sharing followed. Yet the alliance survived because it rested on the presumption of a shared existential threat and because no alternative Atlantic institution existed. After the Cold War, a combination of bureaucratic momentum, accumulated political investment, a faith in democratic peace, and the United States‘ extraordinary margin of power kept it going and allowed it to expand. NATO transformed from a blunt instrument of containment to a political organization charged with maintaining the Euro-Atlantic status quo.
But a narrow security alliance ultimately organized around a negatively framed purpose – deterring Moscow – was never a firm foundation for an enduring transatlantic relationship. Russia‘s invasion of Ukraine has made the threat appear immediate for much of Europe, but it has not recreated the strategic unity of the Cold War. Europeans themselves disagree about the scale and character of Russia’s ambition. More important, Russia occupies a radically different place in American and European hierarchies of concern. For many Europeans, it is the foremost security threat. For the United States, it ranks behind the defense of the homeland, preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and economic and military competition in the Indo-Pacific.
The Trump administration‘s 2025 National Security Strategy made the divergence explicit. It called for shifting forces away from theaters whose importance to US security has declined, identified the Western Hemisphere as America‘s first regional priority, and described the Indo-Pacific as a central economic and geopolitical battleground. Europe, it argued, should take primary responsibility for its own conventional defense. These judgments may be stated more or less bluntly by future presidents, but they will not disappear when President Donald Trump leaves office. If a military alliance is the only thing binding North America to Europe, and the two sides no longer share a common threat assessment, the rift is structural rather than political. Proclamations of unity and marginal adjustments in defense spending cannot repair it.
The transatlantic relationship now faces three possible futures: evolution, rupture, and renewal.
Evolution
On both sides of the Atlantic, the preferred path forward appears to be an evolution of the existing alliance structure. Indeed, NATO has adapted and endured over decades, despite profound disagreements and changing conditions. The alliance has overcome previous crises of confidence: Suez, Vietnam, former French President Charles de Gaulle‘s withdrawal from NATO‘s integrated command, the Iraq war, and Trump‘s first term. NATO survived the collapse of the Communist bloc and the removal of its very raison d’être. American calls for burden sharing are nothing new. And the US and Europe have often disagreed – in both directions – about the imminence of a threat from Moscow. Perhaps the present difficulties are not so dire and NATO will adapt and endure as it has in the past.
Atlanticist institutions are deeply entrenched, and elites on both sides of the Atlantic continue to look for ways to adjust and strengthen the alliance, preserve transatlantic cohesion, and ultimately outlast the Trump era in the hope that a more amenable American administration will restore the familiar relationship. Much of the current discussion of “NATO 3.0,” a stronger European pillar within NATO, or even a more Europe-led NATO can therefore be understood as an attempt to reconcile the alliance with changing political and strategic realities without fundamentally altering its underlying structure. These proposals may appear to address genuine disagreements but there is a danger that institutional evolution becomes a mechanism for preserving continuity rather than confronting the deeper problem.
The central issue remains that the old status quo is no longer sufficient due to structural reasons. A European pillar that remains dependent upon American strategic leadership, American intelligence, American logistics, American command structures and, ultimately, American willingness to underwrite Europe‘s security would represent adaptation in form rather than transformation in substance. NATO can certainly evolve, but if its evolution is principally designed to preserve the alliance as it has historically operated until a more sympathetic administration returns to Washington, it risks postponing rather than resolving the underlying question of burden and responsibility.
A “NATO 3.0” or a “European-led NATO” fails to address a central contradiction. European allies can spend more and fill more commands, but if the United States remains the ultimate decision-maker and security provider, the old dependency persists. If Washington relinquishes those roles, it has little reason to remain a supporting actor in a Europe-centric security structure. A nominally intact NATO would gradually be hollowed out, masking declining confidence in American guarantees. The challenge is therefore not simply to create a new version of the old Atlantic bargain, but to establish a genuinely sustainable division of responsibilities in which European allies assume the conventional military burdens of their own continent. “NATO 3.0” risks turning into a cover for continuity at precisely the moment when continuity is no longer enough.
