The Transatlantic Divorce

The Long Crisis, Part 3

By the spring of 2026, the President of the United States was calling NATO a paper tiger in public and floating withdrawal from the alliance, after America’s European allies declined to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz or back the war in Iran in any meaningful way.

This should have been a five-alarm moment for the Western world. It barely registered as news. And the fact that it barely registered tells you more about the state of the transatlantic relationship than any policy analysis could.

The marriage isn’t ending. It already ended. We’re just filing the paperwork. If Part 2 was right that the war with Iran was an X-ray rather than an earthquake, this is one of the fractures it lit up. The alliance has been functionally dead for years. The war only made the body impossible to keep propping in its chair.

How We Got Here

The transatlantic alliance was never a partnership of equals. It was a protection arrangement. The United States provided the military umbrella, Europe sheltered under it, and the price of that shelter was deference to American strategic leadership. For 75 years this worked because both sides got what they needed. America got forward bases, intelligence cooperation, and the legitimacy that comes from acting in concert with allies. Europe got security on the cheap and the freedom to spend its defense savings on social programs.

The arrangement survived because the threat was clear and shared. The Soviet Union pointed nuclear weapons at both continents. The logic was simple. Hang together or hang separately. When the Cold War ended, the shared threat disappeared, but the institutional habit persisted. NATO reinvented itself as a crisis-management organization, expanded eastward, and found new missions in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Libya. The underlying bargain held through sheer inertia even after the original rationale was gone. America leads, Europe follows, and nobody asks too many questions about who pays.

The cracks started showing long before 2026. The Iraq War in 2003 split the alliance, with France and Germany openly opposing American policy. The Obama administration’s pivot to Asia signaled that Washington’s attention was drifting away from Europe. Trump’s first term made the burden-sharing problem impossible to ignore, with most European allies spending well under 2 percent of GDP on defense while American taxpayers funded a military that ran past 3 percent.

But cracks and collapse are different things. NATO survived Iraq. It survived Trump’s first term. It survived the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which for a while reinvigorated the alliance and brought in Finland and Sweden.

It did not survive Iran. Or rather, the thing that was already dead inside it did not survive the test the war imposed.

Why Iran Was the Reveal

Previous NATO crises were arguments within a family. Iraq in 2003 was a fight about whether to follow America into a war of choice. The Ukraine response was a debate about how much to spend and how fast to act. In both cases the underlying assumption held. We are on the same team, we share the same basic interests, and the disagreement is about method, not direction.

Iran broke the underlying assumption.

When the United States and Israel struck Iran on February 28, European governments faced a choice that earlier crises had let them dodge. Washington asked for support, including base access, logistical help, and contributions to securing the Strait of Hormuz. European capitals said no, one after another. Spain refused. Britain, America’s closest European ally and the special relationship made flesh, refused.

That was not a disagreement about method. It was a refusal to take part. And the reasons for it show how far the two sides have already drifted.

The strategic objection was real and defensible. European governments judged the war reckless, launched without adequate justification, possibly in breach of international law, and likely to produce more instability than it resolved. Allies disagree about wars of choice all the time, and on the merits the Europeans may well have been right. Hold that thought, because it matters later.

But the strategic objection sits on top of something more durable, and this is where the two sides have genuinely come apart.

Three generations of immigration have remade the European electorate, and for the most part not through assimilation. Western Europe absorbed large populations faster than it folded them into any shared national story. France is home to the largest Muslim population in Western Europe, several million strong and concentrated in the urban districts that decide national elections. Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Britain carry large immigrant-origin communities of their own. The point is not the presence of these communities. It is that a meaningful share of them never adopted, and were never seriously asked to adopt, the historic national identity of the country they live in. They are citizens voting in ordinary elections, holding political orientations the old national consensus simply did not contain. That distinction, between immigration that becomes the nation and immigration that only lives inside it, is the hinge of a later essay in this series. Hold on to it.

On most questions the divergence is invisible. On a war waged by the United States and Israel against a Muslim country, with civilian casualties on every screen, it is decisive. That is exactly the kind of action that mobilizes these constituencies, and the mobilization carries a cost that European governments now pay at the ballot box and in the street.

This is not a conspiracy theory, and it does not need to be one. It is ordinary democracy. A government answers to the electorate it has, not the one it had in 1985. The electorate European leaders govern today will not reward a coalition for joining an American war in the Middle East, and in a close race it can punish one badly. That constraint did not exist during the Cold War. It exists now, it is structural, and it deepens with every cycle.

