Trans-Atlanticism Isn’t Dead—It’s Being Renegotiated

This op-ed originally appeared in Foreign Policy on July 1, 2026.

The obituaries for trans-Atlanticism are being written too soon. The Trump administration has indeed profoundly shaken the U.S.-European relationship. But Nathalie Tocci’s recent essay in Foreign Policy, which posits that trans-Atlanticism as a living, operative force is over, mistakes a needed transformation for a terminal diagnosis. The evidence points not to the end of the trans-Atlantic alliance but to the emergence of a more demanding and ultimately more durable partnership that signals Europe’s long-delayed emergence as a geopolitically mature entity.

The case for the demise of trans-Atlanticism rests on the claim that it is inseparable from the liberal international order that has collapsed. But trans-Atlanticism was never only a values project. It was—and remains—a convergence of security, economic, and technological interests between two regions that together account for roughly 43 percent of global GDP and comprise the world’s most capable military alliance.

In his landmark 1997 essay, “Why Alliances Endure or Collapse,” Stephen M. Walt made an essential point: Alliances persist not because of shared values alone but because members perceive a common threat and find their interests better served together than apart. Today, shared values and strategic alignment are being tested simultaneously—and the divergences are sharpening. On values, U.S. President Donald Trump’s open support for far-right movements across Europe is a glaring contradiction: The parties his administration backs oppose the very expectations that Washington places on European allies, including higher defense spending, de-risking from Chinese technology and supply chains, and maintaining sanctions pressure on Moscow. On interests, Europeans see Russia as an existential threat to their long-term security, while Washington sees China as its existential rival. On technology governance, data sovereignty, climate change, and trade, trans-Atlantic approaches are increasingly diverging.

This requires frank and sustained discussions—conversations that the United States and Europe have too long avoided. Instead, they have preferred to paper over diverging threat perceptions and interests with the comforting language of shared values rather than confronting directly where their interests converge, where they diverge, and what each side actually needs from the other.

Walt also identified the conditions under which alliances fracture: visibly asymmetric burden-sharing, free-riding perceived as structural rather than temporary, and domestic politics pulling members in incompatible directions. All three fault lines run through the trans-Atlantic relationship today. No major European state has been spared from the rise of the far right. The 2024 European Parliament elections delivered historic gains for nationalist parties. The 2025 German federal elections saw the far-right Alternative for Germany become the second-largest party. The 2027 French presidential election looms as the most consequential test yet, with the far right polling competitively. Alliances are sustained by governments with the legitimacy to make hard decisions together—and domestic polarization erodes precisely that capacity.

Europe’s response to Trump’s policies has not been withdrawal or resignation. It has been unprecedented mobilization. In 2025, NATO’s European member states and Canada collectively increased defense spending by 20 percent in real terms to reach a combined $574 billion, the largest single-year increase in the alliance’s history. For the first time since committing in 2014 to spending at least 2 percent of GDP on defense, all 32 NATO allies are doing so. Germany shattered its constitutional debt brake to invest $114 billion in defense. Poland is on track to spend 5 percent of GDP. Norway now surpasses the United States in per capita defense spending. Whether the spending surge survives the next electoral cycles is precisely what makes the far-right advance so consequential.

Some may read the events of the last 18 months as a rupture, but they are instead an indication of geopolitical maturation—the end of a trans-Atlantic reflex that has existed since NATO’s founding. European strategic reliance on Washington was long a choice as much as a necessity. Trump’s two terms have made explicit that the old trans-Atlantic deal, which was built on asymmetric dependence and assumed U.S. primacy in European security, was never going to survive the 21st century intact. That process must result in a Europe that assumes responsibility for its own security, builds its own industrial capacity, and engages Washington from strategic weight, not subordination.

Tocci is right that U.S. President Joe Biden was perhaps the last instinctively Atlanticist U.S. president in an emotional sense. But putting emotions aside reveals that many of his policies undermined European strategic and economic interests. On security, the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 was executed without consultation with the European allies, including Britain and Germany, supporting the U.S. mission there. On trade, Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act imposed protectionist rules that were highly destabilizing for European industry, and he maintained the underlying logic of Section 232 steel and aluminum tariffs on European Union exports well into his term.