Rupture
The second path is rupture. A clean break is unlikely in the near term because the existing entanglements are so extensive and influential elites remain committed to them. But a future crisis on the order of the Greenland dispute could push relations past a breaking point Over the longer term, a de facto rupture is entirely plausible
The consequences would be asymmetric. Transatlanticism has been a keystone of US foreign policy since the mid-20th century, but America‘s identity and institutions are not inextricably intertwined with Europe. The United States could retrench to the Western Hemisphere and remain a powerful continental state. Europe, on the other hand, would be totally transformed. An integrated Europe has only existed within a broader American system that suppressed security competition internally and provided the final guarantee against external attack.
One possible result of a transatlantic rupture would be a qualitative increase in European integration: a strategically autonomous Europe with unified command, common procurement, and the fiscal and political capacity to defend the continent. The war in Ukraine and doubts about Washington have strengthened the case for this outcome. But recent rhetoric has produced little comparable capacity. National rivalries, divergent threat perceptions, and a reluctance to abandon the American guarantee remain formidable obstacles. Washington itself might also view a genuinely independent European pole quite differently from a better-armed set of allies operating under US leadership. Americans favor burden shifting; they may be less enthusiastic about a potential peer.
A much likelier outcome is fragmentation. A partial disintegration of the postwar European project would hardly result in the triumph of the fully sovereign nation state. Instead, Europe might revert to the historical norm of overlapping jurisdictions and competing coalitions. For much of European history, political authority was neither centralized nor organized around a single dominant alliance system but dispersed among overlapping jurisdictions and competing centers of power. The Holy Roman Empire contained hundreds of semi-autonomous principalities, free cities, bishoprics, and other jurisdictions, while the papacy exercised its own political and diplomatic authority across Europe. France, Spain, England, Austria, Prussia, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire competed for influence, while Venice, Genoa, and other Italian city-states maintained their own commercial and military interests. Smaller states such as Savoy, Saxony, Bavaria, the Dutch Republic, and Switzerland could shift alignments according to their interests. Coalitions were correspondingly fluid: France could ally with the Ottoman Empire against the Habsburgs; Catholic France could support Protestant German princes during the Thirty Years‘ War; Britain could cooperate with Russia and Austria against France, only to pursue a different alignment in another conflict.
A similar dynamic might evolve. A weakened EU might retain some regulatory authority. Germany would likely preside over a more explicit economic and military sphere, which may include or clash with a Nordic-Baltic bloc, France-led defense initiatives, British minilateral partnerships, and shifting coalitions of the willing. The United States would not vanish from Europe in this scenario. It would deal selectively with whichever states and groupings seemed most valuable and, at times, play them off against one another.
Renewal
The third, and, potentially most productive, path forward would require a renewal of transatlantic relations on an entirely new basis. For the West, it must be reimagined around interests that are genuinely shared. Every participant must see benefits from the arrangement, and each must be an asset to the whole. A relationship centered merely on conventional deterrence of Russia cannot meet that test. One centered on technology and trade might stand a better chance.
Frontier technologies – artificial intelligence, space systems, quantum computing, advanced semiconductors, robotics, biotechnology, and autonomous systems – will shape power and prosperity in the 21st century. Europe lacks the ability to compete independently with the United States and China across all of these fields. If present trends continue, Europeans may eventually have to choose between US and Chinese technological ecosystems from a position of weakness.
While the United States can remain a technological leader without Europe, it could benefit substantially from European talent, capital, industrial specialization, advanced manufacturing, and a market of roughly 450 million people. A coordinated ecosystem could generate returns unavailable to either side alone. The United States would retain overall leadership because of its outsize capacity, but Europeans could occupy indispensable positions in the technology stack – producing more companies such as Dutch company ASML, a leading supplier to the semiconductor industry – and gain real influence as a result.
Such cooperation need not mean European submission to American Big Tech. At present, the two sides are locked in an unproductive conflict between US demands for access and European preferences for regulation. A common project could instead devise standards that promote innovation while protecting societies from the most disruptive effects of new technologies. Regulatory maximalism would leave Europe helplessly behind. But giving companies free rein could produce profound social and economic disruption. Shared rules on AI safety, cyber resilience, data access, biotechnology, and competition could keep technological development within democratically legitimate bounds. The goal would not be to define the West through fear of China or Russia, but to maximize its own potential and build technologies suited to its own societies.
