Until further notice, a transatlantic divorce is inevitable

Photo: Alexandros Michailidis / Shutterstock

The message I recently heard loud and clear from the American defence establishment is not just sobering; it is an existential klaxon. While European capitals are still fixated on strategic drift, the reality is far more visceral: the US defence establishment is in a state of terror. Among those in the know, they do not believe they can win a war with China today, and they see the trends not merely declining, but accelerating toward a catastrophic deficit.

This internal panic, perhaps, is an underlying but no less powerful driver of the 2026 National Defense Strategy, which officially sidelines Europe to prioritize a quixotic “Golden Dome” over the American homeland while shifting from global leader of alliances to a retrograde, throwback style of imperial assertiveness in the Americas. On China, Pentagon thinkers are no longer debating the best ways to project power. Instead, they are debating how to survive a national total war where their own industrial base is hollowed out and their missile inventories dry up in days.

 
To be sure, we should not overestimate China or underestimate nominal American power. China has never conducted complex, multi-domain operations on the scale required for a Taiwan invasion, and US force posture in the Indo-Pacific remains objectively formidable. Chinese industrial power is objectively staggering, but it has its own economic vulnerabilities that could lead to cascading effects. And there is always the chance that Washington, in a frantic pivot, finds the political will – it will always find the money – to fix its crumbling defence infrastructure and return to a war footing that can sustain a peer conflict.

Yet even if the US finds the means, the more concerning rot is political. Washington is currently engaged in what can only be described as strategic arson. While Beijing carefully styles itself as a stable, predictable global actor, the US is systematically cannibalizing its own security architecture for dopamine hits and spare parts. This administration’s recent threats against Greenland – refusing to rule out military force to annex a neighbour and threatening 25 per cent tariffs on European allies to coerce its sale – are not just “erratic”. Indeed, they are the signature of a superpower that has begun to strip its alliance system for parts that it can melt into baubles. Like much of the rest of the Americas, Greenland (and Canada, to some extent) are seen as prizes to be captured, not partners or force multipliers. It is geopolitical fundamentalism pursued by a great power in the violent throes of descent.

For Europe, the challenge is not that the US lacks the capacity to assist us. On the contrary, Europe already possesses enough latent power to balance a depleted Russia on its own, provided we find the collective will to mobilize it. The real challenge is that the US now sees itself as being in terminal decline and is acting accordingly. By attacking its own allies and displaying a chilling indifference toward aggressive authoritarians, Washington has destroyed the very architecture that made it the leader of the free world. Even with more responsible leadership in Washington in the future, which is increasingly more of an “if” than “when” proposition, we cannot be sure that the trust or the structural integrity of the old order will – or should – ever return. More to the point, Americans who believe in democracy and the US-Europe alliance, which I still believe is a strong majority, need Europe to be strong, self-sufficient, and to carry the mantle for the free world while their country cannot.

 
Strategic autonomy must evolve beyond its reputation as a Franco-German vanity project; it is a survival manual for a post-American world. We must build European strategic power, including a defence industrial base that operates independently of an American supply chain that could be severed by a Pacific war or withheld during the next trade dispute. The American mirage is fading, and we must stop treating US partnership as the centre that always holds. It is now a volatile variable. If we continue to wait for revolutionary reform in Washington that the Americans themselves no longer believe in, we are not just failing our citizens – we are inviting the very catastrophe we claim to deter.

Kerel Dysler is a veteran European defence analyst with over 20 years of experience conducting defence-technical assessments regarding Euro-Atlantic security requirements and operations. He most recently served as a requirements officer with the Joint Operational Capabilities and Posture Review Group.

EU foreign policy, transatlantic relations, US foreign policy