The Europe Question, the Rationale of Burden Shifting, and the Promise of Germany • Stimson Center

“Our transatlantic alliance has endured for decades. And we fully expect that it will be sustained for generations to come. But this won’t just happen.” This is what Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said in a speech in Brussels in February 2025, adding, “It will require our European allies to step into the arena and take ownership of conventional security on the continent.” He was echoed by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby: “Germany is Europe’s largest economy, with a history of major contributions to NATO[’s] collective defense during the Cold War. It is vital and justified that Germany step up and lead in Europe’s conventional defense…This includes accelerating the buildup of European conventional forces, capabilities, and industries to enable Europe to assume primary responsibility for its own conventional defense.”

Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that shifting the burden of conventional defense to Europe is currently the officially stated policy of the United States government. According to both the secretary and undersecretary of defense, Europe needs to shoulder the burden of conventional security. Their message is a good initial guideline for Europeans to understand how the new administration is redirecting American grand strategy in Europe: that a complete shift in certain domains — namely in logistics, infantry, armor, intel, and anything that falls within conventional power — is required. Security is a shared burden between the continent of Europe and the United States. U.S. policymakers prefer to keep the nuclear power and escalation threshold firmly in American hands in order to keep any nuclear proliferation in check. Nevertheless, Washington is pushing Europe to shoulder conventional deterrence on the continent.

This is a sound realist strategy, one that satiates populists on both sides of the Atlantic and keeps the United States formally tied to Europe. With this approach, American interests in Europe are minimal but intact. This short essay argues that American right-wing realism — a return to a statecraft that attempts to relitigate the last quarter century of ideological warfare — itself faces a key challenge: Burden shifting is necessary to match American ends to means but risks nuclear proliferation. A compromise posture is therefore needed. This essay attempts to explain the causal logic of burden shifting in certain domains while keeping nuclear deterrence on the European continent in American hands. This approach is in line with an America First concept of U.S. grand strategy in Europe and historic American predilections. Moreover, it is well suited for the structural trends in world politics, in particular the declining power of the United States relative to others, that are occurring today.

Theoretical Contradictions of American Hegemony in Europe

Any conservative-realist grand strategy in Europe should start with a theoretical framework highlighting American interests in Europe, such as that elaborated by American political scientist Hans Morgenthau in 1950: “We have conceived the two wars which we fought essentially as two holy crusades, engaged in by a good people against an evil one. It so happened, that what was really at stake in those crusades was not at all the extirpation of evil of its own sake, but the restoration of the balance of power in Europe,” Morgenthau wrote. Translating that goal into policy provides a clear set of principles.

As a maritime great power, America’s perpetual interest is in opposing a continental hegemon in Europe. A European hegemon — an entity controlling most of the European continental landmass under one flag and one army — is a risky proposition for the United States for several reasons. First, a single, united entity would have an enormous amount of land depth as an imperial power, making military conquest difficult in times of extreme crisis. Second, it would have a massive trade surplus, production capacity, and manpower to challenge, or even dwarf the United States, in extremis. Third, a European hegemon would have trading power to bypass and challenge American prosperity, thus destabilizing America’s relative power. Fourth, it could, if it chose to do so, side with peer adversaries of the United States, isolating Washington. Fifth, it could corrode the preeminent role of the dollar in the global economy, as well as the power of sanctions —  a core tool of U.S. foreign policy. Finally, if American economic power is dwarfed by a continental European empire, second-order effects would be felt on U.S. security in the Western Hemisphere.

Historically, as Morgenthau outlined, the United States opposed any of these scenarios. In the early days of the republic, U.S. leaders pursued this goal through hard-edged realism and protectionism. After World War II, the United States discarded this model of offshore balancing in Europe and instead institutionalized peace on the continent. After the end of the Cold War, institutionalism resulted in the expansion of NATO and the EU, along with the steady atrophy of European military power.

Moreover, the United States was not designed to be an empire. The country lacks an imperial elite and stands as an egalitarian, aspirational, and meritocratic republic. It is a democracy. Classic empires are also often prone to overstretch and practice needless imperial cruelty and exploitation abroad. But given their elite governing structure, they were also often able to avoid the volatility of public passions. American policymakers cannot follow this pattern — a fact that often produces incoherent policy and public discontent about foreign policy.

Nowhere is that incoherence more visible than in American policies toward Europe. American grand strategy in Europe faces historical contradictions. Washington’s predilections are simultaneously not to overspend in pursuit of hegemony over Europe, while berating the Europeans to do more but opposing attempts for the Europeans to build their own military-industrial complex. This incoherence arises from elite fears of a consolidated European empire, which would be an anathema to the United States.