The same logic applies to the physical foundations of the high-tech economy. North America and Europe should coordinate investment in energy, semiconductor supply chains, rare-earth processing, and other critical materials. Joint stockpiles, trusted-supplier rules, financing mechanisms, and long-term purchase agreements would reduce dangerous dependencies without demanding autarky.
While the West institutionalizes a common approach to advanced technology it should also attempt to reduce friction in economic exchange. Global free trade is functionally dead, but national self-sufficiency is an expensive illusion. The United States and Europe should construct a broad trading bloc that lowers internal barriers and aligns external tariffs, export controls, industrial standards, and technology-transfer rules where possible. Unlike the improvised tariff bargains of recent years, this arrangement would need durable institutions capable of resolving disputes and preventing either US protectionism or EU regulation from quietly hollowing it out. In some respects, this would be a return to the positive priorities of the Marshall Plan: investment, industry, trade, and standards rather than permanent military dependency.
The shift from a transatlantic alliance centered on tanks and troops to a renewed relationship focused on tech and trade would require Europe to assume complete ownership of its conventional defense. NATO might go “dormant” or give way to alternative European arrangements. But Europe‘s security would still be strengthened by transatlantic cooperation in the domains that increasingly matter most: cyberspace and outer space. Shared early-warning networks, satellite constellations, secure cloud and communications infrastructure, and cyber defense would improve the capabilities of all participants without organizing the entire relationship against a single adversary. European concerns about technological dependence could be addressed by locating infrastructure in Europe, guaranteeing national control of sensitive data, using interoperable standards and open licensing, and building European-owned satellites and redundant systems.
The Way Forward
Elements of all three futures are already taking shape. Europeans are spending more in the hope of preserving NATO. Some Americans favor hemispheric retrenchment, while some Europeans call for strategic autonomy. A multi-speed Europe, regional blocs, and bilateral coalitions are emerging even as Washington pressures Brussels and courts individual governments. Conflict over digital regulation and political speech is accelerating the rupture. At the same time, initiatives in AI, semiconductors, critical minerals, and trade point toward the possibility of renewal.
The Biden administration‘s US-EU
Trade and Technology Council (TTC), established in 2021, represented an effort to institutionalize transatlantic economic and technological cooperation and provide a framework for Washington and Brussels to coordinate on emerging technologies, semiconductor supply chains, artificial intelligence, digital governance, export controls, investment screening, and technology standards. The Trump administration‘s Pax Silica likewise represents a significant evolution of this approach from transatlantic regulatory coordination toward a broader, more explicitly strategic technology and supply-chain coalition. The principal weaknesses of such initiatives are, however, their institutional fragility and political impermanence.
The strategic objective for Washington and Brussels should therefore be to move beyond episodic presidential initiatives toward a permanent transatlantic economic architecture in which market access, technological cooperation, and supply-chain security reinforce one another, creating predictable mutual benefits for American and European firms.
The old alliance rested on a common enemy and an unequal division of military labor. A new relationship must rest on common projects. The US does not need a comprehensive transatlantic commitment. A rupture leading to more flexible policy toward various European power centers could be more than suitable for Washington. But if Europe wants to avoid divorce, it must offer something more compelling than the preservation of the status quo and fear of Russia.
Grand Strategy
“Armies do not fight for abstractions,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared at the Munich Security Conference in February 2026, in a speech that invoked “civilization” a dozen times. Rubio isn’t the first to call for a revitalized alliance grounded in a shared Western inheritance. Yet the Trump administration has also made clear that the United States intends to retrench from Europe, transfer responsibility for the continent’s conventional defense to Europeans and concentrate American attention on the Western Hemisphere and Asia. A civilizational interest in Europe now coexists uneasily with a strategic instinct to pull back from it.
This tension reflects a deeper structural dynamic. The institutional foundations of the postwar transatlantic order increasingly diverge from the strategic conditions that originally justified their creation.