The Obama administration had already begun signaling this direction. In his farewell speech as defense secretary in 2011, Robert Gates issued a warning that now reads as prophecy: “The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress … to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense.” Gates warned of a “two-tiered alliance” and cautioned that future leaders “may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost.” The two Trump administrations finally forced the reckoning that allies could no longer hit the snooze button.

The future of the relationship, therefore, cannot rest on the emotional attachments of individual leaders. It must rest on structural interdependence, which is deepening. Despite sweeping U.S. tariff increases in 2025, $7.4 trillion in trans-Atlantic investment and nearly $2 trillion in annual trade reflect an unrivaled relationship that shows no sign of abating. U.S. defense firms are positioning aggressively in a European market that could be worth roughly $1.14 trillion by 2035. The U.S. military’s global power projection depends on European bases, access to the Mediterranean, and European logistical infrastructure.

The NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, is the moment to define what this interdependence looks like in practice. The meeting will test whether European leaders can take the next necessary steps. Four things must happen.

First, Europe urgently needs to reform its defense procurement architecture. EU member states invested an estimated $447 billion in defense in 2025. But the machinery governing actual spending remains fragmented, slow, and captive to national champions. Joint procurement, binding interoperability standards, and radically accelerated acquisition timelines are force multipliers, not administrative refinements.

Second, Washington must stop treating European operational autonomy as a threat. The reflex to invoke “no duplication, no discrimination, no decupling” as a pretext to block European industrial consolidation is strategically self-defeating. A stronger European defense base is an asset to NATO, not a threat to it. The goal is strategic complementarity, not substitution.

Third, the Ankara summit should formally codify the new terms of trans-Atlantic responsibility-sharing: European ownership of conventional defense on the continent—ground forces, territorial defense, logistics, and short-range air defense—alongside a U.S. commitment to providing strategic enablers—long-range strike capabilities; intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance; high-end maritime assets; and nuclear deterrence. France’s emerging forward deterrence doctrine should be understood as a complement to the U.S. nuclear umbrella, not a substitute.

Fourth, the summit should launch a trans-Atlantic defense technology compact. A formal framework, negotiated at Ankara and structured through NATO, for joint development, technology transfer, and coproduction in artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, and cybercapabilities would turn the alliance’s industrial assets into a genuine force multiplier. It would also send an unambiguous signal to Beijing that the technological competition is not China’s to win by default. The German Marshall Fund of the United States’ new defense and technology task force was designed precisely to help develop such a compact.

European allies and Canada will now have to do three things simultaneously. First, they must continue to partner with the United States where interests converge—on Indo-Pacific deterrence, AI governance, technology competition with China, and the defense of the Euro-Atlantic space. Second, they must also be prepared to act with less or without the United States where interests diverge—on climate and trade policy, on engaging with multilateral institutions, and on managing neighborhood crises that Washington has little appetite to address. Third, they must also deepen partnerships with other powers as a deliberate diversification and hedging strategy—working with the Gulf states and regional actors on energy security and crisis stabilization; deepening defense industrial cooperation with Japan, South Korea, and Australia under emerging minilateral frameworks; and engaging emerging powers on climate, development, and tech governance where trans-Atlantic coordination alone is insufficient.

Trans-Atlanticism is not ending. It is being renegotiated on rebalanced and more sustainable terms. This renegotiation is painful, but it is long overdue. The central challenge is one of sequencing, ensuring that the transition neither disrupts U.S. and European long-term strategic interests nor degrades overall deterrence, especially when confronting current geopolitical crises that demand coordination, planning, and predictability. Managing that sequencing is what will keep the trans-Atlantic relationship functional and forward-looking. The alliance that emerges will look different from the one built in 1949. It will also be better suited to the world that actually exists.