By Philip Acey*
The Trump administration’s effort to reconfigure U.S. foreign policy to maintain the unipolar international system has generated intense backlash, particularly among America’s allies in Europe and Canada. Much of the criticism fixates on Trump’s rhetoric and actions, rather than the intended strategic reforms for the transatlantic alliance. This skepticism highlights that the most consequential issue confronting the transatlantic alliance today is securing political buy-in from U.S. allies.
It is about how a hegemon – the U.S. – attempts to reform an international system during peacetime, and how junior partners respond when long-standing assumptions about burden-sharing, costs, and hierarchy are challenged. An alliance is never static, and there is continual negotiation regarding these issues.
Today, the dominant reaction among NATO and EU allies has been hesitation, resistance, and, in some cases, open defiance of American demands for reform. Many of these allied governments have complied narrowly with U.S. requests while withholding genuine political commitment. This strategy – adhering to the letter of reform while rejecting its spirit – carries serious risks. It reinforces Trump’s doubts about the reliability of America’s transatlantic allies while deepening allied fears of American abandonment. This dynamic, more than Trump’s rhetoric alone, sits at the heart of the transatlantic alliance’s current instability.
The Insecurity Dilemma within the Transatlantic Alliance
What we are witnessing is a classic insecurity dilemma operating within an alliance rather than between adversaries. Actions taken by one side to increase security are interpreted by the other as threats to its own interests, prompting countermeasures that further undermine trust. This threatens the maintenance of the unipolar international political system that has benefitted the U.S., Canada, and Europe disproportionately to the rest of the world.
From Trump’s perspective, pressure on allies to increase defence spending and assume greater burden-sharing and responsibility for its national security is intended to strengthen deterrence and adapt the transatlantic alliance to an era of renewed great-power competition with China and Russia. The U.S. – as the current hegemon – bears the greatest share of the costs and risks associated with sustaining the existing international system. As near-peer competitors such as China and Russia have emerged, the Trump administration has increasingly questioned whether the current burden- sharing arrangement remains sustainable, interpreting allies’ lack of buy-in as “free-riding.” By contrast, the Obama administration voiced similar concerns but framed Europe’s behaviour as “strategic complacency.”
The Trump administration has acted decisively on the concerns of successive past U.S. administrations that the existing security arrangement with NATO and European allies is unsustainable. Presidents Bush, Obama, and Biden warned that allied underinvestment threatened the alliance’s long-term viability and security. In 2011, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates under the Obama administration cautioned, “…if current trends in the decline of European defense capabilities are not halted and reversed, future US political leaders—those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me—may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost.”
From the perspective of Europe and Canada, however, the decisive actions taken by Trump appear as signals of potential abandonment. Trump’s transactional rhetoric, public coercion, and willingness to question alliance commitments amplify fears that the U.S. may no longer be a reliable security guarantor. For some European states, security under the U.S. nuclear umbrella is not merely beneficial, but existential.
Both of these perspectives are rational. European and Canadian governments are constrained and influenced by domestic politics, fiscal pressures, and public opinion. This limits the ability and speed by which allied governments can take on major reforms. Since the end of the Second World War, credible American security guarantees for Canada and its European NATO allies have provided deterrence at a fraction of the cost that independent defence would require. This logic of dependence was reinforced throughout the Cold War and has persisted to this day. However, from the American perspective, that very dependence is increasingly becoming a liability as adversaries become stronger and more assertive.
Why Strategic Reform within the Transatlantic Alliance is Preferable in Peacetime
The Trump administration’s core strategic argument is that it is preferable to reform the transatlantic alliance during peacetime rather than under the pressure of an externally-initiated crisis or war. Russia is not the wounded power it was in 1995 and nor is China the growing but under-developed country of the 1990s. Both seek to weaken the transatlantic alliance, end the era of unipolar American dominance, and reshape the international system in a way that shifts the balance of power back to the East for the first time since the 16th century, introducing a new system of rules and values.
Critics argue that Trump’s approach risks accelerating American decline by weakening cohesion within the transatlantic alliance. This concern is credible. Unity within any alliance – including NATO – is a source of deterrence. Trump’s approach to increasingly coerce allies in public – rather than behind closed doors – has eroded trust with its allies, which has then fuelled domestic public and political pressure, making it more difficult for allied leaders to be flexible without losing political capital.
