The United States’ ability to cope with the pressures of great-power competition hinges on securing Europe and preserving the trans-Atlantic alliance. While it is true that there are serious and pressing national security problems in Asia and the Middle East, these can only be dealt with effectively once the Atlantic foundation of Washington’s global strength is secure. To conduct a future pivot to Asia, the United States needs a fulcrum in Europe—not vice versa.
Prioritizing the stabilization of Europe may seem to defy logic. Strategically, China is without any question the United States’ most capable and dangerous adversary. Politically, the Iran-Israel standoff is potentially explosive, currently grabs the most attention in Washington, and will probably continue to preoccupy U.S. leaders for a while. Economically, Asia collectively accounts for more U.S. trade than any other region, and events in the Middle East have a direct bearing on gas prices in an election year.
It goes without saying that the United States should endeavor to preserve its interests in all three of these vital regions. But as U.S. military leaders have repeatedly made clear, the country lacks the resources to fight two major peers simultaneously. Therefore, the question of which region should receive the most attention will continue to present itself.
The answer should continue to be Europe. The reasons are not grounded in gauzy nostrums about trans-Atlantic solidarity but in clear-eyed strategic logic.
First, Europe is indispensable to the United States in balance-of-power terms. China may be the United States’ top overseas trade partner when it comes to goods, but when services and investment are taken into the equation, the most important economic partner by far is the European Union. The United States invests four times more in Europe than it does in Asia; Europeans invest 10 times more in the United States than in China and India combined. The United States has 30 allies in Europe compared to six in the Indo-Pacific. The collective GDP of European NATO allies is $20 trillion; that of allied Asia is $9 trillion. The combined annual defense spending of U.S. allies in Europe was $383 billion in 2023, while that of U.S. allies in Asia was $140 billion. European allies make up two of the five permanent seats on the U.N. Security Council and a larger share of the membership of the world’s most important organizations than any other region.
This is where the balance of power comes in. What these numbers show is that, precisely because of China’s growing strength, the United States cannot afford to forfeit Europe, either politically or economically. In a hypothetical scenario, if the United States lost its allies in Asia but kept Europe in its corner, it would retain the capacity to compete with China. But the reverse is not true. If the United States ever lost Europe—for instance, if China succeeded in neutralizing it or a Russian victory in Ukraine caused key allies to seek accommodation—U.S. allies in Asia could not replace the role of Europe.
Second, Europe is indispensable from a geostrategic perspective. As former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski put it, Europe is “America’s essential geopolitical bridgehead on the Eurasian continent.” Its central geography makes it the pivotal region for addressing global problems. For all practical purposes, the Middle East is a sub-theater of Europe. From Europe, the United States can project power toward Ukraine and against Russia, to the Levant in support of Israel, and east into the Indian Ocean. For all its enormous importance, the coastal fringe of East Asia does not offer these advantages. With Europe on its side, the United States is a Eurasian power; without Europe, it is mostly a hemispheric potentate on the margins of the world.
Third, Europe is indispensable in terms of reputation. As former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger often pointed out, power is not only about material factors; it is also a reflection of the perception that other countries hold of a country’s power and willingness to use it. Whatever its flaws, modern Europe is the greatest accomplishment of U.S. foreign policy. From 1917 until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it took Americans two world wars, 14 presidents, and 38 congresses to get Europe—the source of the biggest threats to U.S. security in the 20th century—to where it is today: a continent of free-market democracies modeled, to a large extent, on the United States. Despite what its detractors say, the trans-Atlantic West represents the strongest force for progress in modern history, and it is worth preserving.
This history makes the war in Ukraine the biggest test of U.S. reputation in many decades. Containing Russia is vital to the one region where Washington has invested the bulk of its foreign-policy efforts for more than a century. This is what sets Ukraine apart from other places that the United States’ adversaries may threaten. It’s not another Iraq or Vietnam, the losses of which, however tragic, were peripheral to the core of U.S. grand strategy. To allies and adversaries alike, Europe is the unique bellwether of U.S. resolve. The United States simply cannot afford to lose a major crisis in Europe the way it can in Asia or the Middle East. A Ukrainian version of the Afghanistan debacle would reverberate globally for years. If the United States is willing to cut bait on a European country fighting the continent’s largest land war since World War II, what would it not abandon?
