The Silence of the Atlantic
As Europe charts its own strategic course and Washington turns inward, the transatlantic alliance enters an era of polite estrangement that neither side is willing to name.
The diplomatic cables between Washington and Brussels still flow with their customary frequency, but the language within them has shifted in ways that veteran foreign service officers describe as tectonic. Where once the transatlantic conversation was conducted in the urgent shorthand of allies confronting shared threats, it now reads, according to one senior State Department official who requested anonymity, "like correspondence between respectful neighbors who no longer borrow each other's tools." The Atlantic alliance, forged in the existential clarity of 1949 and sustained through four decades of Soviet threat, is entering a period of polite estrangement that neither Washington nor Brussels is willing to name.
The proximate causes are catalogued with precision in every foreign policy journal on both continents: divergent trade interests, competing technology standards, disagreements over China policy, and the fundamental question of whether European defense can — or should — remain dependent on American guarantees. But the deeper cause is structural, and it predates any particular policy dispute. The Atlantic alliance was built for a bipolar world. The world is no longer bipolar, and the alliance, while not dissolving, is slowly being emptied of its animating purpose.
In the corridors of the Berlaymont Building, where the European Commission conducts its daily business of regulation and compromise, the phrase heard most frequently this winter is "strategic autonomy." It is spoken with varying degrees of conviction — the French with enthusiasm, the Poles with anxiety, the Germans with their characteristic combination of ambition and caution. But the phrase itself represents a conceptual revolution. For seventy-five years, European strategic thinking began with the assumption of American partnership. That assumption is no longer operative. European officials now plan, budget, and negotiate as though the American security guarantee, while still formally in place, is a depreciating asset.
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Washington's response to this European drift has been, characteristically, to simultaneously resent it and accelerate it. The current administration, like its predecessors across both parties, demands that European allies increase defense spending while questioning the value of the alliance those expenditures are meant to sustain. The contradiction is not lost on European diplomats, who have learned to navigate it with a patience born of long practice. "The Americans want us to spend more on defense and also to stop developing independent defense capabilities," observed one senior German official, with a weariness that suggested this particular paradox had ceased to amuse.
The consequences of this growing distance are most visible not in the grand theaters of geopolitics but in the quotidian decisions that constitute the infrastructure of alliance. Joint military exercises, once planned years in advance with meticulous attention to interoperability, are now scheduled with the tentative quality of social engagements between acquaintances. Intelligence sharing, the most intimate expression of allied trust, continues but with an expanding list of carve-outs and caveats that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. The fiber-optic cables beneath the Atlantic still carry vast quantities of data between allied capitals. What they carry less of, with each passing year, is conviction.