On December 4, 2025, the White House released the U.S. National Security Strategy, a document outlining the geopolitical course of the presidential administration for Donald Trump’s second term.
The Strategy primarily serves a signaling function in a rapidly evolving environment in which allies and adversaries alike are calibrating their own policies based on expected U.S. behavior in the coming years.
It explicitly declares the exhaustion of a model in which Washington unilaterally underwrites the global order and signals a shift toward compelling allies to assume primary responsibility for their respective regions.
The document defines the transatlantic space as a critical reserve of combined economic power, technological interoperability, and defense-industrial scale—without which the United States cannot sustain simultaneous deterrence of the PRC in the Western Pacific and of the axis of autocracies across Eurasia.
Washington seeks to keep confrontation below the threshold of major war by shaping a resource configuration within the democratic bloc that renders the anticipated outcome of escalation unacceptable for Beijing and its partners in the autocratic axis.
For the United States, a direct clash with the PRC and the axis of autocracies is strategically disadvantageous, both due to industrial-technological risks and the domestic political costs of prolonged mobilization.
For Europe, a large-scale war represents an existential scenario due to geography and direct exposure to the Russian theater. The divergence lies in how escalation on the continent is to be prevented. European capitals seek de-escalation of Russia’s war against Ukraine as a prerequisite for stabilizing the continent and reducing the risk of NATO’s direct involvement.
Washington frames a negotiated cessation of hostilities in Ukraine as a core U.S. interest, linking it to the stabilization of European economies, the prevention of inadvertent escalation, and the restoration of strategic stability with Russia.
This logic simultaneously frees U.S. resources for the Indo-Pacific theater while exerting pressure on Europe and Ukraine regarding the pace and parameters of compromise.
The transatlantic economic framework remains the world’s largest hub of trade, investment, and technological linkages. In 2024, EU–U.S. economic interaction was estimated at $9.5 trillion and supported more than 16 million jobs on both sides of the Atlantic.
Transatlantic data flows account for over half of Europe’s external data transfers and roughly half of those of the United States, directly tying issues of privacy, compliance, and cybersecurity standards to the competitiveness of Western technological ecosystems.
The United States needs Europe as a force multiplier but does not accept a model of equal coordination. Washington maintains autonomous tracks on Ukraine, the Middle East, Russia, and the Arctic and expects Europe to align with the U.S. course.
In response, several European capitals are expanding channels of economic and political engagement with the PRC, using them as leverage to pressure Washington to take European priorities into account on critical continental security issues.
The European response is shaped around a security imperative. The EU seeks to reduce the risk of war expanding across the continent and to minimize scenarios of direct escalation that would require mass mobilization.
The practical instruments of this logic are accelerated defense-capability buildup and production, alongside efforts to preserve the functionality of supranational decision-making mechanisms amid internal political fragmentation.
The U.S. response, as described in the Strategy, consists of raising demands on Europe’s contribution to deterrence—including defense spending, industrial output, standardization, and sanctions synchronization.
In parallel, Washington is expanding political instruments of influence within the European environment to constrain the EU’s technological and investment engagement with the PRC.
Even under the current configuration, transatlantic security mechanisms remain functional. However, the United States lacks guarantees that European allies are prepared for sustained, large-scale involvement should rapid response to escalation in the Indo-Pacific become necessary.
The structural source of U.S. reliance on Europe lies in the scale of the China-containment challenge and in domestic constraints on America’s mobilization and production base.
The United States cannot, within a compressed timeframe, independently expand manufacturing capacity, mobilization reserves, export controls, and standardization regimes to a level sufficient for symmetric competition with the PRC without European industry, finance, and regulatory alignment.
The National Security Strategy embeds a model in which Washington views Europe primarily as a source of additional capabilities and as an object of political adjustment rather than as an equal center of strategic decision-making.
In practical terms, this means Washington retains autonomous control over key policy tracks and expects Europe to align with the U.S. sequencing of priorities.
In the Strategy’s language, this is framed as the “need to simultaneously stabilize Europe and restore strategic stability with Russia,” to “compel Europe to assume primary responsibility for its own defense,” and to “cultivate internal resistance to the current trajectory of European politics.”