Fourth, Europe is indispensable to the United States in political and cultural terms. It’s true that strategy cannot be made on the basis of sentiment. But strategy untethered from the stuff that makes people tick is unlikely to succeed for long. Notwithstanding domestic demographic shifts, the deep historical, institutional, economic, cultural, and personal ties connecting the two sides of the Atlantic will continue to affect how Americans define their interests. The defense of Europe is more likely to sustain U.S. popular sympathy than any other conceivable foreign objective. It’s hard to imagine a war over the fate of Taiwan producing the same groundswell of U.S. popular support that the Ukraine war has consistently produced since February 2022.
The point in all of this is not that the United States should want to “lose” Asia or the Middle East. Americans have critical strategic and economic interests in all three regions. Rather, it is that Europe is the United States’ indispensable base in global geopolitics. As any architect planning a foundation, investor choosing a core holding, or politician tending to the base knows: Get that right, and other positive things can be added over time. Get it wrong, and you could very well lose the whole.
The same is true in geopolitics. Europe is the epicenter of the United States’ international power, resolve, and affinity. With Europe, Washington can compete with Beijing regardless of developments in other regions; without it, the United States plays at a disadvantage, evicted from Eurasia and deprived of its strongest geopolitical assets.
Viewed in this light, it is an advantage to the United States that the first big crisis of the 21st century broke out in Europe.
First, it gives the United States the opportunity, in a region of accustomed U.S. strength, to make a stand and stop aggression now, before it can spread to other places. Europe is the region where Washington can lead its strongest alliance to thwart its weakest large-power rival. If it succeeds, European security will be sounder than it has been over the last two decades, allowing Washington to face Beijing’s rising threat for the next two decades. Also, the more Moscow is flailing in its own war, the greater the pressure it is likely to place on Beijing and Tehran to supply it with materiel that they might otherwise use for conflicts in their own regions. However, if the United States fails—in the hope that Europeans can counter Russia on their own or in the belief that Europe is not as valuable to U.S. interests as Asia—then the United States is likely to fail in its rivalry with China. Tending to the geopolitical base, in other words, is the best way to ensure that the United States doesn’t face one monumental, World War III-style showdown in multiple regions that would push U.S. national will and resources to or beyond the limit.
Second, the crisis on Europe’s eastern frontier has given Washington the opportunity to reawaken its defense industrial capability and produce what is most needed in a war: ammunition. Defense procurement in peacetime tends to favor narrow bureaucratic interests, developing big-ticket weapons platforms rather than cheap ammunition, aircraft rather than missiles, tanks rather than artillery shells. The largest conventional war in modern Europe is now giving Washington the chance to alter the country’s industrial efforts, surging production of missiles, munitions, and the components that it needs for warfare in both continental European and Asian maritime warfighting environments. Of all the military aid Washington has allotted to Ukraine, the vast bulk of it has gone to U.S. industry to sustain and expand production lines. Many of the weapons deliveries to Ukraine are from surplus or outdated stock valued at replacement cost today—with that money going to buy state-of-the-art weapons for the U.S. military. This would have been impossible to achieve politically by simply prophesizing a war with China at some time in the future.
For both reasons, U.S. strategy should center on securing Europe before turning greater attention to Asia. This is the heart of a strategy of sequencing Washington’s main geopolitical rivalries. Observing these truths does not mean that the United States should not push European allies to take much more responsibility for their own defense—or that U.S. leaders should not be urgently preparing the country’s economy, military, and society for the possibility of having to fight a war across multiple regions. Nor does it lessen the fact that the United States’ military situation in the Indo-Pacific is dire. But in an era of trade-offs, choice is necessary. The United States will be best positioned to deal with China, the greatest threat in U.S. history, with Europe, the greatest alliance in U.S. history, stable and on its side. The adage of U.S. strategists in the 20th century—Europe first, Asia second—remains true in the 21st.
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