However, it is also true that delaying reform until threats fully mature has historically proven costly. Prior to 9/11, Islamist terrorism was recognized by the U.S. government as a threat, but remained largely absent from the consciousness of the American public. Coordination among America’s security agencies was flawed, and successive administrations had not prioritized Islamist counter-terrorism on U.S. soil.
America’s under-preparedness came at an immense strategic, financial, and human cost, not only for the U.S. but for the whole world, which is still felt today. It required a crisis-driven response, that then evolved into the Global War on Terrorism, which shaped the world’s threat and security environment for the next two decades. Counterfactually, had the U.S. prioritized domestic counter-terrorism in the years prior to 9/11 and been able to thwart the plot, the world today would very likely be markedly different.
In the aftermath of 9/11, President Bush demanded immediate global buy-in in a wartime context, declaring, “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” NATO allies committed themselves and reformed accordingly.
Today, Trump is calling for allied buy-in during a time of relative peace to prevent a 9/11-style crisis-driven response towards near-peer competitors who challenge the current international system, upon which the transatlantic alliance is a central component. Reforming the transatlantic alliance now – particularly with respect to burden-sharing, defence manufacturing, and trade – while the international system remains relatively stable, is in the interest not only of the
U.S. but also of its European allies and Canada. Such reforms will take years, but it is preferable to act now rather than defer reform until forced by a war or crisis.
The challenge today, however, is that many Europeans and Canadians no longer perceive an urgent external danger. People are asking, “Where is the threat?” and an increasing number now view the U.S. as their primary or secondary threat ahead of Russia and/or China, with Canadians and Spaniards saying they consider the U.S. as their top threat. This perception complicates efforts to generate public support for reform within NATO and the transatlantic alliance, reinforces mutual suspicion, and provides a fertile ground for narratives and disinformation spread by adversaries who are trying to deliberately undermine and decouple the transatlantic alliance for their own strategic benefit.
Junior Partners and the Structure of the Transatlantic Alliance
Since its inception after the conclusion of the Second World War, the transatlantic alliance has been hierarchal, with the U.S. leading the alliance with Europe and Canada being junior partners. The transatlantic alliance has never been an act of charity. The U.S.-led Marshall Plan, Truman Doctrine, and NATO were strategic investments by the U.S. aimed at rebuilding and stabilizing a devastated Europe and containing Soviet expansion. Together, it involved hundreds of billions of dollars in reconstruction aid and the deployment of up to 475,000 U.S. troops across the continent at the height of the Cold War, a number that has since declined to roughly 80,000 today. Hierarchy was embedded in this alliance from its inception, even if it became less visible after the end of the Cold War. From the outset, the U.S. assumed disproportionate costs and risks in exchange for disproportionate influence over the strategic direction of the transatlantic alliance, including NATO.
Hierarchy in alliances does not ignore sovereignty, but it does allocate responsibility. In a hierarchy, if one country absorbs disproportionate risk and cost, it inevitably expects a greater say in how the alliance adapts to changing strategic conditions. During the Cold War, this hierarchy was widely accepted because the threat was immediate and overwhelming. Part of the resistance to reform among transatlantic allies likely stems from a lack of belief in the urgency and severity of a threat, as well as an overreliance on American Cold War-era security posturing in Europe.
From the end of the Cold War until the 2020s, Western society has lived in an atypical strategic environment, marked by the absence of a near-peer competitor. This has created an overwhelming sense of comfort and safety, which is now at risk from a rising but not yet fully mature near-peer threat. Arguably, it also fostered expectations among allies that
U.S. protection could remain constant without significant changes to their contributions to collective defence, both in letter and in spirit.
Recent allied efforts to reluctantly meet Trump’s demand for defence spending at 5% of GDP by 2035, without buying into its underlying spirit, carries serious consequences that mutually threaten the national interests of the U.S. and its allies. This dynamic reinforces skepticism within the Trump administration, prompting further public coercion and causes allies to question what additional concessions are required and whether their compliance will ever be sufficient.
From the Trump administration’s perspective, current reform efforts are intended to preserve – not dismantle – the transatlantic alliance and American leadership in a unipolar international system. Trump’s goal is to reconfigure the
U.S. and its alliance system for renewed great-power competition, not to abandon it. But from the perspective of the allied leadership in Europe and Canada, Trump’s public coercion and desired reforms to the alliance threaten the very existence of the alliance itself, raising fears that the U.S. is no longer a dependable ally.
