How does the new NSS redefine U.S. strategy? The 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS) is remarkable not because it introduces entirely new themes, but because it systematically recenters them around a single organizing principle: the primacy of the American homeland and the Western Hemisphere as the decisive theater of U.S. security policy. In contrast to earlier, globally expansive strategies, the document narrows the official purpose of foreign policy to the protection of core national interests and explicitly treats economics, border security, and cultural cohesion as central security variables, not merely domestic policy concerns. The NSS can be read in full as an attempt to fuse “America First” economic nationalism, a renewed hemispheric doctrine, and a strong emphasis on internal resilience into a coherent, though normatively contentious, framework.
From an analytical perspective, three structural shifts stand out. First, the NSS elevates the Western Hemisphere to the top of the U.S. priority list, effectively asserting a “Trump corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine and explicitly calling for a readjustment of global military presence away from less vital theate rs.Second, it places economic power—re‑industrialization, control of critical supply chains, and energy abundance—at the very center of long‑term strategic competition, with military strength understood as a derivative of domestic economic performance rather than the other way around. Third, it broadens the notion of threat to include “cultural subversion,” hostile influence operations, and internal fragmentation, thereby pulling questions of identity, social cohesion, and political culture directly into the domain of national security.
The emphasis on nuclear and technological superiority is hardly new, but the ambition is unusually explicit. The strategy demands “the world’s most robust, credible, and modern nuclear deterrent” and next‑generation missile defenses, described metaphorically as a “Golden Dome for the American homeland,” to shield the United States and its allies from both state and non‑state threats. In doing so, the document envisages a security architecture in which a hardened and technologically superior U.S. homeland serves as the ultimate anchor of a more selective, tightly prioritized global engagement. Critics have noted that this framing reduces previous language about defending a rules‑based order and instead foregrounds a narrower calculus of cost, risk, and material advantage.
How does the NSS view Europe?
The most striking feature from a European vantage point is not merely that Europe is deprioritized; it is the way Europe is described. The NSS devotes far fewer paragraphs to Europe than to Asia and treats the continent less as the main arena of great‑power competition and more as a region expected to stabilize itself and assume “primary responsibility” for its own defense. This is accompanied by unusually sharp criticism of European allies, with the strategy questioning both their defense efforts and, at times, the internal cohesion and long‑term reliability of European societies. In effect, Europe appears simultaneously as a partner of convenience, a lagging security consumer, and a cautionary tale of what the United States seeks to avoid domestically.
Equally important is what the NSS says about Russia and the war in Ukraine. The document explicitly calls for an “expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine” and frames the objective less in terms of defeating Russia than in re‑establishing “strategic stability” while preserving Ukraine’s viability as a state. This marks a departure from earlier strategies that placed Russia unequivocally in the category of systemic adversary and instead situates the conflict within a broader desire to limit U.S. exposure in secondary theaters. For Europe, this signals that Washington’s tolerance for a prolonged high‑intensity war on the continent is waning and that any political settlement will be evaluated primarily against U.S. resource constraints and hemispheric priorities.
Furthermore, the NSS’s economic chapters indirectly target Europe by prioritizing domestic subsidies, tariffs, and aggressive industrial policy to rebuild U.S. manufacturing and insulate supply chains, even when this conflicts with the interests of close allies. European economies are implicitly expected to adapt to a world in which the United States uses its market power and regulatory tools to secure its own predominance in critical technologies, energy, and manufacturing. Commentators from institutions such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Atlantic Council note that the strategy is “more polemic than policy” in tone, but agree that its practical effect is to limit the scope of U.S. ambitions abroad while tightening expectations on allies to carry more of the burden.
What does the NSS mean for Europe?
From a political science perspective, the NSS should be understood as a structural stress test for European strategic assumptions. For roughly three decades, Europe has relied on an implicit grand bargain: the United States guarantees the hard security of the continent and leads coalition diplomacy, while Europeans provide diplomatic support, some expeditionary capacity, and a large, wealthy market embedded in multilateral institutions. The new NSS calls this bargain into question in three ways. First, by relocating the center of gravity of U.S. strategy to the Western Hemisphere, it effectively demotes Europe from core to secondary theater status. Second, by linking security so closely to domestic economic and cultural resilience, it makes transatlantic relations more dependent on internal U.S. political cycles and ideological battles. Third, by criticizing European allies openly, it normalizes a more transactional—and at times confrontational—tone toward partners who had long been rhetorically sheltered.
The immediate implication for Europe is a dual vulnerability: material and reputational. Materially, the United States is signaling that its force posture, budgetary priorities, and diplomatic attention will be increasingly oriented toward border enforcement, hemispheric stability, and selective deterrence in the Indo‑Pacific, rendering European security more contingent and less automatic. Reputationally, European states risk being portrayed in U.S. domestic discourse as weak, overregulated, and insufficiently committed to their own defense, a narrative that can easily be instrumentalized in Washington’s internal politics. This combination undermines Europe’s leverage and complicates its ability to shape U.S. choices, even on matters where European stakes are highest, such as the future of Ukraine or sanctions regimes vis‑à‑vis Russia and China.