The same transformation is reshaping the continent from the other direction. The reaction to it has produced the strongest nationalist movements Europe has seen since the war: the Rassemblement National in France, the AfD in Germany, and their counterparts across the continent, every one of them built on the claim that this shift is changing what Europe fundamentally is. You do not have to endorse those movements to see that they are now central to European politics rather than fringe to it. This is the cultural divergence, and it is the main event. Two later essays take it apart directly, one on Europe’s version of the problem and one on America’s. The narrow point here is only this. The Europe that exists today cannot follow America into a Middle Eastern war the way the Europe of 1990 could, and that single fact quietly rewrites the alliance.

America noticed. And America’s conclusion was not that the allies had a reasonable policy disagreement. It was that Europe is unreliable. That when it matters, when the shooting starts, Europe will find a reason to sit it out.

There’s an irony buried in that conclusion, and it cuts against Washington more than it admits. “Unreliable” here means “unwilling to follow us into a war of choice.” From the standpoint of a republic that is supposed to be wary of unbounded military adventure, that is not obviously a vice. But fair or not, the conclusion is now a fixed feature of American strategic thinking. It does not vanish with the next election or the next administration. It is baked in.

The Formal Structure and the Functional Reality

A recent law restricts the president from unilaterally withdrawing from NATO without Congressional approval, and the treaty itself requires a year of notice. The legal barriers to a formal exit are real.

But legal formality and functional reality are different animals. NATO’s value never lived mainly in the treaty text. It lived in the integration. Shared command structures, interoperable forces, joint exercises, intelligence sharing, and the personal relationships between allied officers built over decades of working side by side. The confidence that once a plan was agreed, everyone would execute their part.

That integration can die while the treaty lives. And it’s dying now.

American military planning is already shifting away from its NATO-centric assumptions. The bilateral partnerships with Japan, Australia, South Korea, and India that have been deepening for a decade are becoming the primary framework for US strategy. The Pacific orientation that began under Obama and accelerated under both Trump administrations is no longer a pivot. It’s the default.

European officers trained at American war colleges, American units stationed at European bases, joint procurement programs, shared intelligence feeds: all of it can wither through neglect without anyone signing a withdrawal notice. The alliance becomes a legal fact and a strategic fiction, a zombie institution that exists on paper while the relationships that actually decide outcomes under pressure are built somewhere else.

What Europe Does Next

Europe’s response to the loss of the American guarantee will define the continent’s trajectory for the next 20 years. The early signs are not encouraging.

The immediate reaction has been to announce defense-spending increases and joint procurement initiatives. France and Germany are positioning themselves as the anchors of a European defense identity. The European Commission is producing frameworks and roadmaps. Summits are held. Communiques are issued.

This is what Europe does. It produces process. The question is whether process becomes capability, and the obstacles are large.

Money is the first problem. Credible defense autonomy means spending at or above 3 percent of GDP, sustained for at least a decade. European governments are being asked to find that money at the same moment they are funding pensions and healthcare for aging populations, paying energy bills that jumped after the loss of cheap Russian gas and the disruption in the Gulf, and carrying the cost of absorbing immigration at current rates. Each of those commitments has a powerful constituency. Together they may simply be unaffordable at once. Something has to give, and European political systems are built neither to choose quickly nor to say out loud what they are choosing. That bind, the impossibility of funding social commitments, rearmament, immigration, and the industrial base that pays for all of it at the same time, is large enough that it gets its own essay later in this series.

Industrial capacity is the second problem. Europe’s defense industrial base has atrophied through decades of underspending. It cannot produce enough ammunition, enough armored vehicles, enough aircraft at the scale and speed that real autonomy demands. Rebuilding that capacity takes 10 to 15 years even with money and political will, which pushes the timeline to the mid-2030s at the earliest.

Political cohesion is the third problem and the deepest. The EU has 27 member states with different threat perceptions and different domestic constraints. Poland and the Baltic states see Russia as an existential danger. France sees itself as a Mediterranean power with interests in Africa. Spain and Italy are focused on migration from North Africa. Germany is trying to hold an economic relationship with China together while managing its energy bills. Getting 27 governments to agree on a common defense posture, let alone a common foreign policy, is not a coordination problem that better committees can fix. It’s a structural limit of the EU’s design.

The likeliest outcome is that Europe builds a force real enough to handle low-intensity threats and peacekeeping, and nowhere near enough to deter a great power or project force at distance. Enough for politicians to claim progress. Not enough to replace what NATO provided.

