The Transatlantic Alliance Is Not Dead. But It Is Being Renegotiated.

The transatlantic alliance is not ending. It is being repriced. After decades in which the United States underwrote European security at below-market rates, Washington is demanding that Europe pay full cost. The shift predates the current administration — Obama pivoted to Asia, Trump demanded 2% GDP defence spending, Biden linked aid to conditionality — but it has accelerated sharply since January 2025.

The new US posture is transactional in a way that previous administrations were not. Security guarantees are linked to trade concessions. Technology sharing comes with market access demands. Even intelligence cooperation, once considered sacred, is reportedly being conditioned on European alignment with US China policy.

The European response has been slow but real. Twenty-three of NATO's 31 members now meet the 2% GDP defence spending target, up from just seven in 2022. The EU has launched its first joint defence procurement programme. France and the UK have strengthened bilateral defence cooperation outside NATO frameworks. And the European Council has endorsed, in principle, a path toward a European pillar within NATO that could operate more autonomously.

But the adaptation is uneven. Germany remains conflicted between its transatlantic instincts and the fiscal costs of rearmament. Southern European allies struggle to increase defence spending while managing debt crises. And Eastern European members, who feel the Russian threat most acutely, worry that any European autonomy project might weaken rather than complement the American security guarantee they depend on.

Europe faces a strategic fork. One path leads to greater autonomy — building independent military capabilities, a European defence industrial base, and the political institutions to command them. This path is expensive, slow, and requires a level of political integration that many member states resist. But it reduces dependence on an increasingly unreliable partner.

The other path accepts American primacy and the transactional terms that come with it. Europe would remain a junior partner, trading diplomatic alignment for security guarantees, market access for technology sharing. This path is cheaper and faster but leaves European sovereignty conditional on American goodwill — a commodity in declining supply.

In practice, Europe will likely muddle through with a combination of both. The question is whether muddling through is sufficient for a continent that faces war on its eastern border, instability on its southern frontier, and the most consequential shift in great power relations since 1991.