Even if a future US administration recommits to NATO, the United States and Europe will still be moving toward different priorities. The “US-led liberal international order” was never a single, comprehensive political and economic system. At its Western core, its principal institutional embodiment has always been the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The Marshall Plan offered another model, one focused on investment, industrial reconstruction, trade, and common standards. But it wound down within four years, and economic integration became a largely intra-European enterprise, culminating in the European Union. The transatlantic relationship endured as a predominantly military arrangement.
NATO, meanwhile, evolved from an emergency response to Soviet expansion into a permanent security framework. Many of its American architects did not expect the United States to shoulder the main burden of Europe‘s conventional defense forever. George Kennan saw the alliance largely as a psychological salve that would “stiffen the self-confidence” of Western Europeans while they rebuilt their economies and stabilized their politics. From the beginning, US officials called on Europe to do more for its own defense. Repeated failed attempts at burden sharing followed. Yet the alliance survived because it rested on the presumption of a shared existential threat and because no alternative Atlantic institution existed. After the Cold War, a combination of bureaucratic momentum, accumulated political investment, a faith in democratic peace, and the United States‘ extraordinary margin of power kept it going and allowed it to expand. NATO transformed from a blunt instrument of containment to a political organization charged with maintaining the Euro-Atlantic status quo.
But a narrow security alliance ultimately organized around a negatively framed purpose – deterring Moscow – was never a firm foundation for an enduring transatlantic relationship. Russia‘s invasion of Ukraine has made the threat appear immediate for much of Europe, but it has not recreated the strategic unity of the Cold War. Europeans themselves disagree about the scale and character of Russia’s ambition. More important, Russia occupies a radically different place in American and European hierarchies of concern. For many Europeans, it is the foremost security threat. For the United States, it ranks behind the defense of the homeland, preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and economic and military competition in the Indo-Pacific.
The Trump administration‘s 2025 National Security Strategy made the divergence explicit. It called for shifting forces away from theaters whose importance to US security has declined, identified the Western Hemisphere as America‘s first regional priority, and described the Indo-Pacific as a central economic and geopolitical battleground. Europe, it argued, should take primary responsibility for its own conventional defense. These judgments may be stated more or less bluntly by future presidents, but they will not disappear when President Donald Trump leaves office. If a military alliance is the only thing binding North America to Europe, and the two sides no longer share a common threat assessment, the rift is structural rather than political. Proclamations of unity and marginal adjustments in defense spending cannot repair it.
The transatlantic relationship now faces three possible futures: evolution, rupture, and renewal.
Evolution
On both sides of the Atlantic, the preferred path forward appears to be an evolution of the existing alliance structure. Indeed, NATO has adapted and endured over decades, despite profound disagreements and changing conditions. The alliance has overcome previous crises of confidence: Suez, Vietnam, former French President Charles de Gaulle‘s withdrawal from NATO‘s integrated command, the Iraq war, and Trump‘s first term. NATO survived the collapse of the Communist bloc and the removal of its very raison d’être. American calls for burden sharing are nothing new. And the US and Europe have often disagreed – in both directions – about the imminence of a threat from Moscow. Perhaps the present difficulties are not so dire and NATO will adapt and endure as it has in the past.
Atlanticist institutions are deeply entrenched, and elites on both sides of the Atlantic continue to look for ways to adjust and strengthen the alliance, preserve transatlantic cohesion, and ultimately outlast the Trump era in the hope that a more amenable American administration will restore the familiar relationship. Much of the current discussion of “NATO 3.0,” a stronger European pillar within NATO, or even a more Europe-led NATO can therefore be understood as an attempt to reconcile the alliance with changing political and strategic realities without fundamentally altering its underlying structure. These proposals may appear to address genuine disagreements but there is a danger that institutional evolution becomes a mechanism for preserving continuity rather than confronting the deeper problem.
The central issue remains that the old status quo is no longer sufficient due to structural reasons. A European pillar that remains dependent upon American strategic leadership, American intelligence, American logistics, American command structures and, ultimately, American willingness to underwrite Europe‘s security would represent adaptation in form rather than transformation in substance. NATO can certainly evolve, but if its evolution is principally designed to preserve the alliance as it has historically operated until a more sympathetic administration returns to Washington, it risks postponing rather than resolving the underlying question of burden and responsibility.