At the same time, the NSS creates a paradoxical opportunity. By explicitly calling on Europe to assume “primary responsibility for its own defense,” Washington is, intentionally or not, authorizing a more autonomous European security role. In the long tradition of alliance politics, such clear signaling can function as a permissive condition: it allows European leaders to argue domestically that higher defense spending, industrial consolidation, and more robust common policies are not anti‑American but rather a necessary adaptation to U.S. preferences. The question is whether Europe can translate this permissive condition into concrete capacity and political cohesion before the strategic window narrows.
How should Europe react to the NSS?
The appropriate European response must go beyond rhetorical dismay about tone and language. To treat the NSS as a mere aberration would be analytically naïve, because it coherently reflects deeper trends in U.S. politics: a growing emphasis on domestic inequalities and migration, skepticism of costly foreign entanglements, and rising impatience with allies perceived as free riders. A defensive reflex—denouncing the strategy while maintaining existing patterns of underinvestment and fragmentation—would therefore only deepen the credibility gap that the NSS implicitly exploits. From a political science standpoint, the only viable path is strategic adaptation: using the NSS as a focal point to accelerate long‑overdue reforms.
This adaptation has at least three interlocking dimensions. First, Europe must build genuine hard power. That means not only meeting numerical spending targets, but systematically investing in areas where U.S. support may become scarcer: integrated air and missile defense, long‑range fires, munitions production, cyber and space capabilities, and sustainable land and maritime forces with depth in logistics and reserves. Second, Europe needs to consolidate its defense industrial base. As long as procurement remains fragmented along national lines, European states will struggle to generate economies of scale and to offer the United States an industrial partnership rather than an asymmetric dependency. Third, Europe must engage in a more mature internal debate about deterrence and extended nuclear guarantees, particularly regarding the role of French and British nuclear forces in a scenario where U.S. priorities shift further toward the Western Hemisphere and the Indo‑Pacific.
Equally important is the political dimension. Since the NSS explicitly frames internal cohesion and “cultural subversion” as central security concerns, European leaders must recognize that legitimacy at home is now a strategic variable in transatlantic relations. This implies more serious engagement with public anxieties over migration, identity, and inequality, not simply through technocratic management but through democratic deliberation and policy innovation. If European societies appear unstable, polarized, or ungovernable, the perceived value of Europe as a reliable partner diminishes—regardless of formal treaty commitments. A strategically literate response therefore combines military and industrial reforms with political efforts to renew democratic legitimacy and social resilience.
What future emerges if Europe acts accordingly?
If Europe does respond in a coherent and sustained way, the long‑term effect of the NSS could be to catalyze a transformation of the transatlantic relationship from protection to partnership. In such a scenario, European states would, over the next decade or two, close key capability gaps, create more integrated structures for planning and procurement, and gradually assume the primary burden of conventional deterrence on the continent. The United States, in turn, would maintain a more modest but strategically significant presence, focused on nuclear backstopping, specialized enablers, and high‑impact joint exercises, while redirecting a larger share of its attention to the Western Hemisphere and Indo‑Pacific contingencies. Rather than signaling abandonment, this posture would institutionalize a division of labor grounded in comparative advantage.
In this future, Europe’s role in the world would be qualitatively different. No longer merely the primary theater of others’ strategy, Europe would become a security provider in its neighborhood, a major regulatory and economic pole, and a diplomatic broker between an inward‑leaning United States and a more assertive Global South. A Europe capable of projecting stabilizing power in the Balkans, the Black Sea region, the Eastern Mediterranean, and parts of Africa would be better positioned to shape norms, standards, and crisis responses, rather than simply reacting to U.S. or great‑power initiatives. At the same time, a more autonomous Europe could engage the United States from a position of constructive independence: willing to align when interests converge, but also able to articulate and pursue distinct preferences on trade, climate, digital regulation, and China policy.
Of course, this is not the only plausible trajectory. If Europe fails to act—if defense investments remain incoherent, industrial consolidation stalls, and domestic politics continue to fragment—the likely outcome is a gradual hollowing out of the transatlantic link. Under such conditions, the NSS would mark the beginning of a long, managed disengagement in which the United States increasingly views Europe as both strategically secondary and politically unreliable, while European publics remain psychologically dependent on U.S. guarantees that are no longer backed by commensurate capabilities. From a political science standpoint, the NSS is thus more than a policy document: it is a revealing test of whether Europe can adjust its strategic behavior to a world in which American protection is no longer the automatic default, but a conditional choice that must be earned through performance.
The NSS – National Security Strategy of the U.S. White House is available here.
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