The publication of the Strategy at the end of 2025 serves as a signal to European partners regarding the limits of acceptable balancing in relations with the PRC.
Washington interprets demonstrative channels of rapprochement with Beijing as undermining the coordinated regime of technological and investment restrictions.
Within this framework, political pressure on national capitals and engagement with right-wing parties—explicitly referred to in the Strategy as “patriotic parties of Europe”—become part of the toolkit for disciplining Europe’s strategic course.
The document explicitly demands European action against China’s “mercantilist overcapacity, technology theft, and cyber espionage,” while simultaneously signaling an intent to open European markets to U.S. goods and services as an element of allied discipline.
The White House demonstrates readiness to work with right-wing parties across Europe as instruments to accelerate decisions that subordinate European economic and technological regimes to the U.S. logic of containing the PRC.
This signal reflects Washington’s practical need to secure a pre-validated allied support framework in the event of escalation in the Indo-Pacific, including finance, industrial supply chains, sanctions regimes, and shared technological standards.
In parallel, the United States relies on its Indo-Pacific alliance network—primarily Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the Philippines—but it is the transatlantic bloc that provides Washington with the critical mass of industry, finance, and standards required for a prolonged cycle of competition.
Beijing has already shifted competition with the West into a more coercive phase, combining military demonstrations of force with economic, technological, and investment pressure.
China’s toolkit is moving away from indirect influence via the Global South toward more direct pressure on democratic centers of power, including the United States and the EU.
The PRC is accelerating the modernization of the People’s Liberation Army and transitioning its economy and society into a mode of long-term confrontation with the West. By the end of the decade, Beijing aims to institutionalize these changes as the foundation for broader coercion of democratic power centers.
China will consolidate logistics networks across the Global South to secure supplies of critical goods and raw materials and to accumulate resources for escalation.
Alongside China’s military-economic mobilization, a window of political vulnerability is opening in Europe—one that both Beijing and Washington will seek to exploit.
Between 2027 and 2029, key European states will hold parliamentary and presidential elections with a high probability of victories by Euroskeptic forces opposed to current governments and EU supranational institutions.
This electoral cycle generates political turbulence driven by party-system fragmentation and growing coalition instability in major capitals. As a result, decision-making in Brussels slows, while opportunities expand for external financing, information operations, and investment penetration into critical sectors.
Internal pressure on EU-wide structures from forces questioning the current integration trajectory will reduce the Union’s governability, complicating decision-making in Brussels and increasing vulnerability to external military and economic pressure.
During this period of electoral turbulence, the EU becomes simultaneously a target of China’s influence strategy and of U.S. efforts to advance political transformation across the continent. Beijing invests in deepening dependencies and internal divisions within the EU.
Washington acts symmetrically, seeking leverage over European elites and party systems to anchor European decisions to the U.S. strategy of containing the PRC.
The United States and China may support the same political forces while expecting opposite outcomes. This turns the 2027–2029 electoral cycle into a high-risk zone in which changes of government do not guarantee either consolidation of the democratic bloc or automatic expansion of Chinese influence.
The decisive factor will be whether new governments can implement policies of investment screening, technological security, and reduction of critical-resource dependencies on the PRC.
Chinese investments in strategic EU sectors and Europe’s dependence on critical minerals already function as tools of political coercion and as channels for reshaping European geopolitical dynamics in Beijing’s favor.
Given the PRC’s intention to deploy the full spectrum of instruments to revise the global balance of power by the end of the decade, the United States embeds in the Strategy a preemptive buildup of political and security capacity. The objective is to deny Beijing strategic advantage and reduce incentives for escalation into a more confrontational phase.
The stated goal and the logic embedded in the Strategy do not resolve the dilemma of how the United States can preserve its status as the political and ideological leader of the West while simultaneously deterring Beijing from escalating confrontation.
Without Europe’s defense-industrial base and sanctions synchronization, the United States cannot sustain simultaneous deterrence around Taiwan and across the Eurasian theater, and therefore cannot create conditions under which the expected outcome of major escalation is unacceptable for autocracies.