A “NATO 3.0” or a “European-led NATO” fails to address a central contradiction. European allies can spend more and fill more commands, but if the United States remains the ultimate decision-maker and security provider, the old dependency persists. If Washington relinquishes those roles, it has little reason to remain a supporting actor in a Europe-centric security structure. A nominally intact NATO would gradually be hollowed out, masking declining confidence in American guarantees. The challenge is therefore not simply to create a new version of the old Atlantic bargain, but to establish a genuinely sustainable division of responsibilities in which European allies assume the conventional military burdens of their own continent. “NATO 3.0” risks turning into a cover for continuity at precisely the moment when continuity is no longer enough.
Rupture
The second path is rupture. A clean break is unlikely in the near term because the existing entanglements are so extensive and influential elites remain committed to them. But a future crisis on the order of the Greenland dispute could push relations past a breaking point Over the longer term, a de facto rupture is entirely plausible
The consequences would be asymmetric. Transatlanticism has been a keystone of US foreign policy since the mid-20th century, but America‘s identity and institutions are not inextricably intertwined with Europe. The United States could retrench to the Western Hemisphere and remain a powerful continental state. Europe, on the other hand, would be totally transformed. An integrated Europe has only existed within a broader American system that suppressed security competition internally and provided the final guarantee against external attack.
One possible result of a transatlantic rupture would be a qualitative increase in European integration: a strategically autonomous Europe with unified command, common procurement, and the fiscal and political capacity to defend the continent. The war in Ukraine and doubts about Washington have strengthened the case for this outcome. But recent rhetoric has produced little comparable capacity. National rivalries, divergent threat perceptions, and a reluctance to abandon the American guarantee remain formidable obstacles. Washington itself might also view a genuinely independent European pole quite differently from a better-armed set of allies operating under US leadership. Americans favor burden shifting; they may be less enthusiastic about a potential peer.
A much likelier outcome is fragmentation. A partial disintegration of the postwar European project would hardly result in the triumph of the fully sovereign nation state. Instead, Europe might revert to the historical norm of overlapping jurisdictions and competing coalitions. For much of European history, political authority was neither centralized nor organized around a single dominant alliance system but dispersed among overlapping jurisdictions and competing centers of power. The Holy Roman Empire contained hundreds of semi-autonomous principalities, free cities, bishoprics, and other jurisdictions, while the papacy exercised its own political and diplomatic authority across Europe. France, Spain, England, Austria, Prussia, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire competed for influence, while Venice, Genoa, and other Italian city-states maintained their own commercial and military interests. Smaller states such as Savoy, Saxony, Bavaria, the Dutch Republic, and Switzerland could shift alignments according to their interests. Coalitions were correspondingly fluid: France could ally with the Ottoman Empire against the Habsburgs; Catholic France could support Protestant German princes during the Thirty Years‘ War; Britain could cooperate with Russia and Austria against France, only to pursue a different alignment in another conflict.
A similar dynamic might evolve. A weakened EU might retain some regulatory authority. Germany would likely preside over a more explicit economic and military sphere, which may include or clash with a Nordic-Baltic bloc, France-led defense initiatives, British minilateral partnerships, and shifting coalitions of the willing. The United States would not vanish from Europe in this scenario. It would deal selectively with whichever states and groupings seemed most valuable and, at times, play them off against one another.
Renewal
The third, and, potentially most productive, path forward would require a renewal of transatlantic relations on an entirely new basis. For the West, it must be reimagined around interests that are genuinely shared. Every participant must see benefits from the arrangement, and each must be an asset to the whole. A relationship centered merely on conventional deterrence of Russia cannot meet that test. One centered on technology and trade might stand a better chance.
Frontier technologies – artificial intelligence, space systems, quantum computing, advanced semiconductors, robotics, biotechnology, and autonomous systems – will shape power and prosperity in the 21st century. Europe lacks the ability to compete independently with the United States and China across all of these fields. If present trends continue, Europeans may eventually have to choose between US and Chinese technological ecosystems from a position of weakness.
