NonCredibleDefense

So, during the Cold War, the US had some very direct interests in European security. The US did not want Moscow conquering Europe, then exploiting European capability and resources against the US.

That's probably not any kind of a near-term risk in the post-Cold-War era. Even the people who are very concerned about Russia and feel that it could do very real harm in Europe don't see Russia overrunning all of Europe in the near future. Too big for Russia's mouth to take in one bite.

And Europe has a lot of potential, much larger economy than does Russia. I remember seeing a statistic somewhere that today, Russia is spending more on defense than all of Europe.

kagis

https://breakingdefense.com/2025/02/russia-overtakes-all-of-europe-on-defense-spending-in-key-metric-iiss-military-balance/

Russia overtakes all of Europe on defense spending in key metric: IISS military balance

The spending figures included in the think tank’s newly published Military Balance report also show that in real-terms, Russia’s military expenditure increased by over 40 percent in 2024.

But...Europe's still got that much larger economy. So even if Europe is not ready and may not want to spend more on defense, it can if it has the political will to do so, and one can probably assume that Europe would, if push came to shove, spend more rather than simply watching as Russia slowly clomped across Europe.

But...I'm not sure that I'd say that the US doesn't have some substantial interests in Atlanticism. For one, China is going to be trying to expand its influence and control in the world. China may not primarily be trying to expand its influence through hard power, even though it is certainly building out its military and power projection capabilities. It may aim to use economic and political pressures. Europe's a more-important player there. It does have economic clout comparable to the US.

One of the points I've brought up before is that one of the critical capabilities feeding into both economic and probably military capabilities in the US-China situation is chipmaking. The US government paid to bring extreme ultraviolet lithography to the prototype phase...but then they dropped it. It was the Dutch who took it from there to a commercial state. The US is going to care a lot about China not having access to that technology, and the US continuing to have access to it.

When the US was pushing hard to get people not to use Huawei 5G infrastructure, they were promoting Sweden's Ericsson or Finland's Nokia. I don't know how the situation has developed subsequent to that, but the reason they were doing so was because the US doesn't have a domestic company that fills that role -- we had the Senate talking about buying one of those two companies if Europe wasn't willing to support them, because it was a strategic weakness the US had vis-a-vis China.

There are probably a bunch of others, but those are specific technologies that come to my mind.

Point is, there are capabilities that Europe has that the US does care about as regards China and wants onside. I think that it's probably true that the US is inevitably going to focus more on China over time, and less on happenings in Europe's neighborhood than in the past. But I'm skeptical that it's in US interests to outright end Atlanticism. And one of the things that the US can bring to the table that does have value to Europe is a considerable amount of hard power.