For this reason, the Strategy becomes an instrument of pressure on Europe, embedding a logic in which support for opposition forces and internal political influence become part of the U.S. toolkit to discipline Europe’s strategic course ahead of the 2027–2029 electoral cycle.
The Strategy contains an internal contradiction. The United States simultaneously needs the EU as a force multiplier while applying transactional pressure that increases fragmentation and facilitates Chinese penetration through bilateral channels.
This approach prioritizes transactional manageability, bilateral leverage, and a reduction in the role of EU supranational institutions in order to shift decision-making centers to national capitals.
From the perspective of proponents of this approach, such a fundamental restructuring of Europe would simplify the implementation of U.S.-favored trade and economic models among individual EU member states, as Washington would find it easier to identify and exploit the vulnerabilities of each country.
The proposed model—supported by Donald Trump, his inner circle, and a group of informal intermediaries and presidential advisers—is based on the belief that a fragmented Europe will be more manageable and less capable of autonomously formulating and executing foreign policy.
Achieving this objective would be further facilitated by weakening EU supranational structures, whose internal stability rests on multi-stage decision-making systems and therefore on lower sensitivity to electoral trends than national governments.
Because a fundamental ideological transformation of EU-wide institutions cannot occur within a single electoral cycle, advocates of EU disintegration seek to push them into prolonged political imbalance at the moment of electoral success by conservative and Euroskeptic forces.
As a result, renewed European governments would be more inclined to operate within the framework of U.S. strategy and to delegate agenda-setting for the democratic bloc to the United States.
This approach does not strengthen U.S. positions vis-à-vis the axis of autocracies, as fragmentation of European institutions undermines the foundation for scaling joint defense and technological capacity.
Effective countering of Beijing requires an increase in the combined defense, industrial, and economic potential of the Western bloc—achievable only through maintaining unity and internal governability within Europe’s political dynamics.
One of Washington’s key resources for effectively countering the axis of autocracies lies in integrating the existing capabilities of European states.
As the United States remains the largest economy and military power within the democratic bloc, Washington is positioned to assume the role of coordinator of a unified transatlantic course and, consequently, to retain its capacity to represent the strategic interests of the Western world as a whole.
The implementation of joint U.S.–EU defense programs, the standardization of military-industrial production, and the synchronization of trade and sanctions restrictions against the axis of autocracies would signal to Beijing and Moscow that the economies and security institutions of the democratic bloc function as an interconnected system.
An approach that treats the weakening of EU supranational structures and the political disintegration of the continent as a means of strengthening American influence is fundamentally misaligned with U.S. strategic objectives.
Pursuing such a course would result in the loss of Europe’s financial and defense-industrial resources—assets the United States seeks to consolidate in order to deter China.
Conversely, the course advocated by several members of the President’s inner circle facilitates China’s economic and investment expansion across the continent by exploiting European political fragmentation, diverging national interests, and the presence of governments willing to pursue bilateral cooperation with Beijing in defiance of the democratic bloc’s common position.
Right-wing conservative governments that curtail Brussels’ authority and shift EU policymaking toward intergovernmental bargaining become natural entry points for the PRC into the continental economy.
Through these capitals, Beijing scales up its investment footprint and erodes the unified European position on investment screening, technological security, and dependence on critical resources.
The systematic strengthening of China’s economic influence over Viktor Orbán’s government during the first half of the 2020s resulted in 44 percent of all Chinese investment entering Europe in 2023 being directed to Hungary.
Although this share declined to 31 percent in 2024, Beijing’s capital inflows into Hungary still exceeded the combined volume of Chinese investment directed that year to Europe’s leading economies—France, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
The combination of credit instruments and ongoing disputes between Budapest and European institutions creates a dependency horizon extending beyond a single electoral cycle.
Under such conditions, even a change of government does not guarantee a rapid dismantling of these ties when they are embedded in debt and long-term contractual obligations.
China’s economic presence is also expanding in other EU member states where conservative Euroskeptic governments came to power between 2023 and 2025. China is Slovakia’s largest trading partner outside the EU and the second-largest supplier of goods to the Czech Republic after Germany.
Alongside growing trade relations—which in 2024 produced a €33.7 billion trade deficit for Prague—China continues to increase its investment footprint in Central European states.