A Disunited Europe

Fortunately, the chance of a European hegemon forming is minimal. As for the threat of external hegemony imposed upon Europe, the only contenders are Russia and China. Although China’s influence in Europe is growing, Chinese trade and military hegemony over Europe is unlikely, unless of course, Europe were to consolidate under one supranational entity and side with China against the United States. Russia, meanwhile, has neither the will nor the capability to occupy and pacify all of Europe; it currently struggles to maintain control over one-fifth of Ukraine. Europe’s collective GDP and the size of its collective workforce dwarf that of Russia.

Recent trends also support the idea that Europe itself cannot unify as a hegemon. A decade ago, the European economy and technology market were at parity with that of the United States; today, the dominance of American companies overseas and U.S. tech supremacy are nearly insurmountable. Europe is internally divided over its strategic orientation and its regulatory powers. Various centrifugal forces, from far-right nationalism to social conservatism, are rising in opposition to a more consolidated Europe ruled from Brussels. European peace itself is in many ways an artificial construct — the result of American predominance in Europe — which could logically be undermined by even a partial U.S. retrenchment. The chances of a European split are higher than the chances of European consolidation.

Despite tensions, the fundamentals of the Euro-American relationship remain stable. Vice President J. D. Vance’s February 2025 speech in Munich, Germany, may have sounded unnecessarily belligerent to the Europeans, but the satisfactory end to the trade war between the United States and the EU suggests ongoing shared interests. The question for U.S. leaders, therefore, is how to achieve policy compromise. For decades, instead of a British-style imperial “divide-and-rule” approach toward a stable European balance of power, the United States tried to institutionalize peace on the continent after World War II. This was a shift away from a grand strategy that had worked for centuries, from aiding the smaller of two warring sides to balance any hegemonic threat to incorporating every potential belligerent under one security umbrella and the rubric of a “rules-based order.”

Of course, this resulted in an asymmetry of interest. The expansion of both NATO and the EU — and the idea of an ever-growing Europe whole and free — resulted in a lack of equilibrium where the Western European powers, absent any direct strategic threat to their homelands, started to free ride on the United States. As the frontiers of NATO moved steadily east, for example, German muscle atrophied from around 12 divisions of fielded army (with 36 brigades and around 7,000 tanks and antipersonnel carriers) in 1989 to today’s status quo, where Berlin faces problems in equipping a single brigade in the Baltics. In short, the apparent preference of Western European countries, especially Britain and France, is that they do not genuinely fear a Russian hegemony, nor are they willing to replace the United States in Europe.

Eastern European states, in contrast, have an entirely different grand strategy. These states do not trust their bigger and more powerful western neighbors to protect them and have legitimate fears of a revanchist imperial Russia to their east. Eastern Europe, especially the Baltic states, are therefore heavily dependent on the United States. Every strategic document of the Baltic states includes two core principles: a fundamental interest in a growing NATO and EU, and keeping the United States tied to the security of Europe.  The strategic logic is simple: Increasing the size of NATO will democratize the alliance even further, resulting in the loss of relative power of the US hegemon. Expanding an alliance such as NATO consolidates the already entrenched liberal-internationalist orthodoxy within it; creates a self-sustaining bureaucracy; and makes it difficult for any nation-state, even the hegemon, to act in their narrow and restrained national interest. Put simply, the greater the Russo-American friction, the greater the benefit for Eastern European states.

The Four-Stage Strategy

All of this has resulted in Washington acting as glue for an arrangement that is increasingly unsustainable for the United States to maintain, thanks to structural pressures. The American public has grown wary of European free riding, as well as liberal interventionism, nation-building and wars of choice. The rise of China, on a scale that is unprecedented in American history, has united the American strategic community. China’s naval buildup, dollar-proofing of its economy, nuclear buildup, storage of food grains, and buying gold and medicines portend to at least a potential limited bid for hegemony in Asia, one that might change the international order in the Indo-Pacific.

The decline in relative power of the United States and the growing support for retrenchment among the electorate was reflected in the reelection of Donald Trump, who, in the words of former National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, is “one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its pretenses.”

The most logical way for him to do so is burden shifting.

To reverse its current posture, the United States should reverse its support for “institutionalism” in Europe, which it has promoted for half a century. This approach — a US-imposed European order — has run its course as a strategy and is ill suited for today’s world. Instead, any new security architecture in Europe should start with strategic sidelining of the EU as an entity and instead should entail bilateral grand bargains between the United States and the powerful states of Western Europe.

Second, the United States should return to a posture of offshore balancer in Europe, shifting all conventional burdens — whether artillery, armor, intelligence, logistics, or infantry — to the rich and powerful states of Western Europe, especially Germany. U.S. retrenchment is legally uncomplicated; total withdrawal from NATO is not allowable under U.S. law without a congressional amendment to the treaty, but this is neither needed nor advisable in the current moment. Troop deployments are a presidential prerogative; the president can bypass Congress in this matter.