While the United States can remain a technological leader without Europe, it could benefit substantially from European talent, capital, industrial specialization, advanced manufacturing, and a market of roughly 450 million people. A coordinated ecosystem could generate returns unavailable to either side alone. The United States would retain overall leadership because of its outsize capacity, but Europeans could occupy indispensable positions in the technology stack – producing more companies such as Dutch company ASML, a leading supplier to the semiconductor industry – and gain real influence as a result.
Such cooperation need not mean European submission to American Big Tech. At present, the two sides are locked in an unproductive conflict between US demands for access and European preferences for regulation. A common project could instead devise standards that promote innovation while protecting societies from the most disruptive effects of new technologies. Regulatory maximalism would leave Europe helplessly behind. But giving companies free rein could produce profound social and economic disruption. Shared rules on AI safety, cyber resilience, data access, biotechnology, and competition could keep technological development within democratically legitimate bounds. The goal would not be to define the West through fear of China or Russia, but to maximize its own potential and build technologies suited to its own societies.
The same logic applies to the physical foundations of the high-tech economy. North America and Europe should coordinate investment in energy, semiconductor supply chains, rare-earth processing, and other critical materials. Joint stockpiles, trusted-supplier rules, financing mechanisms, and long-term purchase agreements would reduce dangerous dependencies without demanding autarky.
While the West institutionalizes a common approach to advanced technology it should also attempt to reduce friction in economic exchange. Global free trade is functionally dead, but national self-sufficiency is an expensive illusion. The United States and Europe should construct a broad trading bloc that lowers internal barriers and aligns external tariffs, export controls, industrial standards, and technology-transfer rules where possible. Unlike the improvised tariff bargains of recent years, this arrangement would need durable institutions capable of resolving disputes and preventing either US protectionism or EU regulation from quietly hollowing it out. In some respects, this would be a return to the positive priorities of the Marshall Plan: investment, industry, trade, and standards rather than permanent military dependency.
The shift from a transatlantic alliance centered on tanks and troops to a renewed relationship focused on tech and trade would require Europe to assume complete ownership of its conventional defense. NATO might go “dormant” or give way to alternative European arrangements. But Europe‘s security would still be strengthened by transatlantic cooperation in the domains that increasingly matter most: cyberspace and outer space. Shared early-warning networks, satellite constellations, secure cloud and communications infrastructure, and cyber defense would improve the capabilities of all participants without organizing the entire relationship against a single adversary. European concerns about technological dependence could be addressed by locating infrastructure in Europe, guaranteeing national control of sensitive data, using interoperable standards and open licensing, and building European-owned satellites and redundant systems.
The Way Forward
Elements of all three futures are already taking shape. Europeans are spending more in the hope of preserving NATO. Some Americans favor hemispheric retrenchment, while some Europeans call for strategic autonomy. A multi-speed Europe, regional blocs, and bilateral coalitions are emerging even as Washington pressures Brussels and courts individual governments. Conflict over digital regulation and political speech is accelerating the rupture. At the same time, initiatives in AI, semiconductors, critical minerals, and trade point toward the possibility of renewal.
The Biden administration‘s US-EU
Trade and Technology Council (TTC), established in 2021, represented an effort to institutionalize transatlantic economic and technological cooperation and provide a framework for Washington and Brussels to coordinate on emerging technologies, semiconductor supply chains, artificial intelligence, digital governance, export controls, investment screening, and technology standards. The Trump administration‘s Pax Silica likewise represents a significant evolution of this approach from transatlantic regulatory coordination toward a broader, more explicitly strategic technology and supply-chain coalition. The principal weaknesses of such initiatives are, however, their institutional fragility and political impermanence.
The strategic objective for Washington and Brussels should therefore be to move beyond episodic presidential initiatives toward a permanent transatlantic economic architecture in which market access, technological cooperation, and supply-chain security reinforce one another, creating predictable mutual benefits for American and European firms.
The old alliance rested on a common enemy and an unequal division of military labor. A new relationship must rest on common projects. The US does not need a comprehensive transatlantic commitment. A rupture leading to more flexible policy toward various European power centers could be more than suitable for Washington. But if Europe wants to avoid divorce, it must offer something more compelling than the preservation of the status quo and fear of Russia.
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