As of December 2023, China’s cumulative investment in Slovakia totaled $3.54 million, concentrated primarily in telecommunications, logistics, energy, and the automotive sector.
In the Czech Republic, the Chinese conglomerate CEFC, which maintains ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), acquired a 10 percent stake in the Central European investment group J&T, as well as holdings in the aviation and media sectors.
The behavior of the governments led by Orbán, Robert Fico, and Andrej Babiš illustrates the limits of Washington’s bet on Euroskeptic transformations.
Replacing traditional EU political elites with Euroskeptic forces does not ensure automatic support for the U.S. China-containment strategy, nor does it guarantee that conservative governments will act in lockstep with Washington on restricting Chinese economic, technological, and investment influence.
As a result, this approach does not enhance U.S. leverage over Europe but instead increases the continent’s permeability to Chinese bilateral engagement.
Because political forces critical of deeper European integration view engagement with Beijing as a source of economic resources and a means of resolving conflicts with EU institutions, the Trump administration faces the need to recalibrate its European strategy.
The assumption that the rise of Euroskeptic forces to power would automatically align their policies with Washington’s priorities is giving way to a new approach.
In this approach, decisive importance is placed on the willingness of right-wing conservatives to support U.S. China-containment policy through concrete decisions on investment screening, technological and resource policy, trade restrictions, and sanctions.
While White House efforts to support Central European governments in intra-EU political competition risk entrenching Chinese influence on the continent, certain conservative parties in Western Europe are demonstrating political agency and security perspectives increasingly independent from the United States.
Changes in their public rhetoric are primarily linked to revised assessments of the Russian military threat and a reassessment of Ukraine’s role in its war with Russia.
This shift—most clearly demonstrated in autumn 2025 by the UK Euroskeptic party Reform UK—indicates that a number of conservative influence groups across Europe are increasingly aligning their views with continental European security approaches, while ideological proximity to the U.S. Republican administration plays a secondary role.
The positions emphasized by Reform UK leader Nigel Farage during the early months of Trump’s term largely echoed White House and Republican Party rhetoric.
Following a tense exchange between the presidents of the United States and Ukraine on February 28, 2025, Farage criticized Ukraine’s leader, and a year earlier he had stated that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was the result of EU and NATO enlargement in Eastern Europe.
However, throughout 2025 Farage’s public statements became more aligned with continental European security imperatives. In early 2025, he emphasized the importance of Ukraine’s accession to NATO, and in November 2025 he criticized the U.S. 28-point peace plan aimed at ending the war in Ukraine.
In parallel, Reform UK publicly outlined plans to introduce incentives and tax relief for the UK defense-industrial base, increase defense spending, and expand the size of the British armed forces.
The evolution of Farage’s rhetoric and that of his party—reflecting a broader shift among European right-wing conservatives—signals to Washington the heterogeneity of political forces opposing EU supranational institutions.
Reform UK’s repositioning clearly demonstrates that Europe’s conservative political landscape is characterized by internal competition and a complex interaction among actors prioritizing closer ties with China, parties asserting autonomous political positions, and groups continuing to orient themselves toward cooperation with traditional EU elites.
This internal configuration further underscores that the White House’s expectation of reshaping Europe’s agenda solely through support for Euroskeptics is not viable in practice.
As ideological affinity with the Republican Party no longer guarantees consistent and predictable positions by European conservatives on sanctions, security, defense policy, and relations with EU supranational institutions, an alternative vision for implementing U.S. national strategy is gradually gaining traction within the American administration.
Distinct from the views of Trump’s closest circle, this approach envisions containing the axis of autocracies and depriving Beijing of its global advantage by establishing U.S. political and ideological leadership through Washington’s ability to offer the world a coherent global vision grounded in freedom, economic competition, and the rule of law.
Within this framework, a unified and internally coherent European political dynamic is viewed from a fundamentally different perspective: the EU is no longer seen as a power center to be weakened for short-term political gain.
Instead, Europe’s defense, industrial, economic, and financial potential is recognized as an indispensable component of aggregating the resources of the democratic bloc—without which Washington cannot effectively counter China’s expanding global influence.