The Two-Bloc World

I want to be careful here, because the series has spent two essays warning against false certainty, and a confident map of 2046 would be exactly that. So take this as the trajectory we’re on rather than a fixed destination. A large enough shared shock, a Russian move into NATO territory or a Chinese move on Taiwan that implicates everyone at once, could still pull the two sides back together. That is more or less what Ukraine did in 2022.

But notice why that pull may not work a second time. The Ukraine rally worked because it was a shared external enemy, the one thing that has always re-welded the alliance. The divergence opening now is not about an external enemy. It runs inside each society: over immigration, identity, the legitimacy of force, what these nations even understand themselves to be. A shared threat can paper over a disagreement about strategy. It does not heal a disagreement about values. And absent such a shock, the path leads somewhere specific: two Western blocs that trade, interact, and politely disagree while operating on incompatible strategic assumptions.

The American bloc is bilateral, transactional, and oriented toward the Pacific and the Middle East. Its partnerships rest on specific shared interests rather than shared values. Britain, if it chooses the Atlantic over Europe, and that choice is not guaranteed, becomes the junior partner in an Anglosphere-plus-Asia network. Japan, South Korea, Australia, India, and select Gulf states are the load-bearing nodes. The organizing principle is not collective defense. It’s flexible alignment around particular threats and opportunities.

The European bloc is multilateral, consensus-driven, and turned inward. Its main concern is managing its own internal strains around demographics, migration, energy, and fiscal sustainability. Its foreign policy runs on regulation, diplomacy, and economic leverage rather than military power, because military power is the one tool it doesn’t credibly hold. The organizing principle is not strategic projection. It’s stability management. For anyone who values liberty, neither bloc is a refuge. One drifts toward war-making unbound by allies, the other toward a managerial regulatory state that treats every problem as something to be administered.

These two blocs are not enemies. They don’t go to war with each other. They don’t stop trading. Tourists still cross the Atlantic. Students still spend semesters abroad. But the deep strategic partnership, the reflex that America and Europe are on the same team, the coordination that defined Western foreign policy for three generations, that is over.

The transatlantic relationship comes to resemble the relationship between Britain and France in the 19th century. Two major powers that share some interests, compete in others, cooperate when convenient, and never fully trust each other.

What’s Lost

I want to mark what’s being lost, because it’s real, and because the temptation on the populist right is to wave the whole thing away as good riddance to a club of freeloaders.

Grant that side its due first. The European free-riding was real. The Pacific is where the century will be decided. A Washington that no longer waits for permission from capitals that won’t show up when called is, in one obvious sense, simply acting like a sovereign power again.

But there’s a cost the cheering misses, and it’s the cost this series keeps circling. The alliance, for all its dysfunction, made unilateral war expensive. A president who wanted to fight had to persuade allies, and that friction was a check, one of the few external brakes on the most consequential thing a government does. Strip the alliance out and the brake goes with it. War-making answers to fewer people. That is the concentrated-power problem from Part 1, lifted up to the level of the international order. A transactional world of flexible alignments is a world where force is cheaper to reach for and harder for anyone, ally or citizen, to restrain.

And the partnership was never only a military arrangement. It was an intellectual and cultural ecosystem of shared universities, research institutions, legal traditions, and media. Ideas and people moved across the Atlantic in a way that enriched both shores.

That ecosystem doesn’t survive the divorce intact. Not because anyone sets out to kill it, but because ecosystems need infrastructure, and the infrastructure of the transatlantic relationship rested on a strategic alignment that no longer exists. When the strategic logic goes, the funding goes. When the funding goes, the exchange programs shrink, the research partnerships narrow, the diplomatic channels thin out. The Atlantic gets wider one cancelled program at a time.

A generation from now, an American and a European will sit across a table and realize they don’t understand each other the way their parents did. Not because they’re hostile, but because they grew up in different worlds, shaped by different institutions, running on different assumptions about what matters and why.

That’s the real cost of the transatlantic divorce. Not the loss of a military alliance. The loss of a shared civilization.

Whether what replaces it is better or worse depends on what each side builds on its own. And that depends on something deeper than basing rights and procurement budgets. Underneath every alliance runs an operating system, a shared set of answers to the oldest questions. What is a person? What do we owe our neighbor, and who is responsible for paying that debt, the individual or the state? America and Europe are coming apart on geopolitics because they quietly came apart on those answers first. That divergence, the operating system itself, is where this series goes next.

Next: The Operating System