Third, the United States should encourage strategic independence by individual European nations, with respect to procurement, R&D, tech transfer, weapons acquisition, interoperability, and coordination. Washington should also encourage mini-ententes and the formation of various bilateral relationships — i.e., Franco-Turkic, Greco-British, British-Polish, and German-Lithuanian. 

Finally, the United States should encourage diplomacy between Russia and the European states (especially Poland, the Baltics, and other states wary of Russian power) to defuse tensions. This would require satiating some of Russia’s natural interests in its near abroad, along with allaying the fears of the Eastern European states. Washington should block and veto any further enlargement of NATO, signaling good faith to Moscow. But a strong U.S. naval presence in the form of the 2nd fleet, as well as the U.S. strategic command and nuclear weapons present in Germany, will continue to provide a firm guarantee that, at a minimum, the American extended nuclear umbrella is there to stay.

For the near and foreseeable future, the United States should maintain extended deterrence in Europe, discouraging nuclear proliferation, and keeping the threshold of nuclear escalation in American hands. Some operational changes in posture should be made, such as reducing the number of warheads. The United States can also encourage both Britain and France to transition some nuclear assets to a more unified European command, providing a second-tier deterrence. Moreover, Washington can rely on patrolling subsurface deterrents, instead of static deterrents, such as deploying warheads in Europe. 

Outside of the nuclear question, however, Europe needs to decide how to divide the burden of defense among its own states, either through NATO, or via mini-ententes facilitated by Washington. Two countries are particularly important to the United States as it retrenches and pushes Europe to build a “minimum credible deterrence”: Turkey and Germany. Turkey is the second-largest force within NATO and is a natural historic balancer of Russia in the Black Sea, Aegean, and Mediterranean. American bases in Turkey are a foothold from which the United States can provide deterrence over the Mediterranean and North Africa.

Germany, however, is the most important country in Europe for the United States. German policymakers have recently approved a historic debt break, hinted at creating the largest conventional force in Europe, suggested restarting the draft, and have supported the American call to allocate 5% of GDP for defense spending. Existing U.S. bases and capabilities in Germany are centrally located and are positioned to cover and provide extended nuclear deterrence for the entire European continent — even as the United States retrenches from other countries in Europe (Greece, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, etc.). 

In short, as long as the United States maintains its bases in Germany and Turkey, and as long as a broad consensus exists between Berlin and Washington about the direction of the continent, America does not need to micromanage whatever other tactical alignments develop in Europe. A template for a rapid drawdown of American troops already exists; it occurred between 1993 and 1996. A similarly rapid drawdown this time would incentivize Western European states to rapidly rearm and return to their pre-1990 force postures.

These changes are also likely to improve the US-Russia relationship, signaling to Russia that attempts toward a genuine detente are at play. Simultaneously, the United States should push for further strategic nuclear limitation talks with Russia, continuing the Trump administration’s preference for a balance of diplomacy and deterrence.

The Promise of Germany

Germany is the most special country in Europe for the United States for purely realist reasons. Hans Morgenthau argued that “by virtue of that natural endowment of Germany, whichever nation is able to gain control of all Germany… has gained such an advantage in the struggle for power that it may well have become invincible in a shooting war.” As he notes, the simple logic of the Cold War in Europe was based on this reality of German power, increasing “our strength in the struggle with the Soviet Union” and denying that “the Russians the addition of German strength.” That reality is still present. Germany remains at the center of European power, economy, and industry.

Most Germans are fond of the United States, despite occasional rifts. Both countries would do well not to lecture each other on shared values or culture and instead to focus on their strategic partnership. J. D. Vance’s February 2025 speech in Munich, although harsh, was in many ways a wakeup call for Germany to assume its position as the natural leader of Europe. This administration is clear that the United States intends to employ significant burden shifting to Europe in the coming years, and Germany will need to take the lead in this effort. Luckily, judging from the noises coming out of Berlin, the penny has finally dropped.

Going forward, the United States should no longer aspire to maintain full-spectrum primacy in the European theater and should promote European rearmament and tactical independence. Washington would reap an enormous benefit from this approach: A strong European component, led by a rearmed Germany, would exit within NATO. Moreover, a strong, independent Germany shouldering much of the conventional security burden of Europe is not something that Washington should be wary of, rather, it should embrace such a move.

In 1945, another Morgenthau argued that managing Germany is the core problem for the United States. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. called for “war factories to be dismantled or converted to peacetime production,”  noting that “the United States has demonstrated with what speed these factories can be converted back again and how much basic production is the same for peace or war.” This time, Germany provides great opportunities for the United States to achieve its foreign policy goals. German industry offers promise for Europe, and frees the United States to focus on its peer rival, China, in the Asia-Pacific.