Although China’s officially reported military spending in 2025 amounted to approximately $250 billion, compared with more than $900 billion in U.S. defense spending projected for FY2026, Beijing is accumulating military resources at a faster pace.
Adjusted for purchasing power parity, China’s 2024 defense spending was equivalent to roughly $541 billion—59 percent of U.S. defense expenditures. Between 1994 and 2024, China increased its military spending thirteenfold, with annual growth exceeding 7 percent from 2021 to 2024.
By contrast, while nominal U.S. defense spending increased by approximately 18 percent over the same period, inflation-adjusted growth in real terms reached only 10–13 percent between 2021 and 2024—nearly half the pace observed in China.
Slower growth in U.S. defense spending reflects Washington’s limited capacity to significantly expand its military capabilities through domestic resources alone. As a result, joint economic and defense efforts with Europe are becoming a critical element of sustained China deterrence.
At the 2025 NATO summit in The Hague, European member states committed to raising defense spending to 5 percent of GDP over the next decade.
With the combined GDP of the EU and the United Kingdom exceeding $24 trillion as of 2025, even if European GDP remains flat, annual European defense spending would surpass $1.2 trillion. Combined with U.S. defense expenditures, this level would significantly outpace China’s military capabilities.
Proponents of aggregating U.S. and European resources argue that under such conditions Beijing would be less inclined toward an expansionist strategy and more likely to refrain from escalating global confrontation, at least in the medium term.
A transition to a harder phase of confrontation would require the axis of autocracies to compete against the integrated capabilities of the United States and Europe—an integrated bloc capable, provided political cohesion is maintained, of sustaining defense resilience, technological autonomy, and unity in key political and economic decision-making.
The vulnerability of the U.S. approach is exacerbated by the erosion of institutional memory and regional expertise within the White House foreign-policy apparatus.
In 2025, State Department reorganization included the dismissal of 1,350 employees and a net reduction of nearly 3,000 positions when accounting for voluntary departures, as well as the elimination of several offices—steps that objectively reduce situational awareness and analytical capacity. Such decisions degrade the partnership architecture required for long-term competition with China.
India’s case demonstrates the importance of careful strategic design in relations with key U.S. partners. The Biden administration deliberately constructed a system of exemptions and incentives, tolerating limited divergence in sanctions enforcement in exchange for defense, technological, and industrial cooperation with India and its gradual alignment with democratic coalitions in critical domains.
In 2025, the Trump administration shifted toward more direct coercion, linking economic measures to India’s stance on Russian oil and using tariffs and trade restrictions to pressure New Delhi’s energy ties with Moscow.
A similar logic risks being replicated in relations with Europe. Betting on right-wing conservative forces as the primary tool for disciplining the continent does not guarantee synchronization with Washington, while increasing the EU’s exposure to Chinese capital and internal veto points.
Ultimately, the United States risks losing not due to a lack of resources, but due to a declining capacity to manage its partnerships effectively.
To operationalize the Strategy in practice, Washington will need to synchronize Europe’s security, industrial, financial, and economic potential with its own. Achieving this goal will require a substantial revision of the approaches adopted toward Europe at the outset of Trump’s term.
Establishing a durable long-term policy capable of securing U.S. leadership of the democratic bloc and preventing the escalation of confrontation with China to a global scale will require Washington to abandon destructive practices toward the EU—specifically those aimed at undermining the Union’s functionality and institutional balance.
A sustainable China-containment strategy will rest on a constructive transformation of the European Union and conditional support for local conservative political forces—only insofar as European unity and governability are preserved under principles shared across the democratic bloc.
Revising the U.S. National Security Strategy along these lines would grant Washington access to a significantly larger defense-industrial base while preserving the EU’s capacity for coherent internal decision-making and coordinated action.
An approach centered on integrating European capabilities, respecting European interests, and constructively leveraging transatlantic interdependence would provide the democratic bloc with decisive advantages in key domains by the late 2020s—objectively reducing incentives for autocratic states to escalate toward large-scale confrontation.
Adopting such a strategic course would consolidate Washington’s leadership across the Western world, reinforce its role as coordinator of democratic action, constrain the axis of autocracies, and underpin a more resilient global security architecture by the end of the decade.