The European Strategic Bind regarding Ukraine and Greenland
Nowhere is this tension more visible than regarding Ukraine. European leaders acknowledge that any durable settlement requires a U.S. security “backstop,” yet many remain wary of Trump’s approach to negotiations with Ukraine and Russia, which largely sidelines European leaders. At the same time, European leaders are fully aware that they are not in a position to independently deter and defend themselves against Russia without American support, particularly after transferring significant military assets to Ukraine and assuming large fiscal burdens to sustain Ukraine’s war effort.
The disagreement over Greenland illustrates similar dynamics. The Arctic is rapidly militarizing and gaining economic significance. Greenland is effectively an under-governed territory in a region of growing strategic significance, which invites aggression from adversaries, threatening NATO’s interests and regional stability. From Trump’s perspective, potential U.S. acquisition of Greenland is framed as a means of denying adversaries opportunities to exploit regional vulnerabilities, a goal that aligns with the interests of Canada and European NATO allies.
However, European and Canadian leaders view such proposals as destabilizing and unnecessary, emphasizing continued adherence to collective defence with the U.S. instead. Yet the Trump administration doubts whether its NATO allies are willing or capable of sufficiently investing in Greenland and Arctic defence. Modest Danish commitments – made after earlier Trump threats to acquire Greenland – to provide an additional $1.5 billion for Greenland’s defence, which included a few drones, two inspection ships and two additional dog-sled teams, simply reinforced those doubts.
Together, the cases of Ukraine and Greenland reveal a strategic bind for Canadian and European allies. They remain deeply dependent on U.S. military power for their own security while they continue to resist or reluctantly agree to U.S.-driven reform of the transatlantic alliance. Their early assumption that Trumpian pressure could simply be ignored or resisted until the 2028 presidential election has proven to be misplaced. Trump has acted faster and more boldly than anticipated, and he still has not even completed the first year of his second term. The result is growing uncertainty on both sides of the Atlantic, deepening distrust, and a weakened negotiating position for the junior partners, as Trump wields his leverage in unconventional ways.
Symbolic Buy-in Won’t Sustain the Transatlantic Alliance
The central lesson is that sustaining the transatlantic alliance requires renewed and credible buy-in from all members. NATO has endured so far because its members have historically accepted both the benefits and constraints of alliance membership, including respect for hierarchy and a shared understanding of burden-sharing. After 9/11, NATO allies demonstrated this buy-in by reorienting towards counter-terrorism and fighting alongside the U.S. in Afghanistan and elsewhere at significant cost. The alliance has also rested on America’s longstanding reluctance – until Trump – to use its leverage coercively to pressure defence reform.
Trump’s rhetoric, however, signals an effort to compel reform rather than abandon the transatlantic alliance. Whether NATO and the alliance endures and the insecurity dilemma is resolved depends on whether the U.S. and its allies can renegotiate expectations and burden-sharing without the collapse of trust. Historically, hegemonic systems have required continual alliance reform and adjustments in burden-sharing among its members. Europe itself illustrates this as its regional hegemonies from the 16th to 19th centuries rose or fell in response to shifting alliance structures and responsibilities.
The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS), released in November 2025, explicitly states this expectation, “The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over. We count among our many allies and partners dozens of wealthy, sophisticated nations that must assume primary responsibility for their regions and contribute far more to our collective defense.” The NSS underscores that the U.S. expects Canada and its European allies to increase their contributions to defence, enabling the U.S. to focus on providing a strategic “backstop” to its partners while prioritizing key regions such as the Western Hemisphere, Arctic, and Indo-Pacific.
Therefore, strengthening the transatlantic alliance – and ensuring that European and Canadian allies assume primary responsibility for their defence – requires genuine buy-in, not symbolic compliance. When junior partners consistently offer symbolic compliance, successive U.S. administrations have interpreted it as underinvestment and an unreliable partnership, while Trump’s public coercion and pressure reinforce allied fears of potential abandonment.
Resolving this insecurity dilemma requires not just reform of burden-sharing or defence spending, but sustained confidence-building measures that signal commitment and shared responsibility across the alliance. Without meaningful buy-in from junior partners and a restoration of transatlantic trust, the international political system that has disproportionately benefited North America and Europe for decades will not endure, and that is exactly what its adversaries want.
*Philip Acey is a PhD candidate from Canada and an independent political researcher and analyst who has worked for over a decade across Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America, visiting more than 50 countries. His research has advised the UN Security Council, UN agencies, diplomats, and humanitarian organizations. Connect with him on X: @Philipfficial
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