The U.S.-Europe Alliance Is Strained. Here Is What the Debate Gets Right and Wrong.

The Divorce Metaphor

A recent Wall Street Journal piece, titled "There Is No Going Back: The Inside Story of Europe's Rupture with the USA," described a January crisis meeting among Europe's senior leaders as the moment countries "began to explore separate paths." The piece, written by a trio of Journal reporters, framed the rupture as the central foreign-policy story of this era.

Victor Davis Hanson, writing and speaking for The Daily Signal, picked up that framing and pushed it further, arguing that the estrangement reflects something deeper than a policy dispute with the Trump administration.

Hanson's core historical claim is straightforward. For roughly five centuries, Europe was the economic, cultural, and scientific center of the world. London was the financial capital. Paris set the intellectual agenda. By the late 19th century, a unified Germany had become the industrial leader, briefly overtaking Britain. Then the United States absorbed what Hanson calls Europe's "most bold, most rugged, most adventurous" emigrants—people with no land and no titles—and from roughly the Civil War through World War I, that population "just took over the world."

That is a defensible read of economic history, not a fringe argument.

What the European Side Gets Right

European critics of the current U.S. posture have legitimate grievances worth stating plainly. The Trump administration's comments about Greenland, its early 2025 pressure on NATO burden-sharing, and its ambiguous signals on Article 5 commitments genuinely rattled European defense planners. Those weren't confected anxieties.

The argument that Europe should not depend on a single external guarantor is reasonable risk-management for any continent with 450 million people. European voters also worry, with some justification, about importing social fractures alongside immigration. That concern does not belong exclusively to the American right.

Where the "Destroyed From Within" Argument Overstates

Hanson's framing, echoed in the Daily Signal piece, treats European decline as essentially self-inflicted and irreversible. The evidence is more mixed.

Hanson himself notes that the EU economy is roughly $10 trillion smaller than that of the United States—GDP of approximately $20 trillion versus $31 trillion—a gap that has grown rather than closed since early projections suggested Europe would overtake the U.S. That is real. But the "destroyed from within" language collapses several distinct problems into one narrative: immigration integration failures, fiscal pressures on social programs, demographic decline, and declining military capacity. Those are real and separate challenges, each with its own evidence base. Treating them as a unified death spiral is analytically sloppy, even if the individual data points are accurate.

On defense, Hanson notes that the combined carrier force of the entire EU's 450 million people amounts to roughly three carriers, most of them in repair—a stark contrast to the U.S. Navy's fleet. That gap is undeniable. But a bloc of that size retains significant latent capacity if political will materializes.

The Actual Strategic Question

The Journal's framing—"is it a good thing or a bad thing?"—is the right question, and it doesn't have a clean answer.

If Europe develops genuine defense self-sufficiency, American taxpayers benefit. The U.S. has spent decades subsidizing European security. But a Europe that tilts toward accommodation with Russia or toward transactional neutrality is a different outcome entirely. The Journal piece notes that "important players on both sides are working hard to keep a loveless marriage going." Alliances built on habit and institutions survive friction that purely interest-based partnerships do not.

What Neither Side Is Saying Clearly

The United States also has structural problems, including declining manufacturing capacity in key defense sectors and a political culture that can't agree on basic budget math. American commentators who frame this purely as European failure are working with an incomplete dataset.

At the same time, the European instinct to respond to American pressure by retreating into multilateral process rather than building actual military capacity has been a documented pattern for decades. Calls for strategic autonomy have rarely been backed by the defense budgets required to make autonomy real.

The unresolved question is whether the current European rearmament push—accelerated by Russian aggression and U.S. pressure—actually produces deployable military capability, or whether it stalls once the immediate political pressure eases. That outcome will determine whether this is a painful but productive realignment or a genuine rupture with lasting consequences.