Europe's Struggle with Strategic Rigidity

History has shown us plenty of times that empires rise, empires fall, friends may become enemies, and enemies may become friends. For some, this is an obvious realist insight; for others, shaped by a Manichaean worldview, far less so. Living in an anarchic international system, relations between neighbours and partners are inherently fluid. They change because interests never remain the same over time for a multitude of reasons, including shifts in power, resources, and security that are nevertheless often filtered through rigid moral binaries. Such binaries reduce a complex and contingent international system to a static division between permanent friends and permanent enemies. This way of thinking obscures contingency, discourages strategic recalibration, and risks transforming shifting interests into self-fulfilling antagonisms.

Recent history provides clear examples of such tectonic shifts in interest and alignment. One of the most striking cases is the relationship between the Soviet Union (and later Russia) and China. Once bound by ideological affinity, the two became major rivals following the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s, culminating in deadly border clashes and a prolonged period of hostility. During China's opening to the United States, this rivalry was embedded within a broader triangular diplomacy that reshaped the Cold War balance of power. Today, despite lingering mistrust and asymmetries, Moscow and Beijing have drawn closer again not out of sentiment or ideological convergence, but as a rational response to shifting systemic pressures, particularly those emanating from the United States.

Another, more recent, example can be found in the evolving relationship between the United States under Donald Trump and the European Union. Since the end of the Second World War, both have been close partners, bound together by shared institutions, security guarantees, and a broadly liberal international order. Yet in recent years, divergences in interests, priorities, and threat perceptions have become increasingly visible. Many European policymakers long assumed that their foreign policy orientation was automatically aligned with that of the United States, the principal enforcer of the liberal world order. This assumption was not irrational under earlier systemic conditions, but it hardened into a form of strategic rigidity once those conditions began to change. Over time, strategic rigidity went hand in hand with ideological blindness, ultimately producing a form of geopolitical essentialism in which alignment with the United States was treated as permanent and unquestionable.

Signs of this misalignment were already present in policies pursued by the EU and individual member states, particularly in their limited willingness to develop autonomous strategic capacities or independently calibrate policies toward Russia and China. As long as American interests and European security priorities broadly overlapped, this dependence appeared manageable. Once they began to diverge, however, the costs of overreliance became increasingly apparent.

In this context, emerging tensions surrounding Greenland and the broader Arctic should not be dismissed as peripheral. While not yet a militarized crisis, the Arctic has become a zone of growing strategic competition involving resources, infrastructure, and military presence. These dynamics have exposed the extent to which Europe remains politically and militarily dependent on the United States in regions of increasing geostrategic importance. As a result, European policymakers are now confronted with the need to reassess long-standing assumptions and acknowledge the naïveté of decisions made over the past twenty-five years.

Europe's political overreliance on the United States, its reluctance to pursue independent policies toward Russia and China, and its tendency to follow Washington's shifting priorities as the global hegemon all require serious reconsideration if similar strategic mistakes are to be avoided in the future. The enduring belief that Europe has fixed friends and fixed enemies has contributed to its current predicament. With political capital, resources, and strategic focus overwhelmingly concentrated on confronting Russia in Ukraine, Europe has overstretched its capacity for deterrence on other fronts.

From a narrowly interest-based perspective, the United States has not necessarily miscalculated. Rather, it has acted in accordance with its own strategic priorities, even where this has proven destabilizing for its European partners. In doing so, Washington has demanded what it deems necessary from actors that, despite being former equals or close allies, now lack the political cohesion and military autonomy to effectively resist such pressure. This asymmetry is not a moral judgment but a structural reality of power politics.

As difficult as it may be to accept, if the United States continues along its current trajectory, Europe will be forced to reconsider its approach toward actors long treated as immutable adversaries. This does not imply ideological alignment or moral endorsement, but a pragmatic reassessment of engagement, deterrence, and balance-of-power considerations. An international system defined by contingency rather than permanence offers no guarantees of eternal friendship or eternal enmity. States that fail to internalize this lesson risk confusing sentiment with strategy and in doing so, repeating the very mistakes history has warned against time and again.