What Would a Trump Win Mean for European Defense?

When you talk to European visitors in Washington these days, they tend to be in one of two moods. Some are in a state of high anxiety, believing that the future of NATO is on the ballot this year, even if American voters don’t necessarily know it. Others are in denial, arguing that regardless of who wins, little will change in the transatlantic relationship.

I suspect that both are wrong. Indeed, it seems likely that a Harris victory may not be as redemptive as some in Europe hope when it comes to the future of U.S. security commitments. To put it another way, it seems likely that the U.S.-Europe relationship is headed in broadly the same direction regardless of who wins this presidential election: toward some level of conscious decoupling. The big question is when, how, and under what circumstances Europe takes up some of the defense burden as the United States moves to focus on China.

So for our European readers, why not take a break from worrying about election returns to consider instead, how the transatlantic relationship could change under different administrations?

We published a paper at the Stimson Center in June using foresight methods to build three different scenarios for how and when the U.S. might retrench from Europe: a sudden, shock Trump move to pull the U.S. out of a “dormant NATO”; a slow, unplanned U.S. retrenchment from Europe, caused by a debt crisis and severe fiscal limitations; or a sudden U.S. pivot to Asia—perhaps due to war in Taiwan—prompting cross-European cooperation on defense, significant homegrown adaptation, and confirming Jean Monnet’s conjecture that the European Union is best “forged in crisis.”

The full report can be found here.